HPSG Diagrams

[Luis Casillas]

On Tue, Dec 03, 2002 at 11:55:25AM -0800, Ivan A. Sag wrote:

> Once you've left pure WYSIWYG mode, do you really need something
> simpler than this? Or have I just lost my perspective on simplicity?

This "simplicity" floats on a background you have not articulated:

(a) Having an installed, configured LaTeX installation.

(b) Getting and figuring out where to put the third party packages
    that the HPSG community commonly uses, and how to get LaTeX to work
    with them.

(c) Learning how to use LaTeX.  This involves getting your head around
    the notion of source vs. compiled document, figuring out a text
    editor (and the best text editors for doing LaTeX are the toughest
    ones, e.g. emacs), understanding and effectively using several
    constructs typical of programming but not so much of documents
    (e.g. explicit bracketing, or getting your open/close brackets to
    match up properly; here again an editor like emacs does this job for
    you, Windows Notepad doesn't).  A particularly problematic one:
    learning to understand compilation errors (i.e. if Latex says that
    there's a problem in line 136 of your document, to know that the
    mistake might actually be in line 75).

(d) Learning to visualize how what you enter into the source will look
    when typeset.

(e) Learning all sorts of tricks for when things don't look right.  A
    commonplace one is to use \small to reduce the size of AVMs; a less
    common one I barely see anybody use is to use the command \scalebox
    from the graphics package to shrink/expand things by arbitrary
    factors.

(f) Learn even more tricks for making the task easier.  In your case,
    you seem to have picked up some from Rob Malouf.

And then there's the factor that many people simply don't want to leave
WYSIWYG mode.  Also, many people have a considerable time/money/skills
investment in such software, that they can't transfer to LaTeX.  And
most people simply are not surrounded by a community of LaTeX users for
support.

--
Luis Casillas
Department of Linguistics
Stanford University
http://www.stanford.edu/~casillas/