Manic Street Preachers

Some years ago I heard a song by the Manic Street Preachers which I thought was passably decent, so I tuned into their concert tonight. Bleeurgh. Some guy who can't sing, singing, and some musicians who can't play, playing. An audience of young people who think they're listening to something terribly meaningful and want to sing along with it. I had enough of that in the punk era, thank you.

And right at the end, the guitarist smashes his guitar. Wow, how daring - I bet nobody ever did that before.

Typo psycho

.. or formatting freak or whatever. Having, after several all-nighters, broken the back of my grading backlog (or "broken satn's leg", as we say in Turkey) did I settle down for a few evenings of telly and light reading? No, I went on a typesetting orgy. First I used LyX to turn a thread on the cogling mailing list into a nicely-formatted PDF document. Then, just for the hell of it, I took all the emails that make up our department's meeting minutes and made a nicely formatted PostScript document. Then I took the texts for the final exam and spent ages trying to turn the resulting A4 PostScript output into an A5 booklet (succeeded too, thanks to the help of the good people on the LyX list). Today I've been trying to get LyX to recognise the Prosper LaTeX class so I can prepare OHTs for my talk at METU tommorrow, with no success. Eventually I caved in and used OpenOffice. The funny thing is that the transparencies don't need anything as fancy as Prosper - they're just plain text lists.

It's just that typesetting is the one area I am totally anal-compulsive about. I'm not sure why. When I was a child, I was so bookish that I always wanted to produce books that looked like the real thing. Ofcourse in those days there were no home computers or DTP software, and there's a limit to what you can do with a manual typewriter. Then the 80s came and I could print out documents with my atari and a dot-matrix printer, which looked even worse than a manual typewriter. Now we have laser printers and LaTeX, I'm making up for lost time. I hate conventional word-processor output - even if people can avoid the temptation to use five different fonts, gratuitous boldface, fancy boxes or, God help us, clipart, documents made with Word and the like still look amateurish. The justification and kerning are wrong, and TrueType fonts just don't render as well as proper vector fonts. With LyX/LaTeX/TeX*, you get something that looks like a real book; in fact the typesetting is better than that of a lot of publishers. There's something amazingly restful about a well-typeset page.

* TeX is a typesetting language developed by computer genius Donald Knuth after he didn't like the look of the proof copies of his book The Art of Computer Programming. LaTeX is a set of macros for TeX (developed by Leslie Lamport) which make it possible for mere mortals to produce TeX documents. LyX is a graphic front-end for LaTeX which makes it possible for any klutz to do it.