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.

This month I’ve got few time due to much work, so I did not write much.

So I will give a short summary what I think was interesting in the TeX world this month.

• Textmate 2 is now Open Source under GPLv3. TextMate is a popular text editor for Mac OS X which can be used for TeX and LaTeX.
• Texmaker 3.5 has been released. Texmaker is a feature-rich cross-platform LaTeX editor and Open Source too.
• Joseph Wright and Clemens Niederberger joined the LaTeX Community moderator team. Clemens wrote the chemnum, chemmacros, and modiagram packages, and maintains a blog, mychemistry.eu. Joseph is a member of the LaTeX Project, and author of packages such as siunitx and chemstyle, and maintainer of beamer and achemso.
• Joseph maintains a blog about TeX developments, in August he wrote three posts dealing with the chemfig package, based on TikZ and written by Christian Tellechea.
• Chris Hughes has written a perl script for indenting .tex files. That’s great! I will use this for formatting contributions to the TikZ Example Gallery.
• I started to use LaTeX and TikZ for Network diagrams with Cisco devices, which I use at my work as a network engineer.
• Valetta Ventures examined the TeX Writer app for iOS and noticed that it seems to base on a DOS emulator, which is an interesting approach but perhaps not legal.
• The TeX documentation server has been updated to the newest TeX Live 2012.
• TUG 2013 will be taking place in Japan.
• Werner and Peter showed a nice way of producing asymmetric under- and overbraces.
• David and Joseph contributed very interesting thougts about advantages and disadvantages of fully expandable macros.
• Did you know that \csname…\endcsname has a \relax side effect, and why it’s useful?
• There was a lot of activity in the LyX forum of LC, much more than during the previous months. Still, LyX experts are wanted.

Velimir just published an article about LaTeX templates on LaTeX-Community.org. In this article, he explains benefits of using templates, and he introduces his site www.LaTeXTemplates.com, which collects templates and publishes it under a Creative Commons license.

Some benefits of using templates:

• Rapid document development
• Based on tried, tested and proven pre-defined layout
• Documented methods for customization

Of course, this requires templates which are of high quality and up-to-date. It might be a good idea to additional classify templates by development date and review date. A simple line “Reviewed 2012 by …” can create confidence in a template.

LaTeX3 will introduce a template concept. This is a similar idea, but it will go further and shall separate the design (template) from the author interface (document) and the underlying source (classes and packages). With LaTeX2e templates, design and interface are still mixed, though it can already be a good way for authors. And I think, when LaTeX3 comes out, good existing LaTeX2e templates will benefit and will be designed to become LaTeX3 templates.

On TeX.SX, Primal Pappachan asked:

“How can I introduce a non-technical person to LaTeX?”

There are several answers, for helping learning LaTeX without being too complicated. Yiannis Lazarides gave some of the best suggestions:

• Assist in the TeX installation and install a full distribution, to avoid frustration by installation difficulties later.
• Provide a small template and a compilable document which roughly meets their requirements.
• Assist with the first steps.
• We are used to table of contents, lists and index - a new user though might be impressed how easy that is.
• Explain the concepts of floats early - better show benefits than let a user run into unexpected problems with moving objects.

I would add:

• Point the way to up-to-date LaTeX online resources.
• Show how the mentioned Q&A site TeX.SX works, so he can ask for help or find existing solutions there.
• Introduce him to a LaTeX discussion forum, such as LaTeX-Community.org. A web forum is easy to use and you can talk and discuss, in contrast to a Q&A site. Usenet might be a bit harder to introduce.
• For best online support, explain the importance of code such as minimal working examples.

Visit the original question and answers on the site if you would like to read more.

Untypical for a Q&A site, there’s currently an exchange of views on TeX.SX:

As an expert, can you always use TeX for (nearly) any kind of document?
 

“Yes, you can:”

• It’s easy if you are a routine user, you know the common packages.
• Typing a letter, for example, is just like 20 TeX commands added to the text.
• You get the best possible hyphenation and justification, and a professional consistent look - why to abandon it for a “simple” document.
• After some time you’ve got a lot of documents to use as a template or as a start for a similar document.
• Your, let’s say, 16 years old document still work today. Try documents made with a word processor 16 years ago - can you open it today with current software, without layout loss or change?
• TeX users naturally have TeX installed. Some have a dislike for installing a huge wordprocessing software or suite such as Open/LibreOffice or MS Office - this is overkill for simple documents.

“No, you cannot:”

• For typesetting music, TeX may not be the best choice. Though there’s MusiXTeX, Lilipond seems to be favored.
• TeX should not be used for documents intended for quick onscreen use, such as manual pages which should be readable in a text console window. mandoc and Groff are recommended.

There are 16 answers until know. Perhaps you have a new important point to add? See the original answers with further points.

Agodemar posted a very nice diagram of the LaTeX workflow on TeX.SX:

A bigger version of the image and a link the full source code is shown in the topic Diagram / Infographic of TeX & friends.

Yesterday Seamus Bradley started a topic on TeX.SX:

    Best practice on organising your preamble

For large and highly customized documents, preambles can be lengthy. Should all packages be loaded before macros are defined? Or should packages and related definitions be close together? What about externalizing settings, and handling package dependencies?

Until now, there are two answers.

Yiannis Lazarides’ recommendations:

• Consider developing your own class or package to hold your changes.
• Have the packages and own related commands, near each other.
• Divide the preamble into topics, such as typography, graphics, maths, sectioning etc.
• Have the problematic package settings in their own packages or files.

Mico Loretan’s recommendations:

• Put the entire preamble content into a .sty file. Besides separating the settings from the document content, it has the benefit that you don’t need to use \makeatletter and \makeatother there.
• Check each loaded package if it’s really needed.
• Check your definitions, if there’s a package which could replace them, simpler and perhaps better.
• Use comments and whitespace liberally, to keep your preamble readable.
• A complex preamble could have an overview, a guide like a small table of contents.
• Divide the preamble into topics or tasks.
• Packages, which are loaded without any options, could be loaded by a single \usepackage command, however it would be good to put each package on its own line then.

Justin Bailey’s advice:

• For preambles that load a lot of packages or large packages, such as TikZ, you could create a format file, speeding up compilation.

Justin added a How-To for creating format files for TeX in six steps.

For reasons and explanation, have a look at the original topic.

Lim Lian Tze, Ph.D. candidate at the MMU Malaysia and regular poster on the Malaysian LaTeX Blog, has published a presentation about LaTeX. It’s an excellent survey of LaTeX’s capabilities.

Starting with some slides regarding why, for what and how to use LaTeX and where to get software and support, it focuses on presenting a lot of examples. Code snippets are shown together with final output. The presentation begins with standard documents and demonstrates that you can use LaTeX for writing theses, presentations, posters, leaflets, PDF forms, flash cards, and exam questions. It shows the application of LaTeX in mathematics, chemistry, linguistics, life sciences, business, computer science and electronics.

The slides are useful for bringing LaTeX to a large audience. That’s why Lim Lian Tze has written it, she will speak about LaTeX at the Malaysia Open Source Conference 2011.

Have a look at her blog post for more information and direct PDF download:

Did you ever wonder why there are several (La)TeX lengths for the width of the current line of our text? In different situations, such as writing within a table, a minipage, a list or common body text in one or more columns, these lengths can stand for different values.

There are several lengths worth considering:

• \linewidth
• \textwidth
• \hsize
• \columnwidth

On TeX.SX there’s advice on choosing the command: Difference between \textwidth, \linewidth and \hsize.