Entries Tagged 'LaTeX' ↓

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.

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.