Some of you might know that I've bin improving the lecture notes for the computer engineering lecture (digital electronics) since April 2013.
How I've got the job ¶
This was kind of funny. I send Prof. Dr. Asfour some notes of passages that could be improved (mainly typos). About two days later he proposed me to correct it by myself. Another day later I signed the contract. I've never signed a contract that fast.
What I did ¶
My job was
- to correct errors (German language, statements about computer science and LaTeX),
- find parts that were outdated and update them,
- find sections that were difficult to understand and simplify them and
- to make it easier to make changes in the future (Well, I don't think Prof. Dr. Asfour thought this was my job ... but I think it's important.)
So Prof. Dr. Asfour created a SVN repository with all LaTeX sources of the latest lecture notes (which were already great!). He also sent me Emails he received from students who mentioned errors just like I did and some notes from a tutor who tried to improve the script some time ago.
Revisions ¶
With svn checkout svn://somepath@1 working-directory you can checkout the first revision of a SVN repository.
Total number of files and folders: find . | wc -l
- Revision 1: 1885
- Revision 30: 1488
How often did I change files (source):
svn log -qvr 1:HEAD|perl -nle 'print if /^Changed paths:/ ... /^-+$/ and /^\s/' \
| sort | uniq -c | sort -n
1 M /ti1.bib
2 M /
2 M /anhang-1.tex
2 M /anhang-3.tex
2 M /anhang-5.tex
2 M /diss-report.cls
2 M /figures/Makefile
2 M /titel.tex
2 M /zahlen_codes
3 M /vorwort.tex
7 M /einleitung.tex
8 M /Makefile
10 M /my_def.tex
11 M /sw.tex
14 M /arith.tex
14 M /skript.tex
16 M /daten.tex
19 M /sn.tex
22 M /README.txt
28 M /skript.pdf
With CodeAnalyzer over all .tex files:
| Revision 1 | Revision 30 | |
|---|---|---|
| Total files | 31 | 14 |
| Total Lines | 24,679 | 11,077 |
| Avg Line Length | 39 | 45 |
| Code Lines | 18,500 | 8,967 |
| Comment Lines | 1,124 | 871 |
| Whitespace Lines | 5,177 | 1,391 |
| Resulting PDF pages | 229 | 233 |
| Examples | 93 < | 93 |
| Images | 211 | 211 |
StackExchange ¶
I've learned quite a lot about LaTeX while correcting the document. My questions on StackExchange might reflect that:
- xfig:
- Quotation marks: Is there any difference between \grqq/\glqq and “` / ”'?
- How to use nag? - This gave me a lot of input what I could improve
- How should I prevent images from floating between list and paragraph before
- Can I tell LaTeX to break a list?
- How can I prevent breaks in a custom environment?
- Is it possible to define an environment that might not be displayed?
- Why doesn't grep give the matching line?
And some language questions:
- Nummerierung im Text
- Gibt es ein Verb für “Ein Zeichen wird durch seine Escape-Sequenz ersetzt”?
- “Theoretische Informatik” oder “theoretische Informatik”
What I've learned ¶
- You can open file skript.tex on line 1234 with
vim +1234 skript.tex grep -rniI,find,xargs, make and Meld are VERY useful- I like Git more than SVN (because I don't need internet to commit)
- nag package is interesting
- There seems to be no good way to create images for digital electronics which might contain LaTeX. xfig is the best I found, but it is very hard to use.
Conclusion ¶
Working as a "Skript-HiWi" is easy work, but more time consuming than you might think. Even if you know how to work with LaTeX. Rebuilding a big document takes some time.
I was astonished that there were some topics which I didn't understand yet. After I've prepared for the exam, I thought I knew everything in the lecture notes. Obviously, this was not the case (or I forgot how to do division with twos complement meanwhile).