I have been meaning to blog about this for awhile. File this under “Better Late Than Never”.
What’s the best archival format for your important documents? In a previous post I suggested parchment might be—but that’s impractical. All joking aside, the issue is a serious for anyone who is going to spend the better part of […]
After posting about the version control bundle, I gave it a test spin.
The version control bundle requires GNU awk. If gawk is not installed on your *nix system, this script will do it for you:
#!/bin/sh # # installgawk.sh # # A bash script to install the latest version of GNU awk. Be sure to set the variables to the […]
As I lamented in an earlier post, XeTeX, as cool as it is, still suffers from a paucity of documentation. (Though the situation is improving, and part of the problem is that the technology is relatively new and in flux.) Well, things have just improved. Michel Goossens has published online a working draft of The […]
DOI numbers are increasingly important for academic bibliographies as more and more research is made available online. It is much easier to download a journal article from your office than to walk to the library only to find that the volume has been checked out. (Yes, many research libraries allow journal volumes to be checked […]
Despite my deep aversion to it, I still have Microsoft Word 2004 on my hard disk. Largely because administrators keep sending me Word docs, not to edit but simply to read, many of which have complex tables that TextEdit fails to render sufficiently well to be usable. (When will people learn to send PDFs? There […]
Continuing our ongoing text editor roundup for OS X, I am pleased to report that SubEthaEdit 3.1 has just been released. The world’s best collaboration text engine just got better. SubEthaEdit now supports:
Automatic port mapping making communication over the internet easier—no manual configuration required Inviting your iChat buddies Friendcasting—the ability to connect to a friend’s friend.
To get […]
While on matters typographical, I thought I would continue the monospaced font roundup with Aurulent Sans Mono a free (as in speech and beer) monospace font by Stephen G. Hartke. Available under the Open Font License, Aurulent Sans Mono is a humanist sans serif that comes in italic, bold, and bold italic variants (no slashed […]
Language Log often writes about word rage—the irrational hostility to perceived misusage. Very often the prescribed usage is a stylistic preference elevated to the status of a grammatical rule. Mark Liberman has recently recommended that word rage might effectively be treated with cognitive therapy.
Perhaps we need to recognize another malady—typographic rage. Recently manifest not only […]
As a follow up to my last post and as an act of allegiance to all things typographically correct, I have just installed PHP SmartyPants Typographer, Michel Fortin’s PHP port of John Gruber’s SmartyPants:
SmartyPants is a free web publishing plug-in for Movable Type, Blosxom, and BBEdit that easily translates plain ASCII punctuation characters […]
TV Spot 2 - Where Will You Be?
Following Daringfireball’s link to Apostrphe Atrophy (whose site seems to be down, hopefully termporarily), there was a flurry of comments on MetaFilter militating in favor of straight quotes:
I always turn off “smart quotes” in Word. I think it looks pretentious. I agree! Up […]
You can force Mail.app on OS X to use UTF-8 with the following command:
defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset “UTF-8”
As I have posted earlier, you should be using UTF-8 for all your plain text needs. Dont trust me? Then trust Allan.
A little late reporting this, but Harvard adopted the open access mandate one month ago to the day. This is an important milestone in academic publishing. And an interesting example of how the culture of open source software is ramifying:
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the […]
CTAN has an interesting new package, the vc (version control) bundle. The vc bundle addresses some problems with earlier version control packages such as svn-multi (discussed here). First, earlier version control packages track version control information only for the LaTeX source. So, if you have a graphic, say, produced by an independent application, and you […]
For those who might want to jump the gun on TextMate’s move to distributed development, Kevin Ballard has mirrored the bundle repository on GitHub at http://github.com/kballard/textmate-bundles/tree/master. Clone away!
I have been meaning for some time now to blog about ManOpen, a GUI man page viewer originally developed on NEXT, and another example of a hybrid app. However, Brett Terpstra over at TUAW has beaten me to it, in a post comparing a number of GUI man page viewers (including plugins that allow the […]
“What would you rather do, edit text or process words?”, I once quipped. Funny, if unfair (since the aptness of a system’s nomenclature need not be a reflection of its quality). What I did not realize at the time was that there was a social reality manifest in the term “word processing”, that indeed it […]
Allan Odgaard’s discusses TextMate at C4:
Courtesy of SubtleGradient, sane instructions on how to install Git documentation.
curl -O http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-manpages-1.5.4.2.tar.bz2 sudo tar xjv -C /usr/local/share/man -f git-manpages-1.5.4.2.tar.bz2
sympoze
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