This weekend a little blogging on the WordPress Android application occurred via my Google Pixel 5 smartphone. Two different posts were made to keep my writing streak alive. Both of the posts were just updates to my activity during the weekend, but they were enough to keep things moving along. During the lengthy car ride back to Denver from Kansas City I gave some thought to the edges of the things being expired in my writing. I’m getting to the bleeding edge of a lot of different academic work. Writing is occurring often at that edge, but I’m not taking the time to put it into an academic paper format for submission. While I don’t wholesale believe in that type of writing for every purpose it probably is something that deserves an investment of my time and energy going forward. 

I’m learning how to use the online site Overleaf as a LaTeX editor. A lot of people ask questions online about the best LaTeX editor for beginners. Over the years I have become very skilled at using Microsoft Word to produce manuscripts and it has worked just fine. Millions of people use it daily. Right now I’m writing out of a Google Docs file with a .DOCX extension. Working out of a LaTeX editor is not something that I really ever do. Either I have to learn how to write in an editor that supports that format or I have to take the time at the end of the journey to convert everything over to that format. Some people have found ways to edit LaTeX documents in Google Docs and it seems that it might be possible. Instead of messing around with that type of effort I’m going to just go all in with Overleaf and see what happens. Today will be the day that starts and I’m hopeful it will be a fun adventure. Learning how to modify and work with LaTeX formatting is not really something that I want to invest my time and energy into, but it seems like something that will end up paying off in the end. 

It should be possible to take my research note on open software MLOps repositories shared on GitHub and get everything converted over to LaTeX using Overleaf. I found an arXiv style template that will serve as a basis for the final output. It should be a fun little adventure in the fine arts of typesetting. Right at the start it is clear that the source and recompile being split sides of a screen is radically different from what I normally handle as a workflow. Right now I’m writing in a print preview mode basically that shows me the read pretty much what will happen live within the document and what will be sent to the printer or a PDF document for that matter. I’m not sold on the idea that you need some type of academic typesetting to gatekeeper the publishing world as a technologic barrier to entry at the port of academic freedom.