Recently for my work I had to do some date/time-wrangling in Python. We have a database containing unix timestamp values, and the front-end application needs to talk local time. The necessary conversions aren’t so complicated, but Python makes life a bit harder by having three relevant modules, three relevant data types (not matching the modules), [...]
New to ctan: the TeX Font Errors Cheatsheet, by Nico Schlömer. It’s for people trying to install fonts for vanilla (La)TeX (as I noted recently, there is an easier way), or for unfortunates whose already-installed fonts somehow break. It gives a chart showing what files TeX looks for when, cross-indexed to the errors that it [...]
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Recently I’ve discovered some fun new things about fonts, in LaTeX and under linux. (Yes, it’s another geek-out post. Sorry mum.) All this stuff can be found online (that’s where I found it), but it’s a bit scattered around. And I can’t remember where any of it is. Summary: XeTeX gives LaTeX access to non-TeX-installed [...]
Apparently a local texmf tree no longer requires the ls-R file. Since how long, I know not, nor care I particularly. Nor expect I you to care, particularly, but I was tickled by it. Yet another piece of obscurity and complication getting slightly simpler in the LaTeX world. (Thanks to Micha — I discovered this [...]
Pdfpages is a LaTeX package that lets you drop individual pages of other pdfs into your LaTeX documents. Put it together with the \foreach command provided by pgf/TikZ, and you can get quite a bit done very simply. For instance, you can scan in somebody’s photocopy of a paper from 1978 using the office printer, [...]
Friday, November 28, 2008
André Miede’s Classic Thesis LaTeX style is a thing of beauty. Things to like about it: It’s damn elegant. It’s inspired by Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, which remains the most eloquent and convincing argument for attention to typography I’ve ever read. Namecheck of the booktabs documentation (on why the tables don’t have vertical [...]
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
I’ve posted the slides (3.1M download!) to my LeGO talk, on my publications page. A bit about how and why, and some technical questions maybe the laziweb will answer for me, after the gap.
I’ve spent a bit of time organising my LaTeX setup for maximal dissertatory efficiency. Mainly I want a system that lets me put definitions somewhere sensible (a thesis.sty package), but also makes it easy to typeset chapters individually to hand around, without duplicating definitions or having to hand-edit files for book or single-chapter output. I’ve [...]
Shipping even as we speak, your favourite typesetting engine now has wheels: Snapped from the train on the way back from Paris. I guess I’ll post photos of that trip at some point too.
Tuesday, September 5, 2006
It’s an awfully simple rule: Don’t put words (of more than one letter) in pure math mode. This should be carved into the monitor of every mathematician and (particularly) computer scientist who ever wrote a paper in LaTeX. Don’t use math mode for words. Don’t (don’t you dare) use math mode for italics. Why not? [...]