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Is translating old research paper in Math, Physics or CS (which are not written in the modern LaTex form but old font using typewriters which do not look good or appealing to the eyes and are not easily readable) to latex a good way to learn LaTex?

For example here is an old paper by Leslie Valiant titiled The complexity of enumeration and reliability problems. I am trying to convert it to latex file and then produce its pdf. Similarly other old papers from the time when Latex( say early 20th centurey ) was not available can also be rewritten in LaTex. Is it a good practice to enhence LaTex skills?

Usman Nizami
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  • Welcome. // Kindly check in the right columen, under Related: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/11/what-are-good-learning-resources-for-a-latex-beginner?rq=1 . – MS-SPO Aug 16 '23 at 11:15

1 Answers1

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My first thought: probably the most painful way to approach LaTeX.

Second thought: why not?

Third: why not going over such papers, identify interesting parts and reproducing them in LaTeX? I.e. focus on parts, not the whole paper, at least in the beginning.

Let's illustrate the third thought.

Layout, 1st page

An almost no-brainer is adding a title, the author and the abstract-environment. With \usepackage{blindtext} you can mimic the structure of the content (1. Introduction, 2. Preliminaries etc.)

For the header you need to have indication, that there's a package waiting for you: fancyhdr. And in almost no time you've mimicked 80 % or more of the first page.

What did you learn? Well the standard and its extensions via packages.

enter image description here

Page 2: all the math inside

That's a good exercise to try the standard implementation of the math environment. I.e. here you probably won't have the need to have a look at amsmath etc.

math

Same page: more environments

Right, that is, or should be, an environment, as it's used more than once. So, either time to find an existing one, or to spend some time on your new friend, the \newenvironment statement.

It's also a good idea to identify other repeating patterns, like "TM" here, and may be put them into a macro \newcommand: that improves consistency and makes changes easy.

defi

And so on

It will probably be a good idea to do several things in parallel while you're learning, e.g.:

  • read a good book introducing LaTeX, like on wikibooks
  • try the codes you read there, i.e. write and compile simple documents
  • try identifying what you read in the research papers you mentioned
  • if you don't find it now, leave it for later: it will become more self-evident (or have a search here)
  • do what I lined out above, i.e. replicate parts which are relevant from a LaTeX point of view, like \section, \newcommand, lists etc.

Not to forget: many times there is more than one way to let LaTeX do the typesetting. After some time you'll know which solution came first (and might have had problems, or are still useful), why certain extensions were made (some are very versatile, others are trading trouble for problems).

BTW, a nice search term for google is:

  • ctan //your keywords//

e.g. ctan header leads you quickly to fancyhdr.

MS-SPO
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