Peter Flom National Development and Research Institutes Play (28min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

I will discuss some ways that some people who don’t use LaTeX (or ConTeXt or other TeX packages) might be encouraged to use it. I will concentrate on the case of social scientists, either in academia or in other research settings. I will also include a list of questions that I still have, or possible improvements, that might increase the utility of LaTeX for this group.

Jim Hefferon St. Michael’s College Play (36min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

One of the main practical advantages of using TeX via LaTeX is the existence of a great many, widely available, resources. These include add-on packages, books, articles, web pages, and a long history of question and answer discussions. We will discuss some of the main resources and how to use them, including some of most important add-on packages.

Jon Breitenbucher College of Wooster Play (32min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

Does LaTeX have a place in a liberal arts education? Yes, and in this talk I present my reasons for introducing LaTeX in an undergraduate liberal arts setting. I also present how I introduced LaTeX, issues that were encountered, and what students and faculty think the impact has been.

This talk will be based on the paper published in PracTeX vol 2.

Federico Garcia University of Pittsburgh Play (36min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The miriad of different styles for bibliography and reference layouts can be, in the main, classified into three main “families”: the ‘label’ family, where references are denoted with label, usually in [square parenthesis]; the ‘author-year’ family (Adorno, 1978); and the ‘footnote’ family. Although there are arguments for each of those families, the choice between them is, in the last analysis, decided by tradition: different disciplines have come to adopt different styles, and new generations of authors will naturally follow the uses of their predecessors (which are enforced also institutionally, for example with journal guidelines).

LaTeX itself (with BibTeX) is designed toward the label family. Some packages, like cite, provide extra utilities in that family. The other two families are reflected in the LaTeX world by special packages. The author-year family is well illustrated by packages such as harvard, natbib, and achicago. Footnote-style references are implemented by the package opcit. A basic description of these packages follows. I will spend relatively longer with opcit, that is comparatively recent (2002) and the one I know best. A new release of it, moreover, is planned for the summer.

Onofrio de Bari Play (23min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The intent of this article is to collect information and useful resources for using the editor GNU Emacs with a AUCTEX in the drafting of documents LATEX, presenting instructions and recommendations that up to now have not been brought to the attention of users with documents in Italian. In a first analysis we introduce the GNU Emacs editor, then dwelling on its logical structure and what instructions can be given to Emacs in order to be convenient to use with TeX and LaTeX, are finally analyzed in detail the software modules AUCTEX and preview-latex useful in preparing the source code and display prior document.

Lapo Mori, Maurizio Himmelmann Play (31min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The purpose of this article is to provide the tools to create and format tables using LATEX2e correctly. This is achieved by analyzing the typical problems encountered during the creation of tables and possible solutions; it pays particular attention to the packages to be used in different circumstances. For individual cases are reported and examples, please refer to the manuals of the packages suggested, if necessary.

Massimiliano Dominici, Pier Daniele Napolitani Play (39min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The Project Maurolico was born some years ago with the aim of publishing, in print and electronic versions of the critical edition of the works of Francesco Maurolico (1494-1575). As part of this project was a system, MAURO-TeX which, with a language of mark-up type LaTeX allows, through the use of special tools, to obtain an output html for publication on the Internet and a standard LaTeX output format as an intermediate to pdf and postscript. MAURO-TeX is undergoing profound transformation. On one side is moving towards the xml the part for encoding text, the other starting the printed publication of the works is an opportunity for a thorough review of the macro used by the intermediate format to generate LaTeX output pdf and postscript.

Jerònimo Leal Play (32min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The article has some experience on a course of LaTeX for printing critical. Here are treated the two organizational steps of the course. First, the preparation: the choice of distribution, the editor choice, preparation of lectures, exercises and examples, advertising and subscription, and then the realization: send the material, installation, testing and analysis of the results.

Gustavo Cevolani Play (31min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

The first part of the article presents the main methods available in LaTeX to print leaflets (leaflets), printed a few pages (brochures) and real books (books). The second part presents some examples of code and its result (examples), as well to consider some alternative methods (Appendices psutils and more).

Jacek Kmiecik Kraków, Poland Play (21min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

A few simplest ways for tuning of the canonical LaTeX macros to one’s own typographical requirements will be presented.

David Kastrup Bochum, Germany Play (34min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

Emacs 22.1 has been released last year and is pretty much available in every up–to–date serious software collection. Emacs 22.2, mostly a bug–fix release, is slated to appear “soon”, and development on Emacs 23.1 continues at a rapid pace. Both the multi–tty and unicode–2 feature branches have been merged and problems are being shaken out. Release management has been passed from Richard Stallman to Stefan Monnier and Chong Yidong.

For the TeX/LaTeX user, Emacs 22.1 offers improved Unicode support for editing, advanced version control system integration, desktop interaction and input, syntax highlighting activated by default, new ports for Windows, MacOSX and GTK+ using the native toolkits for graphic support and toolbars and providing a native, well integrated look for those desktop environments, transparent access to files accessible with su, sudo, ssh and other shell accounts: in short, finding a good reason to leave your Emacs window as the central work integration point is becoming more difficult.

The development of the TeX authoring environment AUCTeX has been at somewhat less break-neck speed, though. Some consolidation has happened, some packages are supported better than previously, some setups work better out of the box. By now, most changes are of evolutionary nature. Best supported are still LaTeX and .dtx files, while plain TeX and ConTeXt support is not worked on fervently at the moment.

The RefTeX package for managing cross references and bibliographical citations in LaTeX has been placed into the AUCTeX repository and is maintained and released from there.

Marcin Woliński Warszawa, Poland Play (59min) Download: FLV | MOV | mp3

As this tutorial is intended for beginners rather, we will start by an overview of the basic LaTeX commands for choosing a font, its variant and size. We will reply to recurring on the discussion list questions about how to depart from the standard Computer Modern set of fonts. We then will briefly glance at the available free fonts allowing typesetting of Polish language texts. Further, we will look closer at the LaTeX model of using fonts which will allow to solve the problem of making the chosen font available to LaTeX.

I assume that my part will not fill the allocated time and that the rest of it will be devoted to questions from participants (it would be nice to have then in advance).

Frank Mittelbach LaTeX Project Play (40min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

Looking back at twenty–odd years involvement in LaTeX development and maintenance the author highlights the (in his opinion) most important milestones and pitfalls.

• What are significant events that came at the right moment?
• Which important events came at the wrong moment?
• What were the biggest failures and why?

From this data the article attempts to draw conclusions as to how the future of LaTeX could be shaped in a way beneficial to everybody involved and what needs to happen to make this possible.

Stanislav Šarman Clausthal University of Technology, Germany Play (30min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

We present an on–line system, which tries to convert English text into Gregg shorthand(O’Kennedy, 1990), phonetic pen writing system used in the U.S. and Ireland.

The given text is at first tokenized (tokens being punctuation marks, words and common phrases). For each of the tokens a METAFONT glyph is generated on–the–fly. These glyphs are (smooth) combinations of shorthand graphems corresponding to phonems obtained from a pronunciation lexicon (Fitt, 2006). The shorthand text is then set with LaTeX.

Manjusha S. Joshi Pune, India Play (25min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

There are software with the help of which we can draw diagrams easily. However, there may be some things missing in it, like angle marks, arrows in between vertices etc. Being LaTeX user we also wish to use LaTeX math mode to label diagrams, for that one may require to edit the diagram.

Now–a–days, many figure drawing tools has option of exporting file in PSTricks. Which then generates, PSTricks code for the figure, in a simple LaTeX format. Which is readable and editable. It makes the job easy and efficient.

Morten Høgholm LaTeX Project Play (22min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

TeX has a well–deserved good reputation for its line breaking algorithm and it has found its way into other software over the years. When it comes to interparagraph material such as penalties, skips and whatsits, things start getting murky as TeX provides little help in this area, especially on the main vertical list where most of the action is.

This article describes the galley module which seeks to control line breaking as well as taking care of inter-paragraph material being added at the right time. In other words, galley can assist packages such as breqn which has to construct paragraph shapes on the fly while taking current ones into account as well as ensuring the output routine doesn’t get tricked by penalties, skips and whatsits appearing in places where they could allow breakpoints where none are intended.

Jean–Michel Hufflen University of Franche–Comté, France Play (30min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

BibTeX is the most used bibliography processor in conjunction with LaTeX. To put bibliography styles in action, it uses a stack–based language written with postfixed notations. Recently, other approaches have been proposed: some use a programming language for designing bibliography styles, e.g., Perl in Bibulus; some are based on converters to xml TeXts and use xslt for bibliography styles; a recent proposal—the biblaTeX package—consists of using LaTeX command to control the layout of generated references… We propose a comparative study of these approaches and show which programming styles are encouraged, from a point of view related to methodology. Finally, we explain how this study has influenced the design of MlBibTeX, our multi–lingual reimplementation of BibTeX.

Joe McCool http://benburb.demon.co.uk Play (45min) Download: FLV | MOV | Ogg | mp3

The author is an active Irish traditional musician. He is also a keen inland boater. He is having a lot of fun composing a book on “Traditional Music for Boaters”.

In this paper he describes his successes and frustrations using Lilypond, Lilypond-book, LaTeX, and ABC musical notation. Lilypond and LaTeX have a lot in common. Neither are WYSIWYG, neither demand GUIs. Both compile simple flat files to produce beautiful graphical output.

Lilypond’s original manifestations produced output directly for LaTeX, but of late users writing books have been encouraged to use Lilypond-book. This looks for Lilypond code within LaTeX source files and produces graphics and associated instructions which can then be processed by LaTeX.

Most joy has been gained from automating these processes under Linux and Perl.

Will Robertson University of Adelaide, Australia Play (29min) Download: FLV | MOV | OGG | MP3

Over the last few years I’ve been tinkering with Unicode mathematics in XeTeX. In late 2009 I spent a few weeks ironing out the significant bugs and think I’ve got a pretty good handle on the whole system now. In this presentation, I’ll discuss the advantages Unicode maths brings to LaTeX, challenges faced dealing with Unicode, challenges with maths fonts (including the STIX fonts), challenges with compatibility with pkgname{amsmath} and/or MathML, and assorted related remarks. In future plans, I hope to use this system as the basis for equivalent development in LuaTeX as well.

Pavneet Arora Play (41min) Download: FLV | MP3

Mathematics worksheet generators abound on the web. Many use static content and focus on graphics and animation in order to package the material in an appealing manner. This approach comes across as a fight for \emph{eyeballs}\Dash all too common when trying to attract the target audience on the Internet. The emphasis on form often displaces the basis of learning at the primary education level, which is simple practise. Beginning with an exploration on effective learning strategies for grade school mathematics the use of \LaTeX{} to generate dynamic mathematics worksheets\Dash lots and lots of them\Dash is discussed.