First Journal Paper

So my first journal paper was written in 13 days. My advisor originally wanted it to be written in a single day but I certainly do not posses such superpowers – not in the least. The reason for the massive rush was my advisor promised a journal paper in the grant proposal by a certain timeframe (which has long since passed). Long story short, I constructed a journal paper from the proposal and an earlier conference paper in record time. Oh and learned how to calculate p-values (ttest2 in Matlab). Anyhow, I did a final proof-read, corrected some errors and sent the last draft off to my advisor at 6 AM. I woke up at 9:30 AM, had a bunch of corrections to make, and we had a nice back and forth until lunchtime. After my advisor submitted the paper, I went back to sleep around 2, thinking I would get a good solid couple of hours nap time. Alas this was not to be as my advisor called me 30 minutes later to schedule a meeting discussing what I would be working on next. Sigh…

One of the most annoying things was the format of this paper. They required Word and not just that, but they insisted on Word 1997 format with figures in TIFF and tables on separate pages. Annoying to say the least. Unfortunately for me, I had written the paper in Word 2007 with the new fancy equation editor they introduced. Saving the document in the old format converted all my beautiful equations into terribly rendered picture representations of my equations. It made me want to cry. I had exactly 100 equations in my paper (and no I didn’t aim for that number) so I didn’t want to retype them. So I resorted to some VBA trickery. First I increased the font of the Word 2007 document by 5-10X. Then I saved to the old format and my giant font equations got saved as giant graphics. Then I wrote a VBA script to go through the document and resize all my equation graphics to get high DPI equations. This approach met with limited success. I was successful, but the side effects were terrible. First, the vertical alignment was way off so I had to wind up cropping the graphics to pad the bottom of the equation so that it aligned with the rest of the sentence. I was all happy that this worked until I realized that this totally messed up the print to PDF function, so I decided to convert all the files from PDF format using a sodapdf software fo this. Cropping the equations even in the slightest caused all the equations to come out with black backgrounds. Gar! Foiled! Finally, I decided I’d re-write them all by hand in the old version of MathType so they would be compatible with the old Word format. But to my surprise, I discovered the new MathType library has a function to automatically convert Word 2007 Equations to old Equation 3.0 style equations. Viola! It worked quite well although it made a few mistakes and mangled some of my paragraph formatting. But it was way better to watch it work for several minutes scrolling through my document and converting the equations by hand!