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TeXample.net weblog: Volunteers wanted for maintaining the TikZ examples gallery

by Kjell Magne Fauske

More than three years ago I created the PGF and TikZ examples gallery. Thanks to fantastic contributions from TikZ users from all over the world, the gallery now has more than thousand visits each day. The traffic to TeXample.net is increasing every month and I receive more and more ...

Tanovski & Partners: BibTeX output to XML

Publishing online BibTeX references is not just matter of converting a .bib file to XML/HTML. If there is a print (PDF) edition, two very important items should be the same in both print and online versions: same entries same sorting Further editing of the online references includes for example abreviation of the author/editor names inclundig and formatting the needed fields The publisher’s demands [...]

TeXblog: WinEdt 6 available

Version 6.0 of the powerful LaTeX editor WinEdt has been released. Its interface has been improved but some awaited features like folding and unicode support will come later with version 6.1.

Some TeX Developments: WinEdt version 6

WinEdt is a popular (La)TeX editor on Windows. A new major release, version 6, has just appeared on the WinEdt homepage. The interface has received a lot of attention, with new icons and menu arrangements. One thing that a lot of people have been hoping for is UTF-8 support, but the release notes say Avoid sending [...]

Malaysian LaTeX User Group: Introductory Workshop to LaTeX at MMU Cyberjaya

I conducted an Introductory Workshop to LaTeX at MMU (Cyberjaya Campus) yesterday (8 March). If anyone's interested, the workshop materials (slides, worksheet, sample code, MiKTeX installation guide) are available here.

Some TeX Developments: biblatex: numbered citations as footnotes

Most chemistry journals use numbered citation styles, with all of the references appearing at the end of the article in a References section. However, there are some that place the references at the bottom of the page they occur on, as footnotes. This is a bit more awkward to achieve than a simple section, but [...]

Malaysian LaTeX User Group: Bibtex2html and Springerlink BibTeX converter

I found out these useful tools:

BibTeX2HTML : http://www.lri.fr/~filliatr/bibtex2html/doc/

Springerlink BibTeX converter; http://www.cs.usyd.edu.au/~niu/cgi-bin/springer.cgi

...and I wonder why on earth Springerlink did not put their BibTeX export format by default...? IEEE and ACM did that!

UK-TUG: Baskerville Volume 10, Number 2

UK-TUG recently posted the latest edition of Baskerville to members. This is available to everyone in electronic format: download the PDF. New articles are always welcome: please contact the editor with ideas!

Malaysian LaTeX User Group: Latest version of geometry.sty breaks beamer

So if you updated all your packages in one go and finds that your beamer presentations don't compile anymore, this is why. Don't panic though (42), there's a workaround: put the following line before \documentclass{beamer}:

\makeatletter\let\ifGm@compatii\relax\makeatother
\documentclass{beamer}

Read this post for more information.

Rob J Hyndman: Research tips: LaTeX error in beamer

There is a clash between the current versions of the geometry package and the beamer class. So if you update all your packages and try to process a beamer document you will get the following error. ! Undefined control sequence. \Gm@lmargin ->\Geom@lmargin This is due to a new version of geometry (v5.0). Until the geometry package developers fix the [...]

Some TeX Developments: Building biblatex-biber (again)

I recently posted some information on building biblatex-biber. Since then, v0.5 of biblatex-biber has appeared and there are some positive changes. The code now creates its own file to grab the required Perl modules. So on Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) and Ubuntu (9.10) all I needed to do after downloading the source was perl Build.PL sudo [...]

Random Determinism: Reading files off the web

For some time now, ConTeXt can read files directly off the web. So, you can say \starttext \component {https://docs.google.com/MiscCommands?command=saveasdoc&docID=0AbXLuM4SVI8PZGc2Y2QzamhfOWNzM3Z3aGM5&exportFormat=txt} \stoptext process it with context. ConTeXt will figure out the file name is a url, use curl to download it and read the downloaded file. On subsequent run, ConTeXt just checks if a file with the same name exists, and [...]

Some TeX Developments: Royal Society of Chemsitry TeX Template

A while ago I talked about the variation between different chemistry publishers in their LaTeX support. Looking for something on the Royal Society of Chemistry site today I find that the people at Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics have created an updated template for TeX users. I’d say that is good news: remember of course that [...]

TeXblog: WinShell 3.31 released

After the beta release of 3.31 in October 2009 the actual Version 3.31 of the TeX/LaTeX-IDE WinShell has been released by Ingo H. de Boer yesterday.

Malaysian LaTeX User Group: New Malaysian CTAN Mirror!

There is now finally a Malaysian CTAN mirror server at ftp://mirror.upm.edu.my/ctan/! Oh joy oh joy! Hopefully now all downloads and updates will be a breeze (M'sian network latency being what it is :p) (oh ye of little faith liantze, baaad girl!)

It's already showed up in MikTeX's mirror list. For TeXLive users, just point your repository to ftp://mirror.upm.edu.my/ctan/systems/texlive/tlnet/.

Some TeX Developments: EuroTeX 2009 Proceedings

In my post box a few days ago was the proceedings of the EuroTeX 2009 conference (TUGBoat 30:3, which I get as a joint member of TUG and UK-TUG). Quite a few of the articles are about ConTeXt, not surprising as the 3rd ConTeXt meeting took place in parallel to EuroTeX. The highlights will [...]

TeXblog: TeXShop 2.31 released

Today version 2.31 of TeXShop has been released. TeXShop is a free and open source TeX editor and previewer for Mac OS X written by Richard Koch. The new version requires at least System 10.4 (Tiger) but System 10.5 (Leopard) is strongly recommended.

TeXblog: Neue Version des Geometry-Paketes

Hideo Umeki hat die Version 5.1 des Paketes geometry veröffentlicht. Während 5.1 nur eine Fehlerbereinigung für die pass-Option enthält, bringt die Version 5, wenige Tage zuvor am 12. Februar veröffentlicht, etliche neue und sehr nützliche Features

TeXblog: Geometry package updated

Hideo Umeki has published the version 5.1 of the geometry package. 5.1 brings just a bugfix for the pass option, but the version 5, released a few days earlier on Feb 12th, provides some new and very useful features.

Malaysian LaTeX User Group: CMYK Output for Printing Prepress

This is the 6th and real last post in the bookdesign series. Previous posts in this series:

Happy Chinese New Year! Well traditionally CNY is celebrated up till the 15th day, so this isn't a belated greeting. ;-)

I thought my post on the front and back covers (+ISBN bar codes) was the last thing I wanted to document in the bookdesign series, but I just realised that I'd still yet to talk about producing a CMYK version if your printer is using a offset-printing process.

You can read about the CMYK colour model and how it it's different from RGB. In a nutshell, RGB is for on-screen viewing and is more vibrant, CMYK is for commercial printing and seems more "dull". Check with your printing service if they're using (on-demand) laser printing or offset-printing to print your material; it may depend on the type of printing stock (i.e. the paper) you choose.

If laser printing is used, RGB is fine, and you can hand over your pdflatex-generated file over as it is. However if offset-printing is to be used, you'll need to produce your PDF in CMYK colour model instead. Your printing service might be willing to do the conversion for you at their end; but I think it's more efficient to do this yourself as you'll have more control over the final PDF. It'll also give you a more accurate idea of how your design will look in print, so you'll have a chance of selecting your colours.

Convert all graphics files to CMYK

Any graphic files that you include (via \includegraphics, for example) must be converted to CMYK. If you have imagemagick, the quick way is

convert image_RGB.jpg -colorspace CMYK image_CMYK.jpg

But I've been told that the resulting PDF, when loaded into other applications e.g. Illustrator, contains the "wrong" colours. For more accurate results, you'll need to use colour profiles as discussed here.

Invoke xcolor CMYK mode

By default, the xcolor package uses the RGB colour model. To invoke CMYK mode:

\usepackage[cmyk, ...other options...]{xcolor}

And then there's the issue of different kinds of black. If your design contains large areas of black, and particularly if it involves light-coloured text (e.g. white) on a black background, the RGB black directly converted to CMYK would have values of C: 100% M: 100% Y: 100% K: 100% (over-saturated rich black). You then run high risks of getting unwanted "shadows" if the four colours print out of registration, as shown in the sample on the right from this excellent article:

Now the cmyk mode of the xcolor package automatically redefines the colour black to C: 0% M: 0% Y: 0% K: 100%, i.e. flat or standard black. Flat black can look rather "washed-out", so you might want to define a different shade of black, especially for large areas of black. Check with your printing service for further advice. E.g. our printer recommended to use a "cool black" C: 30% M: 0% Y: 0% K: 100% for the covers of our Grid Computing Cluster book. Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to do it previously, but now I do:

\usepackage[cmyk, ...other options...]{xcolor}

%% cmyk values have range [0,1]
\definecolor{CoolBlack}{cmyk}{.3,0,0,1}

%% In case you want to redefine the basic black
%% (0,0,0,1) across the board. Check with your
%% printer if this is advisable!!
\definecolor{black}{cmyk}{.4,.3,.3,1}

%% Force the new black into effect, because
%% xcolor issues \color{black} with the old
%% black before all its initialisations.
\color{black}

In other words, you should always liaise with your printing service concerning the technical specs. You'll thank them for their expert advice, and you'll learn a lot about graphics design and the printing process as well.

OK that's it! That's truly the last of the bookdesign series. I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I did.

TeXblog: KOMA-Script 3.05 released

On Feb 15th the Version 3.05 of KOMA-Script has been released by Markus Kohm containing improvements in scrlttr2, scrhack and tocbasic.

Nico Schlömer: matplotlib to TikZ converter

Hi all,

development for a translator from matplotlib to the TikZ-based pgfplots has started at

http://github.com/nicki/matplotlib2tikz

As of now, the script is still rather simplistic, but can already deal with line plots, images, subplots, and color bars. Adding new functionality should not be overly complicated.

Some TeX Developments: biblatex reaches v0.9

A couple of days ago biblatex v0.9 appeared on CTAN. As usual, there is a long list of changes, bug fixes and so on. The restrictions on inclusion in TeX distributions have been lifted, and so it’s already available in TeX Live. At the same time, biblatex-biber has been uploaded to CTAN, so hopefully ready [...]

Rob J Hyndman: Research tips: Using Google Reader

Google Reader is a fantastic way to keep track of new papers that are appearing in many different journals, and also to follow some of the interesting research blogs (and blogs on other topics) that are out there. Google Reader checks websites for you and lets you know of any new material that appears. Instead of [...]

Rob J Hyndman: Research tips: Top four LaTeX mistakes

There is a nice post today by John Cook on the top four LaTeX mistakes. I see these all the time in draft papers by my students and co-authors.

Some TeX Developments: TeXworks experimental build 567

I see on the TeXworks mailing list that Jonathan Kew has posted new builds of the ‘bleeding edge’ experimental code. For those of us who use them (and find them pretty stable) this will add a number of refinements, from the look of the change log.

LaTeX for Humans: Arabic Transliteration Systems

For a student starting out in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, the different transliterations systems for Arabic can be bewildering. Academics in different countries follow special conventions to represent Arabic letters in the Latin alphabet, so it can take a while to get used to all these systems. To be honest, they can still be confusing to [...]

Random Determinism: Optimized TeX macros

TeX is a strange programing language, and it reflects in the manner in which TeX macros are optimized. I find the following macro from core-env.mki(i|v) really ammusing. % handy for mp \def\booleanmodevalue#1% can be \relax {\expandafter\ifx\csname\@mode@#1\endcsname\relax fals% \else\ifnum0\csname\@mode@#1\endcsname=0 fals% \else tru% [...]

UK-TUG: BachoTeX 2010: Call for papers

This dropped into the UK-TUG inbox earlier today Dear TeXies, programmers, typographers – TeX friends and lovers of fine typography, This is the call for papers and invitation for BachoTeX 2010, the XVIIIth Polish TeX users Group conference. As usual, it will be held at the traditional TeXies’ and GUST meeting place, Bachotek near Brodnica, in the [...]

TeXblog: Texmaker 1.9.9 released

The version 1.9.9 of the free LaTeX editor Texmaker has been released yesterday.

Some TeX Developments: siunitx version 2.0: alpha 1

I’ve been working on siunitx version 2, getting the code to the point where I’d hope it works for most things that the current release does. Over the last couple of weeks I hope I’ve sorted out the table issues which tend to be a problem in version 1, plus “mopped up” a few outstanding [...]

Some TeX Developments: Real life pgfplots examples

I’ve just sent a draft to TUGBoat for an article about pgfplots. As many readers will know, pgfplots is built on pgf/Tikz, which means that it can be used for both DVI and PDF output, and with plain TeX, LaTeX and ConTeXt. In my draft, I’ve used some real life plots (from a couple of [...]

Some TeX Developments: LaTeX Books online

I was looking something up today, and quite by accident found that Safari Books Online has both the Guide to LaTeX and The LaTeX Companion available. Unfortunately, the subscription costs mean that for individuals the price is far too high, compared to buying the printed versions. However, I also found that my employers (UEA) have [...]

Jeff Hein: tikz-3dplot: Ex Por tikz-3dplot

The tikz-3dplot package has officially been born, and submitted to CTAN. Since I can foresee more work on this package in the future, I have decided to create a standalone blog dedicated to its development. From now on, all tikz-3dplot updates will be posted at http://tikz3dplot.wordpress.com/. If you follow this blog for updates of [...]

Jeff Hein: tikz-3dplot: In Vas tikz-3dplot

For some time, I have developed the tikz-3dplot package, a LaTeX package which implements TikZ/PGF to render three-dimensional vector-based graphics in TikZ. Recently, this package was submitted to CTAN, where other LaTeX users can easily access it and learn how to contact me to provide feedback. Up until now, the package development was [...]

LaTeX for Humans: Giving Better Presentations

I also posted this on my other blog. Last Sunday I went along to Presentation Camp London where I spent the day learning about how to improve my presentation skills. Two particularly useful talks were given by Mike K Smith and Chris Atherton. Giving Technical Presentations When presenting a complex topic, such as your academic research, Mike Smith emphasized [...]

TeXblog: LaTeX-Award on Matheplanet.com

Today Matheplanet.com has celebrated its annual awards for the 8th time. Members of the forum were honored for their contributions during the last year.

Some TeX Developments: Building biblatex-biber

The biblatex-biber project provides probably the best way for biblatex users to switch to pure UTF-8 bibliography information. However, getting it to build can cause problems: biblatex-biber is a Perl programme, and needs various downloads from CPAN. I thought it would therefore be useful to put some simple recipes here, explaining what I’ve done to [...]

Some TeX Developments: Asking for help

I get quite a few e-mails asking for help with my packages, and also spot a few questions in various public places (comp.text.tex and The LaTeX Community, mainly). I’m always happy to help where I can, and it always makes my life a bit easier if the question arrives with all the [...]

Content AND Presentation: 2010-01-21 tikz-3dplot revisited (en)

Some time ago [[2009-11-19 The 3dplot package (en)|I wrote about a very nice 3dplot package]]. A few weeks later I looked into it and saw that it . . .

Jeff Hein: tikz-3dplot: Thesis submitted!

Ok, I finally submitted my thesis to my committee for review. Hopefully now I’ll have more time to do things I’ve been putting off, like clean up the 3dplot package for release on CTAN.

Some TeX Developments: achemso: Cross-referencing to floats

I’ve had a a few questions about the achemso bundle concerning creating references such as “Figures 1 to 3” automatically. The problem has been that I’ve been using the varioref package to turn \ref{some-fig} in “Figure 1” automatically, rather than having to put Figure~\ref{some-fig}. Unfortunately, varioref does not handle multiple references in an automated fashion. For [...]

Malaysian LaTeX User Group: Front and Back Covers (and ISBN Bar Codes)

This is the 5th and last post in the bookdesign series. Previous posts in this series:

Sorry this post is so late after the last one, it was hard finding time to write between work and a toddler. We're drawing to a close for this bookdesign series now... just as we're starting a new year.

I'm not very imaginative, nor am I a graphic designer. So for my book cover, I go for a huge title across the top, a background illustration, and author/editor and publisher information at the bottom. Yes, very boring, but playing it safe — I think with a careful choice of fonts, colours and illustration, the end result wouldn't look too bad at all. :) I personally find the wallpaper package very handy for the cover page. So it might go something like this:

%% No header nor footer on the cover
\thispagestyle{empty}

%% Cover illustration
\ThisLLCornerWallPaper{1}{grapes-in-my-studio-little-too-much-dust}

%% Bar across the top
\tikz[remember picture,overlay]%
\node[fill=Sienna,text=white,font=\LARGE\bfseries,
text=Cornsilk,minimum width=\paperwidth,
minimum height=5em,anchor=north]%
at (current page.north){Exercises in \LaTeX};

\vspace*{2\baselineskip}

{\bfseries\itshape\color{LightGoldenrod!50!Gold}
\fontsize{36pt}{46pt}\selectfont
The Wonderful Calmness\par
of Still Life Photos\par}

\vspace*{2\baselineskip}

{\LARGE\color{LightGoldenrod}
A small dummy example book by
\scshape{Curutari}\par
}

\tikz[remember picture,overlay]%
\node[fill=Sienna,font=\LARGE\bfseries,
text=Cornsilk,minimum width=\paperwidth,
minimum height=3em,anchor=south]%
at (current page.south) {Malaysian \LaTeX\ User Group};

\begin{center}
\LARGE\bfseries\color{SaddleBrown!30!black}

\end{center}

%% Clear to next odd page
\cleardoublepage

Then comes the back cover. Now if the book is published with an ISBN, you'd want to put a bar code for it. I was wondering where I could get a free bar code generator, when a gut instinct told me to look around CTAN for a LaTeX solution. And sure enough, the ean13isbn package does the trick without any hassle:

%% In preamble
\usepackage[ISBN=978-80-85955-35-4]{ean13isbn}

...

%% Print the ISBN bar code
%% See the documentation for other sizes e.g. SC0, SC1...
\EANisbn[SC4]

So here's the code for my backcover:

%% Temporarily enlarge this page to push
%% down the bottom margin
\enlargethispage{3\baselineskip}
\thispagestyle{empty}
\pagecolor[HTML]{0E0407}

\begin{center}
\begin{minipage}{.8\textwidth}
\color{Cornsilk}\Large\bfseries
\lipsum[1]

\begin{center}
\huge\bfseries\sffamily\color{lime}`So Calming.'
\end{center}

\lipsum[2]

\end{minipage}
\end{center}

\vspace*{\stretch{1}}

\begin{center}
\colorbox{white}{\EANisbn[SC4]}

\vspace*{\baselineskip}

\textbf{\textcolor{LightGoldenrod!50!Gold}{Malaysian \LaTeX\ User Group \textbullet\ \texttt{http://latex-my.blogspot.com}}}

\textbf{\textcolor{LightGoldenrod}{Cover Illustration by Dusan Bicanski \textbullet\ \texttt{http://www.public-domain-image.com}}}
\end{center}

I've also added a table of contents with a simple \tableofcontents. The ToC heading is printed as a chapter heading, so I created a fancy style for it, without the chapter number and background picture, by modifying our fancy chapter code from earlier.

All in all, here's what our sample book now looks like (empty pages omitted):

Download links of the LaTeX code producing the above:

Illustrations courtesy of PublicDomainImage.com here, here and here; OpenClipart Project here.

Epilogue

Well it's been fun writing this series. It sure took me some time to prepare the sample code, search for appropriate illustrations and write up the posts, but I'm glad I documented how I achieved some of the effects in that Grid Computing Cluster book. Many thanks to all the readers and especially those who kept the comments section lively. You sure motivated me to finish writing this series! :D

Content AND Presentation: 2010-01-15 Customizing end-of-proof marks (en)

I was recently asked by a friend to help him with customizing end-of-proof marks. . .

Some TeX Developments: PDF Version and file size

The PDF format has evolved over the years as Adobe have released new versions of their Acrobat and Reader software. New ideas have been added to the file format, and as a result there are different versions of the PDF format. If you take a look at a PDF in Adobe Reader, you can see [...]

TeXblog: LaTeX3 news

Issue 03 of the LaTeX3 news has been released today.

LaTeX Project: LaTeX3 news, Jan 2010

We have been working on two of the xpackages: xparse has been re-written and extended, and xtemplate is a new package with a new interface based on the older template package. For full details and plans for the next six months, see the LaTeX3 news page.

Some TeX Developments: Chemistry journals: publishers support of LaTeX

As the author of the achemso bundle (for supporting submissions to the American Chemical Society), I get a few queries about the support various publishers provide for LaTeX. Unlike more physics-focussed journals, the chemistry journals never typeset directly from authors LaTeX sources. As a result, the acceptance of LaTeX material from authors is rather less [...]

Some TeX Developments: pgfplots v1.3

A new version of the very useful pgfplots package has been released. pgfplots provides a very handy interface on top of pgf/TikZ to generate print-quality plots without too much effort. As many readers will know, pgf works with both DVI and PDF output methods, making pgfplots very handy for generating plots without worrying about other [...]

Nico Schlömer: matlab2tikz v0.0.5 released

The next version v0.0.5 of matlab2tikz has just been released to the wild.

The script has undergone significant changes in large parts and can now deal with more MATLAB® plots than ever. For example, support for zplane plots and frequency response plots has been added. Also, thanks to verbose user input, a number of bugs with existing functionality has been fixed.

New command line options are:

silent (boolean, default false): be less verbose with warnings.