Layout of a collection of abstracts of the conference in LaTeX

At the end of last year, a conference of young scientists and specialists was held at the Rocket and Space Corporation Energia. The author of this article was a member of the secretariat, in particular, he performed the function of typesetting a collection of theses. Description of the problems and solutions to them under the cut.

Unfortunately, the LaTeX layout system is not common (according to my statistics) among engineers. Instead of using formatting commands, highly qualified specialists use, as one professor of MGTU im. Bauman, editor-imposed by lawyers and accountants (of course, it’s about MS Word). Yes, undoubtedly, in the layout of some objects there are technical difficulties that make it necessary to spend several hours searching for an elegant solution, but these costs are leveled, if a group of people are involved in writing a document, or if it is necessary to strictly adhere to a certain design pattern. About the set, layout and appearance of the formulas are silent.

Even at the preparatory stage for the conference, the idea arose to enable the authors to send abstracts written in LaTeX (as you already understood, your humble servant is an ardent admirer), for which a style class and document template was developed.

Initially, I did not intend to impose all theses with the help of LaTeX: it was planned that the conference secretaries would send already prepared parts of the collection of theses, each in its own thematic section, and I should be cleansing them in terms of formatting, merge them into a separate document and convert them to PDF. However, my eyes could not calmly look at the material sent, moreover, at that moment there was not too much turnover on the main work, which allowed us to spend time on the layout of theses in LaTeX.

So, my work cycle looked like this:

1) Copy text from Word'a in VIm;
2) With the help of a regular expression, add line breaks after each dot (I like it), add additional line breaks to paragraph endings;
3) With the help of a regular expression I draw up the title of the report and information about the authors;
4) I design the list of references as a list of LaTeX;
5) I convert to PNG and insert images, type the formulas.

In total, there were almost four hundred works in the collection of theses. It should be noted that a dozen works of them were laid out in LaTeX.

During the layout, I plugged latexsuite plugin into VIm - it allowed me to save some time.

What happened to automate (mostly regular expressions):

• search and shielding of LaTeX special characters;
• Add formatting commands to titles, author information, and references;
• the name of the authors in the form of Ivanov ~ I. ~ I., not Ivanov I. and not I.I. Ivanov.
• line break less than 80 characters;
• counting the number of works, including by categories.

What did not work (did not have the patience / desire) to automate:

• conversion of various Unicode characters into LaTeX commands: quotes in <<>> , dashes in "--- , cross in \times , etc .;
• adding a ~ character between a number and a unit of measure;
• formatting units, mainly ^2 , ^3 and degrees Celsius;
• formatting of numbered and bulleted lists;
• renewal of the elements of the list of references approximately in accordance with GOST.

What was incredibly struck - some authors put a large-sized image in the DOC file (for example, a screenshot with a resolution of 1920x1280), and then using a text editor, they frame it by cutting a drawing or a window (for example, 400x300 pixels). Re-registration of this kind of drawings took a lot of time and required some accuracy.

In addition to such drawings, a lot of time was consumed by the transformation of drawings drawn by Word tools into a bitmap image. I had to render the DOC file to PDF format using CutePDF, and then cut the image from the desired page of the PDF document. True, in some cases, it was possible to promptly receive drawings from the authors as separate files.

And, of course, a separate pleasure delivered a repeated set of formulas, originally presented in the DOC file, in the LaTeX commands.

The design of a collection of abstracts, with a total volume of more than 700 pages, containing abstracts of nearly 400 papers, took about 60 working hours. In my opinion, performing similar tasks in MS Word, namely: reformatting into a single style, uniform recording of information about authors, bringing quotes and dashes to uniformity, inserting non-breaking spaces instead of regular ones, would require no less time. At least with me.

The resulting document pleases beautiful fonts and uniform design.

And finally, the cosmic picture ...