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.

Thorsten just posted on LaTeX-Community.org, that the version 2.0 of the free Sumatra PDF reader has been released. This PDF reader is known for its speed and its nice simple user interface. It works especially well with forward and inverse search with TeX source and PDF output and it doesn’t lock opened files like as other readers do.

Compared to v1.9, this major release brings a few changes, as announced in the news:

• It supports the MOBI eBook format.
• CHM documents can be opened from network drives.
• A selection can be copied to the clipboard as an image by using the right-click context menu.
• It uses ucrt to reduce the program size.

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

The version 1.4 of the free and open source PDF viewer Sumatra PDF has been released yesterday. Sumatra PDF is a slim and portable viewer for Windows.

Some of its new features are browser plugins for Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, and support for AES-256 encrypted PDF documents. It’s the second update this year, 1.3 already brought new features in February. More information about the releases can be found on the news page.

Found in the Sumatra PDF releases thread written by Thorsten on LaTeX-Community.org.

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

The version 4.0 of the Foxit Reader has been released. It’s a light-weight and fast reader for PDF documents and it can be downloaded for free. Version 4 provides new features:

• reviewing and commenting tools like highlighting, underlining, striking out, search and replace, magnifying glass and inserting notes,
• editing tools like textbox, adding comments, measuring bar and form filling,
• spell checker for comments,
• undo and redo for comments,
• adding multimedia like images, movies, file attachments and links to a PDF document,
• conversion of PDF to text format,
• modifying bookmarks,
• safe mode for secure reading.

The reader comes with the ask.com toolbar, it’s installed by default so be careful if you don’t like that! In this case choose the custom installation and click the Decline button - otherwise the toolbar will be installed even if you unmark the check boxes. Even if that happened, the Foxit Toolbar can be uninstalled in the Control Panel of Windows.

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

The version 1.1 of the pdf viewer Sumatra PDF has been released yesterday. This viewer runs on Windows systems and is free and open source.

Besides some bug fixes the update brings a text export feature, and now Sumatra PDF automatically detects commonly used TeX editors to support inverse search.

To get more information have a look at its news page.

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

Joseph Wright has published a post giving an overview of the dtx format on his blog Some TeX Developments. It’s the first post of a small series dealing with that LaTeX package format.

The script match_parens has been uploaded to CTAN today. This program has been written by Wybo Dekker to assist the user in checking parenthesis (and braces, brackets) balancing in documents, the characters {}[]()<> are supported.

It’s written in Ruby, though it’s been announced on ctan-ann as Perl script, therefore a Ruby installation is required. On Ubuntu (and Debian) Linux systems Ruby can be installed by:
sudo apt-get install ruby
which installs libruby1.8, ruby, ruby1.8 on Ubuntu 9.04. Of course it could be done using Synaptic on Ubuntu as well. You can define the script to be executable by
chmod u+x match_parens
or use option a instead of u to allow execution by all users. Afterwards the script could by invoked with the name of the file to be checked as parameter, like
./match_parens test.tex
The output of the programm will show mismatches at the left margin. Have a look at this example:

1	[	[Hello, here is some
2		text] (without) a meaning.
3	(	(This text should show,
4	(	how a printed text will
5		look like at this place.)
6	({	({If you read this text,
7		you will get no information}).
8		Really? Is there no information?
9	[	Is there [a difference between
10		this text and ] some nonsense
11		like Huardest gefburn . Kjift –
12	((	Never mind! (A blind text (like
13	(	this) gives you information about
14	({[	{[the selected font, how the
15	({[	letters are written and the
16	({[)	impression of the look).
17	({[)

Unmached parentheses can be seen on the left, vanishing after being matched, at the end you can see the remaining matching problems.

This small tool with its just about 20 lines of Ruby code can be useful especially in checking large TeX documents where errors for instance caused by nested braces could be hard to locate.

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The release of Perl 5.11.0 has been published after more than two years of development by the community of Perl developers. The version 5.11.0 is a development release that has been made available in order to test and to develop software intended to run with Perl 5.12.

Perl is a high-level, interpreted, dynamic programming language, originally developed as a general-purpose Unix scripting language. It is free software and is licensed under both the GNU General Public License and the Artistic License. Perl is available for most operating Systems, for example Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. While Perl is already provided by Linux and Unix-like distributions it can be used on Windows for instance by installing ActivePerl.

Many TeX/LaTeX-Tools have been written in Perl, benefiting from its text processing facilities and its flexibility in general, for instance

• epstopdf converts EPS to ‘encapsulated’ PDF using GhostScript,
• latex2html translates LaTeX code into HTML documents,
• pdfcrop trims pages of any whitespace border or just of of a fixed border,
• texcount counts words in a LaTeX document,
• texdirflatten collects files related to a LaTeX job in a single directory,
• texloganalyser allows the user to extract and to display elements of the log file

and many more, usually available on CTAN.

For information and download visit

• the announcement by Jesse Vincent,
• Perl.org,
• the CPAN download page,
• perl5110delta - what is new for Perl 5.11.0.

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The free document viewer Evince is now available for Windows operating systems. The developer team provided an msi installer file together with the new release 2.28.0. Evince is the standard pdf viewer for the GNOME desktop environment, beside pdf it’s able to show postscript, djvu, tiff and dvi documents. Evince is popular as a previewer among LaTeX users for instance on Ubuntu Linux where GNOME is the default desktop environment.

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Today Jim Hefferon announced on the CTAN mailing list that CTAN will not continue to provide the tools directory. The material contained therein is in no way TeX related, nearly all those programs are archiving software like arj, bzip2, compress, pkzip, lharc, tar etc. and conversion tools like uuencode/ uudecode, word-to-LaTeX and some more.

The reason is that those tools could easily be found and downloaded on the internet today in contrary to the earlier days of the world wide web, it does not make much sense to maintain that part of the archive any longer.

You still could have a look: http://www.ctan.org/pub/tex-archive/tools/, but the link will be dead soon.

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