In LaTeX, sections and subsections lack closing tags. So a section with a subsection followed by another section would be represented like so:
\section{A Section}
\subsection{A Subsection}
\section{Another Section}
A lack of closing tags, however, is far from being structurally innocent. Suppose, instead, we had sections and subsections represented like LaTeX environments:
\begin{section}{A Section} \begin{subsection}{A Subsection} […]
One of the much vaunted conceptual advantages of structural markup is the separation of form and content. In LaTeX, the preamble determines the the form of the document, how it is to be typeset, while the main body determines the content of the document and should contain only structural markup, markup that specifies the logical […]
Reed College offers advice on how to make LaTeX look like Word.
My reaction.
GitHub has just launched Gist, a Git driven pastebin service. It is very handy to have a lightweight public (or private) repository. From the GitHub blog (see also here), Bryan Liles demos Gist:
BryanL demos Gist: A Super Hot Pastebin from Bryan Liles on […]
When I first made the switch from Word to LaTeX, I felt the need for a dedicated LaTeX editor to provide help and guidance. Fortunately for OS X users, there is Dick Koch’s TeXShop. I was lucky. It did just what I expected and it comfortably eased me into the world of TeX. I no […]
Version 1.4 of Aquamacs, the Aqua-native build of Emacs, has just been released, and has a number of interesting features making it an even better OS X citizen:
New multi-tabbed interface similar to Safari. This makes switching between open files faster and more intuitive. Full screen editing now available. This allows you to focus just on editing […]
Academics tend to be pretty good at sharing resources. For example, most publish their research online. This is really helpful since it can take a year or two after submission to finally see its way into print.
One useful thing that academics share, though less often than their research, is their bibliographies. LaTeX is predominant in […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
In an earlier post I described a TextMate command for determining the word count for a LaTeX document. Simpling using
wc -w
gives an inflated estimate since it will include LaTeX commands. One alternative is to use detex:
detex mydocument.tex | wc -w
This will strip the LaTeX commands first before counting words but this assumes that you are […]
*nix operating systems use the following shorthand: . denotes the present directory and .. denotes the parent directory. Names for directories can be conjoined with a /. So ../.. denotes the second directory up from the present directory. You can go down the hierarchy as well as up. Suppose the present directory is foo and […]
Most academic journals in my field publish online as well as print. Increasingly, it is more convenient for me to download an article than to go to the library (especially since my University library has the appalling policy of allowing people to check out journals—which means that there is good chance that what you are […]
File this under “Easy To Do in LaTeX If You Know What You Are Doing”. Nothing to brag about, but it took some time to hit upon a solution, so I thought I would share. The url package helps to correctly typeset urls and email addresses—increasingly common in letters, CVs, and bibliographies. When used in […]
TextMate features prominently in this issue of PracTeX. Charilaos Skiadas and Thomas Kjosmoen have an article on the TextMate LaTeX bundle, “LaTeXing with TextMate” and Charilaos Skiadas, Thomas Kjosmoen, and myself have an article on using subversion in the collaborative production of LaTeX documents, “Subversion and TextMate: Making collaboration easier for LaTeX users”.
Other articles of […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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, […]
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