Sane Vim Plugin Management

Posted 4 May 2011, under text editors
12 comments

The prob­lem

Vim plu­gin man­age­ment has, his­tor­i­cally, been a major pain. Ordi­nar­ily, your .vim direc­tory would have a sub­di­rec­tory for ftplu­g­ins, one for plu­g­ins, one for docs, and so on. This is well and good until you use a plu­gin that has some doc files, some ftplu­gin files, some syn­tax files, and so on. The prob­lem you run into in such a case is this: in order to update the script you would have to (1) fig­ure out what files go with that plu­gin, (2) delete those files, then (3) re-install the plu­gin. Vim­balls are a step toward fix­ing this, but for what­ever rea­son it looks like they aren’t going to catch on.

The result of all this is that peo­ple don’t upgrade plu­g­ins. Relat­edly, when you try out a plu­gin, you’ve com­mit­ted to it (since unin­stalling isn’t easy). So peo­ple are reluc­tant to try plu­g­ins. That is no good.

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New Blog Posts

Posted 28 April 2011, under LaTeX
8 comments

As you may have noticed, there have been a dearth of posts here at Phil­TeX recently. Part of this, surely, has to do with the rapidly approach­ing end of the semes­ter and all the grad­ing duties, etc. that come with that. But part of it, at least for me, is sim­ply that I can’t think of any­thing in the world of LaTeX that inter­ests me enough to write a post about. I’m sure I’ll have more ideas at some point, but I’m not sure when (and maybe Kevin or Sea­mus have some­thing in the works—I don’t know).

So, in the inter­est of (pos­si­bly) get­ting a new post up here in the not-so-distant future, I’d love to hear (a) any ideas you have for posts that would inter­est you (maybe I’ll get inspired!), or, bet­ter still (b) if you’d like to write a post about LaTeX related mat­ters for the blog.

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Join me on Convore

Posted 16 March 2011, under philosophy, technology
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If you are inter­ested in meta­physics (and are so inclined), make your way over to Con​vore​.com and join me in the group I cre­ated on meta­physics. Con­vore, if you aren’t famil­iar, is a bit like a web-based IRC–it pro­vides a room or group for real-time chat on a broad topic. I cre­ated a group for meta­physics (I call it ‘ana­lytic meta­physics’ to let the fans of that non-philosophical meta­physics know what we’re about), with the hope of cre­at­ing a place for online chats about, you guessed it, metaphysics.

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Git Branching (pt 2 of 2)

Posted 8 March 2011, under git
6 comments

In my last post I explained a bit how I use branches in my philo­soph­i­cal writ­ing. In this post I’d like to walk through an exam­ple in a bit more detail, using lots of pictures.

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Quick update on Homebrew

Posted 5 March 2011, under Uncategorized
2 comments

I find myself using Home­brew more and more to install pro­grams on my Mac. Ear­lier today I wanted to use the interactive_editor gem in a Ruby IRB ses­sion but kept get­ting error mes­sages when I tried to use vim. The prob­lem is that the sys­tem vim on my com­puter is the orig­i­nal vim, but I’ve remapped ‘vim’ to the updated vim that comes with MacVim in my .bashrc. But the interactive_editor gem couldn’t find that out for some rea­son. So I looked around and it turns out that brew install macvim --override-system-vim will do just what the flag sug­gests and over­ride the sys­tem vim. Now I can use vim via IRB with­out errors.

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Git Branching (pt 1 of 2)

Posted 2 March 2011, under git
8 comments

Mak­ing branches work for you

I recently wrote a post about using a ver­sion con­trol sys­tem when you write LaTeX doc­u­ments. In this post I want to talk about a spe­cific fea­ture of the work­flow that I’ve adopted for my philo­soph­i­cal writ­ing: branching.

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Modifying section commands with the titlesec package

Posted 21 February 2011, under formatting, LaTeX
3 comments

Here’s a quick post inspired by a “real world” LaTeX prob­lem that I helped some­one out with recently (hi Ben!). Let’s start with Ben’s orig­i­nal ques­tion: “How can I make \paragraph behave more like “sub­sub­sub­sec­tion”?” That is we want to make the para­graph com­mand appear on its own line.

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Matching math fonts to text with the mathastext package (and installing new fonts for PDFLaTeX)

Posted 5 February 2011, under fonts, LaTeX
32 comments

Have you ever found a font on the LaTeX Font Cat­a­logue site, or else­where, that you wanted to use in your LaTeX doc­u­ment, but became turned off when it turned out the font couldn’t be used in math mode, and it seemed ugly to use one font for text, and another for math vari­ables, numer­als and punctuation?

Sure, you could switch to XeLaTeX and get a lot of fine-grained con­trol over fonts using pack­ages like fontspec, math­spec and unicode-math, but there are down­sides to that. PDFLaTeX is faster, more sta­ble, works bet­ter with pack­ages like microtype and movie15, etc.

Fear not, due to a new pack­age recently uploaded to CTAN, math­as­text, you can always make the numer­als, vari­ables, and other Latin let­ters in math mode match the base text font with­out too much effort. Here is the web page for the pack­age by the devel­oper, Jean-François Burnol. It has options for mak­ing the vari­ables default to upright or italic shape, for using more or less punc­tu­a­tion from the text font, and so on. You’ll still have to rely on Com­puter Mod­ern, or other LaTeX font with math sup­port, to pro­vide other math­e­mat­i­cal sym­bols. But still it really opens up the possibilities.

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Using a Version Control System

Posted 2 February 2011, under git
15 comments

If you are using LaTeX, you should be using a ver­sion con­trol sys­tem or VCS. In this post I’m going to explain what a VCS is and why you should use one. In a later post I’ll explain how I use the par­tic­u­lar ver­sion con­trol sys­tem I use, git. Which ver­sion con­trol sys­tem you use is not ter­ri­bly impor­tant. But I think using a VCS is.

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Converting From LaTeX to Other Formats

Posted 20 January 2011, under Conversion, LaTeX, open source
13 comments

Con­tents

Intro­duc­tion

This blog post is a com­pan­ion to my ear­lier piece on Con­vert­ing Doc­u­ments to LaTeX from other for­mats. That piece did not attract much atten­tion, but I’m sol­dier­ing on, in part because con­vert­ing in the other direc­tion, that is, from LaTeX to other for­mats, is some­thing most LaTeX users need to do at one point or another, whether it is to appease a pub­lisher or edi­tor with an estab­lished work­flow, or allow for col­lab­o­ra­tion with a col­league who refuses to give up his or her Word, or even to make use of spe­cial tech­nol­ogy such as a text-to-speech system.

There are many pro­grams out there; at least twice as many pro­grams exist to con­vert in this direc­tion than in the other. I imag­ine that this is in part because the sep­a­ra­tion of form from con­tent in LaTeX input makes it fairly straight­for­ward to move con­tent to a dif­fer­ent medium. On the other hand, when it comes to the sorts of things that LaTeX really excels at, such as type­set­ting math­e­mat­ics and vec­tor graph­ics, it is hard to imag­ine any con­verter doing its job with­out los­ing some­thing. And so while there are many pro­grams avail­able, I’ve yet to find any one that com­pletely sat­is­fies me, and it is nearly always nec­es­sary to tweak and fix up the out­put a lot.

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