> For niche professional documents, like research papers, I'm sure it's accepted and expected, but you're probably already using LaTeX for those anyway!
I think by LaTeX you mean Microsoft Word. For social sciences, at least.
I think by LaTeX you mean Microsoft Word. For social sciences, at least.
There's a document here, describing keyboard entry:
http://www.chem.mtu.edu/~tbco/cm416/EquationEditor_main.pdf
It's basically a markup language of sorts, and I'd use it if I were presently writing a lot of text with equations.
For better or worse, working in industry, my reports are free of equations! I've formed the hypothesis, that when managers and non-technical people see an equation, they assume the report is "incomplete," i.e., the equation needs to be turned into an actual result.
I've been to academic talks where, instead of typeset equations, the author just copies the source code from their MatLab file to a PowerPoint slide.
And I suppose a useful thing is that if you do misspell one of the keywords, it just sits there until you correct it, as a reminder of what you were trying to write.
And in Powerpoint the formulas have constantly different sizes and are distorted. I don't like beamer (a latex package), but it the only viable slide show software for me.
Can you see what I did there?
computer science isn't a science because it's a hodgepodge of algorithms and miscellanea, and very little theory-building.
Certainly I see the humour in this humorous point, and in my most chauvinist moments as scientist (well, mathematician) might mutter it to myself, but I cannot agree with it as fact.
> computer science isn't a science because it's a hodgepodge of algorithms and miscellanea, and very little theory-building.
It sounds like you're discussing programming (which I think of as not yet a science—but I am no programmer), rather than computer science. There is certainly a rich theory behind computer science—indeed, there is a vein of computer science that is essentially just lightly 'applied' mathematics. Just see a random sampling of questions at http://cstheory.stackexchange.com if you don't believe it!
For pedagogics there are huge (like 30 pages) formating requirements. The formating requirements itself are incredible ugly and often quite objectively bad. Such as lots of widows and orphans (even in tables!). The document is distributed as a .doc file, and yes it does look like this even in Word, it's not a fault of LibreOffice. Length is measured in pages and the critical limit is the minimum length.
On the subjective side they IMO made the worst possible choices. Arial (or similar), 12 points, almost no margins, 150% spacing between the lines, italic and bold headings.
It looks very bad, is MS Word centric, but they have the nerve to make a style guide longer than a page.
Also, looking at psychology papers, it seems to me that non technical fields have a thing for shitty typography.
So that's why my high-school's formatting requirements for assignments and papers were exactly what you've listed there.