olpa, OSS developer

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.

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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.

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

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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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I’ve spent two days understanding how to create CJK bookmarks using LaTeX. Finally, I checked the internal structure of a PDF document with a sheet of paper, a calculator and the PDF reference. The PDF document is correct. Problem is in Acrobat Reader 5 (AR5). It is said that AR5 uses the system font to display the bookmarks, and the system font on Windows 2000 Rus doesn’t have CJK symbols.

Some tutorials on non-root installation of LaTeX modules rely on the environment variable TEXMFLOCAL. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work when the folder “~/texmf” contains conflicting files.

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The TeXML development version 1.27 brings new essential functionality: “–ascii” parameter. Now it’s possible to generate plain ASCII TeX files in a desired encoding. Non-ascii bytes are encoded as “^^XX“.

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I have problems with non-latin publishing through LaTeX, and I’m going to ask for help in forums. While asking, I should provide a sample LaTeX file, but how to show non-latin characters? Fortunately, I have TeX background and know some tricks. One of them is that combination “^^xx” is interpreted as a character with the hexadecimal code “xx” by the TeX reader before any other processing. So, for example, if I use the symbol “\u9009″ which is encoded in utf8 by bytes “e9″, “80″ and “89″, I can write in the source LaTeX file: “^^e9^^80^^89″.

Without any knowledge of Chinese, I have to publish a Chinese document. Fortunately, I have a source as an utf8-encoded XML.

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It looks there is a need for a converter from CALS tables to LaTeX. Here is yet another ask in comp.text.tex. Jonathan Fine answers a bit enigmatic, and I answer pessimistic.

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In comp.text.tex, Tristan Miller asked:

Can anyone recommend some small to medium-sized open problems which satisfy all of the four points below?

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I’m writing a paper for a conference. It should be written with conformance to the Lecture Notes in Computer Science style. After visiting the page with information for LNCS authors) I though that it might be a sort of magic for many people.

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