This week, I was having a coffee with Petra and Immanuel and we were discussing the importance of good notation.

Somehow, the idea of writing a script that permutes the notation in a given document came up, perhaps to illustrate this viewpoint.

It sounded like a fun project, and so I wrote permute_notation.py, a short Python script that takes a latex file and produces a copy of the file with completely permuted notation. The effects are not really surprising: usually, you do not understand your own work anymore :)

You can download it and try for yourself. It is quite simple to use: permute_notation.py input.tex output.tex

Attention: The script unconditionally overwrites output.tex, so be careful!

By default, the script permutes lower and upper case Latin and Greek letters. You can specify the switch -s to permute alphabets only among themselves, such that the text might remain at least barely legible.

As usual, the script is provided under the GPL.

Note: This script has been tested to work with my diploma thesis(result [PDF]). I hope that it will also work with your document. If not, just copy a latex snippet which is permuted incorrectly into the comments and I will take care of it.

Ich habe gerade sehr beeindruckende Fotografien des Sternenhimmels über den Osterinseln gefunden. Sehen etwas unecht aus, scheinen aber echt zu sein. Da sieht man mal, was Lichtverschmutzung so anrichtet. Besonders beeindruckend finde ich den Mondregenbogen. Ich wusste gar nicht, dass es das gibt.

Gefunden über Astrodicticum Simplex.

Komisch, das ist mir ziemlich genau so passiert!

Naja, oder fast…toll wars auf jeden Fall! Echte Details zum Urlaub gibt es später :)