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MikTeX Blog: Setup Wizard: using environment variables in user directory path names

The latest version of the setup wizard makes it possible to use delay-expanded environment variables when specifying places for user directories.

For example, consider a shared configuration where all user directories have to be sub-directories of a central directory (say \\server\miktexuser). The user directories can then be specified as follows (in setupwiz.opt):

--shared
--user-config=\\server\miktexuser\<USERNAME>
--user-data=\\server\miktexuser\<USERNAME>
--user-install=\\server\miktexuser\<USERNAME>

The environment variable USERNAME will be expanded at run-time: when user Jane runs a MiKTeX program the directory \\server\miktexuser\Jane is her MiKTeX user directory.

Blog on Latex Matters: Generate LaTeX tables from CSV files (Excel)

Besides various online services and scripts, there are several LaTeX packages that generate tables directly from CSV (comma separated value) files. The advantage is everything is in the tex-file in one place and one doesn’t have to switch back and forth between website/script and LaTeX when changes are made. The drawback clearly is their limited [...]

How To TeX: Adding PDF metadata in LaTeX

When working on a LaTeX project of some value, you might want to add your credentials to the PDF metadata. This way, readers of the document will know who made the document and what its about without actually opening the document. Adding metadata might also be a good idea for copyright reasons, etc. As always, there are multiple ways of

Some TeX Developments: TeX Live 2012 pretesting

Pretesting of the next TeX Live is well under way. This is very much evolutionary: no major changes from TL2011. So far I’ve had no surprises, but that does not mean a bit of caution is not needed (I will keep TL2011 installed too!). Of course, pretesting works best if lots of people get involved, [...]

UK-TUG: LaTeX for Beginners course, London, 23rd July 2012

The UK TeX Users’ Group (UK-TUG) will be arranging a presentation of the very popular course ‘LaTeX for Beginners: Using LaTeX to Write a Thesis’ in the summer. The course will be taking place in London on the 23rd of July 2012, starting at 9:30 am and running to approximately 5 pm. Content will include: [...]

LaTeX Alive: TUG 2012 in Boston

This year’s been a bit of a rollercoaster for being busy and trying to make decisions. After flipping-flopping over the last six months, I’ve decided at the last minute to attend TUG 2012 in Boston in July. (Thanks to Steve Peter, president, for the gentle nudge that finally sorted me out.)

TUG is the annual conference of the TeX Users Group, and I attended it for the first time in San Francisco in 2010. It was the best conference I’ve been to, and I’m expecting to have a great time in Boston as well. I’ve barely been to the east coast of the US, so I’m excited to explore the city in the days around the conference.

For my presentation, I’ll talk about LaTeX3 from a fairly high level, why it exists, why I work on it, and other assorted aspects of my somewhat-dormant TeX work. (Spoiler: without LaTeX3 I wouldn’t have been able to develop unicode-math; it would simply have been too much work.) If there’s anything in particularly you think I should address, feel free to drop me a line beforehand.

If you yourself are attending the conference, please say hi. What do people like to drink in Boston? I’ll buy you one.

Random Determinism: A ConTeXt style file for formatting RSS feeds for Kindle

As I said in the last post, I bought an Amazon Kindle Touch sometime back, and I find it very …

Blue Danube: TeX4ht and biblatex

The very powerful LaTeX bibliography processing package namely, biblatex.sty often clashes with TeX4ht. I do not have much knowledge about the innards of biblatex. However, I could fix problems found in biblatex.4ht consequent to two previous revisions. Now one more revision had taken place, as we can expect, TeX4ht fails to work with current version [...]

Blog on Latex Matters: Correct total number of pages in beamer presentations with backup slides

While writing a presentation with beamer it may be convenient to have some backup/appendix slides ready as a support for answers to potential questions. By default, beamer will count the total number of slides, including the backup slides at the end of the presentation, leading to a wrong number of total slides intended for presentation. The package [...]

Stack Exchange TeX Blog: The Hitch-Hikers’ Guide to LaTeX3

Introduction As with the original Hitch-Hiker’s Guide, this blog post won’t actually be all that useful to someone wanting to truly explore LaTeX3. It’s more of a “What I did on my holidays” kind of guide. I’ve recently had my first go at doing some coding with LaTeX3 and I thought it might be interesting [...]

Malaysian LaTeX User Group: A New LaTeX User’s Testimonial

Last week I received an e-mail from Bahareh Pahlevanzadeh, a graduate student at Universiti Sains Malaysia, describing her happiness at discovering LaTeX and my usmthesis class/template for writing her thesis.

Your mileage may vary, but I was a bit surprised when she expressed her opinion that

When it comes to getting my writing organised, I found LaTeX, especially with the USMthesis class template, to be actually very user-friendly.

Well I don’t know about you, but I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard/read in person the words “very user-friendly” being used to describe LaTeX!

You can read more about Bahareh’s experience here.

Stack Exchange TeX Blog: KOMAscript: new English manual

Markus Kohm, maintainer of KOMAscript has published a new version (3.11) of the KOMAscript bundle. There is one extraordinary issue: The new version includes a new manual in English language. Markus said on his webpage: »A new English user manual with the same structure and completely translated content of the German user manual is provided. [...]

Stack Exchange TeX Blog: A Tale of Two Questions

Introduction For quite some time I’ve had the idea of writing a blog post about what makes a Great Question. The first problem with that is that it is highly subjective. I’ve no real problem with that (and this is the blog part of the site, after all) but it needs to be done carefully. [...]

TeXample.net weblog: pgf/TikZ builds section updated

by Stefan Kottwitz

Today I created a build from the CVS version of pgf/TikZ and added it to the pgf builds section. Also the current manual has been typeset and is available there as well. I will continue updating in the future.

How To TeX: Five minute guide to LaTeX

Together with a friend of mine, I’ve written a beginners guide for LaTeX. The main goal of the guide was to keep things simple and to convince MS Word users to write proper documents with LaTeX. The result? Four pages of text, explaining the basics of LaTeX. The content of the guide is filled with examples. This, in our opinion,

Some TeX Developments: Co-ordinating biblatex style development

Bibliographies formatting is complicated, and over the years this has led to the development of a lot of BibTeX styles and tools like custom-bib. For biblatex users the output style can be altered from within LaTeX, and while there is not yet an equivalent of custom-bib for biblatex there is some excellent advice available for [...]

Some TeX Developments: LaTeX3 gets a new FPU

For a while now we’ve been promising to update the floating point functions in LaTeX3 to provide an expandable approach to calculations. We are now making good progress in swapping the old code for the new material. There are still a few things to be decided, but the general plan looks pretty clear. The new [...]

Rob J Hyndman: Research tips: Blog aggregators

A very useful way of keeping up with blogs in a particular area is to subscribe to a blog aggregator. These will syndicate posts from a large number of blogs and provide links back to the original sources. So you only need to subscribe once to get all the good stuff in that area. There are now several blog aggregators available that might be of interest to readers here. And this blog is now syndicated on several other sites including those listed below. R-bloggers: for all R-related blogs. The posts tagged R from this blog are syndicated there along with about 300 other R blogs. Statsblogs for statistical blogs. This is a very new aggregator, but is growing fast. There is naturally some overlap with R-bloggers. All posts from this blog are syndicated there. TeX community for TeX related blogs. The posts tagged LaTeX from this blog are syndicated there along with about 40 other TeX blogs. Mathblogging.org aggregates a number of mathematics blogs. All posts from this blog are syndicated there. In addition, for those interested in economics, EconAcademics.org aggregates a number of economics blogs (but does not include this blog as I rarely post anything about economics). I have also set

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Blog on Latex Matters: List of symbols or abbreviations (nomenclature)

Printing a list of abbreviations or symbols is one of these things (like so many) LaTeX provides a very simple and elegant solution for. The nomencl package implements a few basic commands to do that. First load the package in the preamble. The makenomenclature command is required for the generation of the nomenclature file (.nlo). [...]

Malaysian LaTeX User Group: Apple's Keynote Beamer Themes for The Poor

If you don't have Keynote in your Mac, or does not even own any Apple's hardware, perhaps considering this theme, click here

TeX Hacks: et al., i.e., e.g., etc.

Only time for a short post. Foreign words are italicized frequently in English; however, et al., i.e., e.g., and etc. probably should not be. It draws unnecessary attention to the words and modern style manuals will tell you not to italicize them.

Of more relevance to the TeX world: make sure the space after the period is an interword space unless the abbreviation is actually ending the sentence. The length of the space is control by a variety of factors in TeX, the most important of which is the \spacefactor. LaTeX provides \@ to reset the space factor and a control space \ can be used to produce a normal space. Examine TeX by Topic for details.

TeXblog: TeX Live 2012 Schedule

Today Karl Berry announced on the TeX Live mailing list, that in about one week (May 10) TeX Live 2011 and tlnet will be frozen, and the building of the pretest version of TeX Live 2012 will start shortly after that.

Stack Exchange TeX Blog: Using sprite sheets with LaTeX

Sprite sheet is the name of a big image containing several smaller images or icons. It’s a technique usually employed by webdesigners to reduce the number of requests the browser makes to the server – reducing the number of HTTP requests can make a Web page load much faster. It’s also used a lot in [...]

How To TeX: Two column journal article template

Today’s LaTeX has a two column layout, which makes it suitable for a (scientific) journal article. The section headings are changed, as well as the font of the document. Furthermore a header is added to the pages. I tried to create a clean looking article. Judge yourselves if I succeeded in doing that. The description in this post will be

Some TeX Developments: The LPPL: ‘maintainer’ or ‘author-maintained’

The LaTeX Project Public License (LPPL) was written to allow development of LaTeX code in a way that is free as in speech while also making sure that LaTeX users get what they expect when they \usepackage{foo} Frank Mittelbach wrote an excellent overview of how the LPPL was developed for TUGBoat last year, where he [...]

Graph Theory in LaTeX 2: Introducing graphiso.sty

The purpose of the new package graphiso.sty is to use tkz-graph to produce an animation of a graph isomorphism in a beamer presentation, such as: You can find documentation and code at Github: rvf0068/graphiso.sty.

Some TeX Developments: babel gets back on track

Posted today to the LaTeX-L list by Javier Bezos Babel gets back on track and it is again actively maintained. The goals are mainly to fix bugs, to make it compatible with XeTeX and LuaTeX (as far as possible), and perhaps to add some minor new features (provided they are backward compatible). No attempt will [...]

Some TeX Developments: Goodies from DANTE

I recently discovered that you can read issues most of Die TeXnische Komödie online. My German is good enough to get the gist of the articles, and there is some interesting stuff there. I’ve always meant to join DANTE, if only to support their core CTAN server, and so this seemed like an ideal opportunity. [...]

TeXblog: TeXworks 0.4.4 released

Today I read on LaTeX-Community.org, that version 0.4.4 of TeXworks has been released, as posted by Thorsten. TeXworks is a quick and efficient LaTeX editor running on most operating systems. It is free and open source. 0.4.4 is a stable version which will be included in TeX Live 2012. New and updated features in this version, compared [...]

Some TeX Developments: Programming LaTeX3: More on expansion

In the last post, I looked at the idea of expandability, and how we can use x-type expansion to exhaustively expand an argument. I also said that there was more to this, and hinted at two other argument specifications, f- and o-type expansion. We need these because TeX is a macro-expansion language, and while LaTeX3 [...]

TeXblog: Kile 2.1.2 released

Version 2.1.2 of the LaTeX editor Kile has been released. Some bugs have been fixed, biblatex.cwl has been updated, and the default encoding in document templates is now utf8 instead of utf8x. biblatex.cwl has been updated.

TeXample.net weblog: Tux in TeX with TikZ

by Stefan Kottwitz

Today, Marco Daniel proudly showed his Tux cup. I thought, how long would it take to draw the Tux image using TikZ? Download the SVG image, use svg2tikz at the command prompt, got the .tex file.

How To TeX: Create a simple nomenclature with the longtable package

There are plenty of LaTeX packages that enable users to create a nomenclature (also called glossary or list of symbols); some make use of makeindex or xindy, others use bibtex. I think a nomenclature adds a great amount of value to theses or other large documents, but setting up a system to maintain one is a bit of a pain

Some TeX Developments: Text blocks on both sides of the header

A while ago, I wrote a short series on creating a CV in LaTeX. I’ve made a few adjustments recently, both to my CV and my letter of application, and one issue came up in both of them: putting text on both sides of the header. For my CV, I wanted to split the address [...]

Blog on Latex Matters: Writing a CV in LaTeX

Writing my curriculum in LaTeX was a task that has been on my TODO-list for quite a while. I liked the style of my Word-written CV and I believed it would take hours to come up with a reasonable CV in LaTeX. Nevertheless, I recently sat down, began writing, and after not too long, I [...]

Some TeX Developments: arara: Making LaTeX files your way

Building a LaTeX source of any complexity means doing more than a single LaTeX run, for example requiring BibTeX or MakeIndex runs along with multiple LaTeX passes. There are several ways to automate this: you can build your own script or use auto-build tools such as latexmk or Rubber. These tools work by checking for [...]

Malaysian LaTeX User Group: LaTeX Template Website

Just read from an article here regarding Vel's effort on putting template on a single page. You can check out Vel's initiative from this page.

Some TeX Developments: biblatex: A team to continue the work

I posted a while ago about biblatex, looking for news of the author, Philipp Lehman. He’d been very active in replying to bug reports up to about 5 months ago, since when no-one has heard from him. As I said before, that’s a big concern well beyond LaTeX work, but it’s also left a question [...]

Stack Exchange TeX Blog: Voting Up, Voting Down

(This is by Joseph Wright but he’s having difficulty logging in to the blog so I’m posting it for him.) Voting up, voting down Voting is an important part of how StackExchange works. Voting for means that good answers are easier to identify, which is vital when you don’t know the best way to do [...]

Some TeX Developments: Programming LaTeX3: Expandability

In the last part, I looked at integer expressions, and how they can be used to calculate integer values. What I did not do was say exactly what can go inside an integer expression. That’s because it links in to a wider concept, and one that is very familiar to TeX programmers: expandability. What is [...]

Some TeX Developments: Die TeXnische Komödie online

TeX use is very strong in German speaking countries, and that means that the German-speaking TeX group, DANTE, is also very active. Their members magazine, Die TeXnische Komödie, has until recently only been available to members in print. However, it’s now available online. Non-members can see editions which are over a year old, similar to [...]

On music, computing and math: A Pygments lexer for GAP

In case you haven’t heard of one of the most awesome LaTeX packages ever, let me introduce to you: minted. It’s a package to create listings (code snippets, preferably with highlighting, line numbering etc.), but it goes much further than the more well-known package listings. A small example: Its awesomeness comes at a cost though, [...]

Malaysian LaTeX User Group: TeX4ht Options

CV Radhakrishnan (CVR) has posted a list of TeX4ht options, the most comprehensive I have seen yet.

TeX4ht is a very powerful piece of software for converting L^aT_eX to other formats, such as (X)HTML and ODT. Unfortunately, the documentation was never truly complete, and the inner workings of the system can be hard to grasp and understand. The original creator, Eitan Gurari passed on unexpectedly in 2009. CVR and Karl Berry has since taken over the maintenance of TeX4ht.

As a side note, if you have an existing L^aT_eX document that you need to convert to other formats, TeX4ht is the most robust system that I have come across, i.e. it works with almost any L^aT_eX packages that are used in your document. (See this link for other L^aT_eX-to-whatever conversion tools.)

On the other hand, if you’re just starting to write your document from scratch, with a view to exporting to different output formats later, you might be better off using DocBook or pandoc instead. I personally prefer the markdown syntax in pandoc and exporting to L^aT_eX later for further editing.

Blue Danube: TeX4ht: Options

The following is a list a of options that can be submitted to TeX4ht when it is run at command line. These can also be provided as options when tex4ht package is loaded in a LaTeX document. -css to ignore CSS code, use command line option -css. -xtpipes to avoid xtpipes post-processing the output. This [...]

Blog on Latex Matters: Counting the total number of…

…sections, chapters, pages, theorems, equations, references, etc. There are numerous potential commands in LaTeX one may consider counting in order to automatically output their total number of appearances in a document. The totcount package provides a simple way to do that. We will to consider two different cases, single commands (cite, section, chapter, etc.) and [...]

How To TeX: 9 essential LaTeX packages everyone should use

Originally, I started this blog to help the very beginners of LaTeX. I have to admit that the horizon got a little wider since the day howtoTeX.com was launched and that is (in my eyes) not a bad thing. Challenges will only keep you motivated! However, today a post that is very useful for starters. In this post, I sum

Stack Exchange TeX Blog: TeXtalk: an interview with David Carlisle

Welcome to the TeXtalk! We have a very special guest for today: our friend David Carlisle, member of the LaTeX3 project, editor of the MathML spec, a very active member of TeX.sx, 16k+ rep, 104 badges, and 325+ answers so far. Get ready for this awesome interview! Paulo Cereda: Could you tell us a bit [...]

Got Emacs?: Getting ppt figures into LaTeX

This might be of interest to folks who work with ppts and LaTeX. There are some interesting methods discussed in this thread, apart from the usual PDF export and cropping edit cycle in comp.text.tex. Might be worth checking out.

*Hell, the new forum interface of google groups is a total UI bork. I so want to swear till the air is blue. Just look at it and weep. Me, I'm going back to my gnus cave.

Random Determinism: A style file for eink readers

Recently I bought an Amazon Kindle touch. It is more convenient than the IREX DR1000 for reading morning news and …

Rob J Hyndman: Research tips: LaTeX templates

Some of the most popular pages on this site are my LaTeX templates: for a curriculum vitae, a beamer poster, a beamer talk, a Monash University working paper and a Monash University thesis. Almost all new LaTeX users begin with templates, so it is surprising that there aren’t more good templates around to get people started. Now there is a great new website for LaTeX templates: www.latextemplates.com. There are some nice templates for letters, lab reports, calendars, theses, assignments, essays, and CVs. The templates are well-structured with lots of comments to make it easy to understand how they work, and to make modifications. Even experienced LaTeXers will probably learn some new tricks and new packages from browsing the templates.