dataref

Writing scientific texts is a craft. It is the craft of communicating your results to your colleagues and to the curious world public. Often your conclusions are based upon facts and numbers that you gathered during your research for the specific topic. You might have done many experiments and produced lot of data. The craft of writing is to guide your reader through a narrative that is based upon that data. But there may be many versions of that data. Perhaps you found a problem in your experiment, while already writing, that forces you back into the laboratory. After a while, the moon has done its circle many times, you return from that dark place and your methodology has improved as significantly as your data has. But now you have to rewrite that parts of the data, that reference the old data points. The dataref is here to help you with managing your data points. It provides you with macro style keys, that represent symbolic names for your datapints. You can reference those symbolic names with dref, use them in calculations to have always up-to-date percentage values, define projections between sets of data points and document them. dataref also introduces the notion of assertions (drefassert) for your results to ensure that your prosa text references fit the underlying data.

Building the documentation

With latexmk installed:

make

or

pdflatex dataref.tex; pdflatex dataref.tex; pdflatex dataref.tex

Examples

Setting symbolic data points

\drefset{/count}{42}
\drefset{/abc}{23}

Referencing them with dref, drefcalc, drefassert

\dref{/count}  => 42
\drefcalc{data("/abc") / data("/count")} => 0.55
\drefassert{data("/abc") < data("/count")}

Getting the latest version

dataref is hosted at github: https://github.com/stettberger/dataref