Some interesting Emacs threads and LaTeX news

C K Kashyap posited some new requirements on code folding and there were a number of interesting responses culminating with a link to HideRegion.  You probably should stick to hide-show or OutlineMode and venture into these solutions only if there is a use case that is not met by hide-show. :)

Did you forget to enable auto-fill while writing text?  No worries, you can fix the written text with a simple C-x h M-q .

Have some file and project management stuff that you want Emacs to handle?  Here's a thread on what one user would like to see as project management that he wants emacs to do some heavy lifting. Might be worth your time to check it out.

BTW, there's a new site pgfplots.net for fantastic LaTeX plotting by the LaTeX guru Stefan Kottwitz.  You should check it out and contribute your pgfplots to it.

PGF 3.0 Released

After a long time, a new version of pgf is out as made out in the announcement from CTAN.  Looks like they've got some massive changes in it.  It's already in the MiKTeX distribution, so you just need to update it.

Some of the things that I found interesting are


 - A Syntax for Graphs: There is now a new simple syntax for specifying
   graphs, borrowed from the GraphViz program. It makes it easy
   to specify graphs and especially trees in a convenient manner.

 - Graph Drawing Algorithms: TikZ now comes with a large and powerful
   system for computing the positions of nodes of graphs automatically
   (you need LuaTeX for this, though).

 - Data Visualization: There is now an alternative to pgfplots as part
   of the standard TikZ installation for creating plots. While pgfplots
   is still the more mature system, the new data visualization system
   comes with some interesting new ideas.

 - Driver Support: Support for all mayor backend drivers has been
   improved. A new, cool thing is the support for dvisvgm, which
   allows you to create powerful SVG graphics directly from TeX,
   including the text.

Your chance to influence Emacs development! Participate in an Emacs survey

The emacs development team is running a survey on what packages to enable by default.  To do that, they need your responses on the packages that you use.  You could parse your .emacs or do M-x report-emacs-bug and see the buffer for the list of modes enabled for you.  The survey link is below

http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/FrequentlyEnabledPackages_Emacs244_Survey

Please follow the instructions in the link above.  If anything, it might make Emacs easier to use for others.  And please do spread the word.

A few unrelated Emacs tips

I used to prefer installing things by hand but now I'm not so sure after using Emacs package manager.  Add this to your .emacs and do a M-x list-packages to see the list of packages that are available for Emacs.

(setq package-archives '(("gnu" . "http://elpa.gnu.org/packages/")
                         ("marmalade" . "http://marmalade-repo.org/packages/")
                         ("melpa" . "http://melpa.milkbox.net/packages/")))

Yes, not all packages are there; yes, the sites go down sometime, yes it's goes into .emacs.d folder in your relevant OS.   It works smoothly and it saves you a lot of hassle in scouring the net for stuff which overrides the minor inconveniences.

Use outline-mode in your AucTeX mode when editing LaTeX files as outline-minor-mode and while you're at it, do install OutlineMagic to handle the not-so-easy-keychord issue of outline-mode.  I've mapped mine to PF12 key.

 (eval-after-load 'outline

  '(progn

    (require 'outline-magic)

    (define-key outline-minor-mode-map (kbd "<\f12>") 'outline-cycle)))

If you ever had the need to copy your gcc messages to different folders at the same time when sending out emails in gnus, then this thread might be of use to you. Currently doesn't work with group names with spaces in their names especially IMAP folders.

Updated Instructions for Installng AucTeX on Windows and Cygwin

I had written about installing AucTeX earlier and it seems to work most of the time for people based on the emails to me.  Since then AucTeX has been developed further and there's a git repository too for it.  Here's a new set of instructions for the combination of Emacs 24.3, Cygwin and AucTeX.  Now you need git too to clone the repository and follow the instructions by Tassilo Horn here.

It's missing only one bit of instruction; you need to run
$./autogen.sh
before you start the ./configure script like
 $ ./configure --prefix=c:/gnu/ --with-emacs=c:/gnu/emacs-24.3/bin/emacs --with-texmf-dir=c:/MiKTeX2.9/

I prefer the in situ use of AucTeX and so you'd definitely need to follow Tassilo's instructions on the directory customisations especially

;; AUC TeX
;;;lines below are needed as we are calling auctex in situ inside the
;;;git repo instead of installing it.  See
;;; http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.auctex.general/5127
(setq TeX-data-directory "C:/gnu/elisp/auctex/")
(setq TeX-lisp-directory "C:/gnu/elisp/auctex/")
(setq preview-datadir (expand-file-name "preview" TeX-data-directory)
      preview-lispdir preview-datadir)
(add-to-list 'load-path "C:/gnu/elisp/auctex/")
(add-to-list 'load-path "C:/gnu/elisp/auctex/preview/")
(setq Info-default-directory-list 
      (cons "c:/gnu/elisp/auctex/doc" Info-default-directory-list))

So, there you have it,using the git version of AucTeX.  And a big thanks to Tassilo for helping me sort out my installation woes.

A Collection of LaTeX Letter Generation Threads

On comp.text.tex, over the last couple of days, there's been some interesting threads on letter templates, signatures and dates.  If you've used the komascript bundle(highly recommended), then it might be worthwhile to browse the threads as the package author Markus Kohm has responded to various letter related questions.  If you're learning komascript, you might find the thread useful. The package is available on  MiKTeX and TeXLive.


And may I once again reiterate that the new google groups interface is stunning in its ability to create UI confusion.  I just don't know where to look, find and generally navigate.  Maybe, it's because I've never been on Facebook?

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.

TeXLive 2012 available on Cygwin

It appears that the TeXLive 2012 is now available as an updated package on cygwin.  Please read the instructions in the announcement to choose the correct package sets when using the cygwin installer.

Interesting Emacs linkfest

Just so you know, that I'm snowed under again and it's criminal not to share my blog laziness with all and sundry.

Another Emacs mail client/backend choice discussion that crops up regularly in gnu.emacs.help.  If you haven't made up your mind, this won't help either but it sure helps in being more indecisive.  I dunno.

Running up and down your C code while coding and want a better way to track and come back to where you last coded?  Well, C K Kashyap seems to miss his vi keys and whaddya know?  Emacs has some key bindings for that and more as you can see in the thread 'Tips for quick jumping back and forth'.  Take a look for various productivity tips.

John Wiegley has been doing some wonderful stuff that might help people who are annoyed that Emacs hangs for 1.5 nano/micro/milli seconds before resuming when sending out mail messages or calling unknown executables instead of writing elisp functions to do the right thing(TM).  So he's gone ahead and posted async.el, followed  by dired-async and again followed by smtpmail-async. He's using the new fangled github so all those of you clever enough to speak git, check it out.

Seeing so much stuff, yours truly went ahead and asked whether this feature,async, is going to be part of Emacs main and the man actually responded to my email! Amazing.  For those chaps who thought Emacs Developers don't respond to feedback....tphthhp.   I kid, I kid.  (I should add, that all the Emacs-Devel people I have contacted, have responded to me or to the list whenever I contacted them).

John apparently never sleeps.  When the whole world is turning into Big Brother, you are encouraged to rat out yourself (and others) by tracking all the email addresses you send and store them, for later....beatings prolly?  Err...he's written gnus-harvest that needs sqlite to store all the email addresses compared to .mailrc or BBDB.

And I just noticed that Texlive 2012 is now available, thanks to this texlive post in comp.text.tex


That's it as I head back to my cave.

June TUG News

I saw this post on comp.text.tex and found a few interesting tidbits that people might be interested in, especially Knuth.



- Donald E. Knuth reports that a new, corrected reprint of Digital 
  Typography is now available. He writes, "I must say that I'm enormously 
  happy to hold it in my hands, because hundreds of things that readers 
  pointed out in the first printing have now been corrected." The best way 
  to ensure that you get the new, corrected printing is to order from the 
  publisher. 
  http://cslipublications.stanford.edu/site/1575860104.shtml




- As mentioned in the last newsletter, new corrected printings of Computers
  and Typesetting are also available. Knuth writes "...the books themselves 
  are significantly better in hundreds of small ways. I went through every 
  page very carefully and introduced many refinements, which have made me 
  extremely happy with the result. I'm now able to replace my personal desk 
  copies, in which hundreds of handwritten notes had been scrawled since the 
  Millennium edition came out, by fresh versions that are essentially 
  perfect (as far as I know). This is especially true of Volume B, because  
  important updates to the TeX software that were made in 2002 and 2007 have 
  never before been available in print." See the section entitled Spiffy New 
  Printings at
  http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.html




- TeX Live '12 is now frozen (svn revision 26895). Public release will occur 
  in a couple of weeks, and DVD will follow soon thereafter.
  http://tug.org/texlive/pretest.html
 

Getting ppt figures into LaTeX

This might be of interest to folks who work with ppts and LaTeX.  There are some interesting methods discussed in this thread, apart from the usual PDF export and cropping edit cycle in comp.text.tex.  Might be worth checking out.

*Hell, the new forum interface of google groups is a total UI bork.  I so want to swear till the air is blue.  Just look at it and weep.  Me, I'm going back to my gnus cave.

TeX Live has been added to the Cygwin distribution

If you've been wondering what replaces the obsoleted TeTeX package in cygwin, here's some news for you.  Tex Live is now available as installable package on cygwin. as native you'd want it to be with Emacs and AucTeX.

Using Beamer Animations to simulate Terminal Input and Output

I've been meaning to write about this for some time.  A few months ago, I had to prepare some training material on Unix basics and such.  While beamer was a natural choice for the presentation, I wanted to show some nifty animations that showed the commands and outputs as typed in a terminal.  I had the written text all done up but didn't know how to get the animation correct; I had misunderstood the features of animate package on CTAN.

Being stuck, I posted on tex stackexchange and had a beautiful solution from Alexander Grahn who went out of his way to solve my different issues that I had with my code.  Finally, on a beamer slide, you can now autoplay simulated Unix commands and expected output while giving a talk, instead of doing uncover on mouse click in beamer.

If you want to see my code instead of the one posted on the stackexchange site, do email me and I shall mail it separately.

EDIT: the compiled PDF can be found here, as requested. Of course you have to download it and open it in Reader for you to see the animations; it won't work in the web preview.

LaTeX tutorial videos for beginners

Joe DiNoto has posted a number of LaTeX tutorials on youtube, available conveniently as a playlist.  If you're new to LaTeX, it might be worth checking it out.  Each video is about 3 minutes long.

Generating PNG images of math equations in LaTeX

This is an interesting thread  on comp.text.tex, which discusses various options of generating PNG images of your LaTeX math equations.  Useful when you want to embed in a webpage or Word documents (at least compared to the built-in option).

TeX Live 2011 release available

Looks like the TeXLive 2011 binaries are now available along with a recommendation to do a network install instead of  a iso download and then installing.

Converting Inkscape Svg layers into Beamer overlays

This might be useful for those using Inkscape and know something about Beamer.  If you don't know anything about LaTeX, then this is not going to be useful.  From the project page

takes an Inkscape .svg as input, and generates pdf files corresponding to each of the layers and a LaTeX file that uses the LaTeX Beamer commands to incrementally overlay them. 

If you use Beamer to make your presentations and Inkscape to draw, then this might be potentially useful though I daresay people would tend to use PGF with Beamer.  PGF examples can be found here.

AucTeX Tip: Automatically save file before compiling

It used to be irritating for me that I had to save the file when I hit C-C C-C when compiling the file.  It tends to break my flow of work when I had to hit 'y' when Emacs queries me to save the file before compiling.

No  more.

Asking on the Auctex mailing list, the answer turned out to be a simple
(setq TeX-save-query nil) ;;autosave before compiling

customisation to my .emacs file.
It saves me a few keystrokes of C-x C-s too in the event I forget to regularly save my file.  Hopefully, this is worth it for you too.

A simple way to extract specific PDF pages

Today, I received a humongous PDF with about 300 pages of documentation which had to be shared with lots of people who had to review each section independently.  Instead of simply forwarding the entire document to them and asking them to wade through it themselves, I thought I'd split the pages out and send only the relevant bits.

That should be easy, right?

Well, I forgot what the tool was.  A few minutes of google search turned up...pdftk which was what I was looking for.  Turned out that I had installed it long time ago and when I tried it, it dumped core on the cygwin installation I had.

This happens to me.  A lot. Just when I have deadline and I think of the solution, the carpet gets pulled under me.  :-)

Wait, I did remember doing something using LaTeX and another quick search revealed pdfpages on CTAN.  Downloaded and installed it, read the documentation and it was  a breeze to get things sorted.  The smallest example that I can create to get a specific set of pages is shown below.

\documentclass[a4paper]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
\includepdf[pages={ 9-14,27}]{RFP.pdf}
\end{document}
%%% Local Variables:
%%% mode: latex
%%% TeX-master: t
%%% End:

That's it.  LaTeXing the file gave me just the pages I needed.  If you have a TeX installation, this works for most cases.  Please read the documentation if you want to something fancy but the above is enough to get the pages you need.

Fitting long TOCs into a single Beamer frame

Here's a simple way to fit a long TOC into a single frame instead of making it flow into multiple frames.  This might be useful for those preparing long lectures with beamer.