I’m under strict instructions that the article I’m currently writing should be under 11,000 words. How to keep track of that while using LaTeX (with a lot of mark-up commands that won’t be separate words in the final product and a full bibliography that doesn’t get compiled until the pdf gets produced and thus is not in reflected in the length of the source file)? Easy, run pdflatex on the source (including the bibliography compilation) and count the words in the resulting pdf. But how does that work? My installation includes a ghostscript utility called ps2ascii (I assume that came with MacTex). So, it really is trivial; in Terminal:
ps2ascii test.pdf | wc -w
Answer: 10198. Whew! Still in the game.
[Crossposted from the S&P Editors Blog]
We just rolled out a major upgrade to the PDFs published in our journal Semantics and Pragmatics. We already had extensive hyper-linking in the articles and in the bibliographies. Now, our PDFs sport rich meta-data that will make it easier for all kinds of services to recognize crucial information about our articles. The meta-data are embedded in the PDF but not visible to the naked eye. You can inspect them by probing into the document properties with Adobe Reader or some other tool. But the main purpose is for automated access by search engines and bibliographic software. If you drag one of our PDFs into a database maintained by Papers, for example, the information about the article will automatically populate the fields in the database, with no need for manual filling in of fields. Similarly, if you use JabRef to maintain a BibTeX database, you can import our PDFs via “Import > XMP-annotated PDF” and have all the BibTeX fields filled in automatically.
Behind the scenes, we are using a customized version of the hyperxmp package to embed XMP meta-data in a number of standardized formats (Dublin Core, PRISM, BibTeXmp).
We are in the forefront of scientific journals in implementing these meta-data standards. To our knowledge only the Nature Publishing Group and Elsevier are also consistently providing rich meta-data in their PDFs. Certainly, none of the other journals in our field have moved to these standards. The upshot for S&P authors is that their work is made even more accessible and useful for readers, in a way that is far ahead of competing journals.
[We thank Uli Sauerland for asking us whether our PDFs could embed bibliographic information in addition to us making BibTeX entry information conveniently available from the online abstracts at the S&P site.]
There is a much expanded second edition of The LaTeX Graphics Companion. It has a chapter on Beamer presentations, which I look forward to reading, even though the Beamer manual is itself a great piece of work. It doesn’t seem to treat PGF and TikZ, which would be my choice, if I had to produce heavy duty graphics.
The book apparently was threatening to burst at the seams, so the two chapters on PostScript fonts and PostScript drivers and tools, updated and expanded with information on TrueType, Opentype fonts, and PDF utilities, are freely available online. A quick look shows some really good information on fonts in LaTeX.
[Old post retrieved for Thony:]
There is a LaTeX package at CTAN that might be useful for class handouts etc.: sectionbox.
This collection of files contains a LaTeX package for sections surrounded by fancy boxes, primarily intended for use within posters
(e.g. made with sciposter.cls). A (pdf) manual is included as well.
Among the alternatives to the LaTeX default font Computer Modern, one of the nicest is the Lucida family.
The TeX user group has offered the fonts at a discount for members for a while now. They charge $90 for members for the complete set (the non-member price is $140).
An alternative vendor is PCTeX, who normally charge $129 for the complete set of Lucida fonts. PCTeX has an “academic price” of $99, which is almost as good as the TUG-membership price.
But what occasioned this particular post is that PCTeX is offering a special sale right now: $79 as the academic price for the complete set of Lucida fonts.
[I already have the fonts and use them for some projects, e.g. the circulation manuscript of this paper.]
Turnstiles are symbols used often in logic and related fields. LaTeX typically makes available a rudimentary set of such symbols: \vdash and \models. Now, there is a new package called “turnstile” with much more fine-grained control over the type-setting of turnstile symbols.
As I was writing an entry over on Geek Notes about “a new LaTeX solution for slide presentations”:http://semantics-online.org/geek/2003/08/beamer_class_for_latexpdf_presentations called “beamer”, I was reminded that when I go to Germany, I am always struck by the many cases of English words in common discourse that are not really English words. In German linguistic terminology, they are called “Scheinentlehnungen”, something like “Pseudo-Loanwords”. My two favorites are ubiquitous:
- “Beamer”, for multimedia or data projector.
- “Handy”, for cellphone.
There’s a decent “article”:http://www.macmillandictionary.com/MED-Magazine/june2003/08-German-English-false-friends.htm on this and related topics in the monthly webzine of the MacMillan English Dictionary. A Google search also turned up “Professor David Yeandle”:http://www.kcl.ac.uk/kis/schools/hums/german/yeandle.html in the German Department of King’s College London, who has a forthcoming paper with the title ‘Handy Callboy Seeks Evergreen Dressman for Flipper Fun’: Pseudo-Anglicisms in Modern German, which is unfortunately unavailable electronically.
On Alex Lascarides’ webpage, there is a paper on “Imperatives in Dialogue”, co-authored with Nick Asher, to appear in a volume on The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue for the New Millenium.
BTW: If, like me, you look at such postscript files only after they’re converted to pdf-format, you may be disappointed at the quality of the onscreen display. That is because the postscript file includes so-called bitmap fonts. Printouts should be fine. There is at least one way to fix the postscript file to include the scalable and hence more easily displayed Type 1 fonts: if you have a working TEX/LATEX installation, you can use a program called “pkfix”, written by Heiko Oberdiek, to do the fixing for you. More on this at the TEX-FAQ.
