DANTE meeting 2017 day 1 – afternoon first session
The afternoon of the DANTE meeting day 1 starts.
After lunch in the canteen, Adelheid Grob explained and demonstrated new and interesting packages, for fun with LaTeX.
- Bewitched mathematics: the package halloweenmath replaces math symbols by witches and pumpkins and offers more of that kind.
- Images in the margin: the package randbild offers two environments for placing small pictures into the page margin.
- EAN and ISBN with LaTeX: the package ean13isbn offers an interface for printing EAN codes and ISBN numbers including bar codes.
- Smoking break: the package Zigaretten produces wrappers for cigarette boxes, to overprint the annoying warning messages by customizable text.
- Smileys: the package tikzsymbols offers smileys aka emojis and further graphic symbols, with parametrization for “emotion value” and adjustments for example of colors of smileys and of angles of stick men.
Another package coloremoji supports smileys as on Twitter or Whatsapp via small embedded images . - Old German fonts: Fraktur, Gotik, Schwabach and Sütterlin are possible via packages such as yfonts, sueterlin, sueterl, suet14, schwell, wesu. Using XeTeX there are even more old German fonts directly usable. An open question from the audience: is there Fraktur for math? For example, it’s used for vectors.
Günter Bartsch made the next presentation. He talked about creating a prescribed page layout in a reasonable way. It’s sometimes not easy to fulfill requirements. KOMA-Script classes and additional packages such as geometry provide suitable tools.
- Statement of the problem: for example fixed page margins and line spacing
- Considered: common pages, not landscape and no title pages
- Definition of type area: imagined gray area on paper. Without prescribed margin values, it’s good to create a type area via dividing in a grid (9 or 12 parts) or golden ratio. The KOMA-Script manual contains very detailed information.
- Standard classes such as article, book or report, offer only a few options. LaTeX commands, such as \enlargethispage and \setlength, don’t make the life easy.
- The geometry package is widely used for typesetting with given page layout parameters such as margins. It can ensure reasonable settings by autocompleting values. There are some further packages, sometimes for specific use, such as fullpage, tocenter, zwpagelayout (layout, crop marks), and typearea. Packages such as layouts and layout display page layout parameters as text and graphically.
- lscape and pdflscape are packages for switching to landscape orientation.
- KOMA-Script classes (typearea) and memoir provide further interfaces.
Coffee break now!
