It has been a bit quiet here for some weeks. I got a son in February, when my little daugher was not much more than 1 year old, both keep us pretty busy at home. So after my full time job I’m not so often at the computer.

However, I still post about TeX news, answer questions in TeX forums, edit and publish articles. My personal site is just not so important. I rather support LaTeX-Community.org, which is read by more people.

Here are some news of the last months I posted there, in case you missed one:

• TeX Live 2013 Release Plan, April 1
• First Beta of XeTeX 0.9999​ released, March 12
• Texmaker 4.0 released, March 10
• Topic Tags for the LaTeX Community Forum, March 1
• Transplanting TeX Live from one Windows system to another one, February 27
• A MikTeX update may remove amslatex / amsmath as obsolete - how to fix it, February 6

Contributed articles, which I edited regarding HTML design and published on that site:

• LaTeX Tricks (VII) by Luca Merciadri, March 20
• TikZ Library for Structural Analysis by Jürgen Hackl, March 10
• News from LaTeXTemplates.com by Vel, January 26
• Installing TeX Live on Linux by Svend, January 9

More articles are in the works and will appear soon.

Do you like reading that TeX and LaTeX site with articles, news, and an active TeX forum? If yes, there are some ways you could support it, for example by

• Answering some LaTeX questions in the forum. Many questions come in, it seems more than the regulars can handle. There are even a lot of unanswered questions. You could pick one or some and answer. Also answers to older questions are welcome.
• Adding a link to LaTeX-Community.org on your website or blog. Feel free to use the banner here, but a text link would already be great. So some more users may find the site.
• Sending us news, if you would notice something in the TeX and LaTeX world. You could also get an account to write posts on the frontpage of the site. Even an article about a topic you like? Very welcome!

Yesterday I wrote a question on TeX.SE:

How can I explain the meaning of LaTeX to my grandma?

I wrote a book about LaTeX, and my proud grandma wanted to have a copy. So she got it, said “What a beautiful picture on the cover!” and - “What is this, LaTeX?”.

She doesn’t know Word, never used a computer. But she reads books. How can I explain what makes TeX and LaTeX special to a non-technical person?

There are already some answers. Perhaps you know eye-opening words? So I could also explain to my boss, why I request some days off to go to a TeX conference, to my daughter what daddy does on the computer, to my girlfriend with what I spend so much time. Possibly you know such situations.

Since today, LaTeX-Community.org readers can use an online LaTeX compiler in the forum, provided by writeLaTeX.com, an online collaborative LaTeX editor with integrated rapid preview.

By a single click on a link above a code box, the reader will land in the editor which shows the code on the left side, and the output preview on the right side. Compilation is done in realtime.

Now it’s easier to support LaTeX users, especially if they would add a compilable minimal example to their problem. Even small code snippets would be wrapped to create a basic LaTeX document.

For more information and examples, have a look at the announcement.

Happy New Year for all!

The animated GIF image shows fireworks displayed with TikZ written by Chris Hughes aka cmhughes on TeX.SE. Follow the link to see further fireworks effects.

The code is:

\documentclass[tikz]{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{decorations.pathmorphing,decorations.shapes}
 
\begin{document}
 
\foreach \radius in {1,2,...,20}
{
\begin{tikzpicture}
  % background rectangle
  \filldraw[black] (-3,-3) rectangle (5,3);
  % skyline
  \filldraw[black!80!blue](-3,-3)--(-3,-2)--(-2.5,-2)--(-2.5,-1)--(-2.25,-1)--(-2.25,-2)--(-2,-2)
                            --(-2,-1)--(-1.75,-0.75)--(-1.5,-1)
                            --(-1.5,-2)--(-1.1,-2)--(-1.1,0)--(-0.5,0)--(-0.5,-2)
                            --(0,-2)--(0,-1.5)--(1,-1.5)--(1.25,-0.5)--(1.5,-1.5)--(1.5,-2)
                            --(2,-2)--(2,0)--(2.5,0)--(2.5,-2)
                            --(3,-2)--(3,-1)--(4,-1)--(4,-2)--(5,-2)--(5,-3)--cycle;
  % moon- what a hack!
  \filldraw[white] (4,2.5) arc (90:-90:20pt);
  \filldraw[black] (3.8,2.5) arc (90:-90:20pt);
  % fireworks
  \pgfmathparse{100-(\radius-1)*10};
  % red firework
  \ifnum\radius<11
      \draw[decorate,decoration={crosses},red!\pgfmathresult!black] (0,0) circle (\radius ex);
  \fi
  % orange firework
  \pgfmathparse{100-(\radius-6)*10};
  \ifnum\radius>5
      \ifnum\radius<16
          \draw[decorate,decoration={crosses},orange!\pgfmathresult!black] (1,1) circle ( \radius ex-5ex);
      \fi
  \fi
  % yellow firework
  \pgfmathparse{100-(\radius-11)*10};
  \ifnum\radius>10
      \draw[decorate,decoration={crosses},yellow!\pgfmathresult!black] (2.5,1) circle (\radius ex-10ex);
  \fi
\end{tikzpicture}
}
\end{document}

The resulting PDF file can be cropped and converted using

pdfcrop myfile.pdf
convert -delay 20 -loop 0 -density 300 myfile-crop.pdf fireworks.gif

This Christmas tree has been written in LaTeX and TikZ by Alain Matthes. See the complete source code.

The first beta version of TeXnicCenter 2.0 has been released. Several issues with TXC 2.0 alpha 4 have been fixed. Though it’s still beta, it’s pretty stable and recommended as replacement for version 1, and of course for the alpha versions of 2.0.

For further details, you can read the announcement by Tino Weinkauf. You can get the installer program at the download page, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Again some weeks without a post here, however I expect to have more time for the blog soon. Here’s a summary of interesting events and news I noticed during the last weeks.

• The PracTeX Journal 2012-1 has been published. The journal contains practical articles, in this issue for example about creating posters, ebooks, and active documents, and about using the APA6 style, visualizing the vocal tract, using MetaPost, and more.
• Texmaker 3.5.1 has been released yesterday. Now it provides export via TeX4HT to HTML, MathML and Open Document format.
• Kile 2.1.3 has been released September 23.
• TeXstudio 2.5 has been released September 17. One new feature is that it can recognize handwritten math formulas.
• The UK-TUG recorded videos of their last meeting and put them online on their vimeo channel. Topics: TeX Gyre Math font, Lua2DoX and TeX on the Raspberry Pi, Coffins: boxes with handles, the history of the longtable package, the arara compiling tool, TeX challenges, and discussions.
• Nicola Talbot published a new article on LaTeX-Community.og: Creating a glossary without using an external indexing application. This article shows how to create sorted glossaries without to run the external makeindex program, by using the datatool package.
• Andrew Stacey wrote about using TeX to make toast, or about the fun of using TeX to program the GPIO interface of a Raspberry Pi to make LEDs light.
• On TeX.SX users discussed how to generate smartphone-readable PDF files. Some of the tips: use a6paper size (or another small one), set a narrow margin via geometry, use a screen-readable typeface such as TeX Gyre Heros, and use microtype. Or go another way, produce EPUB files for example via pandoc.
• Claudio Fiandrino showed how to implement the “Smart Art” feature of PowerPoint (2010) in TikZ, this became a new package available on CTAN: smartdiagram.

This month I’ve got few time due to much work, so I did not write much.

So I will give a short summary what I think was interesting in the TeX world this month.

• Textmate 2 is now Open Source under GPLv3. TextMate is a popular text editor for Mac OS X which can be used for TeX and LaTeX.
• Texmaker 3.5 has been released. Texmaker is a feature-rich cross-platform LaTeX editor and Open Source too.
• Joseph Wright and Clemens Niederberger joined the LaTeX Community moderator team. Clemens wrote the chemnum, chemmacros, and modiagram packages, and maintains a blog, mychemistry.eu. Joseph is a member of the LaTeX Project, and author of packages such as siunitx and chemstyle, and maintainer of beamer and achemso.
• Joseph maintains a blog about TeX developments, in August he wrote three posts dealing with the chemfig package, based on TikZ and written by Christian Tellechea.
• Chris Hughes has written a perl script for indenting .tex files. That’s great! I will use this for formatting contributions to the TikZ Example Gallery.
• I started to use LaTeX and TikZ for Network diagrams with Cisco devices, which I use at my work as a network engineer.
• Valetta Ventures examined the TeX Writer app for iOS and noticed that it seems to base on a DOS emulator, which is an interesting approach but perhaps not legal.
• The TeX documentation server has been updated to the newest TeX Live 2012.
• TUG 2013 will be taking place in Japan.
• Werner and Peter showed a nice way of producing asymmetric under- and overbraces.
• David and Joseph contributed very interesting thougts about advantages and disadvantages of fully expandable macros.
• Did you know that \csname…\endcsname has a \relax side effect, and why it’s useful?
• There was a lot of activity in the LyX forum of LC, much more than during the previous months. Still, LyX experts are wanted.

Cameron Bracken announced that he is looking for a new maintainer of the pgfSweave package. pgfSweave is an R package for use with Sweave for speedy compilation of high quality graphics, specifically it provides capabilities for “caching” graphics generated with Sweave. It has been created by Cameron Bracken and Charlie Sharpsteen, was available at CRAN but has now been removed until somebody would implement necessary changes.

Are you interested in continuing this project? Do you know LaTeX, R and Sweave, are you able to work with Git and Make, or willing to learn it? If you would like to contribute, just send Cameron a message.

David Latchman has posted daily reports from the TeX User Group conference 2012 in Boston:

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3

Very nice to read what happened at the meeting, who talked and about what. Thanks, David!

Furthermore, a new issue of the LaTeX3 News paper has been published. Here’s a short overview and the link to the issue:

• LaTeX3 News July 2012