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stoutfellowWarning: geekspeak ahead.
I've started writing the prisms paper, and it's going fairly well. (I do need to learn how to embed diagrams, though; at several points the argument is nigh-impossible without visual aids.) I have run into one unexpected microproblem, however.
To explain, I need to give a little history. The standard engine for mathematical typesetting is something called TeX1, which was designed by über-guru Donald Knuth around 1980. Like many of my fellow students at Chicago, I learned TeX almost as soon as it became available, and continued to use it for the next decade or so. Eventually, though, I grew lazy and began using Scientific Workplace, which is a WYSIWYG interface on top of a TeX engine. It's possible to directly edit the TeX code, but generally SWP does a good enough job that that's not necessary.
One labor-saving feature of SWP is that it recognizes certain standard strings which need to be formatted differently. For example, "sin" is not the product of s, i, and n, but shorthand for the sine function. This can be toggled on or off, but I generally leave it on.
Now, the conditions for the existence of a geodesic of a given type on an lxmxn prism are usually quadratic inequalities in l,m,n. For example, the condition for the simplest of the Case IIIA geodesics is lm>n2. All well and good, except when the inequality involves the product of l and n. You see, the string "ln" is one of those standard strings, representing the natural logarithm....
I have tried various makeshifts, the most successful being :enter math mode: l :exit math mode: *space* :enter math mode: n; but that screws up the spacing. I could turn the labor-saving feature off, but I need it at other places, and if I turn it back on I'd better not do any editing anywhere near the ln, or it'll be reformatted. I could rename the lengths of the sides, but I've been thinking in terms of l,m,n for long enough that it would require a fair bit of mental readjustment. I could directly edit the TeX code, if I can remember how. (One of my colleagues pointed out that multiplication is commutative, and nl would do the job. He admitted that this would be unaesthetic. Another suggested using the good old centered-dot for multiplication, but... yuck.)
W doesn't use SWP; he relies on a closer-to-the-metal package called LaTeX. He laughed at me.
:sigh:
1. That last letter is a chi, not an eks; "TeX" is a homophone of "tech".
I've started writing the prisms paper, and it's going fairly well. (I do need to learn how to embed diagrams, though; at several points the argument is nigh-impossible without visual aids.) I have run into one unexpected microproblem, however.
To explain, I need to give a little history. The standard engine for mathematical typesetting is something called TeX1, which was designed by über-guru Donald Knuth around 1980. Like many of my fellow students at Chicago, I learned TeX almost as soon as it became available, and continued to use it for the next decade or so. Eventually, though, I grew lazy and began using Scientific Workplace, which is a WYSIWYG interface on top of a TeX engine. It's possible to directly edit the TeX code, but generally SWP does a good enough job that that's not necessary.
One labor-saving feature of SWP is that it recognizes certain standard strings which need to be formatted differently. For example, "sin" is not the product of s, i, and n, but shorthand for the sine function. This can be toggled on or off, but I generally leave it on.
Now, the conditions for the existence of a geodesic of a given type on an lxmxn prism are usually quadratic inequalities in l,m,n. For example, the condition for the simplest of the Case IIIA geodesics is lm>n2. All well and good, except when the inequality involves the product of l and n. You see, the string "ln" is one of those standard strings, representing the natural logarithm....
I have tried various makeshifts, the most successful being :enter math mode: l :exit math mode: *space* :enter math mode: n; but that screws up the spacing. I could turn the labor-saving feature off, but I need it at other places, and if I turn it back on I'd better not do any editing anywhere near the ln, or it'll be reformatted. I could rename the lengths of the sides, but I've been thinking in terms of l,m,n for long enough that it would require a fair bit of mental readjustment. I could directly edit the TeX code, if I can remember how. (One of my colleagues pointed out that multiplication is commutative, and nl would do the job. He admitted that this would be unaesthetic. Another suggested using the good old centered-dot for multiplication, but... yuck.)
W doesn't use SWP; he relies on a closer-to-the-metal package called LaTeX. He laughed at me.
:sigh:
1. That last letter is a chi, not an eks; "TeX" is a homophone of "tech".
