Some TeX Developments

WinEdt is a popular (La)TeX editor on Windows. A new major release, version 6, has just appeared on the WinEdt homepage.  The interface has received a lot of attention, with new icons and menu arrangements. One thing that a lot of people have been hoping for is UTF-8 support, but the release notes say

Avoid sending major feature requests: they will have to wait for version 6.1 (unicode, folding and all)!

So for the moment people who need UTF-8 will have to look elsewhere. Another point to note for users of version 5.5 is that this is not a free upgrade (WinEdt is shareware).

Most chemistry journals use numbered citation styles, with all of the references appearing at the end of the article in a References section. However, there are some that place the references at the bottom of the page they occur on, as footnotes. This is a bit more awkward to achieve than a simple section, but as biblatex has all of the citation data available from the start of a document I thought it should be easy to do.

It turns out that biblatex has the very handy \footfullcite macro, which nearly does what is needed. This macro will print the reference as a footnote, but uses LaTeX’s footnote numbering system to do this. The result is that repeating citations, compressing several citations into a range and so on is not so easy. In the end, I decided to drop Philipp Lehman (the author of biblatex) an e-mail for some guidance. He came back with two approaches, one for citations in the text and one for superscript citations:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[style=numeric-comp]{biblatex}
\bibliography{biblatex-examples}
\makeatletter

\ExecuteBibliographyOptions{citetracker,sorting=none}

\DeclareCiteCommand{\notefullcite}[\mkbibbrackets]
  {\usebibmacro{cite:init}%
   \usebibmacro{prenote}}
  {\usebibmacro{citeindex}%
   \usebibmacro{notefullcite}%
   \usebibmacro{cite:comp}}
  {}
  {\usebibmacro{cite:dump}%
   \usebibmacro{postnote}}

\newbibmacro*{notefullcite}{%
  \ifciteseen
    {}
    {\footnotetext[\thefield{labelnumber}]{%
       \usedriver{}{\thefield{entrytype}}.}}}
\DeclareCiteCommand{\superfullcite}[\cbx@superscript]%
  {\usebibmacro{cite:init}%
   \let\multicitedelim=\supercitedelim
   \iffieldundef{prenote}
     {}
     {\BibliographyWarning{Ignoring prenote argument}}%
   \iffieldundef{postnote}
     {}
     {\BibliographyWarning{Ignoring postnote argument}}}
  {\usebibmacro{citeindex}%
   \usebibmacro{superfullcite}%
   \usebibmacro{cite:comp}}
  {}
  {\usebibmacro{cite:dump}}

\newbibmacro*{superfullcite}{%
  \ifciteseen
    {}
    {\xappto\cbx@citehook{%
       \noexpand\footnotetext[\thefield{labelnumber}]{%
         \fullcite{\thefield{entrykey}}.}}}}

\newrobustcmd{\cbx@superscript}[1]{%
  \mkbibsuperscript{#1}%
  \cbx@citehook
  \global\let\cbx@citehook=\empty}
\let\cbx@citehook=\empty

\makeatother
\begin{document}

Some filler text \notefullcite{cotton}, then some more text
\notefullcite{hammond}. Perhaps some more text and the same
citation again \notefullcite{hammond}. Yet another one
\notefullcite{knuth:ct:a}. Now all again
\notefullcite{cotton,hammond,knuth:ct:a}.

Some filler text,\superfullcite{augustine} then some more
text.\superfullcite{companion} Perhaps some more text and the
same citation again.\superfullcite{companion} Yet another
one.\superfullcite{kastenholz} Now all
again.\superfullcite{augustine,companion,kastenholz}

\end{document}

I might add this to my biblatex styles, but I’ll wait to see if Philipp puts the code or some notes into the biblatex core before I do. I should also point out that if you want footnote citations and other footnotes then you’ll need something like the bigfoot package to do the job. But this is a pretty good place to start from.

I recently posted some information on building biblatex-biber. Since then, v0.5 of biblatex-biber has appeared and there are some positive changes. The code now creates its own file to grab the required Perl modules. So on Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) and Ubuntu (9.10) all I needed to do after downloading the source was

perl Build.PL
sudo ./Build installdeps
./Build
./Build test
sudo ./Build install

at the Terminal. The second step grabbed all of the modules needed and everything worked fine.

On Windows, life is still a bit complicated but I now can get things to work. A bit of a trawl on the Internet led to a blog post about Text::BibTeX. At the moment, the solution is still in beta and so there is a bit of work to do. With Strawberry Perl installed I went to the Command Prompt (as Administrator) and started the cpan program. At its prompt I did

install Config::AutoConf Capture::Tiny IPC::Run
install A/AM/AMBS/Text/Text-BibTeX-0.40_3.tar.gz

which all seemed to work. After downloading and unzipping the source for biblatex-biber (which is in .gz format, so use something like 7-Zip to open it), still as Administrator at the Command Prompt I did

perl build.pl
build installdeps
build
build test
build install

and everything worked. So I’ve finally got it working across all platforms. Hopefully the Text::BibTeX install will become easier when it moves from beta status.

A while ago I talked about the variation between different chemistry publishers in their LaTeX support. Looking for something on the Royal Society of Chemistry site today I find that the people at Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics have created an updated template for TeX users. I’d say that is good news: remember of course that the journals are not typeset from the TeX source.

In my post box a few days ago was the proceedings of the EuroTeX 2009 conference (TUGBoat 30:3, which I get as a joint member of TUG and UK-TUG). Quite a few of the articles are about ConTeXt, not surprising as the 3rd ConTeXt meeting took place in parallel to EuroTeX. The highlights will be different for everyone, of course. I’ll pick out a few articles that caught my attention (and perhaps add a few more in a later post):

• Siep Kroonenberg wrote about maintaining a (Windows) network installation of TeX Live. While not a step by step guide, I found this a useful insight into getting started on providing multi-user access to TeX.
• Péter Szabó looked at optimising PDF size, both using pdfTeX and with post-production tools. This has come up recently on the TeX Live mailing list, so it was interesting to see more detail about the concepts involved.
• Taco Hoekwater explained how the development work on LuaTeX has finally removed all of the Pascal code from the sources, and why this was a ‘Good Thing’. An interesting insight into work at the engine level.
• In the ‘Abstracts Only’ section I was particularly interested in one about PPCHTeX by Hans Hagen. PPCHTeX is an approach to typesetting chemical structures in TeX, and is therefore of more than passing interest to me in my day job.

I note for my diary that EuroTeX 2010 is scheduled for the 25th to the 29th of August 2010 in Pisa. I’ll see how my diary works out: perhaps I’ll make this one!

A couple of days ago biblatex v0.9 appeared on CTAN. As usual, there is a long list of changes, bug fixes and so on. The restrictions on inclusion in TeX distributions have been lifted, and so it’s already available in TeX Live. At the same time, biblatex-biber has been uploaded to CTAN, so hopefully ready to use versions will be added to the distributions at some point (MikTeX is likely to be first, I suspect).

I’ve just uploaded an updated version of biblatex-chem to CTAN, to keep in sync with the changes in biblatex. I’ll try to get biblatex-nature and biblatex-science done in soon (today) so that everything is working.

I see on the TeXworks mailing list that Jonathan Kew has posted new builds of the ‘bleeding edge’ experimental code. For those of us who use them (and find them pretty stable) this will add a number of refinements, from the look of the change log.

I’ve been working on siunitx version 2, getting the code to the point where I’d hope it works for most things that the current release does. Over the last couple of weeks I hope I’ve sorted out the table issues which tend to be a problem in version 1, plus “mopped up” a few outstanding odds and ends. So it feels like an appropriate point for a public snap shot of the code. As progress has been good, I’m calling this one alpha 1.

At this stage, there are likely to be some bugs and other annoyances in the code. However, I hope that enough works for people to risk taking the plunge and trying it out. For those willing to try out siunitx v2.0, you can get:

• The ready to install TDS-style zip file
• The package documentation
• The source file (dtx)

You’ll need to have up to date installations of both expl3 and the xpackages to try out the code, as internally the new code uses the LaTeX3 internal syntax. The biggest change that users should see from version 1 is that I’ve re-thought the option names. They are mainly longer, but more informative, in the new code. Improvements to the names I’ve picked are of course welcome.

At this stage, I’m still working on adding more ideas to the code. So there are some omissions in the release that I know are there and am intending to sort out. Of course, different users have different priorities for improvement. That said, there are bound to be things which simply are broken, things I’ve forgotten and the odd item that I’m currently planning not to carry forward from version 1. Feedback by as comments here, by e-mail or at the BerliOS site is very welcome.

The current development plan is to see how much is wrong with the alpha code, and if necessary to have some more alpha-status snap shots. I’d then hope to have a beta some time in the spring (perhaps April or May), with a full release currently in my mind for June or July. Exactly how this will work out depends on other projects: I’d like, for example, to have some floating-point tools in siunitx, but for that I need to write them for LaTeX3. The feature list for the release certainly isn’t fixed, and I’d expect that once v2.0 is out there will continue to be more ideas to add on.

I’ve just sent a draft to TUGBoat for an article about pgfplots. As many readers will know, pgfplots is built on pgf/Tikz, which means that it can be used for both DVI and PDF output, and with plain TeX, LaTeX and ConTeXt. In my draft, I’ve used some real life plots (from a couple of recent publications in the research group I work in). The draft will probably change a bit, but for a preview take a look a the the PDF.

I was looking something up today, and quite by accident found that Safari Books Online has both the Guide to LaTeX and The LaTeX Companion available. Unfortunately, the subscription costs mean that for individuals the price is far too high, compared to buying the printed versions. However, I also found that my employers (UEA) have paid for access to a range of books via the service. So if you are in a university it might be worth seeing if you can get the books as part of your institution’s more general access policies.