Advanced features of LaTeX are best learned on a need to know basis. The LaTeX Companion can be daunting in its length. If you thought you needed to master all of that material before writing a LaTeX document you would never do so. So start simple, and learn how to do more advanced things as […]
Donald Knuth is renowned for offering a bounty for bugs found in TeX. Many of these checks remain forever uncashed, the recipients rightly regarding the signed check an honor greater than the money it represents. Sadly, this practice has come to an end. No Donald Kuth has not died, nor is he, like Ringo Starr, […]
One of the features of MacTeX 2008 that I was looking forward to was its inclusion of SyncTeX, Jerome Laurens replacement for pdfsync.
There are two ways to call SyncTeX, from the command line and in source. From the command line simply use the argument -synctex=1, and from source include \synctex=1 in the preamble. The former […]
MacTeX 2008 has just been released. Here are some of the new features:
Packages in TeX Live 2008 can be updated over the internet. This is a major advance in the distribution. See documentation about the TeX Live Manager for details, and read the tlmgr man page. Additional documentation for the Mac is forthcoming; see the […]
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 […]
Daniel Winterstein has just released a new version of his Markdown plugin for Eclipse. From the Markdown mailing list:
There’s syntax highlighting, a preview window, and it can export to html. The best feature is the document outline, which is a joy for editing large documents. Plus you can use TODO tags and these […]
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 […]
Donald Knuth, creator of TeX, describes his workflow for writing in an interview:
My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine, using the conventions of TeX. I use tex, dvips, and gv to […]
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 […]
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 […]
Leopard has a small feature that I have often longed for. All my notes are text files in markdown format. URI schemes extend the usefulness of the medium. With the file URI scheme I can link to other files, and with the mailto URI scheme I can send emails. But one thing that I have […]
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 […]
sympoze
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