From Usenet to Web 2.0 and beyond - Presentation on TUG 2011

I attended the TeX Users Group Conference 2011 in Trivandrum, Kerala, India, from October 19 to October 21. On this meeting I made a presentation about TeX online communities, such as discussion groups, mailing lists and web forums. I introduced the TeX Q&A site tex.stackexchange.com and showed some of its features which make it a good choice for developing and sharing TeX contents, for building a TeX knowledge base besides just discussing. Finally I compared those systems.

Direct PDF download:

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Abstract:

Bringing together TeX users online - from Usenet to Web 2.0 and beyond

It all began with the Usenet, around 1980. The online discussion board comp.text.tex emerged, where TeX hackers gathered and still populate it today.

On the continuously developing Internet, TeX user groups created mailing lists, built home pages and software archives. Web forums turned up and lowered the barrier for beginners and occasional TeX users for getting support.

Today, TeX’s friends can also follow blogs, news feeds, and take part in vibrant question and answer sites.

In this talk we will look at present online TeX activities.

See also the TUG 2011 conference program.

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:

The version 3.09 of the LaTeX beamer class been published today. It follows the release of v3.08 last week.

Beamer is a class for creating presentations with LaTeX for a projector or slides. This excellent project has been developed by Till Tantau until v3.07 (2007-03-11). In April 2010 Vedran Miletic became a new maintainer of the class. He has already done bug fixes and patches appeared with v3.08 one week ago.

You can read about the improvement including new features and fixes at the beamer class homepage.

It remains for me to add that I’m happy that this outstanding class will be further developed.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

Many users of the beamer class are irritated by several beamer warnings at every compiler run that are not caused by themselves, I’m referring to the beamer version 3.07. Those warnings are not really important, but it’s a good habit to debug all warnings instead of just ignoring them, otherwise an important warning could easily be overlooked.

When I compile this really small example:

\documentclass{beamer}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
Test
\end{frame}
\end{document}

I’m getting 6 warnings, after the second compilation of course less, but these 4 warnings remain:

1. Package pgf Warning: This package is obsolete and no longer needed on input line 13.
2. Package hyperref Warning: Option `pdfpagelabels’ is turned off
   (hyperref) because \thepage is undefined.
   Hyperref stopped early
3. LaTeX Font Warning: Font shape `OT1/cmss/m/n’ in size <4> not available
   (Font) size <5> substituted on input line 6.
4. LaTeX Font Warning: Size substitutions with differences
   (Font) up to 1.0pt have occurred.

Let’s eliminate those warnings:

1. beamer.cls is loading the obsolete package pgfbaseimage.sty that does nothing but loads pgfcore and prints out this warning. If you put a file with the same name pgfbaseimage.sty somewhere into your texmf directory (TEXMFHOME for example) or into the directory of your tex document containing just the line \RequirePackage{pgfcore} the warning will disappear.
2. Set pdfpagelabels to false by yourself, by providing a beamer class option: hyperref={pdfpagelabels=false}
3. beamerbasefont.sty defines the commands \Tiny and \TINY to choose very small font sizes. Redefine at least \Tiny or load a font providing that size, for instance Latin Modern.
4. fixed by 3.

The new file:

\documentclass[hyperref={pdfpagelabels=false}]{beamer}
\let\Tiny=\tiny
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
Test
\end{frame}
\end{document}

will not cause warnings any more. Using those workarounds you won’t be annoyed by unnecessary warnings during development of presentations. Though the redefinition of \Tiny will fix it for Computer Modern fonts I recommend to consider to use Latin Modern instead:

\usepackage{lmodern}

A new beamer class based presentation introducing LaTeX has been released these days. The author Dr. Engelbert Buxbaum created this presentation for a LaTeX course at the Biochemistry faculty at RUSM and released it for use under GNU Copyleft. It’s based on the tex-kurs by Rainer Rupprecht, translated to English using additional info from l2short. The source code is available too. For download see it’s CTAN directory.

Yet again somebody in the mrunix forum asked for an advice how to put the frame number into the footline of his beamer presentation. He was using the “Warsaw” outer theme. The first solution

\setbeamertemplate{footline}[frame number]

will just overwrite the “Warsaw” footline.

Possible solutions are: to use a different outer theme or to change the “Warsaw” footline. “Warsaw” uses the split outher theme, a workaround for insertion of the frame number should consider that and will be usable for other themes like “Copenhagen”, “Luebeck” and “Malmoe”. Inspection of the file beamerouterthemesplit.sty reveals that the footline uses the \insertshorttitle macro in its right part. So a quick workaround could be to redefine that macro:

\newcommand*\oldmacro{}%
\let\oldmacro\insertshorttitle%
\renewcommand*\insertshorttitle{%
  \oldmacro\hfill%
  \insertframenumber\,/\,\inserttotalframenumber}

If you want to see more details you could look at example source code and its pdf output.

This topic was discussed on mrunix.de and in the Matheplanet forum.