submission of papers in TeX source code

submission of papers in TeX source code

[categories]

Date: Fri, 12 Dec 1997 19:10:27 GMT
From: Paul Taylor <pt@dcs.qmw.ac.uk>

Following Jim Stasheff's announcement of a unified maths eprint archive
on the "categories" list, one issue which provoked a strong reaction
was the requirement that papers be submitted in TeX source form.

Mike Barr and others pointed out that they use versions of macro packages
which cannot reasonably be expected to work under automatic control or
in the hands of anyone apart from themselves.  I agree very strongly with
their views.

I claimed in a previous email that the main site at Los Alamos accepts
submissions in numerous formats but that the implementation at Duke
University, where several existing maths servers exist, restricts this to TeX.

I have spent most of today reading the documentation at xxx.lanl.gov
and it has given me a headache: electronic methods have a very long
way to go to compete with paper when it comes to reading the whole
of a lengthy technical document.

So, my claim was wrong.  Paul Ginsparg has very strong views in favour
of TeX (source):
	http://xxx.lanl.gov/help/faq/whytex.html
and against alternative formats such as PostScript.  I agree with a lot
of what he says,  and would even stick my neck out to suggest that
Mike Barr probably does too.  However, Mike and I feel very strongly
that being forced to submit TeX source is a straitjacket,  and you can
expect us to continue arguing this vigorously (and informedly).

Curiously, Paul Ginsparg doesn't discuss DVI (the output of (La)TeX) as
an archive format, this being the one for which I would argue.
TeX and PostScript are programming languages, but DVI is a very simple
and robust "byte code".  For anyone worried about the "doomsday scenario"
that TeX will no longer exist in 100 years time, the structure of DVI
is simple enough that it could be decyphered from existing binary files
and a viewer recreated.  After all, this was done for hieroglyphs
in the 19th century, without the aid of the very sophisicated hardware
and artificial intelligence techniques which we can expect to exist
in the future. 

Ginsparg's archives have been running since 1991 and (according to his
statistics) take a considerable volume of traffic.  From TeX source
he generates several other formats, configurably by the reader, apparently
on the fly.  To promise to do this and still keep your head above water
requires an extremely robust system, as I know from having run a major
TeX implementation for many years.  There is also a lot of documentation
about configuring your web browser to accept files in formats for which
Netscape was never designed.  In other words, he seems to have a very
professional way of delivering files to readers.  I take my hat off
to him, because this is a conspicuous weakness of Hypatia.

Whatever the arguments and counterarguments about this particular issue,
I suggest that a more liberal attitude to archive submission formats
be taken by this and other archives.

Paul Taylor

PS There was also some discussion of plagiarism, on which subject
        http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/nch/www/koala-info.html
is interesting.