TeXblog

Evince available for Windows

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.

30. September 2009 by stefan
Categories: Uncategorized | 6 comments

Software Freedom Day 2009

Today is the Software Freedom Day 2009. This event is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software with the goal to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality free and open source software in education, in government, at home and in business. The non-profit company Software Freedom International coordinates this event at a global level, volunteer teams around the world are organize local SFD events.

TeX and LaTeX are very remarkable examples of free software.

19. September 2009 by stefan
Categories: Uncategorized | 1 comment

CTAN will drop tools

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.

14. September 2009 by stefan
Categories: Uncategorized | 2 comments

Automatically counting table rows

I’ve just read the blog post Automatic Table Row Numbers in LaTeX by Alexander O’Connor, while reading it came to my mind how to use a feature of the array package to automatize such tasks. The array syntax >{command} allows to include commands in row formating parameters that will be executed with each cell. Here’s a short compilable demonstration example:

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article}
\usepackage{array}
\newcounter{rowno}
\setcounter{rowno}{0}
\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{>{\stepcounter{rowno}\therowno.}cl}
\multicolumn{1}{r}{No.} & text \\\hline
 & first  \\
 & second \\
 & third  \\
 & fourth
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

Output:

Of course it would be only useful with longer tables. But this example is also intended to show how to execute commands for certain cells in general.

10. September 2009 by stefan
Categories: Uncategorized | 2 comments

New packages and updates on CTAN in August

New packages on CTAN in August 2009:

• tablenotes – package by Matthias Borck-Elsner for placing notes in tables and list them, like endnotes and footnotes
• listings-ext – contains macros and a bash script that can be used to input parts of source code programs into a documentation, written by J. Hoffmann
• threeparttablex – extends threeparttable bringing it to longtable, by Lars Madsen
• font-change – macros for plain TeX written by Amit Raj Dhawan allowing to change the fonts (text and math) in a TeX document with only one statement
• JFlap2TikZ – converts JFlap jff files representing a finite automaton, push down automaton, or Turing machine to a LaTeX file depicting the automaton graphically using TikZ, programmed by Andrew Mertz
• suanpan – MetaPost macros for drawing Chinese and Japanese abaci by Denis Roegel
• garrigues – Metapost macros for the reproduction of Garrigues’ Easter nomogram by Denis Roegel
• spverbatim – provides a macro that is analogous to verb and an environment that is analogous to verbatim, but they allow LaTeX to break lines at space characters, developed by Scott Pakin
• titlepic – package by Thomas ten Cate that supports placing a picture on the title page of a LaTeX document

Updates in August:

boolexpr, curves, pst-geo, MWCLS, dvisvgm, pst-math, pst-barcode, pst-3dplot, keycommand, algorithms, fontinst, tablor, biblatex-dw, Asymptote, Boisik, latexmk, cleveref, autolatex, GaPFilL, ctanify, gbrief-creator, thailatex, etextools, biblatex-chem, biblatex, siunitx, findhyph, luaotfload, bibhtml, dashrule, pkfix-helper, pict2e, achemso, xwatermark, expl3, lhfonts, xeCJK, tablists, softmaker-freefont, makecell, hyph-utf8, cellspace, floatrow, bidi, blindtext. For package-specific information visit the package folder on CTAN.

01. September 2009 by stefan
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