PhilT_eX

4 comments

1. Aldo Antonelli says:

   1 November 2011 at 12:25 am

   Char­lie, per­haps you can say more about why you like the pack­age. I fol­lowed some of the links, but could not quite get an idea of how it dif­fers from the stan­dard book class. Thanks!

   • Charlie Tanksley says:

     1 November 2011 at 7:52 am

     Hey Aldo,

     The main draw­back I see to the Tufte pack­ages is that they are so opin­ion­ated. For the longest time you were forced to use the Nat­bib pack­age, for exam­ple (no BibLa­TeX). They are cur­rently being rewrit­ten to give you a bit more con­trol, but that process seems to be going slowly (at least, they haven’t updated the offi­cial pack­age in a really long time).

     There are a cou­ple of things I really like about the Tufte-handout pack­age in par­tic­u­lar (that’s what I write papers in, not Tufte-book).

     1. The nar­rower, left-aligned main col­umn of text. I think it reads eas­ily (I don’t know if it is eas­ier to read than the stan­dard LaTeX setup, though).
     2. The loca­tion of the notes. Foot­notes are always a pain to me. I hate read­ing them because they take me away from the text and so many of them are just ref­er­ences. I like hav­ing them right next to the text so I can see very eas­ily and with­out los­ing my place whether I want to read them. And even if I do read them, I’m almost already back where I need to be to keep read­ing the text.
     3. The \newthought com­mand. A sin­gle sec­tion or sub­sec­tion might con­tain a cou­ple of related, but dis­tinct thoughts. Maybe there are three rea­sons to believe a premise and you want to give them all in one sec­tion. In your writ­ing you’ll give cues about when one stops and the next starts. The newthought com­mand gives a visual cue: there is a larger space between the para­graphs and then the first few words of the new thought are in small caps. I just love that. If noth­ing else, when I’m writ­ing it gives me a way to focus—if I find my text stray­ing from the most recent new thought, I need to reeval­u­ate what I’m doing. (This is one of the rea­sons that I like LaTeX, with its explicit sec­tions, sub­sec­tions, and so on, and the newthought com­mand gives me even more of that.

     The style of the Tufte-handout class is pretty dis­tinc­tive, and since some of the com­mands are new, it takes a bit of work if you decide to switch to an arti­cle class or some­thing. But I like it, and I hope this explains some of the rea­sons why! Please let me know if you have more ques­tions.

2. Seamus Bradley says:

   1 November 2011 at 5:14 am

   I don’t know if it’s dif­fer­ent for Macs, but you shouldn’t have to be root to use tlmgr. Well, I guess it depends how you installed it…

   • Charlie Tanksley says:

     1 November 2011 at 7:42 am

     Hey Sea­mus, It seems weird to me too that you would have to sudo to install pack­ages via tlmgr, but I think you do. A stan­dard TeX instal­la­tion on a Mac seems to go in /usr/local/texlive, which requires sudo­ing (I guess you could set up own­er­ship for it instead I thought that at one point I remem­ber see­ing a ~/.texlive direc­tory (on one of my com­put­ers), but I don’t see that on my lap­top. I do have a ~/Library/texmf direc­tory where I can add cus­tom files, but tlmgr doesn’t add stuff there.

     I guess the moral here is try this with­out sudo first, then do that if you have to!