Typesetting software
The hardest part of scientific research can be publishing it.
Our astronomer has just submitted a paper to a scientific journal for publishing. There is no guarantee this will actually happen; there are many reasons for a journal to reject a submission; but this time he is cautiously optimistic. It will be the culmination of quite a bit of work, spread over several years. The latter part of the effort, however, has nothing to do with the science, but involves instead the software required to write up his results. And this is annoying.
His calculations, interpretations and conclusions have been complete for months. It remained to write them up. He has written quite a few papers, so the organization of ideas and their expression in clear English, while not trivial, were not terribly difficult. The hard part this time around was the typesetting software. While one can, in theory, use a common program such as Word, to do a seriously mathematical paper in that environment is difficult or impossible. Since the days of his thesis he has used something called LaTeX (weird capitalization rules seem to be the norm among programmers). It is not easy to learn nor particularly user-friendly, but can do any math one wants. By now he is quite proficient in it.
But that’s not the end. Each journal, while accepting basic LaTeX, has its own style files to convert input into uniformly-presented output (title in bold, left-justified or centered, one-column format or two, etc.). Our astronomer has met these before and adapted. But since his last submission a lot has changed. Most scientists now read their journal articles online. That permits linking, within the article, to other articles or sources of information; indeed, now it’s possible to link directly to large databases and even interactive simulations. This is all to the good, and makes the era of typewritten manuscripts with hand-entered integral symbols seem quite prehistoric. We’re all glad we never had to deal with it.
But it has also led to a proliferation of details. When he downloaded the new style files for journal A, they stubbornly refused to give him any output at all. A week of prowling the internet finally revealed that he needed a more-than-basic LaTeX installation; after some work, he found directions for upgrading, and this functioned. But journal A was not interested in his paper.
He found the new style files for Journal B. These depended on a set of files that his operating system designated “obsolete” (as indeed they were), and refused to install. After a couple of weeks of back-and-forth emails with someone at the journal, he finally found these and got things to work. The “keywords” are in the wrong place, and the section headings are in all caps instead of mixed boldface, but the paper says what it needs to say. He is now awaiting the reports of the referees.
No doubt if he worked at a big, serious astronomy institution all this would have been taken care of by a LaTeX-savvy sysadmin. But as it is, he laments the amount of time and effort spent on something quite divorced from the actual science.
