"goals: ... replace the second page with a scanned copy ...after it was signed by the examiners... reproducibly."
Oh man, purist side quests like this are exactly how I would procrastinate a philosophy dissertation. But building a complex process for _reproducibly_ handling the once-in-a-lifetime event of accepting your dissertation examiners' signatures is taking it to a whole other level.
For my M.S. I just looked up the relevant PDF merge utility for Linux online. I can't even remember what it was now, but it took the first x pages from the unsigned thesis, intercollated the signed signing page, and then took the remaining pages from the unsigned thesis, and output a single PDF.
Not the parent, but I always tried to keep an "infinite" bash shell history, on each of my machines.
Nowadays I run a mac at work, and I use "atuin" which stores zsh history in an SQLite database. No fear of losing anything, and it really can save you in a lot of ways.
This doesn't really work as intended when I tried to do something similar. Pdftk produces pdfs that were much bigger than the ones generated by LaTeX and you might end up outside of the allowed size range.
I spent my whole grad school procrastinating by working on a system for publishing my papers, which turned out to be the only marketable skill I got from my PhD, so I wouldn’t knock procrastinating.
I’ve known PhDs in philosophy who can barely create slides in power point… while others (like OP) go and use latex, create open source software and use emacs. I’ve never seen such a drastic difference in any other field.
On the technically advanced end of the spectrum you'll find John MacFarlane [1], professor of philosophy at Berkeley and creator of pandoc [2]. Some people are just amazing.
I'm not sure how its possible to get a PhD in the modern era without learning LaTex. It is the required markup and publishing tool for any respected research publication. Since PhDs require (at least mine did) multiple published works in respected journals and conferences, I feel like LaTex is table-stakes for doctoral research and degrees.
Furthermore, outside of my dissertation work, the classes I took often required you to produce other research works which also had to be created with LaTex. Overleaf (a SaaS platform for Latex collaboration and sharing) was essentially the operating system of my PhD. I spent 75% of my time in there.
I feel like it would be impossible to get a Doctoral degree without LaTex knowledge. Maybe it depends on the university?
This is all completely untrue in general. There are many fields in which you'll be the annoying weirdo who tries to force their tools on others if you insist on using latex.
For example, Nature is so kind as to accept final submissions in latex, but they'll convert it to Word. So it's completely pointless.
Frankly people using latex-beamer make me roll my eyes too. It's a sign you care about tools more than outcome. If you're making a presentation, your goal should be to produce the ideal design to convey your message to the audience. Latex always gets in the way of this. (Some latex wizards are going to disagree obviously, but for the vast majority of users it's true.)
> For example, Nature is so kind as to accept final submissions in latex, but they'll convert it to Word. So it's completely pointless.
There is large gulf between submitting a paper (typically limited to a few journal pages) to a well-equipped organization like Springer Nature, and submitting a manuscript hundreds of even thousands of pages in length to a university dissertation office, when that document must adhere scrupulously to various formatting requirements in terms of tables, figures, pagination, citation, appendices, cross-referencing, etc. Word is fine for memos, briefs, letters, and other fairly short documents. But its capabilities for creating complex documents that must include cross-referencing, strict placement of tables, figures, and other floats, citations, referencing, etc. frankly suck. Students can't afford expensive typesetting software: TeX and friends are high quality, stable, have a large and knowledgeable user community, and most importantly, are free. You can bet that publishing houses aren't using Word and PowerPoint to produce anything beyond email. They accept Word documents because of Microsoft's market dominance, which is unrelated to the quality of software they publish.
Yeah, I don't know about that. Most people for whom I know that, myself included, wrote their dissertations in Word. It's fine.
Yes, float placement in Word can be tricky. It can be tricky in latex too.
I'm not saying it's the ultimate tool for the job. I'm just saying it's fine. There are some things to look out for, particularly with figure placement. As there are with latex.
On the upside, you can use EndNote which is quite good, you can use comments and tracked changes, and wysiwyg is ultimately just the superior paradigm.
If you're telling some unsuspecting grad student that they need to write their thesis in latex, and they don't yet have experience in it and they don't have a massive amount of formulas to write, you're doing them a massive disservice.
Moreover, there’s a more fundamental point being neglected: the PhD thesis should be the worst thing one ever will write as no one is ever going to read it. The published papers based on it will be read instead, and if there are no published papers based on the thesis, it’s because your PhD work was shit.
Taking the time to beautifully format a thesis is at best a waste of time and at worst an exercise in vanity.
My experience is that Word (and Office products in general) have worsened over decades, favoring and indulging the least adroit user to maximize their user base, cloying the product with showy gimmicks of marginal utility or worse, whose primary purpose seems to be to keep you glued to the machine for as long as possible.
I used to support MS products way back when, when they were largely a language company. No more. Life is short, and my patience with their products has come to an end. Sure, LaTeX can be a bear, a supremely frustrating one whose learning curve is more like a wall, but at least it's a bear that sits still, and for which there are authoritative sources when you get into a real bind. With Word, PowerPoint, or Windows itself, there are few such resources, relegating you to spend hours wading through the post swamp of self-declared Microsoft MVP “experts”, where your only comfort is that “3332 also have this problem”. No thanks.
> Frankly people using latex-beamer make me roll my eyes too. It's a sign you care about tools more than outcome. If you're making a presentation, your goal should be to produce the ideal design to convey your message to the audience. Latex always gets in the way of this. (Some latex wizards are going to disagree obviously, but for the vast majority of users it's true.)
It's a sign that I care about outcome and efficiency. I want the minimum effort on my part to have the maximum clarity and impact. Beamer is that tool.
I do roughly zero formatting, and in exchange I get something that looks good, is very clear and simple for the audience to understand, and has impact.
The beauty of LaTeX is that it gets out of the way. I don't need to think about formatting, I can think about content.
Why should we favor inertia from social mores instead of advocating better tools?
So many things get shouted down because "people will think you're weird".
Caring about good tools doesn't have to come at the cost of productivity. But just using what everyone else uses just because they use it is intellectually lazy.
I need to disagree with this strongly (I'm an engineering professor of 15 years). I am so "anti-latex" that I border on zealot. I'll save you my sermon, but I can't help but point out that saying "I spent 75% of my time in there" (ie Overleaf) is a pretty obvious "red flag". Did you ever consider that using Overleaf may have hindered your phd productivity? Shouldn't you have spent 75% of your time in the lab, or your IDE, or the field? Does this statement not make you pause and reflect that maybe using an archaic and arcane typesetting language as a "word processing tool" was a trap? The time people need to spend with the formatting and markup in latex rather than the actual creative process is at the top of my many complaints about latex.
I only hopped on this thread to say this so that I could add to the evidence against using latex in case any grad students are reading this and considering using latex. It is absolutely NOT necessary and is in NO WAY helpful. Please leave the type-setting to the publishers and focus on knowledge and content creation.
I wish I heard this advice at the time I was working on my dissertation: everyone just insisted that the right way was to use LaTeX and I just bought into it. At some point so much so that I made my slides with beamers and the animations in TikZ. Clearly I only started being productive when I had real data to present and I decided to switch to Inkscape for graphics and PowerPoint for slides. Leaving academia and being able to write all my documents in word or markdown has been a huge relief.
Latex is the norm in all natural sciences and engineering fields. Most people however are happy with putting their content in someone else's templates.
Honestly I wish it was even templates, usually it is just default Word document with random extra whitespace and hand-written section references that get out of sync.
So, why not use \includepdf{the printed, signed and scanned page} in the .tex file? You can do \ifdefined to have it generate both the initial draft for signing and then second iteration with the scanned page. This should preserve document metadata as far as I can tell.
It's a clever way to foist effort on all other fields and enable research paper procrastination by playing with a complicated publication toolchain. Or is it an intelligence and quality barrier-to-entry filter to reduce the number of papers that need to go through review? ;@]
My dissertation building process was similar. Only it also involved a bunch of custom pandoc filters and the markdown had runnable R code in it. Fun times. I didn't bother with replacing the signed page though, because enough is enough.
True story: While writing my philosophy dissertation, I dropped out of grad school to become a Mac developer, and a key factor was the open source Mac bibliography app BibDesk. https://bibdesk.sourceforge.io/
I think you're confusing time spent in the doctoral program vs. time spent writing the doctoral dissertation?
This appears to be your résumé, according to which you spent five years total in the doctoral program. I'm pretty sure you didn't start writing your dissertation on day one, since there are years of coursework and other requirements before you start writing your dissertation. https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielmdrucker
Looks like 10 years in the program for the author. There could have been a break before grad school, though he was a teaching assistant as early as 2016. https://spwhitton.name//philos/CV.pdf
Ph.D. Philosophy, University of Arizona (expected 2023)
MMathPhil, Mathematics and Philosophy, University of Oxford (2013)
PDF metadata is interesting, there’s a lot of fun stuff you can do like custom page numbers, sections, page sizes, tables of contents, internal links, OCR overlays…
But the format and syntax for these can be tricky, and tools and documentation can be hard to find.
I use a Python library called pdfrw to take PDFs apart, notably to work with sheet music. I think when you ask it for a page, it returns the whole thing, and the PDF files that get written are still readable PDFs.
I assume that within the file structure are things that enable an internal integrity check, such as maybe checksums or CRC's, which would necessarily be different if the file contents are different.
People create some kind of life achievement monument where they seek to summarize the world knowledge and yet nobody is going to read the document. Same for MSc thesis.
What matters (to a point) are your papers and it should be enough to just gather the in a file, add a conclusion and call it a day. We have this in France and some people use the opportunity.
My PhD thesis (physics) was 45 pages long. The expected number of pages was about 200 or 300, a friend of mine wrote two tomes.
The introduction was basically "if you do not know about the topic you should probably to read this thesis anyway but if you really want to, here are some books you can use". 2 lines, introduction done.
The main part was mostly copy/paste from my articles.
The conclusion was that the results were great and groundbreaking.
I added a special section called (I think) "Is this thesis really useful, a discussion with the author" - where I pointed out everything wrong with what I did and where to go further. 75% of the reviewers loved it (less work for them) and 25% were wrong :)
Finally, the acknowledgments were thanking my thesis director profusely (he did not help me much in the research part but eased considerably (considerably) my life and helped me to navigate the muddy waters of Academia), a fried who during a dinner gave me an idea that changed the whole thesis, my wife, my parents and my dog.
The defense was epic (3 hours instead o the expected 45 minutes) because some people decided to manage their political battles there. I was switching between grabbing the popcorn and mopping my forehead when some questions out of the end of the universe were asked (one of them was asked by the dept asshole in residence (AIR) and I understood all the words, but not put together in one sentence (nothing to do with my topic). The president of the jury waited for me to answer, I mumbled something, he said that this was disappointing and asked the AIR to answer. He said that he has no idea but thought I may.)
I will go one day to my dept (I left academia in the meantime) and ask if someone has ever borrowed the thesis (it exists only in one copy).
Im an experimentalist and I'm constantly looking at the online copy of my thesis to grab measurements of the facility, setup info, formulas, etc. I also look at theses of other people for the same reason. It's generally more convenient than going through accelerator documentation.
Good for you - it means that your thesis is one of these that get referred to.
I did not need that because most of what I was writing about was hardly documented (neural networks and genetic algorithms in the '90s) but I can imagine (having done my thesis at CERN) that having all accelerator and detector information in one place is useful.
Oh man, purist side quests like this are exactly how I would procrastinate a philosophy dissertation. But building a complex process for _reproducibly_ handling the once-in-a-lifetime event of accepting your dissertation examiners' signatures is taking it to a whole other level.