Posts from — February 2018

Here are some of the things I came across while putting together my nicely formatted versions of the Epitome and Invited Speaker list for the 2018 APS March Meeting.

The first thing is, that as of 9am on Monday, February 26th, one week before the March Meeting, Session R16 is blank. Its supposed to be an invited session, but there are no speakers, no titles, and not even a “TBD.” Considering the session title, is this supposed to be a sort of backhanded statement?

The rest of these are inconsistencies mainly of interest to someone who’s trying to parse and reformat:

I mentioned in my earlier post using a regex to find chemical formulas, because the subscripts are no longer written out as LaTeX directives and are most often printed straight out. A number of things inadvertently match as chemical formulas (the middle initial “W”), but since the typesetting only changes when there are numbers, this isn’t really a problem. The “Tc” in “High-Tc” will match, and while leaving “Tc” as is would be fine, it’s easy enough to capture this and replace with High-T_c.

There are a few titles that were wholly put in quotation marks; these are unnecessary and can be stripped, but for titles that use quotation marks to set off a phrase, they were set with straight quotes, which should be transformed into open and close quotes for typesetting.

The March Meeting has 14 schedule blocks, 3 a day Monday–Thursday and 2 on Friday; these blocks are labeled with letters. Within each block are up to 59 parallel sessions. A session will have 15 contributed 12-minute talks, 5 invited 36-minute talks, or some combination of these. Some topics have enough contributed talks that there will be multi-part sessions, which are designated with roman numerals. The most popular such session this year is Devices from 2D Materials, which has eight parts. The topic First-principles Modeling of Excited State Phenomena in Materials has seven parts.

But somehow, the (lonely?) session “Coherence and Quantum Aspects of Living Systems I” does not seem to have a second part.

Subtitles are set off both with colons and with dashes. The dashes ought to be typeset as em dashes (—) with no space between the dash and text, but in the Epitome, there are at least three ways the dashes are printed: as single or double hyphens with space surrounding (” — “, ” – “), or a space and a hyphen (” -“). I convert all these dashes to em dashes for printing, but keep the colons.

I decided to tally these with my python scripts this year. There are three ways the Roman numerals are presented: at the end of a title, with no following text; preceding a subtitle, or in parenthesies. It’s fairly easy to make a regex that matches roman numerals, but it can capture too much, so I used positive lookahead to make sure it was one of these categories. But since X-ray also has a following dash, I had to make sure it was excluded!

But I wonder about the folks planning Advances in Computational Statistical Mechanics and their Applications. They’re labeled “Part 1,” “Part 2,” and “Part 3.” Do they have something against Roman Numerals? In all the years I’ve been going to the March Meeting, this is the first time I’ve noticed Arabic numerals to designate a multipart session.

I decided, back in January, that this was the year I’d transition my tcl scripts for re-formatting the APS March Meeting program into Python. I’m putting my python program here, but I don’t know if it will run on your system without tweaking. It needs two text files as input which I’ve traditionally cut-and-pasted from the APS March Meeting website: the Epitome, and the list of invited speakers (but see the discussion below).

march2tex.py

I admit what I do here is sort of quaint, in this age of cloud-based apps and so forth: a script to take two text files and generate three LaTeX files which, when run, make 3 pdf files that you can print. But I do it in part because the APS Meetings app is still garbage: it’s a generic scheduling app that doesn’t take into account the particular structure of the APS March Meeting and isn’t optimized for its main task: helping attendees decide which of more than 60 places they ought to be at any one point. But a rant about the app can come later.

Here are the pdf outputs of my scripts. These use the Epitome and Invited Speaker lists as of a week ago, February 15th.

Mar18_Invitedpy

Mar18_Epitomepy

Mar18_Gridpy

And if you like the idea of these but want to tweak the LaTeX formatting, here are the LaTeX sources for these:

Mar18_Epitomepy.tex

Mar18_Invitedpy.tex

Mar18_Gridpy.tex

Every year, there are changes to the format and structure of the meeting that force tweaks in the code, but this year was one of the most dramatic changes. The titles of invited talks used to use LaTeX commands to show mathematical symbols, Greek letters, sub- and super-scripts, and so forth. This year, there is only one invited talk that shows the $-delimited LaTeX commands in the invited talk list (L35.1), but if you view the abstract, the subscripts that these commands produce are rendered.

Many of the other talks with chemical formulas in their titles just write the titles out without subscripts, which looks ugly. So I found a regular expression that matched chemical formulas (and which needs the python regex package), and a LaTeX package that typeset them (mhchem), to make them look decent. But the regex isn’t good enough to capture something like “Fe_1-x“. And then the regex also can’t tell that PHYS21 isn’t phosphorus-hydrogen-yttrium-henicosa-sulphate. So this required an unfortunate manual tweaking of the input file.

All of the Greek letters, and all the accent marks on speaker names, which used to be displayed with LaTeX commands, are now rendered. This good for readability, of course, but a disaster for a script that’s designed to take plain text and format everything with LaTeX. Parsing all the rendered formatting and unicode would add a whole extra level of programming difficulty.

I’m glad to have switched to python, though. My tcl script was merged together from what had been separate scripts to generate the different files, and I found a number of redundant arrays and unused variables, so the new program is much cleaner. Perhaps for next year, it will be able to scrape epitome and invited speaker list directly from the web. Or even better, perhaps APS will release a machine-readable scientific program. But then I might have to try to develop my own app.