Some TeX Developments

Development of the next release of siunitx has gone quite smoothly: I’ve added a few new features, and there is now nothing outstanding for v2.4. So it is time to ask for some volunteers to test the code.

In terms of new features, I have added the a choice of rounding modes modes the ability to compress down exponents in ranges and lists, both long-standing feature requests. In response to a recent TeX.sx question, siunitx can now also turn exponents into unit prefixes. At a lower level, I’ve also altered some of the options internally so fewer of the assume math mode.

To test, please download the ready to install TDS-style .zip file and install it locally. You should then be good to go. Feedback as a bug report or by e-mail welcome, as always. Assuming there are no problems, I’d expect to upload to CTAN by the end of the month.

The beamer class is rightly regarded as the leading way to produce presentations with LaTeX. A while ago now, there was a need to find a new maintainer, and Vedran Miletić volunteered to take over. At the same time, I’d said I would be willing to at least take on some formal connection, if only to get available patches integrated into the code.

Vedran has fixed a number of bugs in beamer, but the list has been building up. I’ve spoken with Vedran about this, and as I suspected he’s rather busy! There’s also the fact that beamer works for most people most of the time. So for the moment I’m going to be dealing with keeping on top of the bug list.

As a first stage, I’m going through the list, removing anything that is not really a beamer issue (such as passing issues with hyperref) or which I can’t reproduce. I’m also picking up on bugs where there is a patch available: those can go into the code pretty much straight away. The next phase will be to sort bugs that seem to have some obvious fix. This is not so easy as beamer is rather complex internally, and I want to avoid breaking anything.

I’d expect to update CTAN once I’ve had a look through all of the bugs. Probably by the end of this week this first phase should be done, so I’d expect there to be a run of new beamer versions over the coming weeks.

I can’t promise to sort out all of the bugs, but I’d like to at least try to get the list down. If anyone wants to help out (or indeed to take over!) then they are, as usual, welcome to make contact.

As part of my activity for UK-TUG, I and a couple of other members ran a training event last week in London: LaTeX for beginners. This is the third time we’ve run a similar course, and I think that this was the best presentation we’ve given to date. The slides and handouts seem to work pretty well, and the timing and so forth is now becoming a lot clearer!

Coming away from the event, what is most notable is the demand for LaTeX training. We’ve run the same course three times in just over a year, and I’ve currently got a waiting list which will easily fill the next presentation. At the same time, we get asked a lot about an intermediate-level course, and so we’ve made a start on assembling some slides for that, too.

On the course itself, we had a number of people from publishing backgrounds, and again there are more on the waiting list. So it’s clear that LaTeX continues to be a significant player, at least in the UK, in the publishing world.

Depending on availability of help, I’m hoping that we can run one course early in the new year, and another at around Easter. So this will be keeping me busy for a while!

Recent changes to biblatex (in v1.6) mean that the biblatex-chem bundle is currently broken. I’ve not released a quick-fix as there are some long-standing issues to address in biblatex-chem. When I initially wrote the code, I started from scratch and defined only what I wanted. That works, but means that any changes in biblatex are not automatically picked up. From biblatex-ieee, I took the alternative approach and worked from the standard biblatex styles to what was needed. That’s a better long-term approach, so it’s the one I’m now bringing to biblatex-chem. It will take a little while, so user might want to keep an eye on the development code.

On the TeX.SX site recently, there was some discussion about locally over-riding the round-mode = places setting in my siunitx package. One thing this highlights for me is the need to think about which settings to apply globally.

Some siunitx settings are about consistency of appearance, and seem to apply naturally to entire documents. A classic example would be output-decimal-marker: if you are using , as a decimal marker, it should apply everywhere!

However, this is not so clear-cut for many of the options related to number-manipulation. The rounding options in particular are really intended for the case where you have some auto-generated data (say a long list from an instrument), and the real accuracy is not as great as the apparent precision. Instruments are great at providing lots of numbers, but it takes a bit of human thought to decide how many of these are really relevant. So for these cases, setting an appropriate rounding scheme is perfectly sensible.

On the other hand, for a number you’ve typed in yourself I’d hope that you’ve done the thinking part when the number is typed, so rounding by the computer is not needed. That suggests to me that most of the time rounding should not be set as a global option.

Of course, it will depend on the exact nature of the document in question. If all of the data in a document is in tables, all of which need rounding, then there is a performance gain from setting the rounding once globally. So the best I can say, guidance-wise, is ‘think about your document’!

The LaTeX3 Project have recently updated the organisation of the various LaTeX3-based packages on CTAN. This means that the older expl3 and xpackages need to be replaced by l3kernel and l3packages. Unfortunately, this seems to confuse MiKTeX, which does not pick up the need to install the new material. So MiKTeX users will need to do this by hand in the MiKTeX Package Manager. This should be a passing problem, but does seem to be causing some confusion for MiKTeX users.

I’m making a start on the next release of siunitx: v2.3. There are a number of issues in the database targeting this release, and these are mainly about dealing with things behind the scenes. Some options need revision, and I need to improve the table code somewhat. However, I doubt that there will be much to excite users. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: there seem to be a lot of siunitx users, and I don’t want to break the code! Of course, if there is a particular issue that needs addressing then the usual rule applies: make a case to me and I’ll see what I can do.

From a member of the LaTeX3 Project (who will remain anonymous!)

I just came upon this offer:

http://www.getdigital.de/products/Latex

Now you know what to wear at the next conference!

As I detailed a little while ago, I’ve been working on v2.2 of siunitx. I’ve now released the latest version, v2.2, to CTAN. There are a number of small changes, introducing new features, but I thought I would highlight a few.

A long-standing feature request has been to be able to use the cancel package to show how units cancel out. This is useful for teaching, although it’s not of course part of the usual typesetting of units for publication. It turns out not to be too hard to allow this, so that you can now use input such as

\si[per-mode = fraction]{\cancel\kg\m\per\s\cancel\kg}

and have it come out properly. At the same time, I’ve made it possible to highlight particular units

\si{\highlight{green}\square\metre\candela\second}

again for teaching-related purposes.

A second long-standing request is to be able to parse uncertainties given in the form

\num{1.23 +- 0.15}

which was something more of challenge, but again is now working properly. So you can get the same output from the above and from

\num{1.23(15)}.

A final highlight is the new \tablenum macro. This is needed for aligning numbers inside \multicolumn and \multirow, which otherwise does not work. (At a technical level, both \multicolumn and \mutirow use the \omit primitive, and so the code inserted by the S column is not used. The \tablenum macro effectively makes the same approach available as a stand-alone function.)

A new guide for LaTeX beginners has just been published by Packt Publishing. Written by Stefan Kottwitz (of TeXblog fame), it’s a very hands-on  approach to teaching LaTeX. The book is filled with examples, and makes use of modern packages, editors and so on. Stefan has put a summary of the contents on his blog.

I saw the book before publication, so had an opportunity to make some suggestions. In general, Stefan’s done a great job and it is a very readable and accessible guide The style is very much meant to be like a conversation with a knowledgeable friend, and I think this works really well.

However, there is a problem. The examples of LaTeX output in the book are poor: they’ve come out as low-resolution JPEGs. This really detracts from the a key point of using LaTeX in the first place: good-looking output. That’s a shame, as if you picked up the book not knowing much about LaTeX you’d take one look at the output and think it was awful.

Overall, I can recommend the content book for helping new users, but with the warning ‘the real output from LaTeX looks much better than in the book’. So one to use as a complement to other texts, rather than alone.