If you are a TeX maven, or a Unix guru, this post is not for you, neither is it for anyone who never has to deal with LaTeX or any of its relatives. But if, like me, you occasionally need to work with it, here are a few personal observations and recommendations.
I am in the business of proofreading and editing documents, mainly student work, ranging from two-page essays to 80,000 word dissertations. (I work for a concern called BetterEdit.)
Most of my clients send me files created in Microsoft Word™, but now and again scientists or mathematicians who love LaTeX send me files created with this powerful system.
An editor has two options at this point. He or she can simply edit the LaTeX files with an ordinary word processor or text editor (such as Word or NotePad); the files are essentially plain text files and the revised version can be saved as a text file and will still be able to be processed by LaTeX.
This will work OK, as long as you, the editor, leave the inserted codes alone (unless you know what you are doing!). A typical bit of a LaTeX document might look like this (I borrowed this from a student thesis, with apologies):
\begin{figure}[htbp]\centerline{\includegraphics[width=0.75\textwidth]{ProblemStatement/Figures/Figure2ExampleAutomatedTC.pdf}}\caption{Example of an automated QoS and priority control}\label{fig:Chapter2-PriorityQueueingAndTC}\end{figure}In outgoing traffic, small game or voice packets may be held up behind large TCP packets of the file transfer application. A similar problem can happen with incoming traffic, though normally the downstream channel will have a larger capacity than the upstream one.
So, you can edit the plain text parts for grammar or spelling errors, or to make it flow better or be more readable, as long as you don’t touch the TeX codes. This approach is fine, but only up to a point. There’s no way of looking at the final processed text to make sure it is acceptable, and it’s hard to spot errors when they are intermingled with those codes.
The better approach is to do it properly, in a LaTeX environment. I use a software application called TeXShop, for Mac OS X, a freeware package from the University of Oregon.
The web site will tell you all about it, but I will describe how I work with it, and what it will do.
Having received the LaTeX file from the client, I open it in TeXShop and attempt to ‘typeset’ it. Typesetting here turns the source file into an Adobe .pdf file, which is the final finished product, enabling you to see all the text, headings and graphics as they will finally appear, all going well!
Then I can go ahead and do my editing, able to check on the result at any time.
But all does not always go well, of course. Sometimes the client hasn’t sent the graphics files, so there are blank spaces in the output where they should appear; this is probably not too bad, because I can still fix up the text and its appearance, and if he or she sends me those files, I can check them too.
More seriously, and quite frequently, when I press the ‘Typeset’ button, I get an error report and processing stops. The program might complain that it can’t understand something, which is sometimes because a macro file or the like is missing.
Then, I get on to the client again and ask for that auxiliary file to be sent (this happened a couple of days ago), and, with luck, the file will process without error. All good fun!
I hope this will have given you a taste of using TeXShop; you may not have occasion to use it, of course, but if LaTeX turns up in your work, or if you just want to try it out - go for it, and the best of luck!
If you liked this, why not treat me to a coffee (or a bone for Kafka)? Thanks, mate!
Visual QuickStart Guide, by Langer and Jordan, and thought it was worth a look.
