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LatineSummary
This lesson opens the seventh and last unit of the course, devoted to other documents and teamwork. It explains what the unit is for: to carry what was learned in the six previous ones, which was applied to the article and the thesis, to the other genres with which an academic communicates their work (the presentation, the poster, the letter and the curriculum vitae), to the document that several authors write at once and to the one that a journal or a repository receives for publication; it presents its four lessons and the thread that joins them, from the slide to the file that is submitted; it specifies what is taken for granted from the previous units; it recalls where the tools the unit uses come from; it states the problem it solves, that the same content must be presented in different forms without being rewritten in each one; and it shows that those forms are common to the defence of a chemistry thesis, the linguistics conference, the application for a fellowship and the article written by a team of historians.
Learning objectives
- Describe the sequence of contents of the unit and explain what each lesson contributes to the next.
- Recognise what the unit takes for granted from the previous ones and review it if necessary.
- Explain, with an example, why the same content can be typeset as an article and as a slide by changing the document class and not the markup of the text.
- Recognise in one's own discipline the genres, the forms of collaboration and the publication requirements that the unit teaches how to meet.
Entry assessment
Before working through the unit, it is worth measuring the starting point. This assessment is a self-assessment: it is not graded, and its only purpose is to guide your study. Its first two questions review what the unit takes for granted from the previous ones; the next eight cover, two by two and in order, the four lessons of the unit. Anyone who has never made a presentation with Beamer or written a document with other authors should not expect to get them right: every answer, right or wrong, explains the point and names the lesson that deals with it. The same skills are measured again at the end, in the synthesis lesson.
Before starting the unit, measure your starting point. It is a short self-assessment: it is not graded and its result is stored only in your browser.
Question 1From earlier unitsTwo co-authors of a physics paper write vectors in different ways: one with
\mathbf{v}and the other with\vec{v}. What avoids the inconsistency and allows the notation of the whole paper to be changed in a single place?It works once, but each new occurrence written by hand reopens the inconsistency, and the replacement may reach uses that were not vectors.The engine typesets what is written;\mathbfand\vecproduce different forms, and no warning points it out.It could be done, but redefining a standard command surprises whoever reads the source; a command of one's own, with a name of its own, is the way the course teaches.The command of one's own says what the object is, a vector, and its definition decides how it looks; changing it in the preamble changes all its occurrences. In a paper with several authors, the shared preamble is also the team's convention.Question 2From earlier unitsA figure in an article was included with
\includegraphics[width=14cm]{chart}. Copied as it is into a Beamer slide, whose frame is 12.8 cm wide, what happens?Beamer does not change the requested width: the image keeps its 14 cm and sticks out.An overfull box is a warning, not an error: the document compiles and the defect is only visible in the result.In Beamer each frame is a page of its own; nothing moves to another frame for lack of space.An absolute width does not know where it will be used; one relative to\linewidthadapts to the column, the page or the frame where it is placed.Review: Images in the document
Question 3A Beamer frame contains a list of three items, with
\pauseafter the first and after the second. How many pages does it produce in the PDF?The PDF does not animate; Beamer simulates the appearance with successive pages.Each\pauseadds a step to the initial page: two pauses give three pages.The three pages belong to the same frame and carry the same title and the same slide number.A PDF presentation has no animations: each reveal is one more page, and the viewer, when moving forward, gives the impression that the items appear.Review: Presentations with Beamer
Question 4A Beamer frame contains a
verbatimenvironment to show a piece of code, and compilation stops with “File ended while scanning use of \@xverbatim”. What is missing?The environment already exists in the kernel; the problem is how Beamer reads the frame that contains it.It must stand on a line of its own, and even so the error persists withoutfragile.It admits it, with the right option on the frame.Beamer reads the content of the frame before typesetting it, and verbatim text does not survive that reading;fragilemakes the frame be processed in another way, so that it admitsverbatimand\verb.Review: Presentations with Beamer
Question 5A book is read at about 30 cm, and at that distance type stops being comfortable to read below about 7 points. What minimum type size does the text of a poster that will be read at 1.5 m need?
12 points are read at half a metre, not at a metre and a half; the size of a poster is deduced from the distance, not from the options of a class.The type size depends on the reading distance, not on the surface: a larger poster has more columns, not larger letters.The angle the letter occupies is proportional to its size and inversely proportional to the distance: the relation is linear.What the eye perceives is the angle the letter occupies, which decreases in proportion to the distance; hence the rule , with in centimetres. That is why a poster is not typeset at the size of an article.Question 6In a letter typeset with the
scrlttr2class, where are the name and address of the recipient written?\openingwrites the salutation; the recipient must already be declared before it.That variable holds the sender's address, not the recipient's.A letter has no title: it has a sender, a recipient, a date, a salutation and a closing.The sender's data are declared with\setkomavarand the recipient's when each letter is opened; the class decides where each goes, and with it the form of the letter.Question 7A LaTeX project is kept with Git. Which files should be put under version control?
What is generated is recovered by compiling; versioning it only adds noise and conflicts.The source cannot be recovered from the PDF: what is kept in Git is what is written.The included chapters, the bibliographic database and the images are sources too.Generated files change with every compilation and on every computer: versioning them fills the history with changes nobody made and causes conflicts without content.Review: Writing as a team
Question 8Two co-authors, on different Git branches, correct the first and the third sentence of the same paragraph, written on a single line. What happens when the branches are merged?
Git does not distinguish sentences within a line.Git does not choose between two changes to the same line: it marks a conflict and leaves the decision to people.The conflict belongs to Git, not to LaTeX; its markers, however, if they are not resolved, remain in the file as text.Git does not read sentences but lines. That is why teams usually agree on one sentence per line: the engine typesets it the same, because a single line break is a space, and other people's changes stop clashing.Review: Writing as a team
Question 9A journal distributes its class in the file
journal.cls. The author writes\documentclass{journal}and the engine answers “File `journal.cls' not found”. What is missing?A class is not a package: it is loaded with\documentclass, and\usepackagewould look for ajournal.sty.The class is named without its extension; the problem is that the file is not where the engine looks.Only if the class is distributed in TeX Live; many journals hand it out as a loose file.The engine looks for classes in the document's folder and in the trees of its installation; a class that is in none of them does not exist for it.Review: Templates and publication
Question 10To obtain an archival PDF, of the PDF/A type,
\DocumentMetadata{pdfstandard=a-2b}is written after\documentclass. What happens?The command has no effect where it was written, and the engine signals it with an error.The modern handling of the PDF is done by LaTeX itself through\DocumentMetadata; the problem is the place.This command is the exception: it must precede\documentclass.\DocumentMetadataprepares the handling of the PDF before the class and the packages are loaded, and that is why it cannot come after them.Review: Templates and publication
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