The fourth Alpha version of the upcoming TeXnicCenter 2.0 has been released. As it’s still alpha, it is not stable, it may crash and it’s intended for testing only. It can be used alongside TeXnicCenter Version 1.0, both can be used when installed in different directories, like the previous alpha versions.

Some of the changes:

• Completely new File View with support for TortoiseSVN and similar tools.
• Preprocessors are now supported when building the output.
• The editor knows much more commands and options now. For example, multiple selections are now possible.
• File extensions managed by TeXnicCenter can be chosen through the ‘Default Programs’ control panel.
• Native 64 bit support.
• It is (again) possible to cycle through the documents in Most-Recently-Used order. Also, a long-standing issue with shortcuts using the Alt key has been fixed.

For the long list of changes and fixes, have a look at the announcement by Tino Weinkauf and the TeXnicCenter Team, also posted on LaTeX-Community.org: TeXnicCenter 2.0 Alpha 4.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

Untypical for a Q&A site, there’s currently an exchange of views on TeX.SX:

As an expert, can you always use TeX for (nearly) any kind of document?
 

“Yes, you can:”

• It’s easy if you are a routine user, you know the common packages.
• Typing a letter, for example, is just like 20 TeX commands added to the text.
• You get the best possible hyphenation and justification, and a professional consistent look - why to abandon it for a “simple” document.
• After some time you’ve got a lot of documents to use as a template or as a start for a similar document.
• Your, let’s say, 16 years old document still work today. Try documents made with a word processor 16 years ago - can you open it today with current software, without layout loss or change?
• TeX users naturally have TeX installed. Some have a dislike for installing a huge wordprocessing software or suite such as Open/LibreOffice or MS Office - this is overkill for simple documents.

“No, you cannot:”

• For typesetting music, TeX may not be the best choice. Though there’s MusiXTeX, Lilipond seems to be favored.
• TeX should not be used for documents intended for quick onscreen use, such as manual pages which should be readable in a text console window. mandoc and Groff are recommended.

There are 16 answers until know. Perhaps you have a new important point to add? See the original answers with further points.

The release candidate of Speed Dreams 2.0 is out. I'm very proud of all the last minute graphic fixes i did and of course about all the bug fixes the coding guys did.

A very long time i was friend of editors in special PSPad (Windows) and Gedit (Gnome). I never was a friend of Eclipse based IDEs like Aptana.
After checking out Zend Studio and Phpstorm too now i'm using Netbeans 7.1 and like it much. The GUI is more space efficent then Eclipse and it has everything we need at work: HTML5 & CSS3 support (incl. vendor prefixes), Zend Framework, a TYPO3/ TypoScript plugin, Zen coding, and GIT build in for version control.
I'm very happy with it and there are so much amazing plugins to customize it to my needs!

Agodemar posted a very nice diagram of the LaTeX workflow on TeX.SX:

A bigger version of the image and a link the full source code is shown in the topic Diagram / Infographic of TeX & friends.

One thing I love about Ubuntu is that Ubuntu fans and contributors are spread around the whole globe. So when I started planning holidays in Morocco it was almost certain that we’d meet somebody from the LoCo team there.

When I let everyone know about my plans, Adnane Belmadiaf immediately came up with dozens of ideas what I could go and visit in his country. For those who don’t know Adnane, he is one of the heroes behind many of our Ubuntu web projects, for example the LoCo Team Portal, Summit or cloud.ubuntu.com. Adnane is easy to work with, fun and as I found out in Rabat, he’s also a great tour guide.

We arrived in Rabat around noon, quickly found a hotel and got a text message by Adnane saying that he took off the afternoon off work to show us around. Walking around was loads of fun as we not only saw lots of the city, but also because Adnane explained to us a lot about what’s going on in the country.

The second person who contacted me was Hassan, who is member of the Moroccan and Swiss LoCo team. He said:

First, I wish you a Merry Christmas. I know that you’ll be in Morocco. You can have a look on my albums maybe you can see some good plans to visit.

Have a nice trip and in case of any help needed in Morocco you can inform me at <phone number> and I’ll take care.

The Ubuntu community are simply the friendliest bunch on the planet. Amazing, isn’t it?

Two weeks unfortunately isn’t enough to see everything, so we “just” visited Málaga in Spain, took the ferry to Tanger, went to Rabat and Marrakech, did a tour through the desert and flew home from Casablanca. We had a great great time.

Thanks again everyone for making these holidays even more enjoyable!

Big big hugs! شكرا بزاف!

(I still haven’t looked through all the pictures yet, but I’ll upload a few quite soon.)

A few days ago I read the mail from Iain Lane on ubuntu-devel-announce, which announced that ‘syncpackage’ is now able to directly perform syncs for you (if you have sufficient upload rights), without having to get the sync through the archive admin queue first. Great work to everyone involved, both in the Launchpad and the ubuntu-dev-tools team. Awesome!

Of course I had to try it: I had a look at the sponsoring queue, picked a sync request for projectm (among others), reviewed it, test-built it and finally ran:

syncpackage -d unstable -b 916955 -s ximion -v projectm

Here’s what the parameters mean:

• -d unstable: sync from Debian unstable
• -b 916955: close the Launchpad bug with number 916955 during the process
• -s ximion: sponsor upload for Launchpad user ‘ximion’
• -v: verbose output please
• projectm: package we’d like to sync

The whole thing worked flawlessly. Great work everyone!

Noch immer speichere ich meine persönlichen Daten zum Großteil auf meinem guten alten Diary (irgendwann Mitte bis Ende der 1990er)

Allerdings ist Datensicherung dabei ein absolutes muss. Dafür habe ich mir schon damals in den neunzigern ein passendes Backup Kit geholt (genau genommen für ein Vorgängermodell, das mir dann aber bald kaputt gegangen ist) bestehend aus einem Kabel MiniKlinke-Serial und zwei Disketten mit der entsprechenden Backupsoftware, einmal für DOS und einmal für Win, beides noch in einer 16bit Version. Läuft auch bis XP noch ganz ordentlich, wenn auch 8.3 Namenskonvention beim Speichern der Backupdatei etwas altbacken wirkt, aber was solls JJJJMMDD.TWF ist aussagekräftig genug. Nun habe ich das Backup aber schon mindestens 1 1/2 Jahre vernachlässigt und vor mir hergeschoben. Einfach weil ich die alte 500 Mhz laut dröhnende, XP-Kiste einfach nicht mehr starten will.

Auf meinen anderen Rechnern aber läuft kein Windows (naja ok am Tower ist noch vom Rechnerkauf ein Vista, von dem ich aber garnicht mehr weiss ob es noch funktioniert und die olle 16bit Software lässt sich da auch nicht mehr einrichten) und ausserdem habe ich keine serielle Schnittstelle mehr an den Rechnern.

Nun letzteres Problem liess sich leicht mit einem RS232-USB Adapterkabel lösen. Angesteckt und lsusb meldet Bus 002 Device 006: ID 067b:2303 Prolific Technology, Inc. PL2303 Serial Port
Super!!!

Tja und dann? Passende Software gibts wohl auch irgendwie für Linux, aber wirklich komfortables habe ich da nicht gefunden (wer was kennt, gerne in die Kommentare)

Aber hey es gibt Virtualbox. Also installiert ein virtuelles W2K eingerichtet. Ganz zuerst Netzwerkkarte in der vbox ausgeschaltet, will ja nicht dass die Windose ins Netz schleicht. Nach einigem rumprobieren hab ich auch die richtigen Einstellungen für die Com Schnittstelle gefunden, so dass Virtualbox diese adaptierte am USB an den Gast weiterreicht

Gemeinsame Share eingerichtet, das auf dem Host einfach ein Verzeichnis…

…und auf dem Gast als Netzlaufwerk eingebunden ist.

Schliesslich,wurde das Disketten-Image (mangels echtem Diskettenlaufwerk mit dd erstellt) der 16bit Win Backupsoftware (SF-Interface) eingebunden, installiert, Diary und Software auf passenden Übertragungsmodus angepasst und schon lief das Backup, wie in alten Zeiten

Einer Nutzung des guten alten Casio steht also auch künftig nichts im Wege.Und solange mich kein Handy oder Smartphone überzeugt, meine Daten unterwegs genauso komfortabel wie das kleine graue Plastikteil bereit zu stellen, werde ich mich auch weiter darauf verlassen…

…jetzt auch mit dem guten Gefühl bei Verlust oder Defekt des Casio ein Backup stets zuhause auf Platte zu haben.

backup-Grüße DxU

 

P.S.

Ach ja es gibt eine etwas neuere auch 32bittige Software Xlink-Win, aber nur als Shareware oder als Vollversion für mehr als 20$, nicht lokalisiert, unschön designed, unübersichtlich und für mich derzeit unnötige Funktionen. Immerhin die Datenübertragung klappte auch damit.

Und eben noch gefunden DD-Link von einer ungarischen Softwareschmiede, sieht ganz nett aus.

So jetzt aber genug, SenderX ist kein Windows-Portal

Bleibe ich beim alten, da weiss ich was ich hab

 

P.P.S.

Wine als alternative Lösung habe ich recht schnell verworfen, weil wine einfach mit serieller Schnittstelle nicht klar kommt.

Gefallen hätte mir aber schon, einfach das Programm zu starten, statt immer erst eine VM zu booten.

Yesterday Seamus Bradley started a topic on TeX.SX:

    Best practice on organising your preamble

For large and highly customized documents, preambles can be lengthy. Should all packages be loaded before macros are defined? Or should packages and related definitions be close together? What about externalizing settings, and handling package dependencies?

Until now, there are two answers.

Yiannis Lazarides’ recommendations:

• Consider developing your own class or package to hold your changes.
• Have the packages and own related commands, near each other.
• Divide the preamble into topics, such as typography, graphics, maths, sectioning etc.
• Have the problematic package settings in their own packages or files.

Mico Loretan’s recommendations:

• Put the entire preamble content into a .sty file. Besides separating the settings from the document content, it has the benefit that you don’t need to use \makeatletter and \makeatother there.
• Check each loaded package if it’s really needed.
• Check your definitions, if there’s a package which could replace them, simpler and perhaps better.
• Use comments and whitespace liberally, to keep your preamble readable.
• A complex preamble could have an overview, a guide like a small table of contents.
• Divide the preamble into topics or tasks.
• Packages, which are loaded without any options, could be loaded by a single \usepackage command, however it would be good to put each package on its own line then.

Justin Bailey’s advice:

• For preambles that load a lot of packages or large packages, such as TikZ, you could create a format file, speeding up compilation.

Justin added a How-To for creating format files for TeX in six steps.

For reasons and explanation, have a look at the original topic.

TeXmaker version 3.2.2 has been released today. New features, from the ChangeLog file, to 3.2.1:

• Block selection mode has been added (alt+mouse).
• The shortcuts of the “Tool” and “Edit” menus can now be modified.
• While using the “New by copying an existing file” command, the directory of the file is now stored.
• The list of asymptote and tikz tags has been completed.
• Users can now hide the pstricks/metapost/tikz/asymptote icons in the structure panels by clicking on the tool bar.
• Users can now hide some commands in the left tool bar of the editor.
• The “underline” tag is replaced by the “emphasis” tag in the left toolbar of the editor.
• If errors are detected, the log file is now displayed even if the “quick build” command is not used.
• After setting a document as “master”, the structure and the bibliography are rescanned.

3.2.1 to 3.2:

• Faster syntax highlighting and structure checking
• An additional parameter (#) for the current file name is available for the commands (required for pdf synchronization with the sumatra pdf viewer).
• The log panel can now be closed directly with the escape key.

Several bugs have been fixed. The complete ChangeLog can be found here. Click here for downloading versions for Linux, Mac OS X or Windows or source files.

Happy New Year, and the best wishes!

The image shows fireworks displayed with TikZ by percusse on TeX.SX. Follow the link to see further fireworks effects.

The code is:

\documentclass{article} \usepackage{tikz} \usepackage[active,tightpage]{preview} \PreviewEnvironment{tikzpicture} \setlength\PreviewBorder{0pt}% \usetikzlibrary{calc,decorations.pathmorphing} % \pgfdeclareradialshading{someshade}{\pgfpointorigin}{% color(0mm)=(pgftransparent!40);color(5mm)=(pgftransparent!50);% color(10mm)=(pgftransparent!70);color(2cm)=(pgftransparent!100)} \pgfdeclareradialshading{somenodeshade}{\pgfpointorigin}{% color(0mm)=(pgftransparent!0);color(2mm)=(pgftransparent!5);% color(5mm)=(pgftransparent!95);color(20mm)=(pgftransparent!100)} \pgfdeclareradialshading{invertshade}{\pgfpointorigin}{% color(0mm)=(pgftransparent!100);color(6mm)=(pgftransparent!95);% color(10mm)=(pgftransparent!60);color(2cm)=(pgftransparent!0)} \pgfdeclarefading{fadeit}{\pgfuseshading{someshade}} \pgfdeclarefading{fadein}{\pgfuseshading{invertshade}} % \begin{document} \begin{tikzpicture}[projectile/.style={decorate,decoration={random steps, segment length=3pt,amplitude=0.5pt}}] \fill[black] (-4,-4) rectangle (6,5);   \begin{scope}[xshift=0cm,yshift=-0.4cm,transparency group] \pgfsetfading{fadein}{\pgftransformshift{\pgfpointorigin}} \foreach \x in {0,6,..., 360}{\draw[blue!80!white,projectile,line width=1.1pt] (0,0) to [in=90] (10*rand+\x:rand*1mm+2cm);}; \end{scope}   \begin{scope}[xshift=2cm,yshift=1cm] \foreach \x in {0,8,..., 360}{\draw [yellow!5,thick,projectile] (0.7,0) to (3*rand+\x :1mm*rand+2.2cm) node[circle,inner sep=1mm, shade,shading=somenodeshade,opacity=0.1] {};} {\pgfsetfading{fadeit}{\pgftransformshift{\pgfpoint{2.5cm}{1cm}}}}; \fill[white] (-3,-3) rectangle (3,3); \end{scope}   \begin{scope}[xshift=3cm,yshift=-1cm] \foreach \x in {0,10,..., 360}{\def\r1{rand}\draw [yellow] ($(0,0)!abs{\r1}!(\x :5mm)$) to [in=90] ($(0,0)!abs{\r1}+0.2!(\x :8mm)$);} {\pgfsetfading{fadeit}{\pgftransformshift{\pgfpoint{3cm}{-1cm}}}}; \fill[yellow,opacity=0.6] (-3,-3) rectangle (3,3); \end{scope}   \begin{scope}[xshift=-1cm,yshift=1.5cm] \foreach \x in {0,12,..., 360}{\def\r2{rand}\draw [red,line width=0.5pt] ($(0,0)!abs{\r2}!(\x :3mm)$) -- ($(0,0)!abs{\r2}+0.1!(\x :7mm)$);} {\pgfsetfading{fadeit}{\pgftransformshift{\pgfpoint{-1cm}{1.5cm}}}}; \fill[red,opacity=0.6] (-3,-3) rectangle (3,3); \end{scope} \end{tikzpicture} \end{document}

The image has been taken from the TeXworks PDF previewer, not all PDF viewers are capable of showing it in this quality. The example has been added to the TikZ example gallery.

This Christmas tree has been created by Mikko Heiskanen with this code:

\documentclass{article} \usepackage{tikz} \usetikzlibrary{scopes,svg.path,shapes.geometric,shadows} \begin{document} \begin{tikzpicture}[ mystar/.style={star, minimum size=2cm, star point ratio=2.5, shade, thick, line join=round, color=yellow!80!black, draw=red!20!black, top color=yellow!80!white, bottom color=yellow!60!black}, mytree/.style={scale=0.5, rotate=180, draw=green!60!black, thick, line join=round, inner color=green!60!yellow, outer color=green!50!black}, myball/.style={shade, ball color=#1, circular drop shadow={ shadow xshift=0pt, shadow yshift=-.5ex, fill=green!40!black}} ] {[mytree] \shadedraw svg "M355,430 q90,10 105,-85 30,0 50,-30 20,30 50,30 50,-20 100,0 10,88 105,85 -45,90 -205,25 Q400,520 355,430"; \shadedraw svg "M380,325 q83,10 105,-80 25,0 35,-30 20,25 40,30 20,-10 35,-25 20,20 40,25 25,90 105,82 -15,50 -120,15 -30,-2 -60,12 -30,0 -52,-28 C490,370 380,360 380,325"; \shadedraw svg "M435,225 q65,-8 90,-70 35,40 70,0 25,60 90,70 -30,52 -90,5 -36,48 -73,-3 C520,254 445,265 435,225"; \shadedraw svg "M470,139 q50,5 90,-80 50,90 90,80 -30,30 -50,20 -40,45 -78,0 Q500,170 470,139"; } %\shadedraw svg[scale=0.5,rotate=180] %"M460,532 q50,-8 q77,-45 v-20 a20,13 0 1 1 48,0 v20 q30,40 77,45"; %pgf/tikz doesn't like the arc operation, as stated in manual   \node[mystar] at (-9.85,-1) {$\lambda$};   \shade[myball=blue] (-9.7,-2.2) circle (.2cm); \shade[myball=red] (-9.2,-3.8) circle (.2cm); \shade[myball=green] (-10.3,-4) circle (.4cm); \shade[myball=yellow] (-8.95,-5.4) circle (.4cm); \shade[myball=red] (-10.7,-6.1) circle (.4cm); \shade[myball=blue] (-10.8,-5) circle (.2cm); \shade[myball=yellow] (-9.5,-6.7) circle (.2cm); \shade[myball=green] (-8.3,-7.6) circle (.4cm); \shade[myball=yellow] (-11.7,-7.6) circle (.4cm); \shade[myball=blue] (-10.5,-7.8) circle (.2cm); \end{tikzpicture} \end{document}

Further trees based using TikZ and pgfplots, using decorations and L-System fractals are here: Christmas trees with TikZ.

Aït Ben Haddou (Photo by Oscar Gomez - CC-BY-NC-ND)

See you back on 9th January 2012.

The version 3.2 of the free cross-platform LaTeX editor TeXmaker has been released today, read on LaTeX-community.org. New features, cited from the ChangeLog file:

• block selection mode has been added (alt+mouse)
• a “search in folders” dialog has been added
• the settings file can now be saved, deleted or loaded
• all the colors for the syntax highlighting can now be changed (a preconfigured dark theme is available)
• graphics environments and .asy files have their own syntax highlighting mode
• a selected piece of text can now be surrounded by french/german quotes (these quotes has been added to the “LaTeX” menu and to the completion)
• a panel can be added in the structure view to show the list of opened files (”View” menu)
• the Texdoc tool can be launched directly via the Help menu (users can select the name of the environment before calling Texdoc)
• the list of label and bibliography items can now be used to customize the completion
• the “recent files” list can now be cleaned
• the shortcuts of some commands can now be changed (”switching between the editor and the pdf viewer”, “french/german quotes”, “next/previous document”,…)
• *.asy files can now be opened directly without using the “all files” filter
• *.jpeg has been added to the list of the “includegraphics wizard”
• .thm and .pre files are now deleted while using the “clean” command
• windows and mac versions are now compiled with Qt 4.8 and poppler 0.18.2
• a version compiled on macosx lion is now available
• the version number is now added to the info.plist file (macosx)

Further several bugs have been fixed. The complete ChangeLog can be found here. Click here for downloading versions for Linux, Mac OS X or Windows or source files.

TeXample.net is now on Twitter. TeXample.net is a web site dedicated to TeX and related software, currently it’s focussed on collecting and showing TikZ examples.

Follow @TeXgallery to read about new contributions and site features.

Four TikZ examples have been added this week, more are planned, as well as new site features. Twitter will inform about smaller updates, blog posts about bigger changes.

The @TeXgallery Twitter logo is a Koch snowflake, which can be produced using TikZ:

\documentclass{article} \usepackage{tikz} \usetikzlibrary{lindenmayersystems} \usetikzlibrary[shadings] \begin{document} \begin{tikzpicture} \shadedraw[shading=color wheel] [l-system={rule set={F -> F-F++F-F}, step=2pt, angle=60, axiom=F++F++F, order=4}] lindenmayer system -- cycle; \end{tikzpicture} \end{document}

This is also one of the recently added examples.

Hier nur eine kleine Info,

am 1.1.12 schaltet netcup seine alten Nameserver ab.

Ab sofort sind aber die neuen schon verfügbar:

nameserver 46.38.225.225 nameserver 78.47.47.47 nameserver 46.38.252.252

eichfach in der “/etc/resolv.conf” austauschen

Mehr Infos gibts hier:

https://forum.netcup.de/administration-eines-server-vserver/vserver-server-linux/3507-umstellung-dns-server/

Wen es nicht betrifft, weiterklicken

umstellende Grüße DxU

The maintenance release 2.0.2 of LyX has been published. New and updated features are:

• Support for CTEX document classes
• Revised support for the latest versions of the Springer document classes svjour3, svmono and svmult
• R code from a Sweave-enabled document can now be exported
• Document color settings are now respected by XHTML export
• tex2lyx has been improved and now supports conversion of horizontal lines, phantom spaces, hyperlinks, underlined and striked out text, rotated and wrapped floats, subfloats, frameless boxes and the font packages beraserif, ccfonts, chancery, fourier, and utopia
• Cursor movement is faster now when inline completion has been enabled in math
• Improved archive feature , now also external files referenced in ERT in the document body, such as by \input or \insertgraphics, are included

This release fixes many bugs, that’s why it’s recommended to update to this version.

For further information and download visit:

• the announcement,
• the LyX News,
• the LyX Homepage,
• the download area with binaries, complete sources and a source patch against 2.0.0.

This text is available in German. Dieser Text ist auch in Deutsch verfügbar.

Don’t you love it when you get contributions to your project when you didn’t expect them at all?

By reaching out to contributors, thanking them and welcoming them to the Ubuntu community you do a lot to encourage them and help them integrate into your team more quickly. Generally I feel this is part of our culture already.

Discussions at UDS indicated what we probably could do better is:

• do this even more, try to be more personal,
• talk about it more, because it encourages others and motivates others who might still be a bit unsure about getting their feet wet,
• generally talk more about what we’re doing and what’s going on, to explain where you need help.

To help with this, we set up a team of people who work on weekly development news to get the word out. The only thing you need to do is send a quick mail to ubuntu-news-team AT lists dot ubuntu dot com with “[dev]” in the subject if it’s about Ubuntu development.

Feel free to send a just few lines about

• what you (or your team) is currently working on and where you might need help
• a new contributor who just helped your team out

In addition to this, this will give your work the publicity it deserves.

You can also tweet/dent/google+ with the hashtag #thxubuntu.

Thanks in advance!

Since 2.30 (Ubuntu 10.04) a color management tool ship with the Gnome desktop. Just install the package "gnome-color-management" and you will find it at "System > Preferences > Color Profiles" (or start gcm-prefs at the shell).
That sounds great but it didn't help you a lot when you do not have a color spider and your hardware is just customer level. A third part that is missing is the fitting color profile.
May you can download it on the manufactor page for some pro displays. But what to do if there is no manufactor support for color profiles? Then went over to the ICC Profiles and Monitor Settings Database and download it there.
This helps me a lot to get the colors of my new Dell L702x correctly display without the touch of too much blue.
BTW: There is a database of profiles for photographers too: http://www.drycreekphoto.com/icc/