Software

Here is a summary of my developmental activities relating to my humble contribution to free/libre software.

Packages

Here is a listing of my packages and those developed jointly with my collaborators like Han The Thanh, Rajagopal, Karl Berry and Ross Moore.  Most of these package are available at CTAN, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network where contributed packages and libraries are deposited for global distribution among user community. Hence they form part of  TeXLive, the standardized TeX software distribution released every year by the TeX Users Group.

The licenses of these packages are LATEX Project Public License (LPPL) or compatible free software license for free download and usage with freedom to copy, modify and distribute. As such, users can freely download and make use of them at their will.

• pdfscreen: My first package that was publicly released (originally developed for the University of Auckland for online delivery of lecture notes to students. The university allowed me to make the package freely available to public). Available for download at CTAN. (First release: 1999-03-08)
• pdfslide: Helps to make PDF presentations with heavy math content. Available for download at CTAN. (First release: 1999-10-13)
• pdftricks: PSTricks package does not support processing with pdfTeX. This package helps to process any TeX document with PSTricks figures using pdfTeX. Available for download at CTAN. (First release: 2001-02-13)
• bibcheck: Helps to identify uncited bibliographic item in a bibliographic list however long the list might be. Available for download at CTAN.  (First release: 2003-07-13)
• rvwrite: Helps to overcome TeX’s limitation of writing out to 16 files. Using this package, one can make TeX to write out any number of output streams. Available for downloat at CTAN. (First release: 2010-08-28)
• pdfpagediff: Suppose you have two PDF files which are supposed to be identical, but have a suspicion that there is a minute difference, e.g. one word has been hyphenated.  This TeX package that will help find that change by simply superimposing pairs of pages, allowing for a quick visual check. More details and download here. (First release: 2010-09-01)
• pdfdraftcopy: Helps to include strings like DRAFT or watermarks on a pdf document generated with pdfTeX. Available for download here.
• grid: The pack­age helps to en­ables grid type­set­ting in dou­ble col­umn doc­u­ments. Grid type­set­ting (ver­ti­cal align­ing of lines of text in ad­ja­cent columns) is a dif­fi­cult task in LATEX, and the present pack­age is no more than an at­tempt to help users to achieve it in a lim­ited way. Available for download at CTAN. (First release: 2009-06-16)
• parano: Optionally enables automatic paragraph numbering in LATEX documents which is not trivial as it might appear. Available for download here.
• table: Helps to make tables with captions spanning to the exact width of tabular, landscape table as a float along with text in portrait mode, and related bells and whistles. Available for download here.
• pdfx: The pack­age helps LATEX users to cre­ate PDF/X and PDF/A com­pli­ant pdf doc­u­ments with pdfTeX thereby  avoiding the usage of proprietary software like Adobe Acrobat Professional. Available for download at CTAN. (First release: 2008-12-04)

Maintenance

• tex4ht: A con­verter from TeX and LATEX to SGML/XML-based for­mats such as (X)HTML, MathML, OpenDoc­u­ment, and DocBook, pro­vid­ing a con­fig­urable (La)TeX-based au­thor­ing sys­tem for hy­per­text. Has been maintaining it along with Karl Berry of TeX Users Group. A few blog posts describing the functionality of TeX4ht are available here. The project home is here. I took up maintenance when its author, Eitan Gurari suddenly passed away on Monday, June 22, 2009.
• nomenclature: Pro­duces lists of sym­bols us­ing the ca­pa­bil­i­ties of the MakeIn­dex pro­gram.

Documentation

• LATEX Primer: LATEX tutorial for beginners. Available for download here. (First release: 2003-09-14)
• PSTricks Tutorial: Online documentation of PSTricks graphics package. Available for download here. (First release: 2003-09-14)

Software Projects Under Development

The development of software of these projects are still going on and not yet ready for public release. However, links to the codebase will be made available as soon as a working version is ready.

• ltx-stm: A general document formatting package that is most appropriate for STM content. It works with more recent LATEX kernel (now codenamed as expl3) and generates a variety of outputs like screen version pdf, print version pdf, HTML5 and MediaWiki formats from the same source with a change of class loading option alone.
• epub/pdf for Malayalam: Packages and framework to generate ePub and PDF format outputs from LATEX sources of Malayalam documents encoded in UTF-8.
• Pine: This is still an experimental framework and a document processing system in the cloud that makes use of MediaWiki and its resources. A few freely available plugins of MediaWiki, most notable among them being WorkingWiki, have been used to make the job easier in the cloud. As you can imagine, it is in the alpha phase and is now open to the public only as a proof of concept. If you are an author writing scientific articles with a lot of mathematical content, and you mark up your document with LATEX, then this is a place where you can collaboratively write, edit, typeset, generate PDF, HTML + MathML versions, control different versions of your document, discuss with your collaborators and publish your article when ready.