Customizing Your Compose Key Sequences

Posted 26 March 2012, under Linux, open source, text editors
One comment

A lit­tle post only for users of Linux (or other UNIX-like oper­at­ing sys­tem using the X Win­dow Sys­tem) – there may be some­thing sim­i­lar for Mac or Win­dows, but if so, I’m afraid I don’t know what it is.

If you aren’t famil­iar with the Com­pose key, it’s time to get famil­iar. It’s a des­ig­nated key on your key­board, which when pressed before a sequence of other keys, will input a spe­cial char­ac­ter — typ­i­cally a for­eign char­ac­ter or a sym­bol beyond the usual ASCII range — which in some way com­bines these char­ac­ters. This works in any pro­gram or win­dow run­ning on the X server!

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Writing CVs in LaTeX

Posted 9 November 2011, under Conversion, LaTeX
2 comments

Joseph Wright (UK-TUG sec­re­tary, author of siu­nitx and mod­er­a­tor on TeX.sx) has writ­ten a series of blog posts on writ­ing CVs (résumés in Amer­i­can) in LaTeX. Joseph is a chemist, but pretty much every­thing he says is rel­e­vant to peo­ple from all aca­d­e­mic dis­ci­plines. And much is even more gen­eral than that.

  1. Look­ing at the wider picture
  2. Cus­tom commands
  3. Bib­li­ogra­phies
  4. A short example

I’ve recently been exper­i­ment­ing with writ­ing my CV with emacs ORG mode to allow pdf and html ver­sions to be kept in sync. This is one of many ways you might try main­tain­ing mul­ti­ple in-sync for­mats of your CV. Oth­ers include:

  • A TeX ver­sion and using htla­tex to gen­er­ate the html version
  • Writ­ing in mark­down and using pan­doc to gen­er­ate tex and html versions

Each way has advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages. I hope to write up my expe­ri­ences of try­ing out each method soon.

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Tufte-LaTeX and a minimal LaTeX installation

Posted 31 October 2011, under LaTeX, packages
4 comments

In order to save space on my new lap­top, I installed the small­est Mac­TeX pack­age pos­si­ble. So far this has worked out well for me, with one hitch: when you want to use a non-default pack­age, you have to install it, of course, and some­times that requires installing lots of depen­den­cies, too. Unless I’m miss­ing some­thing (which is pos­si­ble), the depen­dency man­age­ment for LaTeX pack­ages is pretty weak. I ran into a ton of depen­den­cies for one of my favorite pack­ages, Tufte-LaTeX, so I thought I’d list them here.

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Lout: An alternative to LaTeX?

Posted 25 October 2011, under Linux, Mac, open source, text editors, Uncategorized
17 comments

I’ve recently been play­ing around with the Lout doc­u­ment type­set­ting sys­tem. Lout is in many ways sim­i­lar to LaTeX, was also cre­ated by aca­d­e­mics, and seems to cater to the same com­mu­nity. While there are dis­ad­van­tages, its chief advan­tages seem to be speed and size: a down­load of the entire sys­tem is less than 1 MB, and takes around 5 MB when installed.

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Squeezing things onto one page

Posted 18 October 2011, under formatting, LaTeX, packages, tutorial
2 comments

One thing that you may want to do with LaTeX is write hand­outs for your classes. This imposes par­tic­u­lar con­straints on you. In par­tic­u­lar, you want the hand­out to only be one page (or two sides). Now, LaTeX’s stan­dard mar­gins are rather gen­er­ous, and the spac­ing it puts between items in lists and between sec­tion head­ings and body text are all like­wise rather gen­er­ous. And with good rea­son: it doesn’t do to make things too cramped. But for this par­tic­u­lar pur­pose, it might be desir­able to squish things just a lit­tle bit. So let’s look at some ways to do that.

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Basics of LaTeX from the Command Line

Posted 11 August 2011, under LaTeX, Linux, Mac, packages
10 comments

Even if you do all your LaTeX­ing from within a spe­cial­ized text edi­tor or IDE with pre-defined com­mands, it’s still a good idea to know some of the basic com­mand line com­mands and options, so you can cus­tomize your editor’s set­tings, or write scripts. Here are some essen­tials I think every­one who uses LaTeX should know about LaTeX­ing from the com­mand line. This guide assumes you are using TeXlive or TeXlive-based sys­tem (like Mac­TeX) on a UNIX-like oper­at­ing sys­tem (GNU/Linux, BSD or Mac), though some of it would carry over to MikTeX/Windows as well, and is meant for rel­a­tive beginners.

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Developments

Posted 19 July 2011, under LaTeX, packages
7 comments

This is just a quick post to say that I’ve put a pack­age on CTAN. Now you can have your page num­bers in octal! Sweet! Less friv­o­lously, this makes greek let­ter enu­mer­a­tion eas­ier. moreenum offers a whole bunch of new enu­mer­a­tion options. It hasn’t been all that rig­or­ously tested, so do please post bugs to the Github page.

I’m also devel­op­ing a pack­age that allows you to print the input file line num­bers in the mar­gin. This is use­ful if you want to print off a copy of your draft for some­one, and then be able to quickly incor­po­rate their feed­back. This is very much a work in progress (there’s no doc­u­men­ta­tion to speak of and some of the options don’t work). But here is the github page for draftinputlines for the interested.

What is the cause of all this LaTeX related pro­duc­tiv­ity? Why, it’s struc­tured pro­cras­ti­na­tion at its finest! I have a paper to fin­ish draft­ing and am des­per­ately try­ing to avoid it.

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Primarily Pandoc: Writing in Markdown instead of LaTeX

Posted 16 June 2011, under Conversion, LaTeX
18 comments

In light of Kevin’s recent post on Pan­doc 1.8, I’ve been think­ing lately about the pos­si­bil­ity of writ­ing papers directly in Mark­down, then trans­lat­ing them into another for­mat (like LaTeX) when the time is appro­pri­ate. This post explores just what this might look like.

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Maintaining multiple versions of the same file

Posted 12 June 2011, under formatting, LaTeX
One comment

Some­times, you want more than one ver­sion of the same file. There are sev­eral ways to do this and I out­line a cou­ple here.

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Pandoc 1.8

Posted 30 May 2011, under Conversion, LaTeX, open source
8 comments

In past blog entries on con­vert­ing from LaTeX for­mat and con­vert­ing to LaTeX for­mat, I men­tioned the pan­doc con­ver­sion soft­ware by John Mac­Far­lane, which con­verts between a num­ber of dif­fer­ent mark-up for­mats. A newer ver­sion than the one I tested with there was released in Jan­u­ary, and only now have I had the time to test it out. I wanted to men­tion it again, since I think the new ver­sion (1.8) is much improved from the one I tested before (1.6).

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