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I'm searching a discussion group for asking questions about how layout, typography and etc. for scientific writing

Especially concerning:

  • Ph.D. thesis
  • in engineering / materials science
  • conventions for scientific writing / Ph.D. thesis German language and/or at German universities

e. g.

  • how to present / structure content?
  • how to typeset mathematical symbols correctly?
  • how to create good images / graphs / diagrams which are also unambigous and readable in greyscale?
  • check list for the final version
    etc ...

(accidentally those are topics which are extremely interesting for me at the moment ;-))

-> Can anyone recommend me online discussion groups covering those topics?

I think here is not the place for such questions, as it more about "how to do it with (La)TeX" and not how to do it in general.

Martin Scharrer
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MostlyHarmless
  • 12,160

2 Answers2

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I do not know of any communities that discuss this (probably because conventions don't change much). However, I can forward you to some relevant documents:

If you know the basics, you can ask the specifics here.

Emre
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0

Start with The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Tufte. It doesn't cover everything in your question, but an provides excellent foundation for anyone trying to make a point with data. As an added bonus, there is a nice latex class modeling the Tufte style.

srking
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  • @srking: I know the book (read it years ago), but I consciously asked for discussion. Thank you for the hint on the corresponding latex class – MostlyHarmless Apr 03 '11 at 08:38
  • @Martin - Right, sorry. – srking Apr 03 '11 at 16:57
  • @srking - don't worry, I'll try to see a recent version of tufte's book, maybe there's also something helpful inside, but I think in general I know the "rules" for good visual representation (no "beautifully distorted" 3d-charts, etc. ;-)). One of the questions bothering me is: how can I transfer the colors of a simulation result (color from blue to red = temperature level) to a greyscale where black is the hottest and white is the coolest... (without having the source data, just the image). – MostlyHarmless Apr 03 '11 at 19:42
  • @Martin - You could convert your image to one of the simple RGB file formats, then create a perl script (or whatever) to transform the image based on per pixel data. Also, check out imagemagick which is quite powerful for low level image manipulations. – srking Apr 04 '11 at 04:01
  • @Martin - And good luck. :^) – srking Apr 04 '11 at 04:02
  • @srking: ok, thanks for the imagemagick hint. but is there a simple way to define the relations between the 2 color "scales"? The scale of the original image is available as a rectangle, so is there a way to put the scale in greyscale besides it and define that every color on the same "x" (in length of the rectangles) corresponds to the same temperature? That's my main problem, I think. – MostlyHarmless Apr 04 '11 at 07:41