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1. technote.pdf in “Obsolete \centerline”
2. bb’s suggestion \text{-} for \stackrel demonstrates \mathchoice
3. “Endnotes”
4. kerTeX
5. “MS Word to Mathtype” has been a great discussion of Word vs. LaTeX and some peculiarities of TeX distributions and platforms, starting here. E.g., bb explained why journals may insist on LaTeX submissions
6. lineno works with multicol?
7. Hex and ANT (luispedro.org/software/hex, ant.berlios.de)
8. [autism]
9. quotation marks with babel in LuaLaTeX
10. paracol
11. PD/MS PDF/VT?
12. “Long entries in index” — hyphenation solutions, alternative styles (Ronald Fehd, Phil Taylor)
13. “Blank first page” → Byte order mark (some more postings on Unicode variants, editors like Notepad and VIM, UNIX vs. Windows, compatibility)
14. Produce InDesign-like documents with TeX (flows) mentions flowfram and textpos, asks about ConTeXt — becomes “The fundamental problem” frames with varying widths
15. highlighting quotation marks in text editors
16. “listmacros”: Michael Doob provides an interesting script — package idea! (“listdefs”). There is cmdtrack already, but listdefs may trim the reports.
17. custom bold math font with Plain TeX/Eplain — result I / result II
18. “\@sptoken” (my final posting) and “implicit spaces” in TeXbook
19. Locked PDF reader on Windows: a flame war on locking/not locking PDF viewers, whether Acrobat Reader or Windows is responsible for locking, and Sumatra PDF vs. AR starts in “adobe 10”; there is a follow-up in June
20. hyperref has option hidelinks
21. PDF to EMF? difficulties with getting EPS into MS Word with good-looking fonts and little footprint
22. Font used colors, neat things …
23. Installing TL without being root this or that way
24. “Using TTF, OTF, and T1 fonts” (PD) very much, see April 2011
25. Adding section levels and repeated text …
26. Changing fonts … text fine, “math not trivial” (U.F.)
27. ff. also in English, cf. Wiktionary
28. Configure page and header …
29. Using longtable to format a resume
30. Misplaced headline with makeindex
31. Win fonts under Linux interesting infos about non-MetaFont fonts (in following postings)
32. figures for on-line and printable book becomes interesting
33. Bibliography
34. Throughput
35. intelligent title capitalization — package idea!
36. aliasing document environment
37. texhash (TeX Live) —  recommendations on installation trees by Reinhard Kotucha | more of them
38. Nested footnotes in \title{…} — with bigfoot!?
39. Stephen Hicks studies code about “category code 16” on p. 209 of The TeXbook | Donald Arseneau comments
40. Eplain […] \@optionalarg — Heiko points at \@getoptionalarg — more specific
41. Detecting extension of main file not possible according to Heiko, except in .log
42. Extracting display formulas from A LaTeX document (with an addition following, Vafa Khalighi)
43. Use of \ldots becomes interesting … Susan Dittmar
44. TeX sucks (Donald Arseneau on an advertisement that Paul Isambert found — “alchemists”)
45. jfbu \DeclareSymbolFont … \DeclareMathSymbol and more
46. PDF features get lost with pdfpages, Heiko points to pax !? 2011/03/03: description (an “experiment” by Heiko — “steroids”)
47. “multiple pdfs from one dtx” (2010-12-25) Heiko … TODO
48. “A couple of questions”
49. spacing with math display (2010-12-25) amsmath | Phil
50. multiple choice (2010-12-25) Phil | Hubert Lam: enumitem
51. Centering delimiters with math accents, e.g., final answer, had something like this before, Philipp Stephani — but this also reminds of “spoon-feeding software” ...
52. “Extracting math from pdf file” (“overlay” symbol with Computer Modern, 2010-12-05)
53. “Xetex: using fonts with missing glyphs” — Susan Dittmar explains her problem
54. “Frequency of reference citations” I recommend a counting macro (… to be written, 2010-11-29)
55. “Misplaced parentheses” — Donald Arseneau on shortcomings of mathit.mf (2010-10-30)
56. “Customising \& per font” — Philipp Stephani (2010-10-28) points to stackoverflow where redefining \sffamily etc. is suggested for font-dependent choices (using fontspec)
57. “Stretchable \baselineskip, per-page?” — Heiko on “proportional” stretch component (2010-10-08)
58. “\input inserts an extra space …” — Heiko explains how end of file line works (2010-10-07 — TeXbook p. 46+48!)
59. “Appendices to chapters” with memoir — Lars Madsen answers to Victor Ivrij (March 2008).

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• May 2011: elections, TUGboat 100f., TeX Live 2011
• presidency
• April 2011: elections, TL’11, TUGboat 100 complete
• February 2011: TUG 2011 moves to Kerala, new interviews including Herb Schulz
• January 2011: Boris Veytsman in TUG board and interview
• December 2010: TUGboat 100, Cairo, ConTeXt, Mimi Burbank; interviews: Herbert Voss – also envolved in LyX –, Frank Liang on the early work on TeX and Microsoft Word

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1. Problem (PD)
2. DA suggests his tabto.sty — CTAN identifier tabto-ltx, as opposed to tabto-generic. Robin Fairbairns made a documentation file tabto.pdf
3. A discussion of tabto.sty ensues with UF.

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\addtocontents{toc}{\protect\begin{multicols}{2}}
…
\addtocontents{toc}{\protect\end{multicols}}

\addtocontents{toc}{\protect\begin{multicols}{2}}
…
\addtocontents{toc}{\vfill\protect\strut}
\addtocontents{toc}{\protect\end{multicols}}

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1. Phil Taylor initiated a discussion of rationales behind choosing names of internal (“private”) control sequences (‘“@” : vowel or glottal stop ?’), triggering quite a few contributions.
2. Arno Trautmann suggested summarizing this discussion in a TUGboat article.
3. While I consider this matter nothing but fun, again more funny and serious attempts followed (Paul Isambert, bb, Philipp Stephani).

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• Jeff Barnett
• List by Reinhard Kotucha
• more German terms (cf. Wikipedia list)
• Philipp Stephani points to Wikipedia on Chess

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• Susan Dittmar (2011-02-07) pgfpages | pdfpages
• Steve Schwarz mentions pdfbook and psbook from psutils
• I add booklet and vpp (enter ‘booklet’ in ‘description’ field of tug.ctan.org/search.html)

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1. Phil’s e-TeX HTML manual
2. Paul Isambert precisely
3. Josef Wright employing \toks@ (looks simpler than mine below)
4. Reinhard Kotucha: change category codes, e.g., verbatimwrite environment from moreverb
5. me employing \@onelevel@sanitize (2011-01-05)
6. TeX by topic Section 12.4 adds \noexpand which doesn’t change category codes

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1. bb: \vspace*
2. Steve Schwartz: titling
3. Phil: “sledgehammer” \title{\kern-4pt}
4. happy about the latter two

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• Wawan asks regarding terminal text editors such as emacs or vi (2010-12-13)
• Torsten Wagner on how-to with emacs, terminal emulation remaining …
• Steve Revilak stresses terminal emulation as well and reports comprehensively about UTF-8 with the KDE console

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1. Philip Taylor “too small …” (“Fermat” – Phil’s idea or mine much older? 2010/11/20)
2. Philip Taylor another time (2010/12/04)
3. James Quirk beats “Fermat’s Gambit” – read on for the “Mandelbrot Viewer” allowing squeezing everything into one page – and
4. pets as mathematicians, those liars

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1. Reinhard Kotucha: \@tfor
2. proposed package (expandable)
3. existing packages (soulutf8 and letterspacing missing in Jürgen’s list)
4. Robert points to the letterspace package included in his microtype bundle (missing in Jürgen’s list as well as in the package descriptions!)
5. caveat about my proposed package

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• LuaTeX;
• font expansion with pdfTeX (two levels),
• …
• under another subject: LuaTeX again, “healing the world” (“world poverty” Paul Isambert);

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1. “Problem with appendices” 2010-10-29
2. “appendix numbering and page numbering” 2010/11/19
3. Barbara Beeton same day reports on the first posting
4. second poster makes use of her suggestion
5. bb points to the AMS FAQ
6. some reasonings on package compatibility with Boris Veytsman followed, finally “VIP” …

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1. OP Wolfgang Lorenz 2010/11/10 poems, \pagegoal, \pagetotal
2. Donald Arseneau
3. Paul Isambert

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1. history from William Adams’ view, mentioning MathML, Stix fonts, BlueSky, and Y&Y
2. Peter Davies criticizes “(mythical) separation of ‘content’ from ‘presentation’”

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• Jürgen Fenn lists some tools available from CTAN (TODO CTAN has more) for “both” directions of conversions
• Here you find: Word → x | …TeX → y
  

1. Wilfried Hennings’ list of converters
2. CTAN:
   • catdoc plain text from Word 6.0, 1995, 1997
   • word2latex wsW2LTX library/API for Word up to 2000
   • word2tex shareware from Chikrii Softlab, deals with Equation Editor and MathType
   • word2x Word 6 only
   • WordML2LaTeX for Word 2003, see Microsoft Office XML formats---as opposed to Office Open XML(?)
3. request (2010-11-01, focus on “many files” and batch approach)
4. more recommendations from list answers:
   • VBA
   • Apache POI—Java API for Microsoft documents
   • antiword
   • some ideas from Pierre MacKay using MS tools and OpenOffice.org
   • wvConvert (!?)
5. OP chooses antiword and catdoc
6. in a different thread of April 2011 (“Converting from .doc to .tex including styles conversion”)
   • Gord mentions .odt and Perl/Python/Ruby;
   • going via XML evolves here — xmltex and WordML (“Save as XML” in Word) with wordml2latex (XSLT)
7. In a later thread, AbiWord (cf. homepage) was mentioned here for the more general purpose. This thread also dealt with MathType.

1. Note: CTAN seems to offer these approaches:
   • to RTF and then import it on your own …
   • to HTML/XML and then … — cf. some collections (that unfortunately also contain material irrelevant here):
     • Jürgen Fenn’s
     • “TeX web projects” on the TUG hint page
2. Wilfried Hennings’ other list of converters
3. request (2010/12/11)
4. recommendations:
   • tth (CTAN)
   • latex2rtf (CTAN)
   • Dieter Meinert reports having tried several solutions and recommends commercial, but affordable .pdf → .doc converters
   • Chris Yocum recommends johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

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$ echo hello > ~/foo.tex 
$ tex ’\input $HOME/foo.tex’ 

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1. Thierry 2010-10-26 on my suggestion to use export—partial solution
2. cvr at river-valley.org
3. Thierry

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1. Paul Isambert 2010-10-23
2. Peter Davis
3. William Adams on xexmltex
4. callable (2010-10-27) – many interesting answers, e.g., Karl Berry: “LuaTeX has been unbundling the typesetter, but there is no standalone C library at this point, as far as I know.” – pointing to tug.org/pipermail/pdftex/2007-January/006999.html and runptex.sarovar.org – “but it is about encapsulating runs of pdfTeX (as a whole) in a library, rather than the kind of piecemeal functionality Peter is describing.”
5. … and another subject of this kind: Send requests to texlive (2010/11/25) …“to be compiled from a web page” –
   • Uwe Ziegenhagen reports of a similar project and offers hints on implementation (PHP, cf. latexrender on CTAN)
   • Andy Farnell makes suggestions on files to be uploaded
   • Vafa Kalighi posts another example based on latexrender as well (cf. ensuing …)
   • another reply to the previous (or to what? no quote …), by Andy Farnell, with a hint on implementation

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1. 2^nd mention… (2010/09/30)
2. COMEFROM
3. Wikipedia
4. secret euphoric joke (2010-10-07 on creating inputtrc, answered euphoricly privately, as I realize only 2010/11/15)
5. pronunciation
6. Instant TeX 2001
7. spelling

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1. Daniel Freedman—with tabular as opposed to figure? (2010/09/09)
2. Axel Retif
3. Stephen Hicks
4. Martin Schröder
5. Daniel Freedman thanks

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1. OP Aleksandar Zec 2010/07/31
2. my follow-up 2010/08/19
3. Alex Zec: my solution doesn’t suffice, presents a better one, maybe not elegant
4. I announce an elegant solution for …
5. Reinhard Kotucha points to Spanish(?) babel, p. 157 of babel.pdf

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• Bryan Lepore 2010/07/28 started a “bibtex” thread, wondering about BibTeX’s Wikipedia entry (cf. resulting Wikipedia talk; I hadn’t noticed this). Tidying my mailbox 2010/08/16, I found the thread somewhat unfinished, I posted that the Wikipedia entry had been corrected.
• Replying, Bryan triggered a discussion about recent alternatives to BibTeX. Among a few answers …
• Philipp Gesang 2010/08/17 praised LuaTeX for making bibliography engines obsolete. A discussion on documentation for LuaTeX ensued. The next day finally, Philipp brought up the idea of an “Appendix K” to the TeXbook.
  • Philip Taylor (still 2010/08/18) pointed out that, according to the law ruling the appendix names of the TeXbook, a chapter on LuaTeX must be “Appendix L”. He is convinced that Knuth had planned exactly this, adding that (presumably) “Appendix K” has been reserved for Karl Berry’s Kpathsea.
  • In his typical asynchronous manner, Donald Arseneau 2010/08/19 replied to Philipp(!)’s idea on “Appendix K” directly, i.e., without noting the former “Philip” (who calls himself ‘Phil’) thread, arriving at the same conclusion about “Appendix K” (Kpathsea) and “Appendix L” (LuaTeX).

I even (really) note again here how smart Donald is: he needed 2 lines in a single posting for both appendixes “K” and “L”, where the parallel thread needed 3 postings. (The other thread developed further.—Donald once wrote me that he seems not to receive all texhax postings, maybe the security department of his company …)

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I thought of extract or some verbatimwrite (quite a few packages for this)—difficult to learn—easy instead (although not tested, sorry): Type theorem body code in an extra file, say, thm-outs.tex. To typeset the theorem at its proper place, type

 
\begin{thm}\label{thm:outs} 
  \input{thm-outs} 
\end{thm} 

 
\newenvironment*{var-id-thm}[1]{% 
  \def\thethmid{#1}% 
  \begin{the-var-id-thm}% 
}{% 
  \end{the-var-id-thm}% 
} 
\newtheorem*{the-var-id-thm}{Theorem \thethmid} 

 
\begin{var-id-thm}{\ref{thm:outs}} 
  \input{thm-outs} 
\end{var-id-thm} 

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One might answer that Mike just had been impressed too much by TeX’s macro mechanism and chose abbreviating macros erroneously when he should have used a different program (not TeX) to perform those substitutions, …

• such as AWK or Perl. But indeed there are scripts right for Mike’s purpose:
• de-macro | detex | ltx2x.
• Instead, you can use functionality of certain editors: user-defined editor commands (e.g., with Vim), “autocompletion”; “expansion” (“auto-correction”, macros, variables, aliases; by shell …)
• If you are sufficiently mad, you may even choose TeX-based substitution: ( datatool [Nicola Talbot] | stringstrings [Steven Segletes] | ted [Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard] | fifindo [mine] ). The latter introduces a kind of script language (consisting of ordinary TeX macros) for performing multiple substitutions (still not very intuitive at present).
• Back to ordinary use of macro files—for substitution! I am currently using an extension of my aforementioned fifinddo that “copies” one file into another, however: expanding especially chosen macros (I am generating HTML this way for my own purposes—“blog.sty”). This could be used here, but it would need \let\foo\relax for any standard LaTeX command that should not expand in this process (generating a source file). This may become useful if those source files don’t include the LaTeX document preamble, but rather are only (parts of) the body of the document environment.

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• … started by Thomas Jacobs 2010/08/19, asking about getting PDF and HTML from the same LaTeX source.
• Deyan Giyev replied 2010/08/20 mentioning
  • LaTeXML, a LaTeX to XML (XHTML + MathML) converter developed at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (many Google entries, including Linux packages),
  • Tralics, a kind of French analogue from INRIA,
  • LaTeX2HTML—which Andy Farnell recommended as well the same day—, and
  • TeX4ht.
• The same day, Leo added TeX2page (cf. online manual).
• I would like to add
  • Jürgen Fenn’s quite comprehensive list of TeX→HTML converters,
  • hevia has been missing there, mentioned here
  • some of the tools listed on the TUG resources page (“web projects”, overlapping with former, “how much” not checked).

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• On 2010/08/14, Michael Barr posted “Strange interaction with revtex”, 2010/08/16 “Weirder and weirder”, wondering about em-based settings of his diagxy package failing with revtex4.cls and at which lines of a main .tex file certain fonts are chosen.
• On 2010/08/17, Philip Taylor recommended something with \AtBeginDocument (perhaps somewhat wrong, correct: defer em-based macros/calculations by putting them into the argument of LaTeX’s \AtBeginDocument command).
• On 2010/08/19 Donald Arseneau replied recommending \normalfont\normalsize ‘before settings with “em”’.
• The day before, Michael Barr had posted as “Revtex incompatibility” (after an “unhelpful reply” from revtex maintainers) that he had found placing \normalsize above \input{diagxy} (after \documentclass{revtex4}) as a solution (or seemingly from his point of view: a “workaround”).
• The OP seems to think that a LaTeX class is “wrong” unless issuing \normalsize. However, there may be reasons … another (journal’s or publisher’s) package might load (proprietary) fonts with non-standard design sizes (such as 1 em = 10.5 pt, I am working with such a package) which a “generic” document class (such as the “generic” journal class revtex4) “cannot predict.” (@Mark Doyle: is this correct?) It is for this reason that em-based settings may better replace the dots in \AtBeginDocument{\normalfont\normalsize ...}.
• em-based settings may be relevant not only for “normal” text in “\normalsize,” but in footnotes or “small print” as well. To deal with this case, one approach is deferring these settings not just to \begin{document}, but to the point in time/code where the setting actually is used in typesetting (so em refers to the design size of the current font). Another approach would be to prepare settings for all the intended sizes at \begin{document} and, at typesetting, to choose the relevant setting using \@currsize.
• It is somewhat amusing that the essential reason of the purported “interaction” is that one package author expects an “action” (\normalsize) from another package that the latter just is not willing to take.

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• I learnt from Brock at quantifier.org (April 2010) how Robin Fairbairns insulted me in 2005
• Philip Ratcliffe’s careful and nice analysis in 2005 (“Mighty Toad”)

Last generated 2013-01-19 © Uwe Lück

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