All posts by rbowen

LaTeX and Microsoft Word

I posted the following to the LPLUG mailing list, but perhaps someone else out there might have some insight. I’ve tried latex2rtf, which didn’t undersatnd my very simple documents. (Choked on makeindex and setpapersize, and it went downhill from there.) And I’ve tried to go LaTeX -> HTML -> Word, which is an abomination.

Of course, the real problem here is people who insist on MSWord documents, when I already have a far superior document format. I have no doubts that if/when I ever do get a conversion, that I’ll get back a modified document, and have no clue what exactly was changed. So I’m going to a great deal of trouble to create additional trouble for myself. *sigh*

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I write stuff in LaTeX. I do this because it is easy, looks professional, makes TOCs and indexes easy to maintain, and converts easily to formats I care about.

Unfortunately, invariably, when I write a document, someone demands that I then provide that document in Word, so that they can make small tweaks to it. This is aggravating for all the obvious reasons. Versioning goes out the window, diffs are impossible, applying changes to the
authoritative copy of the document is icky, at best, the resulting file is at least 10x larger than it needs to be, and I have to use bloatware to do further edits to the document.

And, the more annoying thing, the reason for this note, is that there’s no nice way to convert. Can anyone recommend a reasonable and simple conversion vector from LaTeX –> Word? Most/All of the LaTeX -> plain text conversions are terrible. And, even when they work, you lose all
semblance of formatting. I usually end up having to do a great deal of editing to get back to anything like what I started with, and the resulting document is never quite as professional-looking as what I did initially. I lose all cross references (see section ~ref{section_label}) and I don’t know any way around that.

I find this whole discussion really irritating, but I don’t see much way around the requirement. So any kind of crude conversion would be good, I guess, since I’m never going to get a resulting document that is as good as what I have to start with.

Early adopter syndrome.

I suffer from “early adopter syndrome”. When new technology comes out, I’m one of the first in line to buy. So I get shoddy stuff at 3 times the price that anyone else pays. I have a CD/CDR/MP3 player which I bought in 1999. I paid, I seem to recall, $150 for it. It has no concept of directories (albums) on the CD. It doesn’t always correctly handle CD-Rs. And it doesn’t read any ID3 tags, so you can’t easily navigate through a disk, particularly if it has hundreds of files on it.

This weekend I got a CD/CDR/MP3 player. It indexes the disk at startup, and you can navigate by album and by song. It reads directory names and song names, either from the file name, or from the ID3 tags. And it buffers the song. So if you’re listening to MP3s, rather than a “real” CD, the disk hardly ever even spins. It spins up long enough to read in the file, and then it stops spinning. This means that it has almost infinite shock resistence, and so you don’t get skips when you hit bumps. It appears to buffer about 2 minutes of audio, so you have to be on a pretty rough road to outlast that. This device cost $29.

I had similar experiences with wireless networking and digital cameras and scanners. My only consolation is that I got to enjoy all of these things for at least 2 or 3 years more than “normal” people.

More about evangelism and advertising

Adrian made some responses to my earlier remarks, and he make all very good points. I guess I’m reacting to some things that I’ve seen in the chuch in the United States in recent years – a focus on numbers instead of orthodoxy. Quantity rather than quality, you might say.

A local leader in the Episcopal church, for example, recently said that he would rather have a vibrant community with heresy than to insist on orthodox doctrine and have a church schism.

Larger “non-denominational” churches in this area are, it seems, willing to become social events and entertainment, as long as it brings the people in. But in to what? If the Church must change its character in order to draw people, then why bother drawing them at all?

So, yes, I was unfair to Life Bridge. I made unwarranted conclusions about some people that were kind, giving, and probably very sincere. I did this in reaction to the way in which I saw things happen at another church which used to have a vibrant, and orthodox, community, and now has a much larger, much more vibrant community, at the expense of tradition, clearly stated beliefs, and a commitment to missions. And also at the expense of many of the long-suffering members. But, hey, as long as they brought the people in, these were acceptable sacrifices.

I still have a profound respect for Dr Elliiott, and for many of the folks that have stuck it out there, but I saw no further need to keep attending what was increasingly a social gathering with pretty music.

And so I am elsewhere, with a much smaller community, but a conviction that it is more important to be correct than to be popular.

A blessed Easter to all of you. Christ is risen indeed. Alelulia, Alelulia. I’m still thawing from our sunrise service. 🙂

I love/hate Disney

Here’s the latest episode in my ongoing saga of my love/hate relationship with Disney.

I like Winne the Pooh. There is a marked difference in the quality of story between the original A.A.Milne stories and the Disney spawn. The A.A.Milne stories are sappy and sentimental, but they are just stories about a boy and his friends. The Disney stories are always preachy, and try to teach kids something about right and wrong. This is deeply ironic coming from a company like Disney, but we won’t go there right now, because I’m peeved about something entirely different this time.

There’s a new Winnie The Pooh video, and I was enough of a sucker to buy it. I regret this decision. The movie, so that you can avoid it, is called “Winnie the Pooh – Springtime with Roo”. It is, theoretically, an Easter story, although it has nothing whatever to do with Easter. (And here, too, I will omit a tangent into the difference between Easter and what we in the United States celebrate around this time of year.) It’s about how Rabbit is controlling, and gets irate when things don’t go exactly the way that he plans, so he cancels the easter egg hunt.

Then, thing get really bizarre. He is visited by the spirits of easter past, easter present, and easter future, and persuaded to change his ways and be a better bunny.

* pause for this to sink in *

So, they are so completely incapable of coming up with new plot lines that they rip off Dicken’s “Christmas Carol” for an easter video? That’s just about the lamest thing to come out of Disney in a long, long time.

I am a big fan of Dickens, and “Christmas Carol” is my favorite Dickens work. And I own at least 6 different renditions of “Christmas Carol” movies, ranging from the serious Patrick Stewart version to the Jetsons Christmas Carol. But even if you are as fanatical as I about this story, I do not recommend that you get this one. I was positively slack-jawed watching this, and the only reason I didn’t turn it off, as soon as I realized what they were doing, was that my little person was watching it and wanted to see how it turned out.

I suppose that Disney, who so many parents entrust with their children’s entertainment, have become complacent with this role, and don’t feel that they really need to produce anything of any genuine artistic quality except for the twice-a-year box-office movies, one of which might be good enough to sit all the way through.

While I used to feel that I could feel safe with Sarah watching the Disney Channel and PBS, I’m starting to see more and more things on Disney that make me wonder if I really want to have that in my home. Not just because it is terrible from an artistic/literary perspective, but because the values that are being promoted are just getting a little too odd.

And, of course, PBS seems to be leaning in the “all answers are right” direction with a lot of their shows. (Follow the decision-making process on Dragon Tales some time. All answers are equally valid, and are not subjected to any kind of sieve of experience. “This didn’t work the last 8 times we tried it, but to reject it would devalue you as a person.”)

Perhaps just pitching the TV in front of the next train might be the wisest move.

Party in the park

Today, driving through Shillito Park, I saw one of those huge inflatable slides, and a huge inflatable “moon walk” bounce building. There were people standing at the edge of the street with large signs inviting me to come for free BBQ, free cotton candy, free games, egg hunts, face painting, and various other appealing things. The event was being put on by something called Life Bridge. I had no idea what this was, but, hey, free party.

So, after picking up Sarah, we went back to the park and went to the party.

Turns out that Life Bridge is a church. I was thinking realtor, or perhaps an insurance company, trying to drum up business. But, no, it was a church trying to drum up business.

I’m not sure I buy into the notion that a church needs to put on an advertising campaign to drum up business. I presume that they call this evangelism, but this seems very odd to me.

So I was thinking about advertising. You know the basic idea of an advertisement – you try to make it seem like your product will help you have sex more often. Beer commercials feature scantily clad women. Jeans commercials, car commercials, chewing gum commercials, feature scantily clad women. Clearly, if I purchase this product, I will be surrounded with scantily clad women.

In other words, the primary purpose of advertising is to lie to the customer in order to get them to find your product attractive.

So … if you throw a party in the park, give people free food, free live music, free cotton candy, and an amusement park atmosphere, then maybe people will attend your church? Well, maybe, but that’s only half of the story. When they get to church, the next thing that you do is to tell them not-quite-true things about God, in order to make them stay.

It’s kinda like the conversation we were having on IRC the other day about The Message. The Message is a “translation” of the Bible that takes out all the bits that are inconvenient. It makes everything beautiful and happy. Kinda like the Pricess Bride version of the Bible. Because, as you know, the Bible has lots of rough edges and pointy bits that you can get hurt on. And if you have to think about something, that invariably leads to people coming up with differing conclusions, and, hence, controversy and division. So take out those bits. Problem solved.

Ok, I do readily admit that I’m being truly unfair to Life Bridge. I don’t know anything about them. And after reading their web site, I don’t know anything more about them. They appear to believe mostly good things. And they did seem like *very* nice people. But I have to wonder at their motivation in spending a couple thousand dollars to put on a party in the park, give out tshirts and frisbees, and then invite people to church, while not saying one word about what the church is about. This seems like standard advertising to me, not evangelism. Why would I got to this church? Because they throw really great parties. That is the extent of what I know about them. And this seems rather shallow to me.

I am inclined, however, to go there some week, just to see if my prejudices have any basis in fact.

Always on call

The thing that annoys me, more than anything else, about cell phones, is the way that certain people seem to think that I should be always available. If they call, and I don’t answer, the message left is always petulant and irritated, as though by not answering the phone I have committed some kind of insult against them. Particularly if they call my home phone and my cell phone, and I answer neither, then the message is even more irritated.

I remember, not so many years ago, when you could safely take 12 hours to return a phone message, and nobody thought that you had been run over by a garbage truck. These days, if you wait more than 10 minutes to return a message, you get a lecture about how hard they’ve been trying to get in touch with you. Heaven forbid you should leave your phone home, or … *horrors* … turn it off.

I envy my friends who have decided not to have a cell phone, and I wish for a simpler time when I could make a similar decision. Instead of being a convenience, my cell phone is, primarily, something that I pay for so that people I don’t want to talk to can get in touch with me no matter where I am. I guess this is the price I pay for being a slave to technology.

Missing oil cap

I stopped to get my oil changed on the way to work yesterday, since I thought it would save some time. I knew it was a mistake, but I did it anyway.

First of all, the special-price $20 oil change ended up costing $130 with all the extra services that got thrown in. Granted, they were things that I probably needed, but they kinda had me over a barrel, so to speak.

Anyways, today when I went outside to go to lunch, I noticed that the front end of Rocinante was sheeted in oil. Opening the hood, I found the entire engine and the inside of the hood to be coated with oil, and the oil cap missing.

*sigh*

So I had to spend my lunch hour driving back down to Boston Road to get my oil cap, get things cleaned up a little, and get a few quarts of oil replaced.

Dandelion Wine

I went down to the B&N to get a book to help me study for the CCNA, and wound up buying a new edition of Dandelion Wine. I’m a total sucker for a new edition of a much loved book, and Dandelion Wine is my all-time favorite novel. I used to have another edition, but I loaned it to someone and haven’t gotten it back yet. Good news! You can keep it! Everyone needs their own copy anyway. 🙂

This new edition is hardback, and has those wonderful untrimmed pages that I like so much. It amuses me that untrimmed pages, once a mark of an unsophisticated publisher, are now once again in style. I’m anxiously looking forward to publishers releasing *really* untrimmed pages. That is, books you have to read with a pen knife to cut apart adjacent pages.

“Office Space” moment.

This morning I was scolded for being 11 minutes late to a monthly staff meeting. I was late because I was working on a customer problem. Later in the meeting, I was scolded for that customer problem not being solved yet. This was, in fact, the only part of the entire meeting that had any relevance whatsoever to me.

I’m reminded of a former manager who said, in a meeting, “We’re going to keep having these all-day meetings until we figure out why nobody is getting any work done!” Of course, the difference there was that he was clueful enough to be joking when he said it.

So, if you ever wonder why I seem to hate my job more at the beginning of the month, well, it’s because we have this meeting on the first Monday of each month.

Must remember the mantra: My job is what I do to pay for the part of my life that matters.