TeXhax Digest Wednesday, February 18, 1987 Volume 87 : Issue 11 TEXHAX11.87 Editor: Malcolm Brown Today's Topics: Some notes from last issue. TEX on UTS note for texhax digest PROBLEMS WITH CMS TANGLE. LaTeX style files and Bitnet sites Logo composition Re: More mathematical symbols DVI Driver for LN03 needed LaTeX double spacing and mathematical typesetting Problem in using \sbox in Latex pictures... ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 9 Feb 87 12:29 EST From: HALLETT%CSBVAX.decnet@ge-crd.arpa Subject: Some notes from last issue. To: texhax@score.stanford.edu Hello all! I would like to address a couple of issues from the last issue (is that a pun? 8-)) 1. Latex for the Macintosh. There are two applications currently available, "TeXtures" from Addison-Wesley and MacTex from FTL Systems, Inc. The consensus over all the postings I've seen about these two is that TeXtures is the superior product. It is extremely fast (on shorter docs it is faster than a VAX [dedicated vs. non-dedicated?]), has an excellent previewer and supports a wide range of features like easy cut-and-paste of Mac graphics, some metafont campatibility, and automatic PostScript generation (expected). However, the pre-release version is still rather buggy. There are some re-draw problems with the previewer and the current implementation of TeX font inclusion has its problems (fonts sometimes get "lost" if they are not in the same folder. ie. the application can't find them). On the whole though, people seem to really like it. MacTex however, is probably the most solid now. It's ability to insert direct PostScript is more stable (TeXtures allows this, but has some bugs), thus allowing some neat special effects. Also, it allows you to bypass the generation of a dvi file (according to the ads). TeXtures does not. Both are extremely large and a harddisk and at least 1Mb of RAM are recommended. The prices and contacts are: TeXtures ($495) MacTex ($195) Janice Hughes (617) 944-3700 Addison-Wesley FTL Systems 234 Eglinton Ave E., Suite 205 Toronto, Ontario Canada, M4P 1K5 (416) 487-2142 (Disclaimer: I am not associated in any way with either of these companies. Moreover, I have never even used these products.) 2. Full page figures. This may be too simple minded and we have just been lucky, but we've had good luck just using: \begin{figure}[htpb] \vspace{9.5in} \caption{.....} \label{....} \end{figure} This has always left us a full page for a diagram. JAH ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 9 Feb 87 10:18:33 pst From: tangney@AMES-NAS.ARPA (Mark L. Tangney) To: TEXHAX@SU-SCORE.ARPA Subject: TEX on UTS Has anyone ported TEX to a UTS system ??????? Any information would be appreciated. thx Mark Tangney NASA Ames Research Center Moffett Field, CA 94035 415 694-4415 tangney@ames-nas ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 9 Feb 87 17:13:50 EST From: James Alexander To: texhax@su-score Subject: note for texhax digest Eighteen months ago, I developed a preprocessor for TeX which looks up, processes and sets citation references, as well as some ancillary work. My intent was to make it easy to use, yet flexible so a user could tailor it to his/her own preferences for file organization and reference format. Enough people have used it and liked it that I packaged it, wrote documentation, and advertised it by putting an article about it in TUGboat. I had assumed posting to texhax would be redundant, but from the inquiries I've gotten, I think I was wrong. So, to remedy that, here is a blurb I send to people who inquire. General info blurb about the TeX reference setting package Tib. Tib is based on the troff reference setter bib, written by T. A. Budd. Tib is compatible with plain TeX, LaTeX, AMSTeX, and presumably others. It takes a TeX file with special non-TeX escape characters and a reference file and creates a new TeX file with references set in a style selected by the user. The reference file is formatted much like files for the troff reference setter refer, and many refer files can be used directly or with minor modifications. For more information, see the TUGboat, vol. 7., no. 3, Oct. 1986, pp. 138-140. The source code of tib is in the language C. It was created on a unix system, but some attention was paid to portability. The files include all source code, macros, installation instructions, some test and demonstration runs, and plain TeX source for a manual. It is available as a set of files via anonymous ftp login on eneevax in the directory pub/tib. It consists of 80+ files constituting 600K+. If you contact me, I can put it in a more custom form, e.g. amalgamate the files or compress them. I can also supply tapes (1600 bpi, unix or vms format, or other); however I have had to institute a handling charge. For such orders, please remit $60(US) (or equivalent in convertible currency) check or money order. This includes copying charges, the price of a tape and mailing (I will send airmail overseas). If you send me an electronic mail address, I will make a mailing list for updates, bugs, etc. End of blurb. There is one subsidiary distribution site being set up in Australia. It would be nice to have one or more in Europe. Tib is supposed to be on the unix distribution tape. There are about 15 general bibliography styles included, involving such things as numerical flags, name-date flags, and flags made from authors' initials. Footnote citation styles are also included. In addition, there are styles for a number of professional journals, in particular, for journals of acm, agu, ams (3 styles), aps, ieee, siam (2 styles), as well as styles for some individual journals. It takes about an hour to create a new style. Prof. James C. Alexander alex@eneevax.umd.edu Department of Mathematics {seismo,allegra}!umcp-cs!eneevax!alex University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742-4015 USA ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 10 Feb 87 16:25:57 ZONE To: TEXHAX@SCORE.STANFORD.EDU From: JPHD%FRSAC11.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu Subject: PROBLEMS WITH CMS TANGLE. Help needed. We are trying to install TeX 2.0 on our VM/CMS system, output to a Xerox 9700 Laser printer. Trying to tangle the DVIXER WEB from ArborText inc., we got the following trace: tangle dvixer This is TANGLE, VM/CMS Version 2.8 *1*14*27*28*47*79*105 ! Pascal text flushed, = sign is missing. (l.2945) else if not simulating_fonts then ! Name does not match. (l.2949) @ @ = *117*132*188*192*195*206*212*219 Writing the output file.....500.....1000.....1500.....2000.....2500... Done. Memory usage statistics: 808 names, 382 replacement texts; 5391+5298 bytes, 15285+13144+14633 tokens. (Pardon me, but I think I spotted something wrong.) R(00008); What should we do ? The DVIXER PAS is not on the ArborText tape. +--------------------------------------------------+ | Jean-Pierre H. Dumas | | Cisi-Telematique | | CEN Saclay, BP 24 | | 91190 Gif sur Yvette | | France | | | | Phone: +33 (1) 69 08 46 87 | | | | jphd@frsac11 (bitnet) | | jphd%frsac11.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu (arpanet) | | ..!ihnp4!frsac11.bitnet!jphd (usenet ?) | | dumas@sumex-aim.stanford.edu (arpanet) | ------------------------------ To: texhax@score.stanford.edu Subject: LaTeX style files and Bitnet sites Date: Wed, 11 Feb 87 03:40:24 -0500 From: SKY Re: styles not working, I have heard that certain gateways truncate lines to 80 columns. This could be the cause of problems. If you have problems, drop me a note, mentioning the affected file. I am considering adding to the server the ability to uuencode files. Ken LaTeX-Style@cs.rochester.edu PS: Many archive users are still not fully qualifying their addresses. In particular, our mailer doesn't know about @site.csnet or @site.uucp names. Result: bounced or dropped mail. ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 11 Feb 87 9:52:16 EST From: "Benjamin J. Woznick" To: texhax@score.stanford.edu Subject: Logo composition I am converting our project from a troff world to a LaTeX world, and find that there are certain things I can't figure out. Probably the hardest thing that I have hit on is the conversion of the project logo. The troff representation is P\s-3ROPHET\s0\^II, which causes the central portion of the word to be set in rather small capitals, with a thin space between the T and the II. In troff, this is all very font independent, and I can use it with italic, bold, roman fonts in various sizes (examples: 1) our page headers are set in a bold font down a point from the body of the report, and 2) the name appears frequently in report titles, so is cited in other reports, where it appears in italics). I am now on the verge of madness trying to figure out how to do this in LaTeX. The first cut used the small caps font for the ROPHET, but that is no good, since it is a specific roman font. There is no guidance available from the way the \TeX and \LaTeX macros are put together: the former is all one font, and the other doesn't look like it works in the italic font, either, and the instance on pg 128 of LaTeX shows that it doesn't work in section headings (bold; compare with the word TeX in the section heading on pg 129). Then I thought that I could write some nice complex macro to do the job, but that seems to fail because I can't find any (documented) place where I can find out what size I am, so I can't select the smaller font in any intellegent way. I have examined listings of lots of the system (both TeX and LaTeX) and can find nothing that really helps. I have also extensively experimented with various hacks. The only thing I have discovered so far that is near helping is that \fontdimen1 of the italic fonts is non-zero. The alternatives that I am considering include: 1. Adding the special macros, like this one, to the document style, which I find offensive, since I would like to offer the style macros to other projects at BBN Labs, and they will have no interest in these project specific macros. 2. Adding new global symbols to the package that will allow me to figure out what to do. This isn't super, because the macro defining the symbol will be relatively complex. Am I missing something trivial? Am I missing some document (I have worked back and forth over the TeXbook and LaTeX several times looking for a clue, as well as examining listings of latex.tex and various macro files, and searching around in the tex.web file) that could help me in this? Ben Woznick ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 11 Feb 87 09:52:21 CST From: William LeFebvre Subject: Re: More mathematical symbols To: TeXhax@score.stanford.edu Speaking of mathematical symbols: what am I supposed to use to represent these different sets: Real numbers, Natural numbers, Imaginary numbers, and Complex numbers? What I have always seen used is, respectively, R, N, I, and C, but all with an extra vertical bar. For R and N, this bar appears next to the leftmost bar. For the I, the vertical stroke is doubled, and for the C, the bar is placed just to the right of the leftmost part of the character. I have found no such symbols anywhere in TeX's collection of characters. Have these been subsumed by better, more typographically correct characters? I know I can construct the first three from other characters (with the help of \kern), but it seems like Knuth is thorough enough to have included them in a font somewhere (as real characters) if they were the right ones to use. William LeFebvre Department of Computer Science Rice University ------------------------------ Date: 87/02/11. 12.28.10. To: texhax@su-score.ARPA From: MATH300%UNLCDC3.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu Subject: DVI Driver for LN03 needed Can someone out there please help us? We need a DVI Driver for a DEC LN03, together with all the relevant pixel files. This will be run on a VAX 11/750 under VMS 4.x. We received the generic distribution tapes from Stanford with the VMS TeX implementation, and we have TeX running (we think!) because files are processed with the appropriate messages and a DVI file is produced. With this generic distribution came two tapes apparently containing some pixel files, but (alas) no information on how to use them, how to extract them from the tape, or how to massage them into a usable form. Thanks for the help and/or information. Respond to Steve Dunbar Department of Mathematics and Statistics University of Nebraska- Lincoln Lincoln, NE 68588-0323 (402) 472-3731 or MATH300 at site UNLCDC3 on BITNET ------------------------------ Date: Wed 11 Feb 87 13:20:01-PST From: Robert Wentworth Subject: LaTeX double spacing and mathematical typesetting To: texhax@Score.Stanford.EDU In Volume 87 Issue 9 of TeXHax, Leslie Lamport criticizes university dissertation style requirements, which typically require double-spaced text, and suggests one produce two versions, an official version ``formatted with `\tt \raggedright' declarations'', and ``another version, with the standard document styles, for people to read.'' While I agree that standard dissertation style requirements are archaic, this attitude strikes me as rather snobbish. The implication is that if a document isn't going to be produced according to ultimate aesthetic standards, it doesn't deserve to be anything but junk---`\tt \raggedright' indeed! Personally, I don't want to spend time indulging in religious typographic crusades to enlighten blighted university officials; I just want to produce documents which are as aesthetic as possible given a finite investment of effort. (The suggestion to produce two versions strikes me as a bit impractical, giving printing/binding costs.) While I'm at it, I'm wondering about LaTeX's limitations as far as mathematical typsetting goes... Currently I use plain TeX rather than LaTeX because my documents typically involve very complicated mathematics which I have been led to believe would be all but impossible to format nicely in LaTeX. Up until now this has been no problem, but I would like to be able to make use of LaTeX's document-management features when the time comes to write my dissertation. So I guess I would like to ask: (i) are LaTeX's capabilities for handling complex mathematics as limited as everyone around here seems to think they are (and if so, why?), (ii) is there a macro package out there with much of LaTeX's power, but with full TeX mathematical typsetting capabilities, and (iii) is there at least a (Stanford) dissertation style macro package that uses TeX rather than LaTex? Please excuse my ignorance... Thanks in advance. Bob ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 11 Feb 87 16:58 EST From: JARWALA%ecs.umass.edu@RELAY.CS.NET To: texhax@SCORE.STANFORD.EDU Subject: Problem in using \sbox in Latex pictures... X-VMS-To: CSNET%"texhax@score.stanford.edu" I am having a peculiar problem in using \sbox in Latex. A picture is saved in a box using \sbox, and subsequently used using \usebox. The problem is that the origin of the original picture in \sbox does not align with the new origin, but is offset in the x-axis. An example should clarify this.. % a box is defined... \newsavebox{\tran} % the picture is a MOS transistor symbol... \sbox{\tran}{ \setlength{\unitlength}{0.1in} \thicklines \begin{picture}(3,4) \put(0,2){\line(1,0){1.5}} \put(1.5,1){\line(0,1){2}} \put(2,1){\line(0,1){2}} \put(2,1){\line(1,0){1}} \put(2,3){\line(1,0){1}} \put(3,0){\line(0,1){1}} \put(3,3){\line(0,1){1}} \end{picture} } % The picture saved in \tran is now used..... \setlength{\unitlength}{0.1in} \begin{picture}(10,10) \put(0,0){\usebox{\tran}} \end{picture} The picture in \tran is put at (1,0) instead of (0,0). If instead of saving the picture in a box, it is defined within the \put command, then the picture is still offset, however it appears at (0.5,0) instead of (0,0) .. \setlength{\unitlength}{0.1in} \begin{picture}(10,10) \put(0,0){ \setlength{\unitlength}{0.1in} \begin{picture}(3,4) \thicklines \put(0,2){\line(1,0){1.5}} \put(1.5,1){\line(0,1){2}} \put(2,1){\line(0,1){2}} \put(2,1){\line(1,0){1}} \put(2,3){\line(1,0){1}} \put(3,0){\line(0,1){1}} \put(3,3){\line(0,1){1}} \end{picture} } \end{picture} The amount of the offset seems related to the \unitlength, however it varies if the line width is changed. It is also always in the x-axis. We are running Latex version 2.09 on a VAX. Does it have to do with the "fragility" of certain commands?. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks. Najmi Jarwala csnet address - jarwala%ftcl1@umass-ece.csnet ------------------------------ % %\bye % End of TeXhax Digest ************************** -------