Friday, June 29, 2007

LaTeX Workshop Delivered

I'm still catching my breath after giving the LaTeX workshop on Tuesday (26th June). Talked non-stop for 1 hour 20 minutes and I still had several things I couldn't cover in time, especially demonstrating on-the-spot how an ACM conference paper can be produced from a default article document class, and show a few pages from the USMthesis package, etc.

The audience (20~30 people including both lecturers and postgrad students) seems to have liked the talk, and although I don't have any proper feedback data, here are some comments passed to me after the talk:
  • people have heard of LaTeX before, but have no idea how it's used.
  • people have heard of the wonderful "beautiful" outputs of LaTeX, but until I showed them a side-by-side comparison of output from LaTeX and Word, they had no idea what kind of "beautiful" output people meant.
  • people wanted to try LaTeX before, but didn't know what to install.
  • although I told them that some features like auto-generation of table of contents are also available in Word, people actually told me that they know about the feature in Word but "it's too hard to use", whereas in LaTeX one line of code will definitely get it done.
The fact that the Colloquium programme book was created with LaTeX (I helped the committee to do it within 2 days) helped convinced the audience with physical proof of what LaTeX can do...

Maybe within the next week or two, I'll get more comments and feedback via e-mail, or something. But at least now I've managed to raise some interest here...

2 comments:

0xff said...

Last time I did attend your talk and keep wondering what this chix is talking in front. The only thing I knew that time it is cool but don't understand a thing.

Unknown said...

Waaaaahh :(

But at least I got your attention and look where you are now :D