xstring by Christian Telllechea has been released today. The package provides macros for the manipulation of strings. Some Features:

• tests, if one string is contained in another string (n times),
• extraction of substrings in several ways,
• substitution of some or all occurrences of a substring,
• numerical calculations with string length, position of nth occurence of a substring etc.

You will find the package and its documentation on CTAN.

When I tried to help somebody to solve a problem in the LaTeX Community Forum, I wrote a short test file, but it was not compilable though it contained just basic commands. I reduced it to the following minimal example:

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{listings}
\begin{document}
\lstlistoflistings
\end{document}

It was not compilable with TeXlive 2007 on Ubuntu Linux 8.04, the error message was:
! Undefined control sequence.
\lstlistoflistings ...\lol@heading \@parskipfalse
    \@parskip@indent \@startto...
l.5 \lstlistoflistings

After examining listings.sty it seemed to be just a compatibility issue: the listings version 1.3 of 2004/09/07 distributed with the texlive-latex-recommended package of Ubuntu Linux 8.04 (hardy) just doesn’t work with the scrartcl class of KOMA-Script v2.95b (2006/07/30) that comes with TeXlive 2007-13.

For instance scrartcl.cls v2.8 used \@parskip internally together with the parskip/halfparskip/parindent options, but that’s been changed.

After installation of version 1.4 of the listings package by the MiKTeX package manager the compilation was successful.

The line

\@parskipfalse\@parskip@indent%

of listings v1.3 had been changed in v.1.4 to

\parskip\z@\parindent\z@\parfillskip \z@ \@plus 1fil%

I’ve sent a bugreport by launchpad expecting that the new version of listings.sty will be distributed with the texlive package soon.

CQF.info, a forum on maths, finance and LaTeX was down for one week, today I noticed it’s back up. Currently the most recent post dates from Wed Jun 25, 2008. Good to see that it’s up, it would be a real pity to loose its content. Reading the message about the last unplanned downtime 1 month ago I expect the forum to be supported further on.

I’ve read it today in the Adobe Reader Weblog: the version 9 of the reader has been released. But: until know there’s no Linux version. It’s said that the new version suppports flash, launches faster and more, but I will not boot Windows just to test that. I will add an information if a Linux version would be released.

The MiKTeX Package Manager (mpm) is a tool originally intended for MiKTeX users on Windows platforms. It was ported by Christian Schenk for unix systems, to provide easy access to the MiKTeX package repository also for unix user. There are some docs describing installation and use, some are obsolete now, that’s why I will give a summary how I’ve installed the mpm on the latest Ubuntu Linux version today.

The mpm sources can be downloaded from http://miktex.org/unx.

Important: have a look at the README.unx file! Below are the commands I applied during installation.

Installation of some required packages in addition to the basic setup:
$ sudo apt-get install g++ cmake libcurl3 libcurl4-gnutls-dev lynx

Decompress the archive, change into the created directory, run cmake to produce customized makefiles (I added options to use texmf in my home directory) , run make to compile and to install:
$ tar xfj miktex-2.7.2960.tar.bz2
$ cd miktex-2.7.2960/
$ cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" -DMIKTEX_INSTALLROOT="/home/stefan/texmf" -DMIKTEX_ROOTS="/home/stefan/texmf"
$ make
$ sudo make install

The MiKTeX Package Manager installation is complete. Create the file name database files:
$ sudo ldconfig
$ sudo initexmf -u
$ sudo mpm --update-db


Finally the mpm is ready to use.

Links:

• mpm Homepage
• How to use the package manager on Unix-like operating systems
• mpm on ubuntu.com
• mpm manual page
• M(iKTeX) P(ackage) M(anager) for Unix-alikes
• mpm in the ubuntuusers.de wiki
• Paket-Verwaltung unter Unix/Linux