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. Many logicians have complaint the lack of […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I hate blegging, but I have been asked to write an article for PracTeX on LaTeX and subversion. Most of this material is drawn from some of my recent posts, though rewritten and reorganized. Any comments would be greatly appreciated. The present draft can be found here.
Nature has announced that it cannot accept OOXML documents: We currently cannot accept files saved in Microsoft Office 2007 formats. Equations and special characters (for example, Greek letters) cannot be edited and are incompatible with Nature’s own editing and typesetting programs. And so has Science: Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word […]
LaTeX is great for complex documents. (Of course, other forms of markup are good as well. DocBook comes to mind.) When working on a complex LaTeX document, it is important, nay, imperative to keep it in some form of version control. (The necessity may not be apparent until you actually use version control—if you don’t, […]
Once upon a time, authors would send their manuscripts to their publisher where a copy editor would mark up the manuscript with instructions for the typesetter. (The origin, by the way, of the modern conception of a markup language such as HTML, LaTeX, or Markdown—if, indeed, it is one). This was only feasible if the […]
Good news for text-editing writers on the OS X platform. The venerable Mac text editor BBEdit has released an update which includes native Markdown support and improved TeX support. From the release notes: The Markdown language module now supports syntax coloring. If you choose “Preview in BBEdit” when a Markdown source file is in front, […]
For viewing PDFs I invariably use Apple’s Preview. In contrast with Adobe Reader which is painfully slow to load, Preview is both fast and convenient. Nevertheless, I wanted something more. First of all, Preview doesn’t autoupdate. So if you regenerate a PDF with pdflatex, say, your changes won’t appear in Preview. Largely for this reason, […]
In my first post I described how I gave up Word. For those engaged in academic writing, or the production of certain kinds of complex documents, there’s reason to do so as well. To follow this up, I would like to bring your attention to Marko Pinteric comparison of Word and LaTeX: Although Word is […]
I love LaTeX. But some things that are easy to do are just not obvious, especially to the uninitiated. Like word count. Someone recently asked me how to determine the word count of a LaTeX document. The problem is that we want to ignore the LaTeX markup, so just counting ‘words’ with: wc -w is […]
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