A Translation of Vernadsky's Scientific Thought as a Planetary Phenomenon into English

This translation is made from the Russian published at http://vernadsky.lib.ru/e-texts/archive/thought.html.

Current PDF of the translation: tex/thought.pdf.

LaTeX Packages Needed for Compilation

If you are using a packaged texlive distribution, you'll need to install, at least

• texlive-bibtexextra
• texlive-langcyrillic
• texlive-luatex

You'll also need to have biber installed.

Known Trouble

If you see a “metric data not found or bad” error, e.g.:

! Font \T2A/cmr/m/n/12=larm1200 at 12pt not loadable: metric data not found or 
bad.
<to be read again> 
		   relax 
l.15 }
      %
? 

while running make in the tex directory:

1. Open thought.tex

2. Comment out the \usepackage{bigfoot} line:

%\usepackage{bigfoot} % install {ncctools} and {bigfoot}

3. Comment out the various \DeclareNewFootnote commands, and uncomment the corresponding \newcommand commands which provide replacements for these footnote commands:

%%
% Footnotes:
% Add a comma between the footnote marks:
\newcommand{\fncomma}{${\rule{-1pt}{0pt}}^{, }$}
%\DeclareNewFootnote{default} % Author's footnotes.
%\DeclareNewFootnote{Ed}[fnsymbol] % The editor's footnotes.
%%\DeclareNewFootnote{Ed}[greek] % The editor's footnotes.
%\MakePerPage{footnoteEd}
%\DeclareNewFootnote{Transl}[Roman] % Our (translator's) footnotes.
%\MakePerPage{footnoteTransl}

% Footnotes with original Russian phrases (e.g., which don't have a direct
% English language equivallent).
%\DeclareNewFootnote{Rus}[roman]
%\MakePerPage{footnoteRus}
\newcommand{\footnoteRus}[1]{%
	\footnoteTransl{%
	  \begin{otherlanguage}{russian}%
	    #1%
	  \end{otherlanguage}%
	}}

% Uncommend the following macros when running pdflatex to generate the font
% cache, instead of the above (when avoiding running out ouf TeX counters by
% disabling <bigfoot>).  Also, uncomment the substitute for \footnoteRus above.
%
\newcommand{\footnoteEd}[1]{\footnote{#1}}
\newcommand{\footnoteTransl}[1]{\footnote{#1}}
\newcommand{\footnotemarkTransl}{\footnotemark}
\newcommand{\footnotetextTransl}{\footnotetext}

4. Run make clean && make fontcache

5. Restore thought.tex to its initial state (i.e., reverse steps 2 and 3):

\usepackage{bigfoot} % install {ncctools} and {bigfoot}

%%
% Footnotes:
% Add a comma between the footnote marks:
\newcommand{\fncomma}{${\rule{-1pt}{0pt}}^{, }$}
\DeclareNewFootnote{default} % Author's footnotes.
\DeclareNewFootnote{Ed}[fnsymbol] % The editor's footnotes.
%\DeclareNewFootnote{Ed}[greek] % The editor's footnotes.
\MakePerPage{footnoteEd}
\DeclareNewFootnote{Transl}[Roman] % Our (translator's) footnotes.
\MakePerPage{footnoteTransl}

% Footnotes with original Russian phrases (e.g., which don't have a direct
% English language equivallent).
\DeclareNewFootnote{Rus}[roman]
\MakePerPage{footnoteRus}
%\newcommand{\footnoteRus}[1]{%
%	\footnoteTransl{%
%	  \begin{otherlanguage}{russian}%
%	    #1%
%	  \end{otherlanguage}%
%	}}

% Uncommend the following macros when running pdflatex to generate the font
% cache, instead of the above (when avoiding running out ouf TeX counters by
% disabling <bigfoot>).  Also, uncomment the substitute for \footnoteRus above.
%
%\newcommand{\footnoteEd}[1]{\footnote{#1}}
%\newcommand{\footnoteTransl}[1]{\footnote{#1}}
%\newcommand{\footnotemarkTransl}{\footnotemark}
%\newcommand{\footnotetextTransl}{\footnotetext}

6. Now your make should succeed.

Explanation:

The input file uses UTF-8 to include the various languages in the document (English, Russian, occasionally, French and German). The LaTeX packages, and the macros used in the document use up all the TeX counters, and cause an overflow. These conditions presently require the use of LuaLaTex to compile the document.

Unfortunately, the way lualatex comes in my Gentoo TeX Live installation it doesn't compile fonts, and generate metric data. The usual latex does that properly, but it can't run, because of the above considerations.

Steps 1–3 make LaTeX run (although with some input encoding errors) by temporarily replacing the macros that lead to counter overflow. This run fills the LaTeX font cache with the required compiled fonts and their matadata. After this has been accomplished, lualatex can, finally, use the font chache to compile the disired output PDF.

(C) 2012–2015, 2023 Pavel M. Penev