This page aggregates blog entries by people who are writing about TeX and related topics.
Today’s post is something at the interface of rant and rambling. While I love being interdisciplinary, it’s also quite the hassle at times which is why I guess most interdisciplinary scholars sometimes wished they weren’t doing interdisciplinary work. There are so many negative stereotypes, like… “You have it easier being interdisciplinary” vs it’s actually twice the work So do you really think that we have it easier? I hate how we always get this reproach that we’re taking the easy route. Can somebody please explain to me what’s “easy” about having to follow the state of the art in multiple fields at the same time? And then not even knowing where to get published because scholars from discipline A don’t understand half of your research and the same in the other direction. I tend to be somewhat “too historical” for the Digital Humanities but then waaaay to technical for the “normal Humanities”. I think being in the DH and doingread more Navigating interdisciplinarity (as a DH scholar)
Today I wanted to share a tiny book review of the book I claim to be the most important book you should read if you want to learn any technical topic but are unsure if you are up for it. The book I’m talking about is not Donald Knuth (although his books are highly recommended, especially if you’re a (La)TeX nerd!). It’s not even a computer book! I’m talking about: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck (New York: Random House 2006). The fixed mindset versus the growth mindset This will be a short post because Dweck’s message is simple. There are two mindsets, the ‘fixed mindset’ and the ‘growth mindset’ and which one you have greatly impacts your success in learning and self-development. The ‘fixed mindset’ assumes your abilities and talents are fixed. Thus, you are proud of what you’re good at because you link it to your personality (“I’m a person who is good at…”). Butread more The most important book to read if you want to learn Digital Humanities, Computer Science, Maths, Programming or LaTeX
Having re-read my LaTeX for PhD students post, I realized I hadn’t mentioned a lot of things I would like to impart to you. So here comes LaTeX for thesis writing – a few more arguments in favour of learning LaTeX now. The main points speaking in favour of you typesetting your thesis in LaTeX are the citation management, tables, maths and images which can be more of a hastle in MS Word. In the aforementioned blogpost, I also added that you should take into account that a thesis will yield two PDF outputs with very different requirements from the same document – another reason to use LaTeX. LaTeX for maths, images and the like (in short, everything MS Word isn’t good at) A lot of people say that the “LaTeX is great for maths” argument isn’t that strong anymore nowadays because MS Word has caught up a lot. I couldn’t tell you because I don’t usually use math inread more LaTeX for thesis writing
StackExchange, bekannt als StackOverflow, ist an Prosus verkauft worden für 1,8 Milliarden Dollar. Das beinhaltet die TeX StackExchange Q&A Seite (TeX.SE). Prosus ist ein Technology-Investor und eine Holding Company die bereits Unternehmen wie Udemy, Codecadamy und Brainly (“Your 24/7 homework … Weiterlesen →
The StackExchange network by Stack Overflow Inc., has been sold to Prosus for 1.8 billion dollars. That includes the TeX Stack Exchange Q&A site aka TeX.SE. Prosus is a technology investor and holding company that already owns some learning sites such as Udemy, Codecadamy, and Brainly (“Your 24/7 homework helper”). After $153 Million funding, hiring a former investment banker to lead the company, several round of layoffs, community moderators leaving, becoming more efficient by standardizing site designs, exiting rumours, it was not surprising.
After a long hiatus, I’m back today with a post on how to develop the debugging skill. If you’re new to programming, we refer to the process of finding and solving errors in the code as “debugging”. It can be difficult to acquire this skill as a newbie when you have no idea what you should even look for. This post will help you out with a few hints. Why should I learn debugging? Most people who attend a programming class for the first time get quite the culture shock. Often, their identity had encompassed something like “good with computers”. Then they see what it’s actually like to interact with a computer as a superuser, i.e. someone who interacts with the computer not only in the way intended for users by product designers, i.e. mostly the Graphical User Interface (GUI). Often this is entirely text-based (although you can learn the first steps to programming with visual languages too, like theread more Learning to program: Debugging – Where to start?
So you’re writing your thesis, and you’ve made very sure to use \bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}, or another style that numbers your citations sequentially throughout your thesis. Of course you would then expect that the first citation in your first chapter is [1], right? Right? So why does it not start from [1] in your own thesis; the […]
Nach einem kurzen Gespräch auf TeXnique.fr hat Patrick Bideault das coffeestains-Paket auf TikZ portiert. Das ursprünglich von Hanno Rein in 2009 entworfene Paket erfuhr damit eine Modernisierung und läuft einwandfrei mit pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX, und LuaLaTeX auf TeX Live 2021. Damit steht einer weiteren breiten Anwendung in den Homeoffices dieser Welt nichts im Wege. Ein Anwendungsbeispiel …
Wilhelm Haager hat im April 2021 das Paket worldflags veröffentlicht. Damit kann man Flaggen aller Nationen und einiger weiterer Gebiete und Organisationen in TikZ zeichnen, sowohl als TikZ-Bild als auch als pic-Baustein. Durch eine Vielzahl Optionen kann man Breite, Höhe, “Hängen”, Spiegel, Drehen und mehr einstellen. Die einfachste Nutzung ist geht schon z.B. mit \worldflag{BR} …
TUGboat volume 42, number 1, a regular issue, has been mailed to TUG members. It is also available online and from the TUG store. In addition, prior TUGboat issue 41:3 is now publicly available. Submissions for the next issue, the TUG 2021 conference proceedings, are welcome; the deadline for proposals is June 24 (early submissions are especially appreciated). Please consider joining or renewing your TUG membership if you haven't already (you'll get this issue immediately), and thanks.
I’ve just released version 3 of siunitx: its a major update, in which the internals have largely been re-written. The following is a short(ish) summary of the major benefits and changes. The benefits The major changes under the hood mean I can get better performance out of version 3 than there was in version 2. For most users, you’ll see something like a two-times speed-up of any use of siunitx. That shows up most if you have complex tables. The new font control system means that I have to do a lot less to match the running font. So it is a lot easier to ‘do nothing’ than it was with version 2 (where basically you have to undo all of the font changes made by siunitx to get back to where you started!). There’s new functionality across the board for number processing, and that means I can do more. Most obviously, there is now the ability to round numbers based on their uncertainties. I’ve also removed the oddities and limitations for interaction between parts of the code. Uncertainties can now be formatted using the NIST approach: a long-standing request. For programmers, there is now a formal documented code-level API ...
With v3 of siunitx out, I am as expected getting quite a few questions about moving from v2. In the main, this is quite easy as there is a decent amount of compatibility code. Here, I’ll pick out a few cases where you might want some adjustments. Working with Overleaf One thing that people sometimes need is to work with the latest version but allow their input to work with the older version: that’s particularly true if you work with people using Overleaf, as it will be some time before they update to v3. You can of course just stick to the v2 interfaces, but if you’d prefer to have v3 if possible, then you will need to define \qty and \unit (and maybe others) conditionally. I’d recommend doing that using \usepackage{siunitx} \ifdefined\qty\else \ifdefined\NewCommandCopy \NewCommandCopy\qty\SI \else \NewDocumentCommand\qty{O{}mm}{\SI[#1]{#2}{#3}} \fi \fi \ifdefined\unit\else \ifdefined\NewCommandCopy \NewCommandCopy\unit\si \else \NewDocumentCommand\unit{O{}m}{\si[#1]{#2}} \fi \fi That then leaves options, but almost always these should be set in the preamble, so are a ‘one shot’. You can of course add to my tests above to know which version is in use, and set selectively. Working with products or complex values For people who’ve been using products or complex numbers in ...
Es gibt ja viele Internet-Foren, Blogs, Wikis und andere Webseiten mit Codebeispielen für TeX und LaTeX. Gerade in Foren ist es üblich, Problem-Beispiele zu posten, und Antworten enthalten oft vollständige Lösungs-Codes. Optimalerweise mit Screenshots zum Komfort aller Leser. Man kann … Weiterlesen →
Following up on the recent first beta for siunitx, I’ve now made a second beta available. There was only one issue picked up so far by testers, plus of course those I’ve spotted myself. In particular, I’ve allowed a way to set the text font manually if simply resetting back to the standard one doesn’t work. I’ve also sneaked in a late addition: the ability to parse and print uncertainties the way NIST seem to suggest they should appear. Assuming that I get no major issues coming up, I plan to put this out as the first v3 release in a couple of weeks time: before the next LaTeX kernel update!
Since you all probably already know that I’m a bit short on time but trying to keep this blog aliveread more Teaching Materials: A German intro class to XPath and XSLT
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