Converting From LaTeX to Other Formats

Posted 20 January 2011, under Conversion, LaTeX, open source
15 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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My idiosyncratic LaTeX preamble part II

Posted 21 December 2010, under git, LaTeX
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When I wrote my “pre­am­ble” post, I only com­mented on half the pre­am­ble. So here is the sec­ond half. Also, the doc­u­ment I was draw­ing the pre­am­ble from has changed sig­nif­i­cantly since I wrote that last post, so there may well be some overlap…

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LaTeX in (g)Vim with live update-as-you-type PDF preview

Posted 15 December 2010, under LaTeX, Linux, text editors
34 comments

Overview: How It Works

Ever since try­ing the gummi LaTeX edi­tor, which pro­vides a live-updating PDF pre­view, I’ve been intrigued by the idea. If you’re a nat­ural fid­dler like me, you appre­ci­ate instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion. Here’s gummi in action.

gummi in action

While I really liked this fea­ture of gummi, I was unim­pressed with it as an edi­tor in most other respects. It does not have nearly the high-level fea­tures of an advanced edi­tor like vim or emacs, or even a stan­dard LaTeX IDE like Tex­maker or Kile.

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Vim, LaTeX, and ‘conceal’

Posted 23 November 2010, under Uncategorized
4 comments

I came across a blog post this morn­ing that I thought might be of inter­est to those using Vim to write their LaTeX doc­u­ments. In the post, Bjorn Winck­ler explains how to use the con­ceal fea­ture in Vim to make your LaTeX sym­bols look nice in Vim. Appar­ently if you set it up right, Vim can dis­play your \exists as the uni­code back­wards ‘E’.

(It is pos­si­ble, I sup­pose, that you might be able to just use the uni­code in your LaTeX doc­u­ment, but I don’t know any­thing about this.)

The post linked to above explains how to do this in detail, so if you are inter­ested, check it out.

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Converting Documents to LaTeX

Posted 20 November 2010, under LaTeX
7 comments

Con­tents

Intro­duc­tion

For a vari­ety of rea­sons, you might need to con­vert a doc­u­ment saved in a tra­di­tional Word Processor’s (MS Word, Open Office Writer, etc.) for­mat to LaTeX. Per­haps you are a new LaTeX user, and need to migrate an older project. Per­haps you need to col­lab­o­rate with some­one unwill­ing to switch for­mats. Per­haps, like me, you are tired of stu­dents play­ing games with mar­gins and font sizes, and just want to con­vert what­ever they send you to a uni­form for­mat con­ve­nient for you.

Luck­ily, tools exist for the job. Unluck­ily, they all have draw­backs. The TeX User Group has a page devoted to con­vert­ers between LaTeX and PC Textproces­sors which is very use­ful, despite being rather dated. As it points out, not only aren’t there any per­fect con­ver­sion meth­ods out there right now, it prin­ci­ple it hard to see how there could be, given that there are no clear cri­te­ria defin­ing what makes a good con­ver­sion. Should a con­ver­sion aim to match the look of a WYSIWYG editor’s out­put, or aim instead to cap­ture (or even guess) the seman­tic struc­ture instead, with no extra­ne­ous mark-up? You might answer that dif­fer­ently in dif­fer­ent contexts.

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Another Sample Preamble

Posted 12 November 2010, under LaTeX
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Intro­duc­tion

Char­lie and Sea­mus have each con­tributed a blog post shar­ing their LaTeX pre­am­bles. It’s my turn. It’s a bit hard, since, well, I don’t have one that I use all the time.

Why I Don’t Have a Stan­dard Preamble

Why not? The first year or so of using LaTeX, I did, but I’ve come to the real­iza­tion that, at least for me, it’s bet­ter just to load pack­ages as needed, and only when needed. This min­i­mizes the changes of con­flicts between pack­ages, and speeds up com­pi­la­tion, since noth­ing unnec­es­sary is processed. It also forces you to remem­ber which com­mands are included in which pack­ages, so you know what doc­u­men­ta­tion to look at when you need to. Finally, it nar­rows down the pos­si­ble cul­prits in case some­thing goes wrong.

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Another preamble/prologue

Posted 10 November 2010, under LaTeX
7 comments

Inspired by Seamus’s post on his pre­am­ble, I thought I’d (clean up and then share) my pre­am­ble. (Note: I tend to call it a pro­logue for some rea­son. Sea­mus is prob­a­bly right; nev­er­the­less, I refuse to change my ways!)

So here goes:

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My idosyncratic LaTeX preamble

Posted 26 October 2010, under Uncategorized
13 comments

One of the most intim­i­dat­ing things about start­ing LaTeX is look­ing at other peo­ples’ doc­u­ments and see­ing huge long pre­am­bles full of pack­ages that you don’t under­stand before you even get to the “\begin{document}”! My doc­u­ment pre­am­bles tend to pretty messy, so I have decided to tidy one of them up, anno­tate it, and post about it here. Con­tinue Read­ing ▶

Emacs: an advertisment

Posted 8 October 2010, under text editors
9 comments

This is the first in a series of posts about Emacs. Emacs is another ven­er­a­ble old text edi­tor, like Vim. There are some sim­i­lar­i­ties between them: they both have rather steep learn­ing curves, both are designed for effi­ciency rather than user friend­li­ness, both have been ongo­ing soft­ware projects since before I was born. How­ever, Vim and Emacs are quite dif­fer­ent beasts. They both work quite dif­fer­ently from a nor­mal text edi­tor, and they both work quite dif­fer­ently from each other. Con­tinue Read­ing ▶

A word on updating Vim

Posted 29 September 2010, under text editors
3 comments

If you are using Vim and haven’t updated to 7.3, you should. It has some very nice fea­tures, and your plu­g­ins will start to expect it and use some of them (I’m guessing–I had a prob­lem with the LaTeX-box plu­gin until I updated to a pre-7.3 release a while back).

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