
Writing math papers in pre-LaTeX era (2010) - EndXA
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/19930/writing-papers-in-pre-latex-era
======
corysama
I have a theory that ~50% of the games/graphics industry uses row-vector
notation, rather than the column-vector style that is more common default in
mathematics, because when RenderMan was created typesetting tools were still
so difficult. So, it was much easier to typeset M*[x,y,z,w] than to typeset a
vertical column vector. (Much like it still is in this textbox).

Direct3D 1.0 and several other early trendsetters in 3D graphics took a lot of
inspiration from RenderMan. And so, along with coordinate system orientations,
vector notation became yet another endian-war in 3D. Now that typesetting is
much easier, column notation is slowly gaining ground in the name of
consistency with the math community.

~~~
a_e_k
Did you mean [x,y,z,w]*M?

For textbox use, my workaround is to write [x,y,z,w]^T when I want to be clear
that I really mean a column vector.

Incidentally, your comment inspired me to go spelunking through some old tech
memos (Standard disclaimer: RenderMan dev, opinions my own, this is my
speculation, yada yada). As best as I can tell, the row vector convention in
RenderMan must have came from Newman and Sproull's "Principles of Interactive
Computer Graphics" [1] by way of Alvy Ray Smith who referred to the convention
as "computer graphics normal form" [2]. Interestingly, that book seems to have
been inspired in turn by course material from Ivan Sutherland [3], who had
previously built a head-mounted display using custom hardware with a row
vector times matrix multiplier unit, among other things [4].

[1]
[https://archive.org/details/principlesofinter00newm/page/334...](https://archive.org/details/principlesofinter00newm/page/334/mode/2up)

[2]
[http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Pixar/Matrix64.pdf#page=6](http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Pixar/Matrix64.pdf#page=6)

[3]
[https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an/2018/04/08506443/1...](https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an/2018/04/08506443/17D45Xh13tX)

[4]
[http://www.medien.ifi.lmu.de/lehre/ss09/ar/p757-sutherland.p...](http://www.medien.ifi.lmu.de/lehre/ss09/ar/p757-sutherland.pdf#page=6)

------
yammd
Interesting to get experiences from people who lived in that era.

For those of you interested in the subject I remember enjoying reading this
essay also covering the topic in a cohesive way:
[http://www.practicallyefficient.com/2017/10/13/from-
boiling-...](http://www.practicallyefficient.com/2017/10/13/from-boiling-lead-
and-black-art.html)

------
skytreader
An example of a paper from the pre-LaTeX era (heck pre-TeX): John Nash's
dissertation [https://library.princeton.edu/special-
collections/sites/defa...](https://library.princeton.edu/special-
collections/sites/default/files/Non-Cooperative_Games_Nash.pdf)

My points of interest:

\- Greek letters aren't even available! Or even sub/super-scripts! And I
thought I had it hard in highschool, writing up on math with MS Word.

\- Parentheses are available (PDF p. 22) but it escapes me why he uses
brackets for in-text annotation where today we'd use parentheses (as I am
doing right now). And it seems his typewriter doesn't even have brackets
available so he hand-writes it (PDF p. 26)

\- In PDF page 10, there's a couple of lines (P_{i\alpha}(s*)...) where the
space left for the math expressions are too generous. I wonder how that came
to be especially as for most of the document the typesetting is pretty tight.

\- I am very amused at the dedication to typewrite as much as possible. For
instance, there will be short lines here and there to the effect of "Let
<quantification> for <domain condition>" and the words "Let" and "for" will be
typewritten! I would've handwritten that whole line by myself.

~~~
wenc
Also of note is the fact that it is only 32 pages long.

------
acqq
There was a time where a program that produced output like here, much worse
than TeX of course, but very fast on the PC computers of that time, and easy
to learn, was very popular for scientific writing with formulas:

[https://nomdo.nl/cw.htm](https://nomdo.nl/cw.htm)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChiWriter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChiWriter)

------
threatofrain
What environment or note-taking tool have people found to be the best for
latex + markdown? I've been using VSC + extensions with git for syncing.

~~~
thangalin
Of late I've been modernizing ExTeX[0] for integration with my markdown editor
Scrivenvar[1][2] so that the editor can include TeX. My Typesetting Markdown
series[3] dives into numerous reasons why I prefer to embed plain TeX in
Markdown over LaTeX (skip ahead to parts 7 and 8). The text editor's TeX
integration hasn't started yet[4], but if you're keen, star the GitHub page.

[0]:
[https://github.com/DaveJarvis/extex](https://github.com/DaveJarvis/extex)

[1]:
[https://github.com/DaveJarvis/scrivenvar/](https://github.com/DaveJarvis/scrivenvar/)

[2]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_dFd6UhdV8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_dFd6UhdV8)

[3]: [https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/](https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/)

[4]:
[https://github.com/DaveJarvis/scrivenvar/issues/69](https://github.com/DaveJarvis/scrivenvar/issues/69)

