LYX Branches” – a Case Study in Open Source and Development of Teaching Materials
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“LYX Branches” – a case study in Open Source and development of teaching materials Martin Vermeer May 7, 2020, originally March 8, 2004 1 Describing the problem The number of students without a command of Finnish is always small in my courses, but 1.1 Multilinguality in education a solution has to be found. This situation will become only more urgent as European policies Finland is a bilingual nation. Our university, in support of facilitating international student Helsinki University of Technology (HUT), is exchange take hold, which will position us on in reality multilingual and very international. an international market for attracting the best The presence of many foreign students implies and brightest to Helsinki. the need to be able to provide eduation, and I applied for funding for this translation work educational materials, in English in addition to from the HUT’s funds for teaching develop- Finnish and Swedish. ment, under the name Verkkodesia (a word play: I have on several occasions had to produce verkko means “network” in Finnish; desia comes exam question sets both in Finnish and in from geodesia == geodesy). Most of my applied- Swedish, sometimes also in English. Also lec- for funds were granted and the work could ture note sets and other teaching materials are start. sometimes needed in more than one language: in 2001, I was lecturing for the first time the course “Methods of Navigation”, which be- 1.2 The translation work longs to the major “Positioning and Naviga- tion”. Among the students were several grad- In spring 2002 I hired a student to translate uate students, one of which was a foreigner the lecture notes into English. She had spent a unable to read Finnish. The lecture notes were training period in Canada and thus managed however only available in Finnish. reasonably well in English, but by no means perfectly. I ended up making numerous correc- In 2001 I solved the problem by providing tions to the text, especially where professional the student with pages from an English text- terminology was concerned. Nevertheless, do- book, which contained more or less the same ing it in this way saved a substantial amount things. I decided however there and then, of my time. that I wouldn’t be caught again with my pants down. in 2003, the next time I lectured this This translation work was done using the LYX course, an English version of the lecture notes document processor, which is installed for use was available. And as it happened, there was on the HUT’s local area network’s UNIX and again a foreign student. Linux work stations. The student worked at 1 home using her own home Windows PC and a 2 A short description of Open Secure Shell as well as an “X server” (UNIX’s Source, LATEX and L X graphic user interface) installed onto it under Y the HUT’s campus licences for these packages. 2.1 What is Open Source? In this work, the existing standard version of LYX was used with a little “kludge” (ugly, im- provised solution) added to it. The basic idea Open Source, or in an older but more appropri- was however great: there was to be a single ate terminology free software, is currently best source document containing both the Finnish known because of the Linux operating system. and the English version in such a way, that cor- It comprises however much more than that. responding pieces of Finnish and English text The movement was started somewhere in the would show together in the same on-screen 1980’s out of frustration with the inflexibility of view. Changes could then be made simultane- proprietary software that was distributed with- ously in both languages, thus eliminating the out its source code, and that thus could not be synchronisation and jumping back and forth modified or adapted by its users. problems that occur when editing two separate The defining property of Open Source or free documents in their own editing windows. software is, that not only can it be freely dis- On the screen, the Finnish text was painted in tributed, but so can its source code, the original blue and the English text in magenta. Sepa- programming language code that is human- rate Finnish and English language PDF docu- readable and from which binary, executable ments could be output with the aid of a spe- applications are built. And this source is freely cially crafted LATEX code stanza in the docu- modifiable and redistributable. That is how the ment preamble, in which only a single number software grows and improves progressively in needed to be changed from 1 to 2 in order to the hands of an loosely organized, international get English instead of Finnish output. development community counting thousands, the Open Source/Free Software Movement. It must be clear that the invention of the Inter- 1.3 Developing the new feature net was the best thing that could ever have happened to free software. this is where the Encouraged by this experience, I decided that community lives. the “official” LYX sources should support this feature, i.e., editing two different language ver- Through the years, many useful applications sions within the same document. To my knowl- were produced, including several operating edge no other word processor offers this facil- systems, like FreeBSD and Linux. It is only now, ity. however, that the threads are coming together: I called the feature by the name of “Branches”. today a functionally reasonably complete work- Each branch can be a language or, e.g., in the station, operatable by somewhat knowledgable case of technical documentation, the slightly users, can be built based completely on Open different documentation texts for different Source software. Also more and more com- product versions. Or, when writing student mercial applications running on these freely exercises, the version including the answers or distributable systems are beginning to appear “teacher’s version” could be one branch; and so as use of free software is spreading in both cor- on. porate and public service environments. A second advantage of using branches is, that Free software has a community ethos that is those parts of a document that are the same in somewhat similar to that of the scientific com- both languages — formulas, figures, tables —, munity. There are in fact many close connec- need to be written only once. tions between the two. It is no coincidence that 2 the Unix operating system is popular in sci- An entirely different approach to document cre- entific circles and that Linus Torvalds chose it ation is offered by mark-up language, of which as his model when starting up Linux develop- the most well-known specimen is the HTML ment. Peer review, building on past achieve- or Hypertext Mark-up Language used for Web ments, and free exchange of ideas. pages. The principle, however, is much older. And the internet is a Unix network. The earliest UNIX systems included a program called troff, that was able to beautifully print to It has been argued that Open Source software paper a text into which suitable mark-up codes is more secure than proprietary software, due had been embedded. Of more recent origin is to its availablility for public inspection, and un- TEX, a computer mark-up language created by doubtedly there is truth in this. It has also be ar- the Californian math professor Donald KNUTH. gued, that part of this security advantage is sim- This language is still today in extensive use for ply due to its smaller installed base and more typesetting mathematics-heavy texts for scien- knowledgable users, and thus its unattractive- tific journals. ness as a target for crackers and malware writ- ers; undoubtedly that is partly true as well. A popular variant of TEX is LATEX, a macro pack- Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that the ex- age created by Leslie LAMPORT, which has as posure of the source code to public scrutiny, its beautiful characteristic the separation be- no matter how few people actually make in- tween a document’s structure and its visual ap- formed use of this, would not have a positive pearance. A large number of so-called document effect — in the same way that the scrutiny of classes have been created for LATEX, standard- a free press tends to make governments better ised layout solutions for, e.g., scientific jour- 1 behaved. nals . On the other hand deviating from these standard layouts, i.e., their visual-manual “tun- ing”, is cumbersome or impossible to do. (Not 2.2 What is (La)TEX? necessarily a bad thing, as such tuning tends to consume inordinate amounts of time and few Millions of computer users are familiar with so- users dabbling in this are competent typogra- called WYSIWYG word processing (“What You phers.) See Is What You Get”), as practiced in Microsoft Word, WordPerfect or StarOffice Writer. The If you are curious why on Earth many people governing principle is that the on-screen view still use LATEX when perfectly good WYSIWYG is reproduced faithfully on paper. software exists, you only should visually com- pare a text typeset by LAT X with the same text The beauty of WYSIWYG is, that it is easily E created in Microsoft Word. Especially if the text learnt and a robust principle: it produces pre- is scientific. The typographic quality is from a cisely what it promises. different planet. Nevertheless WYSIWYG has its share of prob- lems and limitations. “What You See Is All You Get”. For this reason, all word processing appli- 2.3 What is LYX? cations contain also non-WYSIWYG properties, such as, e.g., auto-numbering header styles.