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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

When the version 9 of the Adobe Reader was released last years summer, Adobe did not publish a Linux version. Now the version 9.1 of the reader has been relased for Linux and Solaris, including an important security patch, version 9.0 was skipped. To get information about its features and for download visit adobe.com or the Adobe Reader Blog announcement, for short german information you could visit golem.de, techniknews.com or Dogan’s Solaris blog.

Though pdflatex provides the command \pdfannot for pdf annotations it is somehow complicated to use. The new package pdfcomment offers a user-friendly way to insert comments/ annotations into pdf files.

pdfcomment requires the packages hyperref, xkeyval, ifpdf, marginnote and packages needed by them.

pdfcomment provides options for subject, author and color of annotations, supports icons used as graphics for pdf annotations.

For further information you could have a look at

• the README file,
• the documentation in English,
• the documentation in German,
• the package homepage on CTAN,
• the pdfcomment homepage with documentation and example.

Here’s an example illustration made with Jpgfdraw following a drawing in Singer/Thorpe Lecture Notes in Elementary Topology and Geometry, I made freehand it to illustrate homotopy of paths in my notes.

Screenshot:

Output in pdf format: homotopy.pdf
Jpgfdraw binary file: homotopy.jdr
exported tex file: homotopy.tex

LaTeX main document:

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage[landscape]{geometry}
\usepackage{amsmath,pgf}
\pagestyle{empty}
\begin{document}
\centering
\input{homotopy}
\end{document}

The vector graphics application for LaTeX users Jpgfdraw beta version 0.5b has been released today.

The author Nicola Talbot announced:

    Jpgfdraw is a graphics application written in Java. You can use Jpgfdraw to:

• Construct shapes using lines, moves and cubic Bezier segments;
• Edit shapes by changing the defining control points;
• Incorporate text and bitmap images (for annotation and background effects);
• Extract the parameters for TeX’s \parshape command and for \shapepar (defined in the shapepar package);
• Construct frames for use with the flowfram package;
• Pictures can be saved in Jpgfdraw’s native binary format (JDR) or native ascii format (AJR) or can be exported as:
  • a pgfpicture environment for use in LaTeX documents with the pgf package;
  • a LaTeX2e package based on the flowfram package;
  • an encapsulated postscript file;
  • a PNG image file;
  • an SVG image file;
• Incorporate text and bitmap images (for annotation and background effects);
• Alternative text may be specified for use when exporting to a LaTeX file (e.g. if the text contains symbols or if it should be set in maths mode);
• Mappings may be used to specify what LaTeX font declarations should be used when exporting to a LaTeX file.

That sounds very promising. I made a quick test today with Ubuntu Linux 8.04. After installing sun-java6-jre I downloaded and installed jpgfdraw-0.5b-us. It worked immediately. For the test I created a drawing and exported it into a pgf picture, tex format. After including it into a tex document and compiling I got the error Illegal unit of measure (pt inserted). It was caused by the numbers of the export file, they were using a comma instead of a decimal point. That problem is mentioned in the Jpgfdraw FAQ, but contrary to the FAQ it is still occuring with version 0.5b as I noticed using the locale de_DE.UTF-8.
After correction It worked perfectly, the drawing was displayed with high quality. Jpgfdraw could establish itself as a very useful tool.

Links:

• Homepage
• HTML manual
• Frequently asked questions
• Download
• TeX Catalogue entry
• on CTAN, directory