I’m a bit furious. I spent a lot of time on getting EPS from LaTeX. Portability of PostScript and PDF is a great myth. This idea works only in theory. But in practice, one has to struggle with buggy software.
Finally, I’ve found a working sequence of conversion commands.
* Indents: first, left, right
\parindent, \leftskip, \rightskip
* Space: above, below:
\addvspace
* Align: left, right, center, justified
ragged2e package
\Centering \RaggedRight \RaggedLeft
* Font, linespacing
\selectfont and family
* Keep with next or previous paragraph:
\nobreak or some penalty
In addition to my talk “Generative XPath” at XML Prague 2007, I decided to submit also a poster:
Title: XML to beautiful documents
Abstract: I’d like to present an alternative to XSL-FO. Using TeX to create PDF from XML is an old trick, but thanks to TeXML (an XML syntax for TeX) and Consodoc (a publishing server), the process is greately simplified and the produced documents are of high quality.
* http://getfo.org/texml/ — URL linking to a web page related to the poster.
* http://consodoc.com/
In the mailing list docbook-apps, I recently answered to the post titled “General questions about DocBook -> LaTeX“. I think my notes are interesting not only for the subscribers, but also for others.
The symbols like “_” and “<SPACE>” are special for LaTeX, therefore using them for file names used by LaTeX isn’t a good idea. Anyway, we can’t control environment and a solution is required. A bookmark for me: Passing Underscore.
I’ve spent some time trying to nicely format an GPL excerpt in LaTeX. The problem is that the all-caps text of the “no warrantly” section doesn’t fit to the TeX rules well. Finally, I gave up and decided to find out how this problem is handled by other people. I found the GNU General Public License (GPL) in LaTeX format on the official site gnu.org. Surprise! They don’t have a solution, they have a workaround. The all-caps text is converted to normal text. I like it. The workaround is adopted.
Some TeX implementations or macro packages provide the facility to automatically include so-called “source specials” into a .dvi file. These contain the line number, eventually a column number, and the filename of the .tex source. This makes it possible to jump from a .dvi file to the corresponding place in the .tex source and back (also called “reverse search” and “forward search”). I’ve asked for the same for .pdf files, and have got an answer from Will Robertson in comp.text.tex:
In mary cases, LaTeX should be run several times to get the correct result (for example, to resolve cross-references). The only way to detect if re-run is required is to analyze the log file. I haven’t found anything ready to use, so I’ve written it myself.
I’m using LaTeX in batch scripts, and I need to detect if the result is successful. It seems the best way is to look into the log file. I wonder if an imaginery tool “texloginfo” exists to:
Not a first time when I need to trace a LaTeX layout by digging into the details, and again I’ve spend time remembering how to do it. Fixing the magic in writing.
I noticed that my \parskip was ignored by the “minipage” environment. After some investigations I found that many vertical spacing commands have a special behaviour inside a minipage, and that the command “if@minipage” is used quite often.
The problem is best described by someone else’s question:
I’m trying to use the generic list environment inside a longtable. Unfortunately I get unexpected space above and below the list environment. If I use the same list between normal paragraphs, this extra space is not there.
Any ideas?
Some of my longtables are wider than \hsize (=\columnwidth). It’s ok. The problem is the left-aligned captions of such tables. If a table is X too wide, then the caption is indented by X.
Automatic font selection scheme in LaTeX somethimes is not so good. For example, when series “n” (normal) and “bx” (extra bold) are defined for a font, and an user want “b” (bold), the system uses “n” font, not “bx” font.
Babel allows LaTeX to speak multiple languages. It also introduces shorthands, one- or two-character sequences, which help non-English authors to type language-specific letters easily. Unfortunately, this feature leads to problems when generating LaTeX-files automatically.
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.
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.
I’ve noticed that results of pdfLaTeX and LaTeX plus dvipdf sometimes differ. One case is the color of an image.
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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