TeXhax Digest Friday, October 30, 1987 Volume 87 : Issue 88 [SCORE.STANFORD.EDU]TEXHAX88.87 Editor: Malcolm Brown Today's Topics: immoderate notes: files to be deleted on Score Flavors of TeX Macros for programexample? Some TeX recommendations Help for typesetting chemical structural formulas? Include files in LaTeX Re: BibTeX sorting Re: Footers Lining up terms in an equation array followup & japanese Tex Users mailing to TEX-L. Footnote mechanism of LaTeX Beebe Driver Family, Fonts, etc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: the present From: Malcolm Subject: immoderate notes: files to be deleted on Score %% due to space crunch, I will be removing the following files from %% the directory on November 10th: %% texhax01.87 through texhax19.87 %% all *.txh files created before or during April 1987 %% %% The TXH files are submissions that are too long to go out with the %% digests and are stored on Score and the BITNET TEX-L server for %% file transfer. I assume these files will still be available on %% TEX-L until Glenn notifies us differently. %% Malcolm ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 26 Oct 87 17:35:50 ECT To: texhax@score.stanford.EDU From: HANCHE%NORUNIT.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu Subject: Flavors of TeX Hello, I am new to this list but have been skimming through almost all of the (103 or so) back issues. Surprisingly, I find no discussion about the relative merits and/or shortcomings of the different varieties of TeX: Plain TeX, LaTeX, and AmS-TeX. And yes, I know, it depends what you want to do. Leslie Lamports comments on the ``family sedan'' (LaTeX) versus the ``highly-tuned racing car'' (Plain TeX)in the LaTeX book are illuminating, but does not quite solve my problem. As a working and teaching mathematician, I have a rather diverse need for formatting tools. I might occasionally want to create lecture notes, problems sheets and solutions to exercises. I appreciate the simplicity of LaTeX for these jobs: They get done with a minimu of fuss. However, I also write papers. I might hope to get some of these published once in a while, perhaps in one of the AmS journals or other journals that will accept a TeX file. But can I use LaTeX for this purpose? The suspected answer is no, since these journals probably want to have full control over the layout... Thus it looks like I will have to use plain or AmS-TeX at least for some purposes. The question is then: Is it worth bothering with LaTeX at all? Sure, it simplifies a lot of my writing, but having to cope with slightly different TeXs all the time is such a hazzle. If I have to learn to drive a sports car anyhow, maybe I will be better off using it for trips to the grocery store as well. Does anybody out there want to comment on this? I don't want to start some sort of religious war over this issue. What is right for some people may be wrong for others. But hearing about other people's experiences may be helpful to others than myself. Harald Hanche-Olsen Div. of Mathematics The Norwegian Institute of Technology N-7034 Trondheim NTH NORWAY Uninett: hanche@vax.runit.unit.uninett Arpa : hanche%vax.runit.unit.uninett@nta-vax.arpa Bitnet : hanche@norunit.earn Bix : hanche Phone : +47-7-593515 ------------------------------ Date: 26 Oct 1987 16:14-EST From: Siddhartha.Chatterjee@VLSI.CS.CMU.EDU To: texhax@score.stanford.edu Subject: Macros for programexample? My officemate has a lot of program fragments in his thesis (which he is typesetting in LaTeX) which he wants typeset in tt font, with tabs, underscores, braces and other normal programming language symbols being obeyed. The catch is that he does not want to have to put formatting commands in the code itself (so a solution like the example in p.234 of the TeXbook is not acceptable). Does anyone have a set of macros which could be used to do this? Ideally, we'd like to define a new environment ``programexample'' and be able to say something like: \begin{programexample} thread_sleep(event, lock) event_t event; lock_t lock; { assert_wait(event); unlock(lock); thread_block(); } \end{programexample} and get properly formatted output. We'd rather not use a yapp-like system to process these fragments, because there are a lot of them and we'd rather not be dependent on software external to LaTeX. ARPA: Siddhartha.Chatterjee@vlsi.cs.cmu.edu UUCP: {seismo,decvax,allegra}!rochester!cmu-cs-pt!cmu-cs-vlsi!sc ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 27 Oct 87 08:57 EST From: Jeffrey Mark Siskind Subject: Some TeX recommendations To: texhax@score.stanford.edu %% Note: this submission, originally sent to Don Knuth, was forwarded to %% TeXhax by Phyllis Winkler. -- Malcolm Dear Professor Knuth: I appologize for sending this to you directly. I am not familiar with the appropriate channels for sending this kind of request. Please forward this to the right place. I must admit that I am not a plain TeX user. I primarily use LaTeX and friends. I am not sure whether the two suggestions I am about to make are properties of LaTeX or of TeX in general. My experience with text formatter in general over many years indicates that these are two issues which affect text processors in general. 1) The LaTeX \today command is usually the wrong thing to use. What is really needed is a \lastFileWriteDate command which would be more appropriate but is not provided. It is useful to be able to track the evoulution of a document and the date acts as a good version maintenance mechanism. Keeping arround DVI files is redundant and costly of space so I would like the option of having a TeX source file maintain the same version so long as I have not changed it. I could of course do this manually by not using \today (which I am forced to do now) but an alternative mechanism would be more convenient. This same requirement is true for letters and other correspondance. I keep the TeX source as my electronic "file cabinet" of outgoing mail. It is inappropriate to have the date of archived correspondance change when I print it. In a similar vein, a command such as \lastFileVersionNumber would be appropriate when running TeX under an operating system which supports file version numbers. 2) I often find it useful to organize a family of documents, which share common text, as a subdirectory. For example my directory memos might have several documents such as memos>proposal.tex, memos>thesis.tex, memos>paper.tex and memos>slides.tex all of which make use of a set of figures in memos>figures such as memos>figures>figure1.tex, memos>figures>figure2.tex etc. As my memos directory is the common place for all of my formal documents I like to keep such documents in that directory level, and not in a subdirectory, so that I can let people know a general rule for finding my documents. On the other hand, I don't want to clutter up that directory with non-top-level files such as the figures. The version of LaTeX I am using on a Symbolics lisp machine allow me to \include{figures>figure1}. The problem is that if I transfer my files to another system, say Unix or TOPS-20, I must change my source file to process the document. This makes it difficult to send the TeX source to someone requesting a copy of my document. What is needed is a portable syntax for specifying pathanmes. Admittedly, this is generally needed for other systems as well, but it would be nice to have this capability in TeX and not wait for a general standard to develope and be implemented. I appologize again if it is inappropriate to direct this mail to you. You are to be commended for a very fine system. Jeffrey Mark Siskind ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 27 Oct 87 09:33:02 CST To: From: "Linda J. Hutchison" Subject: Help for typesetting chemical structural formulas? My question is a repeat of one posed by Warren Stewart in Vol. 87/Issue 72: Is anyone out there typesetting chemical structural formulas with TeX? We have a request from a professor in our Vet Med college for help in this area. While I realize the question is a repeat, I'm hoping maybe there are either new developments in this area--or possibly someone new to the TeXhax audience who can offer help/advice. (I've found no replies in Issues 73-84.) Linda Hutchison ga.ljh@isumvs.bitnet ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 27 Oct 87 09:11:38 est From: beser_nd@scovcb.ge.com To: "texhax@score.stanford.edu"@mcnc.org Subject: Include files in LaTeX I am using LaTeX to write several chapters in an computer engineering textbook. I have been breaking the chapters up using the \include file option since the chapters have many sections in them. The trouble with this method is that include files are forced to begin a new page. (Page 76 of the LaTeX book). Is there some way to disable this? The only option that I can think of is to write a preprocessor to expand all of the includes prior to runing LaTeX. Nicholas Beser General Electric Company Astro-Space Division (215) 354-2814 ------------------------------ Mail-From: PATASHNIK created at 27-Oct-87 08:46:34 Date: Tue 27 Oct 87 08:46:34-PST From: Oren Patashnik Subject: Re: BibTeX sorting To: mroth@AFIT-AB.ARPA, texhax@Score.Stanford.EDU > From: mroth@afit-ab.arpa (Mark A. Roth) > Subject: bibtex sorting > Does BibTeX do the sorting or is that specified by the bst file? Both. BibTeX does the sorting, but the bst file specifies the sort key. > The alpha and newalpha bib styles sort the entries on the cite key. Thus > you get wierd orders like: > [BB86] G. Bat and H. Bone. ... (the order should be [BF84],[BB86], > [BF84] G. Ban and H. Fone. ... [BK85],[Bid81]) > [Bid81] C. Bidling. ... > [BK85] G. Bat and H. Kone. ... These styles sort by label (e.g., BB86), but ties are broken by author. Most people don't consider this weird: When you're looking for something in the reference list, usually all you have to go by is the label, so sorting by label makes sense. > Can the sorting be done by last name of first author, first name of first > author, middle name of first author, last name of second author, etc., > and then by title or year if all authors agree? Yes, in fact that's how the PLAIN and ABBRV styles sort---author, then title. The new versions, to appear shortly, will sort by author, then year, then title. --Oren Patashnik (BibTeX implementor) ------------------------------ To: texhax%score.stanford.edu@ROME.UCI.EDU Subject: Re: Footers Date: Tue, 27 Oct 87 14:08:55 -0800 From: Michal Young Gil, Here is an excerpt from my custom .sty file, called my.sty: \newcommand{\footing}[1]{% \def\@evenfoot{\hfil{#1}\hfil}% \def\@oddfoot{\hfil{#1}\hfil}} Note that this code must be in a .sty file, or else be preceded by \makeatother. An example use of this code is: \documentstyle[12pt,my]{article} \footing{{\it \today} \hfill \arabic{page}} An \hfill can be used to move the footing text to either side, or to both sides as in this example. Without an \hfill, the text is centered at the bottom of the page. -- Michal Young, young@ics.uci.edu ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 27 Oct 87 13:43:03 pst From: hildum@iris.ucdavis.edu (Eric Hildum) To: texhax@score.stanford.edu Subject: Lining up terms in an equation array Hello, I am trying to format a set of equations such that the terms of the equation line up into columns. Unfortunately, the terms contain subscripts of varying lengths, and I need to indicate missing terms (with centered dots). Currently, I am using the eqnarray environment, which provides me with the equation numbering I need, but does not give the alignment of the terms on the left hand side of the equation that I need. The equations are given below: \begin{eqnarray} f_{M-1}+\cdots+f_{3N-1}+f_{2N}+f_N+f_{2N}+f_{3N-1}+\cdots+f_{M-1} &=& h_N \\ \vdots & & \vdots\\ f_{3N-1}+\cdots+f_{2N+1}+f_{N+2}+f_2+f_{N+2}+f_{2N+1}+\cdots+f_{3N-1} &=& h_2 \\ f_{2N}+\cdots+f_{N+2}+f_{N+1}+f_1+f_{N+1}+f_{N+2}+\cdots+f_{2N} &=& h_1 \\ f_N+\cdots+f_2+f_1+f_0+f_1+f_2+\cdots+f_N &=& h_0 \\ f_{2N}+\cdots+f_{N+2}+f_{N+1}+f_1+f_{N+1}+f_{N+2}+\cdots+f_{2N} &=& h_1 \\ f_{3N-1}+\cdots+f_{2N+1}+f_{N+2}+f_2+f_{N+2}+f_{2N+1}+\cdots+f_{3N-1} &=& h_2 \\ \vdots & & \vdots\\ f_{M-1}+\cdots+f_{3N-1}+f_{2N}+f_N+f_{2N}+f_{3N-1}+\cdots+f_{M-1} &=& h_N. \end{eqnarray} I need all the first, second, etc. terms on the left lined up in columns. If you have any suggestions, they would be most appreciated. Thank you, Eric Hildum dehildum@ucdavis.edu (Internet) dehildum@ucdavis.bitnet (BITNET) ucbvax!ucdavis!dehildum (uucp) ------------------------------ Date: 28 Oct 87 02:57:00 GMT+109:13 From: "DARREN STALDER" Subject: followup & japanese Tex To: "texhax" This is a followup and summary to the replies I have received from bad font loads using dvi2ln3. A mighty thanks to Rainer Schoepf and Erik Kilgore for their help. It seems that dvi2ln3 has a small problem with math. The following are the names of the files that I have been able to get: *.1000PXL (66.667%) *.1095PXL (73.000%) *.1200PXL (80.000%) *.1315PXL (87.667%) *.1440PXL (96.000%) *.1500PXL (100.000%) %of course *.1642PXL (109.467%) *.1728PXL (115.200%) *.1800PXL (120.000%) *.2074PXL (138.267%) *.2160PXL (144.000%) *.2400PXL (160.000%) *.2488PXL (165.867%) *.2592PXL (172.800%) *.2628PXL (175.200%) *.2986PXL (199.067%) *.3110PXL (207.333%) *.3456PXL (230.400%) *.3732PXL (248.800%) *.4479PXL (298.600%) These files should work. For those of you with the later versions of dvi2ln3, the magnifaction numbers are names of directories and the filenames are just *.PXL. Yaski, We have some people here at GMU that would be highly interested in the high quality Japanese fonts you mentioned in TeXHaX issue #82. Also our host tables do not include Turing.Stanford.Edu. Could you please send me mail on what your net address in numeric format is? A good book showing examples of fonts that I found at the local library is Type and Typography by Ben Rosen. It is published by Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., New York, 1976. The ISBN is 0-442-27020-8. Torin/Wolf/Darren Stalder Bitnet: DSTALDER@GMUVAX Internet: DSTALDER@GMUVAX.GMU.EDU UUCP: (dolqci | uunet!pyrdc)!gmu90x!dstalder SNAIL: 15713 Edgewood Dr./Dumfries, VA 22026 ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 27 Oct 1987 13:26:29.40 CST From: (John L. Huxtable) Subject: Users mailing to TEX-L. To: I have been getting TeXhax through the BITNET redistribution at MARIST (which is a redistribution from TAMVM1, I guess...) and I get about six or seven messages per week which have been sent by users in BITNET land to the TEX-L redistribution. I don't see these messages in TeXhax, so I assume that they are seen only by the BITNET subscribers. It would probably be a good idea to get an official policy statement on this. Here is a modest proposal, assuming I know what's going on: BITNET users should subscribe to TeXhax through the BITNET redistribution lists. However, submissions should still go to texhax@score.stanford.edu, where they belong. That way, everybody in the TeX community has to see them whether they want to or not. How's that? %%% That's exactly the way it should work, although it sounds %%% somewhat pessimistic to put it "everybody ... has to see %%% them." Are they that bad?? The main point is: if you %%% send a message to TEX-L, it will NOT make its way into a %%% digest. Malcolm John L. Huxtable The University of Kansas huxtable@ukanvax.bitnet huxtable@ukanvax.ukans.edu (not yet, but real soon now...) ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 28 Oct 87 13:16 N From: Subject: Footnote mechanism of LaTeX To: texhax@score.stanford.edu From: Nico Poppelier (Poppelier@Hutruu51.Bitnet) In several TeXhax Digests people have asked questions about the table and footnote mechanisms of LaTeX. Here's another one, concerning generating footnotes in a minipage environment. I encountered the problem when I was writing a paper with lots of tables. In one of the tables I wanted to have footnotes just below the table. So I used the following nest of environments \begin{table} \begin{minipage} \begin{tabular} ... \footnote{...} \end{tabular} \end{minipage} \end{table} The footnotes are numbered a, b, c, ... But then I wanted to refer to the same footnote more than once. The LaTeX book suggests using \footnotemark and \addtocounter{footnote}{..}, but this does not produce the desired result inside a minipage. Try this: \begin{document} This is a test \footnote{First footnote} of the \verb|footnote| mechanism of \LaTeX. To refer to the same footnote again, one can use \verb|\addtocounter| and \verb|\footnotemark|. This is the same footnote\addtocounter{footnote}{-1}\footnotemark. And now the same thing in a minipage environment. \begin{minipage}{\textwidth} This is a test \footnote{First footnote} of the \verb|footnote| mechanism of \LaTeX\ inside a minipage. To refer to the same footnote again, one can use \verb|\addtocounter| and \verb|\footnotemark|. This is the same footnote \addtocounter{footnote}{-1}\footnotemark. \end{minipage} \end{document} The text is rather un-original, but it illustrates what I'm saying. Why does LaTeX do what it does here? Is it a bug or a feature? Nico Poppelier ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 28 Oct 87 08:58 EDT From: Subject: Beebe Driver Family, Fonts, etc. To: texhax@score.stanford.edu Greetings, I have a few questions which some of you may have already received. 1a. Can anyone on BITNET send me the Beebe DVI Driver Family. I'm in need of it immediately and I'm not sure how long a tape will take to be processed. 1b. I'm also looking for a DVI to PostScript driver which allows the use of the PS fonts. If anyone on BITNET has such an animal, please let me know. 2. What mode should be used for the DEC PrintServer 40? I heard it uses a Ricoh engine. Does that mean it will use the fonts for the ln03? 3. We are typesetting our PBS TV station's broadcast schedule. Does anyone currently do this? Is there a set of macros that produces listings similar to other "well-known" TV schedules? As always, I would like to take this time to thank any and all who may reply to these requests. Thanks, --mike mcguffey@muvms1.bitnet ------------------------------ %%% %%% subscriptions, address changes to: texhax-request@score.stanford.edu %%% please send a valid arpanet address!! %%% %%% submissions to: texhax@score.stanford.edu %%% %%% BITNET redistribution: TEX-L@TAMVM1.BITNET (list server) %%% %%%\bye %%% ------------------------------ End of TeXhax Digest ************************** -------