# Those who know history find new ways to err

It is part of typesetting folklore that Donald Knuth was so upset on seeing the galley proofs of The Art of Computer Programming that he decided to write a computer program that followed the traditions of computer typesetting. And, hence, TeX was born.

For anyone who has to typeset math, TeX is the next best thing to sliced bread. I have been using TeX (in fact, LaTeX exclusively) to submit journal articles to IEEE journals. But it appears that in the race to become more adapted to online publishing, many journals are changing their publishing tools. And, in the case of IEEE, it appears that TeX is no longer in their tool chain.

I first noticed that something was amiss, when I was proof reading the galley proofs of a paper that was to appear in IEEE Transactions of Information Theory. I used \mathscr from the rsfs package to denote sets (as it is more ornate than \mathcal). The paper had an expression

\sum_{q \in \mathscr Q} ...


In the galley proof, the script Q in the subscript was of normalsize, rather than scriptsize. So, I pointed that out in my corrections. In the corrected version, the script Q was of a size between normalsize and scriptsize, which a comment from the typesetter that “we cannot make it smaller”. It is at that time that I realized that they were not using TeX. In fact, all mathematical symbols were inserted as images, which has two consequences:

1. It throws accessibility out of the window. These days I read most papers on my iPad. It is a pain to annonate images (normal tools like highlight, underline, do not work with images).
2. It increases the file size by a factor of 10. Just take a look at the average filesize for papers in the current issue (where the filesize is 2MB to 10MB) and early access papers (which are author preprints before they have been processed by the journal; for these the average filesize is 500-600kB).

Last month I went through another round of painful proof reading of galley proofs for a paper that is to appear in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. Again, all the math was converted to images, and the niceties of TeX, like the correct vertical location of : in \coloneqq were lost.

As an author, publishing in IEEE has become more painful for me (due to the typographic errors introduced by whatever software IEEE is using). As a reader, reading IEEE papers has become more painful for me (as I have to download papers that are 5x times bigger in size, and have math typeset as embedded images). Oh well, the irony of IEEE not accepting documents with Type 3 (bitmap) fonts is not lost on me.

This whole process makes me wonder, do we still need big publishers in this day and age of online publishing. Why should we, the authors that generate the content; the reviewers who verify it; the editors who carefully curtail it, offer our voluntary services to a big publisher like IEEE when we get nothing in return (no copy editing, no free open access). I wish I were in a field where I could publish exclusively with good publishers like SIAM and ACM (I have published once with SIAM; they actually copy edited the content and gave me the final TeX files when they were done), or in online journals like JMLR.

I am shocked at IEEE’s solution to manage the load on their servers.  After I pay \$200 per year for subscription and god knows how much my university pays for institutional membership, I get an “all on-line seats are occupied”. Really IEEE.

# Using ConTeXt to convert markdown to PDF

I am using markdown to write the course notes for a lecture that I am teaching this semester. The notes have no math—just text and images—and markdown is the ideal input format. At the same time, I am easily convert a markdown file to a nicely typeset pdf using pandoc—with the ConTeXt filter module providing the plumbing.

However, it took me a while to come up with a work flow that I like. Keep reading

# Look before you leap — especially if you are going to jump over others

Today I got 120 odd emails from ISIT. Yes, that is right. 120. All were like this

Dear XXXX

The IEEE Information Theory Society and the Technical Program Committee of ISIT 2010 encourage authors to post preprints of their submitted papers on the arXiv (http://www.arXiv.org/) preprint server at the time of submission. More information can be found at http://www.itsoc.org/publications/arxiv

record for

#XXX: ‘XXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXXX’

for display on the ISIT 2010 website before the symposium begins, you may do so by clicking the following link:

http://www.isit2010.org/arXivUpdate.asp?q=xxxxxxxxxxx

You may alternatively link to a longer version of your ISIT paper. This does not necessarily have to be on arxiv. You can link to any online version.

We feel that this will make it easier for the attendees to browse the technical program and read the papers prior to the symposium, thereby enriching their interaction with the authors at the symposium.

Please note that this action is entirely optional.

Regards,
ISIT 2010 Program Chairs

A noble cause, gone horribly wrong. I suspect someone did not check the automated script and instead of sending emails to individual authors, all emails went to all authors.

As a result, they also had to disable the link to add an arxiv update, and will probably send a whole bunch of emails again. Shudders.

Instead of soliciting preprints from all the authors, wouldn’t it make it easier for attendees to browse the technical program and read the papers prior to the symposium if the organizers simply included a link to the submitted papers? Oh, the irony.

# Chasing a moving target

The CDC 2010 deadline has been extended again, this time to April 2nd. First it was March 15th (the call for papers still says March 15th), then it got extended to March 30th (today), and now it has been extended to April 2nd. Seriously, why do conference organizers have to extend the submission deadline? I have heard that sometimes small conferences extend the submission deadline if they fail to receive sufficient papers. But surely a mammoth like CDC (last time I checked it had 1500 participants; my submitted paper has a submission number in late 900s) cannot have that problem. And this is not the first time that CDC has done this. I think that last year the deadline got extended by a month. Why?

I suspect that such extensions are requested by some big and powerful people who could not submit their papers on time. I cannot figure any other logical explanation 😦

# Who cares about the reviewer?

I reviewed a paper for ISIT and got an automated reply from the review system.

Dear <TPC member handling the paper>

ISIT 2010 Reviewer <reviewer’s name> has submitted a complete review for the following paper:

< Details of the paper >

Thank you for participating in ISIT 2010.

Err, what!? The automated reply is thanking the TPC member for participating in the review process. And I was the one who spent the whole day reading the paper. After reading this letter of appreciation, I don’t really want to finish the other three reviews.