TeXhax Digest Thursday, March 10, 1988 Volume 88 : Issue 22 [SCORE.STANFORD.EDU]TEXHAX22.88 Editor: Malcolm Brown Today's Topics: Style parameters revisited Update on macros for producing chemical structural formulae Makeindex Addison-Wesley and MicroTeX Re: Times Roman in Metafont Varying the Numbering Style in Enumerate Environments. PKTOR--request for information Common TeX annoyance bug making fonts for ln03 A problem with \immediate and \write in TeX Re: Icelandic TeX (TeXhax#19) Dvi to Sun and HP LaserJet Series II XEROX 4050/9700 Font file formats ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 25 FEB 88 11:07- From: RALPH%UHHEPG.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU Subject: Style parameters revisited My two cents about the indented paragraph discussion: I like non-indented paragraphs, and instead some space between paragraphs (something which amounts to more or less one free line). That is a trivial change, it only requires resetting two parameters. I think it makes the page more readable if it contains a lot of text (i also increase \textwidth and \textheight by a lot). I don't know whether that is good style, nor do i care. I like it, i have been told that it looks good and is easily readable. I actually don't care what is in the original style files --- Dr. Lamport's taste is just VERY different from mine, but i can't blame him for that. I see a real problem elsewhere: using the standard article and report styles, do the following: (actually, the following text is pretty much what the result SHOULD look like, thats why it is right-justified). Write one page with several short paragraphs. Then, put an \itemized list into one of the paragraphs. Result: - First, the space between the items is much bigger than the space between paragraphs. That rips the whole structure of the page apart, and makes it very hard to understand the relation between the paragraph and the itemized list. - The indentions of the itemized list are far too big, compared to the paragraph indentations. The result will look pretty desastrous. Again, i fix it by redefining most parameters for itemized lists. But in this case i think Dr. Lamport SHOULD do something about it. Otherwise, i can only quote Alastair Milne: > I have in fact been very pleased overall with my results from LaTeX, which is > the main reason I'm willing to invest some time (of which, like most of us, I > have much too little) in learning its more sophisticated features. In particular, compared to Vanilla TeX or AMSTeX, LaTeX is a great step forward, reven though one always notices that it is not ONE program specifically written to do the task, but a set of macros interface to TeX. For example, the error handling is really bad, i always get funny TeX error messages complaining about things i never saw before, just because LaTeX unfortunately passed my mistake through its macro-blender and then to TeX. On the other hand, one really can't expect Dr. Lamport to rewrite the LaTeX-TeX package into one homogeneous program. Ralph Becker-Szendy RALPH@UHHEPG.BITNET University of Hawaii / High Energy Physics Group (808)948-7391 Watanabe Hall #203, 2505 Correa Road, Honolulu, HI 96822 "Hawaii - it's not just for tourists. People actually live and work there." ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 25 Feb 88 15:21:43 CST From: "Linda J. Hutchison" Subject: Update on macros for producing chemical structural formulae I continue to get questions regarding the status of Ms. Roswitha Haas' LaTeX macros for producing chemical structural formulae. I finally wrote a standard reply (as some of you have almost certainly received!) which I just recently revised due to some progress to report. Since I have seen a recent flurry of related questions just this week, I'm distributing the response to TEXhax and apologize to those interested parties who have already read the following. (Barbara, hope this doesn't result in you receiving multiple msgs.) * * * * * * * I have received chapters 3-6 and appendix A & B from Ms. Haas for her thesis dealing with chemical structural formulas using LaTeX. These, as well as the macros, have been forwarded to Barbara Beeton-- editor of TugBoat. She is in the process of finding a 'home' for the files and I believe has been in contact with Ken Yap at Rochester. You can possibly imagine the volume of mail generated by my original announcement that I was following up on this project. I know that it is frustrating waiting for something to be announced when it is "out there lurking..." I ask that you be patient with both Barbara and me. I anticipate an announcement from Barbara in TEXhax when the files are in their final repository. Until then, I don't have anything in proper shape for distribution, nor--I suspect--does Barbara. I am gratified by the interest out there and I am passing on comments to Ms. Haas. She is quite pleased that others may benefit from her work. Not being a chemist, it was hard for me to determine the accuracy of the work, so I just relied on getting her thesis to print so it matched the hardcopy that she sent me. Since she had worked on individual pages to get final absolution from her thesis editor (and did not put the changes in her original), the thesis which I received was not entirely in a working state. I was unable to get things working and organized until just recently. (In mid January) I have received several dozen queries dating from my original announcement last fall (how time flies!), and I'm pleased to hear from Barbara that the final steps for readying the files for distribution are about to be taken. I would ask that you not contact Barbara directly (this comes from me...not at Barbara's suggestion). From personal experience I would guess that she'll be able to progress much faster if she doesn't have to stop to deal with many individual requests. Linda Hutchison ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 26 Feb 1988 05:37:48.20 EST From: Subject: Makeindex I'm trying to get a copy of the program "makeindex". score.stanford has makeindex.tex and the associated .sty file, but there should be a program that goes along with it that I can't find. Can someone please point me in the right direction. Rick Zaccone zaccone@bknlvms.bitnet ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 26 Feb 88 11:34:13 EST From: "Don N. Kleinmuntz" Subject: Addison-Wesley and MicroTeX This may be of general interest: Addison-Wesley has sent out a letter (dated Feb. 18, 1988) to all registered users of MicroTeX. A brief excerpt... >While the product has been well received, and one that we have been proud >to publish, Addison-Wesley has decided the future of MicroTeX will be best >served by having the product's future development, sales, marketing and >technical support handled by an organization whose primary business and >marketing strength is in the computer aided publishing market..... >For those reasons Addison-Wesley has made the decision to divest itself >of the MicroTeX product line. They go on to state that they do not know who will take over the product, but hope to make an announcement by March 15. ALL SALES AND MARKETING ACTIVITY WILL CEASE ON MARCH 4. They intend to continue technical support until the product is placed with another organization. Finally, Addison-Wesley WILL continue to publish The TeXbook, Lamport's LaTeX book, and other books on computerized typesetting. My opinion, as a reasonably satisfied user of MicroTex (for over a year), is that this may be a change for the better. While I have been reasonably happy with the product, I have not been impressed with Addison-Wesley's technical support, marketing, or development efforts. Of course, if no one picks up the product line....... ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 26 Feb 88 13:43:04 est From: adler%huma1@harvard.harvard.edu I am using the graphics capabilities of LATEX in order to make layouts for printed circuits. I find that the results are excellent but unfortunately I seem to exhaust LATEX's memory even with fairly simple layouts. Enclosed is a program which seems to do just that. Here are some ideas of mine and of other people for dealing with the problem: (1) expand the memory available to LATEX. (2) use METAFONT to make a font containing a few of the graphic elements which are used in these layouts, such as forty pin pads. That might free up parts of the memory which LATEX is using. (3) somehow bypass LATEX and just make the graphics that I am using directly available to TeX. I don't need circles; I just need to be able to draw lines of any length and thickness. Part of the difficulty in solving the problem is that I don't really know why the problem is not working. For example, since I don't really know how LATEX works, it is easy to imagine that maybe LATEX has a limitation on the amount of its memory that can be devoted to a simgle page and that would not be changed by increasing the memory capacity of LATEX as a whole. I have good reasons for using LATEX instead of other programs such as MacDraw or MacPaint. One reason is that with LATEX I can set the unitsize to 0.001in to get accuracy of a thousandth of an inch, which I need. It is admittedly inconvenient to do a layout without visual aids, but I think that is not a serious problem: a hardcopy of the layout is easy to obtain and diagnose. Also, I think it would not be hard to write some interactive graphics program to obtain the basic layout and convert it to LATEX format. I am aware that other programs exist for doing layouts but I don't know what they are or how to obtain them. I do know that I can't afford to pay for even reasonbly priced software whereas I can use LATEX for free. If anyone has any comments or suggestions, I would be very interested in hearing them. Please do not reply to me personally since disk space at this site is quite limited. I subscribe to texhax at another site (namely, ghoti@cauchy.mit.edu ) and will receive all replies which are posted to texhax or which are mailed directly to ghoti@cauchy.mit.edu . Sincerely, Allan Adler ghoti@cauchy.mit.edu \documentstyle[12pt]{report} \begin{document} \setlength{\unitlength}{0.001in} \newsavebox{\closepads} \savebox{\closepads}(100,90){ \multiput(0,0)(300,0){3}{\rule{0.045in}{0.06in}} \multiput(55,0)(300,0){3}{\rule{0.045in}{0.06in}} \multiput(0,0)(300,0){3}{\rule{0.1in}{0.025in}} \multiput(0,35)(300,0){3}{\rule{0.1in}{0.025in}} \multiput(0,70)(300,0){3}{\rule{0.1in}{0.02in}} } \newsavebox{\fortypin} \savebox{\fortypin}(700,4060){ \multiput(0,0)(0,100){40}{\usebox{\closepads}} } \begin{picture}(4000,8000) \multiput(100,100)(900,900){3}{\usebox{\fortypin}} \end{picture} \end{document} ------------------------------ From: FBNUCEST%PTEARN.BITNET@forsythe.stanford.edu Date: Fri, 26 Feb 88 18:42:36 PRT A few days ago I sent the following note (by mistake, I sent it to be redistributed instead of sending it to TeXhax): > I'm a TeXbegginer and have a problem trying to run MicroTeX under > MS-DOS 3.2 on a AT-compatible. This computer has 512 kb of memory > directly accessible (plus 512 kb which can be used only as RAM-DISK), > so, according to the MicroTeX system manual it should be enough for > running the thing. But I just get the message 'Not enough memory for TeX !', > although I've tried to reduce memory usage by MS-DOS to a minimum, > making changes to the CONFIG.SYS file (parameters 'files', 'buffers', etc.) > (in fact the value of the 'files' parameter which I specified must be to > low for MicroTex !). Before making some of these reductions, I sometimes > got a message 'TeX overlay trouble !' (or something similar). > Does anyone out there have a solution for this (or any clues to the > cause of the problem) ? In some of the replies which I received it was suggested that I should remove all programs and drivers resident in memory; I had done that already, but forgot to mention it in that message. Robyn Robertson (GSRLR@ALASKA) suggested that the MicroTeX memory problem could be related to one of the recently discovered 'viruses' that increase the size of any EXE or COM file when it is executed. I think this hypothesis can be excluded, because the TEX.EXE file in question has already been used several times (on a computer with 640 Kb of memory) and its size remains the same. ------------------------------ From: Ian Kemmish Date: Fri, 26 Feb 88 09:11:36 GMT Subject: Re: Times Roman in Metafont I have a Times font in Metafont which I have been tinkering with over the past six or seven months. It is modelled on Monotype Times New Roman (visually - no callipers in sight!) The standard of rasterisation is about comparable to a LaserWriter, but the typography is of necessity a lot more amateurish. The regular font is largely OK, the italic is a few weeks behind and probably needs some tweaking. There is a rather lumpy semibold which needs parameter tweaking. I suspect a genuine bold needs a new set of minusucule routines. I also have a typewriter font generated from it, and am working on a Nebiolo Eurostyle sans-serif font. (I needed something easy after the Times! I want to do Helvetica sometime soon.) I have not yet found a satisfactory way of doing the shearing of important pen positions in Times minuscules. Suggestions are welcome. At the moment it's an ugly hack. (Have you ever seen a prety hack:-)?) I'd be happy to distribute what I have, though I suspect my employers would want to charge something for it. Ideally, I'd like to send out some gf files first to people who are interested in test-driving them and can make constructive comments about how to improve them. The Metafont code is still in a state of flux. I'd hate to distribute it and have a lot of unco-iordinated changes being made to it all! Ian Kemmish Whitechapel Workstations UUCP: ian@wcw.co.uk 75 Whitechapel Road OLDUUCP: ..!mcvax!ukc!wcwvax!ian London PHONE: (+44) 01 377 8680 E1 1DU FAX: (+44) 01 247 4589 England TELEX: (UK) 885300 WCW G "It's even tougher at the bottom." ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 26 Feb 88 21:10:17 ECT From: HANCHE%NORUNIT.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU Subject: Varying the Numbering Style in Enumerate Environments. Sub-Title: LaTeX Manual Baby Bug A student wanted roman numerals numbering the items in his enumerate environments. Neither he nor I could find out how to do that from the LaTeX Manual. It did not take much poking around, however, to discover that the solution is to issue the command \renewcommand{\labelitemi}{\roman{itemi}} (Replace the two occurences of itemi by itemii, itemiii, or itemiv whenever appropriate.) This seems to be such a useful thing that it should have been mentioned in the LaTeX manual. Leslie, please take note in case there will be a second edition. Others might want to scribble a note on the bottom of p.165 in their own copies... ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 26 Feb 88 13:57:42 PST From: KARNEY%PPC.MFENET@NMFECC.ARPA Subject: PKTOR--request for information I just heard about a program called PKTOR which converts PK font files to the Macintosh's raster format. Does anyone know how I can get hold of it via Internet FTP or mail? Thanks. Charles Karney Plasma Physics Laboratory Phone: +1 609 243 2607 Princeton University MFEnet: Karney@PPC.MFEnet PO Box 451 ARPAnet: Karney%PPC.MFEnet@NMFECC.ARPA Princeton, NJ 08543-0451 Bitnet: Karney%PPC.MFEnet@ANLVMS.Bitnet ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 27 Feb 88 16:05:25 +1300 From: Mark Davies Subject: Common TeX annoyance bug A while ago someone on this mailing list, I think it was Steve Grandi, mentioned the annoyance bug in Common TeX where it prints what should be the first line of output as two lines. eg. This is Common TeX, Version 2.1.1 (preloa ded format=lplain 88.1.19) I finally got sufficiently bugged with this to sit down and track it down. Turns out the problem is the variable term_offset wasn't getting reset in the dumped latex. A quick check of tex.web showed that tally and file_offset should probably be reset as well. The following patch fixes. *** tex.c~ Fri Dec 4 15:38:58 1987 --- tex.c Sat Feb 27 14:04:08 1988 *************** *** 61,68 **** if (ready_already != 314159) initialize(); ready_already = 314159; - print(banner); selector = TERM_ONLY; if (format_ident == 0) print(" (no format preloaded)"); else print_str(format_ident); --- 61,69 ---- if (ready_already != 314159) initialize(); ready_already = 314159; selector = TERM_ONLY; + tally = 0; term_offset = 0; file_offset = 0; + print(banner); if (format_ident == 0) print(" (no format preloaded)"); else print_str(format_ident); -- Domainised: mark@comp.vuw.ac.nz Bang form: ...!uunet!vuwcomp!mark ------------------------------ Subject: making fonts for ln03 Date: Fri, 26 Feb 88 15:23:08 EST From: sshurr%wellesley.edu@RELAY.CS.NET Hello, I'm a beginner at Metafont and TeX so please be patient. When I arrived here we had an old version of TeX (1.5) that used the am series of fonts. We recently got TeX82 (version 2.5) and I am installing it on our Ultrix 2.0 system, using ln03-plus printers. I am having problems generating acceptable cm fonts for the ln03. The first problem is the lack of a mode_def for the ln03. I attempted to use the mode_defs in the waits.mf file for various other 300dpi printers but all the characters turn out very thin. Could someone send me the correct mode_def for an ln03? Could someone also tell me if I have set up Metafont correctly? I created a preloaded Metafont, called cmmf, which uses as base files: plain.mf local.mf (an edited copy of waits.mf) cmbase_w.mf (this should make it work for write-white devices like ln03?) The final problem is with the ln03dvi program, which uses fonts in the pk format. I found that the program would crash occasionally in the copy_pk_char function of the ln03fonts.c module. It would execute the abort(); function because (tfm_width != chw[lnfno][to]). I commented out that if statement and now it seems to work. Is this a bug in the way the program was written, or did I do something else wrong? By the way, we don't have ftp here, so if the solutions to any of my questions require getting files from somewhere, they would have to be available via electronic mail or from a server. Thanks very much for any help. --Scott Shurr Wellesley College sshurr@wellesley.edu ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 27 Feb 88 22:31 CDT From: Subject: A problem with \immediate and \write in TeX I have been using my own set of TeX macros for formatting reports and thesis documents. However, I have run into a problem with \write which I use to insert the table of contents entries into a file while texing the boy of the report. If I just use \write to write a table of contents entry, then the chapter numbers and section numbers get messed up. That is, if there are two or more section titles on the same page then the last section's number is written for all the other sections in the page. However, if I use \immediate with \write as \immediate\write then the entries are written with their appropriate chapter and section numbers into the contents file. But the problem with using \immediate before \write is that if a section title appears in the beginning of a page then its page number is stored as the previous page's number! I think it is something to do with \output or \shipout. Could anyone please help me with this problem. I have got to get my dissertation out soon! I have listed below two sample macros I have been using: % This macro prints the entry in the table of contents page (from B. Beeton) \def\tocsection#1#2#3{\hsize=5.5truein \leftskip=0.75truein \parfillskip=0pt \noindent\llap{\hbox to 0.5truein{#1\hfil}} #2\leaderfill \rlap{\hbox to 0.5truein{\hfil#3}}\endgraf\hsize=6.0truein} \newcount\sectcount \sectcount=0 % section counter \newwrite\toc % write table of contents entries \immediate\openout\toc=contents.tex % into the file contents.tex % This macro is used in the text to indicate the beginning of a new section % and to insert the section's number, title and page no. into a file. % Usage: \section{section title} \def\section#1{\par\penalty -250 \advance \sectcount by 1 \vskip 18truept \leftline{\sectfont \the\sectcount. \ #1} % write section no. and title \vskip -6truept \immediate\write\toc{\noexpand\tocsection{\the\sectcount}{#1}{\the\pageno}}} If anyone understands my problem, please give me a hand. Will appreciate it very much. Thank you. Murali Krishnamurthi MURALI@TAMLSR (on Bitnet) ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 26 Feb 88 16:50:29 GMT Subject: Re: Icelandic TeX (TeXhax#19) From: mcvax!lexis.hi.is!jorgen@uunet.UU.NET (Jorgen Pind) Well, "Icelandic" TeX is perhaps a bit to grand since we are running an unmodified TeX with new fonts and formats only (including hyphenation). Those interested can contact: Jorgen Pind Internet: jorgen@lexis.hi.is Institute of Lexicography uucp: ...mcvax!hafro!rhi!lexis!jorgen University of Iceland Reykjavik 101 Iceland ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 26 Feb 88 09:49:30 EST From: darkstar!brian@uc.msc.umn.edu (Brian Utterback) Subject: Dvi to Sun and HP LaserJet Series II I have a Sun 3/50 with a 141 Mb disk. I run the disk at about 87% so I have very little space left over. I am trying to assemble a minimal set of code for TeX and LaTeX. I have built them both but I can't look at the output! I have no previewer for the sun, nor dvi filter for the LaserJet. I don't even know if my TeX passes the Trip test, since the Tripman is in TeX and I can't look at it to find the criteria for passing. I have gotten the impression that there are others in the world with Suns and HPJLII's. Can someone help me out. By the way, I have no budget for this stuff whatsoever, but I can FTP. Brian Utterback |UUCP:{ihnp4!cray,sun!tundra}!hall!blu | Think of it as Cray Research Inc. |ARPA:blu%hall.cray.com@uc.msc.umn.edu | evolution in One Tara Blvd. #301 | | action Nashua NH. 03062 |Tele:(603) 888-3083 | ------------------------------ Date: 29 Feb 88 14:48:00 EST From: "Michael J. Porter" Subject: XEROX 4050/9700 Font file formats Can anyone give me a complete desciption of how to construct a XEROX 4050/9700 type of font? I know how to make a basic font, but I saw in a manual that version 10 of the printer's operating system will support 1MBIT fonts. The field that I know of that controls the font size will only allow specification of a .5MBIT font though, so there must be some other field. There also seems to be some support for large fonts that must be split, but again I have no solid information about this. Also, I would be interested in finding out more about the METACODES that are available. Michael Porter Systems Programmer Univeristy of Delaware Newark, DE 19716 Phone: (302) 451-6040 Internet: mike@vax.oit.udel.edu ------------------------------ %%% %%% subscriptions, address changes to: texhax-request@score.stanford.edu %%% please send a valid arpanet address!! %%% %%% BITNET distribution: subscribe by sending the following %%% line to LISTSERV@TAMVM1.BITNET: %%% SUBSCRIBE TEX-L %%% %%% submissions to: texhax@score.stanford.edu %%% %%%\bye %%% ------------------------------ End of TeXhax Digest ************************** -------