[OS X TeX] NASA, Word, TeX and PowerPoint

[Adam M. Goldstein]

Right, my thought about the NASA bussiness immediately was, if they  
had used, say Beamer or TeX in general more widely, their  
communication would have been that much more effective, and then  
things such as what Tufte refers to in his little pamphlet wouldn't  
have occurred.

Moreover it occurs to me that Springer, at least, has a LaTeX  
submission option that allows you to upload your source, and it will  
typeset it and show you the completed PDF. So it's not as though this  
is impossible. You are supposed to put in any macros you want to use  
in the document itself. They are not generating a house style, I don't  
think, with manuscripts, but the auto upload does work. NSF's fastlane  
works the same way.

-Adam

On Feb 4, 2009, at 10:00 AM, Rene Borgella wrote:

> Hi All:
>
> I was catching up on the list and read the threads about  
> Macintouch's report about NASA's use of Word vs. TeX.  It reminded  
> me of Edward Tufte's book, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint".  Are  
> you folks familiar with it?  It's very interesting!  In the essay,  
> Tufte documents how NASA engineers use of PowerPoint impacted their  
> ability to effectively communicate critical safety and engineering  
> information and, unfortunately, was partly to blame for the Shuttle  
> Challenger's tragic accident.  If you are not familiar with Tufte's  
> work, a visit to his website is probably worth it.  Although he's  
> not a TeX user, as far as I know, his ideas about how to present  
> information are worthy of your time.
>
> Here are some relevant links
>
> <http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1&topic=Ask+E%2eT%2e 
> >
>
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaster>
>
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Tufte>
>
>
>
> All the best,
>
> René
>
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------------------
Adam M. Goldstein PhD, MSLIS
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