Seventh Emacs Pretest out

The seventh Emacs pretest is now out for testing.  This probably might be the final one before release.

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.

An Emacs conference?

This looks like a fabulous idea, via Hacker News, that an Emacs Conference is being planned, probably in London.  Go ahead, sign up or at least provide your inputs on what you'd like the experts to cover for you in the PROPOSALS section of the link.

This is the best chance to ask for detailed help if you were too embarrassed to ask on the mailing list or Usenet.

The Sixth Release of Emacs Pretest is out

The sixth release of  Emacs pretest, of what will become Emacs 24.1 is out.  The Windows binaries can be found here.

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.

Fifth Emacs Pretest Released

The fifth Emacs pretest of what will become 24.1 is now available. The windows versions of the Emacs pretest binaries can be found here and the announcement here.

Emacs Tip: Change Background colour depending on File mode

From the gnu.emacs.help mailing list, here's a nice tip by Kevin Rodgers that might be useful for those who need visual reminders when working on read only files.  Adding the following to your .emacs, would change the background to yellow in this case, which, of course you can modify.

(add-hook 'find-file-hooks

 (lambda ()
   (when buffer-read-only
     (set-background-color "yellow"))))

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.

Ma Gnus 0.3 released and changing file transfer mode in Ange-ftp

Ma Gnus 0.3 has been released, primarily targeting marks removal from various backends.  And if you want to change the file transfer modes(binary/ascii) when read/writing remote files in emacs, you need to tinker with ange-ftp-binary-file-name-regexp as suggested in this post.  If you need to know what Ange-ftp is, you also need to know Tramp.

Org-mode, Another reason to learn it

You know why people fall in love with org-mode?  Because of posts like this, explaining how to do source code and results with the minimal of overheads.  That's why.  It's all in a bloody, blooming, text file, dammit.

What's your excuse in not learning it?
.
.
.
.
sotto voce: Emacs?