[ale] LaTeX question?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 19:44 -0500, Thompson Freeman wrote:
> In any event, it was early in the era of  
> computer checking of student papers, using a home grown  
> system. In the second or third year of the systems use, the  
> final course paper showed something horrible like 30%+  
> students reusing papers from the previous years students,  
> many of which were literal full copies. Which amounts to my  
> other big reason for rather liking computer assistance: a  
> huge percentage of students is looking for, and working  
> very hard at, finding a way to avoid doing something that  
> they don't want to do - the assigned work.

Very true, however...

If Evince can read the output of my documents as generated by any flavor
of LaTeX to PDF output, I don't see why a plagiarism checker couldn't do
the same.  The system that the school that I go to uses is probably not
home-brew, but it only supports Microsoft Word documents, which I find
rather annoying and obtuse.  At the very least, if it supports other
filetypes, it is configured to not permit them to be uploaded if one of
those filetypes is PDF.  It gives the error message "Only files
with .doc extension are allowed."

It is a shame, I think, given that a PDF document renders 100% correctly
no matter what viewer you use to view it, so long as the viewer is
adhering to the standards that PDF is.  The thing is that any technical
argument is lost on this school, and I am beginning to think that
technical arguments are lost on many more institutions than not anymore
simply because many of the people that control the flow of things
monetarily and technologically are not educated enough to see the merit
of such arguments.  The more that I use this system to create documents
over using OpenOffice.org, the more I can't stand OOo---and I am sure
that the same would go for Microsoft Word, if I had access to one
currently.  The output in PDF format is just so attractive, and the
documents are so easy to generate.

I recently learned how to typeset a greeting card, as an example.  Now,
I have tried to learn how to do cards in minimal time with
OpenOffice.org, but have not succeeded.  It requires that you create
frames and rotate things about, and you wind up getting pretty cruddy
output.  However, I typeset a few greeting cards this year with XeLaTeX,
and I was absolutely amazed at how easy it was---particularly how good
looking it came out to be.  The requirements for making the images look
wonderful are of course to use high-resolution images, but it deals very
nicely with a 300 or 600 dpi JPEG image that is hardly compressed, and
the output looks wonderful both on the screen and printed.  I cannot say
that for OOo.

Of course, thinking about it more, I might be able to side-step the
requirement altogether by simply submitting the PDF with a copy of the
text contained within the PDF in .doc format, perhaps copy-pasted from
the PDF... 

--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                   mike at trausch.us
home: 404-592-5746, 1                                 www.trausch.us
cell: 678-522-7934                       im: mike at trausch.us, jabber
Ubuntu Unofficial Backports Project:    http://backports.trausch.us/
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