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).

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!

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.

I get quite a few e-mails asking for help with my packages, and also spot a few questions in various public places (comp.text.tex and The LaTeX Community, mainly). I’m always happy to help where I can, and it always makes my life a bit easier if the question arrives with all the information to start with.

One of the things that get repeated by almost everyone trying to help out users is the need for a minimal example. For LaTeX, that typically looks something like:

\documentclass{article} % Or perhaps memoir, beamer, ...
\usepackage{...}
\begin{document}
Example here
\end{document}

ConTeXt examples are not dissimilar, while plain TeX ones need very little at all (but I get very few of these). It’s much faster to supply everything to start with than to send a snippet with key details left out. It’s surprising how many things people simply assume are obvious, when they are not (“Surely everyone uses package wibble”).

Another useful thing to do in advance of sending a query is to send a log file. Again, LaTeX users are normally best advised to include \listfiles in their input, so the kernel makes a neat listing of everything in use (hopefully including the versions).

Often, I get description of either how things should look or why they are wrong, rather than an actual example. If at all possible, a “reference rendering” is much easier to follow. That can be something done in a drawing programme, using some alternative (but awkward) TeX code, or a screenshot of something.  Describing things in words (especially if the questioner is not a native English speaker) can be a recipe for a long and painful process.

For questions posted in public, it’s always best to drop me a line so I spot it: I do my best but sometimes I miss things. For places such as comp.text.tex, that can simply be a CC on the posting, or for forums a quick note that says

Hello,

I posted a question about your <whatever> package:

http://some-url-here/

Please take a look.

will make sure that the issue gets me interest.

On the other hand, questions direct to me obviously get straight to the point but miss out on the public record part of a posting to Usenet. The same issues do tend to pop up more than once! Sometimes there is good reason for avoiding public postings: I get questions including unpublished material about achemso, for example. So I’d encourage anyone with an issue they think is general (such as a bug in one of my releases) to post something in public if possible. I always try to follow up postings as well as e-mailing people directly as well.

As I say, I’m always happy to try to help. I hope that most of the time I succeed.

The PDF format has evolved over the years as Adobe have released new versions of their Acrobat and Reader software. New ideas have been added to the file format, and as a result there are different versions of the PDF format. If you take a look at a PDF in Adobe Reader, you can see which version the file is using in the Document Properties information. Of course, files using the newer versions of the PDF format need a suitable viewer, be that Reader or something else.

This is relevant to TeX users as PDF tends to be the target format, either directly or via DVI files, for many users. Tools such as pdfTeX are not tied to one version of the PDF specification. For example, when creating a PDF directly with pdfTeX the \pdfminorversion primitive can be used to set the PDF version to 1.3, 1.4 or 1.5.

Why would you want to do this? Well, obviously the newer versions bring new features. A particularly significant one is the compression of non-stream objects. The detail of these objects is not really important, but they relate to items such as links within documents. Version 1.5 of the PDF specification allows these to be compressed, which can make quite a difference to the resulting file size. For example, I did a trial run with the siunitx manual, and by adding the lines

\pdfminorversion=5
\pdfobjcompresslevel=2

resulted in reducing the file size from around 700 KiB to around 550 KiB, a saving of roughly 20 %.

There is some discussion ongoing at the moment on the TeX Live mailing list about possibly changing the default PDF version produced by tools such as pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX, etc. The current standard setting is version 1.4, which makes larger files but does have the advantage of being readable by a wider range of viewers. On the other hand, PDF version 1.5 was first released in 2003, and there is pretty good support for it in most of the well-known readers. As long as switching to version 1.5 also enables the compression, this looks like a good idea: just moving to version 1.5 without using the features available seems a bit odd to me.

There are times where you need to use PDF version 1.4 (for example for archive-type PDFs), but for those you also need to check other features of the PDF. So I feel that the change looks like a good idea, provided there is a good way to set the version to something else.

A new version of the very useful pgfplots package has been released. pgfplots provides a very handy interface on top of pgf/TikZ to generate print-quality plots without too much effort. As many readers will know, pgf works with both DVI and PDF output methods, making pgfplots very handy for generating plots without worrying about other content.

For me, the stand-out new feature in v1.3 of pgfplots is the ability to automatically reverse the axes. As a chemist, I need to do this as convention dictates that some types of data are displayed with the x axis running from high values to low ones. So for me not having to do this by hand is a really significant reason to upgrade. There are lots of other new features as well: I see that the manual now includes a number of 3D surface style graphs, which many people like.

If you are plotting data in TeX, the pgfplots should be very high on your list of packages to consider.

A while ago, I had some interaction with the people at PCTeX. They let me have a copy of MathTime Lite for testing, which was very good of them. I now see that they’ve extended this to the wider world: MathTime Lite is now available for free. I’m sure there is good commercial sense to this decision (you still have to pay for the Pro version), but for people who want maths fonts beyond Computer Modern it’s certainly worth knowing.

I see from the LuaTeX mailing list that version 0.45.0 has been released. There is the usual long list of new things and bug fixes, but some that caught my eye:

• \input and \openin now accept braced filenames;
• The new primitives \aligntab and \alignmark are aliases for the use of & and # in alignments;
• LuaTeX can now optionally use kpathsea to find lua require() files.