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- find parts that were outdated and update them,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://[email protected] 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).