On Friday, 27 January 2017 at 11:05:41 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
On Thursday, 26 January 2017 at 10:26:25 UTC, Chris wrote:
Er, yes. That's how it works. Always ask the publisher first.
But that wasn't the question. The question was Markdown or
LaTeX, and if you want to generate your own PDF for e.g. a
M.A. or Ph.D., some people prefer LaTeX because of the fine
grained control it offers. I don't know a single Ph.D. student
who used Word who didn't have to fight with Word stubbornly
restructuring the layout. The footnotes, the graphics ... a
nightmare.
I believe I just used the default Word style. It's a goddamned
text, why it needs any sort of sophisticated layout aside from
fitting the page? I had no problem with footnotes maybe because
I believe they shouldn't exists in such documents in the first
place: if you want to write something, just write it where it
fits. It's baffling to see footnotes in ISO standards: if it's
something important, write it where it belongs, W3C and IETF
got it right, their documents have no footnotes.
Yes, you are right of course. In a perfect world we'd just write
a text and give the odd reference. Unfortunately, anyone who
writes an M.A., M.Sc. or Ph.D. thesis has to reference
everything. Not even the most basic concept can be mentioned
without referencing a book written by some professor(s). If a
student writes "1 + 1 = 2" s/he has to reference it with a
footnote à la "[1] Smith, T. & Wesson, J. Basic Concepts of
Arithmetics - An Introduction. Cambridge, 2001."
If you fail to do so, they will grill you. I know, it's
ridiculous. Having said this, depending on the topic, you do need
to insert footnotes - either to guide / help your readers or to
shut up potential critics :-)
