Reading the latest issue of The PracTeX Journal I was reminded of this by the column by Dave Walden. He’d written a column there, Travels in TeX Land, since the journal came into being five years ago. Dave has found many different things to say, looking at different things that he’s done using TeX. Each entry is different, and I think all of them are enlightening. The latest Travel in TeX Land is also the last

This will be my final TeX Land column in this journal. I am pleased to have provided a column for every previous issue, but it is now time for me to focus on other things.

However, it looks like inspiration is not the issue, as we are also assured that there will be continued TeX-related writings available from http://www.walden-family.com/public/texland/. I do hope that new insights continue to appear there.

Speaking of inspiration, if there is anything you think I should talk about here I’m always happy to get feedback. I do look round for potentially-interesting things to include, but the odd one does slip past.

In the talk, the approach shown off was going very much for a device-dependent approach, and creating pre-defined bitmaps for both landscape and portrait viewing on the iPad screen. There is some good discussion after the presentation about alternative approaches, such as doing the typesetting on the device, reflowable PDFs and intermediate methods.

While I don’t have any of these devices, I can see that thinking about supporting them is going to be important. It’s clear that the overall market is very big, and that there are unique challenges in supporting small screens with a different form of interaction to the ‘traditional’ PDF. So I’m pleased to see that a variety of people are exploring all of the possible TeX-based solutions.

• Restricted \write18 support is back. I’ve written about the issues with this before, but as I understand it these are now solved. The idea of this support is that EPS graphics can be turned into PDF graphics automatically, meaning that pdfLaTeX is much easier to use for end users with mainly EPS graphics available.
• The default PDF output is level 1.5, which means that more compression of the output is available. The amount of compression depends on the type of output (files with lots of hyperlinks seem to show the most dramatic results). I’ve been using PDF 1.5 for a while with no issues, so I hope that this is applicable to most users.
• The is a Unicode version of BibTeX included: BibTeXU. I can’t see any details of where this is coming from or the exact nature of the support: I hope to gain enlightenment at some stage. I’ll certainly be testing it.

As I’m currently testing on my Mac, I’ve installed the 64-bit binaries (these still have to be installed in addition to MacTeX at the moment). I’m seeing slightly better performance with the 64 bit binaries than the 32 bit ones, but not by much. On Windows I’m currently limited to 32 bit, so there I’ll have nothing to worry about!

So far, I’ve not had any major issues. TeX Live is very much evolution, not revolution, so that is not too much of a surprise. The team have done a good job, as usual, and I hope that others will brave the testing status of this release to help find any bugs before it’s unleashed on the TeX world at large.

sudo cpan Config::AutoConf
perl Build.PL
sudo ./Build installdeps
./Build
./Build test
sudo ./Build install

The cpan line adds one module to Perl which for some reason biber’s installdeps routine doesn’t find automatically: if you miss this out then the build will fail. There are a lot of Perl questions while the additional modules are installed: I just say yes to all to them. The build itself is pretty quite, and it’s almost at the point of being trivial (the above instructions now seem to work on all the platforms I use).

The latest Ubuntu release, 10.04 ‘Lucid Lynx’, finally moves to TeX Live 2009. This finally makes it easy to get TeX Live in a reasonable up to date version:

sudo apt-get install texlive

This grabs a subset of the complete TeX Live 2009, but seems to include quite a good selection (a bit like the MiKTeX basic installation on Windows, but I think a bit bigger). TeXworks is also on the list (at least the stable version), so if you don’t want to compile it from the source you can do

sudo apt-get install texworks

and be ready to go. Of course, you might still need to grab a few more bits of TeX Live (for example, XeTeX is not included in the standard selection). However, it’s definitely an improvement of the earlier situation.

Aims

There are a few different things that I wanted to get sorted out with all of my packages. First, I think it is useful to make the code (and code changes) publicly available in one place. That is what version control systems provide: you get a list of changes, with hopefully some notes on what was going on. That also makes it possible for other people to easily suggest patches (if they want to, of course!). Second, tracking bugs and feature requests really requires some kind of structure. I currently have a long list of e-mails that list things to think about: making these both publicly available and organised is a good idea. That helps me, and also lets user see what has already been logged. Third, it is useful if there is a way of having on-line documentation, for example using a wiki.

Moving to BitBucket

I had a look at various approaches to doing all of that. I’ve had a few issues with BerliOS, and as I’ve used it I’ve realised that the interface is rather awkward. Two services which look rather more helpful are BitBucket and GitHub. Both of these are based around distributed version control systems: Mercurial and Git, respectively. I’m not going to go into the details of either of these (or the differences between them), but Mercurial seemed a bit easier to use to me so I decided to go that way. BitBucket includes all of the bug tracking and wiki features on my list of ideas, and so far I’ve found the interface clear and powerful.

Over the last couple of days I’ve uploaded basically all of the current versions of my packages to BitBucket. As most of these were written without formal version control, I’ve had to ‘reconstruct’ the historical changes from my archive. I’ve aimed for a balance between providing information and my time: the history goes back to the first version of the current releases (for example, from v3.0 for achemso, which is currently on v3.4f). Of course, any new versions will appear on BitBucket. I’m now working on moving all of the issues into the bug databases. I’ll also look at the wiki side of things: I’ll try to put some basic installation and use information, and perhaps some frequently asked questions. BitBucket includes RSS feeds, so anyone interested can follow what is going on.

The beamer connection

I should add that one of the reasons for looking at all of this was the recent news that the beamer package has a new maintainer. I’ve taken a bit of interest in this, and as the code has been moved to BitBucket, took a look at the facilities on offer there. As a result, I’ve been given access to the new repository. I have a few vague ideas about areas to look at, but at the moment nothing definite!

Get involved

Anyone interested is of course free to contribute. Adding any bugs, enhancements or ideas to the databases is one of the easiest way to do that. If anyone wants access to edit the wikis or add code, drop me a line.