When generating PDFs with PDFLaTeX or XeTeX, I use the hyperref package which adds some nice functionality to the compiled document. So, for example, citations are linked to the bibligography and if you use the backref option there’s a link back to the page with the orignal citation. Nice and user-friendly. The other day I […]
Code folding is a feature of some text editors that allows the selective hiding and displaying of the text being edited. This is particularly useful if you are working on a small subsection of a large, complicated text. Code folding allows you to display and work on the relevant portion of the text while hiding […]
Though this is a blog about the technology of writing (primarily advocating the use of plain text alternatives over proprietary formats), I sometimes post about its history. Recent posts about “-30-” have led to another historical excursus.
A comment on a post on Metahacker correctly claimed that the origin “-30-” was more “on the news gathering […]
Well it turns out that teh internets are good for more than viral marketing, memes, and FUD. Mark Liberman’s Language Log posts have uncovered the true history and origin of “-30-“.
Though why it, as opposed to other markup arcana, is subject to conflicting interpretation remains a mystery. All the more so since it is not […]
New versions of BBEdit and SubEthaEdit are available.
BBEdit 8.7 includes improved code folding, LUA support, the ability to open the terminal. Interestingly, there seems to be an attempt to institute TextMate-style snippets, a method for “smart” text insertion:
Clippings—previously known as “the Glossary”, Clippings provide an easy way to capture and re-use frequently needed […]
Concerning the etymological speculation that I reported in the previous post Mark Liberman writes:
In the absence of evidence, this sort of thing becomes a sort of large-scale game of Balderdash. Of course, there are theories in which all rational thought is an internal version of this style of post-doc story-telling…
Well, I did describe […]
Language Log posts about the following erratum that brings to light an interesting piece of markup whose origin is shrouded in mystery:
An article on Thursday about the arraignment of three men in the shooting of two New York police officers, one of whom died, misstated the schedule set by a judge for a […]
See Allan Odgaard’s email here. Sounds like it might be awhile before this is implemented, if it is, so there’s plenty of time to learn Git.
CTAN just announced a new package, turnstile:
turnstile is a style based on article.cls to be used for typesetting articles. Among other uses, the turnstile sign is used by logicians for denoting a consequence relation, related to a given logic, between a collection of formulas and a formula. […]
On the TextMate irc channel. CIA-12 automatically reports new commits to the TextMate subversion repository, inner-six is the irc bot, and Allan is Allan Odgaard, TextMate’s developer:
CIA-12: ale * r7887 /trunk/Bundles/ActionScript.tmbundle/Support/ (4 files in 2 dirs): [23:18] CIA-12: - Improved “Build with MTASC” command for compiling on project subfolders (it […]
In earlier posts, I observed that some things that are easy to do with LaTeX are unobvious, like word count and double spacing.
There are a lot of packages for LaTeX that add a lot of extra functionality. Consider the following esoteric example. Gottlob Frege was a nineteenth century German mathematician and philosopher and arguably the […]
Over at An Antic Disposition, Rob Weir compares Micorsoft’s attempt to pass off OOXML as a standard to Diogenes the Cynic’s response to Plato’s definition of man.
Plato, teaching in the Akademia grove, defined Man as “a biped, without feathers.” This was answered by the original smart-ass, Diogenes of Sinope, aka Diogenes the Cynic, […]
Typesetting a LaTeX source generates a lot of helper files, like *.aux and *.log. A quick look through my directory of LaTeX files reveals the following kinds of files:
*.aux *.log *.out *.pdfsync *.bbl *.blg *.brf *.svn *.dvi *.toc *.bak *.nav *.snm
(Your helper files may differ depending on the programs you are running. Thus for example, *.bbl files are generated by BibTeX and *.nav files are generated by […]
Font management is one are where TeX is really showing its age. Installing fonts in a TeX tree is a daunting task for the uninitiated, to say the least. Doubtless, it would be very different if unicode existed when Donald Knuth wrote TeX.
Fortunately, XeTeX addressed some of these issues. XeTeX is an alternative TeX engine, […]
Subversion, a free and open source version control system, is great for keep track of the development of your LaTeX documents. As cool as it is, though, it has its limitations. One serious limitation is branch management.
Suppose you have a document that you are writing and that you are considering restructuring that document. Suppose, further, […]
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