Via Dave Bacon’s blog, I came across Detexify, a cool tool that enables you to find the LaTeX command for a symbol by drawing the symbol. LaTeX is the standard typesetting system for researchers in the mathematical sciences. One indication of its popularity is that Scott Aaronson lists “The authors don’t use TeX” as the first of his “Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong.” Unfair I know, but so it is.
The ACM Digital Libary is an invaluable research resource for a wide range of academic disciplines. I would find it hard to write papers without it. Invaluable as it is, it could be more valuable still by supporting not just use by its subscribers, but also research by its subscribers.
A lot of FXPAL’s research involves interactive multimedia that is easy to demo but remarkably hard to capture in print. Many of us have struggled to make a simple demo clear in the flat, static pages of a conventional research paper. It was exciting to see Nature publish a paper last month that includes interactive 3D PDF content. The paper can be found here. Click on the images at the top of the second page to activate the 3D controls. One of the authors, Alyssa Goodman, has a web page on 3D PDF in scientific publishing. Her site includes links to videos demonstrating how to use 3D PDF.