[tor-dev] First five Tor tech reports

[Zack Weinberg]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 10:05 AM, Karsten Loesing
<karsten at torproject.org> wrote:
> On 7/18/12 5:12 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
>> On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 6:12 AM, Karsten Loesing <karsten at torproject.org> wrote:
>>> here are the first five metrics tech reports that I'd like to turn into
>>> Tor tech reports (see #5405 for the idea behind this).
>>
>> I'd like to offer some typographical improvements -- it looks like
>> these are being generated with mostly default LaTeX settings, which
>> are not great for PDFs that people will mostly read online.
>
> Oh, that would be very useful.  Maybe we can come up with a template for
> all Tor tech reports.

I have put together a suggested template as tortechrep.cls (it builds
on the standard article.cls) and updated all five of your tech reports
to use it.  I also made some very small adjustments to some of the
content (notably the bridge descriptor listings).

You can get it from https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/zwol/tech-reports.git .

The biggest bikeshed in here is probably the font selection.  I picked
something that looks good to me and should be comprehensively
supported in recent TeX Live, but the only thing I feel like
_insisting_ on about the fonts is "not Computer Modern."

> Right.  There's always the trade-off between using colored graphs which
> don't go well when printed and dashed/dotted lines which are at least
> equally useful on screen and on paper.  I'm open to suggestions there.

I liked the varying shades of gray solid line that were in a different
report.  (Some of those graphs also use dotted lines, but there's only
one *kind* of dotted line and it's used for something that's not
terribly zigzaggy, so it's probably OK.)

> (Note that the graph sources are in a different Git repository than the
> LaTeX sources.)

Where do I find them?  I have a fair bit of experience with ggplot2
and would like to experiment (may not be able to do so promptly,
though).

If you change nothing else about the graphs, please redo the bitmap
(PNG) graphs in bridge-blockings with vector graphics (PDF) instead.

I'd also encourage you to experiment with tikzDevice; it's nice when
the graphs are font-consistent with the main text, and using tikz
gives you that for free.  Also R's PDF output is frankly pretty awful
(most significantly, it doesn't embed any fonts, which makes some
publishers very unhappy with you).  tikzDevice _can_ generate output
that is painfully slow to compile through TeX, but I don't think these
graphs will have that problem.

zw