# Scientific Editor

I have a dream: a scientific editor that would be suitable for editing scientific papers. Currently, Word is king. There is no way around it: everybody has it, everybody uses it, sooner or later you will have a co-author who knows how to edit text only when writing an e-mail or when writing in Word. Chances are, that collaborator will be one of the big fishes on your authors list, maybe even your boss. Word has some basic collaborative options (like tracking changes and comments), bibliography (via Endnote or similar tools), and is accepted by most journals.

However, Word sucks. Big time. I know you know it.

I envision an open source solution that is based on an updated markdown syntax and the pandoc system. Here is, point by point, an informal specification of the system.

1. Markdown as the primary text format. A user should be able to edit markdown directly without compromising any information contained in the document or write the document in rmarkdown and directly pass it down to the system.
2. Zip file as the primary format: documents would be exchanged using a zip file containing
• manuscript file in markdown
• bibliography file (I would recommend BibTeX)
• figure files
3. Bibliography as in pandoc — bibliography in a format that is acceptable by pandoc, with CLS for reference formatting.
4. Figures: figures are a major pain in the neck. Publishers require usually a vector graphic format or a high resolution image, but you want low-res previews in your print files or documents. The manuscript zip file should therefore either contain both, or only previews, with original files to be contained later.
5. Markdown extensions:
• extensions that would allow a “rich” export to Word’s docx: marking reviews, comments etc.
• (better) figure and label captioning and cross-referencing
• special bibliography sections (currently, you can only place the references at the end of the file)
6. A visual UI with editor:
• Java or similar that allows a painless installation process for even the least computer-savvy users, and allows them to edit the manuscript in a way that they are used to
• GUI operations for an easy update of bibliography (I mean like really easy, just paste+copy of whatever: pubmed ids, google scholar links etc)
• Equation editor, table editor etc. suitable for saving in markdown format
• Version tracking
7. Version tracking and managing revisions. Still pondering how to do this best, but this should be one of the major points for the system.
8. Misc operations. The system should be able to quickly and painlessly accomplish following tasks:
• split the manuscript into submission files by using logical definitions in the markdown (e.g. in the main manuscript file, separate figure files, separate supplementary data files)
• provide detailed statistics on the document (word count)
• possibly the visual UI could provide a plug-in to facilitate submission specifically in some of the most common manuscript submission systems (e.g. manuscript central).

# Fold-change bar plots with “0” on y axis

I see it more and more frequently: bar plots which are supposed to illustrate the regulation of a gene in terms of “fold change”, which include a “0” on the y axis.

It is subtle, but it irks me a lot. Also, the last time I tried to argue with my experimentally working colleagues, I heard that “everybody does it like this” and that I am nit-picking.

What is the fold change? Suppose that you have a before and after measurements, $a_0$ and $a_1$. Now, the fold change is

$F=\frac{a_1}{a_0}$

Could you replace $a_0$ by $a_1$ and vice versa? Yes, you could define it as $\frac{a_0}{a_1}$, right? Fold change decrease (how many times smaller) rather than fold change increase (how many times larger).

OK, so what does that mean if the fold change is equal to 0?

First, think what it means that the fold change is equal to 0.5. That means that $a_1$ is half of $a_0$, or that $a_0$ is two times that of $a_1$.

What about 0.1? That means that $a_1$ is ten times smaller than $a_0$.

0.01? Hundred times.

0.001? Thousand times.

You see where this is going. As we approach zero, the relation $\frac{a_0}{a_1}$ approaches infinity; you could say (incorrectly) that when fold change is equal to zero, $a_1$ is infinitely smaller than $a_0$.

Of course, this is outside of regular statistics. In other words, a fold change of 0 is meaningless and cannot be computed. If you measured $a_1$ and it was zero, you cannot meaningfully compute the fold change. Putting a zero on the y axis is therefore as meaningfull as putting “infinity”.

For that and other reasons, in many applications one calculates the log-fold change rather than fold change:

$log_2{FC} = \log_2\frac{a_1}{a_0} = \log_2{a_1} - \log_2{a_0}$

That makes the measure nice and symmetric around 0. If $a_1$ is twice higher than $a_0$, then $log_2{FC}=1$. If it is half of $a_0$, then $log_2{FC}=-1$. Also, it follows that $a_0$ and $a_1$ cannot be equal to 0 — because you cannot logarithmize zero.

Moreover, in most applications, logFC is (more or less) normally distributed. Fold change not only isn’t, it is not even possible for it to be. That means that not only putting a zero on the y axis is meaningless; but calculating parametric statistics such as mean and standard deviation of fold change is equally misleading. You simply shouldn’t do that.

But people nonetheless do, and they are happy with that. That is why we cannot have nice things.

# Testing variance before ANOVA

“To make the preliminary test on variances [before running a t-test or ANOVA] is rather like putting to sea in a rowing boat to find out whether conditions are sufficiently calm for an ocean liner to leave port!”

• George Box, Biometrika 1953;40:318–35.

# More on reveal.js and pandoc

One of the problems I had with reveal.js was the interactive PDF exporting mode — not only you require google-chrome for that, there also is no way of easily automatizing that task.

It turns out that decktape.js is a good, command line solution. The only drawback is that it actually creates screenshots from a browser, so that the slides do not contain any text — they are just a bunch of screenshots! This makes the PDF huge and not searchable. Moreover, you really want the script to wait between the screenshots (by default one second, which makes the hole process slow), otherwise it creates screenshots of the transition, and the result does not look good.

On the up side, it looks exactly like the presentation.

There were two issues to install it in Ubuntu 14.04, though. First, it was necessary to install the libjpeg62 package, and second, it was necessary to install the gcc 4.9 compiler, which I did by using the toolchain ppa:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-toolchain-r/test
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gcc-4.9 g++-4.9


Everything else went smooth.

Then I put phantomjs into ~/bin/, the decktape/ directory into ~/.local/share/, and wrote a little bash script to be able to call it easily from anywhere:

#!/bin/bash

PHANTOMJS=~/bin/phantomjs
DECKTAPE=~/.local/share/decktape/decktape.js
FILE=$1;shift PDF=$1;shift

if [ -z "${FILE}" ] ; then cat <<EOF Usage:${0##*/}  [output file [options]]

decktape options:
EOF
$PHANTOMJS$DECKTAPE -h
exit 0
fi

if [ -z "$PDF" ] ; then PDF=${FILE%.*}.pdf ; fi

$PHANTOMJS$DECKTAPE "$@" "$FILE" "$PDF"  # Two bar plots What is the difference between the two bar plots below? I am sitting on a conference and these type of plots are relatively frequent in the presentations. Complete with a log-scale. The answer is, of course, that there is no difference between these two — the data is exactly the same, the only thing different is the vertical scale. These two plots explain why you should never, ever use a bar plot to represent log-scaled data: the position of the y axis is completely arbitrary, yet it influences greatly our perception of which plot shows a larger difference. (See also “Kick the bar chart habit”) # R-devel in parallel to regular R installation Unfortunately, you need both: R-devel (development version of R) if you want to submit your packages to CRAN, and regular R for your research (you don’t want the unstable release for that). Fortunately, installing R-devel in parallel is less trouble than one might think. Say, we want to install R-devel into a directory called ~/R-devel/, and we will download the sources to ~/src/. We will first set up two environment variables to hold these two directories: export RSOURCES=~/src export RDEVEL=~/R-devel  Then we get the sources with SVN. In Ubuntu, you need package subversion for that: mkdir -p$RSOURCES
cd $RSOURCES svn co https://svn.r-project.org/R/trunk R-devel R-devel/tools/rsync-recommended  Then, we compile R-devel. R might complain about missing developer packages with header files, in such a case the necessary package name must be guessed and the package installed (e.g. libcurl4-openssl-dev for Ubuntu when configure is complaining about missing curl): mkdir -p$RDEVEL
cd $RDEVEL$RSOURCES/R-devel/configure && make -j


That's it. Now we just need to set up a script to launch the development version of R:

#!/bin/bash
export PATH="$RDEVEL/bin/:\$PATH"
export R_LIBS=$RDEVEL/library R "$@"


You need to save the script in an executable file somewhere in your $PATH, e.g. ~/bin might be a good idea. Here are commands that make this script automatically in ~/bin/Rdev: cat <<EOF>~/bin/Rdev; #!/bin/bash export R_LIBS=$RDEVEL/library
export PATH="$RDEVEL/bin/:\$PATH"

# Second part
## Slide 3
... contents ...


# 2. From Rmarkdown to markdown

I use knitr only to create a markdown file.

Rscript -e 'knitr::knit("test.Rmd")'


This produces the file test.md. With that, knitr’s job is finished, we will not need it anymore.

I decided for reveal.js. It was easy to work with and adapt to my needs, it had elegant default themes, it has a low footprint and shortcuts. And it has the “2D” layout, meaning that sections (level one headers) are arranged horizontally, while slides within one section are arranged vertically. Pressing “Esc” in a presentation shows the slide overview:

Anyway, download reveal.js and unpack it in the same directory as test.md.

# Making the presentation

Use pandoc to create the reveal.js presentation. Note that this is not the final command line; in the following points I will discuss the problems which will influence the final version.

pandoc -s -S -t revealjs --mathjax -o test.html test.md


# 4. MathJax

On slide 2, we have a bit of maths. The maths is written in a LaTeX-like notation, and there are many ways to turn it into an elegant mathematical equation on the final presentation. I have tried many options with pandoc, and found that only MathJax works properly and without a major hassle. This is why on the previous command line I used the option --mathjax.

However, if you run the above command line, you will notice that on “Slide 2”, the maths doesn’t work, despite using the ‘–mathjax’ option. It would work, though, if we put the file on a server. The reason is that pandoc puts the URL to MathJax in the form ‘src=”//cdn.mathjax…”‘. This assumes the context of how we opened the file. If we opened it from a server, using http or https, this would have worked. If we open it directly in a browser, it uses “file://cdn.mathjax…” which is obviously not on our file system. We have two options.

## 4.1 External MathJax

Use the command line

pandoc -s -S -t revealjs --mathjax="http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML" -o test.html test.md


This works unless we have no Internet access, for example because we show our presentation in another institute, where our laptop cannot connect to the Internet, because then we are screwed.

## 4.2 Local MathJax

wget https://github.com/mathjax/MathJax/archive/v2.5-latest.zip
unzip v2.5-latest.zip
mv MathJax-2.5-latest/ MathJax


and specify the local installation with the following command line:

pandoc -s -S -t revealjs --mathjax="MathJax/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML" -o test.html test.md


This works, but our presentation has suddenly over 170 megabytes. Which sucks.

# 5. 2D layout and section headers

I mentioned previously that reveal.js allows a neat 2D layout, in which slides from one section are arranged vertically, and sections are put next to each other. However, sections with only a title and no contents might be a bit boring, so let us modify the .md file changing the second section as follows:

# Second part

This is the second part, even more interesting.

## Slide 3
... contents ...


You run pandoc again, and…

Huh, where is the 2D layout gone? Why are all slides next to each other? Why are all slides from one section all on one single slide?

Pandoc automatically guesses which level header denotes boundaries between slides. It defines “slide level” as “the highest level followed immediately by non-header contents”. After our modification, the top level header (starting with a single #) became the level at which slides are separated. OK, so maybe we try specifying the slide level manually?

pandoc -s -S -t revealjs --mathjax="MathJax/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML" -o test.html test.md


OK, this works, but… the contents under the first level header (“This is the second part…”) is gone! This is because “Headers above the slide level in the hierarchy create “title slides,” which just contain the section title and help to break the slide show into sections.”

Turns out that there is no way we can have both: 2D with slides divided neatly into sections, and section slides which contain more than just a title. Not if we use pandoc, that is.

# 6. Modifying the layout

## 6.1 reveal.js theme

This is the easiest part: pick one of the existing reveal.js themes (I omit the mathjax command line for simplicity sake, do remember to put it back in):

pandoc -s -S -t revealjs -o test.html test.md -V theme=blood


Note that the themes listed on the reveal.js website start with a capital letter, but you must specify a lowercase letter in the above command line.

## 6.2 Fine tuning the theme

I did not like the sans-serif, capitalized and decorated fonts of the blood theme (shadows on titles, I beg you). Ugly. However, if you know a little CSS (and you’d better learn it!), you can easily adapt it to your needs.

Look up the file reveal.js/css/theme/blood.css for hints and create your own CSS file (let us call it test.css) in the same directory as test.md. In the file below, I reset all the ugly decorations and set two fonts for headers and body, respectively: Garamond for headers, and Quattrocento Sans for body, using the google fonts service:

@import url('http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=EB+Garamond');

.reveal {
font-size: 32px;
font-family: 'Quattrocento Sans', 'sans-serif'; }

.reveal h1, .reveal h2, .reveal h3, .reveal h4, .reveal h5, .reveal h6 {
font-family: 'EB Garamond', 'serif';
font-weight:normal;
text-transform: none;

.reveal h1 { font-size: 2em; }
.reveal h2 { font-size: 1.7em; }
.reveal h3 { font-size: 1.4em; }
.reveal h4 { font-size: 1em; }


Also, as you might notice, I prefer smaller fonts here. We integrate our test.css file with the following option

pandoc -s -S -t revealjs -o test.html test.md -V theme=blood --css test.css


You can add a logo (or whatever other background for your slides) by modifying the CSS file test.css. If logo.png is the name of your logo, adding this to your CSS will put it on all your slides in the top left corner:

body {
background-image: url(logo.png);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-position:20px 20px;
}


## 6.4 Better syntax highliting

Pandoc’s syntax highlighting doesn’t look good on a dark background. You can add the following to the “test.css” file to reproduce the Solarized theme.

.reveal pre code { color: #839496;
background-color: #2B2B2B; } /* use #FDF6E3 for light background */

.sourceCode .kw { color: #268BD2; }
.sourceCode .dt { color: #268BD2; }
.sourceCode .dv, .sourceCode .bn, .sourceCode .fl { color: #D33682; }
.sourceCode .ch { color: #DC322F; }
.sourceCode .st { color: #2AA198; }
.sourceCode .co { color: #93A1A1; }
.sourceCode .ot { color: #A57800; }
.sourceCode .al { color: #CB4B16; font-weight: bold; }
.sourceCode .fu { color: #268BD2; }
.sourceCode .re { }
.sourceCode .er { color: #D30102; font-weight: bold; }
}

# 7. Creating a PDF of your presentation

Of course you need a PDF for printing and as a backup.

There are two ways for producing PDF from reveal.js. Each one is imperfect.

## 7.1 Creating PDF using pandoc

Since the test.md file is a generic markup, we can turn it into a simple PDF

bash
pandoc -s -S -o test.pdf test.md


Or even beamer presentation:

pandoc -s -S -t beamer -o test.pdf test.md


Unfortunately, this is not so nice as our presentation, and completely ignores whatever we have put in the CSS.

## 7.2 Using the reveal.js printing facility and Google Chrome

The second way is interactive only (you cannot create the PDF with a command line). Open the file in google chrome and add ?print-pdf to the file URL, such that the end of the URL reads test.html?print-pdf.

The output looks garbled: the slides overlap. Don’t worry, it’s OK. Open the print dialog (press Ctrl-P), and you will see that now the output is correct. You can save it as PDF or send it to a printer.

# 8. The final command line

pandoc -s -S -t revealjs --mathjax="http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML"  -V theme=blood --css test.css -o test.html test.md
`