TeX and LaTeX News

TeXmaker 3.3.3 released

mailrobot@latex-community.org (Stefan Kottwitz) — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 21:22:38 +0000

Today, TeXmaker version 3.3.3 has been released.

Today, TeXmaker version 3.3.3 has been released. Texmaker is a free and cross-platform LaTeX editor, running on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows systems. It is Unicode capable and provides spell checking, auto-completion, code folding, and it comes with a built-in PDF viewer with SyncTeX support and continuous view mode.

New features, from the ChangeLog file:

Now there’s a session management (files, line, bookmarks and “quick compilation” mode are stored and can be restored via the new “session” menu).
After a compilation, the horizontal position in the pdf viewer is restored (if valid), also the zoom factor after a restart.
Now it’s possible to modify a “user tag”.
User tags can now be reordered by dragging items.
For the windows version, poppler-data files and fontconfig configuration have been added.
An US English dictionary has been added.
@electronic has been added to the bibliography items detection.
Several bugs have been fixed.

The complete ChangeLog can be found here. Click here for downloading versions for Linux, Mac OS X or Windows or source files.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

Lucida OpenType available

mailrobot@latex-community.org (Stefan Kottwitz) — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 10:11:05 +0000

Today Karl Berry announced on the texhax mailing list, that the Lucida OpenType font distribution is now available. You can get it from the TeX Users Group (TUG): http://tug.org/lucida provides ordering information together with documents and samples.

News provided by

Lucida is a family of typefaces which has been designed by Bigelow & Holmes. It includes many variants, such as serif, sans serif, scripts, and monospaced. It has been extended to contain a full set of TeX mathematical symbols. Very few fonts support both text and math typesetting, which means Lucida is very exceptional.

Since a long time, there’s been a Type 1 (PostScript) version of Lucida, which supports only 8-bit character sets. This version will not be developed further. But the OpenType version will be maintained and developed. Lucida OpenType even provides a bold math variant.

The Lucida fonts are not redistributable, they can be ordered from TUG with a discount for TUG members.

For further information, have a look at

the announcement of Karl Berry
Lucida information and ordering page at tug.org
“Another incarnation of Lucida: Towards Lucida OpenType” by Ulrik Vieth and Mojca Miklavec, published in TUGboat, Volume 32 (2011), No. 2
“Notes on Lucida designs” by Charles Bigelow

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

LaTeX3 News Issue 07 released

mailrobot@latex-community.org (Stefan_K) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 15:04:40 +0000

The LaTeX3 News Issue 07 has been released today. Some of the topics:

Joseph Wright has been working on adding "native" drivers for LaTeX3 to support box transformations such as rotation, clipping and scaling with dvips and xdvipdfmx drivers, and with direct PDF output.
Bruno Le Floch has developed a TeX-based regex (regular expression) engine, which works with pdfTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX.
The xparse module has been overhauled and became more efficient.
Work on the galley module continues. The galley module is for managing the vertical area into which text and other content is placed.

Fancy tables with TikZ

mailrobot@latex-community.org (Sven) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 07:50:10 +0000

Stefan has created a nice short article of how to render nice looking tables with round corners with LaTeX using TikZ. The article has been published on his TeXblog.

Generation of Timing Diagrams

mailrobot@latex-community.org (Sven) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 07:19:22 +0000

Martin Scharrer has released version 0.3b of his tikz-timing package. The package provides macros and an environment to generate timing diagrams (digital waveforms). The TikZ (pgf) package is used to produce the graphics.

The diagrams may be inserted into text (paragraphs, \hbox, etc.) and into tikzpictures. A tabular-like environment is provided to produce larger timing diagrams.

Write Letters, Facsimiles, and Memos

mailrobot@latex-community.org (Sven) — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 12:22:13 +0000

Paul Thompson has released version 9.4 of his newlfm class. The new version fixes several bugs and introduces some new features. The newlfm document class integrates the letter class with fancyhdr and geometry to automatically make letterhead stationery.

The class is useful for writing letters, fax, and memos. One can set up an address book using ‘wrapper’ macros: All the information for a person is put into a wrapper and the wrapper is then put into a document. The class handles letterheads automatically. The object for the letterhead (picture, information, etc.) is placed in a box and all sizing is set automatically.

Automated LaTeX Document Generation

mailrobot@latex-community.org (Sven) — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 12:17:35 +0000

John Collins has released version 4.05 of his latexmk script. The new version fixes several bugs. Latexmk completely automates the process of generating a LaTeX document. Given the source files for a document, latexmk issues the appropriate sequence of commands to generate a DVI, PS, PDF or hardcopy version of the document.
An important feature is the “preview continuous mode”, where the script watches all of the source files (primary file and included TeX and graphics files), and reruns LaTeX, etc., whenever a source file has changed. Thus a previewer can have an updated display whenever the source files change.

Update Script for MiKTeX

mailrobot@latex-community.org (Sven) — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 12:24:29 +0000

Josef Kleber has released version 1.3 of his update script for MiKTeX. Besides some bug fixes the new version supports the specification of a rsync-server URL. The miktex_update script offers automatic updating and/or installing of new packages of an existing MiKTeX installation.

The script supports the direct connection to an online repository of the MiKTeX server network, as well as synchronizing a local repository (CTAN) with following update. In the end you should have an up-to-date and complete MiKTeX installation.

The script requires a bash/cygwin environment on Windows.

WinEdt 7 released

mailrobot@latex-community.org (Stefan Kottwitz) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:44:13 +0000

WinEdt version 7 has been released. WinEdt is a feature-rich LaTeX editor running on Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8, on 32-bit and 64-bit systems. It is published as shareware.

News provided by

The new version is unicode-capable, and it works with current TeX versions such as TeX Live 2011 and MiKTeX 2.9.

For more information and free download visit

the WinEdt home page,
the WinEdt news page
or download WinEdt 7 from the WinEdt site.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

LaTeX-Community.org has a new maintainer

mailrobot@latex-community.org (Stefan Kottwitz) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:08:15 +0000

The web site and forum LaTeX-Community.org has moved to a new server, and I am maintaining it now. Many thanks go to Sven, who founded the forum in 2007, and administered it until now.

Today, the forum contains about 56.000 posts in 15.000 topics written by more than 8.000 users. That's a large amount of information. I plan to improve the accessibility of this knowledge base, supported by new features. First additions have already been implemented, such as

See you in the forum!

Stefan

TeX and LaTeX News

TeXmaker 3.3.3 released

Lucida OpenType available

News provided by

LaTeX3 News Issue 07 released

Fancy tables with TikZ

Generation of Timing Diagrams

Links

Write Letters, Facsimiles, and Memos

Links

Automated LaTeX Document Generation

Links

Update Script for MiKTeX

Links

WinEdt 7 released

News provided by

LaTeX-Community.org has a new maintainer