Today Karl Berry announced on the TeX Live mailing list, that in about one week (May 10) TeX Live 2011 and tlnet will be frozen, and the building of the pretest version of TeX Live 2012 will start shortly after that.

So the schedule for the release of TeX 2012 is, as it can be read on the TeX Live homepage:

• May 10: TeX Live 2011 and tlnet frozen
• About 2 weeks: CTAN updates continue, pretesting starts
• May 24: Also CTAN updates stop, updates only on request
• May 31: Complete freeze, some time for testing and documentation
• June 14: Final images for the TeX Collection DVD
• In August: DVDs will be delivered to TUG members.

This is the plan, changes are still possible as it depends on the time of the developers and contributors.

Today I read on LaTeX-Community.org, that version 0.4.4 of TeXworks has been released, as posted by Thorsten. TeXworks is a quick and efficient LaTeX editor running on most operating systems. It is free and open source.

0.4.4 is a stable version which will be included in TeX Live 2012.

New and updated features in this version, compared to 0.4.3:

• “Clear Recent Files” has been added to the “Open Recent” menu.
• The preferences dialog now contains an autocompletion entry.
• Lua(La)TeX has been added to the default tools, LaTeXmk has been dropped.
• Now there’s an option to open log files.
• Experimental CMake support has been implemented.
• SyncTeX has been updated to version 1.17.
• URLs have been updated and now point to http://www.tug.org/texworks/.
• The window running TeX is brought to the top at the beginning of typesetting, to ensure that the console output is visible.
• Symlinks are allowed and display only folders in “path for programs” in the preferences dialog.
• The “Unable to execute…” error dialog has been improved.
• “Show/Hide Output Panel” was renamed to “Show/Hide Console Output” in the menu and in the preferences dialog.
• The “email to mailinglist” now includes instructions in the body, the subject was removed.
• When looking for scripts, symlinks are resolved
• Scripting has been improved.

Moreover, many bugs are fixed and some further improvements have been made. You can read about that in the changelog or on the TeXworks homepage where you also can find the way to the downloads.

The version 2.1.2 of the LaTeX editor Kile has been released. Some bugs were fixed, and the default encoding in document templates is now utf8 instead of utf8x.

biblatex.cwl has been updated. CWL files are completion files: they contain abbreviations, which are replaced by longer text strings on demand. So, good news for biblatex users.

For more information and download visit:

• the Kile Homepage,
• the latest news
• the download area.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

Velimir just published an article about LaTeX templates on LaTeX-Community.org. In this article, he explains benefits of using templates, and he introduces his site www.LaTeXTemplates.com, which collects templates and publishes it under a Creative Commons license.

Some benefits of using templates:

• Rapid document development
• Based on tried, tested and proven pre-defined layout
• Documented methods for customization

Of course, this requires templates which are of high quality and up-to-date. It might be a good idea to additional classify templates by development date and review date. A simple line “Reviewed 2012 by …” can create confidence in a template.

LaTeX3 will introduce a template concept. This is a similar idea, but it will go further and shall separate the design (template) from the author interface (document) and the underlying source (classes and packages). With LaTeX2e templates, design and interface are still mixed, though it can already be a good way for authors. And I think, when LaTeX3 comes out, good existing LaTeX2e templates will benefit and will be designed to become LaTeX3 templates.

Today, Texmaker version 3.3.3 has been released. Texmaker is a free and cross-platform LaTeX editor, running on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows systems. It is Unicode capable and provides spell checking, auto-completion, code folding, and it comes with a built-in PDF viewer with SyncTeX support and continuous view mode.

New features in 3.3.3, from the ChangeLog file:

• Now there’s a session management (files, line, bookmarks and “quick compilation” mode are stored and can be restored via the new “session” menu).
• After a compilation, the horizontal position in the pdf viewer is restored (if valid), also the zoom factor after a restart.
• Now it’s possible to modify a “user tag”.
• User tags can now be reordered by dragging items.
• For the windows version, poppler-data files and fontconfig configuration have been added.
• An US English dictionary has been added.
• @electronic has been added to the bibliography items detection.
• Several bugs have been fixed.

The complete ChangeLog can be found here. Click here for downloading versions for Linux, Mac OS X or Windows or source files.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

I just read on LaTeX-Community.org, that the publisher Springer still recommends to use eqnarray. I could not believe that, so I went to Book Manuscript Guidelines, choose Manuscript Preparation in LaTeX and downloaded svmult.zip, which contains the Springer class for contributed books, proceedings, and similar. It has a folder called templates, which contains a file author.tex. In this file I could read:

...
% Use this file as a template for your own input.
...
Use the standard \verb|equation| environment to typeset
your equations, e.g.
%
\begin{equation}
a \times b = c\;,
\end{equation}
%
however, for multiline equations we recommend to use the
\verb|eqnarray| environment\footnote{In physics texts
please activate the class option \texttt{vecphys} to depict
your vectors in \textbf{\itshape boldface-italic} type -
as is customary for a wide range of physical subjects}.
\begin{eqnarray}
a \times b = c \nonumber\\
\vec{a} \cdot \vec{b}=\vec{c}
\label{eq:01}
\end{eqnarray}

A close look shows this template doesn’t even align at the relation symbol, which could be done with eqnarray. The example equations are simply right aligned. One could see that in the output if one of those equations would be extended.

eqnarray is considered to be obsolete and faulty, as I wrote 2008 in the comparison eqnarray vs. align. Actually it’s been obsolete since the amsmath package appeared. The better ways are described in its manual, such as using align, gather or multline.

I’m sure most experienced LaTeX users know that fact, and LaTeX beginners are told this frequently in forums and Usenet groups. Why it does not reach Springer? Perhaps this publisher doesn’t really welcome LaTeX for scientific publishing and doesn’t care if his templates are outdated. I wonder what they use then.

Thorsten just posted on LaTeX-Community.org, that the version 2.0 of the free Sumatra PDF reader has been released. This PDF reader is known for its speed and its nice simple user interface. It works especially well with forward and inverse search with TeX source and PDF output and it doesn’t lock opened files like as other readers do.

Compared to v1.9, this major release brings a few changes, as announced in the news:

• It supports the MOBI eBook format.
• CHM documents can be opened from network drives.
• A selection can be copied to the clipboard as an image by using the right-click context menu.
• It uses ucrt to reduce the program size.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

Maïeul Rouquette has published an article on LaTeX-Community.org: Stemma with TikZ. It is an English translation of his three French blog articles about that topic.

A stemma codicum is a “family tree” of different manuscripts of a same text, see Stemmatics (Wikipedia). The article explains how to draw such a tree, which is also a method for constructing TikZ trees in general:

• For simple trees, use nodes, edges and children with the TikZ tree syntax
• For complex trees, you can go through these steps:
  1. Place the nodes, using coordinates or relatiive positioning, and give them names
  2. Apply styles for the nodes, choose or define your own styles for this
  3. Connect nodes by lines or arrows such as by \draw[->] (node1) — (node2);

Once you have created such a tree, you could easily use this as a template for further trees, if you don’t like to go through such a construction process each time. Though some things seem to be complicated with TikZ, it’s easy to re-use and to adjust for similar drawings. For this, the TikZ example gallery can give good start code. It also provides some examples for TikZ trees.

Stefan Löffler wrote to the TeXworks mailing list, that helping participants are needed for trying the latest TeXworks 0.5 r979. This is for preparing the release of version 0.4.4, which is expected to come mid-April, for the inclusion in TeX Live 2012. Recent Windows and Ubuntu builds are available, a Mac build is planned to be provided very soon.

Especially changed features need testing, such as

• The rewritten log parser
• Search & replace (such as multi-line copy-to-search/replace)
• Check if the problems with the disappearing lines still exist
• Reproducing the crash of TeXworks when pressing the return key at the beginning of a wrapped line. Did you ever notice it?

If you would like to help, download the latest build and test it, and send your test results to Stefan or to the TeXworks mailing list.

Today is the “Document Freedom Day”. Today, we can celebrate information accessibility, and we could raise awareness of open standards, which mean document formats which

• can fully publicly used without constraints,
• don’t have dependencies on formats or protocols that are not open,
• are legally and technically unlimited in utilisation,
• are maintained and further developed independently of any single vendor
• and are available in various implementations by competing vendors or just freely available.

Let’s look at TeX and LaTeX. The source document format is plain text, usable on any platform. Only the encoding can be a small issue between operating systems or editors, which can be handled by freely available conversion tools. Furthermore, Unicode text is commonly supported today. But ASCII still works everywhere, while Unicode is convenient.

And the output? Well, PDF is commonly chosen today and widely supported, though I would not call it an open standard, just in parts. However, we have the source, and we still have the DVI format. I wish there were better onscreen display programs.

With nonfree document formats, TeX and LaTeX would hardly be as useful as today, compatible and cross-platform. I can work with my up to 16 year old LaTeX documents in best quality on any hardware today - try it with so old Word or Works files.

For general information regarding free documents and open standards, have a look at documentfreedom.org.