March 17, 2019
Regular readers will know that I’m a fan of the light-weight TeXworks editor. It keeps the user interface pared down, letting both new and experienced users focus on their input, whilst at the same time having lots of handy features.
March 7, 2019
LaTeX environments are almost always used for cases where the content does not make sense as a macro argument. That can happen for example because there are clear ‘start’ and ‘end’ conditions, because the content is long and open-ended, or because category code changes are needed.
January 1, 2019
Just over ten years ago, I decided to establish a blog about TeX matters.
After a bit of consideration and searching, I found that texdev.net was
available, and decided to call the blog Some TeX
Developments.
December 9, 2018
TeX does not include any ‘native’ support for floating point calculations, but that has not stopped lots of (La)TeX users wanting to do sums (and more complicated things) in their document. As TeX is Turing complete, it’s not a surprise that there are several ways to implement calculations. For end users, the differences between these are not important: what is key is what to use. Here, I’ll give a bit of background, look at the various possibilities, then move on to give a recommendation.
December 6, 2018
In parallel with work on the
\expanded primitive, I’ve been working
recently on bringing the ‘utility’ primitives in
XeTeX into line with those in
pdfTeX, pTeX and upTeX.
December 6, 2018
In recent years, development of pdfTeX has been very limited, with the v1.40
branch now being around for over 10 years. However, in the past there were
plans for a v1.50 branch, and some code was actually written. One primitive
that was fully coded-up at that time was \expanded. The idea of this is
pretty simple: it carries out full expansion like \message (and almost
like \edef), but it is still expandable. For example, try
November 26, 2018
I’ve been writing Some TeX Developments for ten years now, starting off on WordPress.com before moving to a self-hosted WordPress set up. All of this time, I’ve stuck with WordPress as it’s a very powerful and flexible system. However, it’s got some downsides too. In particular, as it is dynamic, database-driven, system, the pages are created each time someone requests them. That’s great for things like supporting comments, but it means there’s a non-trivial amount of work done each time someone views a page. That turns into a real cost when you are paying for your own hosting. My most recent hosts were really good for support, but I needed enough CPU cycles to push me into the ‘non-trivial’ cost bracket. At the same time, a dynamic site means that there’s always a security risk.
October 20, 2018
Members of TUG might have seen a survey from the Board asking about the status of TUGboat. To date, the journal issues have been available online one year after publications. The Board were interested in how going open-access would affect the number of members.
July 22, 2018
The final day of TUG2018 followed the conference banquet, which of course meant that there were a few tired (or missing!) delegates.
July 21, 2018
The second day of TUG2018 picked up with a few announcements for those us here at IMPA, before we moved on to the business end.