Re: Long file names in Dired

[Emanuel Berg]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:

> If by "typography" you mean "putting all the
> elements where the designer wants them to be" - then
> I agree (to some extent - try using LaTeX to typeset
> anything containing equations /and/ figures on the
> grid, or to wrap a figure with text when the text
> includes an enumeration - good luck!) that it's
> /relatively/ simple (at least most of the time).
>
> If by "typography" you mean "the art and technique
> of arranging type to make written language readable
> and appealing" (this is what Wikipedia has), then
> you most probably need /at least/ half a dozen years
> to get reasonable experience, and twice to three
> times that to achive what could be called mastery.

You can have a look at my Master paper. It has a ToC,
footnotes, references, an index, figures, tables,
lists, definition boxes, equations, inline code (the
appendix - even an inline man page!), and more.

    http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/hs-linux/docs/report/report.pdf

I spent many hours on the LaTeX, of course, but I'm
a layman. If I ever were to write something more for
the techno-scientific world, I'd just reuse 95+% of
the stuff because I'm already happy with it. The last
couple of per cent I'd keep for unexpected events, but
it's possible it'd be more like 99-1 or 100-0
depending on the project.

We should remember that techno-science writing has
a much bigger need for all those tables and lists and
all that than ordinary books, like travel writing or
sports commentary or whatever. Because the contents is
much more complicated, it is necessary to do.
Without it, I could easily have written 200-300 pages
and not the ~150 it turned out to be. Also, the
logical and structured contents is easily reflected in
a logical and structured report. It is natural as well
as beneficial to do, not only to the report but to the
implementation as well.

On the other hand, if I had a publishing house that
published crime and science fiction novels and travel
books and all that it would be absolutely no problem
to get one or two or three books to look good and then
just use them as blueprints to mass produce books.

I'm sure a "Master" at typo-whatever would be able to
typeset my paper better, but by how much? I don't
think the difference would have been radical even in
"absolute terms", and as for the presumed reader
experience, I think it would have been minimal. Here,
feel free to check it out, that'd be interesting to
hear...

And, the Master-layman difference - both aspects -
would be yet much smaller (infinitely so) for
ordinary books.

Normal books aren't flawlessly typesetted or
well-organized, all of them, even from the grand old
houses. Many of them lacks and index or a nested ToC,
many of them have notes (the commented ones, which you
want to read, not the references) - many have them as
a separate part at the back so you have to turn back
and forth all the time, and many have references bulky
right in the text instead of the discrete [9] system.

So no, I don't believe it is something only masters of
the lost art can do. I expect them to be better than
me but not to a degree that will have any
significance. I can typeset a brand-new Stephen King
novel every day of the week and master or not (i.e.,
not) it'd sell like sliced bread just the same.

That said, I think it is absolutely fascinating and
fun to do, and I did it very seriously indeed just as
I think it should because it really makes
a difference, so I'm not disrespectful in that way,
rather I think it can be done and then mass production
can take on, and you don't have to worry about it or
spend a lifetime mastering it.

And when it comes to writing that should explain or
document things, I think it is more a challenge to see
what is a list, what is a table, what can be made into
a figure, what are the keywords that should be
defined, all that - after that, making it so with
LaTeX is straightforward (and fun) and if you get
stuck just ask at comp.text.tex :)

> If you're wondering what the publishing houses do
> all day, I can tell you what. I work for a small
> journal (two issues per year, each issue is
> typically 150-200 pages long), and it's /a lot/ of
> work. I work there with a friend, and our duties are
> (mainly) to, let's call it, "make the issue look
> good". We receive the files prepared by the authors,
> and after several weeks of hard work we produce
> a pdf file ready to send to the printing house.
> And by hard work I mean hard work - probably the
> main reason it's just "hard" and not "impossible" is
> several thousand hours of experience of both of us.
> (Another reason is that I have a few hundred lines
> of Elisp code, automating these parts of our job
> that /can/ be automated - it's not even a majority,
> but it saves us considerable time of boring,
> repetitive tasks.)

Again, I don't see how that cannot be solved by
reusing the LaTeX from last issue? I already said all
the stuff I did and modified or just put there to
varying degrees. Most or all of that stuff would
reoccur if I ever did it again. So I'd just use it all
over but with new material. It would require some
fiddling and some fixed detail but it cannot be
compared by far with the original work, that'd be like
100-1 in man hours. And for every iteration such
overhead would get smaller as experience is gained...

> What does it have to do with BibLaTeX? Exactly what
> I wrote about: different countries (or cultures)
> have different naming schemes, and BibLaTeX supports
> only a small subset of the set of Germanic naming
> schemes. No Slavic ones (granted, the Polish one is
> trivial, especially now that it's simplified: even
> though we don't have any von-like thing, we did have
> declension of names depending on sex, and for female
> names also on the marital status: the wife of Mr.
> Nowak used to be called Nowakowa, and his daughter -
> Nowakówna. These forms, however, are very seldom
> used now. AFAIK, in Czech you still have something
> like this), no Asian ones, no Icelandic ones. (I
> don't know about other languages.)

All people have names, at least since the paleo-Romans
who assigned numbers to their daughters (first,
second, etc. in the order they were born). And that's
all it takes (names). The ethnic traditions and their
implications (?) doesn't break the association that is
desired in this case, which is between the work and
them who did it.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573