DANTE meeting 2017 in Zeuthen
Right now, from March 22 until March 24, the DESY in Zeuthen near Berlin hosts the meeting of the German speaking TeX users group DANTE.
I travelled yesterday evening with the train to Berlin and then to Zeuthen. The DESY is just a few minutes away from the train station. I stay in the “Seehotel Zeuthen” right at the see. There was an informal gathering at 7pm in the “Ristorante Cafe Peperosa”. Due to my late arrival, and because I travelled in the morning from Triest/Italy to Hamburg before taking the train to Berlin, I did not went there.
The registration started at 8:30, at 9:00 Dr. Johannes Knapp started with an introduction about DESY, its history and current projects, from particle physics and colliders up to photon science.
Uwe Ziegenhagen then made a workshop about using LaTeX and Python together. He provided an introduction to the script language Python, to syntax basics such as strings, lists, dictionaries (key-value pairs) up to flow control and functions.
He considered both directions of integration:
- Generating LaTeX-Code by a Python program
- Using Python within a LaTeX document
He showed practical examples:
- Generating tables based on calculated data, output is LaTeX with booktabs
- Data processing with pandas
- Reading and writing CSV and Excel files
- Using the template engine jinja2
- Automated generation of donation receipts with pandas
All example codes and the presentation slides in German can be downloaded here: https://github.com/UweZiegenhagen/PythonAndLaTeX
Now it’s lunch break. More to see in the afternoon!
Becoming a TUG member becomes easier
Good news for 2017!
Students, seniors and TeX friends from countries with modest economies can become TeX Users Group members for an annual rate of just $15 – for an electronic membership, early bird until March 31, 2017. This means full membership, so the TUGboat journal and TeX software are online available to you, instead of getting it on paper or DVD. Saves money and is good for our environment. 🙂
Join us, plant the flag, elect our president, visit our conferences! If you look for a way to support TeX, that’s a great one!
A regular early electronic membership is $45, hopefully still affordable. Non-electronic late bird 😉 regular membership stays the same as last year.
By joining now, you can directly be part of and support the TUG TeX activities. You know,
- Maintaining and developing the TeX Live distribution, that is also the base of MacTeX
- Yearly international TeX conferences
- The TUGboat journal
- Supporting projects, such as LaTeX3, CTAN, LuaTeX and MetaPost and font creation
Let me know what you think! I love comments here.
It’s all up to us. Want to join in 2017? Link: http://tug.org/join.html
TeXdoc.net updated
The TeX on-line documentation service TeXdoc.net got an update: it’s now based on the newest documentation coming with TeX Live 2016. At this occasion it moved to a new web server.
In the background, TeXdoc.net runs the texdoc application that comes with TeX Live. The front-end runs with Apache on Debian Linux, using the dwoo PHP5 template engine. The content gets updates via a script. Recently, the step to TL ’16 was delayed, as it should happen on the new server.
So, for example, there are the manuals of the brand-new TikZ 3.0.1a and pgfplots 1.14.
You can browse documentation by topics, or simply type into a search field. Auto-completion will offer suggestions:
OpenSearch is supported: when you are on the TeXdoc.net web site, you can add it to your search engines, such as here on Firefox:
You can view documentation on your own computer, just typing texdoc <keyword> on the command line. Just to mention that – an experienced TeX user knows that, while a new user sometimes did not yet use the command line mode.
What is the purpose of TeXdoc.net?
- You can read TeX documentation even without having TeX installed.
- You can access TeX documentation on tablets and mobile phones too, in addition to PCs or laptops.
- Even if an older TeX is installed, you can get the newest documentation on the Web.
- You can read a package manual before you install it.
- The standardized link syntax http://texdoc.net/pkg/<packagename> is easy to remember.
- Forums, such as LaTeX-Community.org and goLaTeX.de have buttons and BBCode tags for linking keywords (package names) to the corresponding documentation – saying RTFM is made easier 😉 of course meant in a friendly way. Whenever you mention a package or want to point to its manual, it’s as easy as a mouse click.
The last point lead to the idea to start this service, adding value and easiness to thousands of forum posts.
TeX Live 2016 released
You may have read the great news on ctan-ann or TeX.tips: this year’s update of TeX Live has been released. It is available on CTAN and via http://tug.org/texlive. What’s new?
- GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) is used for file verification for update security.
- There are a lot of changes in LuaTeX backend.
- pdfTeX and XeTeX got new primitives (fundamental commands).
- MetaFont got experimental Lua integration.
- MetaPost got bug fixes and was prepared for a new major version coming soon.
- Some tools got updates, including the TeX Live Manager aka tlmgr.
It doesn’t sound like a big change, but it comes with updates for a lot of packages compared to last year’s TeX Live 2015.
I thank the TeX Users Group and the TeX Live team for that yearly milestone!
LyX 2.2 released
After two years of work, LyX 2.2.0 has been released. There’s a lot of new features, some of the most important are:
- High resolution display support (aka retina)
- Qt5 support (Qt4 still supported)
- Improved text display: proper kerning and ligatures, higher rendering speed
- Horizontal scrolling for large insets such as tabular and math material, keeping the cursor visible
- Improved control of paragraph breaks: plain separators split consecutive environments, parbreak separators do the same and introduce a blank line in the LaTeX output.
- Improved text color support – 11 new colors: brown, darkgray, gray, lightgray, lime, orange, olive, pink, purple, teal, and violet
- Better handling of boxes and tables
- Faster and better instant preview
- Enhanced source panel, outliner and navigation menu
- Layout and module enhancements
- Support for mathtools commands
- New converters such as for Microsoft’s docx format
For further information and download visit:
- the announcement,
- the list of new features in LyX 2.2,
- the LyX Homepage,
- the download area.
Registering for the DANTE autumn meeting 2015
At http://www.dante.de/events/Herbst2015/anmeldung.html you can now register to the autumn meeting 2015 of DANTE e.V. It takes place on September 5th at the TU Graz. Besides the member’s meeting and the program with talks, there will be an evening gathering the day before, and a tourist program afterwards. Early registering is extremely helpful for the organizers!
The meeting is also open for TeX friends who are not member of DANTE e.V. Participation at the meeting and at the talks is free.
I registered already, and I will fly Sep 4 from Hamburg to Graz and Sep 6 back. If anybody likes to join me, send me an email: I can get up to 2 cheaper tickets for travelling partners, because I work at the airline.
All information regarding place, travel information, and program can be found here.
TUG 2015
I am currently attending the TUG 2015. I met a lot of great people here.
I posted daily reports on
- LaTeX-Community.org (in English)
- TeXwelt.de (in German)
Maybe I will add some rather personal thoughts here too.
TeX Live 2015 pretest is running
The TeX Live mailing list shows increasing traffic: the TeX Live 2015 pretest version is available, and many users already downloaded and tested it.
It contains the LaTeX2e 2015 release, which brought a notable change: the fixes, which were previously available by explicitly loading the fixltx2e package, are now enabled by default. You still can revert to the old behavior: the new latex release package enables you to switch on backwards compatibility to a chosen release date. A small but useful improvement is a new float storage allocation mechanism. By default, LaTeX could handle 18 floats at a time, a higher number would cause an error. Now, you can say \extrafloats{600} to allow 600 more. Under the hood, it improved the support for Unicode engines, and the release uses a new build system.
pdfTeX now supports EXIF metadata in JPEG files.
The shell script fmtutil has been reimplemented in Perl. Now it works with multiple formats at once, and it’s better customizable.
If you would like to download and to test it, note that it’s not yet stable so you may see errors. However, that’s what the test phase is for: you can try it out and report errors or possible improvements to the TeX Live team.
For more information, visit the TeX Live pretest page.
LaTeX Beginner’s Guide available for download today
In agreement with Packt Publishing, I can provide the „LaTeX Beginner’s Guide“ as an ebook for free, only today, March 4, 2015.
For further information and updates and background production story you can visit: LaTeX Community forum announcement.
This is a special thanks to all LaTeX supporters for helping in forums and Q&A sites and personally. I know, our experienced LaTeX supporters don’t need this book, but feel free to get it for curiosity. Your download will prove interest to the publisher, so I could offer them a revised updated edition.
Our LaTeX friends, who may be new in this topic, may benefit. And I thank all for their questions in online forums, because they would not exist without you!
More details, including table of contents and sample chapter: Publisher’s LaTeX book page.
Tell your friends to download a free copy. 🙂
We are always happy to welcome LaTeX friends in the LaTeX Community forum, so it would be great if you would join us in the forum. I will answer any question to the book’s contents there. Experts: our forum also needs your help, perhaps have a look at the unanswered questions. Are you able to answer one, even if it’s older? Orginal poster and later readers would be happy!
TUG 2015 Details
These days, the TUG announced details of the upcoming meeting. You can read all here: https://www.tug.org/tug2015/.
This 36th annual meeting will take place July 20 – 22 in Darmstadt, Germany. It’s about 30 kilometers away from Frankfurt, so I plan to fly from Hamburg, where I live, to Frankfurt, then take the direct bus connection. Since I’m an employee of the Lufthansa airline, I’ll take a standby ticket for a nice rate.
Apropos rate: students can register for 75 Euro (TUG member normal price: 260 Euro) And great news: DANTE members can get 50 Euro discount! More details on the above linked web page.
TeXdoc.net got a new interface
Today, TeXdoc.net shines in new splendor.
It’s a project of Paulo Cereda and me. While I maintain the web server and the TeX installation, he contributes layout and programming for the interface. Today Paulo provided a completely new version. Together we tested and adjusted the code. What was developed on his Fedora laptop, now runs on the Debian web server, adaption went like a clockwork while skyping.
Now, TeXdoc runs on the dwoo PHP5 template engine. Something new for me after OSQA, Django, Joomla, WordPress, phpBBx, having Drupal still on the list.
What is it all about? Well, TeXdoc.net provides an interface to the current TeX documentation, understanding search keywords but also allowing topic browsing. It bases on the texdoc and texdoctk scripts which belong to a TeX Live installation. Via the server, you an access current manuals without having the newest installation or using an tablet like an iPad or a smartphone.
The main motivation was to provide a generic shortcut for web forums. By highlighting a package name, and clicking a button, you can generate a link to the package documentation. Handy while talking. It is integrated for example on LaTeX-Community.org, TeXwelt.de and goLaTeX.de by buttons and markup code but used anywhere people know the link syntax.
Finally, its OpenSearch feature integrates with the quick-search field in browsers such as Firefox.
Matheplanet Award
These days, the voting phase of the Matheplanet Member Award ended. Among the 15 categories, there’s an award for the best LaTeX advisor.
