Permute notation in latex documents

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.

LaTeX-Symboltabellen-Ersatz

Lars hat heute etwas echt praktisches verschickt: den LaTex-Symbol-Erkenner! Kein mühsames Suchen in Symboltabellen oder per Google mehr, einfach schnell das Symbol malen, und man kriegt den richtigen TeX-Code :) Super!