MiKTeX will become portable
Christian Schenk announced on April 2nd that he’s planning to release a portable MiKTeX edition later this year. The portable edition will allow you to run MiKTeX from a flash drive:
- you could carry MiKTeX on a portable drive for use on any Windows computer,
- configuration settings will be stored on the portable drive and not on the host computer,
- using the portable edition won’t leave traces on the host computer,
- administrator privileges on the host computer won’t be necessary.
Christian said that a beta will be released soon, on April 6th he has noted that also the package manager will be available with the portable edition and that packages will be on installed on the flash drive.
Periodic Table of Typefaces
Reading Jürgen Fenns blog TeX & Friends I stumbled across a very nice work by Cam: inspired by the Periodic Table of Elements he created a Periodic Table of Typefaces listing 100 of the most popular and influential typefaces today grouped categorically by families and classes: sans-serif, serif, script, blackletter, glyphic, display, grotesque, realist, didone, garalde, geometric, humanist, slab-serif and mixed. Here’s an impression of the result:
Click on the picture to see the larger version of the table, perhaps click again to enlarge it further.
To get more information, especially how the typefaces were chosen, categorized and ranked visit Cam’s page.
LEd’s future plans
The developer of the freely available LaTeX Editor LEd have announced a change of its distribution model. From now on they want to maintain a free version of the LEd like today but provide further features with nonfree plugins.
Currently they are working on new features like
- spellchecking for command parameters and a mathematical mode,
- wizards for table and figure creation,
- improved thesaurus data,
- hints for some of small packages,
- more hints for a memoir package,
- additional templates,
- a detailed technical documentation,
- CVS support,
- import features regarding other editors,
- a built-in PDF viewer,
- a script language to create more complex macros,
- a built-in BibTeX entries editor,
- support for Unicode and UTF-7, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 encodings
and more. For further information visit
- the original announcement,
- the LEd homepage.
Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” Release Party
On April 23, 2009 the version 9.04 of Ubuntu Linux will be released. The user group Ubuntu Berlin is inviting to the Jaunty Jackalope Release Party:
The party in the c-base Berlin will start on April 25, 2009, 4pm, admission will be free. There will be presentations showing new features of Ubuntu 9.04, encryption, localization, Ubuntu on USB sticks. I will come to that party too of course.
If you cannot come to Berlin but want to celebrate the Jaunty release too, have a look at the Jaunty release parties worldwide.
TUG logo competition
The TeX Users Group is holding a competition to design its new logo. If you are interested to contribute visit http://tug.org/logo/competition/ for more information about reasons and requirements. The deadline for submissions is April 30, 2009.
Inline math: $…$ vs. (…)
l2tabu, a text informing about obsolete packages and commands, recommends to replace $$…$$ by […], but it doesn’t say a word about the difference between $…$ and (…). “Mathmode” by H. Voss does tell something, but it says in v2.40: “In general $…$ is the best choice”. I doubt it, and when I mentioned here some thoughts about that, the author noticed it without much comment. Because of a question on Matheboard today I’ve listed some reasons why I’m preferring the (…) environment:
- With (…) you can easily distinguish opening and closing of the math mode, in contrary to $…$, mistakes in code could be harder to find with $.
- LaTeX does additional error checks in (…), whereas $…$ is plain TeX and is used internally by (…).
- (…) is working inside alltt-environments, $…$ is causing errors.
- Both ( and ) could be redefined or extended easily.
- Though ( and ) are not robust, possibly causing problems in sectioning for instance, that could be fixed by just loading the fixltx2e package.
In general I recommend to use LaTeX macros instead of corresponding plain TeX commands.
Adobe Reader 9.1 for Linux released
When the version 9 of the Adobe Reader was released last years summer, Adobe did not publish a Linux version. Now the version 9.1 of the reader has been relased for Linux and Solaris, including an important security patch, version 9.0 was skipped. To get information about its features and for download visit adobe.com or the Adobe Reader Blog announcement, for short german information you could visit golem.de, techniknews.com or Dogan’s Solaris blog.
Bugfix of the rotating package
Robin Fairbairns has released the version 2.16a (2009/03/28) of the rotating package, there he has corrected a bug introduced in v2.16 (2009/03/16). Using 2.16 you could get the error message ! A <box> was supposed to be here. when using a rotating environment like rotate or sideways.
<to be read again>
\ignorespaces
The bug and it’s cause were discussed by Jürgen Spitzmüller and Ulrike Fischer (“…rotating uses \color@hbox in a context where a box command is needed…”) on comp.text.tex and Robin fixed it by adding
\AtBeginDocument{% \providecommand\color@hbox{\hbox\bgroup}% \providecommand\color@vbox{\vbox\bgroup}% \providecommand\color@endbox{\egroup}% } |
to 2.16.
If you encounter this error just update the rotating package, perhaps by a package manager like mpm or tlmgr. Thanks to Jürgen, Ulrike and Robin for the quick solution.
This topic was also discussed on mrunix.de.
LaTeX Microblogs
On LaTeX-Community.org I’ve read that the Identi.ca microblogging service provides blogs/groups about (La)TeX related subjects too:
- latex
- textsatz (in German)
- typesetting
- typography
Links to those groups were provided by Thorsten on LC.
Tutorial: Commutative Diagrams using TikZ
In previous posts I’ve shown some examples how the TikZ graphics package could be used to draw mathematical diagrams like exact sequences and commutative diagrams. Felix Lenders has written a tutorial called Commutative Diagrams using TikZ dealing with this subject and has published it today. In that paper he’s describing basic syntax, styles, arrows, curves, positioning issues and more. The tutorial contains several examples with the corresponding source code.
To read related blog posts have a look at the TikZ category.
LaTeX-Award on Matheplanet.com
The big german math portal Matheplanet.com has presented its 7th annual awards yesterday evening, Jan 25th. Those awards honor the efforts of community members who are providing help, knowledge, work and time to all of the Matheplanet users. More than 4000 votes were given in different categories like mathematics, physics, computer science, moderation, information, article writing, book reviewing and more. Because that math site has a lively LaTeX forum there’s also an award for honoring the best LaTeX advisor. This year (and the last year too) the voters have chosen me, and I’m very proud of it, because I’m part of the Matheplanet community for many years and I appreciate this site and its members. At this place I want to say thank you for your feedback.
If you’re having LaTeX questions, especially if they are concerning mathematics, you’re invited to visit the Matheplanet LaTeX forum to post questions and also to help other users. If you’re interested in LaTeX or just look for advice you may also visit our LaTeX User Group.
Write and Win
If you want to share your LaTeX knowledge you could write an article for the Know How Articles Section of the LaTeX
Community Forum. The author who has written the best rated article until the end of March will receive an iPod Nano with 8 GB or €100 cash instead.
If you are interested and want to read more, to get ideas or to know how it’s working, visit the Announcement on LaTeX
-Community.org.
