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Issue 13(1), February 2006
Book review: Digital typography using LaTeX
Scientists and engineers never do anything
By Jackie Damrau (jdamrau3@airmail.net), Senior Member, Lone Star Community
Many moons ago (circa 1985), I worked in academia as an editorial assistant for the Mathematics and Statistics Department at the University of New Mexico. At that time, I learned a new way of typing research papers and proposals and graduate dissertations using a UNIX mainframe computer. In those days, the computer sat miles away with a broadband connection to the actual system. I used “troff,” which is a set of UNIX commands for formatting text files for printing to typesetters or laser printers that had PostScript-based engines. Preparing files in troff required using embedded codes for line spacing, margin settings, centering, tab stops, keeping lines together, and so, on using dot (.) commands. Here’s a small sample of troff code for a very simple sentence (# symbols indicate comments that explain the purpose of a command):
.ce # center the next line of text
.sp # skip a line space
.ps10 # use 10-point type
The quick brown fox jumped
.I # italicize the word or phrase on the next line
quickly over the fence.
Okay, it looks complicated. It’s not really. Here’s what the output actually would look like:
The quick brown fox jumped quickly over the fence.
Troff was soon replaced with a more popular typesetting application, called TeX (pronounced “TEK”).
Donald Knuth, a computer science professor at Stanford University, created TeX in 1970 after the revised second volume of his The Art of Computer Programming series came back from the publisher. The quality of the new computer typesetting was far different than the first edition of Volume 2, so Knuth set out to study the traditional rules of typography and typesetting mathematical equations. What started out as a 6-month project eventually took Knuth 10 years to perfect into the ultimate design of TeX. He achieved his goal of providing a typesetting system that produces output that will always look the same and that had the best price tag of all: free. Besides this, TeX was able to typeset complex mathematical equations when other applications available at the time were cost-prohibitive, proprietary, and limited to specific hardware. The one disadvantage: there was no WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) view.
With TeX, the author would have to decide what layout to use, the point sizes for the title and body text, and so forth. This was bad for documents because the design and layout was being done by authors who had no experience or skill in designing a great-looking document.
In 1985, Leslie Lamport developed LaTeX (pronounced “Lah-Tech” or “Lay-tech”), a document preparation system that uses TeX as its underlying "engine", yet it leaves the document design to document designers and helps authors to write documents. LaTeX encourages anyone using it to delay thinking about the document’s appearance so they can concentrate on creating the content, which is the most important part of a scientific document. LaTeX has become the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents.
LaTeX comes with templates that let you typeset journal articles, technical reports, books, and slide presentations, as well as letting you typeset complex mathematical formulas. Other advantages are that it gives you complete control over large documents, automatically generates bibliographies and indexes, and can typeset documents in any number of languages.
After about a year working with troff, I was asked to learn LaTeX. So in the summer of 1985, I began working to teach myself LaTeX. At that time, there was a very crude user’s manual available that was still being written. It took me three months to get used to the new programming sequence and to learn not to use the old dot commands. Now, I was using “backslash” (or \) commands. The documentation alluded to the fact that a user’s group existed for those who were using TeX. This group was aptly named "the TeX Users Group" (TUG).
The University agreed to pay my membership in this group so that I could continue learning and communicating with peers about the uses of LaTeX. In the fall of 1985, TUG’s monthly publication, TUGboat, reported that TUG was conducting a competition for the best typeset entry using TeX or LaTeX. I had just finished typesetting a combinatorial mathematics textbook for one of the mathematicians in the department. This textbook had a large amount of graphics that I managed to produce using LaTeX.
Working with graphics at that time required using graph paper to plot the X and Y coordinates of the combinatorial mathematics diagrams and then typing the coordinates into LaTeX to describe a line art picture. This is not as easy as it sounds, yet I became quite proficient in producing very complex mathematical diagrams.
So when the Call for Entries appeared in TUGboat, I decided to enter one section of the textbook, with the professor’s approval, of course. Well, guess what! I found out a few short months later that I had won the first Donald E. Knuth TeX Scholarship for my LaTeX entry. What this prestigious honor did for me was this: it gave me an all-expenses paid trip to the Annual TeX Users Conference, where I was able to meet and network with fellow LaTeX users and attend sessions on how to create even more fantastic documents.
I spent approximately 10 years in the TeX Users Group, serving as a TUGboat column editor for several years and one year as a member of the Board of Directors. At the same time, I was being persuaded to enter into the world of technical writing: instead of typesetting text written by others, I was being asked to help write the actual content.
Through the years, I have left the TeX world behind as many of my employers required knowledge and experience with different software applications. My heart still belongs with LaTeX, since it was the stepping-stone that launched my career. I’ll never forget the honor that learning that software gave to me. As well, I’m not afraid to tackle any software now, because if you can tackle TeX and LaTeX in all its programming glory, you can do anything.
The TeX Users Group (TUG) is similar to STC. It’s a non-profit organization run by and for its members to represent the worldwide interests of all TeX and LaTeX users. Visit www.tug.org to learn more about this organization. You’ll find a lot of information on where you can download TeX and LaTeX. You’ll also find a number of books available today at your local bookstore about TeX and LaTeX.
Jackie Damrau has more than 20 years of technical writing experience and 6 years in creating training materials and delivering soft-skills training courses. She is a senior technical writer on the Digital Solutions Team at Perot Systems and is a senior member and first vice-president of the STC Lone Star chapter.
By Kathie Gorski (kgorski@execpc.com)
Greetings, fellow SciCom SIG members. I have been serving as president of the Scientific Communication SIG since the start of 2006. I’ll admit that I haven’t really done much yet, primarily because I’ve had an inordinate amount of work coming my way in the past few weeks. That’s always a good thing for a consultant to be able to say, right? These recent (and ongoing) projects have been really quite fun, and they have reminded me why I enjoy scientific communication and to some extent about why I value this SIG.
In my first article as SIG president, written for the previous issue of the newsletter, I mentioned that in a follow-up article I would explain why I value the Scientific Communication SIG. After pondering the issue off and on over the past month, I have concluded that my connection to the SIG is to a large extent emotional. If there were not a Scientific Communication SIG, I am not sure I would continue to be a member of STC. This SIG makes me feel like there is a place for me and my interests within the larger group. I wonder how many other SIG members think or feel this way?
On top of this emotional link, there’s also the excellent newsletter Geoff Hart pulls together for us, plus the newly revamped Web site that Cory Koeppen has developed. [Editor's note: The prototype for the new site can be found at <http://www.stcsig.org/sc/style3.htm>. Please have a look and let Cory know what you think!—GH]
I expect that there’s more we can do to increase the value of the Scientific Communication SIG for its members. If you would like to help explore this topic, please consider joining a few others of us in the SIG as we go through the rechartering exercise. Send me an email and let me know you’d like to help!
by Geoff Hart (ghart@videotron.ca)
You may have noticed a growing backlash against science in modern society. Over the past few centuries, it's been noted with equal measures of justice and imprecision how science has pushed aside religion as a way to explain the world and deal with its vexing uncertainties. This may have resulted from a growing dissatisfaction with religion or with religion's perceived inability to provide certainty, exacerbated by a growing exposure to many new and vastly different cultures and religions. Whether this is a good or bad thing, I leave to each individual to decide.
However, whenever the thrill of a new paradigm wears off and we stop ignoring the holes in the emperor's new clothes, the new paradigm becomes unsatisfactory in its turn. For example, society has collectively grown disenchanted with science's inability to explain some of the more important aspects of our lives, particularly the emotional aspects of being human. Then there are the adverse consequences of uncritically adopting the technological paradigm spawned by science and its firstborn child, technology: industrial accidents, pollution, species extinctions and decreased biodiversity, the greenhouse effect, and increasingly serious diseases. These symptoms tell us that science doesn't have all the answers either.
(A brief clarification before proceeding: A closer look at both religion and science reveals that it is not the paradigm per se that is the problem, since paradigms are nothing more than tools for understanding. Rather, the problem arises from blind and simplistic adherence to a paradigm, combined with greed, laziness, and other typical human character defects.)
We see this disenchantment in the popular press all the time, where dismissive phrases such as "of course, this is only a theory" reveal both the dissatisfaction and a profound misunderstanding of how science works. Even some of my scientist clients make this mistake. An arguably more serious problem come from those who adopt a proven and highly effective rhetorical approach to attack science: use your opponent's own words against them when speaking to those who don't fully understand those words. The result? When (as is natural) scientists follow their learned reflex and use familiar words in an attempt to communicate clearly, as they would do when talking to their peers, the clarity and value of their message is greatly diluted by their opponents' misuse of those terms.
What should the message be? Something that more accurately reflects both the power and the limitations of the scientific paradigm. Before we can craft that message, it helps to take a large step back and refresh our memory of how science works. Simplistically, we can say that science attempts to describe our world in four phases:
Let's look at each of these in turn.
When scientists observe a phenomenon, they attempt to explain it based on what they already know about that phenomenon and thereby create one or more hypotheses (testable propositions) to explain the observed but currently unexplained aspects of the phenomenon. A given hypothesis may be entirely incorrect—the framer of the hypothesis often knows this when they frame it—but it follows logically (thus, plausibly) from what is already known or believed to be known. Where the framer strongly suspects that the hypothesis is incorrect, the goal of framing the incorrect hypothesis is to provide a tool that will eliminate certain possibilities, thereby leaving fewer potential explanations to be tested in future research.
As meticulous study begins to muster evidence that supports or refines (revises and improves) a hypothesis, scientists increasingly come to believe that the hypothesis offers a reasonable, if incomplete, understanding of the world. (Never forget the word incomplete in discussing theory: scientists fully recognize the amazing complexity of the world and accept that they may never reach a final, completely accurate description of any aspect of that complexity.)
The original hypothesis gradually transforms into a theory—an explanation that provides a unifying framework for understanding some aspect of the world. That original hypothesis has usually undergone considerable fine-tuning or revision as a result of an ongoing series of confirmations of key aspects of the hypothesis and rejections of other aspects of the hypothesis based on contradictory results. It's important to remember that theories are not static; even their proponents recognize them as a work in progress. In particular, theories spawn subordinate hypotheses that are in turn tested and either supported or rejected, thereby deepening and broadening and enriching the theory.
When a theory has withstood the test of time, which in the context of science means that it has been tested repeatedly, from many different perspectives and using many new generations of insights, and has withstood repeated challenges from competing hypotheses, it becomes enshrined as law. At that point, researchers gradually lose interest in testing that theory until new technologies or new insights from other fields suggest the possibility of tests that have not previously been attempted. Until those new tests can be done, the law is simply accepted as one of the "givens" of a field, and scientists move on to more interesting problems.
This has both good consequences and bad: researchers can build new hypotheses and theories that expand upon and enrich the law, but they may also come accept the law as dogma. It's the latter consequence that is most problematic: accepting something as a dogma means that we no longer challenge our assumptions, and perhaps even blindly and simplistically apply the law even when it is not completely satisfactory. This can lead us to complacency and a temptation to ignore or aggressively fight any philosophy or any person who challenges that dogma. That's unfortunate, because it is the restless unease of an inquiring mind, combined with an increasing dissatisfaction with known imperfections in a theory or law, that leads to breakthroughs.
Even the finest theory and the most widely accepted law inevitably fails to describe some subtle or not-so-subtle aspect of the reality it purports to describe. When asked why I'm so in love with science, my answer generally relies on one of two metaphors. When I'm feeling lofty or exalted, I respond that each new mountain we climb reveals a new and exciting vista of distant peaks that we have not yet climbed. If I'm feeling more reductionist, I'll frame this in the other direction: the more narrowly we focus, the more of life's wonderful complexity we see. (I still remember my excitement, as a youth, in looking at a microscope slide filled with pond water and suddenly perceiving a whole new world whose existence I'd never before suspected.)
A paradigm shift occurs when some researcher detects a problem with or inadequacy in an accepted law and entertains a suspicion that they may be able to resolve that problem or fill in a gap. Perhaps there is some small detail the law does not describe, but that has been considered trivial and unworthy of explanation, or perhaps the law is known to only approximate reality and the researcher imagines they can provide a better approximation. The researcher does what any good scientist will do: they challenge the prevailing assumptions and propose a new testable hypothesis that will both honor the spirit of the law (which has, after all, worked well up to this point) and modify its letter by providing new knowledge or a more precise description. When the challenge is sufficiently radical, it becomes what Kuhn called a "paradigm shift": the way we look at and explain our world (the paradigm or metaphor) changes. The cycle begins again, leading to new theories and laws and new challenges that overturn the old laws.
In this manner, Sir Isaac Newton's hypotheses about how force and acceleration related to mass were tested and confirmed, giving rise to his theories of motion, and when these theories were tested extensively, exhaustively, and creatively, and found to be correct, they became Newton's laws of motion. Then along came Einstein, who demonstrated that Newton's laws only approximated reality—an enormously useful approximation, to be sure, and one that remains as valid today as it did nearly four centuries ago. Einstein recapitulated the process of turning hypothesis into theory, and now, after rigorous and long-term testing, both special and general relativity have nearly attained the status of law. However, we still refer to Einstein's theories (not laws) of relativity because there remain troublesome aspects that have not yet been fully explained, such as the linkage between relativity and quantum mechanics and uncertainty over how gravitation really works.
Some future genius will undoubtedly resolve these difficulties and update Einstein's work in much the same way that Einstein updated Newton's work. The important thing to understand about this process is not that Einstein made Newton irrelevant, nor that the future researcher will make Einstein irrelevant. Rather, they will provide a better approximation of reality that explains things that neither Newton nor Einstein could explain. Newton's laws still provide an acceptably accurate explanation for how moving objects such as cars will behave at the speeds we're likely to encounter in daily life; this lets us design functional cars. Similarly, Einstein's relatively allows us to calculate time discrepancies that result at much higher speeds with sufficient accuracy that we can obtain useful measurements from the global positioning system (GPS).
It is this process of continual refinement of theory that is widely misunderstood, particularly by the public, and that is seen as a flaw in science. It's natural and human to desire certainty, but if science teaches us nothing else, it teaches that even the most solid-seeming laws represent nothing more than the best current approximation of an unimaginably complex reality. The more we seek, the more complexity we discover and the more we find that we've described only the surface reality, not the truth that lies beneath it. It is this process of endlessly seeking a better explanation that truly captures the spirit of science. Contrary to the popular perception, the goal of science is not to provide certainty, but rather to provide an increasingly good approximation of how our world works. That is, we continually replace our former understanding with something more profound. This process of change should not be seen as a criticism of science, but rather celebrated as one of the unique insights offered by the scientific method: recognition and delight in uncertainty.
What does this mean for us as scientific communicators? It means that we must reconsider how we think of our work, and particularly, that we must discard the notion that our goal is to strive for certainty. Instead, our goal must be to communicate an increasingly accurate understanding of our world and of the limitations of this understanding. We must never forget that our understanding is provisional and that the journey to understanding will continue long after our personal journeys come to an end. We must never give the mistaken impression that we have completed that journey. Instead, we must embrace the complexity of our world and remind our audience that "the road goes ever on", as Tolkein wrote so movingly. Let us take back and revalue our words (hypothesis, theory, law), and use them to once more communicate effectively with both the experts and the innocents in our audience.
Syropoulos, A.; Tsolomitis, A.; Sofroniou, N. 2002. Digital typography using LaTeX. Springer-Verlag, New York, NY. [ISBN 0-387-95217-9. 510 pages, including index and CD-ROM. $44.95 USD (softcover).]
by Jackie Damrau (jdamrau3@airmail.net)
Previously published in Technical Communication. Republished with permission.
Digital typography is far different from desktop publishing. A major distinction is that many desktop publishing software packages cannot easily handle the vast array of mathematical equations and chemical formulas. Donald Knuth, a computer science professor at Stanford, became disenchanted with the computer technology available for typesetting his books during his struggles to complete the two volumes of The art of computer programming (Addison-Wesley, 1997 and 1998). His solution was to invent TeX.
TeX is a typesetting programming language that offers users the ability to define macros and use them to help create the final document. LaTeX, created by Leslie Lamport, is an offspring of TeX that sits on top of TeX and simplifies much of its macro-intensive programming code to allow easy creation of such documents as letters, simple articles and reports, and even books. LaTeX2e, in turn, is an enhancement of Lamport’s original LaTeX application developed by Frank Mittelbach and his team. Digital typography using LaTeX discusses the LaTeX2e version of LaTeX.
The Foreword provides an excellent past–present–future history of TeX. Although a bit lengthy, it helps set the stage for why this software and its related community of followers rely so heavily on this tool and work so hard to expand its usability. It makes clear, for example, that Knuth’s main vision was to use typography as it was meant to be used.
I once belonged to the TeX community, living and serving in its user’s group for about 10 years. Although I left the daily LaTeX world as my career changed, my heart still belongs to the software for typesetting mathematical and computer science theses and dissertations. The software has undergone many changes, yet I can discern the love that the authors of this book have for its use.
The authors start the Preface by defining typography as “an art because it exists to honor content, and consequently, it can be deliberately misused. On the other hand, it is a craft, by which the meaning of a text (or its absence of meaning) can be clarified, honored, and shared or knowingly disguised” (p. xxv). They then proceed to talk about the advantages of using LaTeX rather than today’s standard WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) desktop packages. One of the drawbacks to desktop publishing software is its inability to handle “the typesetting of mathematical text, which is very demanding. However, if one is provided with a programming notation specifically designed for typesetting purposes, then one loses the friendly user interface, but this is usually compensated by the output quality” (p. xxv).
The Preface explains each chapter in detail along with recommendations of how novice readers and advanced readers (who can use the book as a reference book) should read Digital typography using LaTeX. The authors, for example, explain their use of a special typographical symbol indicating passages that first-time readers should avoid until they are more familiar with the software itself. The Introduction suggests the scope of use for the software:
Although LaTeX and LaTeX2ε (the ε stands for epsilon, which replaces the older LaTeX 2.09 version) are "excellent typesetting tools for all sorts of documents, many people still think that they are the tools of choice only for mathematical typesetting. By presenting the multilingual capabilities and the other capabilities of these systems, we hope to make clear that these tools are just the best typesetting tools for all kinds of documents and all kinds of users!" (p. xxvi)
Digital typography using LaTeX intersperses exercises throughout each chapter to teach readers how to begin using the software. It starts very simply and moves on to more advanced usage. The CD-ROM that accompanies the book provides the reader with the complete software, answers to the exercises, and other assorted software tools and templates that the book mentions.
A substantial improvement has occurred in how you typeset mathematical equations since my sojourn with LaTeX. As I read the section on commutative diagrams (p. 126–127), I pulled out my 1986 LaTeX user’s guide and reference manual to refresh my mind on how I used to typeset them. The newer LaTeX version has greatly enhanced this action for mathematicians and other scientific professionals.
Chapter 5 shows how to make LaTeX generate XML and SGML input for generating Web pages. It also covers MathML and OMDoc, which are additional tools for the transfer and display of mathematical equations on the Web. The process requires more in-depth programming of the source files and attention to which software is being used. Appendix D provides information on how to transform LaTeX documents through a number of HTML and XHTML converters for producing Web-displayable documents. Other packages mentioned here allow for the conversion of documents into e-books and and online documents that follow the DocBook specification.
The next several chapters discuss the various supplemental coded plugins (applets) that readers can use with LaTeX. The authors do a great job of providing a brief description, the author’s name, and a discussion of the applet with sample programming code to use for each one. Chapter 9 describes using LaTeX to draw pictures. Drawing pictures does require knowledge of the standard Cartesian coordinate system. At the time I used this software, I used graph paper to diagram my pictures and then plotted them out using the extensive LaTeX programming codes to get the finished product. This chapter succinctly describes the added features of rotatebox (used to change the horizontal and vertical positioning of a word) and scalebox and resizebox (both used to affect the graphical image), all vast improvements.
Section 9.11 also provides a concise explanation of the use of color and shading in tables, graphics, and so on to improve documents. LaTeX requires additional plug-ins or PostScript commands to create actual color output; the authors provide brief details on how to accomplish such results. This section provides the best explanation for the terms grayscale, RGB, HSB, and CMYK that I have seen:
"The grayscale color model is used to specify shades of gray... black is denoted by 0.0 and white by 1.0 ... RGB is the Red-Green-Blue color model. Other colors are derived from combinations of the three primary colors and are specified as triplets of numbers from 0.0 to 1.0. For example, purple is defined to be the triplet (0.7, 0.3, 1.0). Obviously, 0.7 is the 'amount' of red, 0.3 the 'amount' of green, and 1.0 the 'amount' of blue (actually, it is blue phosphorus). RGB is an additive color model and is used when light is generated... CMYK is the Cyan–Magenta–Yellow–blacK color model and has four primary colors... This is a subtractive color model and is used in applications where light is reflected, such as printing." (pp. 293–294)
The HSB color model is not usable in LaTeX because it is an alternate version of RGB. The authors recommend the use of CMYK to achieve actual color representation for printed materials. Four-color separations for high-quality offset printing are possible, although they require a plug-in. Overall, I am pleased with this section.
I recommend Digital typography using LaTeX for anyone in the scientific community who wants to learn this software. The book will make it easier to typeset complex research papers and other documentation.
Jackie Damrau has more than 20 years of technical writing experience and 6 years in creating training materials and delivering soft-skills training courses. She is a senior technical writer on the Digital Solutions Team at Perot Systems and is a senior member and first vice-president of the STC Lone Star chapter.
by Jean-luc Doumont
Previously published in the IEEE Prof. Commun. Soc. Newsletter 47:1, 9 (January/February 2003)
If you browse through most of the research literature, especially in scientific or technical fields, you might be tempted to draw this conclusion: researchers never seem to do anything. When relating an event as simple as We measured the temperature, they are likely to remove the agent to obtain the supposed benefit of the passive voice. But even the sentence The temperature was measured has little chance of finding its way into print; the authors are likely to remove the action, too, and end up with A measurement of the temperature was carried out.
Readers of this Newsletter who wield the red pen as part of their job have usually learned to home in on passive voice and fix it instantly, yet we may do so for different reasons. Some of us defend the point of view that active verbs are more dynamic, making for a more interesting style. Others argue in favor of conciseness. But when I help scientists and engineers write more readable journal articles or research reports, my chief concern is not so much style as accuracy. In other words, I am more concerned by the missing agent than by the use of the active voice or the first person, even if the three are often linked.
As usual, though, researchers pursue a good goal when using the passive voice, even though those good intentions lead to what we might consider weak, wordy, or inaccurate sentences. The reasons given by the participants in my training programs seem to fall into two categories: cultural influences on the one hand, and intended objectivity on the other.
Cultural influences, in turn, seem to be two-fold. Many participants were simply taught in school to avoid the first person when possible, lest they sound arrogant. Others developed the passive-voice habit from their reading or from their mentors (PhD supervisors being typical culprits). Cultural influences, being powerful, quickly lead to myths: “you just can't do that in a paper” is a frequent reaction to my proposing the use of first person, even when the journal's (alas, seldom read) guidelines for authors encourage such active verb forms.
Those participants who get over the cultural shock start advancing more rational arguments. “Look,” they might say, “it doesn't matter who measured the temperature; what matters is the measured value, so let's focus on that.” Agreed, but with two comments. First, the passive voice The temperature was measured does not focus on the measured value either; a better sentence might be The measured temperature of 28°C indicates… Second, sometimes the agent does matter to the readers, for example when the verb implies human judgment or responsibility (as in decide, believe, or recommend).
My favorite ambiguous phrase is no doubt It is believed… When I ask a group of training participants who the implied agent might be, I often hear several people answer at once, “Well, it's obvious, isn't it?” To some of them, however, it obviously means The authors believe; to others, The scientific community believes.
Clarifying the agent when the agent matters thus becomes our endeavor—one that scientists and engineers may be more receptive to than dogmatic statements such as “Avoid passive voice” or “Write in the first person”. How we clarify the agent is important in its own right, but is not the priority. Phrases such as The authors believe, for example, sound wordy to my ear, but they convey the agent accurately, so I may propose but never insist that they be changed to We believe.
Interestingly, researchers who grew fond of impersonal constructs sometimes propose adding a reference citation as an easy fix: they thus write It is believed [5] in an attempt to mean The authors of [5] believe. Unfortunately, the latter is but one way of interpreting the former. All the reference citation really says is “You will find more on this belief in [5].”
Let us regard passive voice more as a symptom than as a cause. Let us be alert to its presence, but not ready to automatically turn passive phrases into active voice. Some passive sentences are useful, for they allow us to focus on the act rather than the actor. Some are ineffective, but would remain so if merely converted to the active voice by adding an actor such as we. Those need to be rewritten entirely for clarity, accuracy, and conciseness.
Dr. Jean-luc Doumont teaches and provides advice on professional speaking, writing, and graphing. For some 20 years, he has helped audiences of all ages, backgrounds, and nationalities structure their thoughts and construct their communication.
Looking for a way to find published scientific material? Have a look at the SCIRUS search engine (www.scirus.com/srsapp). The service claims to index more than 200 million science-related pages and filter out results that aren't directly related to science. Whether it is truly "the most comprehensive science-specific search engine on the Internet" I leave to you to discover, but it does link to a wide variety of useful resources, some of which provide no-cost full-text versions of their content.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) plans to make all research funded by NIH available to the public at no cost. For details, see their press release (www.nih.gov/news/pr/feb2005/od-03.htm). The goal is to offer manuscripts that result from NIH-funded research available to the public within 12 months of final publication. To achieve this, new NIH grant guidelines require authors to submit an electronic version of their final manuscript equivalent to the final version. The ability to delay publication by up to 12 months represents a reasonable compromise between the public's right to access to information produced with taxpayer dollars and the right of commercial journal publishers to cover the costs of publication, including peer review. NIH already offers a substantial online resource in the form of PubMed Central (www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov), which offers access to the full text of a great many journals.
FreeFullText claims to provide direct links to more than 7000 scholarly periodicals that offer access to some or all of their online content. The database assumes that you already know the journal and volume information for the article, and recommends searching elsewhere (such as the SCIRUS search engine described earlier in this article) first if you're not sure about the publications details. Access to articles is governed by the publisher of the articles, not FreeFullText, and although no registration is required by FreeFullText, the publishers themselves may require registration. For more information, visit their Web site (www.freefulltext.com).
by Geoff Hart (ghart@videotron.ca)
Time once again for my annual message about your membership in the e-mail discussion group offered by our SIG. (See the last page of the newsletter for subscription details.) As usual, I've had to unsubscribe more than a dozen members who changed their e-mail address without updating their subscription information. When I get enough error messages (at least three that suggest the address is no longer valid) and cannot contact you directly by e-mail to confirm this, I have to remove your name from the list. Unfortunately, it's too time-consuming for me to hunt down every person's new address in the STC member database. So: If you've changed e-mail addresses in the past several months, please take a moment to confirm your subscription information or sign up once again if I deleted you.
You might also be interested in joining the STC Science and Technology forum (http://forum.stcforum.org/). Although not formally associated with the SIG, this forum will likely become an ongoing part of how our community discusses our profession. The forum has only just begun operation, so there are no messages, but because it is open to all members and not just SIG members, I expect it to become more active over time. In the meantime, I encourage you to have a look at this site, since there are many other forums you might want to participate in.
"We instinctively seem to prefer clear boundaries in our view of the cosmos, with neatly pigeonholed categories, but nature is more canny, presenting us with a continuum... and a messy degree of overlap... As often happens in science, discoveries are made at the margins, where phenomena shade into one another and their most essential features become most apparent."—Subhanjoy Mohanty and Ray Jayawardhana, The mystery of brown dwarf origins
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"It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry."—Thomas Paine, philosopher and writer (1737–1809)
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"It is not certain, as Pascal put it riddlingly, that everything is uncertain. Even the scientist in his lab knows there are things you do not need to prove, like the colors of substances, and he could not even get started if he thought otherwise."—George Watson, Socrates' Mistake
The Exchange is published on behalf of the Scientific Communication special interest group of the Society for Technical Communication. Material in the Exchange can be reprinted without permission if credit is given to the author and a copy of the reprint is sent to the editor. Please send comments, letters, and articles to the editor.
Editor and Publisher of the Exchange newsletter:
Geoff Hart (ghart@videotron.ca)
Scientific Communication SIG Manager:
Kathie Gorski (kgorski@execpc.com)
SciCom SIG Webmaster:
C Joel Koeppen (cjoelk@earthlink.net)
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