The assorted finds of Artefact Publishing
My use of footnotes in academic essays, particularly the one I am currently working on, is not really proper. They veer too much into either digressions of only tangential relevance (in which case they shouldn’t really be included at all) or go off in a relevant direction that doesn’t quite fit with the main thrust of the argument (in which case they should be either omitted or incorporated into the body of the essay). It occured to me yesterday, when I started thinking about how I was going to put up the completed essay on the web, that I use footnotes as a primitive and very limited form of hypertext, to escape the linearity of the paper essay. (This may be an indication that I am simply poor at organising my thoughts and material, and I wouldn’t wholly dispute such a claim.) I think I use parenthetical remarks in non-academic writing for the same purpose, with even less success.
When the time comes to put the essay up on the web, I may put in a bit more effort and reorganise/rewrite it to derive as much benefit as I can from the different medium. In that respect, it would be a resurrection of Mythesis, although I suspect it would end up just being a mess. Hyperlinks everywhere, all the content in small chunks, without any driving force behind it. I guess that’s the challenge.
As a footnote to the above, in doing a conversion of the DVI file of my essay to UTF-8 encoded text, I noticed that it translated the typographic ligatures that LaTeX automatically generates into the correct corresponding Unicode characters (rather than their approximate equivalents). So instead of using ffi in sufficient, it used ffi (U+FB03), sufficient to cause more display problems for my unwitting readers. Militant and unsympathetic though I am, I think I’ll hold off on such flagrant (not to say rather strained) geekery.
Posted by jamie on September 3, 2003 14:10+12:00
The mismatch of fonts is due to the fact that whatever font your browser is using to display the main part of the text does not contain the glyphs for the ligatures. Mozilla Firebird is clever enough to find the appropriate glyphs in other fonts that are available to it, but of course these will not be in the same style as the rest of the text. If you set the font you use for the page to be whatever font it’s using for the ligatures, everything would look consistent.
Don’t worry, I shan’t be using any more typographic ligatures except on special occasions.
Posted by: Jamie on September 3, 2003 20:59+12:00
You use LaTeX to do your essays? I haven't done that since... fourth year, I think. And I still can't forget the horror. The eyes, the mouths, the curly brackets...
Posted by: Idiot/Savant on September 3, 2003 22:12+12:00
I wouldn’t use anything but LaTeX. Well, maybe if I was doing something really fancy I would use TeX, but that’s not going to be the case for an essay of this sort. The curly brackets don’t bother me, even though I have a lot of {\th} and {\ae}s and the like due to quoting Old English and Old Norse texts.
If you want the quality of LaTeX output without seeing the raw commands, you might try LyX.
Posted by: Jamie on September 3, 2003 22:40+12:00
I can see how it would be useful for Old English etc. But I've used it mostly for maths.
Posted by: Idiot/Savant on September 4, 2003 10:40+12:00
Using Firebird I can see all of the ligature gimmickry, and the other exotic scripts too, but the ligatures don't really seem to mesh with the surrounding font, so they stand out in rather a distracting way.
Posted by: michael on September 3, 2003 20:45+12:00