Comments on: Typographic Style for Computer Scientists

By: book publisher

book publisher — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 23:45:19 +0000

I also mildly disagree about not nesting subscripts.

By: Justin Bailey

Justin Bailey — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 14:49:54 +0000

Thanks for writing this up – pretty good recommendations.

Your section on “Boxes and Vertical Lines” should show some examples of good vs. bad tables. A lot of writers seem to think tables in a paper should look like a spreadsheet, with horizontal and vertical lines, when in fact they can look much better. The LaTeX package “booktable” makes it easy to create beautiful tables.

By: Cale Gibbard

Cale Gibbard — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 13:51:49 +0000

I mildly disagree about not nesting subscripts. It’s often the most convenient notation to use when talking about subsequences of an infinite sequence. There may be similar circumstances where the notation just naturally goes that way. Of course, I suppose it’s easy to take it too far, and at a certain point you’d be better off switching to a more plain functional notation. I just found the blanket statement a bit harsh.

By: Joshua Dunfield

Joshua Dunfield — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 01:17:30 +0000

s/just proceeding/just preceding/

2.1, rule 7: I agree that the sentence before an equation is not *required* to have a colon, but one may be acceptable. For example:

“Frozzing the pants side leads to gibberish:

massive-pants-term = ish ish ish

Clearly, unfrozzed pants are necessary.”

2.1, rule 8: I, and many others, just omit the punctuation entirely. This doesn’t contradict your rule, but it’s an alternative you may want to mention (unless you disagree with it).

Bibliography:
“version 3.0 edition”
“communcation”
“java” “java” “gj”
“Eigthth”
“chicago”
“15th edition edition”
ICFP ’03 expansion: missing capitals

By: oxlahun

oxlahun — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 22:09:11 +0000

On page 6, I find the italicized sample harder to read at some resolutions because Acrobat renders the letters shorter. As I resize the window, with the page auto-scaled to fit it, the italic type does not scale as smoothly as the roman. There’s not much you can do about my software choices, of course, but it might be worth inserting some caution to your readers that italics are sometimes too fine to be legible in low-res situations. It’s good to be aware of how one’s type will be encountered, not just how it looks on one’s own system.

Other than that little nit, I think the article is wonderful, and will likely be passing it around my office.

By: washburn

washburn — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 15:09:36 +0000

@Evangelos: Thanks for catching that. It should be fixed in the current version.

@Brian: I had not heard of that before (or if I have, I have since forgotten), but I did a Google search and I found a few places that mentioned this, including two calls for papers. Without a more concrete reference I don’t think I would say that it should be required, but it probably looks fine, so it seems like a reasonable idea. I’ll add a comment about it in the next revision.

By: Evangelos Tsagkas

Evangelos Tsagkas — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 13:32:43 +0000

Page 7, that should be Wadler there

By: Brian

Brian — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 16:09:51 +0000

That was a nice, short read.

I’ve known about 2.1.8 (punctuation immediately after a displayed equation). I noticed that you didn’t include any space before the punctuation, whereas somewhere along the way, I picked up the habit of including small space, e.g.

\[ ... an equation \, . \]

Any thoughts here?