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Brave GNU World
Brave GNU World
W
elcome to another issue of the
This column looks into projects and current
Brave GNU World, where we
take a look at two projects to
avoid neglecting the technical side of
Community affairs.
affairs in the world of free software from the per-
spective of the GNU Project and the FSF. In this issue, we will be focusing on:
Jaxodraw
Thomas Theußl drew my attention to a
program called Jaxodraw by mailing me
at the usual address [1]. Jaxodraw [5] is
a program that allows users to create
Feynman diagrams interactively.
Richard Feynman was one of the most
influential physicists of the 20th century.
He and his fellow-researchers, Sin-Itiro
Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger, were
awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965 for their
work on quantum electrodynamics. His
“Feynman Lectures on Physics” are the
first (and best) read for many students.
Feynman diagrams are time/space dia-
grams that describe the interaction of
elements in space, where the x-axis rep-
resents space, and the y-axis time.
Jaxodraw provides a GUI using the
Axodraw package [6] by J.A.M. Ver-
maseren to do so. This allows users to
create diagrams with a mouse. Details
can be then added using the keyboard.
The diagrams use the XML format, and
can be output either as (encapsulated)
PostScript or Latex code.
Jaxodraw, Mom and coin slots in hotel rooms.
BY GEORG C.F. GREVE
Latex formatted output was one of the
Jaxodraw authors’ (Daniele Binosi and
Lukas Theussl) major motivations, as
they were looking for a way to embed
diagrams in scientific publications with a
minimum of effort. The Latex publishing
System has been popular for many years
now on account of its flexibility and effi-
ciency. However, it was hard
to achieve the desired results
without a WYSIWYG dis-
play.
As the name suggests, Jax-
odraw was programmed in
Java. This makes the pro-
gram platform independent
to a large extent. But unfor-
tunately, it will only run
correctly on the Sun Java
implementation. Quite a few
issues arose with IBM’s Run-
time Environment. Refer to
[7] for more details. Jaxo-
draw itself was released
under the GPL. The develop-
ers have published the
Jaxodraw manual as a scien-
tific paper at [8], and ask users of the
program to refer to this page in their own
work. This allows the authors to more
closely monitor how many people are
actually use Jaxodraw.
There is an extremely interesting cor-
relation between this and the discussion
in issue #37 ([9]) of Brave GNU World on
free software and its influence on sci-
ence. It clearly demonstrates how free
software itself can form the basis of a sci-
entific publication.
Figure 2: The winner of
the Nobel Prize for
Physics, Richard Feyn-
man – a firm proponent
of describing complex
processes in a way that
non-experts could
understand.
thing to do with text layout, but is defi-
nitely not aimed at scientists. Most
GNU/Linux users are familiar with GNU
Troff (Groff, [10]), mostly from reading
its numerous manpages (you can type
man command
to view formatted pages
describing the commands of Unix-type
Systems). Few are aware that Groff is a
fully-fledged text layout sys-
tem like Latex or Lout that
allows users to create Post-
Script documents.
Groff needs only a fraction
of the resources that Latex
requires. It will run without
fuss on a 386 with 8MB
RAM and a 250MB hard
disk. The careful use of
resources that GNU/Linux
and Groff display is what
made the Canadian author,
Peter Schaffter, opt for this
combination. Just like many
of his fellow-authors, Peter
is not well off. He uses com-
puters that people give to
him, and this may mean
that they are a whole generation behind
state-of-the-art machines – as he puts it
himself, they are “resource challenged”.
Groff may not be easy to use, as the
commands are typically quite terse and
not always intuitive. This is why Peter
Schaffter starting working on Mom [11].
In a similar fashion to the way Latex is
built on Tex, Mom is a set of macros for
Groff that provides a simple syntax. At
the same time, it allows highly granular
control over the generated documents,
which can easily hold sway with other
DTP solutions, without requiring in-
depth knowledge of Groff’s somewhat
cryptic syntax.
Figure 1: Jaxodraw is a scientific program that
allows users to create Feynman diagrams. It pro-
vides a graphical interface and can produce
various output formats.
Mom
The next project, which is a very much
an insider tip at present, also has some-
90
March 2004
www.linux-magazine.com
The Monthly GNU Column
Brave GNU World
COMMUNITY
Figure 3: GNU Troff (Groff) is the GNU version of
the well-known Unix tool troff.
tems only use Tex,
rather than Groff for
printed output. Groff
would provide an excel-
lent output format for
XML-based documents,
as O’Reilly has already
demonstrated with its
combination of Doc-
book SGML and Groff in
“Programming Perl”.
In Florian Cramer’s opinion, Peter
Schaffter is one of the unsung heroes of
free software. Florian was particularly
impressed at how well Peter Schaffter
received his suggestion (concerning
automatic creation of a table of con-
tents), and at the speed with which this
suggestion was implemented. If you
want to contact Peter Schaffter, make
sure that the subject line of your mes-
sage includes either the word “Groff” or
“Mom”, as his spam filter will ditch any
other email messages.
Even if the program will need a few
minor functions adding at some stage, it
is stable, and Schaffter intends to leave it
up to the users to decide exactly which
add-ons make sense. The decision to
release Mom as a free software tool
under the GPL was a conscious decision
taken by Peter Schaffter that not only
reflects his gratitude to the Community,
but also his commitment to underlying
social implications of free software.
bies, or at airports in Europe cannot pos-
sibly cost more than an initial
investment of about £350 (500 Euros,
$640) and monthly charges of about £21
(30 Euros, $38) for a broadband flat-rate.
The charge rate for this access is typi-
cally between £2 – £7 (3-10 Euros, $4-13)
for half an hour. It is quite common for
providers to require the use of prepaid
cards, which are usually sold out. If you
happen to find the right card, you might
think you would be up and running, but
unfortunately the providers seem inca-
pable of designing stable websites that
will work with arbitrary browsers.
When you consider how little it actu-
ally costs to install and run wireless
Internet hotspots, in comparison with
water and sanitary installations, for
example, users can expect to find coin
slots in hotel showers and bathrooms
any day now. We have been living in the
plumbing age for quite a while now, the
information age seems to be far distant
in the face of developments like this.
That’s all for this month. As usual, I
would like everyone to get in touch with
comments, questions, and ideas to the
usual address [1].
Mom is aimed at users who need a lay-
out program, but have not felt up to
tackling Groff’s syntax, authors who
need to layout their work quickly and
without any fuss, and newcomers who
value a well-documented solution. Peter
Schaffter has put a lot of effort into the
manual. He is convinced that good docu-
mentation is a major element of program
development. The manual was released
under the Free Documentation License
(FDL), and is available in HTML format.
Florian Cramer, who drew my atten-
tion to Mom, quotes three main reasons
for using Mom:
•a unique combination of structured
document processing with excellent
manual layout control facilities
• frugal resource requirements
• less complex than Latex, which facili-
tates individual modifications
One of the program’s limitations is the
fact that it is not suited to scientific pub-
lication – in contrast to Latex – as it
cannot handle cross-references, indices,
or numbered illustrations. The choice of
output formats is also limited. Mom is
designed to produce Post-
Script output. The
commands
grotty
and
gro-
html
also allow cleartext
and HTML output, but they
were not part of Peter’s
original game plan.
■
INFO
[1] Send ideas, comments, and questions to:
column@brave-gnu-world.org
[2] Homepage of GNU-Projects:
http://www.
gnu.org/
[3] Georg’s Brave GNU World homepage:
http://brave-gnu-world.org
[4] “We run GNU¯Initiative”:
http://www.
gnu.org/brave-gnu-world/rungnu/
rungnu.html
[5] Jaxodraw:
http://altair.ific.uv.es/
~JaxoDraw/home.html
[6] Axodraw:
http://www.nikhef.nl/~form/
FORMdistribution/axodraw/
[7] Known bugs in Jaxodraw:
http://altair.ific.
uv.es/~JaxoDraw/bugs.html
[8] Jaxodraw study:
http://arxiv.org/abs/
hep-ph/0309015
[9] Georg C.F. Greve,“Brave GNU World”,
Linux Magazine, issue 37, p.89
[10]GNU Troff:
http://www.gnu.org/software/
groff/groff.html
[11] Mom Macro set:
http://www.ncf.ca/
~df191/mom.html
[12] The GNU Manifesto:
http://www.gnu.
org/gnu/manifesto.html
Coin Slots in Hotel Rooms?
Finally, let’s expose a new trend which is
on the increase: wireless Internet access,
but at absurdly high prices. Installing
wireless Internet hotspots in hotel lob-
Alternatives to Tex
Originally programmed by a
Canadian author for his
own use, Mom offers exactly
what many users need: a
simple, but feature-rich text
layout tool. Florian Cramer
goes one step further and
asks why XML/SGML sys-
Figure 4: Internet Wireless LAN hotspots, such as the one at
Munich airport, are on the increase. However, the asking price in
no way reflects the effort put in by service providers.
www.linux-magazine.com
March 2004
91
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