Eeebuntu 3.0 Base edition released
Just seen on twitter/eeebuntu, as announced there 1 hour ago Eeebuntu 3.0 Base Edition has been released now. Torrents are up, mirrors are established.
If you’re waiting for Eeebuntu 3.0 like me or just interested visit
- the Eeebuntu homepage,
- the download page,
- the Eeebuntu forum for news and experiences.
Eeebuntu is the basis of my TeX system during traveling. After download I will install the base edition on a high speed usb stick for testing, the installation on the internal SSD has to wait until the NBR edition is available too.
News Cooperation of LaTeX-Community.org with TeXblog
From today on the (La)TeX related news posted in the TeXblog will be available also on the LaTeX-Community.org front page and news section.
LaTeX-Community.org is a community platform for LaTeX users all around the world, maintained by the Sven Wiegand, the founder of the famous TeXnicCenter IDE. LaTeX-Community.org has been online since Jan 14, 2007 and until now there are 3141 registered members and a huge amount of LaTeX knowledge has been collected there.
For more information visit the announcement on LaTeX-Community.org.
Kile and TeX Live 2008 on Ubuntu Linux
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.
TexMakerX 1.8.1 available
The second version of TexMakerX v1.8.1 has been released as the author Benito van der Zander announced on mrunix.de today. TexMakerX is a fork of the LaTeX editor Texmaker, also licensed under the GPL and running on Windows, Unix/Linux, BSD and Mac OS X systems.
TexMakerX provides some remarkable new features like interactive spell checking, code folding, improved navigation and automatic encoding detection.
The new release contains some bugfixes and additional features. For more information visit
Just another mirror for LaTeX Hypertext Help
Sometimes when I’m posting advice and code in LaTeX forums I’m linking used commands to a LaTeX reference site. Then there’s no need to explain a command and its syntax further because the reader could just click on it to get all basic information. In German forums I’m using the reference of Weinelt, keeping in mind that it’s still LaTeX 2.09, in international forums I’m using the classical LaTeX hypertext help derived from the basic LaTeX help and improved by Dr. Sheldon Green.
Because it’s allowed to copy those documents and to install it on other web servers there are several mirrors worldwide sharing the load. Perhaps not every server is reliable, further the structure of servers of reliable institutions may change and links could become dead. Just one example: once the location of the GISS reference has been changed, now there’s a lot of dead links to it and also dead deep links to command pages, just search for the obsolete location, there are even wikibooks and tex faqs using the dead link. Further there’s no redirection to the moved site, just an error 404 will appear when you visit http://www.giss.nasa.gov/latex/.
That’s why I’ve decided to host just another mirror. For now it’s still a mirror, at the moment I don’t know if it’s reasonable to make improvements by myself, but I will see.
You are invited to use that reference too for linking commands in forums/ discussion boards, the LaTeX Hypertext Help is linked above and in the navigation bar on the left side.
Talk: Creation of extensive documents ready for printing with TeX/LaTeX
Tomorrow on April 29th, 2009, the author Dr. Herbert Voss will give a talk in the specialist bookshop Lehmanns in Hamburg, Kurze Muehren 6. This talk will be held in German and it’s called “Erstellung grosser, druckreifer Dokumente mit TeX/LaTeX“. The speaker will explain how extensive documents (more than 1000 pages) can be created and managed by several authors until it’s ready for printing such that no post-treatment by publisher or printing company would be needed. Among the topics will be revision control systems, the possibility of postprocessing of directories by external scripts and creation and inclusion of high-quality graphics. The talk will start at 8pm. For further information visit the LOB events page.
Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” released
Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop, Server and Netbook editions have been released today. The new version is starting faster, is now supporting the ext4 file system and comes with a lot of software updates. Regarding its new features features have a look for instance at the desktop edition feature overview.
To download Ubuntu 9.04 or to obtain CDs see: Get Ubuntu. For instructions on upgrading visit: Upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04.
Upgrades to the latest version of Ubuntu are entirely free of charge as always.
To get more information, visit www.ubuntu.com.
LaTeX news of the past few days
New packages on CTAN:
- alterqcm – a LaTeX2e package for making Multiple Choices Questionnaires in a table with two columns
- diagmac2 – John Reynolds’s diagram macros modified to allow arbitrary line slopes, requiring pict2e
- texdirflatten – a Perl script parsing a (La)TeX source file, recursively following its included children (La)TeX files
collecting together its components (graphics and BibTeX files etc.) in different directories - CircuiTikZ – a package for drawing electrical and electronic networks using pgf/TikZ
- Turkish intro – the first book in Turkish language describing (La)TeX in detail, discussing basic and important topics and providing examples
Updates on CTAN:
- svn-multi – bug-fix for v2.1 avoiding if-fi parsing error for beamer and other classes
- achemso – v3.2 adds tocentry environment for graphics TOC entry, provides easier methods for turning on and off sections and section numbering, brings internal improvements and has reduced dependencies on other packages
- sparklines – bug-fix of previous version
- xifthen – bug-fix, spurious space removed
- nicetext – see documentation
- glossaries – bug fix in ngerman captions
- disser – improved natbib compatibility, new page styles, optional exclusion of AMS packages, changed and fixed templates, improved installation
- mfpic4ode – this new version allows to draw trajectories with prefixes like dashed, dotted, gendashed etc.
- newlfm – bug fix and feature enhancement
- oberdiek – bug fix in package reload prevention, adaptations for LuaTeX 0.40 and minor issues
Information about new packages and updates before April 15th (and of course those newer too) can be found in the ctan-ann archive.
Seen on blogs:
Cameron Bracken has published a short style file for a memo header for use with amsart.
Nico Schlömer has published an update of his TeX font error cheat sheet where he has compiled some of the most frequent occuring error messages regarding TeX fonts and ways to tackle them.
Marcin Borkowski discussed typesetting of a list of publication using amsrefs.
Jürgen Fenn has pointed out the publication of the second article of George Grätzer regarding the development of LaTeX in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, available for download in pdf format.
Eeebuntu / Ubuntu Linux on the Asus Eee PC S101
Last weekend I’ve got an Eee PC S101, now I’ve got time to test it: I’m writing some notes here sharing the first experience with the S101 and useful links for installation. After delivery I’ve upgraded the netbook to 2 GB RAM using a Kingston 2GB 667MHz DDR2 Non-ECC CL5 SO DIMM module. The S101 came with Windows XP. Though I’m mainly using Ubuntu Linux I decided to keep XP for compatibility reasons but to install a double boot system with Linux and Windows. I’ve used the free EASEUS Partition Master 3.5 Home Edition to resize the XP partition to 8 GB, that worked fine. I installed the Gavotte RAM disk and linked tmp and temp directory there as well as the browser cache to speed up work and to save SSD life time. For the TeX work I’ve added TeXnicCenter and MiKTeX. I’ve chosen MiKTeX because it’s been a great distribution since many years, further I’ve already planned to install the alternative TeX Live 2008 on the Linux partition.
But the Windows installation wasn’t the main issue – back to Linux. I decided to install Eeebuntu, in particular the Eeebuntu Netbook Remix 2.0. After downloading the Eeebuntu NBR iso file I’ve used Unetbootin to save that iso image to the SD card that came with the S101 and to make the SD card bootable. The S101 is able to boot from the SD card, so I did it, the Eeebuntu live system started, using this I installed Eeebuntu to the remaining free 8 GB space on the internal SSD. That was done quickly, not much to tell. The GRUB boot manager has been installed and allows me to choose between Ubuntu Linux and Windows. Ubuntu runs fine now, I’ve also linked the Firefox browser cache to the RAM disk located on /dev/shm.
Finally I’ve installed Kile by Synaptic and TeX Live 2008 over the internet using the small network installer package. The latter took some time but required few interaction. Even after it failed because of a network disconnection restarting it just continued the installation with the same settings. After adding some tools and of course some math software I’m very satisfied with it and I’m using it right now.
New package totcount: final counter values
If you need for instance to display page numbers in a way like “page X of Y”, there are packages like totpages and lastpage helping to achieve that. The today released package totcount allows to use the last (usually maximal) value of an arbitrary counter like the total number of chapters, sections, footnotes, citations, figures and tables etc.
A simple example of its usage:
\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article} \usepackage{totcount} \regtotcounter{section} \regtotcounter{page} \begin{document} \section{First} This is section \thesection\ of \total{section}. \clearpage \section{Second} This document has \total{page}\ pages. \end{document} |
The result will display “This is section 1 of 2. … This document has 2 pages.”.
For detailed information about usage, installation and implementation have a look at its documentation.
When I was looking at the package today I’ve got the idea that it could improve the usability if one could register counters just by a package option instead of needing to call \regtotcounter after loading the package.
Full Justification: pdfLaTeX vs. LaTeX
Once in a while there are discussions if pdfLaTeX would be preferable to LaTeX. There are some reasons, here I will just point out the effect of the micro-typographic extensions of pdfTeX, in particular font expansion and character protrusion. Using it you could get better margin adjustment and more even interword spacing. The package microtype is providing an interface to those extensions, you could see an effect already if you would just load the package without any options. The effect will be most notable if you need to typeset text with small columns like in tables.
Let’s test this very small example:
\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{article} \usepackage[english]{babel} \usepackage{blindtext} \usepackage{microtype} \begin{document} \begin{minipage}{3.7cm} \blindtext \end{minipage} \end{document} |
After compilation with LaTeX I’ve got 12 bad/underfull boxes. Using pdfLaTeX I’ve got 0 bad boxes. You could test it yourself. Btw. without microtype I’ve got 10 underfull boxes with both LaTeX and pdfLaTeX. Let’s bring the results of fLaTeX and pdfLaTeX face to face, just compare the first four lines or even more:
[LaTeX] 12 badboxes [PDFLaTeX] 0 badboxes
Without microtype the text will also look like the left one, the line breaks will be the same.
Microtype provides even more features that are not enabled by default, like additional kerning, spacing, tracking/letterspacing and allows you to fine-tune its capabilities. For more information have a look into its documentation.
To conclude I recommend to use pdfLaTeX if the situation allowed it, especially if you are using tables with cells or columns containing text. If you think you couldn’t use pdfLaTeX because it cannot embed eps images, consider to convert those images to pdf format.
This topic was discussed on apfeltalk.de, LaTeX Community, MatheBoard and Matheplanet.
LaTeX Community Know How Contest finished
On January 22nd I’ve informed about the LaTeX Community know how article contest. On April 5th the winner has been announced: Thiago S. Mosqueiro from Brazil has got the award for for his brief and concise description of RevTeX 4 package. Congratulations, Thiago!
Until now there are 4 articles in the know how section:
