From: Adonay Felipe Nogueira <adfeno@hyperbola.info>
To: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org
Subject: Re: General advice beyond Org
Date: Fri, 18 May 2018 16:57:48 -0300 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87tvr4ka83.fsf@hyperbola.info> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <7dc580d0ea76c21328dc586ffadb5499@openmail.cc> (edgar@openmail.cc's message of "Fri, 18 May 2018 00:28:22 +0000")
2018-05-18T00:28:22+0000 edgar@openmail.cc wrote:
> Hello,
>
> _I_ need help. I am in graduate school, and I keep having issues with
I'm undergraduating (seeking a bachelor's degree in organization
management). :D
> _I_ need help. I am in graduate school, and I keep having issues with
> my advisor for my strong inclination to use free software. I am
> obviously not in position to refuse, but she dislikes to have
At first glance I would recommend you to keep using free/libre software
only, and advocating for it where you live, work and study. But please
read on...
> discussions about it. She pays a stipend to me every month, and my
> tuition is waved.
... Now this is a tricky challenge. Not that difficult, but as far as I
can see these are the options:
a) worst: make the compromise and use these non-free tools in your
computer (the same applies when using a virtual machine or a
container), because all-in-alll, it's still your personal
computer. Besides, the virtual machine or container can misbehave and
impact your real system or personal files.
You will still have to deal with side-effects caused by loss of
control over your own computing, let alone the need to learn
how to use that non-free tool;
b) somewhat better, although slow: use another computer (or get one from
a rent) to do the work, and only do the work with that machine.
The same case described in the second paragraph of (a) applies here;
c) better: do it with only free/libre software, and perhaps even teach
or show the people involved how to make use of tools that support
your workflow. For example Software Carpentry has awesome
collaborative material on the basics of VCS using Git and of
statistics wih R.
If you don't have time to teach, make use of a tool that eases *them*
participating in their terms.
As an example, I'm writing my final course work using Org-mode, LaTeX
and TikZ/PGF (this last one is for graphics), and whenever I want to
send a snapshot for review to my advisor I do so through making a
.pdf, but there is even more...
The .pdf files don't actually track changes, so I must go into the
extra step of doing the following:
--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- #
# Convert old .pdf work snapshot to text. Makes a .txt file of the same
# name, minus ".pdf". Caution here because if you don't specify a name or
# path to place the .txt file, `pdftotext' will put it in the same
# directory where the original is, contrary to what most commands do in
# GNU+Linux. In Trisquel 8.0 Flidas, `pdftotext' comes from the
# "poppler-utils" package.
pdftotext "Documents/Work_---_2018-05-01.pdf"
# Same for current .pdf which will be sent.
pdftotext "Work.pdf"
# Use GNU `diff' to produce Unified diff for text-only content. For us
# who use GNU+Linux or GNU-with-Linux computers (GC) the diff files
# commonly have .diff or .patch extensions, but we use .txt here so that
# users of Windows computers (WC) can open those with ease in their
# default plain text editor.
diff -u "Work_---_2018-05-01.txt" "Work.txt" > "Work_diff.txt"
# Among other unknown reasons, WCs make use of "\r\n" (carriage return
# followed by line feed, commonly known as "CRLF" or "CR+LF") in the end
# of each line to distinguish these plain text files from binary files.
# WCs' default notepad will open a non-CRLF file but with all lines
# joined, so we correct that using the `sed' line below. The side-effect
# for us GC users is that some editing software might present two line
# breaks.
sed -i '/\r$/! { s/\($\)/\r\1/g }' "Work_diff.txt"
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
Then send them both the .pdf and the diff file (the one which has
.txt extension of course). And explain to them that the .txt is plain
text that can be opened in plain text editor (usually called
"Notepad" in Windows), and mention that it essentially shows the
difference between old and new versions, and that:
- Lines that begin with "+ " is new content;
- ... "- " old content being removed;
- ... "@@ -old_start,count_old +new_start,count_new @@" a line jump to
given "old_start" line in the old file.
With all that said, the advantages of .pdf files is that the advisors
can highlight and annote/comment on these, save the changes and send
it back to you (they can't change the structure or content of the
document itself, but can at least give you hints).
With all the options I presented, there is still another issue which is
quite common at least in the college I study: the advisors don't
actually orient people that well here, so even if someone theoretically
decides to "suck it up and use non-free software anyways" this doesn't
stop the advisor from being too vague as to give comments such as "it's
not compliant with the institutional norms" (what exactly is not
compliant?! And how?!).
> As a student or junior faculty, how do you go about this? Do you just
> nod and wave your freedom good bye?
Particularly I would make use of (b) or (c), but not (a).
I hope this has shed some light.
Respectfully, Adonay.
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2018-05-18 19:58 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 20+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2018-05-18 0:28 General advice beyond Org edgar
2018-05-18 1:52 ` Peter Neilson
2018-05-18 7:12 ` S. Champailler
2018-05-18 8:10 ` edgar
2018-05-18 11:44 ` Diego Zamboni
2018-05-18 14:21 ` Aaron Ecay
2018-05-18 22:31 ` Stefan Monnier
2018-05-18 10:54 ` Yuri Khan
2018-05-18 11:10 ` S. Champailler
2018-05-18 13:50 ` Kevin Buchs
2018-05-18 13:50 ` hymie!
2018-05-19 7:18 ` Marcin Borkowski
2018-05-18 19:57 ` Adonay Felipe Nogueira [this message]
2018-05-19 7:17 ` Marcin Borkowski
2018-05-20 1:24 ` Samuel Wales
2018-05-20 4:56 ` Exporting ODT to Org [was Re: General advice beyond Org] edgar
2018-06-05 19:52 ` General advice beyond Org Adonay Felipe Nogueira
2018-06-06 8:58 ` Marco
2018-06-15 16:24 ` Grant Rettke
[not found] <mailman.79.1527004820.3124.emacs-orgmode@gnu.org>
2018-05-23 4:15 ` edgar
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