[Rd] R Newsletter: 1st Call for Articles

[Bill.Venables@CMIS.CSIRO.AU]

With regard to the burgeoning side-discussion on whether or not to accept
WORD submissions, I plead for a quick, decisive and final ruling in the
negative.

Apart from the major practical considerations to do with the amount of work
putting together a document from sources of both kinds and achieving an
acceptable result, there is the relatively minor issue of principle: R is
open source software and should do what it can to promote the use of other
open source products.

I fully realise that this will create problems for people who are not
familiar with LaTeX.  I hope for people like Yves it is the start of a
liberating journey of discovery...but for many it will not be.  It would
seem to me the best option for such people is simply to accept submissions
in neat ASCII, (with some diffidence, of course, as such submissions will
require someone to do a lot of work before they can be incorporated into a
document).

When it comes to submitting graphics, though, I have no easy solution for
those unfortunates crippled and imprisoned by the MicroSoft arrogation of
the universe.  It would be simple if R had a pdf.graph device: is any such
development in prospect?  For that matter, how should Unix/Linux people
submit graphics?

Charles Berry observes:
> 
> FWIW, at least one of the equation setting add-ons for WORD 
> (MathType, see http://www.mathtype.com) has TeX as its engine. 
> It will optionally provide (La)TeX on the clipboard for pasting 
> into non-WORD docs. So a WORD user could provide ascii for the 
> text and (La)TeX for equations.

Yes, but....  MathType is yet another (stiffly priced) commercial add-on, it
is only one version of MathType that has the TeX output options and as far
as I can see mathematical typesetting is not going to be a large part of the
newsletter, anyway.  I would also claim that the TeX output you get from
such automatically produced stuff is not always very good TeX, too...for
example, vulgar fractions such as 1/2 are always too large.  I'm not all
that sure this intended courtesy to the person putting the newsletter
together would actually save very much work.  The best solution from all
points of view is the hard one: encourage submissions in GOOD LaTeX.

Bill Venables.

--
Bill Venables, CSIRO/CMIS Environmetrics Project
Email: Bill.Venables@cmis.csiro.au
Phone: +61 7 3826 7251
Fax:   +61 7 3826 7304
Postal: PO Box 120, Cleveland, Qld 4163, AUSTRALIA
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