E-TeX: Guidelines for Future TeX Extensions - revisited

FrankMittelbach | Saturday, 6 April 2013

Shortly after Don Knuth announced TeX 3.0 I gave a paper analyzing TeX's abilities as a typesetting engine. The abstract back then said:

LaTeX Tricks (VII)

Luca Merciadri | Wednesday, 20 March 2013

We shall see some tricks:

1. Putting two itemizations on the same line,
2. Using footnotes in boxes,
3. Dealing with PDF cut-and-paste and search functionalities, even when you are using accented characters,
4. Making a distinction with \overline for propositional logic formulae,
5. Referring to labels by long names.

We will then discuss some problems people often face when dealing with many figures, and, more generally, floats, in reports. Finally, we will deal with a Beamer scheme which aims at using a single file for both a presentation, and the related report.

TikZ Library for Structural Analysis

Jürgen Hackl | Sunday, 10 March 2013

At university it is always a very time consuming work to create new assignments, and tests; especially when those tasks include drawing graphics.

In the field of structural engineering those small structures are a key part for teaching. For this reason I developed, in cooperation with the Institute for Structural Analysis at the Graz University of Technology, a TikZ library for Structural Analysis.

Installing TeX Live on Linux

Stefan_K | Wednesday, 9 January 2013

The following document contains installation instructions for TeX Live when using a Linux distribution. It was tested with TeX Live 2012 on Fedora Linux.

LaTeX Tricks (VI)

Luca Merciadri | Saturday, 1 December 2012

Customizing a document class is important in the LaTeX world. We will here see two examples of this through the lettre document class:

1. Removing line bending,
2. Making the space smaller, between address, etc., and the beginning of the text.

Next, we will consider a small fraction of a bigger LaTeX problem: the encoding facts.

Creating a glossary without using an external indexing application

Nicola Talbot | Thursday, 27 September 2012

There are a variety of packages (including my own glossaries package) that can generate a sorted list of terms or nomenclature, but they require the help of an external application, such as makeindex, to collate and sort entries. However some users don't like this, either because they find it difficult to invoke the indexing application or because they don't like the complexity of multiple LaTeX plus indexing runs. This article discusses how to by-pass the need for an external indexing application by using the datatool package to create sorted glossaries.

Pic for expressive LaTeX diagrams

aespinosa | Thursday, 21 June 2012

In my graduate work, I draw a lot of system diagrams which basically involves drawing a bunch of shapes with arrows. When typesetting my figures, I like using the Pic preprocessor because of its expressiveness. In the following post I will show how to use it.

Drawing with the tikz-3dplot Package

jeff | Thursday, 21 June 2012

When I started working on my thesis dissertation using LaTeX, I discovered the TikZ package for drawing vector-based figures. I needed a way to easily draw three-dimensional figures, and so I put together a few handy tools in the tikz-3dplot package. This package builds on TikZ, providing an easy way to rotate the perspective when drawing three-dimensional shapes using basic shapes in a tikzpicture environment.

Let's explore some examples of what tikz-3dplot can do.

Overcoming some flaws with graphics created using matlab2tikz

frits | Wednesday, 20 June 2012

Matlab is a widely used numerical computation environment. It is easy to make plots in Matlab, which can be exported to vector format (PDF/EPS) for implementation in LaTeX. The problem is that the default Matlab plots do not fit very well in the style of LaTeX, due to the different font and font size of the text in the Matlab plots. My favorite way of creating Matlab figures with LaTeX fonts is by making use of the matlab2tikz script. On my website, I've already described how to use this. In general this method works great, although...

Semi-automatic plotting using pgfplots

Joseph Wright | Wednesday, 20 June 2012

Producing data plots is an important part of doing research work. Making good looking plots is not easy, and getting them right as well is a real challenge. Perhaps the best way of producing plots, whether for use with LaTeX or otherwise, is to use the pgfplots package. For a general overview of using pgfplots effectively, see my TUGBoat article.