The new www.ctan.org

Looks like www.ctan.org has refreshed their website with a new look. Christmas seems to have come early for the LaTeX community.  You can read more about the announcement here and the subsequent thread replies might be of interest too.

Firefox CTAN plugins

Via gmane, saw a post about Firefox plugins for CTAN.  Might be useful for folks who want to search from Firefox without going into the CTAN site directly.

If you want to subscribe to CTAN announcements or to the archives, go here or here.

Good movie formats to embed in LaTeX and PDF

This should be an interesting thread to follow for those who embed movies in their LaTeX document. A fairly good discussion on comp.text.tex on what works and what doesn't with different multimedia file formats and different viewers on different platforms.
*hey, that's 3 differents in one sentence.

Essential reading for those who want to make some interactive PDFs. Just in case, you didn't know, the popular package to embed them is movie15 which allows you embed video and audio files.

Of course, your PDF file will then be humongous; no, no magic compression or size reduction will occur.

PDFcomment: A userfriendly interface to \pdfannot

Just saw this new package,PDFcomment on the ctan-ann mailing list.  The \pdfannot command is used to add comments to your PDF file when generated through pdflatex.  This has varying degrees of support depending on the PDF viewer and the version of the viewer i.e. you might not see the comments at all if your viewer does not support it;  Rest assured that the PDF file is still the same.

And this style file is a decent interface (warning PDF file) to the underlying pdfannot command.   Note that while one can add comments through PDFLaTeX, others receiving it cannot add more comments. Unless explicit permissions are set on the PDF file.  Which pdftex does not support and needs to be done using some other external tools.

The last time I checked, there were some legal issues in changing document permissions of an already created PDF file. Unfortunately, can't find where I saw that and I could be completely wrong about it.  I believe this AREnable tool probably would help though I've never used it.

Jpgfdraw: drawing PGF figures

If you find PGF too difficult to learn and use, then Jpgfdraw may be the tool for you. It exports the drawn picture as a file containing a pgfpicture environment which can then be included in your LaTeX document.

The drawback as I see it, it requires java 1.5 or later to run the application. That's way too much HDD storage needed for a bit of laziness in learning pgf. But if you already have it installed, then this should be ideal for those quick drawings that need to included into your LaTeX document.

Latest Builds of the PGF manual

The pgf package which is one of my favourite LaTeX packages for drawing pictures is released rather infrequently. Meaning, you get to wait a pretty long time for new features that are added, tested and then bundled for a release.

In case you want to the latest, you need to check out the CVS code and the prebuilt manual is available from Kjell's site.

Kjell recently posted on the pgf mailing list about the availability of the latest pgf manuals.

Listing code snippets in LaTeX

There are a number of ways and packages that provide for code listings in LaTeX. One that I personally prefer and that has enough options to customise is the listings package. It provides a multitude of options to pretty print code snippets. It has support for a number of languages which is more along the lines of keywords that is just about enough for code listings.

It has features to

• Number the lines
• keyword highlighting
• Ability to add your own keywords
  
• provide background colour
• whitespace identification for languages that need them
  
• labeling them for cross reference

One other feature is the ability to reuse the definitions into a style format, so that the same environment can be reused with a minimal of code repetition. And the documentation is excellent with lots of examples and feature setting explanation. For code which is indented, it also allows the verbatim code to be shrunk to fit the page(in the default font size, it does scroll off the page), though it does affect the readability of the page.

Extracting specific pages from PDF files using LaTeX

I frequently receive large PDF files from my colleagues which needs to get reviewed by a number of people. Instead of mailing the whole document, especially if it is large, I mail them the relevant pages.

You don't need any extra software or some external binary. There is the package pdfpages on CTAN which does exactly what is required and more.(If you read the documentation, that is)

A simple example demonstrates the ease by which PDF pages can be extracted.

\documentclass[a4paper]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
\includepdf[pages=72-74]{statistics.pdf}
\end{document}

%%% Local Variables:
%%% mode: latex
%%% TeX-master: t
%%% End:


Of course, it can also be merged with the current document that one is writing in LaTeX too. So if someone sends in PDF images that needs to be incorporated in your workflow, just plug in some \includepdfs with the name of the file and compile the document. And it is simply plugged in without any fuss. So, if you're the delegating type, this is a godsend. :-)

Printing address labels using LaTeX

One of the best things about CTAN is that it has all the software for your everyday needs. For the last couple of weeks, I'd been sending out some large number of snail mails to a lot of organisations. And my handwriting is pretty much crap; even I can't decipher it after a few days. The return address looked like I had an epileptic seizure when writing it. And the solution was to print out my return address on labels. I could spent half an hour, doing it on my own (which would have been crappy too) but why reinvent the wheel? I was pretty confident that it had been done before.

Since I had MikTeX installed, I fired up the package manager and soon enough, located the labels package. Installing through the package manager was a breeze. And the documentation is excellent. Here's what you need to type to print a A4 sheet of your own address labels.

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}
\usepackage[newdimens]{labels}
\LabelCols=3 %3 columns of labels
\LabelRows=7 % 7 rows of labels
\numberoflabels=21 % number of repeated labels

\begin{document}
\boxedaddresslabel[\fboxsep=3pt]
{\textbf{From:\\ Sivaram} \\Line1\\Line2 \\Bangalore \\Karnataka}

\boxedaddresslabel[\fboxsep=3pt]
{\textbf{From:\\ John Doe} \\Line1\\Line2,\\ Bangalore \\Karnataka}

\end{document}

%%% Local Variables:
%%% mode: latex
%%% TeX-master: t
%%% End:

Save and run PDFLaTeX on the file and you should get a 2 page PDF that has 21 address labels on each.

Locate a paper cutter and chop the paper and you have your address labels ready. That's it. It took me half an hour to do this. Which is the same time to do it on my own, :-) but at least this is definitely much better than the trial and error method of trying out fonts with different sizes and boldness.