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.

Today Markus Kohm announced on golatex.de that KOMA-Script 3.06 has been released. Beside bug fixes it brings some new features, see 3.06 release notes. You can download the new version on BerliOS.

German version | auf Deutsch

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.

The third alpha version of the upcoming TeXnicCenter 2.0 has been released. It is not stable, it may crash and it’s intended for testing only. Version 2.0 has been designed to work alongside TeXnicCenter Version 1.0, both can be used when installed in different directories.

Many issues of Alpha 2 have been fixed. For more information about improvements and known issues read the announcement of Tino Weinkauf and the TeXnicCenter Team.

The version 2 comes with a new logo: have a look at the TXC logo contest results to see the winner.

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

Today Karl Berry announced that a pretest version of TeX Live 2010 is available now. It can be downloaded from certain repositories. The documentation has not yet been updated. The same may still apply to versions for some Unix platforms. But it’s in progress; by now you can obtain an early version of TL 2010 for testing. The TeX Live Team would be happy if you send them test reports and suggestions.

Some changes in 2010:

• When using pdfLaTeX EPS files can be automatically converted and included.
• The default PDF version for the output is now 1.5 allowing a better compression.
• Some new programs have been included: pTeX for Japanese typesetting, chktex, the dvisvgm converter, futher BibTeXU for Unicode support in BibTeX.

Fore more information and download visit the TeX Live testing page.

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

The maintenance release 1.6.6 of LyX has been published yesterday. It brings a lot of bug-fixes and improvements. Furthermore it provides new features like support for SVG images, for Aspell language varieties and the enchant spellchecker. The LyX team encourages all users to upgrade to this version.

For more information and download visit:

• the LyX Homepage,
• the announcement containing a very long list of changes,
• the download area.

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.

The new release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS “Lucid Lynx” is available since yesterday. It comes with a fresh design, faster boot speed, some new features and many updates.

Good news for us TeX users: the new version provides TeX Live 2009 installable by the Ubuntu package manager. The LaTeX editor Kile is included as version 2.1beta4, TeXmaker as 1.9.9.

If you would like to celebrate it: our user group Ubuntu Berlin invites you to our release party today!

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

At present I don’t have much time for the blog because of my work, but I keep on reading and answering questions and comments.

For instance since I’ve noticed a link by Uwe to a table related topic and because of Oliviers comment there I’ve added another comment to “Fancy tables with TikZ“. It shows a tikz-matrix based table, seperating the actual implementation from the table contents. A simple code like

\begin{mytable}{1.2cm}{2.4cm}{1.2cm}{0.6cm}{
   \head{Rank} & \head{Distribution} & \head{Hits} & \\
   1 & Ubuntu & 2114 & \down \\
   2 & Fedora & 1451 & \up   \\
             ...
  10 & Arch   &  625 & \down \\
}
\end{mytable}

produces the following output.

Changing the style of tables in the whole document is easier when they are defined as new environments in the preamble. For instance the mytable environment could be implemented without TikZ using just the standard tabular environment without changing the usage of those tables. Likewise with \head - I avoid using \textbf directly. It allows to change the look of the headings in a consistent way by formatting logically.

Comments and suggestions are always welcome, perhaps following the original post “Fancy tables with TikZ“.

Version 6.0 of the powerful LaTeX editor WinEdt has been released. WinEdt 6 is running on all non-legacy Windows versions: Windows 7, Vista, 2000 and XP. It has a long history - being developed in 1993 for Windows 3.1 it’s now supporting the latest TeX distributions MiKTeX 2.8 and TeX Live 2009 on modern Windows platforms. The interface has been improved but some awaited features like folding and unicode support will come later with version 6.1.
WinEdt is shareware and may be used for an evaluation period of 31 days with full functionality. After that trial period the editor will continue to work but issue reminding messages concerning a registration.

For more information and free download visit the WinEdt homepage.

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