Tomorrow on April 29th, 2009, the author Dr. Herbert Voss will give a talk in the specialist bookshop Lehmanns in Hamburg, Kurze Muehren 6. This talk will be held in German and it’s called “Erstellung grosser, druckreifer Dokumente mit TeX/LaTeX“. The speaker will explain how extensive documents (more than 1000 pages) can be created and managed by several authors until it’s ready for printing such that no post-treatment by publisher or printing company would be needed. Among the topics will be revision control systems, the possibility of postprocessing of directories by external scripts and creation and inclusion of high-quality graphics. The talk will start at 8pm. For further information visit the LOB events page.

Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop, Server and Netbook editions have been released today. The new version is starting faster, is now supporting the ext4 file system and comes with a lot of software updates. Regarding its new features features have a look for instance at the desktop edition feature overview.

To download Ubuntu 9.04 or to obtain CDs see: Get Ubuntu. For instructions on upgrading visit: Upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04.
Upgrades to the latest version of Ubuntu are entirely free of charge as always.

To get more information, visit www.ubuntu.com.

New packages on CTAN:

• alterqcm - a LaTeX2e package for making Multiple Choices Questionnaires in a table with two columns
• diagmac2 - John Reynolds’s diagram macros modified to allow arbitrary line slopes, requiring pict2e
• texdirflatten - a Perl script parsing a (La)TeX source file, recursively following its included children (La)TeX files
  collecting together its components (graphics and BibTeX files etc.) in different directories
• CircuiTikZ - a package for drawing electrical and electronic networks using pgf/TikZ
• Turkish intro - the first book in Turkish language describing (La)TeX in detail, discussing basic and important topics and providing examples

Updates on CTAN:

• svn-multi - bug-fix for v2.1 avoiding \if-\fi parsing error for beamer and other classes
• achemso - v3.2 adds tocentry environment for graphics TOC entry, provides easier methods for turning on and off sections and section numbering, brings internal improvements and has reduced dependencies on other packages
• sparklines - bug-fix of previous version
• xifthen - bug-fix, spurious space removed
• nicetext - see documentation
• glossaries - bug fix in ngerman captions
• disser - improved natbib compatibility, new page styles, optional exclusion of AMS packages, changed and fixed templates, improved installation
• mfpic4ode - this new version allows to draw trajectories with prefixes like \dashed, \dotted, \gendashed etc.
• newlfm - bug fix and feature enhancement
• oberdiek - bug fix in package reload prevention, adaptations for LuaTeX 0.40 and minor issues

Information about new packages and updates before April 15th (and of course those newer too) can be found in the ctan-ann archive.

Seen on blogs:

Cameron Bracken has published a short style file for a memo header for use with amsart.
Nico Schlömer has published an update of his TeX font error cheat sheet where he has compiled some of the most frequent occuring error messages regarding TeX fonts and ways to tackle them.
Marcin Borkowski discussed typesetting of a list of publication using amsrefs.
Jürgen Fenn has pointed out the publication of the second article of George Grätzer regarding the development of LaTeX in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, available for download in pdf format.

Last weekend I’ve got an Eee PC S101, now I’ve got time to test it: I’m writing some notes here sharing the first experience with the S101 and useful links for installation. After delivery I’ve upgraded the netbook to 2 GB RAM using a Kingston 2GB 667MHz DDR2 Non-ECC CL5 SO DIMM module. The S101 came with Windows XP. Though I’m mainly using Ubuntu Linux I decided to keep XP for compatibility reasons but to install a double boot system with Linux and Windows. I’ve used the free EASEUS Partition Master 3.5 Home Edition to resize the XP partition to 8 GB, that worked fine. I installed the Gavotte RAM disk and linked tmp and temp directory there as well as the browser cache to speed up work and to save SSD life time. For the TeX work I’ve added TeXnicCenter and MiKTeX. I’ve chosen MiKTeX because it’s been a great distribution since many years, further I’ve already planned to install the alternative TeX Live 2008 on the Linux partition.

But the Windows installation wasn’t the main issue - back to Linux. I decided to install Eeebuntu, in particular the Eeebuntu Netbook Remix 2.0. After downloading the Eeebuntu NBR iso file I’ve used Unetbootin to save that iso image to the SD card that came with the S101 and to make the SD card bootable. The S101 is able to boot from the SD card, so I did it, the Eeebuntu live system started, using this I installed Eeebuntu to the remaining free 8 GB space on the internal SSD. That was done quickly, not much to tell. The GRUB boot manager has been installed and allows me to choose between Ubuntu Linux and Windows. Ubuntu runs fine now, I’ve also linked the Firefox browser cache to the RAM disk located on /dev/shm.

Finally I’ve installed Kile by Synaptic and TeX Live 2008 over the internet using the small network installer package. The latter took some time but required few interaction. Even after it failed because of a network disconnection restarting it just continued the installation with the same settings. After adding some tools and of course some math software I’m very satisfied with it and I’m using it right now.

If you need for instance to display page numbers in a way like “page X of Y”, there are packages like totpages and lastpage helping to achieve that. The today released package totcount allows to use the last (usually maximal) value of an arbitrary counter like the total number of chapters, sections, footnotes, citations, figures and tables etc.

A simple example of its usage:

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage{totcount}
\regtotcounter{section}
\regtotcounter{page}
\begin{document}
\section{First}
This is section \thesection\ of \total{section}.
\clearpage
\section{Second}
This document has \total{page}\ pages.
\end{document}

The result will display “This is section 1 of 2. … This document has 2 pages.”.

For detailed information about usage, installation and implementation have a look at its documentation.

When I was looking at the package today I’ve got the idea that it could improve the usability if one could register counters just by a package option instead of needing to call \regtotcounter after loading the package.

Once in a while there are discussions if pdfLaTeX would be preferable to LaTeX. There are some reasons, here I will just point out the effect of the micro-typographic extensions of pdfTeX, in particular font expansion and character protrusion. Using it you could get better margin adjustment and more even interword spacing. The package microtype is providing an interface to those extensions, you could see an effect already if you would just load the package without any options. The effect will be most notable if you need to typeset text with small columns like in tables.

Let’s test this very small example:

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\usepackage{microtype}
\begin{document}
\begin{minipage}{3.7cm}
\blindtext
\end{minipage}
\end{document}

After compilation with LaTeX I’ve got 12 bad/underfull boxes. Using pdfLaTeX I’ve got 0 bad boxes. You could test it yourself. Btw. without microtype I’ve got 10 underfull boxes with both LaTeX and pdfLaTeX. Let’s bring the results of fLaTeX and pdfLaTeX face to face, just compare the first four lines or even more:

               [LaTeX] 12 badboxes               [PDFLaTeX] 0 badboxes

Without microtype the text will also look like the left one, the line breaks will be the same.

Microtype provides even more features that are not enabled by default, like additional kerning, spacing, tracking/letterspacing and allows you to fine-tune its capabilities. For more information have a look into its documentation.

To conclude I recommend to use pdfLaTeX if the situation allowed it, especially if you are using tables with cells or columns containing text. If you think you couldn’t use pdfLaTeX because it cannot embed eps images, consider to convert those images to pdf format.

This topic was discussed on apfeltalk.de, LaTeX Community, MatheBoard and Matheplanet.

On January 22nd I’ve informed about the LaTeX Community know how article contest. On April 5th the winner has been announced: Thiago S. Mosqueiro from Brazil has got the award for for his brief and concise description of RevTeX 4 package. Congratulations, Thiago!

Until now there are 4 articles in the know how section:

• Defining operators like sin, log etc. by Marcin Borkowski,
• A brief and concise description of RevTeX 4 package by Thiago S. Mosqueiro,
• Glossaries, Nomenclature, Lists of Symbols and Acronyms by Dr. Nicola L. C. Talbot,
• Boxes and more boxes by Ivan Pagnossin.

Christian Schenk announced on April 2nd that he’s planning to release a portable MiKTeX edition later this year. The portable edition will allow you to run MiKTeX from a flash drive:

• you could carry MiKTeX on a portable drive for use on any Windows computer,
• configuration settings will be stored on the portable drive and not on the host computer,
• using the portable edition won’t leave traces on the host computer,
• administrator privileges on the host computer won’t be necessary.

Christian said that a beta will be released soon, on April 6th he has noted that also the package manager will be available with the portable edition and that packages will be on installed on the flash drive.

Reading Jürgen Fenns blog TeX & Friends I stumbled across a very nice work by Cam: inspired by the Periodic Table of Elements he created a Periodic Table of Typefaces listing 100 of the most popular and influential typefaces today grouped categorically by families and classes: sans-serif, serif, script, blackletter, glyphic, display, grotesque, realist, didone, garalde, geometric, humanist, slab-serif and mixed. Here’s an impression of the result:

Click on the picture to see the larger version of the table, perhaps click again to enlarge it further.

To get more information, especially how the typefaces were chosen, categorized and ranked visit Cam’s page.

The developer of the freely available LaTeX Editor LEd have announced a change of its distribution model. From now on they want to maintain a free version of the LEd like today but provide further features with nonfree plugins.

Currently they are working on new features like

• spellchecking for command parameters and a mathematical mode,
• wizards for table and figure creation,
• improved thesaurus data,
• hints for some of small packages,
• more hints for a memoir package,
• additional templates,
• a detailed technical documentation,
• CVS support,
• import features regarding other editors,
• a built-in PDF viewer,
• a script language to create more complex macros,
• a built-in BibTeX entries editor,
• support for Unicode and UTF-7, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 encodings

and more. For further information visit

• the original announcement,
• the LEd homepage.