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1. 2 Such as this one 3 A note 4 I also use this in a redefinition of natbib s cite command when using numerical references As a more in teresting example 2 2 2 Abbreviations The use of Latin abbreviations e g i e cf etc in formal text isn t always encour aged Nonetheless they can be handy and it s important to remember how they should be punctuated Macros can address both of these issues by easily being able to switch out the abbreviations if necessary or ensure that the punctuation is always correct Let s begin with a simple macro to mark up words in another language e g foreign a priori newcommand foreign 1 emph 1 Since e g and i e will generally always be followed by a comma it s possible to define a macro to ensure this comma isn t omitted 5 newcommand ensurecommat y ifnextchar latex error Don t forget the comma Now it s simply a matter of defining our abbreviations newcommand eg foreign e g ensurecomma newcommand ie foreign i e ensurecomma newcommand cf foreign cf The ensures that no extra space is added after the period as it would if the period ended a sentence These macros in use I concur ie I agree I concur i e I agree Add lots of sour Veg five lemons Add lots of sour e g five lemons Use white sugar cf brown sugar Use white sugar cf brown sugar I usually also define the uppercase variants Eg et
2. entry XEmacs R Member of the review board the entry s key otherwise empty entry GNUI and the entry s contents are simply Cont GEBIGE RO orice dips Solar anything that follows up to the next ii entry or subrubric The presence of a star in the command s name is for historical reasons there is also a Ventry command that takes the whole entry s contents as a mandatory argument hence within braces In order to create a subrubric you simply call the subrubric command Its mandatory argument specifies the subrubric s title end rubric Figure 3 A rubric source file 3 Customizing the appearance In the previous section we saw that writing a cv with Cw is a fairly easy process Once you are satisfied with the contents you might still want to tweak the layout to your personal taste or constraints Since the layout generated by Cur is extremely customizable it would be out of the scope of this paper to describe every possible configuration option besides CyrVW is fully documented and the documentation is I hope well written Rather let us take back our minimal example and tweak it a bit to illustrate some of the possible customizations Figure 4 shows the result of the cus tomization process The full source code for this version is given in Appendix A Note that there is no modification of the rubrics M ridicu it files whatsoever Protessional Experience You can see that the photo is
3. LaTeX Wordplay Three LaTeX theme crosswords In order of difficulty easiest first Joy amp Dave Morris s puzzle Arthur O Dwyer s puzzle with medium difficulty clues the same puzzle with hard clues http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 distract 1 of 3 8 19 2006 6 17 26 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group Bob Newell s Cryptic crossword Solutions below A few months ago the movie Wordplay about crossword puzzles and the people who solve them was released It s a great little film even if you re not a puzzle fan In the movie one of the great puzzle makers Merl Reagle showed how he compiles a puzzle with pencil and paper Crossword makers are called compilers setters or even cruciverbalists It would have been nice to have Merl Reagle compile a LaTeX theme puzzle for the PracTeX Journal but since he probably thinks of LaTeX as a pliable plastic substance the result might have been different than expected Fortunately several LaTeX users compiled some excellent puzzles for your enjoyment Joy and Dave Morris both math professors at the University of Lethbridge Canada created a large puzzle full of LaTeX and math related answers and clues This puzzle is their first try at compiling a crossword and they used the LaTeX crosswrd package to typeset it Arthur J O Dwyer of Carnegie Mellon who compiles puzzles for the student newspaper and has written some crossword making software used his so
4. Mr Venugopal is a stenographer by profession He has been using computers since the two floppy PC stage A former lover of WordPerfect his first encounter with TeX LaTeX was in the year 2000 At present exploring various packages experimenting with Omega MetaPost and MetaFont and teaching and or explaining advantages of TeX LaTeX over wordprocessors are his hobbies You can contact him at venugopal_duvvuri rediffmail com e PDF version of paper e Example of six A4 pages for telephone directory prior to folding and cutting e Comment on this paper e Send submission idea to editor Page generated August 19 2006 TUG home page search contact webmaster http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 venugopal pocketbook 8 19 2006 6 15 19 AM The PracTgX Journal 2006 No 3 Article revision 2006 08 15 Creating Pocket sized Books Using IATEX D V L K D P Venugopal Banaras Hindu University Varanasi India Abstract This article deals with creating pocket sized books of A7 size using IATEX in a quick and dirty method 1 The Need For day to day work in an office or for personal use many people like to keep telephone numbers and other contact information handy For this purpose at my institution we generally keep a small telephone diary in which to write names and numbers Since we carry this in our pockets there is danger of it getting torn or soiled preventing us from reading the numbers we wrote in it and if we lose it then we
5. The class also provides functions similar to those provided by the following packages although the commands are different fancyhdr geometry sidecap subfig ure titlesec You can use these packages if you wish or just use the capabilities of the memoir class The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group Journal home page General information THE Ti X PracTEX Journal style files Copyright Contact us LaTeX curricula vitae with the CurVe class Didier Verna Abstract CurVe is a LATEX2e class for writing curricula vitae cv It provides a set of commands to create headers rubrics entries in these rubrics etc CurVe will then format your cv with a consistent layout while you can just concentrate on the contents The layout of a CurVe cv is highly customizable CurVe also has a very special feature known as the flavor mechanism it is able to manage different flavors versions of your cv simultaneously CurVe is distributed under the terms of the LPPL license This paper describes the features available in version 1 11 Mr Verna is a computer scientist working for the prestigious EPITA Research and Development Laboratory in the south of Paris France He is married and a father of two children and he is a semi professional jazz guitarist and singer In addition to his research and teaching Mr Verna has published the book GNU autoconf automake libtool New Ryders and is a software developer of for example XEmacs Gnus and
6. typearea end 14 setlength oddsidemargin useplength toaddrhpos addtolength oddsidemargin 1in th th NET continue as per description setplength firstheadvpos Opt setplength firstheadwidth paperwidth setplength firstfootvpos paperheight addtoplength firstfootvpos useplength toaddrvpos addtoplength refvpos 1 5 baselineskip newkomavar company newplength infocolwidth Kohm amp Morawski 2005 C 7 Modifikationen Modifications ifdim textwidth lt 0 666 paperwidth setplength infocolwidth 22222 paperwidth else setplength infocolwidth 0 1667 paperwidth fi continue as per description firsthead fontsize 7 8 sffamily hspace fill begin picture 0 0 put 0 0 parbox t useplength infocolwidth vspace useplength toaddrvpos usekomavar fromlogo th th put 0 0 parbox t useplength infocolwidth raggedright vspace useplength refvpos vspace useplength refaftervskip usekomavar place usekomavar placeseparator usekomavar date 10 baselineskip 15 usekomavar fromname ifkomavarempty company usekomavar company JN baselineskip usekomavar fromaddress usekomavar fromphone usekomavar fromphone usekomavar fromfax usekomavar fromfax baselineskip usekomavar fromemail usekomavar fromur1 th th put 0 0 parbox t useplength infocolwidth raggedrig
7. We prepared only one or two copies for our exclusive use Later versions of the word processor had a feature for printing booklets and our work became somewhat less tiresome Still creating directories smaller than the size of an A5 page 148 x 210 mm was a problem 3 Tools Available in IATEX About four years after I began learning LATEX I had gained enough confidence to convert the telephone directory into TEX Though converting the data to ATEX was easy creating a pocket sized telephone directory without cutting and pasting was a challenge On a cursory glance through the ConTEXt manual 1 I found that one can typeset beautiful books using ConTgXt As it was developed by a publishing company it has all the facilities for creating quality books But as I had never used it I continued my search While studying the ProTEgXt Package Manager I discovered the leaflet twoup booklet and pdfpages packages I first explored leaflet 2 This package is use ful for creating leaflets of conferences symposia etc that contain six pages on an A4 page In the 1eaflet documentation I found that it was inspired by the booklet and twoup packages The twoup package uses the dvips route and re quires the user to be familiar with Postscript files and their printing 3 This twoup package is dependent on 2up a generic TEX package The booklet package gives us the facility to create booklets of size A5 4 However I wanted to create a booklet of
8. and saved it in ps format this worked and indicated to me that the problem was in using the Illustrator produced PDF Therefore I ran a test of converting the EPS output of Illustrator to PDF via epstopdf then opening the PDF in Acrobat and then saving to ps This apparently worked In the end I provided eps ps and pdf files of the cover to the printer I m not sure which one the printer used 6 North American and European distribution With the book published in India my next problem will be printing and distribution in North American and Europe Various issues come to mind Who should the publisher in name be I will be the actual publisher Should I ask the Indian publisher to keep its name on the book for this hemisphere should I seek another industry consortium or should I make up my own publisher name There are also related ISBN number issues WillIhave to resize the text block and reformat the pages or will I want to improve the overall typesetting in light of what I see in the Indian printing In particular will the Minion font I chose for my main text reproduce well using the printing technologies of print on demand printers I believe that by printing via a print on demand company e g Lightning source I will have distribution via Ingram to U S on line book stores such as Amazon com and bn com Will connecting to Lightning Sources UK group also provide distribu tion via on line book stores in E
9. congue non vo lutpat at tincidunt tristique libero Vivamus viverra fermentum fe lis Donec nonummy pellentesque ante Phasellus adipiscing semper elit Proin fermentum m m Sed diam turpis molestie vitae placerat a molesti aecenas lacinia Nam ipsum cipit a ipsum Morbi blandit ligula feugiat magna Nunc eleifend consequat lorem Sed lacinia letters in the window Even without further explanation you will probably be able to adapt this simple example for your own use But let s see some more of the power of KOMA Script and create a slightly fancier letter As a mat ter of fact let s go all out and use one of the fanciest pre defined styles that can be downloaded as a 1co file from http www komascript de The source of our fancier letter including some commands to include the beautiful Lucida Bright fonts from Bigelow amp Holmes is shown in figure 9 and the source code of asymTypB 1co in the appendix page 14 The two output pages are displayed in figures 10 and 11 Most users will probably not be willing or able to create such complex 1co files as shown in the appendix however several of them are freely available at http www komascript de and simpler ones can easily be created even by beginning users using the KOMA Script documentation Help is available at the forum at http www komascript de This fancy example letter creates a column with relevant information about the sender including
10. geometry but I must admit to have failed to investigate it Note that there are a few packages for formatting section titles and contents tables titlesec sectsty titletoc tocloft and I m not qualified in all of them enough to give a firm recommendation on their use Personally I ve enjoyed the simplicity of the sectsty packages but it is very limited booktabs For great tables The manual is worth reading for its advice alone caption Customise the formatting of captions used for figures tables and anything else csquotes Error checking and flexible quotation markup E g quoted text 11 bigfoot enumitem fixltx2e mathpazo microtype natbib pdfcolmk refstyle Slstyle subfig textpos xcolor zref can be typeset with quotation symbols chosen in the preamble such as or or This is useful not just for multilingual docu ments it also helps with ensuring quotation consistency Does absolutely everything related to footnotes Provides almost everything one could want for formatting lists such as the one you re reading Fixes and adds many little details Better to be safe than sorry Don t miss out on the sc osf options to activate better kerning amp real small caps and old style lowercase numbers Also see the FPL Neu font which provides further improvements with maths support soon to come Enables pdfIEX s microtypographical features margin kerning ac
11. hopefully with a matching fussy Another OSNews reader It is insanely difficult to get text paragraphs to flow around http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 readers 3 of 4 8 19 2006 6 10 48 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group arbitrarily shaped inserts Try using usepackage shapepar and draw up the desired shape in xfig OSNews reader For ultra high end artistic typesetting think of Bringhurst s Elements of Typographic Style LaTeX is probably not the best tool although with some of the experimental micro typography additions to pdftex it is 99 of the way there Actually pdftex would ve typeset that much better and Peter Wilson s memoir class shows as an example how to achieve that pagestyle I still find it reprehensible that it s advocated hanging punctuation since the first edition though that index entry vanished from the second yet only used it on the back cover of the second edition I m also endlessly amused by Quark and InDesign users who decry my usage of TeX or LaTeX claiming that features I find essential or useful are not important until Quark or InDesign gains said feature at which point they crow about it endlessly The person wanting OLE TeX equations could look into how Mac OS X and one of the Equation Service programs interact should be possible to achieve something like to that in Windows William Adams Mechanicsburg PA TpJ From Tom Colson regarding the Andy Roberts LaTeX articl
12. stallation instructions are rather straightforward and covered in detail in the in cluded README and INSTALL files Copyright O 2006 Yuri Robbers Markus Kohm and Rasmus Pank Roulund Permission is granted to distribute verbatim or modified copies of this document provided this notice remains intact 2 Page layout using typearea sty 2 1 Some theoretical considerations When looking at a page of printed text one may notice that it consists of the actual text and the margins Sometimes there are headers and footers as well in between the main text body and the top and bottom margin respectively When the printed text is a book there was some additional white space that was printed but is hidden in the binding Setting up a page with optimal margins and text area is called page layout Page layout doesn t depend only on fashions that change over time and from one culture to another it also have a firm basis in human visual perception Some texts are easier to read than others and the two most important factors determin ing readability are page layout and the choice of typeface Bringhurst 2004 KOMA Script implements a series of modern European page layouts using its typearea package The basic tenets of this series are as follows a the size of the top margin compared to the bottom margin should be as 1 2 b for a single sided document the left and right margins should have equal width c for a double sided document the t
13. 6 inch pages and I used the url geometry package to place text blocks of the correct size within 7 75 x 5 inches on the correct size pages could I send my cover design to the printer as an Illustrator file and for what version of Illustrator that the printer could use to make final adjustments did I need to convert some of my photographic images which were in color to gray scale there were to be no color plates in the book or would that conversion au tomatically happen as part of the B amp W printing process they asked me to do the conversion 14 when I sent the printer my ready to print PostScript file and many Illustrator files did the printer want those on multiple CDs or one DVD we agreed the printer would try to download the PostScript file of the book and the Illustrator file of cover art from my website and that I would send a couple of CDs containing a gigabyte of backup files mostly images by air courier In parallel with sorting out the issues with the Indian publisher and printer my co author and I worked on the design of the outside cover After several iterations with Adobe Illustrator I produced a design that satisfied us both 4 2 Refining the line and page layout I have always disliked how IATEX left to its own devices feels free to stretch the inter paragraph spacing Steve Peter told me that the first step should be to give the command parskip Opt to disallow insertion of inter paragraph vertic
14. I hope to look into this format in more detail in the future Reading comp text tex Iam regularly surprised by the breadth of packages that already exist When looking specifically I can only recommend exploration of CTAN and asking questions of people who have done similar explorations themselves 4 Summary Formatting shouldn t be hard coded into a document macros to ensure flexibil ity and consistency are preferable There are many packages available that pro vide such functionality along with a plethora of other convenient customisations These should be experimented with References 3 David Walden Travels in TEX land IATEX for productivity in book writing 1 Robin Fairbairns The new IATEX 2e The PraclEgX Journal 2 2006 URL TUGboat macros TUGboat 17 3 282 http tug org pracjourn 2006 2 288 September 1996 ISSN 0896 3207 walden URL http www tug org TUGboat Articles tbi7 3 tb52guid pdf 4 David Walden Travels in TEX land Final layout of a book The PracTgX Journal 3 2006 URL http tug org 2 Yuri Robbers Markus Kohm and Ras pracjourn 2006 3 walden mus Pank Roulund Replacing IATEX 2e standard classes with koma script The 5 Peter Wilson The memoir class The PracTEX Journal 3 2006 URL http PracTEX Journal 3 2006 URL http tug org pracjourn 2006 3 robbers tug org pracjourn 2006 3 wilson 9 http tug ctan org 10 http texcatalogue sarovar org 13 The PracT
15. Right justification The justification of the right margins of my draft manuscript didn t look as straight as they are with another book I recently had published that the publisher typeset with Quark Express A few months before while interviewing Frank Mittelbach for TUG see www tug org interviews I learned that so called microtype capabilities exist with pdfTpx Consequently I decided to try RequirePackage microtype I printed out the documentation for the microtype package but I didn t read it as mi crotype just worked without any additional commands luckily Minion was one of the five or six fonts for which configuration files came with the microtype package The right margins immediately looked straighter there were less line overflows and fewer lines were hyphenated Microtyping apparently involves two primary capabilities First hyphens periods etc are allow to extend slightly past what should be the right margin and this makes the right margin look more straight Second justifying lines using the inter word spacing the actual characters in a line and inter letter spacing are allowed to shrink or expand slightly to better fit the line in addition to the normal expansion and shrinkage of interword spaces Microtyping is turned on for this column 2 4 Figure placement The macros for figure and table formatting that I defined in my column in the previous issue www tug org pracjourn 2006 2 walden did no
16. address the company logo and a digitised signature For these options see the KOMA Script documentation and perhaps we ll write another paper in a future issue of The PracIEX Journal Please refer to figure 8 for the example source code of a basic letter the output is shown in figures 6 and 7 The DIV option is set to 9 the fontsize to 12 and a few more options are set The enlargefirstpage option is specifically intended for letter writing Generally on multi page letters the first page has different settings from the next pages and adding the option enlargefirstpage enables those Next a new variable company is defined in addition to the many pre defined variables We use this variable to set a company name in our letter We include some packages for including the signature and the dummy text and set a whole bunch of komavar variables These variables can be defined in the letter itself as shown in this example but it is generally advisable to create Figure 7 The second page of the output for our very ba sic KOMA Script letter from fig ure 8 documentclass DIV 9 fontsize 12pt pagesize twoside enlargefirstpage scrlttr2 Wnewkomavar company Vsetkomavar location d Vifkomavarempty company H 6 usekomavar company usekomavar company N Hu setkomavar place Leiden setkomavar company LEMUN 2006 usepackage graphicx usepackage epsf usepackage lipsum nex
17. are due to its ability to be customised The first half of this article discusses small macros written to ease document production with some examples of how I use macros to save time and effort Then I briefly cover a selection of packages that provide a whole heap of functionality that other people have kindly implemented Will Robertson is a PhD student in Mechanical Mechatronic Engineering in the University of Adelaide South Australia His LaTeX experience came about from being distracted with it while writing various reports and papers on his real research and now he s hooked Will may be contacted at wi 1 1 que rilla net au e PDF version of paper e Comment on this paper e Send submission idea to editor Page generated August 19 2006 TUG home page search contact webmaster http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 robertson 8 19 2006 6 11 59 AM The PracTEX Journal 2006 No 3 Article revision 2006 08 15 Productivity with macros and packages Will Robertson Email wspr810gmail com Address School of Mechanical Engineering University of Adelaide Australia Abstract IATEX s advantages in productivity for me are due to its ability to be cus tomised The first half of this article discusses small macros written to ease document production with some examples of how I use macros to save time and effort Then I briefly cover a selection of packages that provide a whole heap of functionality that other people have kindly implem
18. bitten hard down the road 9 40am Jonathan Kew XeTeX past present future Kaveh Bazargan For me XeTeX was the star of the show bringing simplicity to TeX Troy Henderson Of course the talk on XeTeX was particularly interesting because of the ease of adding and using new fonts Donald Pellegrino The presentation not only helped me understand what XeTeX is but it also helped me understand how silly I am for not using it already Dave Walden In addition to describing XeTeX Jonathan repeatedly mentioned the value of Will Robertson s fontspec package for use in conjunction with XeTeX Boris Veytsman Jonathan Kew brilliantly presented his great work on XeTeX a plot to make the TeX font guru obsolete Editor s note I have allowed a disproportionate number of comments on this presentation As Kaveh says above it was the star of the show this status was clear from the spontaneous burst of applause from the participants when Jonathan dragged a new non TeX format font file to his computer s fonts directory and with no other machinations his document compiled correctly using the new font 10 20am break 10 30am Federico Garcia Capabilities of PDF interactivity Boris Veytsman The talk by Federico Garcia gave a very good short introduction into PDF capabilities of hyperref something interesting for various users 11 10am Boris Veytsman Maria Shmilevich Automatic report generation with web TeX and SQL Dave Walden
19. blue Packages amp classes are typeset in a sans serif font hyper linked to their CTAN documentation where available a couple won t work at time of publication but should in the future and coloured dark red like the other external links in the document Internal links within the document are coloured green 2 Writing your own macros Writing things like Figure ref fig myfigure every single time a figure is re ferred to results in errors creeping in that are hard to detect typical of such errors might include misspelling Figure the absence of the non breaking space the tilde something even experienced LATEX users often forget to use and so on The command newcommand becomes a new friend to relieve these problems Suddenly it s easy to define commands such as figref that will expand out to the figure string and the reference newcommand figref 1 Figure ref fig 1 After adding this command to the preamble I can now write figref myfigure to refer to my figures Two advantages are gained with this method error checking the output will now always be consistent and correct or throw an error and flexi bility If we wish to change our string to look like Fig 7 it s a matter of changing one line in the preamble newcommand figref 1 Fig ref fig 1 Note the thin space which is appropriate in this case after the period and which is also often omitted to the detriment of the output
20. chapter Remembering a tip from Walter Cazzola in response to a question of mine on comp text tex six years ago I inserted addtocontents toc raggedbottom protect vspace 5in chapter Build New Business flushbottom at the beginning of the chapter in question which forced the chapter and chapter subsec tions lines onto the next page without putting extra vertical space in either page of the table of contents Barbara Beeton has told me flushbottom has no effect in the above 3 5 Part and chapter headings Later I decided that IATEX s default chapter heading format was a little oversized compared with my text I experimented a little bit with usepackage fncychap but the packages built in styles seemed more different than I wanted So I found the following definitions in book cls and modified the vertical spacing and the font sizes as follows def makechapterhead 1 vspace 30 p0 parindent z raggedright normalfont ifnum c secnumdepth gt m ne NifOmainmatter LARGE bfseries chapapp space thechapter par nobreak vskip 15 p fi 11 NET interlinepenalty OM LARGE bfseries 1 par nobreak vskip 30 p H def makeschapterhead 1 vspace 30 po parindent z raggedright normalfont interlinepenalty OM LARGE Nbfseries 1 par nobreak vskip 30 p Er This caused some interaction with the table of contents and I had to undo the last change I described in the previous section 3 6
21. for an example or to the margin or perhaps a bit to demonstrating the use of DIVlast and both Things get even more complex BCORcurrent when we start including marginal notes the IATEgX2ecommand marginpar es tablishes these notes Should one of these elements be empty then obviously it ought to be included with the margin Similarly a footer that contains no more than a page number is optically almost empty and should thus be considered part of the margin If however the header is full of text perhaps even underlined then it is better to include it with the text body rather than with the margin KOMA Script is not able to decide whether headers footers or marginal notes should be considered part of the text body or part of the margin By default it considers these textual elements to be part of the margins but this behaviour can be changed using the following options to the typearea command headinclude headexclude footinclude footexclude mpinclude mpexclude Using the include version of any of these options makes the respective textual element a part of the body the exclude version makes it part of the margin The size of the page header is 1 25 times the height of a reg ular line but this can be changed using the headlines option with the typearea or usepackage command For example the command usepackage 1 8headlines typearea sets the header to a height of 1 8 line height It is also possible to s
22. kept changing their minds about what they wanted I grew increasingly frustrated with having to keep modifying the internals of the class and packages that I had developed Separately I became interested in book design and felt that there was a need for a class that would support layout experiments I worked on this in a desultory fashion for several years and eventually produced something that I felt might be generally useful The memoir class was first released in 2001 and since then has proven to be reasonably popular The class can be used as a replacement for the book and report classes by default generating documents virtually indistinguisable from ones produced by those classes The class includes some options to produce documents with other appearances for example an article class look or one that looks as though the document was produced on a typewriter with a single font double spacing no hyphenation and so on In the following I use the term standard classes to denote the book and report classes and when appropriate the article class as well The memoir class includes the functionality of many packages for instance the tocloft package for controlling the table of contents or methods similar to the Copyright 2006 Peter R Wilson Permission is granted to distribute verbatim or modified copies of this document provided this notice remains intact fancyhdr package for designing your own headers The built in package functions a
23. macro input is rede fined to look for flavored files first This is actually very nice because you can use it if you want to make different flavors of text that does not belong in rubrics For instance suppose you want a special version of the subtitle of your cv for the flavor dvr just create a file called subtitle dvr tex and put something like subtitle special subtitle init Do something similar for the default subtitle Now go to the skeleton of your cv and write input subtitle in the preamble That s it You have different subtitles in your different cv flavors 5 Conclusion In this paper we have barely scratched the surface of the features Cur has to offer but provided enough I hope to make the reader feel like giving it a try For instance there are many more customization options available control of spacing most notably Please refer to the official documentation for more information To conclude let me just mention some other important features of CyrVe it supports the standard IATEX options font size paper geometry etc and page styles It comes with built in support for AUC TgX command completion in Emacs or XEmacs etc Thanks to many contributors 9 foreign languages are also supported and customizable Cur has some caveats though mostly as a consequence of the underlying implementation based on the LTXtable package In order to help the official documentation now provides a FAQ and a section with some
24. now on Bii the right This is achieved by passing m an optional argument to photo like this gu photo r didier You can use 1 the de fault c or r meaning that the photo will ap Sw 2 pear on the left center or right Additionally the headers are now aligned on top rather than vertically centered This is achieved by passing an optional argument to makeheaders like this makeheaders t You can use t for top b for bottom or c for center the default Also note the use of different fonts for the titles rubrics keys etc In Curk virtually any text category comes with a command to modify the font used for it For instance to change the appearance of the rubrics titles use the rubricfont command to change that of the title use the titlefont command and so on You will also notice that we changed the prefix for something fancier The command to do that is prefix to which we passed ding 52 from the pifont package in that particular case If you prefer you can get rid of the prefix alto gether Figure 4 A customized cv Finally note how we changed the alignment of the rubrics titles they are not centered anymore but rather aligned with the entries contents and also the subrubrics for that matter The command to do that is rubricalignment There are up to 6 possible alignments for the rubrics titles Horizontal alignment of the subrubrics and the keys can also be changed 4 A
25. of letterpaper legalpaper executivepaper aXpaper bXpaper cXpaper dXpaper and landscape Please note that the X in for example aXpaper is any reasonable integer So it is possible to make a small booklet on paper one fourth the size of A4 paper using the a6paper declaration You may also notice that the re sulting output is markedly different documentclass a4paper twoside report usepackage bookman from the output for our first exam usepackage DIVcalc BCORI2mm typearea usepackage lipsum ple as presented in figure 2 These A UNE differences are caused by the change lipsum 1 8 in line spacing and the change in erd document font It is probably a good idea to do some experimenting yourself in order to get a feeling for the way the KOMA Script page layout mech anism works Figure 3 The adapted source for our ba sic example now using the DIVcalc op tion Of course we have only been look ing at very basic Page layout options Nusepacin sd R so far and we have ignored the fact Vonehalfspacing that for most documents it may not _ t Pearealcurrent last usepackage lipsum be all that clear what the actual mar begin document gin is This may seem a trivial issue Pseml 8 documentclass 10 pt twoside BCORI2mm DIVcalc scrreprt end document It isn t Consider headers and foot ers Do they belong to the actual text Figure 4 The source
26. presents two beginning projects using ConTeXt The first project is a letterhead that can be used for business and personal correspondence mailed in an envelope with an address pane The second project is a four page brochure done by the Botany Committee for Ape Awareness Day last November at the Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens Joe Hogg is a volunteer docent at the Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens He can be reached by email at Joseph Hogg bigfoot com e PDF version of paper e ConTeXt source file for letterhead e Example of resulting letterhead e ConTeXt source file for four page brochure e Example of resulting four age brochure e Comment on this paper e Send submission idea to editor Page generated August 19 2006 TUG home page search contact webmaster http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 hogg 8 19 2006 6 14 21 AM The PracTEX Journal TPJ 2006 No 03 2006 08 15 Comment on this article CONTEXT Starters Joe Hogg Abstract This article presents two beginning projects using CONTEXT The first project is a letterhead that can be used for business and personal correspon dence mailed in an envelope with an address pane The second project is a four page brochure done by the Botany Committee for Ape Awareness Day last November at the Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens Joe Hogg is a volunteer docent at the Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens He can be reached by email at Joseph Hogg bigfoot com At th
27. size A7 74 x 105 mm or about 3 x 4 125 inches Then I stumbled upon the pdfpages package 5 It has many tricks up its sleeve Using this package one can combine many small PDF documents into a single document useful for keeping separate publications together create a new PDF document from selected pages of other PDF documents useful to keep ab 2 stract pages of many related articles together or to insert diagrams from another PDF file 4 Creating the pocket sized booklet For readers who are not familiar with the A series of page sizes two A5 pages side by side in a portrait orientation fit on one A4 page in a landscape orientation two A6 pages fit on one A5 page and two A7 pages fit on an A6 page Thus eight A7 pages fit on one A4 page and 16 A7 pages fit two sides of one A4 sheet of paper Our first step in creating the A7 sized directory we desired was to create a telephone directory of A5 size which came out to be 48 pages long The tele phone directory earlier created using the word processor was saved as a text file and edited appropriately for use with TEX We used the article class and longtable package The directory so created was named pocket td pdf 4 Second Step We then created another file pocket tex consisting of the following lines of IATEX which processed the file pocket td pdf Ndocumentclass a4paper article usepackage final pdfpages begin document includepdf pages nup
28. to do the calculations of DIV factor and page layout multiple times in the same document This is indeed the case but we can of course only include the typearea sty package once If we want to do the necessary calculations again later we use the command typearea BCOR DIV For example if we want to use DIVclassic with an 8mm binding correction we can use the command Ntypearea 8mm classic Note that as opposed to the options given when including typearea sty with the usepackage command we do not include the letters DIV or BCOR explicitly in argu ment of the typearea command The option current as used in conjunc tion with DIV is also available for BCOR for re calculating the page layout including the existing BCOR value The other DIV options are not available with BCOR These options may seem rather esoteric at first sight so it is probably best to give an example of their use See the source in figures 4 and 5 Here we use Figure 2 The first page of the output for a basic example of the use of typearea sty the KOMA Script replacement for the report class which is called scrreprt We also use the default Computer Modern or Latin Modern font but we want to increase the line spacing to 1 5 using the package setspace You may notice that the default paper size for KOMA Script is already A4 and hence this does not need to be included with the documentclass options Paper size can be changed using any
29. to use at various venues Boris Veytsman The two presentations about graphics by Troy Henderson and by Andrew Mertz and William Slough were a useful introduction into great and useful graphics packages 3pm break 3 10pm Andrew Mertz William Slough Graphics with PGF and TikZ Karl Berry I thought Andrew and William did an excellent job presenting a graduated series of examples with TikZ a friendly front end to PGF I gather for producing graphics entirely within TeX They did a similarly excellent job introducing the beamer package last year 3 50 Jon Breitenbucher LaTeX at a liberal arts college Barbara Beeton Jon Breitenbucher s presentation on tactics for getting students not only to use TeX but to improve the quality of their content while doing so was full of ideas that could profitably be used to spread the word Boris Veytsman We all could easily relate to the talk by Jon Breitenbucher about successes and tribulations in teaching LaTeX to students 4 30pm Q amp A TUG meeting Tuesday August 1 http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 practex06 5 of 7 8 19 2006 6 30 43 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group 9am Peter Flynn Rolling your own document class Elizabeth Dearborn It is extremely difficult to choose only one presentation to comment upon but Peter Flynn s talk on rolling your own document class has inspired me to try something I thought was beyond my capabilities Boris Veytsman The talk by Peter Fl
30. 1x2 landscape signature 48 pocket td pdf end document IATpXing pocket tex placed pairs of our A5 pages on each A4 page in the resulting pocket pdf file creating 24 A4 pages from our initial 48 A5 pages 1 For a full description of paper sizes see http en wikipedia org wiki A4 Paper Size 42 Third step Then we created another file named pocket2 tex with the following lines of TAT RX documentclass a4paper article usepackage final pdfpages begin document includepdf pages nup 1x2 landscape signature 24 pocket pdf end document Running pocket2 tex through ATEX to process the file pocket pdf produced a new file pocket2 pdf containing 12 A4 pages each of which had four A6 size pages on it 43 Final Step Another file named pocket3 tex was created containing the following lines of TAT RX documentclass a4paper article usepackage final pdfpages begin document includepdf pages nup 1x2 landscape signature 12 pocket2 pdf end document On I4TpXing the above file we obtained the file pocket3 pdf containing the six A4 pages of a booklet of A7 size See the link to the file on the HTML page for this paper Print these pages yourself on both sides of three A4 or letter size pages fold the pile of three pages at the center and cut along the fold to get A5 pages Fold the pile of A5 pages at the center and cut along the fold to get A6 pages Fold the pile of A
31. 6 pages in the center staple pages at the fold and voila you get the telephone directory of A7 size 44 Simplifying the process In the above process we have seen that we have to compile four documents But we may have to change or add numbers frequently in the telephone directory Once we created the above files there is no need to follow all the steps Instead we created a pocket bat file we are using MS Windows The entries in the above batch file are as follows cd cd teldirtex pdflatex pocket td pdflatex pocket pdflatex pocket2 pdflatex pocket3 So whenever we make corrections in the main file we save it and open the MS DOS prompt and type pocket All the files are IATpXed simplifying a tedious process 5 Conclusion The above process is a quick and dirty method TpXperts will be able to create better macros and an easier process Our process is best suited for pocket sized books containing up to 32 pages and 48 pages is OK If the pocket book contains more than 48 pages we would have to follow another route Acknowledgments I thank the anonymous reviewers and Dave Walden guest editor of this issue for their help in refining the presentation of this paper Biography of the author Mr Venugopal is a secretarial assistant by profession He has been using com puters since the two floppy PC stage A former lover of WordPerfect his first 5 encounter with TEX IATEX was in the year 2000 At present his hobbies ar
32. BBDB and has created several add on packages for LaTeX such as FiXme FiNK QCM and CurVe Mr Verna can be reached at didier lrde epita fr e PDF version of paper e Comment on this paper e Send submission idea to editor Page generated August 19 2006 TUG home page search contact webmaster http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 verna 8 19 2006 6 13 43 AM The PracT X Journal 2006 No 3 Article revision 2006 08 15 IATEX curricula vitae with the Curk class Didier Verna Email didier lrde epita fr Website http www lrde epita fr didier Address ErrrA LnpE 14 16 rue Voltaire 94276 Le Kremlin Bic tre France Hobby Also a semi professional Jazz guitarist and singer Abstract CyrVe is a IATEX2 class for writing curricula vitae cv It provides a set of commands to create headers rubrics entries in these rubrics etc CyrVe will then format your cv with a consistent layout while you can just concentrate on the contents The layout of a CyrVe cv is highly customizable Curk also has a very special feature known as the flavor mechanism it is able to manage different flavors versions of your cv simultaneously Cure is distributed under the terms of the LPPL license This paper describes the features available in version 1 11 1 Getting Curke Cure can be obtained from any CTAN archive at CTAN macros latex contrib curve You can also download it directly from my website at the URL above Please follow th
33. Kerning I noticed that there was too much space between the W and the a in my last name Walden in NLarge size on the title page and in italics at the end of the preface As a result I took a many hour look at how kerning tables are specified in TpX s font files but ultimately I gave up trying to modify and recompile these tables and fonts As an interim measure I just inserted a kerning command at the few places that were particularly obvious to me for example Large scshape David W kern 2pt alden 4 Preparing a ready to print file While I was doing the work described in the last section my co author finished his review and suggested a number of changes to the manuscript We debated some of his proposals and I made the changes we agreed upon in my T X and eps image files We also began to discuss the cover design which I did as an Illustrator file see the following page 12 7 me PU uerpug jo uorje19poguo X 4 vip s jdwexg yum SS3204gd IASI uap eM puea Xf TT Y 8 pue eqrys toys Shiba and Walden I Woy ajqejene pue eqius fous 3044 Aq oSv upped reueg TN ning ay osuos pue uwouxun eu pue aqsa au ubnoiu YOO ureejun o3 panies A pider aw eus uruq ea ieuipioenxe Sty Lir ejas diusiepea umo Alu oyu Squ amp rsul epqipersur peure amp aet AJjeuosj g uouo puoKeq amyn s PAON Ya peulJogsuer aney sdousxiow sH 1njraod Kjgqipei sur yaf pue spduams Ajanda
34. Peter Flom s presentation gave me a rare opportunity to see how TeX is viewed by a relative novice after all these years of working with TeX I sometimes lose this fresh view 11 10am Jim Hefferon LaTeX resources Karl Berry Jim s tour of LaTeX resources operated was at a level we need more of not just saying you can use x y or z but actually making recommendations and choices Boris Veytsman Jim Hefferon s work gave a bunch of references to LaTeX resources there were some new points for everybody and I picked up a couple too 11 50am Boris Veytsman Design of presentations Notes on principles and TeX implementation Dave Walden Taking off from Edward Tufte s 31 page self published essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint in which Tufte denigrates PowerPoint style presentations particularly their bulleted lists Boris gave many illustrations of another approach to presentations he particularly emphasized the use of the pdfscreen program from attendee Kaveh Bazargan s company to avoid the artificial boundaries that each PowerPoint slide tends to put into the flow of a presentation Boris s admonition to avoid bullets on slides became a running joke for all the rest of the presenters at the conference 12 30pm lunch 1 40pm Alan Wetmore TeX and after dinner speaking Boris Veytsman Alan Wetmore s presentation gave me many new ideas about interactive texts and presentation and how to make them myself 2 20pm Steve Peter Fon
35. S period and three dots four altogether def fMYdots hbox hspace BDS hspace BDS hspace BDS hspace BDS 4dots for block quote text def SDS 2pt three dots without end spaces def MINsmalldots hbox hspace SDS hspace SDS three dots def sMYdots hbox hspace SDS MINsmalldots hspace SDS period and three dots four altogether def fsMYdots hbox hspacef 3pt hspace SDS MINsmalldots hspace SDS The above macros are intended to be used directly as here abutting text on both sides thus inhibiting line breaking at either side of an ellipsis With so few ellipses in my entire manuscript my plan was to manually note instances where there should be a line break before or after an ellipsis and manually allow the correct thing to happen Such manual intervention rather than trying to develop a redefinition of Ndots that better suits my needs has the disadvantage that if I later change the text for example in a reuse of the text in another document the manual fix might no longer be the correct thing My thought is that I could deal with this eventuality by then redefining all of my special dots macros to be equivalent to dots or by simply doing a Replace All of each instance of one of my dots commands by dots 3 3 End notes When I was originally drafting my book I used footnotes because it is convenient to have them on the same page as the text they refer to However everyone I run int
36. TEX2e For my IATEX courses I distributed the earlier version version 3 4 of Flynn s book along with the IATEX Tutorials from the Indian TUG Group The books com plement each other and the students easily begin to grasp IATEX Overall I believe Peter Flynn s book is a must read for every IATEX beginner and we should thank Flynn for giving us such a fine introduction to the practical use of IATpX 6nttp www tug org tutorials tugindia Thttp www tug org tex archive info math voss mathmode Mathmode pdf 4 The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group Journal home page General information THE Ti X PracTEX Journal style files Copyright Contact us Ask Nelly What are the differences among MiKTeX ProTeXt and LaTeX How do I add change bars The Editors Abstract Ask Nelly is a question and answer column Nelly is the quiet person who sits at the back corner desk who knows a lot and when asked any question is always ready with a patient answer If Nelly doesn t know the answer Nelly will know an expert who has the answer Feel free to Ask Nelly about any aspect of LaTeX TeX Context etc e Comment on this paper e Send submission idea to editor TpJ Q Dear Nelly This is my first contact to the TeX World and I cannot understand what is the difference among MiKTeX ProTeXt LaTeX Can you help me A MiKTexX is a distribution of TeX including the basic TeX typesetting engine plus many other things T
37. The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group Issue Table of Contents 2006 Number 3 Published 2006 08 15 Notices From the Editor In this issue Dave Walden Feedback From the Readers Report on PracTeX06 From the Participants and Compiled by Dave Walden Whole Issue PDF for PracTeX Journal 2006 3 The Editors Articles Productivity with macros and packages Will Robertson Replacing LaTeX2e standard classes with KOMA Script Yuri Robbers Markus Kohm and Rasmus Pank Roulund The memoir class Peter Wilson LaTeX curricula vitae with the CurVe class Didier Verna ConTeXt Starters Joe Hogg Creating Pocket size Books Using LaTeX D V L K D P Venugopal Columns http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 1 of 2 8 19 2006 6 09 52 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group Travels in TeX Land Experiences Refining Page Layout for a Book David Walden Book Review Formatting Information A beginner s introduction to typesetting with LaTeX by Peter Flynn D V L K D P Venugopal Ask Nelly What are the differences among MiKTeX ProTeXt and LaTeX How do I add change bars The Editors Distractions LaTeX Wordplay 3 crosswords math font quiz answers The Editors http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 2 of 2 8 19 2006 6 09 52 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group Journal home page General information THE Ti X PracTEX Journal style files Copyright Contact us From the Editor In t
38. This presentation showed how a small number of weeks of work was able to produce a system that automatically formatted reports required under U S government contracts based on minimal essential input from the people doing reporting 11 50am Kaveh Bazargan Removing vertical stretch mimicking traditional typesetting with TeX Boris Veytsman Kaveh Bazargan presented both an elegant solution to a very old problem typesetting to a grid and a very interesting talk about his company which represents a way to go in introducing TeX to real life environments 12 30pm lunch http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 practex06 4 of 7 8 19 2006 6 30 43 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group 1 40pm David Walden A lifetime as an amateur compositor The amateur your editor for this issue lectures his betters Karl Berry I found Dave s review of pre computer technologies with props a whole lot of fun Peter Flom I particularly liked the talk by Dave Walden on some tips for writing a book using LaTeX I have already implemented some of them Boris Veytsman Dave s fascinated me by its historical part it put the digital typography in a perspective 2 20pm Troy Henderson Using MetaPost for creating high quality technical graphics Robin Laakso I enjoyed Troy s talk on MetaPost very much I thought the department logo he re created with MetaPost looked great and was wowed by his LaTeX and MetaPost previewer both of which could be handy
39. al space Thus vertical space got automati cally added only around floats titles thought breaks www tug org pracjourn 2005 4 walden and so forth At PracTeXo6 TPJ editiorial board member Kaveh Bazargan gave a wonderful paper on a set of macros his company has developed for controlling vertical stretch thus facilitating lining up the lines of text in parallel columns or on facing pages I next read section 4 5 of the second edition of The ATEX Companion on visual layout to avoid pages with too much vertical space facing pages with obviously different numbers of lines and the like Based on the ideas presented there I added the following commands to my class file newcommand Lnewpage newpage newcommand Lpushlines 1 enlargethispage 1 baselineskip newcommand Lpulllines 1 enlargethispage 1 baselineskip newcommand Lhyphen newcommand Lhspace 1 hspace 1 newcommand Lvspace 1 vspace 1 The L at the beginning of each new command L standing for Layout is to let me easily find all uses of these commands to remove them for a later different page layout of pages of the book Probably one page in six needed manual adjustment using these new commands View ing facing PDF pages side by side in my Acrobat Reader was key to seeing where such 15 adjustments were needed and trying out various possibilities for fixing things plus lots of recompiles of each chapter Other techniques that proved use
40. an optimal division factor of 15 and we need a binding correction of 12mm because our report will be bound with glue The first page of the resulting output in figure 2 There are some additional ways of using the DIV option One of them is using calc rather than an explicit DIV factor This will tell IATEX to take care of deter mining an optimal DIV factor This makes life a lot easier for those users who lack the typographical or mathematical background to determine the optimum line width themselves Please see figure 3 for an adaptation of our previous example to include this useful option A complete list of ways to use the DIV option is Figure 1 The source for a basic example of the use of typearea sty DIV factor Set the division factor to be equal to the number lt factor gt DIVcalc Calculate the optimal division factor for the current page and font set tings DIV classic Calculate a division factor for the current page and font settings that approximates the mediaeval page layout as closely as possible DIVcurrent Re calculate the page layout using the DIV factor that is currently in use DIVdefault Calculate the page layout with the standard value for the current page and font settings or lacking a standard value use DIVcalc DIVlast Repeat the calculations for the page layout using the same DIV argument that was used previously These uses of the DIV option seem to im ply that it is possible
41. an optional logo in the right hand margin of the first page Figure 10 The first page of the output of our fancier KOMA Script letter from figure 9 12 The adressee and an underlined return address in small print are again displayed at exactly the right place for sending the letter in an ISO compliant window en velope Note that since a 1co file was created anyway the definition of the company keyword was moved there too This 1co can be reused for business letters of various styles It is straightforward to include multiple 1co files in one document 5 Concluding remarks We hope a little bit of the power and config urability of KOMA Script has been demon strated to the reader Of course the scope of Vel magii Tiret non enim Praesent euismod nunc eu purus Donec bibendum quam hi v l li d h in tellus Nullam cursus pulvinar lectus Donec et mi Nam vulputate metus eu enim Vestibulum pellentesque felis eu massa this paper is necessarily limited much more podere qme p E vel nid vitae lacus tincidunt ultrices Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet con sectetuer adipiscing elit In hac habitasse platea dictumst Integer as been explained 1n the boo y one o the tempus convallis augue Etiam facilisis Nune elementum fermentum wisi Aenean placerat Ut imperdiet enim sed gravida sollicitudin fe lis odio placerat quam ac pulvinar elit purus eget enim Nunc vitae 5 tortor Proin tempus nibh sit amet nisl Vivamus
42. atters panels and side bars Chapter 7 introduces the reader to typesetting quotations footnotes marginal notes cross references bibliographic references and the BIBIEgX Creating bib liographic data bases for BIBIEX and the freely available graphical interfaces to the BIBTEX databases were also discussed Please note that there is a BIbDB pro gramme that is freely available for Windows and DOS platforms Creating multi column documents index and glossary were also discussed in this chapter Changing the layout of the document and using fonts in IATEgX documents is nicely handled in Chapter 8 The various fonts available in METRFONT and the freely available Adobe and X Consortium fonts along with the name of the family and the necessary packages the various size changing commands and changing the colour of the text were also illustrated Installing METRFONT fonts and post script fonts creating font definition files are also discussed in this chapter One of the most powerful feature of IATEX programmability is discussed in Chapter 9 Creating new commands changing previously defined macros creat ing macros with arguments are nicely introduced to the readers with examples The last chapter discusses the compatibility with other systems of typesetting like Quark XPress Pagemaker FrameMaker etc The various commercial and share ware software available to convert IATEX to other formats MS Word WordPerfect and vice versa are also
43. bleCommands renewcommand dash Secondly it can be a little distracting having to literally write dash all the time in the source Those of us lucky enough to be using unicode aware editors might prefer to use a literal em dash in our source to denote a text dash naturally enough After usepackage utf8 inputenc in the preamble it is then possible to bind the meaning of dash above to a uTF 8 em dash in the source with the following incantation DeclareUnicodeCharacter 2014 dash A snippet of the source document could then look like this is a dash in the source but it would be typeset according to all the rules given above I consider this a great advantage for readable source 2 35 Where to keep your macros I generally use macros on a per document basis Others may prefer to keep their macros all together in one place Both have their advantages and disadvantages Since each document requires different logical markup I write and adapt my macros as I go copy and pasting from previous documents Alternatively it can be very convenient to write a private package incor porating all of your own macros This can be as simple as starting a new file mymacros sty with the line ProvidesPackage mymacros 2006 08 15 v0 1 My custom macros Placing this file in the local texmf tree of your distribution then provides a com y E g Library texmf tex latex on Mac OS X C localtexmf tex latex on Wi
44. c Now here s some more definitions along these lines Abbreviations such as etc and et al may occur at the end of sentences so it would be unfortunate to insert the period incorrectly in these cases Here we go newcommand ensuresingleperiod ifnextchar newcommand etc foreign etc ensuresingleperiod newcommand etal foreignfet al ensuresingleperiod 5 Inside a package PackageError would be better to use than latex error 6 These are used similarly Sentence ending etc Sentence ending etc riverrun etc livvy riverrun etc livvy As discussed by Robertson etal As discussed by Robertson et al Of course many people will argue against emphasising these abbreviations with italics while others will disagree with using the abbreviations at all The poet E E Cummings might have recommended omitting all of the punctuation The definitions above can be adjusted appropriately to suit such requirements and make the appropriate changes throughout the entire document In this application using macros for the abbreviations ensures both consis tency and flexibility with the formatting not to mention that using the macros pre cludes spelling errors in the output without an error in the compilation provided they are used exclusively 2 2 3 Punctuation Many people now have written macros for inserting smart dashes into their doc uments I copied the TUGboat macro 1 in this regard when w
45. ces e g instances where one end note said See note ref fn whatever on page pageref fn whatever and the label fn whatever was defined in the referenced end note this printed as 5 See note 8 on page 243 All non inter end note cross references worked fine thus rather than trying to figure out what was going on I replaced note ref fn whatever with an absolute note number e g note 8 in the two instances where I had of such cross references and I put a comment in the source file to remind me to remove the absolute references if I later reuse this text in another document When this paper was being edited for publication Barbara Beeton pointed out the I should not have redefined ref which XTpxX already uses for cross references Rather I should have called my macro something else such as Ref This also indicates the value of using newcommand for defining macros which would have told me I was redefining an existing macro Some lessons I seem to have to learn over and over again 3 4 Table of contents Using the ATEX defaults and the size font I had specified the table of contents spilled slightly onto a third page I wanted the table of contents to fit on two pages and I wanted the page boundary to be between parts of the book Again I looked in the documen tation and at the comp text tex discussion group but didn t find what I needed So I hunted around in the files latex 1tx and book cls and a few other
46. cularly in chapters 1 2 and 10 than some books do In particular many introductory books focus on IATEX and more or less ig nore the rest of the beginner s development environment This is understandable Which of the many editors and other aspects of the user s development environ ment should a general IATgX introduction select While learning IATEX I had to struggle a lot and I am sure many other begin ners have similar problems I was unaware of the various editors like emacs or vi with which one can easily handle typing compiling and viewing the document without leaving the editor Generic instructions along the lines of Type your text in plain vanilla editor Save it with tex extension Then run IATEX on it with latex somefile and you will get the out put somefile dvi View it with a DVI viewer Inttp www ctan org tex archive info lshort 2Helmut Kopka and Patrick W Daly A Guide to IATEX fourth edition Addison Wesley 2004 http www tug org tex archive info beginlatex beginlatex 3 6 pdf were not sufficient for me Half the struggle in the initial stages of learning IATEX doesn t have much to do with IATEX itself If information on the user s overall development environment is not provided it may leave the user confused and inclined to drop the idea of learning TEX or IATEX It was through the postings to the Indian TUG that I learned about emacs and its AucTeX mode I happened to see Peter Flynn s book Formatting Infor
47. d maketitle at the top of your document One surprise however is that the content of the rubric is not available directly in the main source file each rubric must remain in its own file For instance to include an education rubric you must write it to a file named education tex and include it as shown in the example with the makerubric command 2 22 The rubric source files The code associated with the Profes sional Experience rubric is shown in figure 3 As you can see the subrubric Research whole contents of a rubric file must Nene gt yldots OO and Meta Programming in functional be enclosed in a rubric environment languages try 1996 2004 This environment takes one manda Y l Virtual Reality and Cognition tory argument which specifies the begin rubric Professional Experience subrubric Lectures re Sai f rubric s title When a rubric crosses entry 2002 Idots several pages its title is restated with textbf LaTeXe an overview 3 hours i yy ded Ventry 2000 ldots a continuation text appenaed textbf OpenGL Programming 15 hours You create entries in your rubrics mn ETI r textbf Operatin stems 30 hours by calling the entry macro This p Re macro behaves much like an item subrubric Development AA Ventry LaTeXe within a list environment there is Author of Curve QM RINK and FiXme one optional argument that defines
48. discussed Because typically it is not possible to convert from one format to another format completely cleanly the book only deals with how the pain can be decreased and not eliminated In addition to these ten chapters the book has three Appendices dealing with configuring TEX search paths how to become a member of the TEX Users Group and its benefits and the ASCII character set A fourth appendix contains the GNU Free Documentation License under which author Flynn has generously made this book available To help the reader use the book it has a detailed table of contents down to the subsubsection level another table listing the page numbers of exercises that show how to undertake 20 common tasks another table listing the page numbers of several useful charts and a fairly thorough index Since Flynn s book lacks deep discussion about typesetting mathematics and other matters of document formatting I recommend its use in conjunction with the IATEX Tutorials and Herbert Vof s Math mode I greatly appreciate having these three books available in PDF format I keep them on my computer s desktop and whenever I am in doubt about something I just open one of these books read the appropriate discussion and use the code Another advantage of these PDF books over the printed books is that the authors regularly modify and improve the content Another book which is undergoing regular update is Oetiker s The Not So Short Introduction to IN
49. dvanced usage In this section we describe two advanced features of Cyrk that might come in handy 4 Bibliography Most scientists include their own list of publications in their cv The first thing you can do is create your own bibliography manually just as you would create a rubric If you find this process too cumbersome however you can use the standard IATEX bibliography mechanisms with Curk the thebibliography environment is supported along with its bibitem companion The behavior is actually that of a rubric environment with its entry companion with an empty prefix how ever Hence the layout of the bibliography remains consistent with the rest of the cv This fact has two implications however firstly the argument to the thebibliography environment is unused in Cur but remains for compatibility with the rest of IATEX because Cur itself formats the keys and contents prop erly aligned Secondly the bibliographic environment must reside in its own file as any other rubric Don t forget that if you happen to write the environment manually If you want to use BIBTEX that s also possible of course Do it as you would do in any other document You will probably issue a nocite command followed by a call to bibliography In Grk the bbl file is actually used as if it is just another rubric on the cv Finally note that Curk is compatible with the bibentry package 4 2 Flavors It is often desirable to maintain several s
50. dy modified it and renamed it dw endnotes sty to slightly change the format of end notes Now I changed the end of each chapter to only reset the end note counter i e setcounter endnote 0 and I put a single theendnotes command in a new Notes chapter near the end of the book beginning with chapter Notes and appropriate redefinition of the running heads The result of having only one theendnotes command is that all the endnotes for all chapters go in succession in one ent file with no distinctions among notes from different chapters although the note numbers restart at 1 at the beginning of the notes from each chapter My changes to the portion endnotes sty which it typesets the end notes included commented out where it typesets the heading for a Notes section since we only needed this once and not with the notes for each chapter included a test for whether a note number was equal to 1 defined a new counter with which to keep track of chapter numbers inserted a test for whether a note number being read from the ent file is equal to 1 i e is the first note of a chapter if it is the chapter number counter is incremented by one and the word Chapter and the chapter number are typeset with appropriate vertical spacing If someone wants my actual code for the above please ask Unfortunately for some reason my end note processing changes put an erroneous space in instances of inter end note cross referen
51. e tug org pracjourn 2006 2 roberts I would have graduated a year earlier had I read this TpJ Page generated August 19 2006 TUG home page search contact webmaster http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 readers 4 of 4 8 19 2006 6 10 48 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group Journal home page mr TEX PracleX Journal i Contact us Report on PracTeX06 From the Participants and Compiled by Dave Walden e Comment on this paper e Send submission idea to editor This journal is a child of the PracTeX conference series it was conceived two years ago at the second PracTeX conference in San Francisco As this journal was pulling its seventh quarterly issue together the third PracTeX06 conference was held at Rutgers the State University Busch Campus Piscataway New Jersey USA LN Ue ses Te yay The conference began with a four day LaTeX workshop followed by a three day conference with a mostly idle day in between Editor s note For this conference report I solicited two or three sentences from each participant on his or her impressions of the conference generally of one specific session and one sentence on any other aspect of PracTeX06 Several attendees followed the rules and submitted the requested two or three sentences a couple of attendees said they could and did provide sentences on more presentations as needed and the enthusiastic and prolific Boris Veytsman sent remarks o
52. e 2005 PracTgX conference in Chapel Hill I saw CONTEXT demonstrated on several projects and wanted to try it The exposure to different ways to typeset documents was one of the benefits of my attending this conference At the time I didn t view CONTEXT as a replacement for IATEX and I still don t CONTEXT IATEX and Plain TEX can all be used for their separate strengths 1 Letterhead My first project using CONTEXT was letterhead that I could use for business and personal correspondence I like to use envelopes with address panes and wanted to include the recipient s address in the letter in a position that would show through the pane in the envelope The complete source file letterConTeXt tex and associated PDF file accom pany this article You may have to adjust the spacing for font size and address length in order to be sure the recipient s address shows through the pane in the envelope If you don t use this type of envelope simply comment out or remove the address com mands My correspondents have liked the appearance of my letters However the first time they receive my letter in US 10 business envelopes with the address showing through they think I m sending an invoice 2 Four page Brochure In the late fall the Los Angeles Zoo and Botanical Gardens hosts a conservation event called Ape Awareness Day Various handouts and exhibits are included with information about apes and their environment This four page brochure lists sev
53. e explor ing various TEX packages experimenting with Omega MetaPost and MetaFont and teaching and or explaining advantages of TEX IATEX over word processors References 1 Hagen H ConTpxt The Manual 2001 www pragma ade com 2 Niepraschk R Schmidt W and Gafslein H The document class leaflet 2004 3 Hansen M L The twoup Package 2005 4 Wilson P Printing booklets with TEX 2005 5 Matthias A The pdfpages Package 2004 The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group Journal home page General p TEX PracTEX Journal style files Copyright Contact us Travels in TeX Land Experiences Refining Page Layout for a Book David Walden Abstract In this column in each issue I muse on my wanderings around the TeX world In my last column www tug org pracjourn 2006 2 walden I described some methods I use to make it easier to draft large documentation projects 1 e books In this column I describe my experience with taking final steps of turning a book manuscript into a published book David Walden is retired after a career as an engineer engineering manager and general manager involved with research and development of computer and other high tech systems You can contact him via the email address you can find by scrolling to the bottom of the page at www walden family com alternatively send email to his attention via pracjourn tug org e PDF version of paper e Comment on this paper e Send s
54. e links on the left menu If you are a Debian unstable user unstable referring to Debian not you unofficial source and i386 packages are available The package name is curve Here s the source list entry to use deb http www lrde epita fr debian unstable i386 deb src http www lrde epita fr debian sid source For installation instructions please read the README file included in the distri bution Copyright 2006 Didier Verna Permission is granted to distribute verbatim or modified copies of this document provided this notice remains intact 2 First Contact Figure 1 shows the output of Cur for a minimal cv with absolutely no customiza tion of any kind Only the basic information for a cv is provided 21 The document layout Note the different parts of a cv made by Grke and their default layout as you can see a CV begins with a small photo two headers up per left and upper right in which you usu ee nd nD yn computer ocience ally put your name address email whether Professional Experience you re married and so on After these head ers come a title and a subtitle m The remainder of the document is com posed of sections called rubrics in the Curk terminology A rubric represents a major topic that you want to detail in your cv Typ ical rubrics are Professional Experience Education and the like Rubrics have a title centered on the page by default and appear under the form of
55. eX Journal TeX Users Group Journal home page General pm TEX PracTEX Journal style files Copyright Contact us Replacing LaTeX2e standard classes with KOMA Script Yuri Robbers Markus Kohm and Rasmus Pank Roulund Abstract KOMA is a complete replacement of the standard LaTeX2e classes It is aimed more at European typography but is easily configurable Some of KOMA s extensions and ways to configure document layout are also available in other document classes such as the LaTeX2e standard This paper discusses just a few parts of KOMA especially those that have to do with page layout and with writing letters Yuri Robbers holds a degree in Animal Behaviour and is a teacher a researcher and a published author He s always had a keen interest in typography possibly because his father is a professional typographer Ever since he discovered LaTeX in 1995 he s always done his best to avoid using word processors and he has embarked on a quest to learn as much as possible about TeX and its derivatives and to apply this knowledge whenever possible Contact him at yuri robbersGgmail com Markus Kohm worked after finishing his degree in Computer Science as a software developer for several years eventually as a project leader Nowadays he takes pleasure in running the household and being a father His interest in typography already started in secondary school through literature In his spare time he has been working as a typographe
56. en prominent plants in areas where apes live The text was written by the Chairman of the Botany Committee and illustrated with photos from various Internet sites I did the layout and typesetting with CONTEXT with the goal of placing the photos to the right of the text I started with letter size paper but the content was too long for two pages Legal size paper worked and allowed for a brochure layout with a single piece of paper folded in the middle Processing the document produced a four page PDF file Using this file I imposed the brochure with Acro Software s cutePDF and printed it on a color laser printer single sheet of paper printed both sides then folded I usually score the paper along the fold in order to make a sharp crease and a tight fold The complete source file brochureConTeXt tex and associated PDF file accom pany this article 3 Wrap Up These examples are my first attempt to use CONTEXT Surely the design of the documents and their coding can be improved and I would appreciate any com ments you have Nevertheless if you can use any of the coding for your projects you are welcome to do so The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group Journal home page General information THE Ti X PracTEX Journal style files Copyright Contact us Creating Pocket size Books Using LaTeX D V L K D P Venugopal Abstract This article deals with creating pocket sized books of A7 size using LaTeX in a quick and dirty method
57. ented 1 Introduction One of LATEgX s advantages lies in its separation of content and formatting This concept called logical markup enables authors to write without the distraction of worrying about typesetting Of course authors aren t forced to work this way but it s highly recommended Implicit in the idea of logical markup is the ability to define your own logical elements as the text requires These are known in ATEX as macros or commands and can be as simple as newcommand strong 1 textbf 1 to define a com mand for strongly emphasising words as so for strong strongly emphasising A whole world opens up when you can write your own macros in my own documents whenever there s an issue of formatting that will re occur it gets a macro in case I change my mind later But when things start to get more com plex there are better ways to do things it s much better to use other people s solutions i e other people s packages This article is split into two halves The first half section 2 discusses small macros written to ease document production with some examples of how I per sonally use macros to save time and effort In the second half section 3 on page 9 I briefly cover a bunch of packages that provide a whole heap of functionality that other people have kindly implemented no need to do it yourself Formatting in this article Verbatim in this document is represented by typewriter text in bright
58. er using the sclttr2 class We chose a letter for several reasons First of all the standard IATRX2 letter class is not used all that often since it looks rather outdated and does not lend itself well to cus Figure 6 The first page of the output for our very ba sic KOMA Script letter from fig ure 8 tomisation The scrlttr2 class is quite the opposite it looks quite modern already and it is rather easy to make significant customisations and modifications Also letters tend to be rather short by nature so it easy to include a complete exam ple in this paper Finally while there are quite a few replacements for the other standard classes there are very few available replacements for the letter class We do not intend to show the full power of the scrlttr2 sty package merely to show some of its options and the effects these options have This means we will not show all the commands for changing the look and feel of the letter nor any of the advanced op tions such as mail merge set of commands for easily creating standard letters that get sent with slight alternations sent to many people based on databases of recipients We will show without explanation how to save various sets of settings in small data files so that they can be easily reused when send ing out for example a personal letter us ing your home address and perhaps a clos ing with your first name or a business let ter using your work
59. et the type area to a particular fixed size and have the typearea sty package calculate the right DIV value to achieve this For this use the command Figure 5 First page of the result areaset BCOR textwidth textheight for the example of figure 4 Should you for example desire to typeset a book of poetry with square text bodies of 15cm by 15cm and a binding correction of 1cm use the command areaset 1cm 15cm 15cm 7 This will give you a text body of the desired size and adjust the margins accord ingly Should you require particular margin sizes that do not fit into the system described above then it is better to use the geometry package Umeki 2000 3 A short remark on headers and footers KOMA Script has a style file named scrpage2 sty that allows all sorts of manipu lations both simple and complex of headers and footers It easily surpasses the capabili ties of the better known fancyhdr sty Since this is a large and complicated style file with many options we think it is better to just make the reader aware of its existence here and refer to the included documentation for now We intend to write another paper deal ing exclusively with the scrpage2 sty pack age for a future issue of The PracIEX Journal 4 An application writing letters This section is intended to show the power of using KOMA Script We could have cho sen an article report or book but we have decided to show a lett
60. f two morning sessions separated by a break lunch and two afternoon sessions separated by a break Other formal and informal events were fit in before after and between formal sessions Sunday July 30 http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 practex06 2 of 7 8 19 2006 6 30 43 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group 9am Karl Berry Opening amp introductions 9 20am Barbara Beeton keynote address How to Create a TeX Journal A Personal Journey Steve Grathwohl It was a wonderful presentation full of stuff I didn t know and was glad to learn Boris Veytsman The keynote address was an interesting and enjoyable journey into the history of TeX TUG TUGboat Dave Walden Barbara gave a fascinating tour through the various changes in the style of TUGboat over the years Even more exciting was hearing and meeting Barbara in person she has been the editor of TUBboat for essentially its whole life and TUGboat in turn was the initial reason I joined TUG 10 20am break 10 30am Peter Flom LaTeX for social scientists and other people who think they don t need it Robin Laakso Peter s funny common sense perspective on encouraging people to use La TeX was instructive and personally inspiring He ended his talk with a wish list of suggestions on how to improve its ease of use It was amazing and at times amusing to observe Peter s wish list getting smaller and smaller as attendees recommended solutions and gave advice Boris Veytsman
61. files until I found the starttoc command and the 1 chapter command I first looked at the toc file resulting from the compilation of my book That was full of lines of the form contentsline chapter numberline 3 Identify Need 45 contentsline section numberline 3 1 Humanitas and principle 1 45 I found Ncontentsline defined in latex 1tx def contentsline i csname 10 1 endcsname Although I don t completely understand this definition it seemed like it was defining a command that had as its name the first argument of the contentsline command I 10 hunted around for 1 chapter and found in book c1s the definition which controlled the spacing before chapter lines in the table of contents Then I looked for where the table of contents is typeset and found the starttoc command in latex 1tx I redefined both starttoc and 1 chapter in my class file so there was less vertical space before chapter lines and baselineskip was a little smaller throughout the table of contents By trial and error with the amounts of vertical space I was able to get the page break to be where I wanted it to be without the table of contents flowing onto a third page Altogether I spend several hours until I had the page breaks of the table of contents where I wanted them Then after talking with the printing company I changed the text block size of the whole book which put the table of contents page break in the middle of the subsections of a
62. for instance footnotes can be as normal typeset in two or three columns or all run into a single paragraph You can create new verbatim like environments read and write information in external files design your own style of maketitle convert numbers to words reserve space at the bottom of a page and so on and so forth A Packages Most packages work with the memoir class Apart from from those indicated below the main exception is the hyperref package This package modifies many of the internals of the standard classes but does not cater for all of the differences between memoir and the standard ones If you wish to use hyperref with memoir then you must use the memhfixc package after using hyperref For example like 1 memhfixc is supplied as part of the memoir distribution 5 documentclass memoir usepackagel hyperref usepackage memhfixc begin document The memoir class includes code either equivalent to or extensions of the fol lowing packages that is the set of commands and environments is at least the same as those in the packages abstract appendix array booktabs ccaption chngc ntr chngpage crop dcolumn delarray enumerate epigraph framed ifmtarg ifpdf index makeidx moreverb needspace newfile nextpage patchcmd shortvrb showidx tabularx titleref titling tocbibind tocloft verbatim verse The class automatically ignores any usepackage or RequirePackage related to these
63. ftware to make a challenging LaTeX themed puzzle His C program xword typeset generates a crossword in the form of a LaTeX file which uses the cwpuzz1e package The puzzle Arthur originally sent had really tough clues and he allowed them to be edited down provided he could make a second set of really tough clues These two versions of his puzzle are available at the top of this page Bob Newell a games person who has also written some crossword software and who once participated in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament featured in the movie Wordplay made a cryptic or British style crossword If you re not familiar with this type of puzzle see this cryptic crossword explanation Bob is an avid cryptic solver but since this was his first try at compiling a cryptic crossword he asked for suggestions to improve the clues Several of us helped with this and it turned out to be a lot of fun It seemed that each time someone came up with a pretty good clue someone else would then improve it then someone else would improve it a little more Peter Flom a Scrabble expert helped with clues Gerd Neugebauer the author of the cwpuzzle package made a heavily TeX and LaTeX themed puzzle which will appear in a future Distractions column Hope you enjoy solving the puzzles Solution to Joy amp Dave Morris s puzzle Solution to Arthur O Dwyer s puzzle both versions Solution to Bob Newell s Cryptic crossword http dw tug org pracj
64. ful were a slight ad justments of figure and table sizes an invisible tiny fraction of an inch change sometimes made things lots better and b encouraging floats of figures and tables in some cases to be placed at the bottoms of facing pages to avoid having to balance full pages of text on facing pages In a dozen or so places in my 280 page book I had to rewrite a part of a sentence to avoid problem lines I also had to put in a few specific hyphens that TEX s automatic hyphenator couldn t find particularly in proper names I also spotted a few more instances where I thought kerning was required I added explicit kerning in these instances and to mark the spots for later removal of the explicit kerning I used my L convention newcommand LVught V kern 1pt ught newcommand LVerschuren V kern 1pt erschuren I reproofread each chapter before I made the changes described above and checked the changes after I finished each chapter A book with all text might need fewer adjustments but my book had perhaps 100 fig ures in 280 pages lots of subtitles many block quotes and many lists that all had to be well placed on a page and it seems to me that this made the layout harder most of the time I did all the manual adjustments by hit and miss using what looked good to me as my only standard Next time I first will read some theory about proper page layout 5 Printing The printer in India wanted a PostScript file of the manuscript
65. gebar package described on pages 189 191 of the second edition of The LaTeX Companion may help you I always go to the index of this book first when looking for a new capability Having found the package in the book I also found by putting RequirePackage changebar in the preamble of a document and trying to compile the document that the changebar package is already included in the ProTeXt distribution of TeX that I use thus I assume many or most other distributions also include it I then also found a document on the changebar package already in my computer by doing a search of my texmf file hierarchy for changebar it found changebar dvi among several other files I clicked on changebar dvi and the documentation opened in my previewer window You might also look in the FAQ i e at http www tex ac uk cgi bin texfag2html label changebars The above question also was answered by Dave Walden TpJ Page generated August 19 2006 TUG home page search contact webmaster http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 asknelly 2 of 2 8 19 2006 6 17 06 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group Journal home page General information T H E Submit an ra Download style files Copyright Contact us CTEX Journal Distractions LaTeX Wordplay 3 crosswords math font quiz answers The Editors e Comment on this paper e Send submission idea to editor Crossword puzzles Math font quiz answers
66. h its default leading interline spacing looks nice and airy to my not too discerning eye I am also using 12 point for this column However using normalsize text the ATEX default for block quotes doesn t make them distinctive enough to my eye despite the greater indentation on the left and right Using Nsmall for block quotes with its default sizing looked too small to me Thus I redefined smal1 in my class file using a pattern that Steve Peter showed me renewcommand smal1 setfontsize small1 10 7pt 13 05pt abovedisplayskip 9 5 p plus2 5 p minus5 p abovedisplayshortskip z plus p belowdisplayshortskip 5 25 p plus2 75 p minus2 5 p belowdisplayskip abovedisplayskip Initially I didn t know what much of the above means although Peter Flynn s presentation at the PracTeXo6 conference which presumably will be published in an upcoming issue of this journal and or TUGboat explained what it means but it produced a pleasing result for block quotes and the few other places where I used small text in the bibliography end notes and so forth I redefined IATEX s block quote macros to use my version of Nsmall renewenvironment quote list rightmargin leftmargin small added by me item relax endlist renewenvironment quotation list listparindent 1 5em small added by me itemindent listparindent rightmargin leftmargin parsep z plus pe item relax endlist 2 2
67. have to start from square one In addition our university has a large Electronic Private Automatic Branch Exchange or EPABX system For these reasons it is desirable to have an institution wide printed version of a pocket sized booklet of telephone numbers 2 Pre IATpgX Era Prior to 1995 we were wholly dependent on the telephone directory printed by our university press There were fewer telephones then so managing the infor mation was easy But from 1995 onwards there was an information technology revolution and the telephone which was considered a luxury until then became a necessity Frequent change of telephone numbers due to establishment of new telephone exchanges was a feature of this period As our office is the nerve center Correspondence D V L K D P Venugopal Personal Assistant Vice Chancellor s Office Ba naras Hindu University Varanasi 221 005 India E mail venugopal_duvvuri rediffmail com of the university and we have to deal with many officials inside and outside of the university it was natural for our office to want more frequent updates of the telephone book and we started creating them ourselves Computers were introduced in our office in the year 1995 So we started com piling a telephone directory on a computer As the word processor we used didn t have much capability we originally prepared the telephone directory by photo copying two A4 210 x 297 mm printed pages on to one A4 page by reduction
68. he water is fine Troy Henderson I got more out of this conference than I have from any other conferences that I ve attended Robin Laakso I thought the talks and interaction at this PracTeX conference were particularly rewarding inspiring and fun Sometimes it seemed like a real life version of a support mailing list which is the whole point of organizing a Practical TeX conference so yay Donald Pellegrino Practical TeX 2006 was a great opportunity to see how TeX is being used by the experts who really know how to use it Boris Veytsman This was a very pleasant and useful meeting The atmosphere there was just right Dave Walden This was my first TeX or TUG conference I learned much was inspired to try several new things and loved meeting all the TeX users Many not all conference participants posing for a photo Detailed conference agenda Tuesday July 25 through Friday July 28 the LaTeX workshop with volunteer instructors Sue DeMeritt and Cheryl Ponchin Saturday July 29 Many people arrived by plane train and car for the conference proper An informal reception was held from 5 7pm on Saturday evening at the Clarion Hotel in Edison NJ where many conference attendees stayed At the reception conference attendees made new acquaintances and renewed old acquaintances The conference itself was held on Sunday July 30 through Tuesday August 1 at the Core Building on the Rutgers Busch campus Each day consisted o
69. here are other commercial and free distributions of TeX each containing many of the same things including LaTeX and a some distinguishing things ProTeXt is the MiKTeX distribution plus a nice PDF guide of the installation procedure plus a couple of editor options that are not part of the MiKTeX distribution LaTeX is a set of TeX macros commands such a set is called a format in the TeX world that makes a particular set of assumptions about what a book report letter etc look like http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 asknelly 1 of 2 8 19 2006 6 17 06 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group many people find LaTeX more appropriate to use than the plain TeX format of the basic underlying TeX typesetting engine LaTeX also has provisions for modifying many of these LaTeX assumptions The MiKTeX distribution also comes with other alternatives to the LaTeX format modifications to LaTeX or built directly on basic TeX that offer different starting assumptions about what various documents look like and the level of detail the user wants to give commands to TeX The above question was answered by Dave Walden a member of the editorial board of this journal TPJ Q Dear Nelly Have you covered how to add vertical lines to the margins to indicate areas of change editing revision etc In resubmitting grants I need to tell the reviewers what areas have changes I don t want to italicize bold or underline the text A The chan
70. hints on what you can and can t do within a longtable The next big step for Gye which will trigger an increment of the major ver sion number will be the support for the notion of themes The idea is to make it easy to use predefined layouts and also to support official cv styles like the european one This has been on my todo list for some time now A Customized main source file NeedsTeXFormat LaTeX2e documentclass a4paper curve usepackage nohead nofoot hmargin 1 5cm vmargin 1 5cm geometry leftheader textbf Didier Verna texttt didier lrde epita fr texttt http www Irde epita fr didier rightheader 1 wife 2 children and 8 guitars photo r didier titlefont fontfamily pag selectfont bfseries Huge title Assistant Professor subtitlefont fontfamily pag selectfont itshape huge subtitle Ph D in computer Science rubricfont fontfamily pag selectfont bfseries Large rubricalignment cl subrubricfont fontfamily pag selectfont bfseries itshape large keyfont fontfamily pag selectfont bfseries usepackage pifont prefix ding 52 begin document makeheaders t maketitle makerubric experience makerubric education end document The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group Journal home page General PracTEX Journal style files Copyright Contact us Context Starters Joe Hogg Abstract This article
71. his issue Dave Walden e Comment on this paper e Send submission idea to editor Hello My name is Dave Walden and I am the guest editor of this issue of The PracTeX Journal TPJ I am on the Editorial Board of the journal but until now I have worked in the journal s back room maintaining the journal s web pages In this issue I was hoping that this issue would have a theme of using TeX to improve productivity and using TeX more productively and two or three pieces in the issue are explicitly on that topic for instance prac journ 2006 3 robertson However as I look at the whole collection of papers and columns in this issue I realize that a key to both TeX s productivity and using it productively is its flexibility In fact flexibility may be the underlying theme of every issue of TPJ and may help distinguish TeX from standard word processing systems and other typesetting systems TeX is extraordinarily flexible and customizable in many dimensions Users of TeX have several formats they can choose from plain TeX LaTeX ConTeXt pracjourn 2006 3 hogg and so forth Users have different major classes they can choose from basic LaTeX KOMA pracjourn 2006 3 robbers memoir prac journ 2006 3 wilson AMS and so forth Typesetting all manner of languages is possible There was great excitement at the recent PracTeX06 conference pracjourn 2006 3 practex06 about XeTeX s capability along with the fontspec pac
72. ht vspace useplength firstfootvpos 7 vspace footskip 7 usekomavar frombank th th end picture hspace useplength infocolwidth 7 th 1 addto macro firstheadfootfield setkomavar date nexthead begingroup tempswatrue if twoside ifodd number value page else tempswafalse fi fi if tempswa makebox Opt 1 hspace oddsidemargin hspace 1lin hspace paperwidth hspace useplength infocolwidth 7 normalfont fontsize 7 8 sffamily 16 begin picture 0 0 put 0 0 parbox t useplength infocolwidth vspace topmargin vspace 1in vspace headheight vspace useplength toaddrvpos begin tabular c usekomavar fromlogo usekomavar company end tabular th th end picture th fi endgroup th pagestyle headings endinput 17 The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group Journal home page General information THE Ti X PracTEX Journal style files Copyright Contact us The memoir class Peter Wilson Abstract The memoir class is essentially the book and report classes with lots of bells and whistles as it includes the functions of over 30 popularly used packages It can also simulate the appearance of article class documents and provides a basis for producing the typewritten like manuscripts which some publishers ask for Peter Wilson PhD first started using LaTeX soon after it became available for creating camera ready copy f
73. ime scrdate sty used for displaying system time and date respec tively in I4TpX documents verb scraddr sty used for handling address files and scrlfile sty adds additional hooks pre and post inputing files and load ing classes or packages These classes offer advanced ways of manipulating document layout using powerful options and commands that are easy to learn 13 We urge readers to give KOMA Script a try and to experiment with the many available options We thank David Walden and the anonymous referees for their helpful com ments References BRINGHURST R 2004 The Elements of Typographic Style 2nd Edition Vancouver Hartley amp Marks Komm M amp MonAwski J U 2005 KOMA Script Eine Sammlung von Klassen und Paketen f r IATEX2eg Heidelberg DANTE UMEKI H 2000 The geometry package CTAN macros latex contrib geometry A The contents of the asymTypB 1co file ProvidesFile asymTypB 1lco 2005 04 09 v0 2a unsupported LCO filel LoadLetterOption DINmtext setlength oddsidemargin useplength toaddrhpos addtolength oddsidemargin 1in Take care that the shift stays intact even after recalculating the page layout see Kohm amp Morawski 2005 section C 7 1 addto macro typearea end setlength oddsidemargin useplength toaddrhpos addtolength oddsidemargin 1in ifx AtBeginDocument notprerr KOMAoptions DIV last else AtBeginDocument g addto macro
74. imilar problems arise adding hyperlink support to the figref command from the in troduction The point is that many packages are designed to fit in around each other and doing this is not always a straightforward task when you re trying to hack your own support Things work fine doing simple things and for one off solutions sometimes it can be quicker to hack your way to output that looks right This is an oft repeated criticism of IATgX in general it s so much easier in Plain TEX to do this or that with a quick macro re definition What is wrong with these sorts of ideas it that IATEX isn t complicated because its authors wanted to obfuscate their work rather various functionality has worked its way into its facets that cover edge cases you re not even considering when trying to hack your own way 8 To make such changes you d look through the class and copy paste the snippets you were in terested in modifying to the preamble of your document see footnote 1 on page 4 or your own class file The article class can be found at TEXMF tex latex base article cls with documen tation at CTAN macros latex base classes dtx 10 3 1 Choosing classes and packages In the previous sections I ve shown two tiny sets of macros that make my writing more productive Perhaps they ve inspired you along similar lines But in many cases it s not the best thing to do to build up your own macro packages from scratch because other people
75. indented with respect to the other three It is not always possible to fit a line into the available space and you can specify the particular indentation to be used when a logical verse line spills over the available textwidth thus forming two or more typeset physical lines 5 End matter Normally appendices come after the main body of a book The class provides some methods for introducing appendices at the end or you can place one or more appendices at the end of selected chapters if that suits you better memoir also lets you have more than one index and an index can be set in either the normal double column style or as a single column which would be more appropriate say for an index of first lines in a book of poetry The titles of any bibliography or indexes are added to the table of contents but you can prevent this if you wish The class provides a set of tools for making glossaries or lists of symbols the appearance of which can of course be easily altered The makeindex program is used to sort the entries An example is shown in the current version of the Addendum The most recent addition to the class provides configurable end notes which can be used as well as or instead of footnotes 6 Miscellaneous As already noted the Manual for memoir runs to some 300 pages and it is impos sible to cover everything in a short article Suffice it to say that hooks and macros are provided for most aspects of document layout
76. ities with LaTeX under MS Windows But I still had problems finding a suitable MS Windows tool to incorporate eps until I found and installed The Gimp for MS It would be helpful if you could update section 5 of your paper by indicating that there is a version of The Gimp for Windows Regards Laurent Peckels TPJ Issue 2006 2 of The PracTeX Journal reprinted a an opinion piece from OSNews by Andy Roberts tug org pracjourn 2006 2 roberts and the reprint included responses to the author after the piece s original publication OSNews reader For horizontal spacing issues however you have the reverse problem LaTeX would rather overrun a right margin than leave too much space between words The infamous overfull hbox whose black slug indicating an error certain styles remove incidentally even in draft mode grrrr I m not sure why Knuth thought an overrun was such a better idea than extra whitespace in an hbox while extra white space was preferable to an overrun in a vbox but the result in many published papers and even some books has been ugly It certainly does not look professional but the only way to fix it is to do some really obscure TeXing or else completely rephrase your wording the universal fallback I ve seen in all LaTeX manuals I don t see how one would term begin sloppypar Stuff which one wants typeset in a fashion which will allow ugliness end sloppypar as really obscure or just use sloppy
77. kage from our editorial board member Will Robertson to easily use any font in a Mac Windows or Linux font folder including non Latin fonts TeX can be used any type of application as illustrated by various articles in this issue creating a pocket size book http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 editor 1 of 2 8 19 2006 6 08 38 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group pracjourn 2006 3 venugopal pocketbook developing a letterhead or a laying out a small brochure pracjourn 2006 3 hogg laying out a book pracjourn 2006 3 walden or formatting crossword puzzles prac journ 2006 3 distract All this capability comes with lots of free documentation e g pracjourn 2006 3 venugopal review As usual this issue of TPJ includes some other standard features letters from readers prac journ 2006 3 readers and Nelly s answers to questions prac journ 2006 3 asknelly and a PDF of the whole issue pracjourn 2006 3 wholeissue Thanks Helping with reviewing and copy editing for this issue were Barbara Beeton Karl Berry Jon Breitenbucher Lance Carnes Peter Flom David Ignat Reinaldo Opus John O Rourke Yuri Robbers and Will Robertson please forgive me if I have forgotten anyone Especially notable is the work of Yuri Robbers who solicited two of the papers for this issue edited one of them led the writing of a third paper and helped with production editing Will Robertson who also wrote a pa
78. larx packages is integrated within the class To improve the appearance of rules in tabular material the booktabs package is also included Multipage tabulations are often set with the longtable or xtab packages which can of course be used with the class For simple tabulations that may continue from one page to the next memoir offers a continuous tabular environment This doesn t have all the flexibility provided by the packages but can often serve instead of using them More interestingly but more limited the class provides automatic tabulars For these you provide a list of simple entries like a set of names and a number of columns and the entries are automatically put into the appropriate column You choose whether the entries should be added row by row or column by column 4 Verse The standard classes provide a very simple verse environment for typesetting poetry This is greatly extended in memoir For example in the standard classes the verse stanzas are at a fixed indentation from the left margin whereas memoir lets you control the amount of indentation so that you can make a poem appear optically centered within the textwidth Stanzas may be numbered as can individual lines within a poem There is a special environment for stanzas where lines are alternately indented Also you can can define an indentation pattern for stanzas when this is not regular as for example in a limerick where the 3rd and 4th of the five lines are
79. les of macros and the types of macros I often use 2 2 3 Foot or margin or end notes The first is a macro for adding notes to text Generally this refers to footnotes but sometimes one might wish to annotate their texts in a slightly more inter esting manner Or even using end notes as discussed by Dave Walden 4 Semantically these could be exactly the same thing so the markup for denoting this should be the same Therefore newcommand note 1 unskip footnote 1 Note the unskip This is included so that the note needn t be placed with no whitespace preceding it in the source For example some text note A note will appear as some text gt Note the omission of the space before the superscript Now to adjust this definition to send the note out to the margin instead it s simply a matter of a new definition newcommand note 1 unskip marginpar hspace Opt raggedright small itshape 1 rightarrow or however The Nunskip is a nice trick to ensure that there s never a line break before the note call out in the text 4 and the hspace Opt is to ensure hyphenation in case of a long first word in the margin note In this case the note command adds flexibility to the document it s easy to later change the definition to adjust the typesetting of the notes and to enforce consistency in the output by controlling how the space around the note callout be it superscript or other behaves
80. lightly divergent versions of one s cv at the same time For instance when I was looking for a job some time ago I had a version of my cv emphasizing Artificial Intelligence and another emphasizing Distributed Virtual Reality Only the title and some entries in the Professional Experience rubric were a bit different the main skeleton basically remained the same Cur provides an easy to use mechanism for maintaining different flavors of your cv at the same time You basically write different versions of some of your rubrics in different files tell Cur which flavor you want to format Cre can even ask you which one to use directly and that s it CywVe will use the global skeleton and whenever it finds a rubric file specialized for that particular flavor it will use it Otherwise it will simply fall back to the default one no particular flavor The flavor mechanism works by assigning a pre extension to rubric file names For instance suppose you want to make a special flavor of your cv emphasizing distributed virtual reality You would call this flavor dvr and write the mod ified Professional Experience rubric into a file named experience dvr tex In order to tell Cur which flavor to use you then call the flavor macro like this flavor dvr Instead of using the flavor macro you can make CyrVW ask you at run time which flavor to use by passing the ask option to it In order to implement the flavor mechanism the IATEX
81. mation A be ginner s introduction to typesetting with IATEX in the year 2003 version 3 2 and was attracted to its lucid style of presenting IATEX to the beginners It not only intro duced the concepts of integrated development environments available for various platforms but also gave important information about installing new packages and fonts and modifying macros Later TUGBoat dedicated its November 2003 issue for this book version 3 4 The earlier name of Flynn s book was Beginner s IATEX and it started its journey as lecture notes for a 10 session IATpX introductory course The earliest edition I could obtain was version 2 2 December 2001 with 75 pages As the years passed and at the request of readers Peter Flynn added more content to the book Re cently I stumbled upon version 3 6 of this book which has grown to an awesome 275 pages The rest of this note applies to version 3 6 The book is divided into 10 sessions or chapters By reading and practicing the exercises given in it one can gain enough confidence to tackle IATEX The first chapter contains discussion about various TEX distributions available obtaining them and installation instructions for various platforms In earlier edi tions this chapter contained details about the various editors available but in the present edition this information was moved to second chapter The second chapter deals with creating the TEX documents the concept of markup and the various p
82. n all presentations except the three he was involved in giving Although my intention was to select only one comment for each presentation in the end I included everything I received General comments on the conference Kaveh Barzagan Content was possibly the best ever Precisely relevant to Practical TeX and a minimum of geekspeak All presenters did a great job The location was disappointing with nothing much to do around the hotel Barbara Beeton The enthusiasm reminded me of early TUG annual meetings which tells me that TeX s time isn t over yet And the informal http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 practex06 1 of 7 8 19 2006 6 30 43 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group networking that everybody indulged in is perhaps the most important aspect of a meeting like Practical TeX as well as one of the most enjoyable Karl Berry As an organizer of the conference I was very happy that the general consensus seemed to be that nearly all the presentations provided useful information rather than being over my head Several people used essentially that phrase Elizabeth Dearborn I truly enjoyed participating in PracTeX 06 with so many knowledgeable interesting people and I look forward to PracTeX07 Peter Flom The conference was excellent with many informative talks at different levels I would encourage more attendance and participation by people who are relatively new to the world of TeX the presenters are friendly and t
83. ndows or usr local texmf tex latex on Linux mon location to maintain your macros accessible with usepackage mymacros in your documents I don t use this method personally because I m scared of backwards compat ibility problems although with enough foresight this shouldn t be a problem in general Furthermore this method assumes you want the same output from your macros in each and every document and I don t always find this to be the case Further information on I4TpxX class and package writing can be found in the documentation file clsguide which can be found in TEXMF doc latex base or by using the command line texdoc clsguide 2 4 Mini summary on macros Bear in mind I ve only touched the surface of how macros can be used to help you write documents more efficiently I haven t even mentioned the xspace package which simplifies how IATEX commands deal with following space TeX the Book and TeX the Book would produce identical output no need to worry about how spaces are gobbled MletNoldTeXNTeX renewcommand TeX oldTeX xspace TeX the Book the TeX book TEX the Book the TEXbook When writing your own macros be as fine grained as possible a macro should only do a single thing ideally and if more is required then write two macros This was exemplified when I discussed wrapping up a figure environ ment into a single macro in my opinion more trouble than it s worth The macros shown in this sec
84. nn D V L K D P Venugopal Abstract The reviewer sees Peter Flynn s Formatting Information as a more practical introduction to LaTeX than many other popular introductions Mr Venugopal is a stenographer by profession He has been using computers since the two floppy PC stage A former lover of WordPerfect his first encounter with TeX LaTeX was in the year 2000 At present exploring various packages experimenting with Omega MetaPost and MetaFont and teaching and or explaining advantages of TeX LaTeX over wordprocessors are his hobbies You can contact him at venugopal_duvvuri rediffmail com e PDF version of paper e Comment on this paper e Send submission idea to editor Page generated August 19 2006 TUG home page search contact webmaster http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 venugopal review 8 19 2006 6 16 30 AM The PracTEX Journal TPJ 2006 No 03 2006 08 15 Comment on this article Book Review Formatting Information A beginner s introduction to typesetting with IATFX by Peter Flynn D V L K D P Venugopal Many excellent books are available introducing IATEX to beginners Some are freely available on the net like The Not So Short Introduction to IATFX2 IATEX2e in 131 Minutes by Oetiker et al whereas some are nicely published like A Guide to IATFX by Kopka and Daly My favorite introduction is Peter Flynn s Format ting Information which has more emphasis on the beginning user s overall set of problems parti
85. o in profes sional publishing seems to disapprove of footnotes because they make the book look too scholarly Before I sent the manuscript to the copy editor I converted all the footnotes to end of chapter notes with the following definitions renewcommand footnote endnote comment out to not have end notes newcommand dumpendnotes medskip begingroup setlength parindent Opt setlength parskip lex theendnotes endgroup setcounter endnote 0 I added a dumpendnotes command at the end of each chapter In this way my copy editor was able to also edit my notes in a realistic format along with each chapter However publishing professionals also seem not to like end of chapter notes I guess it is considered rude to force readers to look in different places in the book for notes for different chapters Therefore I decided to move all the end notes to a single chapter near the end of the book In particular I happened to be skimming through a copy of Misquoting Jesus Bart D Ehrman Harper 2005 at the same time and tried to mimic this books style for end of book chapter notes I looked in The BTEX Companion second edition and on comp text tex for how to combine all chapter end notes in one place but neither of these was much help to me perhaps because I was not smart enough to understand what I was reading Therefore I modified the endnotes sty file some more in my last column I mention how I had alrea
86. of the book from which they could do imposition I obtained this by opening the PDF of the manuscript in Adobe Ac robat and saving it to ps format which I posted to my website for the printer to download I also saved this on a CD and all of the source text and image files on a DVD and mailed them to the printer via international air courier for backup Sending the cover art to the printer was more difficult however They could not access the ai file I provided out of Illustrator even though they purportedly were using the same version I was CS2 They decided it would be best for me to send them a PostScript file Unfortunately as far as I know Illustrator outputs eps files and not ps files At Prac TeXo6 Jonathan Kew and Peter Flynn told me I can convert an eps file without previews to a ps file by removing the e from the file name extension I tried converting a PDF 16 file out of Illustrator to PostScript via Acrobat but I couldn t make this work for some reason all the art content was lost somewhere along the conversion path or the sizing information was confused Eventually I converted the Illustrator EPS file to a PDF using epstopdf as I did for all the rest of my illustrations wrote a nine line BIEX program that set up the geometry of the page size I needed for the cover front spine and back as one image and did an includegraphics of the pdf image I then compiled with pdfATEX opened the PDF output in Acrobat
87. ological for each author and then edited these bibliography entries according to the copy editor s red pen marks on the hard copy of the manuscript Therefore I wrote a little macro to do gross formatting of bibliography entries which follows along with an example of its use defining a macro named ref below was a serious mistake see the note at the end of section 3 3 def ref 1 2 vskip 4pt vbox noindent small1 hangindent 1pc textbf 1 hskip 05in 2 ref Ackoff81 Ackoff Russell L textit Creating the Corporate Future Plan or Be Planned For New York Wiley 1981 ref Bower97 Bower Joseph L Harvard Business School Case Teradyne The Aurora project revised March 29 1999 Boston Harvard Business School Press 1997 This produces the following Ackoff81 Ackoff Russell L Creating the Corporate Future Plan or Be Planned For New York Wiley 1981 Bowerg7 Bower Joseph L Harvard Business School Case Teradyne The Aurora project revised March 29 1999 Boston Harvard Business School Press 1997 In the main text I cited such bibliography entries as follows Russell Ackoff talks of type 1 system properties and Cc type 2 or emergent system properties Ackoff81 Obviously this is a somewhat nonstandard citation method but I like it and I can use it since I am self publishing I treated the bibliography as just another unnumbered backmatter chapter rather than using the
88. om another especially in the case of multiline entries or entries sharing the same key 22 The code 2 2 1 The main source file Let us now examine the source code for this cv The main file is given in figure 2 The only tiny bit of customization here is the use of the geometry package to provide a very wide text area on the page some thing very common for a cv urke itself does not do anything to mod ify page dimensions margins etc There are very powerful packages to deal with this so there is no point in duplicating the functionality Otherwise the rest is pretty straightforward you provide head ers with the leftheader and rightheader commands the photo command takes an image file name sans extension if your graphicx package is properly configured and the title and subtitle the usual way Without any surprise headers and titles are formatted by calling NeedsTeXFormat LaTeX2e documentclass a4paper curve usepackage nohead nofoot hmargin 1 5cm vmargin 1 5cm geometry leftheader textbf Didier Verna texttt didier lrde epita fr texttt http www Irde epita fr didier rightheader 1 wife 2 children and 8 guitars photo didier title Assistant Professor subtitle Ph D in computer Science begin document makeheaders maketitle makerubric experience makerubric education end document Figure 2 A minimal source file makeheaders an
89. opular editors that are available including LyX TEXshell Winshell TEXnicCenter WinEdt and emacs along with screen shots The concepts of typing the document and the various special characters are also discussed Document structure along with the concepts of documentclass and its options various environments commands for obtaining the Table of Contents List of Ta bles etc are handled in Chapter 3 This chapter also contains information on methods of changing the abstract name adding entries to table of contents chang ing the spacing between paragraphs and paragraph indentation nttp www tug org TUGboat Contents contents23 2 html Phttp www tug org tex archive info beginlatex beginlatex 3 6 pdf Chapter 4 deals with typesetting viewing and printing of the documents Var ious error messages their meaning and how to handle them are explained in this chapter The concept of adding on features using packages downloading packages from CTAN and installing them are discussed in Chapter 5 The concepts of the TEX Directory System TDS various types of files used by TEX like sty cls fd mf and where to place all these files are well illustrated This chapter also lists various places where a user in need of help can find desired information like TEX Users Group TUG and various mailing lists Chapter 6 discusses including graphics figures and images in the document bulleted and numbered lists tables verbatim text boxed m
90. or ISO International Standards plus internal company reports and conference and journal submissions and one book He has written two LaTeX classes something over 20 packages and two series of fonts using Metafont His is a past Editor in Chief of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications which accepted LaTeX manuscripts He says Having worked long and hard in the UK and US in industry government and academia I am now retired He can be reached at herries pressGearthlink net e PDF version of paper e Comment on this paper e Send submission idea to editor Page generated August 19 2006 TUG home page search contact webmaster http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 wilson 8 19 2006 6 13 12 AM The PracTgX Journal 2006 No 3 Article revision 2006 08 19 The memoir class Peter Wilson Email herries press earthlink net Abstract The memoir class is essentially the book and report classes with lots of bells and whistles as it includes the functions of over 30 popularly used packages It can also simulate the appearance of article class documents and provides a basis for producing the typewritten like manuscripts which some publish ers ask for 1 Introduction For nearly 20 years I was involved in using TEX to produce camera ready copy of International Standards in particular ISO 10303 STEP As the standard grew it now consists of thousands of pages spread across many publications and ISO and various committees
91. otal inner margin i e the right hand margin of the left page plus the left hand margin of the right page should equal the width of the outer margins an example of this is shown in figure 5 on the fifth page page 46 of the document by Willi Egger at http waw ntg nl maps pdf 30_13 pdf Please note that when talking about page we refer to the visible page which may or may not be equal to the sheet of paper used to print the page on In a book for example the sheet of paper contains both the page and the binding area Knowing how to set the margins in relation to each other is of course not enough The text width and height should also be determined The optimal line width is determined by many factors including typeface and font size used interline spacing language of the text and average word length number of columns page dimensions Larger fonts allow wider lines than smaller fonts serifed fonts guide the eye along the text and hence allow for wider lines than sans serifed fonts More space between lines makes it easier to skip from the end of one line to the beginning of the next and hence allow for wider lines but bear in mind that there is an optimum somewhere and increasing line space beyond this optimum will hinder rather than help the eye Average word length and language play a role too Generally a text in a western language typeset with a standard serifed font of size 10 to 12 and the s
92. ourn 2006 3 distract 2 of 3 8 19 2006 6 17 26 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group Math font quiz answers In the 2006 1 fonts issue Michael Spivak supplied a challenging math font quiz No one submitted an answer by the deadline so we extended the contest and offered a prize to the person who answered three or more questions correctly Harri Haanpaa of the Helsinki University of Technology answered several of the questions correctly and we will be sending him a copy of the MathTime Professional II Lite fonts Answers to the math font quiz from Issue 2006 1 Page generated August 19 2006 TUG home page search contact webmaster http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 distract 3 of 3 8 19 2006 6 17 26 AM
93. per and Lance Carnes who was supposed to be taking a break also did extensive production editing Other members of our editorial board also commented on the content of this issue in various useful ways Thank you to all of them and to the authors Next issue Editor Lances Carnes states that next issue will include papers from the recent PracTeX06 conference but will also be accepting other papers so if you have something to say about the world of TeX please write it down and send it to this journal Page generated August 19 2006 TUG home page search contact webmaster http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 editor 2 of 2 8 19 2006 6 08 38 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group Journal home page General p TEX PracTEX Journal style files Copyright Contact us Feedback From the Readers e Comment on this paper e Send submission idea to editor TpJ How does one join the TeX user group Please see tug org 5oin html for information and a link to the membership form Ed TPJ Dear editor I am a beginner in using LaTeX to write a paper Will you please give me an example of preparing a journal paper double spaced one column 12pt etc Thanks a lot in advance Regards Haixia Zhang Editor s note Several members of our editorial board discussed this request There were a few main thoughts e Many journals already have their own LaTeX style Google on LaTeX journal style to find seve
94. ple given by Dave Walden 3 newcommand insertfig 2 begin figure htbp centering includegraphics 1 caption 2 label fig 1 end figure At first the attraction is clear Isn t the following much easier to write insertfig figname This is an example figure caption This version has much to offer in that the formatting may now be adjusted from a single place in the document a feature always to be aspired to But we quickly run into trouble Firstly semantics have been lost The arguments to the command are un named and arbitrary Consider a smart editor which parses the document for Mabel commands and builds a list from which to prompt for ref instances How will it know that fig figname is a label to use Secondly we begin to want to add more functionality Say we want a short caption for headers footers and the Table of Contents and a long caption for the actual text Well easy Just change the macro to accept an optional argument just like the caption command does Okay now let s say we want to stick in some graphics options such as scaling More work more arguments And don t forget the option to change the figure placement from htbp which should always be considered in the fine tuning of the typesetting of the completed document Now our previous calls with this command throughout the entire document need to be amended to take the other argument into account This might not be that much wo
95. properly aligned entries see below If a rubric has to be split across different pages its title will be repeated auto Education 1988 matically An entry is an item of information related to the rubric under which it appears An entry has a contents and an optional key under which it is classified For instance under the Education rubric you could state that you got a Ph D in computer science in the year 2000 In that case the year would be the entry s key and the Ph D in computer science part would be the entry s contents Cur aligns both keys and contents together Keys are optional in order for you to classify several entries together without repeating the same key over and over again There is also an option that will make Grk automatically skip identical keys in consecutive entries Additionally you might want to further split your rubrics into subrubrics Figure 1 A minimal cv For instance in the example above the Professional Experience rubric is further split into three subrubrics Research Lectures and Development Sub rubrics are displayed in alignment with the entries contents by default but are formatted differently so that they remain distinguishable Finally note the presence of a small bullet in front of each entry s contents This is called a prefix in the Cy terminology This prefix is a visual clue that helps in distinguishing one entry fr
96. quality While you can use the above macro in your documents there is a macro package refstyle see page 12 that does the job a lot more completely It includes macros for all sorts of references tables sections footnotes etc and even allows you to reference more than one figure at a time such as figref myfigi myfig2 myfig3 Figures 1 2 and 3 2 1 How not to use macros I have now briefly introduced macros as a way to be productive In the section after this one page 5 I ll continue along these lines But it is said that a little bit of knowledge can be dangerous It s worth considering how macros should not be used The following is a good template for inserting figures begin figure htbp centering includegraphics caption label fig end figure In fact in my editor TeXShop for Mac OS X I ve set it up so that dragging an image into a source document inserts this snippet automatically with the filename and label filled in with the path and name of the graphic respectively All I have to write is the caption itself This isn t an ideal situation however Using such a template freezes the formatting decisions at the instant it s inserted if changes are desired on a large scale repetitive search and replace is required It is better to start to use macros that define the formatting from a single place Here is an example of one of my first efforts Coincidentally it s quite similar to an exam
97. quis tortor vitae authors Kohm Orawski or yabi Fusce mauris Vestibulum luctus nibh at lectus Sed bibendum nulla a faucibus semper leo velit ultricies tellus ac venenatis arcu KOMA Script offers a uniform interface wisi vel nisl Vestibulum diam Aliquam pellentesque augue quis sagittis posuere turpis lacus congue quam in hendrerit risus eros eget felis Maecenas eget erat in sapien mattis porttitor Vestibulum porttitor Nulla facilisi Sed a turpis eu lacus commodo facilisis to document layout with a replacement class Morbi fringilla wisi in dignissim interdum justo lectus sagittis dui d et vehicula libero dui cursus dui Mauris tempor ligula sed lacus Duis cursus enim ut augue Cras ac magna Cras nulla Nulla egestas for each of the original IATEX2e classes ex ne leo en re NM ett Nor E cept the slides class The standard layout is pe oN well thought out modern looking and based on European rather than American typo graphical ideas KOMA Script is highly con figurable and adaptable Several extension packages for standard LATgX2e are no longer necessary when using the KOMA script classes Should one however decide to use another class KOMA Script still has much Fi 11 Th d f to offer through its classes typearea sty aie egies a the output of our fancier KOMA Scrpage sty scrtime sty has not been Script letter from figure 9 mentioned before but is used for displaying system t
98. r typesetter LaTeX consultant and class author for several years already He has worked with LaTeX since the early nineties KOMA Script is just the tip of the iceberg that has been created out of his many years of helping out in TeX newsgroups and mailing lists and his profession Markus Kohm can be reached at komascript gmx info Rasmus Pank Roulund was born in 1986 In the summer of 2006 he graduated from a Danish gymnasium see http en wikipedia org wiki Gymnasium_school and currently works as delivery man and warehouseman for a local medicine distributor Next year he will study math economics or social studies at Aalborg University Although vanilla LaTeX is nicer than any Word document he almost instantly switched to KOMA Script He can be contacted at rasmus_pank yahoo dk http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 robbers 1 of 2 8 19 2006 6 12 35 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group e PDF version of paper e Comment on this paper e Send submission idea to editor Page generated August 19 2006 TUG home page search contact webmaster http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 robbers 2 of 2 8 19 2006 6 12 35 AM The PracT X Journal 2006 No 3 Article revision 2006 08 18 Replacing ATRX2 standard classes with KOMA Script Yuri Robbers Markus Kohm and Rasmus Pank Roulund Email yuri robbers gmail com Website http www komascript de Abstract KOMA is a complete replacement of the standard LATEgX2e classes It i
99. racTjX Journal c o the Editor in chief 2701 Some Street 32768 Anytown Lorem ipsum LS Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet consectetuer adipiscing elit Ut purus elit vestibulum ut placerat ac adipiscing vitae felis Curabitur dic tum gravida mauris Nam arcu libero nonummy eget consectetuer id vulputate o magna Donec vehicula angue en neque Pell habitant morbi tristique malesuada fames ac turpis egestas Mauris ut viv is rhoncus sem Nulla et lectus vestibulum urna fringilla ultrice ellus eu tellus sit amet tortor gravida placerat Integer sapi aculis in pretium ets ltrices bibendum Aenean faucibus Morbi dolor nulla malesuada eu pulvinar at mol lis ac nulla Curabitur auctor semper nulla Donec varius orci eget risus Duis nibh mi congue eu accumsan eleifend sagittis quis diam Duis eget orci sit amet orci dignissim rutrum Nam dui ligula fringilla a euismod sollicitudin vel wisi Morbi auctor lorem non justo Nam la o pretium at lobortis vitae ultricies et tellus Donec aliquet tortor sed accumsan biben dum erat ligula aliquet magna vitae ornare odio metus a mi Morbi ac orci et nisl hendrerit mollis Suspendisse ut massa Cras nec ante Pellentesque a nulla Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes nascetur ridiculus mus Aliquam tincidunt urna Nulla ullamcorper vestibulum turpis Pellentesque cursus luc tus mauris Nulla malesuada porttitor diam Donec felis erat
100. ral examples The first thing Haixia Zhang should do is ask if the journal he has in mind has an existing style file e Double spaced is a style that was used with traditional typewritten submissions The LaTeX journal styles that we know of don t use this e An interesting question worthy of a future TPJ journal article is how to maximize portability among http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 readers 1 of 4 8 19 2006 6 10 48 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group journal styles as an author repeatedly submits his or her paper until a journal accepts it If you would like to write an article on the subject of the last point above please contact the editors at pracjourn tug org TpJ Dear Sir Madam I very much liked the article by Stephen Hartke on Free Math Fonts in issue 2006 1 tug org pracjourn 2006 1 hartke It seems like almost all the fonts have only LaTeX support and not Plain TeX support Would it be possible for those of us who prefer Plain TeX to prevail upon the font authors to make header files such that we Plain TeX ies can use their Math Fonts too This is even more necessary now that LaTeX has moved forward and offers limited support for LaTeX 2 09 and earlier And an article by Michael Spivak in your journal showed that there are people who don t wish to use LaTeX for whatever reasons Sincerely yours Jesse Deutsch A response from Karl Berry 1 Plain TeX has no standard macros for font support
101. re mainly related to document design and layout memoir does not touch upon areas like those that are covered by the babel or hyperref packages or any related to typesetting mathematics On the other hand it is easy to configure a work produced with memoir to meet a university s thesis layout requirements memoir has improved substantially since it was first released over 50 IATEXers have provided code or suggestions for improvements The class is included in the TUG Tpx distributions and the latest version of the class and its supporting doc umentation is always available from CTAN macros latex contrib memoir 2 General considerations The class is a large one consisting of about 10 000 lines of LATEX code documented in a 400 page report there is no need for most users to look at this There is a separate comprehensive User Manual which runs to about 300 pages and from time to time an Addendum is released noting extensions to the class The first part of the Manual discusses some aspects of book design and typography in general something that I haven t come across in the usual TEX books and manuals This is intended to provide a little background for when you design your own printed documents The standard classes provide point options of 10 11 or 12 points for the main body font memoir extends this by also providing 9 14 and 17 point options The width of the text block is automatically adjusted according to the selected point size
102. resentation by Steve Peter was a good introduction into the capabilities of memoir 3pm break 3 10pm panel Barbara Beeton Peter Flynn Mirko Janc Jonathan Kew moderator Dave Walden Boris Veytsman I really liked the panel the questions were interesting and the possibility for all of us to talk about the future of TeX was priceless 4pm closing 7pm banquet at the Clarion hotel Kaveh Bazargan Perhaps one alcoholic drink could have been provided per person with the rest available at the bar Wednesday August 2 Visit to New York City and the Morgan Library Karl Berry The Morgan Library was awe inspiring To see an actual Gutenberg Bible especially along with so many other exemplars of the finest printing made me remember why I was drawn into this world in the first place http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 practex06 6 of 7 8 19 2006 6 30 43 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group Conference organizers Karl Berry and Robin Laakso with Dante president Klaus H ppner at the top of the Empire State Building Page generated August 19 2006 TUG home page search contact webmaster http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 practex06 7 of 7 8 19 2006 6 30 43 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group Journal home page General information THE Ti X PracTEX Journal style files Copyright Contact us Productivity with macros and packages Will Robertson Abstract LaTeX s advantages in productivity for me
103. riting the template for this very journal But I m going to add a twist at the end so keep reading There is more than meets the eye when using dashes in text like this one According to the tradition followed differing amounts of space are used around dashes From no space like this to a full width space such as here In all cases it s desirable to avoid line breaks before them although a break after like here is fine Others will like to use an en dash instead depending on the taste of the typographer and the font being used These points aren t what you want to think about while writing and it s easy to get things wrong An ideal case for a macro then DeclareRobustCommand dash unskip nobreak thinspace textemdash thinspace ignorespaces This is the definition straight from the pracjourn class and incorporates all of the details described above The amount of surrounding space is customisable and 6 The pracjourn class can be found at http tug org pracjourn styles latex the unskip ignorespaces arrangement ensures consistency no matter how the macro is used in the text Here s a couple of small details to make things even better First we don t want to use the dash definition above when writing things like ppF bookmarks where plain text is the order of the day So if the hyperref package is being used the following line substitutes an ascii dash in such cases pdfstringdefDisa
104. rk with a fancy search n replace but this is supposed to be IATEX for productivity right That was a long winded way of saying that the approach taken above is too coarse grained for our application As a rule of thumb restrict new commands to performing a single action to avoid such problems In the above example the only formatting is to centre the figure on the page The following redefinition of the figure environment provides this renewenvironment figure 1 fps figure float figure 1 centering end float Because we re overwriting the existing definition of the figure environment it s necessary to use renewenvironment instead of newenvironment fps figure is the default float placement usually tbp and the float end float pseudo environment is the internal IATEX generalised method for creating floats 1 I should warn some of you that if this code is pasted into a regular document not your own package it must be preceded by makeatlatter and ended with Nnakeatother More details can be found in Robin Fairbairns TEX FAQ answer and in macro names 2 2 Examples of my macros Two sections ago I discussed how macros should be defined for error checking flexibility and consistency In the previous section I showed that macros should be as specific as possible in general they shouldn t be used as a method for simplifying the input as an end to itself Below I ll give some examp
105. ruinlaan 15 2313 EP Leiden The Netherlands setkomavar fromphone 31 71 5121365 setkomavar fromfax 31 71 5144543 setkomavar fromemail robbers lemun org setkomavar fromurl http www lemun org setkomavar frombank Postbank 9307157 pagestyle empty begin document begin letter The Prac TeX Journal c o the Editor in chief 2701 Some Street 32768 Anytown setkomavar subject Lorem ipsum opening L S lipsum 1 5 closing With kind regards VJ V o 1em includegraphics height 25nm yuri JN V 20mm end letter end document Figure 9 The source code for a fancier KOMA Script letter Note that a 1co file named asymTypB 1co is included in the documentclass command 11 a so called 1co file a letter class option file Any definitions made in this 1co file will be automatically loaded by adding its name minus the lco extension to the documentclass options Then we begin the document and the let ter with addressee and create an opening and a subject put the main body in this case using dummy text generated with lipsum and a closing including a picture file with a signature Then we close letter and docu ment Note that the resulting letter is rather ba sic but does include fold marks and has the addressee in the exactly the right spot for an ISO compliant window envelope There is even an underlined return address in tiny The P
106. s aimed more at European typography but is easily configurable Some of KOMA s extensions and ways to configure document layout are also avail able in other document classes such as the IATpX2 standard classes This paper discusses just a few parts of KOMA especially those that have to do with page layout and with writing letters 1 Introduction KOMA Script is a complex bundle of classes intended to replace the IATEX2e stan dard classes The standard look and feel of KOMA Script is rather different from the standard classes and is inspired by European typographical standards Since the whole design philosophy of KOMA Script is new it offers all the commands that are offered by the standard classes except for the letter and slides class but not vice versa Generally speaking the KOMA classes offer far more options for adaptation and configuration than standard IATEX2e Using the KOMA classes it should be relatively easy to obtain the look and feel that you like Some of the KOMA Script options are also made available in packages that can easily be loaded in your own favourite class for example the AMS classes by including a usepackage command with one of the special KOMA Script packages see below for details Most modern TgX distributions already include KOMA Script but if your in stallation does not then download a copy from CTAN macros latex contrib koma script or from http developer berlios de project koma script3 In
107. se Minion I continued to use Helvetica for sans serif because I only used it in a few TEX based tables and I had many tables drawn with Illustrator that used Helvetica and wanted the lettering in all tables to be in the same font I switched to using what came with Minion for roman fonts Thus my personal class file was changed from RequirePackage mathpazo RequirePackage scaled 95 helvet RequirePackage courier to RequirePackage minion RequirePackage scaled 95 helvet RequirePackage courier This column uses Minion However I didn t like the way Courier only used for URLs looked with Minion so I dropped the Courier line above RequirePackage minion RequirePackage scaled 95 helvet and fell back on the TEX default Computer Modern typewriter font which I think looks OK with Minion and which I also use in this column Having changed to Minion I had to make some adjustments The first adjustment was to change the Roman numerals of my part numbers to small caps in the table of con tents and running head full caps Roman numerals looked too big compared with old style numerals Next I had to change all instances of to textdollaroldstyle which was defined in one of the Minion files from Steve Peter My book is about business management so quite a few dollar signs were present This was my first experience with a font that used old style figures Old style figures are number characters
108. sent the much improved manuscript to my co author to review he is a non native English speaker we collaborate on the content but I do all the writing in English While waiting for his review I made some more changes on my way to a final layout 31 Log file I searched the PDF output once again for instances of a double question mark indicating places where IATEX could not resolve cross references and I took a look at the log file for the first time until now I saw little point in plowing through vast numbers of log file comments about line overflows and I normally run pdfIEgX from WinEdt where the IATEX window closes after a successful compilation without leaving me anything to scroll through on the screen I immediately noticed that the were lots of label multiply defined messages involving tables which resulted from my table macro in fact having a redundant Mabel command and which was trivially fixed But there was so much other stuff still in the log file that I set it aside and vowed to look again later I never did 3 2 Ellipses My copy editor was never happy with the spacing of ellipses that were done with TEX s dots command I only used ellipses a few times in my whole manuscript mostly in block quotes Therefore I created much less general versions of where I could explicitly control the spacing dots for main text def BDS 3pt three dots def MYdots hbox hspace BDS hspace BDS hspace BDS hspace BD
109. so it is not entirely clear what to provide 2 Font authors are almost certainly not going to be able to help address the writer s desire as they are busy making fonts and many of them probably do not use plain TeX However they would probably welcome such a contribution If there are certain font families of particular interest please email prac journ tug org and we can see if a plain TeX volunteer can be found to work on it TpJ Editor s note the following note is in reference to the third Ask Nelly question in issue 2006 2 tug org pracjourn 2006 2 asknelly Dear Sir I believe that the mdwlist package has options for suspending and resuming list environments Maybe is worthwhile to mention it in your column Yours sincerely Rafael Pappalardo TPJ Editor s note the following notes is in reference to the article by D V L K D P Venugopal in issue 2006 2 tug org pracjourn 2006 2 asknelly Dear Sir http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 readers 2 of 4 8 19 2006 6 10 48 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group Very good An excellent way to structure a lecture series Sincerely Keith Jones TpJ Editor s note we are unsure which article in issue 2006 2 the following note refers to We tried to clarify it but without success We guess it refers to the article by Hlavacek on Ipe tug org pracjourn 2006 2 hlavacek Dear Sirs This article really helped me out with the different image possibil
110. sp we soo pue sida2uo2 sajdound yusuiseueu ubnonp essq SEYS Jong T Breakthrough Management i py sureis s jon4 Tyr 1090 Guibeueyy tex amp er y ny u 9 w Pe Ue sinn eui jo serujeria un SYR a2ej O e qe aou aujo3eq eeu aM pue EQIYS Old Aq 146ne1 spouxsui pue syda uo snowen Burroexd Aq petieusq Anes seu uonesiuefio no uedujoo ino jo ssabeuew Bunok sq 10 Duada Dune epe ue uesq sey 1 Wwewebevew v5noupeaiq jossaaoid ayi Sujuieat ur equus oys Jodium poierosse uaoq sey TIN on Ol eB 9I qg ypu ur Ayunwuso Bujues SyS oJ jo rapuno pue pu suis Bupesis o amp oy euos Jo oyang Duibeuew pue veude indey rspunns a0 Moinouro jo siopeo ayi Og o aapoy soeur Buhok pue juauobeueu jo SUAPNYS jie 10 zsU e i YOO i jeuosied eui padjeu exeu dit srepea d suossa sig se eid f ubnoiupeauq 140ddns o Aessasau si u ruw UONeZIUeDIO snonxapiiiheue oyu oKoy euos wuojsues 0 atu padpay eeu yoo siu jo Ved e ae jeu suy SH nang ALU si equus yog s M i SN 13 4 1 Our first publisher and printer Our intention had been to publish the book ourselves in the United States before publish ing it anywhere else in the world using print on demand e g Lightning Source To this end I had always planned to prepare a ready to print PDF file of the manuscript However suddenly the opportunity arose to first publish the book in India using an industry group my co author worked with there as the nominal publisher and dis
111. t include a parameter for speci fying page position I could see that I was going to want to be able to better force figures to the top or bottom of pages or sometimes to the middle of a page with text above and below I immediately converted the table macro and all calls of it to have an additional argument there were only a few IATEX produced tables in the whole book I had many figures how ever so for them I defined a new macro that included the additional positioning argument and began to switch to its use a figure at a time as I came across combinations of text and a figure where IATEX s default figure placement was not adequate Will Robertson s paper in this issue deprecates the use of figure macros such as I discussed in my last column and mention again here My justification for using them is that they help me handle my large number of figures 2 4 Bibliography I actually made the decision I am about to discuss before I sent my manuscript to the copy editor I made it because I was using a copy editor For my last book developed in ITEX I used BibTpX BibTpX was very convenient for experimenting with different formatting and citation systems for the bibliography However in this case of using a copy editor and with a modest size bibliography I decided that it would be easier to make the copy editor s edits in my computer files if I just typed the approximate format for each entry in the correct order alphabetical by author and chron
112. tandard IATEgX line space should contain no more than on average fifteen words per line This usually translates to 60 or 70 characters per line including spaces and punctuation Finally the available space on the page plays an important role One can imagine that the optimal line width for a paperback novel and a glossy magazine or even a newspaper would be rather different The optimal text height is influenced more by our sense of aesthetics than by readability Nowadays the optimal text height is considered to best be linked to the text width When we take all these considerations together we end up with an algorithm for dividing a page into equally sized rectangles Suppose we assume nine rect angles horizontally and nine vertically for a single sided document see again figure 5 on the fifth page page 46 at http www ntg nl maps pdf 30 13 pdf This is called a division factor of nine Mentally shift the gray area of the figure half a rectangle to the right we would then have a left and right margin of one and a half rectangle each a top margin of one rectangle and a bottom margin of two rectangles Our typearea would then be six rectangles wide and six rectangles high For the two page spread of a double sided document all heights would re main the same but the vertical margins would change The inner margin would consist of one rectangle and the outer margin of two rectangles as shown in the referenced figure The text width
113. thead setkomavar fromlogo includegraphics width 2cm LEMUN 10g02006 setkomavar fromname Yuri Robbers setkomavar fromaddress Fruinlaan 15 2313 EP Leiden The Netherlands setkomavar fromphone 31 71 5121365 setkomavar fromfax 31 71 5144543 setkomavar fromemail robbers lemun org setkomavar fromurl http www lemun org setkomavar frombank Postbank 9307157 pagestyle empty begin document begin letter H The Prac TeX Journal c o the Editor in chief 2701 Some Street 32768 Anytown setkomavar subject Lorem ipsum opening L S lipsum 1 5 closing With kind regards Vincludegraphics heightz25mm yuri JN V 20mm end letter end document Figure 8 The source code for a basic KOMA Script letter Note that the setkomavar and newkomavar statements could all be moved to a separate 1co file for easy reuse 10 documentclass asymTypB DIV 9 fontsize 12pt pagesize twoside enlargefirstpage scrlttr2 setkomavar place Leiden setkomavar company LEMUN 2006 new variable defined in asymTypB lco usepackage graphicx usepackage epsf usepackage english babel usepackage latin1 inputenc usepackage T1 fontenc usepackage lucimatx usepackage lipsum nexthead setkomavar fromlogo includegraphics width 2cm LEMUN 10g020061 setkomavar fromname Yuri Robbers setkomavar fromaddress F
114. ting for copy editing My manuscript was more or less finished and I sent it to the copy editor for her review While she edited the manuscript I began to tune up the manuscript in anticipation of final layout 24 Fonts I had drafted the manuscript using Palatino for my roman font Helvetica for sans serif and Courier for the typewriter font Steve Peter suggested that I might switch to Minion as the roman font and helped me do so I had asked Steve a professional book designer and Copyright 2006 David C Walden publisher to be my consultant in the use of IATEX in the design of my book as this is the first time I have taken a book length document all the way to publication in ATpx I have gone all the way with ATEX for journal publications and I have developed book length manuscripts in BIFX But with my previous 4TEX developed books the publisher in both cases retypeset the book using QuarkXpress based on my conversions of my ATEX files to plain text via HTML see for instance section 4 of www tug org TUGboat Articles tb24 2 tb77walden pdf I tried downloading and installing a set of files that claimed to be Minion Pro for TEX but I couldn t get it to work Eventually Steve provided me with a set of Minion files he had created for TEX and he talked me through installing them I already had Minion Pro on my computer as part of Photoshop CS2 and Illustrator CS2 so I felt comfortable that I was licensed to have and u
115. tion are supposed to simply be indicative of how I use macros The sky s the limit when writing your own documents Be creative Just remember when writing your own documents if you find yourself writing repetitive formatting commands a macro would make it more convenient 3 Using others macros in packages At some stage in the development of learning TEX we ve learned how to write our own shortcuts and definitions well enough that we re no longer intimidated by delving into other people s packages and classes to see what s going on I don t 9 know about you but I was pretty pretty happy with myself that to customise captions say I understood that all I had to do was edit the following from the article class long def makecaption 1 2 vskip abovecaptionskip sbox tempboxa 1 2 ifdim wd tempboxa gt hsize 1 2 par else global minipagefalse hb xt hsize hfil box tempboxa hfil fi vskip belowcaptionskip So if I needed say an en dash instead of a colon after Figure or Table in my cap tions it was simply a matter of copying the above and changing the appropriate parts to 1 2 I used to do things this way until I came to the realisation that I was wast ing my time Why Other people had already solved to problems I was having What happens if we want to start using the hyperref package Our macro redefi nition spoils everything because now we can t link to the figure caption S
116. tion at http www imf au dk system latex artikler MemoirChapStyles For those who like putting quotations near chapter titles the epigraph envi ronment can be used The options for changing section and lower level titles are more constrained but generally speaking document design unless for advertisements should be constrained Sometimes but particularly in novels a sectional division is indicated by just leaving a blank line or two between a pair of paragraphs or there might be some decorative item like three or four asterisks Commands are available for typesetting such anonymous divisions In the standard classes the sectioning commands have an optional argument which can be used to put a short version of the section title into the table of con tents and the page header memoir extends this with a second optional argument so you can specify one short version for the contents and an even shorter one for page headers where space is at a premium 2 2 Captions memoir incorporates the code from my ccaption package which lets you easily modify the appearance of figure and table captions bilingual captions are avail able if required as are captions placed at the side of a figure or table This also supports subfigures and subtables along the lines of the subfig package plus let ting you define your own new kinds of floats together with the corresponding List of 3 Tables Code from the array dcolumn delarray and tabu
117. tive for this document and font expansion gives better output but slower processing and greater file sizes best for print work Formatting citations in either author year or numerical format The hypernat package is essential when using numerical citations to al low the sort amp compress feature to work in conjunction with hyperref Fixes colour in pdfTEgX which can sometimes break half a page of coloured text for no reason for example The most convenient and flexible method for cross referencing as discussed in section 2 Also uses the varioref package for smart on the following page type functionality The most convenient way to typeset numbers with units E g in stead of 1 2 times 10 3 N N Ncdot m just write SI 1 2e 3 N m For creating sub tables and figures For putting things anywhere on the page even using absolute posi tioning e 2 3 cm from the top of the page 4cm left of the margin Very flexible colour functionality When it s released looks to be amazingly comprehensive reference anything 12 3 2 Finding packages There s little advice I can offer on how to find out about packages that have the functionality that you re looking for Every time I look there s more on CTAN and the TeX Catalogue that I ve never seen before Various esoteric things such as sorting index entries from within T X itself see Kees van der Laan s BLUe format have been implemented ten years ago
118. to try and keep within generally accepted typographical limits for line lengths you can override this if you wish The class also provides easy methods for specifying the page layout parameters such as the margins both side margins and those at the top and bottom of the page the methods are similar to those of the geometry package The page layout facilities also include methods like those provided by the fancyhdr package for defining your own header and footer styles and you can have as many different ones as you wish In fact the class provides seven styles to choose from before having to create your own if none of the built in styles suit you The styles are all displayed in the Manual Sometimes it is useful or even required to place trimming marks on each page showing the desired size of the final page with respect to the sheet of paper 2 that is used in the printer This is provided by the showtrims option A variety of trim marks are provided and you can define your own if you need some other kind 2 1 Sectioning styles Handles are provided for designing and using your own styles for chapter titles and such The class comes with six predefined chapter styles ranging from the default look to a style that mimics that used in the Companion series of LATEX books There is even one which uses words instead of numerals for chapter numbers The Manual shows at least one example of each style and over 20 are shown in Lars Madsen s collec
119. tributor and this industry group had a recommended printer in New Delhi I had previously been unable to find the equivalent of Lightning Source for print on demand in India I imme diately began a major email correspondence with the publisher and printer to nail down a variety of mundane but important issues the format of the publisher s name and logo on the title page and cover the publishers information on the back of the title page including an ISBN number what promotional text and images the publisher wanted on the back cover of the book whether the printer could print from a PDF file of the whole manuscript doing the page imposition itself or would I have to learn algorithms and find software tools to create big PDF pages with 4 or 8 book size pages on each big page that would later be folded and cut into book pages in the correct order the printer would do the imposition but wanted to work from a PostScript file which I planned to obtain by saving my PDF file as a PostScript from Adobe Acrobat would I have to use a different page block size for India where I thought perhaps they used different size book pages than the frequently used U S standard page size of 9 x 6 inches or could I find a compromise text block size that worked in both the United States and India William Adams gave me guidance on a compromise text block size it turned out the the problem was non existent as the printer in India is happy to print on 9 x
120. ts typefaces glyphs amp sorts Boris Veytsman Steve Peter s beautiful talk was a fascinating representation of the history of typography 3pm break 3 10pm Klaus H ppner Creation of a PostScript Type 1 logo font with MetaTypel Karl Berry I found Klaus s tutorial on using MetaTypel in practice very carefully worked out and quite entertaining to boot Boris Veytsman Klaus Hoeppner s talk explained techniques for MetaPost MetaTypel work it was a useful exposition of a rather obscure material http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 practex06 3 of 7 8 19 2006 6 30 43 AM The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group 3 50pm William Adams TypeSpec v2 typesetting font specimens Boris Veytsman William Adams s talk was a very passionate showcase of great fonts I really enjoyed the beauty of typography 4 30pm Q amp A session 5pm Four parallel birds of feather sessions Professional Publishing and Meeting Journal Guidelines for PDF with TeX Maintaining a large TeX installation Customizing TeX Shop Trial run slide show introducing La TeX Additionally a MacTeX group discussion took place at the hotel Saturday afternoon they also met for lunch on Sunday Monday July 31 9am Ned Hummel Common macro pitfalls and how to avoid them Boris Veystman Ned Hummel s talk was a very good introduction into logical markup and an exposition of the sad fact that most people choose the seemingly least resistance path of visible markup and are
121. typical command to insert the bibliography This approach to the bibliography in this case is indicative of my tendency to do a tiny bit of programming and a good bit of manual editing rather than taking time to look around for and especially learn to use capabilities that may already exist 2 5 Integrating the copy editors work At this point groups of chapters began to come back from the copy editor each page cov ered with red ink marks and writing indicating necessary or suggested changes to the man uscript and suggestions for possible improvement of the presentation When writing I try to insist that editors make no changes to my files until the final layout pass however some publishers these days insist that their editors edit my files flagging the changes they have made for my review I am not fond of this modern practice of editors actually changing my files Fortunately the copy editor for this book was as reactionary in this matter as I am and insisted on editing a double spaced printout of the manuscript with her red pen I processed all of the copy editors mandatory and suggested changes each chapter took me a long e g 10 hour day to do a couple of weeks altogether next came about four solid days of proofreading and minor changes and a couple of hard to think about major changes that I had procrastinated about making from before the manuscript went to the copy editor 3 Waiting for co author s review I
122. ubmission idea to editor Page generated August 19 2006 TUG home page search contact webmaster http dw tug org pracjourn 2006 3 walden 8 19 2006 6 15 57 AM The PracTIgX Journal 2006 No 3 Article revision 2006 08 15 Travels in TEX Land Final Layout of a Book David Walden Abstract In this column in each issue I muse on my wanderings around the TEX world In my last column www tug org pracjourn 2006 2 walden I described some meth ods I use to make it easier to draft large documentation projects i e books In this column I describe my experience of taking the final steps of turning a book manu script into a published book 1 Caveat I worry slightly about the suitability of my following descriptions maybe people more more expert with ATEX than I would recommend better approaches and deprecate the approaches I have figured out My concern is reduced however by the thought that there is a lot to be said for doing whatever is expedient to get the job done in this case getting a book to the printer and being motivated by the experience to seek better approaches next time Whatever the quality of my practices it may be useful for other non expert IATEX users and first book publishers to see the long list of issues that came up for me These experiences also will make me consider seriously using something other than IATEX s book class for my next book Perhaps I ll try the Memoir class or ConTpXt 2 Wai
123. urope I have the option of selling books direct from my website www walden family com breakthrough in the United States What parallel arrangement might I make for Europe 17 Elizabeth Dearborn s presentation at PracTeXo6 on self publishing a book provided inspi ration that I can manage the logistics of publishing my own book While these last book publishing steps are mostly not TEX issues I will give a brief final report on what transpired in my next column Acknowledgements My copy editor Jay Howland helped me settle on a number of design points for my book Steve Peter helped me extensively as I prepared the book to go to the printer William Adams answered more than one question and suggested a number of changes to a draft version of the manuscript Karl Berry gave me comments on another draft Peter Flom Hans Hagen Steve Peter Will Robertson and particularly Barbara Beeton gave me many useful comments on the nearly final draft Biographical note David Walden is retired after a career as an engineer engineering manager and general manager involved with research and development of computer and other high tech systems More history is at www walden family com dave 18 The PracTeX Journal TeX Users Group Journal home page General p TEX PracTEX Journal style files Copyright Contact us Book Review Formatting Information A beginner s introduction to typesetting with LaTeX by Peter Fly
124. where 1 2 and o are the size of letters such as a m and x the numbers 3 4 5 7 and 9 hang down like g p and y and 6 and 8 stick up like b h and t Old style figure are also known as text figures hanging figures and lower case figures the other kind of figures where the number characters are all the size of capital letters are known as titling ranging and lining figures For a discussion of the two types of figures see page 46 of the 2005 paperback edition of Robert Bringhursts The Elements of Typographic Style Hartley and Marks Point Roberts WA I quickly became used to seeing old style figures however I had the characters 10x several places in one of my book chapters as in a 10x change in the market which Andrew Grove talks about in his book Only the Paranoid Survive paperback edition New York Currency 1999 This looked OK with lining capital letter size numbers and a capital letter X in Palatino or plain text 10X change but with the conversion to Minion I had to define newcommand TenX 10 kern 01in times to find something that I thought looked good as in the quote above from Grove With the switch to Minion I also switched to 12pt for my main text documentclass 12pt btbook The style specified in the above command is my own style for this book as described in my previous column I chose 12 point primarily because my co author s and my eyes are not getting any younger and 12 point wit
125. will have done it before Don t waste time replicat ing the work of smarter and or more experienced people There are a huge number of packages on crAN which are conveniently or ganised by category in the TEX catalogue http texcatalogue sarovar org bytopic html There s a very high chance that something you wish to do is con tained somewhere within But where to start looking First off choose your class For beginners I highly recommend an all in one class such as memoir well summarised in this issue of The PracIEgX Journal 5 or one of the KOMA classes also featuring in this issue 2 These have the huge advantage of a single reference If the formatting requires adjustment simply search through the manual There s not much of an easier way to get started on your own with LATEX These integrated classes are more resistant however to being amended with packages And in some cases single purpose packages provide more features These days I use memoir for large documents and article with packages for smaller things To follow is an incomplete subjective list of packages that shouldn t be over looked I ve left out the ones that everyone knows such as geometry and hyperref In the spirit of the article you shouldn t take my word for it but look into any other options available and see if there are alternatives that are better for ex ample I ve frequently heard the typearea package is easier in many cases than
126. would thus still be six rectangles so changing from single sided to double sided does not change line breaks We can use any factor other than nine as long as it is at least four The reason for the lower limit of four is that using the margin size rules described 3 above typearea would be one rectangle high and one rectangle wide which would already probably look silly a smaller division factor would leave no space for the typearea The ideal division factor depends on the page size the chosen font etc For an A4 sized page width a 12pt text as described above one would probably take a division factor of 15 There are however ways of having LATEX take care of determining an optimal division factor 22 Implementing the theory using typearea sty KOMA Script implements two op tions to control the page layout ud ope report according to the theory described Vusepackage DIV15 BCORI2mm typearea above This is done using the Nuus eo Md package typearea sty which can lipsum 1 8 be loaded with any document class didecument The KOMA Script classes load this package automatically so when us ing a KOMA document class these options can be given in the optional part of the Ndocumentclass command The options are called BCOR Binding CORrection and DIV DIVision factor Figure 1 shows an example using the standard IATpX2e report class We use A4 paper to print a double sided report with the Bookman fonts yielding
127. ynn was a good introduction for fledgling class writers 9 40am Federico Garcia LaTeX and the different bibliography styles Boris Veytsman The talk by Federico Garcia described among other things his great work on the very useful opcit package It was interesting amp practical 10 20am break 10 30am Boris Veytsman Leila Akhmadeyeva Drawing medical pedigree trees with TeX and pstricks Dave Walden We learned a lot about certain kinds of genealogical tree diagrams used in medical research and diagnosis and how TeX can support creating them the insight I gained surely applies to other application areas 11 10am Elizabeth Dearborn TeX and medicine Boris Veytsman Elizabeth Dearborn s talk was one of the most inspiring presentations at the conference The details of book publishing and the dos and don ts of the process were quite interesting 11 50am Bob Neveln Bob Alps Writing and checking complete proofs in TeX Boris Veytsman The presentation by Bob Neveln and Bob Alps gave an insight into the math papers of the future when computers will check not only our spelling but the soundness of our logic as well God forbid they do the same with the speeches of our politicians 12 30pm lunch 1 40pm Stephen Moye A wayward wayfarer s way to TeX Boris Veytsman Stephen Moye s talk was a great talk about the life with TeX by a wise man and a very good storyteller 2 20pm Steve Peter Introduction to memoir Boris Veytsman This p

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