[texhax] test for LaTeX typist ?

Steve Schwartz s.schwartz at imperial.ac.uk
Wed Apr 26 18:54:34 CEST 2006


On Wed, 2006-04-26 at 16:58 +0100, Philip TAYLOR wrote:
> "think [La]TeX"

I've never tried it, but you might try the following: I presume that
they would regard themselves as proficient in MS Word (or Lotus or ...)
and have never used LaTeX. Give prospective candidates a short article
already typeset and printed (centred title, authors, formatted abstract,
section and subsection headings, etc.) and ask them to construct an
exemplary Word document (e.g., to be used in an Intermediate/advanced
Word classroom) matching it. If they use Word styles to define the
indents, bold, fonts, etc., they at least think structurally about the
document. If they type all the text in and manually make each individual
section heading larger and bold, they'd fail my "think latex" test.

Perhaps getting them to do some simple formulae in a spreadsheet would
demonstrate the ability to think algorithmically.

Good luck!

Steve
-- 
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
Professor Steven J Schwartz      Phone: +44-(0)20-7594-7660
Space and Atmospheric Physics    Fax:   +44-(0)20-7594-7772
The Blackett Laboratory          E-mail: s.schwartz at imperial.ac.uk
Imperial College London          Office: Huxley 6M70 
London SW7 2BW, U.K.             Web: http://www.sp.ph.ic.ac.uk/~sjs
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+




More information about the texhax mailing list