Typesetting DSL Teaching Method based on the Paradigm WYSWYM

Jean-R

emi Bourguet

1 a

, Melissa Zorzanelli Costa

2 b

and Jussara Teixeira

3 c

Department of Computer Science, Vila Velha University, Vila Velha, Brazil

Postgraduate Program of Informatics (PPGI), Federal University of Esp

ırito Santo, Vit

oria, Brazil

Institute of Information and Communication Technology of Esp

ırito Santo (PRODEST), Vit

oria, Brazil

Keywords:

Word Processing, Learning Pathway, Typesetting DSL, L

X, Teaching Method, ABNT, WYSWYM, Survey.

Abstract:

In Brazil, the parameters that determine the standardization of academic texts are deﬁned through technical

norms produced by an organization called ABNT. The majority of students in higher education courses opt for

Microsoft Word as the main reference to edit their academic productions. However, few students are able to

question themselves about the tools and the methods they use to comply with these rules and a very large part

of them do not know the so-called paradigm WYSWYM. In this paper, we present a methodology to acquire

knowledge about word processing through the presentation and practice of the typesetting DSL L

X for non-

exact science students. A survey was conducted to gather the feedbacks of our students demonstrating a fair

acquisition of the method and a high conﬁdence concerning the future return on their learning investment.

1 INTRODUCTION

Donald E. Knuth viewed computer programming as

an art form just like the creation of poetry or mu-

sic (Knuth, 1997). In 1977, outraged by the poor

quality of the typography of the word processors in

the market, he inﬂuenced a revolution founding on a

new edition paradigm called WYSWYM (What You

See is What You Mean) as opposed to the classical

WYSWYG (What You See is What You Get) (Scales

and Ecke, 2002). Therefore, T

X was released as

a free software document composition system, inde-

pendent of the hardware used for viewing or print-

ing (Knuth and Bibby, 1984). The T

X system was

designed to be ergonomic (the authors can use it di-

rectly with little computer knowledge background)

and free (as the fruit of an academic research). The

direct use of plain T

X format being quite tough, it

has been extended to L

X in 1984. L

X was origi-

nally written by Leslie Lamport (Lamport, 1994), and

constitutes actually a set of T

X-based macro com-

mands. The Brazilian Association of Technical Stan-

dards (ABNT) is a non-proﬁt organization promot-

ing technological developments and responsible for

technical standardizations in Brazil. It is a founding

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3686-1104

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4695-5799

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6152-0291

member of the International Organization for Stan-

dardization (ISO) and the exclusive representative of

Brazil in the International Electrotechnical Commis-

sion (IEC). ABNT has been active in product cer-

tiﬁcation since 1950 establishing marks of confor-

mity with standards applied in product certiﬁcation

schemes. ABNT also certiﬁes quality systems, en-

vironmental management systems and several other

products. ABNT is organized in committees (called

CBs standing for Brazilian Committees) which are

designed to support the development of technology

and the participation in international standardization.

The documentation standards, which serve as guide-

lines in the edition of academic works are established

by ABNT/CB-14 (Brazilian Committee for Informa-

tion and Documentation). With these rules, Brazil

owns a unique standard for transmitting the academic

knowledge in a clean and organized manner, properly

understandable by any researcher, scientist or profes-

sor. The majority of students in higher education

courses opt for Microsoft Word as the main refer-

ence to edit their academic productions. However,

Microsoft Word is concerned by many issues such

as a lack of features, incompatibilities between ver-

sions and operating systems, potential expensive li-

censes, etc. An alternative would be to use a free

Software as a Service like Google Docs or Word

Online. Nevertheless, the main issue of these solu-

tions stands in the adequation of the academic work

352

Bourguet, J., Costa, M. and Teixeira, J.

Typesetting DSL Teaching Method based on the Paradigm WYSWYM.

DOI: 10.5220/0010480603520359

In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2021) - Volume 1, pages 352-359

ISBN: 978-989-758-502-9

with the ABNT standards. As a consequence, during

school life, many students have contact with ABNT

rules. However, it is in higher education that rela-

tions with such norms become closer. This is due

to the fact that most Brazilian universities opt to use

them as guidelines for editing the scholar produc-

tions. Following the ABNT rules is extremely im-

portant for the clarity of information and thus facili-

tates the identiﬁcation and understanding of contents.

It is well known that many students have a certain

fear of the ABNT rules thinking that these rules are

too much complicated. However, few students are

able to question themselves about the tool and the

methods they use to comply with these rules and a

very large part of them do not know the paradigm

WYSWYM. In this paper, we present a methodology

implemented during the second semester of 2020 in

a discipline called Introduction to Computer Informa-

tion Systems from the course of Bachelor in Account-

ing, Economics and Marketing at the Vila Velha Uni-

versity in Brazil. Most of the classes took place in a

hybrid schoolroom (virtual and physical) in reason of

the COVID-19 pandemic. The objective of this disci-

pline is to provide for the students general knowledge

about 5Cs for managing information in organizations

for operation, management and decision-making. The

5Cs represent well established processes to change

data into information. They consist of capturing in-

formation, conveying, creating, cradling and commu-

nicating. In other words, the discipline tackles the

procedures that convert data into required information

by recording, classifying, organizing and interpreting

them. Technically, these procedures are fast done by

a computer (both hardware and software) using arte-

facts like spreadsheet, database management system

or word processing. With regard to the latter, the

paradigm WYSWYM was taught through the presen-

tation and practice of the language L

X with an em-

phasis on some fundamental notions such as Installa-

tion, Simple Commands, Report creation, Figures, Ta-

bles, Formulas and Bibliography. The students were

evaluated across two projects along the semester. At

the end of the semester a survey was conducted to

gather the feedbacks of the students demonstrating a

fair acquisition of the method and a high conﬁdence

concerning the future return on their learning invest-

ments.

The remainder of the paper is as follows: in Sec-

tion 2 we will describe our methodology to teach the

paradigm WYSWYM with L

X; in Section 3 we

will present the results of our survey conducted at the

end of the teaching-learning process; in Section 4 we

will present some related works; and ﬁnally in Section

5 we will conclude and draw some perspectives.

2 LEARNING PATHWAY

In the Figure 1, we describe the different blocks

of the learning pathway to acquire knowledge about

the main topic Word Processing of the discipline

Information Systems. As explained in the intro-

duction, our strategy is to introduce the paradigm

WYSWYM through an hands-on learning of the lan-

guage L

X (Scales and Ecke, 2002).

In the ﬁrst block, we epistemologically repre-

sent L

X as an historical rich keystone in Com-

puter Science. First, this language is special since it

comes from an asynchronous co-creation of two Tur-

ing Award laureates: Knuth and Lamport. L

X is

basically a set of macros to facilitate the usage of T

X is a typesetting Domain Speciﬁc Language

(DSL) created to support a particular set of tasks per-

formed in the speciﬁc domain of the digital edition.

It provides macros with an easy-to-understand gram-

mar supporting semantic markups (Hufﬂen, 2006).

The markups concern the logical meaning of a doc-

ument rather than its appearance as advocated by the

paradigm WYSWYM. Behind the scenes, T

X han-

dles the procedures. As a consequence, the founda-

tional language T

X is considered a procedural de-

scriptive markup language for edition. This part of

our learning pathway represents an opportunity to re-

call the wide variety of classical DSLs created in the

history of Computer Science, such as HTML or SQL

for example.

In the second block, our strategy is to present two

alternatives for the installation of the proper technical

framework: (i) by setting up a local solution and/or

(ii) by using a Software as a Service (SaS). For the

ﬁrst alternative, different options are presented to ful-

ﬁll the students needs in terms of conformities with

the different operating systems architectures. For the

second alternative, a collaborative cloud-based L

editor is presented as the simplest solution for the stu-

dents who would not invest so much time in setting

up a local solution. This block is the opportunity to

describe the modern usage of the cloud computing,

particularly in relation with the last SaS generation.

In the third block, the classical syntax of the

X command is presented (a given word usually

preceded by a backslash determining a special be-

haviour and potentially taking some parameters). The

native document classes in L

X are presented (i.e.

article, letter, report and book). The distinc-

tion between content and form is an essential feature

of the paradigm WYSWYM.

Thereafter, we present the command to declare a

style in the preambule of a document. Subsequently,

other commands (inside the body of the document)

Typesetting DSL Teaching Method based on the Paradigm WYSWYM

353

 Information Systems (Word Processing)

I. History

Knuth & Lamport

Classical DSLs

II. Installation

Local

Software as Service

III. Basic Commands

Class

Packages

IV. Article

Metadata

Sections

V. Formatting attributes

Character

Paragraph

Page

VI. Report

Table of contents

Figures and Table

VII. Logical Syntax

Math mode

Equations

VIII. References

Bibliography

Index

IX. Customization

Styles

New macros

X. Presentation

Beamer

(Libraries + Editor)

(SaS)

(author, title, date)

(cross references)

Figure 1: This caption has one line so it is centered.

are illustrated through the addition of a diacritic to

a letter. This is also an opportunity to introduce the

packages (declared by using commands in the head of

the document) and particularly the package inputenc

together with its parameter utf8. Character encoding

is re-contextualized as a major artefact to store and

transfer data in Computer Science.

In the fourth block, we select article as the

class of a new document. Thereafter, we present the

commands to declare the metadata of a document

(i.e. author, title, date and abstract) and to set its

language (e.g. French, Portuguese, ...) through the

package babel with the appropriate option. At this

stage, a ﬁrst draft of an article is built by introduc-

ing the different levels of a document (part (only

for the class book), chapter, section, subsection,

subsubsection and paragraph). The mechanism of

cross references is presented by promoting the scala-

bility of such an architecture for the document.

In the ﬁfth block, we present a collection of for-

matting attributes applicable to a text in a single native

step. Therefore, we introduce the commands aiming

to set different font families, font sizes, font styles

and font colors. Structured and structuring elements

such as list and ﬂoating, footnote, line break, indent,

vertical and horizontal spacing and page break are in-

troduced. The commands to deﬁne a page style are

presented and particularly the ones to deal with page

numbering, headers and footers. Finally, a list of spe-

cial characters in T

X is presented and the way to es-

cape them is also explained.

In the sixth block, the proposal is to switch the

class of the document from article to report. The

intention is to reveal a large part of the L

X poten-

tial through the edition of a report that can be po-

tentially turned into a course conclusion monogra-

phy. The content produced in the other blocks can be

reused. First, we introduce the command to automat-

ically generate a table of contents. Thereafter, some

images are included in the document by using differ-

ent options. The distinction between ﬁxed and rela-

tive dimensions is explained by investigating different

ways to dimension the images. The macro figure is

presented with the command caption. A list of ﬁg-

ures is automatically generated in the same way as the

table of contents (by using a different command). The

same operation is conducted with the macro tables

and consequently a list of tables is generated.

In the seventh block, a focus is given on one of the

strongest beneﬁts of using L

X: the edition of some

mathematical typesetting. This is achieved by the use

of the operating mode called math mode. Neverthe-

less, it constitutes a large topic due to the existence of

a lot of notations. The most commonly used notations

CSEDU 2021 - 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

354

of the plain L

X are introduced and the edition of

some more complex formulas is described through the

use of the amsmath package. The three different ways

to write in math mode are described: inline, equations

and numbered equations.

In the eighth block, a new important feature of

academic works is explored through the incorporation

of the references. First, the package makeidx is intro-

duced to support the creation of indices (alphabetical

list of expressions with the pages upon which they can

be found). After that, we explain why L

X owns a

great support for citing references thanks to the aux-

iliary tool BibTeX. We describe the two alternatives

to deal with the list of references: by ﬂat-ﬁle database

or by embedding them at the end of the document.

The relevance to deal with a centralized bibliogra-

phy source linkable to many documents is highlighted

(write once, read many). We present the most com-

monly used entry types (e.g. article, book, or confer-

ence). We present the BibTeX style ﬁles that describe

how bibliography items will be formatted. An ABNT-

based BibTeX style for listing is introduced to con-

vince the students about the simplicity of such an ap-

proach. Different citing styles are introduced through

the package natbib.

In the nineth block, we take advantage of the

past block to generalize the ABNT-based styles from

the biliography list to the whole document. The

distinction between the ﬁles .cls (describing the

classes) and the ﬁles .sty (describing the packages)

is explained. A selection of interesting classes (e.g.

lncs.cls, elsarticle.cls, acmart.cls, etc.) and

packages (e.g. tikz, algorithm2e, listings,

supertabular, etc.) is presented. AbnTeX2, a suite

with a class, citation packages and bibliographic style

formatting that meet the requirements of ABNT stan-

dards is introduced. Finally, we focus on Plain T

X to

explain advanced techniques for creating commands

or environments that match speciﬁc needs.

In the tenth block, the beamer class for creating

presentation slides is introduced. A set of templates is

presented, and some elements structuring the presen-

tations are described (e.g. title page, headers/footers,

highlighting, table of contents, effects, etc.).

3 SURVEY

An online questionnaire was carried out in December

2020. The survey was targeting students that partic-

ipated in the discipline called Introduction to Com-

puter Information Systems from the course of Bache-

lor in Accounting Sciences, Economics and Market-

ing at the Vila Velha University in Brazil. They fol-

lowed the learning pathway presented in Section 3 to

acquire knowledge about Word Processing. In order

to address the research questions, this study relied on

qualitative and quantitative data collected by the ques-

tionnaire summarized in Appendix. The instrumenta-

tion to conduct our study consists of a form, divided

into eight blocks and including a consent form for

the study to guarantee the participants’ rights (regard-

ing anonymity and strictly academic use of the data),

some questions to proﬁle the participants (knowledge

and experience in word processing) and the remain-

ing questions to obtain their feedbacks and percep-

tions about the learning pathway. The questionnaire

was created at https://www.questionpro.com/. After

gathering the data, some subsequent analysis was per-

formed through spreadsheets analysis.

3.1 Procedure

The procedure for applying the survey was to send

the students an online questionnaire

at the end of

the semester just a few days after the ﬁnal evaluation.

Thereafter, the participants would have 48 hours to

respond. The participation was optional, nevertheless

in order to encourage the engagement it was offered

one additional point for the averages in case of con-

tribution.

3.2 Participants

The survey was viewed 91 times and 59 non-exact

science students started responding. From them, 49

students completed the questionnaire out of a total of

115 students in this discipline. Figure 2, through its

external ring, describes the partitioning of the under-

graduate courses in the class. The internal ring rep-

resents the percentage of students from each course

who completed the questionnaire. In relation with the

participants, 21 men and 28 women aged between 16

and 49 years completed the questionnaire. Three par-

ticipants did not inform their age, however, their an-

swers were considered and replacements by median

were performed.

Most participants informed that before taking the

discipline, they had no experience in using any pro-

gramming language (91.8%). Only four participants

(8.2%) have had such an experience (2 in C, 1 in

Python and 1 in Microsoft Ofﬁce Automation). No

student knew L

X before taking this course.

https://www.questionpro.com/a/TakeSurvey?tt=

N9drEjTsgvY %3D

Typesetting DSL Teaching Method based on the Paradigm WYSWYM

355

Figure 2: Participation of the students.

3.3 Perceptions

As described in Figure 3, from the 49 students who

completed the questionnaire, 77% of the participants

(38 students) intend to use L

X in the future (by an-

swering yes or maybe), and among them, we high-

lighted two groups: students over and under the age

of 30 years.

Figure 3: Intentions of the students.

A small number of participants are over 30 years

old and among them, 75% mentioned that they

intend to use Latex for academic purposes and did

not have any difﬁculty with learning the language,

demonstrating that age is not impacting for learning

X. Concerning the participants under the age of

30 years, 35 students (71.4% with an average of 20.5

years) answered that they intend to continue using

X in the future (yes or maybe), and among them,

31 students (88.6%) mentioned that they would use

it for academic purposes. Even if they are beginners

attending the second semester of their undergraduate

course at the university, the students became inter-

ested and conceptualized the potential needs in using

X for future works (e.g. ﬁnal year project reports).

We observed a large part of the students glimps-

ing a potential beneﬁt of L

X for academic purposes

(e.g. scientiﬁc works). Among the participants, 45

students notiﬁed using Microsoft Word and only 2

students mentioned using LibreOfﬁce Writer which

corroborates the observations stated in the introduc-

tion about the mainstream usage of Microsoft Word

in Brazil.

Figure 4: Fluency of the students.

We observed that few students are used to learning

how to practice word processing (28.57%). Fourteen

participants declared having already taken a course to

learn how to use a word processor (in other words 35

participants had never taken such a course). Nobody

replied that they had few knowledge about word pro-

cessing, 12 students thought they could improve, 15

students thought they had a normal background and

21 students thought that they already knew a lot of

features concerning word processors.

In Figure 4, the perceptions of the students in re-

lation with some staples (ToC: Table of Contents gen-

eration, H/F: Headers and Footers conﬁguration, Bib:

Bibliographic references insertion, Fig: Figures man-

aging) of the word processing are detailed either for

Word or L

X. Concerning Word, 28 students can

generate a table of contents while 14 students are ex-

perts on that; 28 students can conﬁgure headers and

footers while 19 students are experts on that; 25 stu-

dents can insert bibliographic references while 19 stu-

dents are experts on that; and ﬁnally, 25 students can

manage ﬁgures while 21 students are experts on that.

Concerning L

X, 27 students can generate a table

of contents while 15 students became experts on that;

CSEDU 2021 - 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

356

29 students can conﬁgure headers and footers while

12 students became experts on that; 28 students can

insert bibliographic references while 11 students be-

came experts on that; and ﬁnally, 32 students can

manage ﬁgures while 9 students became experts on

that.

3.4 Inferences

First, we can infer that the percentage of students who

can work with Word is very close to the percentage of

students who can work with L

X (w.r.t. the same

features). Despite the students having few contacts

with the language, their consolidated skills in L

are close to the ones reported in Word. The students

who declare to have no idea about how to use the sug-

gested functionalities are generally similar between

Word and L

X. In other words, the difﬁculties en-

countered by the students confronted to the two word

processing paradigms are very similar. The learning

period on L

X was short, though, the results of the

survey showed similar students perceptions about the

consolidated skills between Word and L

We notice that L

X learning does not require any

background in programming languages since only

8.2% (4 students on a total of 49 students) possessed

such knowledge. Thus, there are obvious beneﬁts for

who is not ﬂuent in a given programming language.

Finally, 25 students conceptualized L

X as a nor-

mal or quite easy language, 22 students found difﬁcult

while two students found it extremely difﬁcult. Half

of the students who thought it was easy did not have

any difﬁculty in learning L

X. Ten students declare

their intentions to continue using L

X, 28 students

are dubious and 11 intend to not continue. Although a

large part of the students demonstrate to have learned

the staple, they are still in doubt whether to continue

using L

X or not. Nevertheless, when asked if they

would like to add any comments, 11 students (a quar-

ter of the participants) voluntarily made very positive

comments regarding the learning and the use of L

4 RELATED WORKS

In Breitenbucher (2007), the authors are literally

shocked by the poor typesetting quality of the inde-

pendent study theses. They notice that most of their

math and science students begin college or university

study with no idea of how to use Word or other tools to

write a technical paper. On the other hand, Neuwirth

(1991) thinks that T

X has nothing to do in schools

and encourage to keep it only in the academic and

commercial world.

It already exists a substantial set of approaches

that deal with L

X teaching and particularly to in-

troduce L

X for beginners (Lamport, 1994; Gr

atzer,

1999, 2013). There exist handbooks (see for example

Higham, 2020) or L

X companion (see for example

Mittelbach et al., 2004) that advice on how to write

and publish a paper by covering the entire publica-

tion process. There also exist brief introductions to

the L

X system for typesetting documents (see for

example Grifﬁths and Higham, 1997; Oetiker et al.,

2014). Such introductions to L

X generally begin

with typing a small text and enriching it (see for ex-

ample Bitouz

e and Charpentier, 2006).

While mathematics remains the main domain for

teaching L

X in universities (Aebischer et al., 2009;

Sullivan and Melvin, 2016; Heavner and Devers,

2020), it also exist some approaches dealing with stu-

dents in engineering science and mechanics (Gray and

Costanza, 2003; Abdullah et al., 2013) or in liberal

arts (Breitenbucher, 2007). Hufﬂen (2006) introduces

X in the context of semantic markups-based lan-

guages (related to semantic notions, rather than lay-

outs).

Generally, the approaches focus on preparing the

students for some long conclusion works or ﬁnal year

project report (see for example Aebischer et al., 2009;

Abdullah et al., 2013) as to our purpose. In (Abdullah

et al., 2013), the authors point out writing as one of

the skills necessary for engineering students to mas-

ter.

Naturally, the related works address the materi-

als, tools, logistics, syllabus and topics covered in

class or workshops as well as the assignments given

to the students (see for example Gray and Costanza,

2003; Blaga, 2007; Abdullah et al., 2013; Sullivan and

Melvin, 2016). For example in Moudgalya (2011),

the authors created the following list of tutorials: what

is compilation?, letter writing, report writing, math-

ematical typesetting, equations, tables and ﬁgures,

bibliographies, inside story of bibliographies, L

on Windows, updating MiKTeX on Windows and

Beamer.

Some approaches (see for example Heavner and

Devers, 2020) also promote L

X as a method to sup-

port students learning and understanding mathemati-

cal compositions while also developing their commu-

nication. Finally, a large part of the related works

also present the students perceptions and the pros and

cons feedbacks and suggestions (see for example Bre-

itenbucher, 2007; Aebischer et al., 2009; Abdullah

et al., 2013). Some authors also discuss the lessons

learned both pedagogical and L

X-related (Gray and

Costanza, 2003) or the problems related to the process

of L

X learning (Blaga, 2007).

Typesetting DSL Teaching Method based on the Paradigm WYSWYM

357

5 CONCLUSIONS

Scientiﬁc writing is central to the popularization of

science. Nevertheless, technical writing, and mathe-

matical writing in particular, is a complex and difﬁcult

task. Generally, the paradigm WYSWYM supports

the creation of documents which are beautiful in form

as well as content. L

X is a powerful typesetting tool

which can be used creatively or detrimentally to ful-

ﬁll the exigences of such a paradigm Hwang (1995).

Therefore, in the context of teaching, L

X allows

the students to be more concerned with the contents

and consequently reduce the weight of the formatting

tasks increasing the quality of their works. L

X be-

ing extensible in reason of its numerous packages, it is

impossible for an initiation course to give all the func-

tionalities that already exist (Aebischer et al., 2009).

In this paper, we present a methodology to ac-

quire knowledge about Word Processing through the

presentation and practice of the language L

X and

a learning pathway comprising ten blocks with an

emphasis on some fundamental notions such as In-

stallation, Simple Commands, Report creation, Fig-

ures, Tables, Formulas and Bibliography. A survey

was conducted to gather the non-exact science stu-

dents feedbacks demonstrating a fair acquisition of

the method and a high conﬁdence concerning the fu-

ture return on learning investment. It seems that stu-

dents were highly motivated to participate in such a

discipline, since each block requires some resources

and personal time. Many students who took this

course showed interests in continuing to use L

X for

academic or scientiﬁc purposes.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The ﬁrst author would like to thank, through his co-

authors, all the students indirectly involved in the pro-

cess of co-creation of the discipline Word Processing

in the Federal University of Esp

ırito Santo and Vila

Velha University.

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APPENDIX

Questionnaire

The process of developing the questionnaire was done

in cooperation with some past students who already

have experienced the method. The instrument for

assessing the students opinions was 30 items mostly

multiple-choice questions (MCQ) and open-ended

questionnaire (OEQ). The questionnaire is structured

around 8 main sections (Parts) and is divided into

relevant sub-sections that brieﬂy details the questions:

Part A. Demographic/Background Information

(a) class (Accounting Sc., Economics, Marketing)

(b) age, gender

Part B. Previous Knowledge

(a) previous skills in L

(b) previously used text editor/word processor

Part C. Self-evaluation Word/LibreOfﬁce

(a) general

(b) generating table of contents

(d) ﬁgure with caption and numbering

(e) citations/bibliographic references

Part D. Self-evaluation L

(a) general

(b) generating table of contents

(d) ﬁgure with caption and numbering

(e) citations/bibliographic references

Part E. Perceptions

(a) Perceptions on the opportunity to learn L

(b) Difﬁculty level about L

Part F. Intentions

(a) Intention to continue using L

(b) Possible future issues to apply L

Part G. Willingness to use L

(a) while confronting with the ABNT rules

(b) while writing an ordinary document

Part H. Preferences (End of the Semester)

(a) Microsoft Word/LibreOfﬁce vs. L

(b) Additional comments

Typesetting DSL Teaching Method based on the Paradigm WYSWYM

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