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thessalianI. Want. A holiday. Maybe it's just borderline exhaustion talking, but I am so fed up with this shit that it's not even funny.
Look, it's not hard. You send a paper in for publications. The guidelines clearly state that all submissions should be made via e-mail with a submitted hard copy to come in the post later. Do people do this? Usually. However, I've seen sheer idiocy when it comes to paper submissions, three counts of it just today. I had someone send in a floppy disc that had been paper-clipped to the fucking hard copy of the document and then crammed into an unpadded envelope and stuck through the post with no "WARNING: CONTENTS FRAGILE"-style notification whatsoever. By the time I got it, the paper clip had got wedged into the little metal slidey flap-thing that I assume protects the disc while still allowing access to the disc so the computer can read it, probably scratching the disc to fuck, and the metal thing was stuck with the disc exposed. Needless to say, it was no longer an adequate piece of data storage equipment. The best part is when I e-mailed the guy asking for a copy by return e-mail; he honestly seemed surprised that his disc had got so damaged when he put it through the Post Office with no protective padding and a bloody paper clip attached to it.
That was not today. Today was the singular CD (I am going to e-mail this person and get them to send it to me via e-mail anyway), one paper with no electronic media whatsoever, and one... Oh, the one from Japan is a doozy; this author sent in one original and not one but two hard copies but no soft copy at all. You pay that much for postage and you don't send an electronic version as required by our guidelines? And you pay that much when you could have just e-mailed the fucking thing? Oh gods people are so unbelievably stupid.
And then there's that awful woman with the total lack of comprehension problem with regards to how she sends her submissions in. She sent a document to us that she'd done in some programme called LaTex, which apparently is used by "all scientific publications; after all, your publishers use it". We are not Cambridge University Press. We are not a university. We aren't even strictly speaking a scientific publication, and we don't have such a need for statistics that LaTex is going to be even remotely useful to us. So we don't have it. Instead, we have Word, which a vast quantity of people use. By using Word and sending us a Word document instead of LaTex and then sending us a PDF file of the document, you are guaranteeing that we can send it to referees and not have to worry about fucktard doctors who only use Hotmail or Yahoo. (Neither of those two internet mail clients can actually support PDFs, at least how we do them here. I don't know why; I just know that every time I send PDFs to a web-based mail address, it borks.) And who in their right mind thinks that you can embed a document in PDF format into another document? Because this woman obviously thinks you can. Grah. Hate.
But of course, if I take a holiday, everything goes to hell. Nobody touches my workload, except in tiny dribs and drabs in case of anything urgent going on, so when I come back it's hell on earth. I would dearly love to take the week after next off so that I can sit back, relax, prepare for Dragonmeet and generally have a holiday. But no. That's not going to happen. Because if I take time off, I'll go from Dragonmeet to Mage day to Uber-Workload-Hell with no breather in between. At least if I stay at work, everything will get done and I'll have at least somewhat less reason to stress.
Generally, my job is great, but sometimes these little annoyances will really stick in my craw.
Look, it's not hard. You send a paper in for publications. The guidelines clearly state that all submissions should be made via e-mail with a submitted hard copy to come in the post later. Do people do this? Usually. However, I've seen sheer idiocy when it comes to paper submissions, three counts of it just today. I had someone send in a floppy disc that had been paper-clipped to the fucking hard copy of the document and then crammed into an unpadded envelope and stuck through the post with no "WARNING: CONTENTS FRAGILE"-style notification whatsoever. By the time I got it, the paper clip had got wedged into the little metal slidey flap-thing that I assume protects the disc while still allowing access to the disc so the computer can read it, probably scratching the disc to fuck, and the metal thing was stuck with the disc exposed. Needless to say, it was no longer an adequate piece of data storage equipment. The best part is when I e-mailed the guy asking for a copy by return e-mail; he honestly seemed surprised that his disc had got so damaged when he put it through the Post Office with no protective padding and a bloody paper clip attached to it.
That was not today. Today was the singular CD (I am going to e-mail this person and get them to send it to me via e-mail anyway), one paper with no electronic media whatsoever, and one... Oh, the one from Japan is a doozy; this author sent in one original and not one but two hard copies but no soft copy at all. You pay that much for postage and you don't send an electronic version as required by our guidelines? And you pay that much when you could have just e-mailed the fucking thing? Oh gods people are so unbelievably stupid.
And then there's that awful woman with the total lack of comprehension problem with regards to how she sends her submissions in. She sent a document to us that she'd done in some programme called LaTex, which apparently is used by "all scientific publications; after all, your publishers use it". We are not Cambridge University Press. We are not a university. We aren't even strictly speaking a scientific publication, and we don't have such a need for statistics that LaTex is going to be even remotely useful to us. So we don't have it. Instead, we have Word, which a vast quantity of people use. By using Word and sending us a Word document instead of LaTex and then sending us a PDF file of the document, you are guaranteeing that we can send it to referees and not have to worry about fucktard doctors who only use Hotmail or Yahoo. (Neither of those two internet mail clients can actually support PDFs, at least how we do them here. I don't know why; I just know that every time I send PDFs to a web-based mail address, it borks.) And who in their right mind thinks that you can embed a document in PDF format into another document? Because this woman obviously thinks you can. Grah. Hate.
But of course, if I take a holiday, everything goes to hell. Nobody touches my workload, except in tiny dribs and drabs in case of anything urgent going on, so when I come back it's hell on earth. I would dearly love to take the week after next off so that I can sit back, relax, prepare for Dragonmeet and generally have a holiday. But no. That's not going to happen. Because if I take time off, I'll go from Dragonmeet to Mage day to Uber-Workload-Hell with no breather in between. At least if I stay at work, everything will get done and I'll have at least somewhat less reason to stress.
Generally, my job is great, but sometimes these little annoyances will really stick in my craw.
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-14 11:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-16 12:08 am (UTC)TeX was developed by Donald Knuth, a very famous computer scientist, after he looked at the draft of his newest book from the publisher and saw how utterly horrible the symbols and math stuff looked. He also enlisted the help of many others, including Herman Zapf - one of this century's most famous typographers.
It's popular because it produces the best quality layout of pretty much any software. It takes some time to learn, but then, unlike Microsoft Word, you don't need to relearn it every version :)
no subject
Date: 2005-11-15 11:52 pm (UTC)You mention a woman sending you a LaTeX document. I don't actually know what publications your organization is responsible for, but every conference I've submitted a paper to has accepted LaTeX documents. LaTeX's been around since the mid 1980's; it's built upon TeX, written during the 1970's. I've generally been under the impression that it's widely used in scientific fields; it's also entirely free. LaTeX is actually a document format rather than a specific program.
One of the nice things LaTeX lets you do is very easily reformat your document for different publications. Using the right templates, it's pretty easy to take the body of your document and make it fit the guidelines of a particular publication.
LaTeX isn't specifically optimized for statistics. It's a general purpose document formatting system.
I know how irritating it is to receive a document in a format that's hard to deal with. However, LaTeX is a fairly normal format for the field, and, having used both LaTeX and Word, I find LaTeX very preferable. Taking a LaTeX document and converting it to Word is very tedious and time-consuming; doing it the other way is equally frustrating.
You mention embedding PDF documents in other documents. Adobe Acrobat (standard edition, not the free reader) does let you do that.
http://www.sci.usq.edu.au/staff/robertsa/LaTeX/latexintro.html