Again some quiet weeks on my blog. If some people would blog together, there would be active blog life even if somebody would temporarily be too busy with other things. So I liked Patricks idea very much, to set up a community blog together with some TeX friends and who ever likes to join us. I quickly set up a wordpress blog and we chose a friendly bright theme together.

It’s site for people who did not blog yet but would like to do it sometimes, or TeX users like me who blog in English but like to post in German sometimes. Yes, the starting crew is German, from the huge German speaking TeX community, Patrick, Rico, Clemens, Marco, Dominic, and me. First topics? Clever footnotes, maths, xparse, translations, minted, and planned are biblatex and pgfplots.

Curious? Have a look: TeXwelt.de

It has been a bit quiet here for some weeks. I got a son in February, when my little daugher was not much more than 1 year old, both keep us pretty busy at home. So after my full time job I’m not so often at the computer.

However, I still post about TeX news, answer questions in TeX forums, edit and publish articles. My personal site is just not so important. I rather support LaTeX-Community.org, which is read by more people.

Here are some news of the last months I posted there, in case you missed one:

• TeX Live 2013 Release Plan, April 1
• First Beta of XeTeX 0.9999​ released, March 12
• Texmaker 4.0 released, March 10
• Topic Tags for the LaTeX Community Forum, March 1
• Transplanting TeX Live from one Windows system to another one, February 27
• A MikTeX update may remove amslatex / amsmath as obsolete - how to fix it, February 6

Contributed articles, which I edited regarding HTML design and published on that site:

• LaTeX Tricks (VII) by Luca Merciadri, March 20
• TikZ Library for Structural Analysis by Jürgen Hackl, March 10
• News from LaTeXTemplates.com by Vel, January 26
• Installing TeX Live on Linux by Svend, January 9

More articles are in the works and will appear soon.

Do you like reading that TeX and LaTeX site with articles, news, and an active TeX forum? If yes, there are some ways you could support it, for example by

• Answering some LaTeX questions in the forum. Many questions come in, it seems more than the regulars can handle. There are even a lot of unanswered questions. You could pick one or some and answer. Also answers to older questions are welcome.
• Adding a link to LaTeX-Community.org on your website or blog. Feel free to use the banner here, but a text link would already be great. So some more users may find the site.
• Sending us news, if you would notice something in the TeX and LaTeX world. You could also get an account to write posts on the frontpage of the site. Even an article about a topic you like? Very welcome!

Yesterday I wrote a question on TeX.SE:

How can I explain the meaning of LaTeX to my grandma?

I wrote a book about LaTeX, and my proud grandma wanted to have a copy. So she got it, said “What a beautiful picture on the cover!” and - “What is this, LaTeX?”.

She doesn’t know Word, never used a computer. But she reads books. How can I explain what makes TeX and LaTeX special to a non-technical person?

There are already some answers. Perhaps you know eye-opening words? So I could also explain to my boss, why I request some days off to go to a TeX conference, to my daughter what daddy does on the computer, to my girlfriend with what I spend so much time. Possibly you know such situations.

Since today, LaTeX-Community.org readers can use an online LaTeX compiler in the forum, provided by writeLaTeX.com, an online collaborative LaTeX editor with integrated rapid preview.

By a single click on a link above a code box, the reader will land in the editor which shows the code on the left side, and the output preview on the right side. Compilation is done in realtime.

Now it’s easier to support LaTeX users, especially if they would add a compilable minimal example to their problem. Even small code snippets would be wrapped to create a basic LaTeX document.

For more information and examples, have a look at the announcement.

Happy New Year for all!

The animated GIF image shows fireworks displayed with TikZ written by Chris Hughes aka cmhughes on TeX.SE. Follow the link to see further fireworks effects.

The code is:

\documentclass[tikz]{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{decorations.pathmorphing,decorations.shapes}
 
\begin{document}
 
\foreach \radius in {1,2,...,20}
{
\begin{tikzpicture}
  % background rectangle
  \filldraw[black] (-3,-3) rectangle (5,3);
  % skyline
  \filldraw[black!80!blue](-3,-3)--(-3,-2)--(-2.5,-2)--(-2.5,-1)--(-2.25,-1)--(-2.25,-2)--(-2,-2)
                            --(-2,-1)--(-1.75,-0.75)--(-1.5,-1)
                            --(-1.5,-2)--(-1.1,-2)--(-1.1,0)--(-0.5,0)--(-0.5,-2)
                            --(0,-2)--(0,-1.5)--(1,-1.5)--(1.25,-0.5)--(1.5,-1.5)--(1.5,-2)
                            --(2,-2)--(2,0)--(2.5,0)--(2.5,-2)
                            --(3,-2)--(3,-1)--(4,-1)--(4,-2)--(5,-2)--(5,-3)--cycle;
  % moon- what a hack!
  \filldraw[white] (4,2.5) arc (90:-90:20pt);
  \filldraw[black] (3.8,2.5) arc (90:-90:20pt);
  % fireworks
  \pgfmathparse{100-(\radius-1)*10};
  % red firework
  \ifnum\radius<11
      \draw[decorate,decoration={crosses},red!\pgfmathresult!black] (0,0) circle (\radius ex);
  \fi
  % orange firework
  \pgfmathparse{100-(\radius-6)*10};
  \ifnum\radius>5
      \ifnum\radius<16
          \draw[decorate,decoration={crosses},orange!\pgfmathresult!black] (1,1) circle ( \radius ex-5ex);
      \fi
  \fi
  % yellow firework
  \pgfmathparse{100-(\radius-11)*10};
  \ifnum\radius>10
      \draw[decorate,decoration={crosses},yellow!\pgfmathresult!black] (2.5,1) circle (\radius ex-10ex);
  \fi
\end{tikzpicture}
}
\end{document}

The resulting PDF file can be cropped and converted using

pdfcrop myfile.pdf
convert -delay 20 -loop 0 -density 300 myfile-crop.pdf fireworks.gif