I don't KISS, but I like to keep it DRY.

If you didn't get past the disgusting interpretation of that title, then you probably shouldn't be reading this blog ;)
I make elephants out flies and flies out of elephants, after-all, the human genetic code is 40% bananas!

Monday, February 22, 2010

Ugly LaTeX

Sometimes books are written in LaTeX, and my, are they pretty(usually)! But sometimes the beauty of the typeset itself is overshadowed by the grimness of the package used for graphics or the lack of a graphical designer to fix the graphics! Our DBMS course material at DIKU is one such example(Introduction to Data Management Systems, ISBN: 9781847766120). Sure the description says "Custom publication for the course: Database og web programming", but that does not excuse the ugliness! It almost makes me unable to read through material due to the irritation to my eyes, but perhaps that's just me, anyways, here's a few examples.

Mostly I've been irritated by the E/R diagrams presented in the book, here's one example from page 114:

Seems alright at a quick glance, right? Wrong! Look here:

And here:

And here:
Get the idea? Now knowing the anomalies try to look at the next diagram:


Now that's eye-terrorism! Aaaah!

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