This page aggregates blog entries by people who are writing about TeX and related topics.
After having been (again) demoted (timed perfectly to my round birthday!) based on flimsy arguments, I have been forced to rethink the level of contribution I want to do for Debian. Considering in particular...
Heute, am Donnerstag, 13. Januar 2022, gibt es den ersten Berliner LaTeX-Stammtisch des Jahres 2022, um 19 Uhr. Nur für Berliner? Weiß nicht, hab ich gerade auf Twitter gefragt. Weil es ist ja online mit jitsi-meet auf dieser Adresse: https://meet.ffmuc.net/LaTeXStammtischBerlin Keine besondere Tagesordnung. Ob man da mal reinschaut? Könnte interessant sein! War eh zu lange im Homeoffice. Wer meint was auf Twitter?
In the TeX world, the name Stefan Kottwitz is best known for the websites and forums he runs, but Stefan is not just a server admin but also a book author. The first edition of his LaTeX beginners book was published in 2011, followed by the “LaTeX Cookbook” in 2015, now the second edition of the beginners book “LaTeX Beginners Guide” is available.
Conference paper submissions in LaTeX become increasingly popular in fields outside the technical disciplines (which have embraced them a long time ago already). Be that the Digital Humanities or historians wanting to contribute to events such as HistoCrypt, LaTeX templates for submission become more widely adopted. That’s why I wanted to dedicate this first post of 2022 to this important topic, so you can be ready for LaTeX conference paper/abstract submissions! How to get started quickly and what to be aware of Find the template to use. The conference will have probably prepared a template you’re supposed to do. Since a principle behind TeX/LaTeX is the separation of form and content, you really only need to focus on writing your text. The layout will be provided by the conference organizers in said template. If this template isn’t on Overleaf yet, download it and upload it as a new project in the online LaTeX editor Overleaf. This will reduce hassle asread more The LaTeX Newbie’s Guide to Using Overleaf for Conference Paper Submissions
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Antioch Sanders told us on LaTeX.org about his new project that he called extexify. That’s a browser extension for finding LaTeX symbols by drawing them with mouse or finger on the display. It is inspired by detexify, but works integrated in the Overleaf online LaTeX editor.
Regarding the recently-discovered log4j vulnerability, the only program to our knowledge in TeX Live which uses the Log4j class is the arara utility; further, arara is not directly impacted by this issue, as explained in this Arch Linux issue. Nevertheless, arara has been updated in TL (and on CTAN, and upstream), and is available through normal update mechanisms. No program in TeX calls arara internally. The TeX engines (TeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX, etc.), are completely unaffected. LaTeX and other TeX formats are also completely unaffected.
Regarding the recently-discovered log4j vulnerability, the only program to our knowledge in TeX Live which uses the Log4j class was arara; further, arara is not directly affected by this issue, as explained in this Arch Linux issue. Nevertheless, arara has been updated in TL (and on CTAN, and upstream), and is available through normal update mechanisms. The TeX engines (TeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX, etc.), are definitely unaffected. LaTeX and other TeX formats are also unaffected.
OK, time for another Cuti-cuti Malaysia calendar for 2022… and yes I’m shamelessly reusing text wholesale from last year’s post 🙂 You can download the PDF customised for Penang here. If you would just like a calendar without the Malaysian holidays and/or Chinese lunisolar calendars, see this Github repo or this Overleaf template. Federal public […]
Most productivity advice is essentially always the same. If you’re new to self-help, you will be familiar with the most important concepts after reading this post. It will sum up the best advice I have found reading a ton of productivity books over the past ten years. More importantly, I have tried out many of the concepts suggested and these are my top picks. Different productivity methods generally won’t be equally beneficial for everybody. There are some which work for you and some just don’t. But the central aspects always remain the same. So here they are. The motivation: The best of productivity advice without the “hustle culture” In the post The Right Mindset for Learning Challenging New Skills, I menioned how some blogposts (like Steve Pavlina’s Do It Now) have massively influenced me when I first got into personal development and productivity books. I’m not on board with the “hustle culture” associated with the productivity movement any longer butread more The 33 most effective productivity hacks I’ve come across in 10 years
Have you heard of the concept of “deliberate practice”? It’s a method for rapid skill aquisition through practicing in a certain way. The concept is discussed in detail in a highly recommened book: Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by K. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool (2016). So here it is. At last. The long promised book review and summary of the most important takeaways from Peak. Ever wonder why you’re not improving at skills despite using them every day? You’re not using deliberate practice is why. So what is deliberate practice anyway? […] deliberate practice [is a] a term coined by Ericsson to refer to the specific learning method used by experts to achieve superior performance in their fields, and mental representations. (Wikipedia entry on Peak) The book resulted from the key reserach in the science of expertise, K. Anders Ericsson, cooperating with science communicator Robert Pool to make his research understandable to the masses. The fact thatread more How to use Deliberate Practice to reach your Peak [Book Review]
In today’s post, I wanted to pick up again on a topic I had adressed previously in The most important book to read if you want to learn Digital Humanities, Computer Science, Maths, Programming or LaTeX. The general gist was that when you want to learn a new skill which you perceive as challenging or difficult, maybe even anxiety-inducing (up to a degree that you’re seriously doubting your ability to learn it all), the most important thing to work on before doing anything else is changing your mindset. Today I will elaborate what your self-image and/or identity has to do with that and how you can use it to your advantage when learning daunting new skills. Do you enjoy posts on learning and skill building? Let me know! I feel that people are actually enjoying my posts on learning how to learn because they generate likes months after they have been posted. I guess there really isn’t enough material outread more The Right Mindset for Learning Challenging New Skills
Stefan has published the 2nd edition of the LaTeX Beginner’s Guide. For this edition, I had the honour of being a technical reviewer while the book contents were being developed; and now that the updated edition is released I had also written a short book review. Read my review here, and get the book here.
I’ve been meaning for a little while to look properly at my Jeykll theme for the site and tidy it up: it was a bit basic. Prompted in part by Will Robertson, I decided that now is the moment. I consulted with my favourite —duck— internet buddy, Paulo Cereda, and he pointed my to the rather flexible Hamilton theme. You’ll see I’m tweaking it a bit, so there will be minor changes over time, but I think it looks good: balances off between not being totally plain with the fact I have zero design ability! Paulo himself doesn’t have a blog, but he’s part of the excellent Island of TeX, most famous for arara. Paulo tells me they don’t use Jekyll, but rather Zola, but that didn’t stop him helping me :)
The third major release of siunitx was out in May, after the TeX Live 2021 DVD. That means it’s been picked up primarily by more active users: people who install TeX between the ‘fixed’ DVD releases (or who use MiKTeX). It also didn’t initially appear on Overleaf, as they take a while to test TeX Live images before making them public. I’ve been making maintenance releases between May and now, and have reached v3.0.36, picking off small (or less small) issues I’d missed initially. At the same time, Overleaf now have a TeX Live 2021 image (currently featuring siunitx v3.0.23). So I now have an increasing number of ‘normal’ users: people who don’t want to deal with testing, and just want their documents to work. What I notice is that increased usage hasn’t raised any truly major issues. Yes, there have been corrections (see the ChangeLog for the detail), but they were mainly at the level of predictable issues: places that I’d not explored quite enough. I hope Overleaf will consider an in-place update to somewhere around the latest release: whilst the issues have been minor in the grand scheme, it would be good to get a reasonably bug-reduced version ...
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