Today is Sysadmin day. That’s a nice opportunity to thank your sysadmin, if you have one, who may have installed your computer hardware and software, maintains servers of your company, hosts your homepage, blog, or websites you use, takes care of your network and protects you with firewall and antivirus software. Good work goes without saying, however a driven sysadmin can be very valuable for ensuring and improving your daily work. You’ll get to know it when any of the components in the network or the computers fails - and there’s one who’s able to quickly help you.

Special thanks go to sysadmins who install and maintain a TeX installation on a server or on client PCs. While often found on university servers, TeX is not so common in business companies, further keeping it up-to-date requires some work. So, if you are lucky and one maintains a TeX installation for you, it’s a good day for sending thanks to him. It can even motivate him to update to the latest TeX Live 2012, if not yet done.

Today, Texmaker version 3.4 has been released. Texmaker is a free LaTeX editor which runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows systems. Some of its features are Unicode capability, spell checking, auto-completion, code folding, a built-in PDF viewer with SyncTeX support and continuous view mode.

Enhancements in 3.4, from the ChangeLog file:

• The option “Use a ‘build’ subdirectory for output files” has been added for the (pdf)latex. This means, that the “–output-directory=build” parameter will automatically be added to the (pdf)latex command and texmaker will search the log and pdf files into this subdirectory.
• A word counter has been added to the internal pdf viewer (via context menu).
• The “Tool” menu provides an additional command “Open Terminal”.
• Now the “find/replace” dialogs support regular expressions.
• From the internal pdf viewer, you can now export a pdf page to a png image (via context menu).
• A “Save a copy” command has been added to the “File” menu.
• Texmaker now supports Mac OS X Lion fullscreen mode.

Besides these and further new features, some bugs have been fixed.

The complete ChangeLog can be found here. Click here for downloading versions for Linux, Mac OS X or Windows or source files.

Today, TeX Live 2012 has been released. TeX Live is a comprehensive TeX and LaTeX system for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix systems. A special version called MacTeX 2012 is available for Mac OS X.

Changes compared to TeX Live 2011:

• tlmgr supports updates from multiple network repositories.
• The parameter \XeTeXdashbreakstate is set to 1 by default. This allows line breaks after em-dashes and en-dashes, which has always been the behavior of other engines and formats such as plain TeX, LaTeX, and LuaTeX. Explicitly set \XeTeXdashbreakstate to 0 for perfect line-break compatibility for existing XeTeX documents.
• The output files generated by pdftex and dvips, among others, can now exceed 2gb.
• The 35 standard PostScript fonts are included in the output of dvips by default.
• In the restricted \write18 execution mode, set by default, mpost is now an allowed program.
• A texmf.cnf file is also found in ../texmf-local, e.g., /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local/web2c/texmf.cnf, if it exists.
• The updmap script reads a per-tree updmap.cfg instead of one global config.
• Platforms: armel-linux and mipsel-linux added; sparc-linux and i386-netbsd are no longer in the main distribution, but are available for installation as custom binaries, along with a variety of other platforms.

For more information and download visit

• the Homepage of TeX Live
• the list of changes
• the TeX Live download page
• Donating to TUG Activities
• Contributing to TeX Live as user, author or developer.

The maintenance release 2.0.4 of LyX has been published this week. Most of the improvements are bug fixes, such as crash fixes. That’s why it’s recommended to update to this version.

For further information and download visit:

• the announcement,
• the LyX News,
• the LyX Homepage,
• the download area with binaries, complete sources and a source patch against 2.0.3.

On LaTeX-Community.org, 10 authors have sent contributions to the “LaTeX and Graphics” contest.

Did you like an article? Or many? It would be great if you would

• comment on it - what you liked, what further ideas do you have about this topic. Feedback is very welcome by authors. If you already read an article, it’s still a good idea to visit the article again and to comment on it.
• blog about it - if you are a blogger. Tell your readers, which article you liked, what do you think about the contributions.
• share it via Twitter, google+ or Facebook - there are buttons for it over and below each post. Spread the word about LaTeX!

It will be hard to decide, which authors would be the winners. You can help: show which contributions are the most liked by you!

Here are the nominees - please vote, comment and share!

• LaTeX and Chemistry - Drawing Reaction Schemes by Clemens Niederberger
• Efficient Seamless Tiled Backgrounds by Lim Lian Tze
• Fun with gnuplot and arara by Paulo Roberto Massa Cereda
• Why should I be using TeX for graphics? by Pieter Belmans
• Tufte-style Bar Charts with pgfplots by Jürnjakob Dugge
• Semi-automatic plotting using pgfplots by Joseph Wright
• Plane affine constructions and the TikZ calc library by Hugues Vermeiren
• Overcoming some flaws with graphics created using matlab2tikz by Frits Wenneker
• Drawing with the tikz-3dplot Package by Jeff Hein
• Pic for expressive LaTeX diagrams by Allan Espinosa

Did you like the contest and some some contributions? Let the authors know!

Let’s review some time, then we will know who has won the prizes.

To have a quick glance, what the contributions show to us:

The currently running “LaTeX and Graphics” article competition on LaTeX-Community.org will close on 20/06/12. Until now, very few users told me that they would make a contribution. Which means, there’s a good chance to win one of the gnuplot books.

Do you …

• … have a blog you would like to mention?
• … maintain a web site, people may visit?
• … wrote a LaTeX related package, you would like to introduce to readers?
• … would like to show what is possible with LaTeX, today?

This contest could be a nice opportunity for these points and more. Just add some lines about you as the author and your website or your software.

Even a small blog-like post would be very welcome. Feel free to contact me via email to stefan@latex-community.org or via the contact form. I can create an account for you both on the main and on the development server, so that you could even check the final layout before posting.

LaTeX-Community.org has teamed up with Packt Publishing to organize a contest. Two users stand a chance to win a copy of the new book on gnuplot, the newly published gnuplot Cookbook written by Lee Phillips.

To enter the contest, write a small article for publishing on LaTeX-Community.org. The topic of this contest is: LaTeX and Graphics.

From the book’s web page:

gnuplot Cookbook – it will help you master gnuplot. Start using gnuplot immediately to solve your problems in data analysis and presentation. Quickly find a visual example of the graph you want to make and see a complete, working script for producing it. Learn how to use the new features in gnuplot 4.4. Find clearly explained, working examples of using gnuplot with LaTeX and with your own computer programming language.

You will learn to plot basic 2d to complex 3d plots, annotate from simple labels to equations, integrate from simple scripts to full documents and computer progams. You will be taught to annotate graphs with equations and symbols that match the style of the rest of your text, thus creating a seamless, professional document. You will be guided to create a web page with an interactive graph, and add graphical output to your simulation or numerical analysis program.

To read more details, have a look at the contest announcement and the book’s web page, including the entire table of contents and a sample chapter for download.

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

Today Karl Berry announced on the TeX Live mailing list, that in about one week (May 10) TeX Live 2011 and tlnet will be frozen, and the building of the pretest version of TeX Live 2012 will start shortly after that.

So the schedule for the release of TeX 2012 is, as it can be read on the TeX Live homepage:

• May 10: TeX Live 2011 and tlnet frozen
• About 2 weeks: CTAN updates continue, pretesting starts
• May 24: Also CTAN updates stop, updates only on request
• May 31: Complete freeze, some time for testing and documentation
• June 14: Final images for the TeX Collection DVD
• In August: DVDs will be delivered to TUG members.

This is the plan, changes are still possible as it depends on the time of the developers and contributors.

Today I read on LaTeX-Community.org, that version 0.4.4 of TeXworks has been released, as posted by Thorsten. TeXworks is a quick and efficient LaTeX editor running on most operating systems. It is free and open source.

0.4.4 is a stable version which will be included in TeX Live 2012.

New and updated features in this version, compared to 0.4.3:

• “Clear Recent Files” has been added to the “Open Recent” menu.
• The preferences dialog now contains an autocompletion entry.
• Lua(La)TeX has been added to the default tools, LaTeXmk has been dropped.
• Now there’s an option to open log files.
• Experimental CMake support has been implemented.
• SyncTeX has been updated to version 1.17.
• URLs have been updated and now point to http://www.tug.org/texworks/.
• The window running TeX is brought to the top at the beginning of typesetting, to ensure that the console output is visible.
• Symlinks are allowed and display only folders in “path for programs” in the preferences dialog.
• The “Unable to execute…” error dialog has been improved.
• “Show/Hide Output Panel” was renamed to “Show/Hide Console Output” in the menu and in the preferences dialog.
• The “email to mailinglist” now includes instructions in the body, the subject was removed.
• When looking for scripts, symlinks are resolved
• Scripting has been improved.

Moreover, many bugs are fixed and some further improvements have been made. You can read about that in the changelog or on the TeXworks homepage where you also can find the way to the downloads.

The version 2.1.2 of the LaTeX editor Kile has been released. Some bugs were fixed, and the default encoding in document templates is now utf8 instead of utf8x.

biblatex.cwl has been updated. CWL files are completion files: they contain abbreviations, which are replaced by longer text strings on demand. So, good news for biblatex users.

For more information and download visit:

• the Kile Homepage,
• the latest news
• the download area.

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