HPSG Diagrams

[Paul Kay]

Speaking as something between a marginal member of the HPSG community and
a wannabe - in short a sympathetic outsider - I can second Luis's
suggestion that LaTeX proficiency is a barrier to participation in the
HPSG community. Luis's observation that this barrier operates at the
graduate student level, and thus might influence career choices, is
disturbing if one wants to see the HPSG community grow. For those who
prefer Word, the Equation Editor (and I assume MathType, since it's
supposed to encompass the EE) can do most, if not all, of what the HPSG
writer needs, when combined with the insert-picture capability of word to
draw the vertical and diagonal lines for trees - except for little boxes
to make tags.  No reason tags can't be indicated in square brackets or
with overlining or underlining, etc., though.  I think the real issue is
whether the leading players in the HPSG game are open to the idea of a
more pluralistic word-processing culture.

Paul

On Mon, 2 Dec 2002, Luis Casillas wrote:

> I think it would be particularly interesting to hear from people who
> (a) participate very much in the HPSG community, yet (b) don't use
> LaTeX.  I am somewhat worried that it is an unwritten standard that
> thou shalt use LaTeX if thou wanst to write HPSG papers, and that this
> is be a barrier to entry into HPSG.  In fact, I think a little web page
> cataloging software available to draw AVMs and other of our common
> diagrams in various platforms would be a most appropriate thing for the
> HPSG community to provide.
>
> My experience as teaching assistant for Sag and Wasow's intro syntax
> course (the one their intro book is based on) is that barely any of the
> students use LaTeX and that they much prefer to write their homework
> with Word rather than handwrite it.  The solutions they arrive at are
> varied: some handwrite the whole homework, some do all the textual parts
> in Word and draw the AVMs manually, others improvise AVMs with plain
> text characters in Word.
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 02, 2002 at 05:40:06PM -0500, Tony Abou-Assaleh wrote:
>
> > I use LaTeX:
> >
> > www.tug.org
> > www.latex-project.org
> >
> > Under Windows, I use miktex as a LaTeX engine and WinEdt for editing:
> >
> > http://www.miktex.org/
> > http://www.winedt.com/
> >
> > For MS Word, I've heard of MathType but never used it.
>
> --
> Luis Casillas
> Department of Linguistics
> Stanford University
> http://www.stanford.edu/~casillas/
>


__________________________________________________________
 Paul Kay                      Department of Linguistics
 kay at cogsci.berkeley.edu       University of California
 www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay    Berkeley, CA 94720, USA