Recently Michael Downes collection of TeX challenges “Around the Bend“, originally in ASCII format, has been typeset in pdf format by Peter Wilson and has now been released on CTAN.
The document contains exercises posing a problem and one or several solutions.

The stampinclude package v1.0 has been released. It replaces \includeonly and will select the files for inclusion by inspecting the time stamp of the .aux files. Files will be selected for inclusion if the .aux file doesn’t yet exist or if it’s older than the corresponding .tex file. stampinclude does a similar job like the askinclude package but not interactively. The pdftex command \pdffilemoddate is internally used, \include is redefined and \includeonly is ignored.

A new beamer class based presentation introducing LaTeX has been released these days. The author Dr. Engelbert Buxbaum created this presentation for a LaTeX course at the Biochemistry faculty at RUSM and released it for use under GNU Copyleft. It’s based on the tex-kurs by Rainer Rupprecht, translated to English using additional info from l2short. The source code is available too. For download see it’s CTAN directory.

In addition to the shell scripts mentioned in this post I wrote another small script:

#!/bin/bash
# texcd - change into the directory
#   corresponding to a certain tex related file
if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
  echo 1>&2 Usage:    . texcd filename [pattern]
  echo 1>&2 examples: . texcd beamer.cls
  exit 1
fi
cd `kpsewhich $1 | sed 's/\(.*\)\/.*$/\1/'`
echo Changed to: `pwd`

It’s purpose is to change into the directory where a certain tex related file resides. For instance if you want to search through some beamer class theme files, you don’t have to know the directory, just type
. texcd beamer.cls
and you will enter (for instance) the directory /usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/beamer/base/. The dot at the beginning of the command is important. Thats one reason why I show this small script too. Normally if you change the directory inside a script, after the script is finished you will be back inside the directory where you were before, because the script starts a new shell for itself. If you want to run the commands inside your current shell you can use the source command, the dot I’ve used is just an abbreviation for source.

Some additional hints I didn’t mention in the other post: instead of putting the scripts into your home directory you could copy them into your local file system, for instance:
sudo cp texcd /usr/local/bin/
and those scripts should be made executable using chmod:
chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/texcd
Thats recommendable for the other scripts too.

If you include a picture within a pdf document and view it with the Adobe Reader you may notice a change of color under certain circumstances. Let’s test this png file:

This short example will be enough to produce a pdf by pdflatex:

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
\includegraphics{test}
\end{document}

You may compile by yourself or look at the pdf output. Here’s a screenshot of the Adobe Reader:

Nice blue color, but not the original one. Compare this color with a screenshot of the open source pdf viewer Evince:

Because most people use the freely available Adobe Reader it may be necessary to fix this issue. I found a solution by converting the color mode from RGB to an indexed palette using the freely available open source software GIMP. Here is the changed png file, and here the pdf file, finally the screenshot:

Using GIMP it’s possible to automate the conversion by GIMP’s batch mode using the procedure gimp-image-convert-indexed.

This topic was discussed in the LaTeX Community Forum.

The very recommendable book TeX by Topic by Victor Eijkhout, originally published by Addison-Wesley 1991, is now available printed and bound from lulu.com. The author himself announced it today in the usenet group comp.text.tex.

The book has been published under GNU Free Documentation License 2007 and will remain downloadable from savannah.nongnu.org. It’s also available on the author’s homepage.

Even if it’s freely available I recommend to purchase this really great book to support the author. And of course to have a printed version. Its 319 pages are paperback bound to keep the price low at €11.30.