olpa, OSS developer

My documents should use WingDings font, so I’ve added the font to LaTeX. It wasn’t easy task because (1) the font is True Type (2) the font encoding is non-standard.

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I generated an HTML version of a product catalogue and found that the result was very bad due to poor PNG images. To get good PNG images, I had to write some code. Here it is: convertor from eps to other formats.

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I’ve prepared a mini-bio for a possible DDJ article:

Oleg Paraschenko is a PhD student in the Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia, and a freelance developer in the area of technical documentation. His main research interests are XML technologies and generative programming. In spare time he supports xmlhack.ru, a server for Russian-speaking XML community.

My mini-article on XSieve seems going to be published in Dr. Dobb’s Journal. The rewritten version passed an editor, and a editor-in-chief asked me for a photo and some other personal information.

The base for relative paths in “x:eval” is the XSLT context node. It wasn’t possible to change the base in XSieve 1.0.0, and it was behaviour by design. I realized that it is a misfeature and corrected it in XSieve 1.0.1. More, a new example is introduced: “Miltiple sum, or quantity times price.”

A LaTeX document sets Helvetica as the main font, but some special symbols (like “copyright”) look strange. After detailed look at PDF, I found that the symbols aren’t taken from the font, but assembled from different items.

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I’ve updated my research support wiki. One of the changes is a new page for XSieve.

I’ve noticed that results of pdfLaTeX and LaTeX plus dvipdf sometimes differ. One case is the color of an image.

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Superior comment from Stefan Gentz (TRACOM).

Here you go with a list of characters that are *not* possible with FrameMaker (as long as you don’t use any patches) as far as I have isolated them from alphabets of several languages.

CJK and everysel seems not compatible. If a CJK document loads “everysel” package (or “ragged2e”, which loads “everysel”), the result has artefacts.

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I started to use CJK in LaTeX recently, and I spend a lot of time trying to fix the following problem:

! Font C70/song/m/n/9/65=cyberb65 at 9.0pt not loadable:
                         Metric (TFM) file not found.
 
                   relax 
l.74 ^^e6^^97^^a0
                 \\par
? 

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I’ve added a new feature to TeXML. Content of the element “pdf” is converted to utf16be and encoded using escape-sequences. It is useful for making PDF strings, in particular, for PDF bookmark strings.

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From a letter to the libxml mailing list. Probably it’s well known, but I’d like to share useful gdb settings. From my ~/.gdbinit:

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XSieve was released 1 September 2005, but I started to send announces only recently. Here is an example of announce for the xml-dev mailing list and the comp.text.xml newsgroup.

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Although Acrobat Reader 5.0 is supposed to support Unicode bookmarks, it doesn’t. I can make bookmarks “ßß” or “Ñ?Ñ?“, but I can’t create a bookmark “ßÑ?“. Alas, only a slice of unicode per bookmark.

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I’ve just found an article PerlTeX: Defining LaTeX macros using Perl by Scott Pakin, published in TUGboat 25(2) 2004.

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It seems that text format rules, which are defined in a FrameMaker EDD, are lost when updating text insets.

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I need to check if a float value is actually an integer. If so, I use the value as integer, otherwise as float.

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Russ Ward (West Street Consulting) have announced a beta version of InsetPlus, a FrameMaker plugin for managing documents that consist of reusable text modules.

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