Book design with LaTeX

I'm now embarking on a series of blog posts on how I produced the Grid Computing Cluster report with LaTeX for the Malaysian LaTeX User blog. Look for posts tagged with 'bookdesign'.

Nostalgia

I do so, so miss U of Warwick and Coventry sometimes, especially the Cathedral...

Addicted

Y'know, I think I'm actually getting addicted to this blogging stuff with Flock. :)

Flock!

I'm testing out Flock, a "social Web browser" that comes bundled with an blog editor. Mainly because I'm sick of getting disconnected (Baaaad streamyx! Baaaad uni network! Baaad!) halfway through authoring a post. It's supposed to be very Web 2.0 and everything.

I looked at some desktop blogging clients alternatives, but they're either only available for Windows, or they're not free. If most websites and features load alright in Flock I'd probably even ditch Safari altogether.

Accessing Package Documentations

LaTeX package authors are awesome, not only because they develop and maintain so many goodies for the convenience of other LaTeX users (especially those of us who aren't that well-versed with TeX), but also because they fully document the usage of their packages. (Well most of them anyway.)

How do you access these documentations and manuals, though? Do you google (or search on CTAN) and download the manuals every time you want to look up the details of user commands in, say, the glossaries package? Occasionally, though, you may find that the manuals you just downloaded are the wrong versions for the package files installed on your system.

Chances are that the documentations are already installed on your system, when you first installed those packages. They're usually located in $TEXMF/doc/tex/latex, or $TEXMF/doc/bibtex for BibTeX-related packages.

There's an easier way to look up a package's documentation than manually navigating the TEXMF trees, though. In TeXLive (that's probably what you have if you're on a *nix or Mac system), type

$ texdoc glossaries (or whatever package you're interested in)

at the shell prompt. Voíla! The documentation for the glossaries package would open automatically for your perusal.

If the file that appears seem like an example file demonstrating a package's functionalities and not the documentation proper, try

$ texdoc --list glossaries


instead. You'll be presented with an interactive list from which you can select the file you want to open.

MikTeX users on Windows can use the command

mthelp glossaries

at the command prompt or from the "Start → Run" dialog instead. A browser window would open, listing possible documentation files associated with the package name you supplied. Click on a link to view the file you're interested in. And if you trust the system enough to hit upon the "main" documentation file at the first try, use

mthelp --view glossaries

instead.

Malaysian LaTeX Users

I just signed on as an author on the Malaysian LaTeX Users blog! :D

I'm just wondering how long I can keep this stint up though? *Peers at own lonely, lonely blog*

Using .eps Graphics with PDF output

For quite some time now, the graphicx package would automatically sort out which file types to use whenever it encounters \includegraphics{some_file}, where the extension of some_file is not specified.

That is to say, if you are generating to a .dvi, the system would look for some_file.eps. If you are generating to a .pdf, it looks for some_file.{pdf|jpg|png}.

But what if you want a .pdf and you work with .pdf, .jpg and .png graphic files, but suddenly you received a .eps graphics from your collaborator? (This actually happened to a lecturer at my university.)

Well, you could always convert it manually to a .pdf yourself with GhostScript or GIMP, of course. But now the process can be automated if you're using MikTeX 2.8 or TeXLive 2009, as highlighted by Rob Hyndman.

In MikTeX 2.8, use the epstopdf package together with graphicx, like so:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx,epstopdf}
\begin{document}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{some_file}
\end{document}

If all you have is some_file.eps, it will be automatically converted to a some_file-eps-converted-to.pdf during the first time the LaTeX document is compiled and included in the final document output.

If you're using TeXLive 2009, you don't even have to load epstopdf explicitly, but I say include it anyway, for portability's sake.