[OS X TeX] Semi-OT

[Will Robertson]

On 23 Jan 2005, at 2:21 AM, Bruno Voisin wrote:
> That said, personally I disagree with this rule, which seems to date 
> back to the time when the concept of environmental awareness was not 
> invented: wasting all this amount of paper on each page seems a shame. 
> Generally first thing I do when creating a new LaTeX document is 
> resetting the margins to 1 inch on all sides, whatever the character 
> size.

I agree that it's a waste of paper, but I also agree with the experts 
who say that it's ugly to do this. One day I'm going to make a two 
column landscape layout with very small margins for the purpose of 
saving trees as well as being typographically acceptable.

> There are a number of typographical rules in the LaTeX manual that I 
> disagree with, like the recommendation to use numbered references 
> instead of author-date ones. Try to read a paper of each type: with 
> numbered references, even when having some prior knowledge of the 
> literature referred to, you are all the time interrupting your reading 
> of the paper to move to the list of references so as to identify which 
> publication is referred to; with author-date references, and provided 
> you have some familiarity with the literature, then reading the author 
> and date is sufficient to know which publication is referred to, 
> without having to move to the list of references.

Oh god yes. What's worse is when you read sentences like "and it was 
claimed in [45] that such-and-such" or "[3] claimed something else". 
Yeah, I don't understand people's opposition towards author-date bib 
styles. They seem to make heaps more sense to me...

W

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