*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 […]
What is direct quotation? You might think the answer is clear—it is the direct transcription of another’s words. In some contexts, however, it can be unclear what counts as a direct transcription. If that’s right, then direct quotation is vague, and its representation in structural markup is an idealization. Though I am no historian of […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 trial […]
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 […]
Not Weapons of Mass Destruction, nor even Word and the North Korean Missile Crisis, but Wysiwym MarkDown editor. As discussed in a previous post Mardown is an edge case of markup. A marked-up document contains: text information about that text A markup language determines: what markup is allowed what markup is required how the markup […]
In an ealier post I wrote about the power of plain text…and its perils. One of the perils of plain text, at least for a writer, is that it is unformatted. Formatting, however, is not merely aesthetic; it carries semantic significance—which can be crucial, especially with complex documents. The way to avoid this particular peril […]
There is a nice piece in the Stanford Magazine about Donald Knuth author of TeX and METAFONT. Frustration with the quality of mathematical typesetting and the fact that publishers were moving from manual to digital layout prompted Knuth to write TeX: It had changed into a problem of bits, zeroes and ones. You put the […]
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, […]
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