[PLUG-TALK] Computers for linguistics work

[Rogan Creswick]

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 10:45 AM, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>  1) the PSU Department of Applied Linguistics woudn't know what to do
>  with a (La)TeX document, not that it matters, because work must be
>  delivered in paper format anyway,

Generally the LaTeX source is for you and a journal (see brief note
below about how the separation of content from styling is a Good Thing
for them too), everyone else gets a pdf / postscript.  They can't
easily modify it, but they can easily print/read it.

>  2) I don't know of any peer reviewed journal of linguistics that
>  accepts anything other than Word or OOo,

<shudder>  I don't sleep well if/when I have to submit a document of
that degree of importance as a word doc.  There are entire companies
based on the need for tools that go through and find all the "hidden"
content in word docs (old trac changes stuff, text behind images,
content that was deleted, but still exists in the file for performance
reasons... etc.)  Not to mention the general modifiability of the
content (which is occasionally a requirement, if the journal needs to
do substantial formatting to paginate the articles--but gee, wouldn't
that be easier if the *content* was separate from the *styling*?).

> There is an alternate notation system, like:
>
> [CP[TP[NP[D The][AdjP[Adv very]][Adj small]][N boy]][VP [V
> kissed][NP[D
> the][N platypus]]]]]
>
> But I think y'all can see how much faster and easier it is to grasp the
> structure of even a very simple one-clause sentence like the above
> with a visual tree.

Sure -- but assume (1) you know what content you want to include and
(2) the notation above was *all* you had to enter to get a properly
formatted visual tree in your document.  Is it really slower to draw
out the tree on a whiteboard / paper to figure out the short syntax
and enter it into your file than it is to try and align everything
poperly visually, and then deal with generating an image, inserting it
in the doc, adjusting the sizing and placement, ensuring that it
doesn't cover up text, or get bumped over another image, etc... ?

>  I should also mention that presentations are almost as important these
>  days as paper documents. For example, this term I have to prepare a
>  one-hour presentation on the FOXP2 gene, using the electronic equipment
>  in the classroom. I'll use OOo Impress to create the slide show. Then
>  I'll export and upload the show as a .ppt file to my H drive at the
>  university, from where I can run it on the Windows computer in the
>  classroom.

The *safest* route I've found for presentations is to create a pdf
file, and run acrobat in full-screen mode.  It works great on every
platform I've tried (linux, windows, OS X, and iirc, solaris and
hpux).  The biggest benefit is not worrying about the minor
differences between OO.org version X, version Y, version Z and the 3-5
versions of PowerPoint you're likely to encounter.

That said, I haven't set up a great workflow for doing presentations
in LaTeX -- there are ways of doing it, and it's not that hard, but I
do find a tool like powerpoint to be useful.  (I just print to ps/pdf
and use that for the actual presentation.)

--Rogan