Upcoming LaTeX Talk

ｷｬ━━━━(ﾟ∀ﾟ)━━━━!! MOSC2011 has posted about my upcoming L^aT_eX talk!

I make e-books as a pastime

Whenever I get really, really bored, is unmotivated to do “real” work but still itching to touch a computer but not in the mood for games… I re-visit good articles I came across on the Web, and typeset them with L^aT_eX to make my own PDF e-books.

(Yes, I’m weird, I know.)

And I’m putting the e-books online, if only to fill out my Website.

Now all I’m missing is an iPad to read them on!

LaTeX Introductory Workshop at MMU

I gave an introductory workshop to L^aT_eX at the Multimedia University (Cyberjaya campus) today, on my co-supervisor's invitation. Anyone who's interested in the materials can download them from the workshop webpage, including the slides, worksheet, sample code for the exercises, installation guide for MiKTeX in Windows.

We had 19 participants, and while it wasn't full capacity, I'm still thankful for that number because 1. it still took up a fair bit of the lab space, and 2. that's just about the number I can handle, because this was a hands-on workshop, so people were raising their hands left and right with questions, debugging errors, etc. We even had 4 participants who came all the way from the Malacca campus! Wow, thank you!

Overall feedback was quite positive, which is good. I'm of the opinion of the more people show aptitude, experience (however meagre) and interest in using L^aT_eX, the more willing conference organisers and journal publishers will be to accept L^aT_eX submissions.

(YES, I'm talking about you, M'sian conference organising secretariat, sir/madam. Please stop insisting on "Word submissions only" because 2 out of my 3 Word submissions have been mangled in a bad way in the final proceedings!)

Paycheck!

I'd just received my payment for developing a LaTeX template for the Journal of Advanced Computing and Applications published by the School of Computer Science, USM.

TeX Live 2009 (and MacTeX 2009) is here!

TeX Live 2009 has been released!!! *Squeeeee!*

I'm downloading MacTeX now. Except that, considering Malaysia's slow internet speed (even with broadband), I'm actually getting BasicTeX and upgrading the packages with TeXLive Manager after that.

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'.

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.

Book Printed — Finally

Early this year I was asked to help compile a technical report/book for a grid computing research project that I'm involved in. Essentially it's a group of researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds (grid computing, medical imaging, animation, mathematics, natural language processing, software engineering, networking, ...) coming together to "grid-enable" their own existing applications so that the apps run faster etc.

"But not too technical, so that even lay-people can understand what we're doing. Make it look as professional as possible," I was told.

Look professional? Gee, great excuse for me to run wild with LaTeX. Whether it was the right decision might be debatable, and I haven't solved all issues to perfection (e.g. CMYK colour model with "true black")... but we managed it!

Book's Printed and Published!!

@BOOK{GridATUSM:Report,
  title = {Grid Computing Cluster:
           The Development and Integration of
           Grid Services and Applications},
  publisher = {Platform for Information
               Communication Technology Research,
               Universiti Sains Malaysia},
  year = {2009},
  editor = {Bahari Belaton and Lim, Lian Tze},
  address = {Penang, Malaysia},
  isbn = {978-983-3986-58-3},
}

Chasing after the chapter write-ups. Playing with design ideas. Lots and lots of experimenting with the memoir, tikz and various other packages. Searching for free stock photos. Adjusting the various margins and skips and spacing so that each chapter fill up each page just right. Writing to and calling the National Library to get an ISBN number and CIP data. Hiccups along the way due to requests in design changes, mismatches with the printing company's technical specs etc...

And finally all is done. We have now 200 copies of the thing. Not for sale (which would've been a nightmare with the royalties, we're not that gung-ho yet... maybe the next one. If there's a next time.) but for distribution.

Great, great thanks to the team members (principle investigators and research officers) for the write-ups, Pn Norliza for the proof-reading, Mr Tan for pointing us in the right directions every now and then, Hooi Leng for handling the liaising and PO procedures with the printing company. Couldn't have done any of this without any of you.

Use LaTeX — Or Don't Bother to Format Your Manuscripts

Read it here yourself: http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/55780/

Farewell Eitan

Eitan Gurari, the author of TeX4ht — the best LaTeX to HTML/OO.o/etc conversion system that I've come across — has died. :-(

He was a most helpful soul on comp.text.tex . RIP Eitan.


(Yes yes yes, no tribute to MJ and yet one for Eitan, I'm a geek, yes.)

ISBN to BibTeX Converter

Kenjutsu posted about an ISBN to BibTeX converter in comp.text.tex. Given an ISBN e.g. 0471976970, it returns:


@book{0471976970,
Author = {D. Grune and H. Bal and C. Jacobs and K. Langendoen},
Title = {Modern Compiler Design},
Publisher = {Wiley},
Year = {2000},
ISBN = {0471976970},
URL = {http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Compiler-Design-D-Grune/dp/0471976970%3FSubscriptionId%3D0JYN1NVW651KCA56C102%26tag%3Dws%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0471976970}
}


The author of the converter stated that he's obliged to include the link to Amazon to comply with the terms and conditions for using Amazon's Web Service API to generate the information.

The converter accepts both 10- and 13-digit ISBNs, but doesn't seem to be able to recognise books with editors instead of authors (you know, a collection of articles). Still, it can be useful.

C'mon, Tajel!

Awwww c'mon, Tajel! LaTeX has lots of goodies for the Humanities, too!

Attack of the LaTeX Typesetting Job Windfall

Well since it was a windfall I probably shouldn't call it an "attack" – but as we raced towards the end and with other stuff happening, it felt like it.

It was nearing mid-afternoon on Sunday and I was in the middle of downloading the latest versions of Apache Tomcat and PostgreSQL so that I could install my project system on Windoze, when I received an SMS from a USM PhD candidate. His conference paper was selected to be published in a Springer journal, but the catch was that it must be in LaTeX. He tried to learn it that morning (I greatly admire his courage), but gave up by afternoon. As it was a tight deadline he decided to offer me a bounty to do the job.

I'm always up for a LaTeX fix (it's the high I'm after not the $$, get that straight! ) so I said Yes. When's the deadline though? I was hoping that I could finish dealing with the ScienceFund project presentations first.

Tuesday, came the reply.

Yikes.

I decided that I still needed my LaTeX fix. Besides, this was my first paid LaTeX assignment! (Did I mention that it's the high I'm after and not the $$?)

The LaTeXing itself wasn't too difficult, although the conference organiser's failure to post the correct version of style files to be used made it a bit frustrating. We were told to go hunt the correct version down at the Springer website instead. Also a couple of not-so-trivial table formatting, but luckily the trusty LaTeX Companion book was ever helpful. In the end what proved to be my downfall were typos. With the deadline fast approaching we went absolutely frantic with the to-and-fro e-mailing and SMS-ing. These keep turning up till 11.59pm on Monday night, when I just couldn't hold my eyes open nor my head up anymore, and had to call it a night. Luckily my client didn't come across any more typos after that, and he submitted the paper in the morning.

(I'm really sorry about all those typos, J!)

In hindsight I probably charged a bit too low for so much effort, especially with my tight deadline and packed schedule at the time. I guess I should consider it as a First Client Discount though.

So if you have any LaTeX typesetting job (for a fee), why not try dropping me a line? It'd help a lot if you also attach existing text in soft copy (Word etc) if any, as well as information about the formatting or style guidelines required. A link to the conference organiser's or journal publisher's web page providing such info should do. A comfortable timeline for both you and me would be one week at least, so that we'd have time to review the outputs. Anything shorter than that and I'd either have to turn down the job or charge extra.

Please note that I will not typeset your thesis for you, though. I'd be happy to offer advice and answer questions on how to use the USM thesis template, or even design your university's template for you (price negotiable), but not typesetting your thesis itself.

And remember – I do things like this for the fun of LaTeXing, not for the money! Me, crazy? Sure, why'd you think I name this blog what it is now?

Well cheers, folks!

New USM Thesis LaTeX Class Files

I just uploaded the new USM Thesis LaTeX class files (usmthesis 1.2) at http://liantze.googlepages.com/latextypesetting#usmthesis, to be compatible with the new thesis guidelines effective from Dec 16 2007 onwards.

Major changes:

• Body font is now Times Roman for serif type, Helvetica for sans serif type, and TX Typewriter for typewriter font.
• Bottom page margin increased to 4.0cm.
• Page number now placed 1.0cm from bottom edge of paper.
• All text on title page are now in bold.
• Title of bibliography/references is now "REFERENCES".
• Introduced new "plate" float and "List of Plates".
• List of Publications is now moved to after appendices.
• Re-formatting of the table of contents:
• all text are unformatted (chapter headings are neither in bold nor using larger font size
• otted leader between titles and page number
• larger separation between (sub)section numbers and titles to resemble the sample in the guidelines more closely
• Fixed bug in definition of \chapter to honour short title in \chapter[short title]{full title}

Enjoy!

(p/s I've yet to blog about our recent participation in the 11th International Conference on Translation in KL... I wonder if I'll ever get round to it?)

Generating JPGs and PNGs from Tikz/PGF

Gem of a post found at Nabble.com:

Re: Generating PNG or JPG ?

by Kjell Magne Fauske Mar 23, 2007; 02:47am

On 3/22/07, Hari Sundar wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Is it possible to generate images from tikz code ? I would like to put these
> images on a webpage and was wondering if there is an automatic way of
> generating the images rather than taking screenshots.
>

Sure, I do it every time I update the gallery I maintain at
http://www.fauskes.net/pgftikzexamples/

My approach is to use Ghostscript. Lets say I have a tex file named
figure.tex The work flow is approximately like this:

> pdflatex figure.tex

I then run ghostscript on the generated file figure.pdf to generate a PNG:

> gs -dNOPAUSE -r400 -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -sDEVICE=png16m -sOutputFile=figure.png -dBATCH figure.pdf

(On Windows the command is gswin32c. )

>From the resulting PNG file I generate a jpg thumbnail.

To crop the figures I use a package called preview[1]. The package
provides several ways of previewing parts of your document. For
example, adding this to your document preamble:

\usepackage[active,tightpage]{preview}
\PreviewEnvironment{tikzpicture}

will extract every tikzpicture environment. If you use pdflatex, every
tikzpicture will be put on a separate page in the resulting pdf
document. To add a margin around the figure add:

\setlength\PreviewBorder{10pt}%

[1] http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/preview.html


Regards,
Kjell Magne Fauske

People are downloading my stuff!

OMIGOSH, people are actually starting to download my LaTeX scribblings! *tears of joy*

That people wanted the workshop slides are expected; anyway the colloquium committee put up a copy at their website too. Surprisingly the LaTeX installation walkthrough for Windows is the most sought-after file now! And the Absolute Beginner short guide! And the USMthesis style files!!

w00t!!

LaTeX Workshop Delivered

I'm still catching my breath after giving the LaTeX workshop on Tuesday (26th June). Talked non-stop for 1 hour 20 minutes and I still had several things I couldn't cover in time, especially demonstrating on-the-spot how an ACM conference paper can be produced from a default article document class, and show a few pages from the USMthesis package, etc.

The audience (20~30 people including both lecturers and postgrad students) seems to have liked the talk, and although I don't have any proper feedback data, here are some comments passed to me after the talk:

• people have heard of LaTeX before, but have no idea how it's used.
• people have heard of the wonderful "beautiful" outputs of LaTeX, but until I showed them a side-by-side comparison of output from LaTeX and Word, they had no idea what kind of "beautiful" output people meant.
• people wanted to try LaTeX before, but didn't know what to install.
• although I told them that some features like auto-generation of table of contents are also available in Word, people actually told me that they know about the feature in Word but "it's too hard to use", whereas in LaTeX one line of code will definitely get it done.

The fact that the Colloquium programme book was created with LaTeX (I helped the committee to do it within 2 days) helped convinced the audience with physical proof of what LaTeX can do...

Maybe within the next week or two, I'll get more comments and feedback via e-mail, or something. But at least now I've managed to raise some interest here...

Vector Graphics Application with LaTeX PGF/Tikz

I simply must blog this before I go off for a meeting. Nicola Talbot has written a vector graphics program, JpgfDrawing, that can export to LaTeX code that renders the graphics using the Tikz/PGF package. PGF is used in the Beamer package, and I played with Tikz while preparing for the LaTeX workshop. It's the best drawing package for use with pdflatex I've encountered so far. (I'm not a fan of PS files, so I don't use PSTricks much, sorry.)