binary stumble

After a very inspiring meeting with Peter Vasil who along with his colleagues has been working with us on our own GPS tracks and more recently the visualisation for The Monday Walks project we’re making with students from the University of Leipzig for the play! Leipzig Performance Festival and Conference, (phew!), we fell to talking about version control and Git as well as /LaTeX/

Version control is amazing and I really wish I’d known about it when I was developing the GPS / Python / Pure Data project I really must outline in this blog someday soon. For all of you who don’t know what it is, it is a way of keeping track of computer programmes, text files, etc. so you don’t have to do what I have done until now which is copy the scripts I’m writing on and name them different (and partly random) things. You can already tell that this is less than satisfactory. Version control means that the computer keeps track of the changes for you, makes diagrams of how different your changes are from each other and gives you the opportunity of going back to an earlier version without keeping loads of different versions of the same script floating about in random order in a directory. I guess this is why they call it version control.

LaTeX is a hilariously geeky way of writing documents and it’s worth researching Donald Knuth, the developer of the underlying TeX, just to remind yourself of how weird and fascinating the world is. Having said that, as someone who spends a certain amount of time trying to bring sense to the word processing way of formatting documents, I really appreciate the concept of divorcing content from form and letting the semantics drive the look. In the end, you just want to read the information in as clear a way as possible and this is exactly what LaTeX makes possible.