Utterly bizarre. Checking proofs in our article and every single instance of the digraph “fi” is missing. Blank.
Con guration.
rst.
Signi cantly.
De nition.
Ef ciency.
A two character gap each time.
How on Earth does that happen when the document was submitted in TEX? Maybe the fact that all occurrences of the Greek letter pi are also blank is some kind of sign of typographical sympathy or affinity.
#academiclife
@sellathechemist it's simple: hardly any publisher use LaTeX for the production version of the paper s. Rather, they pass perfectly fine TeX through (proprietary) software, which sometimes fails epically.
Having published with APS throughout my PhD, I was very surprised to find out that Nature recommended sending in submissions in MS Word format.
This, en passant, reminds us of how utterly exploitative scientific publishing is. Kudos to Sci-Post and JS Caux for trying to make some right out of this wrong.
@sellathechemist there are generations of us physicists who studied in Pisa that started using TeX at lab 1 with Martinelli on the first year. It is kind of like imprinting :)
@ciclotrone My objection to TeX is mostly an emotional one based simply on the clunkiness of the default typefaces which seem really old-fashioned and dry. I'm not after Comic Sans, but surely something less stuffy… less "pen-protector in the shirt pocket" would be nice. 😝
@sellathechemist it's somewhat funny that you say that, considering Computer Modern was programmed from scratch because professor Knuth was dissatisfied with the looks of his papers.
Here is a short and somewhat hilarious history of TeX, METAFONT and Computer Modern.
https://yakshav.es/the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/
@sellathechemist @ciclotrone I wrote my PhD using LaTeX and I thought that the fonts looked old-fashioned back then.
But, after a while, the Computer Modern aesthetic grew on me. I find them a lot easier to live with now. Or perhaps it's just that my eyes have got a lot older.
@ciclotrone Unfortunately my coauthors (who did 90% of the work) are physicists, hence the use of TeX rather than Word…