Jim Hefferon has published the document “Getting something out of LaTeX” on CTAN, taking new LaTeX user through making a first document. The author wants to give a quick taste, the reader could get an idea if the LaTeX system could help him and how it’s working.

The article contains information about getting the software, using an editor, compiling, handling errors and writing math. It comes with some source code examples and recommendations for tutorials.

The version 1.9 of the free LaTeX IDE Texmaker has been released today and comes with the following changes:

• inline spell checking,
• bi-directional support,
• a new modern interface,
• asymptote support,
• the interface language can be changed via the “Options” menu,
• new translations
• and a bugfix in the latex log parser.

The new version requires Qt >= 4.5.1. For more information have a look into the changelog file.

For download and documentation visit the Texmaker homepage.

Asymptote is a powerful descriptive vector graphics language useful for for technical drawing, using LaTeX for high-quality output. It’s not just a graphics program but a programming language. Asymptote is inspired by MetaPost but provides C++-like syntax. It runs on Linux, UNIX, MacOS and Windows. In a very mathematically oriented way you can create 2D and 3D graphics, here’s just a small example coming with the program:

Now it’s been released on CTAN, 19 May 2009.

For more information visit:

• the Asymptote package on CTAN,
• the Asymptote homepage.
  The homepage contains also
  • a gallery,
  • documentation,
  • Answers to frequently asked questions (FAQ),
  • a discussion forum and more.
• the forum Asymptote and GeoGebra on artofproblemsolving.com,
• the Asymptote Wiki also on AoPS,
• the Asymptote example gallery.

Asymptote can be used easily within LaTeX documents. There’s a good introduction by Dario Teixeira: Asymptote and LaTeX: An Integration Guide.

There are even more resources you can find if you follow those selected links.

If you are using the handy package enumitem in version 2.1 or earlier you could consider to update it. The author Javier Bezos announced v2.2: “This release fixes a bug in some description styles (the first label in the first list after a description was wrong).”
I did not encounter that error yet, but I’ve noticed a different behavior of v2.2 and v2.1 with the example Javier posted here in his forum.

For update or information visit:

• enumitem on CTAN
• the Homepage of Javier Bezos
• the enumitem page on Javiers site
• the enumitem forum also hosted there.

Yesterday Christian Schenk has released the portable edition of MiKTeX 2.8 beta3. This edition allows to use MiKTeX on portable storage devices like USB sticks or flash cards for use on any Windows (2000/XP/Vista/7) computer. Using Portable MiKTeX leaves no traces on the host computer, no administrator privileges would be needed. Visit miktex.org/portable for more information and download.

New packages on CTAN:

• ulqda - supports the integration of Qualitative Data Analysis research tasks with LaTeX, assists in the analysis of textual data by providing macros used to markup textual information. ulqda is requiring pdfeTeX, further it’s needing the packages soul, color, multicols, pgf/TikZ, dot2texi and for processing and graph/list generation the external tools GraphViz, dot2tex, Perl and the Digest::SHA1 module. The author is Ivan Griffin, for further information have a look at its documentation.
• lshort-mongol - another translation of Tobias Oetiker’s Not so short introduction, this time to Mongolian by Dorjgotov Batumongke.
• pst-gantt - drawing GANTT charts, by Herbert Voß, requiring PSTricks, see documentation.
• logical-markup-utils - contains two packages by Michał Masłowski for inserting language-dependent inline quotes and dashes, see README file.
• figbas - fonts by Bob Tennent for figured-bass notation in music, see README and example.
• draftmark - putting user-defined draft marks (”watermarks”) on selected pages, by Ahmed Musa, highly customizable, requires the atbegshi package, see documentation and example.
• tolkienfonts - fonts for writing J.R.R. Tolkien’s languages with pdfTeX, see documentation, by Ariel Barton.

Updates on CTAN:

• libertine - new version of the libertine font for LaTeX and XeLaTeX)
• diagmac2 - additional macros and expanded documentation
• tikz-timing - bugfix, syntax change, some additions and improvements, see Change History in its documentation
• hyphen-spanish - some fixed patterns
• tablor - bugfix
• fonttable - improved aid for font designers and testers, another method for font selection
• VnTeX - enhanced documentation, bugfixes in fonts, internal improvements
• pst-math - now able to solve linear equation systems
• pstricks-add - new macro psTangentLine, matching new pst-math version
• MetaPost - supporting SVG graphics generation, providing access to PostScript Type1 font curves from within MetaPost, bugfixes, improved manual and tutorial
• BibTexMng - new features, see README file for the list
• biblatex-dw - bugfix and improvements, see CHANGES file
• fge font - fixing garbled dvips output with PostScript version of the font
• TeXcount - support added for handling Unicode (UTF-8) encoded documents, now being able to handle non-Latin alphabets, providing special options for counting the characters of Chinese and Japanese texts
• achemso - “email” option to prevent printing e-mails, bugfix for non-superscript citations, improved compatibility to v3.1 configuration files
• fancytooltips - bugfix
• CircuiTikz - support added for op-amps, new options arrowmos and noarrowmos for drawing arrows in pmos and nmos
• svn-prov - new macro \DefineFileInfoSVN, defining the version, revision, date and info text of the package, class or file as macros

Information about new packages and updates before Mai 1st (and of course newer too) can be found in the ctan-ann archive.

Just seen on twitter/eeebuntu, as announced there 1 hour ago Eeebuntu 3.0 Base Edition has been released now. Torrents are up, mirrors are established.

If you’re waiting for Eeebuntu 3.0 like me or just interested visit

• the Eeebuntu homepage,
• the download page,
• the Eeebuntu forum for news and experiences.

Eeebuntu is the basis of my TeX system during traveling. After download I will install the base edition on a high speed usb stick for testing, the installation on the internal SSD has to wait until the NBR edition is available too.

From today on the (La)TeX related news posted in the TeXblog will be available also on the LaTeX-Community.org front page and news section.

LaTeX-Community.org is a community platform for LaTeX users all around the world, maintained by the Sven Wiegand, the founder of the famous TeXnicCenter IDE. LaTeX-Community.org has been online since Jan 14, 2007 and until now there are 3141 registered members and a huge amount of LaTeX knowledge has been collected there.

For more information visit the announcement on LaTeX-Community.org.

Though the installation of TeX Live 2008 could be done easily also on Ubuntu Linux the installation of the very recommendable LaTeX editor Kile could raise a problem because Kile depends on the package texlive-latex-base of Ubuntu/ Debian Linux. There’s a tool called equivs helping to circumvent such dependencies by creating dummy packages, see APT HOWTO, Very useful helpers.

equivs can be installed by Synaptic or by aptitude or apt-get from the repositories:
sudo apt-get install equivs
equivs is able to create Debian packages providing information to the local package management. I’ve created a control file (calles texlive.ctl) for equivs simulating just texlive-latex-base:

Section: tex
Package: texlive-dummy
Provides: texlive-latex-base
Description: texlive dummy package
 This package provides dpkg with the information that
 there is the package texlive-latex-base installed.

I’ve processed it with equivs-build:
equivs-build texlive.ctl
The program created a file texlive-dummy_1.0_all.deb. This could be installed by
sudo dpkg -i texlive-dummy_1.0_all.deb
Afterwards Kile could be installed without to request any texlive package from the repositories and Kile worked fine with TeX Live 2008. (Update: see comment #4 for a complete control file for Kile on Jaunty.) You could lock the package to prevent it from being installed later.

The control file may refer to a different section (like misc) or could contain additional information (Provides: texlive-base, texlive-base-bin, …)

TeX Live 2008 is not planned any more to be released for Debian and therefore not for Ubuntu Linux. That version will be skipped, as announced by a Debian TeX maintainer, and TeX Live 2009, meant to be the next release for Debian/Ubuntu, is still under construction, that’s why I’m taking this as a temporary solution. After all the 2008 version is working fine thanks to the great work of the TeX Live team.

The second version of TexMakerX v1.8.1 has been released as the author Benito van der Zander announced on mrunix.de today. TexMakerX is a fork of the LaTeX editor Texmaker, also licensed under the GPL and running on Windows, Unix/Linux, BSD and Mac OS X systems.
TexMakerX provides some remarkable new features like interactive spell checking, code folding, improved navigation and automatic encoding detection.

The new release contains some bugfixes and additional features. For more information visit

• TexMakerX Homepage
• feature list
• download.