September 2011
1 post
March 2011
1 post
February 2011
6 posts
fontspec missing font error
The latest version of fontspec now returns proper error messages when a font cannot be found:
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
./small.tex:6:
! fontspec error: "font-not-found"
!
! The font "Ggeorgia" cannot be found.
!
! See the fontspec documentation for further information.
! For immediate help type H <return>.
!...............................................
l.6...
KenKen in LaTeX etc.
The latest issue of the PracTeX Journal (discl.: I used to be a production editor there some years back) contains a set of interesting challenges: typeset and solve a KenKen puzzle. I haven’t seen this puzzle before; it looks fun for those of you who like this sort of thing. I encourage all with the time to attempt at least some of the problem—it looks fun!
In 2008 TPJ issued a similar...
Delayed active characters
Funny problem in mathtools vs. francais babel. (Only a coincidence that I’m debugging two babel problems back-to-back.)
Morten Høgholm’s mathtools package has an option to turn the colon into an active character so that writing := produces a colon-equals sign with a correctly centred colon. (Unicode mathematics provides a specific character for this symbol but the input shorthand is...
TeX’s font-loading optimisation
A user of Peter Wilson’s fonttable package reported an interesting bug in the interaction between it and the Spanish module (if not others) of babel.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[spanish]{babel}
\begin{document}
$\lim x_n$
{\font\x=cmr10\x hello}
$\lim x_n$
\end{document}
Can you see the problem? It certainly wasn’t immediately obvious to me.
I...
October 2010
4 posts
Callbacks in LuaTeX
You often hear the term “callbacks” bandied about when reading about new functionality offered by LuaTeX. Callbacks offer powerful functionality, but they don’t have pithy explanation that can easily explain why they’re so useful.
Paul Isambert has written a great example of using callbacks on comp.text.tex, his post prompted by Dan Luecking’s plea:
What is a callback? And don’t tell me to...
The asymptote LaTeX package
John Bowman has just announced version 2.05 of Asymptote, a 3D programmatic drawing package that uses TeX for typesetting its labels. Asymptote is unique in its ability to generate 3D graphics that can be rotated and zoomed within Adobe Reader, allowing far more interactive graphics for scientific documents.
John has written several TUG papers on Asymptote over the last few years; the latest was...
A little bit of TLContrib
The indefatigable Taco Hoekwater has released a new project called “TLContrib”, which is an orthogonal package hosting site for TeX Live installations. It does not mirror TeX Live, but consists of a place to distribute material that is otherwise unsuitable for the main TeX Live tree: namely, non-free material, binary updates, and pre-release updates. For example:
Non-free material:...
Improving documentation through the community
While I’m technically spending as little time as possible on TeX development at the moment, I’m still keeping an eye on things around the place. (In some cases, having to fix bugs comes as a rather time-critical priority now that users are updating very frequently with tools such as tlmgr or MacTeX’s ‘TeX Live Utility’.)
Over on the TeX branch of Stack Exchange (still yet to be...
August 2010
1 post
Hiatus
Those of you who have been following my activity for the last few years will recall my frequent comments “the thesis is almost done” — for the last several years. Well, has it been? All that time?
The past year has been a combination of too many mini-projects for me: code and papers for my PhD; fontspec and unicode-math in XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX; the Herries Press collection of...
July 2010
4 posts
Correct punctuation spaces
Who can remember when to use \@ in a (La)TeX document? I thought I knew, but an exception caught me by surprise today.
In approximate detail, the idea of \@ is to indicate when punctuation is or isn’t ending a sentence. Why would you want to do that? By default, Plain TeX and LaTeX both have a feature whereby a little extra space is allowed after a sentence (whether a period or other...
TeX Live 2010 freeze date
Anyone reading this that has not heard otherwise, the expected freeze date for TeX Live 2010 is scheduled for July 15, six days from now. Any TeX-related package authors with impeding fixes should upload them to CTAN as soon as possible — please not on Wednesday night :) A big congratulations to everyone involved in the TeX Live team for continuing to push back the release schedule. There being...
TUG 2010 recap
I arrived home yesterday from TUG 2010 in San Francisco. What a great conference!
It was held over three very full days with a registration/get-together the night before. Earlier still, members of the MacTeX mailing list met to discuss what’s going on and (for me, anyway) meet each other for the first time.
The venue was the Sir Francis Drake hotel, which I found charming. On entering the...
TUG 2010: An Earthshaking Announcement
Just got back from TUG 2010. Even before I have time to compose my own thoughts of the event, the filmed presentation for Donald Knuth’s “Earthshaking announcement” is now available on Kaveh Bazargan’s River Valley TV.
A great finale for a great conference.
June 2010
4 posts
Upright pi with mathpazo
A friend of mine asked if it were possible to define an upright pi to use to represent the constant number pi. ISO standards recommend this as well as upright i and e for their respective mathematical constants, but it’s not common to see the upright pi due to the constraints of most maths fonts.
I’m not aware of a general solution to accessing an upright pi (until unicode-math becomes more...
A curated font collection
Here’s an off-the-cuff idea that I’d like to explore when I talk to people at TUG 2010.
Currently TeX Live basically includes any free font that anyone would like to upload to CTAN. There’s some good stuff there, dominated mostly by font designers within the TeX community itself.
With the growing popularity of web fonts using OpenType and the Lua(La)TeX engine able to use them for multilingual...
Unicode-math in a picture
If you haven’t seen unicode-math or really understood what it does, see the image below for one of its features.
Writing maths like this isn’t any faster than using normal LaTeX commands, but it sure makes reading and editing the stuff far easier.
Compare this with the Mathematica programming language, say. There, it allows you to write programs with either variable names or mathematical...
Release
They say a lot of things about releasing software. I’ve got many things running through my head right now. It’s never been like this before. I’m pretty pleased to have just sent into CTAN my latest, and also largest ever, LaTeX package.
I’ve been working on unicode-math since 2006, before XeTeX had math support and my preliminary efforts, I think, convinced Jonathan Kew to add it. The years...
May 2010
5 posts
Clarification on luaotfload & mkluatexfontdb
I recently covered some of the details for running fontspec under LuaTeX.
As development continues while TeX Live 2010 is still under development, many details are still subject to change. In fact, I overlooked a recent feature of luaotfload that simplifies the whole process significantly.
I mentioned that before typesetting for the first time, and after installing fonts, it was necessary...
fontspec for LuaTeX
As previously mentioned, TeX Live 2010 will contain the first version of fontspec to support LuaTeX.
This has been made possible by a partial port of the ConTeXt OpenType font handling system by Khaled Hosny and Elie Roux in their luaotfload package (links: CTAN, Github). This package allows users to load OpenType fonts in plain LuaTeX is much the same way as in plain...
fontspec in TeX Live 2010
I have just gone through the always-slightly-worrying process of submitting a new version of fontspec to CTAN. (There’s always more typos and bugs you wish you could fix before you hit that “Upload” button.)
The new version is a major release, v2.0, representing quite a significant internal update over the v1.18 release that’s been going strong since, well, ages. There are quite a few minor...
SplitShow for dual-screen PDF presentations
I’ve started lecturing recently in the area of Sports Engineering, which is slightly outside my area of expertise but tremendous fun to jump into. I’ve been asked to help out for around a third of the lecture material which was previously being outsourced to a different course. (I.e., the students went off and attended someone else’s lectures for a few weeks.)
While the content I’ve been...
A LaTeX future
I’ve been thinking for a while that it would be a good idea to start a weblog of sorts to post everything that I think about related to my various LaTeX activities. Joseph Wright really provided the inspiration with his cleverly-named website.
Right now, I’m somewhat-actively working in two major areas of LaTeX development: LuaLaTeX and LaTeX3. LuaLaTeX has been the great work so far of Elie...