Archive for the 'TeX' Category

The LaTeX Tutorial

Published on January 29, 2020 in Community and TeX. 0 Comments

primer-1The LaTeX Tutorial — A Primer was published by the Indian TeX Users Group in 2002. The intended audience were the novice users of LaTeX, particularly the students and researchers who’re disgruntled with the wordprocessors (which promise a lot with dismal delivery!). The tutorial has been very popular among this community. However, the book is not without shortcomings by way of typos, errors in the verbatim code listings and lack of a comprehensive index. Since the Indian TeX Users Group is now non-functional, Sayahna Foundation has taken up the publication of this valued documentation and released this second edition.

It is only a pre-release version 1 for the user community to go through the book and suggest further modifications, corrections, etc. Many persons have contributed to this volume, but notable among them is Dr E Krishnan, an ardent free software and math education activist who served as the chief editor of the book.

Apart from fixing all problems including the reported ones, the chapter on boxes has been revised, so also a new chapter on graphics inclusion has been added as the replacement of the very basic original content about the topic in the floats chapter of previous edition. An exhaustive index has also been added.

A release candidate version 2 is also planned which will happen on the last week of February 2020 with two more chapters added (i) how to write a thesis or dissertation using LaTeX and (ii) typesetting documents with Indic scripts with special reference to Malayalam script. Readers are also requested to contribute to this volume if they can.

Download link: http://books.sayahna.org/en/pdf/primer-2.rc1.pdf

Awesome font Packages

Published on August 5, 2019 in Fonts and TeX. 0 Comments

Awesome font Everybody loves the icons provided by Font Awesome since they are pixel perfect, accessibility minded, desktop and web friendly. The free version of the font provides 1,535 icons and pro version provides 7016 icons which encompass almost all facets of human activities for which an icon might be necessitated when a software interface or web page is designed. Such is the variety of themes that were covered. In fact, TeXFolio and Neptune use the free version of awesome fonts for the choice of icons used for the web interfaces.

Almost in tune with the release of awesome fonts, a few packages have also appeared at CTAN, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network, the official repository where TeX software are archived for public consumption. The first among the packages, namely, fontawesome.sty contributed by Xavier Danaux who did the font integration into LaTeX and Dave Gandy who indeed designed the awesome fonts. The package provides easy to use interface to invoke the glyph in a TeX document similar to the one followed in web development.

Second package is fontawesome5.sty by Marcel Kruger which does an identical job as its predecessor with similar interface, but covers all the glyph in the latest version of the font (5.10). The last one is awesomebox.sty by Etienne Deparis. It provides an easy interface to include any of the glyph which can be used in a document to communicate some information like a warning, caveat, additional information, etc., with necessary bells and whistles.  The user can also define newer functions and environments of her choice. In fact, the newer edition of LaTeX Primer of TUGIndia will have this package used to indicate warnings and extra information to the reader. All the packages are available at https://ctan.org/pkg/<pkgname> for free download and usage.

Biblatex 3.0

Published on June 7, 2015 in Biblatex, TeX and TeX4ht. 4 Comments

Biblatex package has undergone a lot of changes as a consequence of its revision to version 3.0. The back-end namely biber (the modern equivalent of BibTeX program) which is needed to exploit all the features of biblatex has also been upgraded to a newer version with changes in the data structure of resultant bibliographic listing file. Both these revisions have broken the functionality of current version of biblatex.4ht of TeX4ht bundle causing panic among biblatex users, particularly, in the humanities world. This page in github issue tracker of biblatex has a long exchange about the current issues. The noteworthy postings in this page are quoted below:

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TeXPortal, a TeX system for Android

Published on May 5, 2015 in Android, Applications and TeX. 10 Comments

If you’re an Android user looking for a complete TEX system in a tablet, here is a glad news waiting for you . An application namely, TEXPortal in combination with TEXpert will make a complete TEX system in your Android tablet or smart phone. TEXPortal is a complete TEXLive distribution ported for Android and TEXpert is a full fledged text editor and integrated development environment within which the user can create, edit, run the compiler, view and debug without leaving it. The user interface is uncluttered, elegantly simple and very easy to use that will put to shame some of the cloud based frameworks that have germinated in the fertile soil of Internet in recent times.
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TLC in ePub format

Published on October 22, 2013 in TeX and The LaTeX Companion. 0 Comments

Frank Mittelbach and Michel Goossens, with Johannes Braams, David Carlisle, and Chris Rowley. The LATEX Companion -– 2nd ed. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-201-36299-6. 2004, Pearson Education, Inc., Boston, MA.

TeX Lion

Courtesey: Paulo Cereda

The 1,200 pages long The LATEX Companion (TLC) is now available in a variety of ebook formats — ePUB, mobi and PDF. To quote Frank Mittelbach:
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TeX4ht and Multicolumn Layout

Published on July 31, 2013 in Multicolumn, TeX and TeX4ht. 2 Comments

Nasser M. Abbassi had filed a feature request at TeX4ht project for multicolumn support in TeX4ht which is lacking at the moment. This link provides the latest specifications of W3C relating to multicolumn layout in HTML which some of the mainstream browsers support in varying degrees. Our initial efforts are pointed towards multicol package so that TeX4ht provides enough hooks to generate output with multicolumn layout as envisaged in LATEX by multicol package. Support for \twocolumn still remains to be done, though.

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Biblatex 2.5

Published on January 16, 2013 in Biblatex, TeX and TeX4ht. 0 Comments

Two updates have already been made for biblatex since we tested compatibility problems of TeX4ht with the package last. This time, except for one change of the string, URL, which was hardwired in previous versions, becoming a localization string, all the remaining changes relate to biber, the bib database processor. None of these have any bearing on TeX4ht. However, a thorough run of all example files in the package bundle has been done and could not find any problems in generating HTML output identical to the PDF counterparts.

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Biblatex 2.3

Published on November 7, 2012 in Biblatex and TeX4ht. 4 Comments

You might have noted that biblatex has been updated to version 2.3 and the documentation documentation says:

If an entry in the revision history states that a feature has been improved or extended, this indicates a modification which either does not affect the syntax and behavior of the package or is syntactically backwards compatible (such as the addition of an optional argument to an existing command). Entries stating that a feature has been modified, renamed, or removed demand attention. They indicate a modification which may require changes to existing styles or documents in some, hopefully rare, cases.

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An Annotated TeX Source

Published on October 23, 2012 in Annotated Source, Lettrine, TeX and TeX4ht. 5 Comments

Mahesh wanted to see the annotated source of the TeX document that generated the output shown here. There are two components in the source:  (1) document source, let us call it as test.tex, (2) a custom configuration for TeX4ht, let us call it as my.cfg.
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TeX4ht Supports Lettrine

Published on September 30, 2012 in Lettrine, TeX and TeX4ht. 6 Comments

Raphaël Pinson has kindly contributed the code that enables TeX4ht to support lettrine package. (lettrine.sty helps to typeset dropped capitals in a LaTeX document.) This probably will solve the long standing problem of drop capital support in TeX4ht, even if all the options of lettrine package are not supported at this time. Hope, Raphaël will continue support to enhance TeX4ht by adding all the missing options of lettrine.

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