On December 26th Zdenêk Wagner has released the zwpagelayout package, dealing with page layout in general, like the well known geometry package.
It may not provide as many features as geometry but it brings additional tools, for instance it’s supporting cropmarks.

The package can be loaded by:

\usepackage[options]{zwpagelayout}

All options have to be set in the preamble, either by this line or given to the document class.
Options may be paper sizes (by name or by lengths), orientation (portrait, landscape), margins, text dimensions (also concerning head and foot), cropmark related options and options concerning the design of book covers like spine and flap.

There are even options to reflect pages horizontally or vertically, that are intended for printing but shouldn’t be used for documents providing hyperlinks.

Further the package is capable of calculating missing page layout dimensions if enough dimensions are already given.

zwpages comes well documented on 16 pages. For more information and download visit:

• the package homepage,
• its directory on CTAN,
• the short README file,
• the package documentation.

The version 3.30 of WinShell has been released on Monday this week. WinShell is a LaTeX Editor with Unicode support, spellchecking (Hunspell), project environment, configurable toolbars, syntax highlighting and provides many more features.

Some the new features of the version 3.30 are

• SyncTeX/Sumatra PDF support,
• improved UTF8 support for the spell checker,
• update to Hunspell 1.2.8, Scintilla 1.77,
• BibTeX front-end,
• a pdfLaTeX optimized toolbar,
• Linux support by wine.

For further information and download visit the WinShell Homepage.

Though pdflatex provides the command \pdfannot for pdf annotations it is somehow complicated to use. The new package pdfcomment offers a user-friendly way to insert comments/ annotations into pdf files.

pdfcomment requires the packages hyperref, xkeyval, ifpdf, marginnote and packages needed by them.

pdfcomment provides options for subject, author and color of annotations, supports icons used as graphics for pdf annotations.

For further information you could have a look at

• the README file,
• the documentation in English,
• the documentation in German,
• the package homepage on CTAN,
• the pdfcomment homepage with documentation and example.

The first candidate for TeXnicCenter 1.0 has been released as announced yesterday. It’s expected to be more stable than the beta release. Visit its download page to get it.

Some weeks ago I began to work as IT Technician onboard of a passenger ship. I’ve already worked some years as IT Administrator on a ship (for a different company) and also in the position of the IT Communication Officer there, so it’s not completely new to me but will require most of my time.
That’s why I will publish less posts here at the moment, at least for some time.
I’m hoping that readers of this blog would return from time to time to check out if there’s something new. I will continue working on this site.

Stefan