- Readability – posted Feb 13, 2008
Before we get too well underway, let me start by warning that I am not a typographer by trade. What follows here is my understanding and subjective opinion on the choice of typefaces for academic articles, working papers, books and pretty much anything with a high amount of content that needs to be presented. Many of my observations here will most likely not matter to those who are creating flyers, posters, etc., as there are pretty much no rules that I am aware of that governs those materials.
- BibTeX – posted Feb 10, 2008
In academia one of the most important points in any work that you want to have published is citing other works that you have used to reach your conclusions, or works whose conclusions that you have sought to disprove in your work. Doing this (hopefully) confers credibility to your work as well. As with most other things in academia, there is an approach to cite and reference works that you use.
- Microtypography – posted Nov 27, 2007
Type setting is an art, and as most arts, it is extremely subjective. However, I will try to venture a few of my subjective opinions here as absolute truth (just because a bit of controversy is fun; feel free to disagree). Today we will look a bit at how interword spacing changes the feeling of a text, why margin protrusion makes things more even (and what margin protrusion is), as well as what font expansion is and why that helps as well.
- Programming packages – posted Aug 11, 2007
Now that we have seen how to both write commands and environments, it is time to look at how we can reuse this code in several different documents. The basis of reusability in LaTeX is handled through packages, otherwise known as .sty-files. A copious amount of packages exist for LaTeX at CTAN, and we have seen several of them already: tikz, graphicx, fontenc, mathdesign, and many others. Common to each package is that it provides a number of commands and environments that gives you some form of functionality.
- An example book style – posted Jun 20, 2007
Now that we have made our way through how to style a document, it is time to look at how we can actually use some of this knowledge in practice, by typesetting an actual book. Since all that Lorem Ipsum can get a tad boring in the long run, we will create a book with some works that have passed into the public domain, namely some by H. P. Lovecraft, a significant American horror author of the early 20th century.
- Styling the page footer and header – posted Jun 12, 2007
This leads us to the last post in my series of styling documents, namely the one on how to customise page headers and footers. This is one of the most visible style elements as it is (typically) present in some form or the other on almost all pages except chapter pages. As with the section titles it is also relevant for the page headers and footers to mimick the aesthetic feel of the chapter page, thus keeping a uniform expression that can be tied exclusively to your work (this is the really hard part, by the way).
- Styling the other document divisors – posted Jun 2, 2007
While sectional titles aren't as stylistically free as the chapter page, it is still important to carry over the style of the chapter page to sections, subsections and other such entries you have throughout your text. Thus, if the chapter style contained sans-serif text and a line below the text, it might be relevant to make the sections be sans-serif and possibly with both a line on top and below the section title.
- Styling the table of contents – posted May 26, 2007
Styling the table of contents isn't quite as trivial as the chapter page, as there are several more things to consider. Before we embark on this, however, let us take a look at how the table of contents are usually set up in a typical LaTeX book. While this seems to be a fairly tradition-bound way to set up the table of contents, it may feel rather out of pace with the rest of the styling of the document.
- Styling the chapter – posted May 21, 2007
When we write larger works, one of the places we have the most stylistic freedom is with chapter pages. The chapter page is meant to break off the flow of pages and present something new. Looking through books on the book-case we see a wide-ranging difference in chapter styles. While the standard chapter style (as seen below) is pretty decent, there's a long way to the chapter styles of books like Unicode Standard 5.0, A History of Mathematics, or Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology.
- Styling the document – posted May 21, 2007
Over the next few blog posts we will be looking at how we can restyle an entire document without changing its contents. This is one of the key strengths of LaTeX: separating content from style. There are, of course, several aspects of a document that can be interesting to restyle, but we will focus on some of the primary elements: the table of contents, chapter headings, part, section, subsection, etc. headings, and finally the page headers and footers.
- Importing graphics – posted Dec 4, 2006
Most people get a sudden surprise when they need to use graphics in LaTeX as it isn't as easy as in the good old word processor. It's not hard, there are just some pitfalls, and like all pitfalls it has an elaborate description. Today, I will start with the complex part in order to describe why the code is wrapped to make it easier for the user to import graphics, as importing graphics natively is by no means simple.
- Initials and the saints – posted Nov 15, 2006
Taking a short intermission from the chapter styling, we take the time to look at a time-honoured tradition in the western world, the initial, or drop capital, or lettrine, or uncial, or.... There are, indeed, many forms and variations of these majuscule letters at the beginning of a paragraph, but they still crop up here and there in books everywhere. So, since LaTeX is supposed to be this fantastic typography and typesetting tool, let's have at it then.
- Customising class styles – posted Oct 31, 2006
The basic premise of TeX is that nearly everything can be changed. So, we could change, for instance, the \maketitle command to output a page of fluffy bunnies with your title, name and other info (like \thanks) in a pink box. This will almost guarantee that your paper looks rather unique in your teacher's pile of papers to grade—we will leave that up to you to decide whether that is a good thing, though.
- A typographical beginning – posted Oct 30, 2006
For the most part, LaTeX is used almost exclusively in the academe, by some few publishers and by some companies that are largely populated by disaffected college students. So, despite its fairly limited widespread use, it is by far one of the best tools for typesetting articles and books, in particular for mathematical equations. However, I won't spend a lot of time presenting the basics in this blog, but rather spend time on stepping away from the mediocre standard layout it presents a user with.
- Graph illustrations – posted Apr 5, 2006
When we typeset documents for publishing, be it articles, journals or books, there is another important aspect to it, apart from the content: the layout. The hyphenation should be sensible, it should use ligatures properly, and the fonts shouldn't change throughout the document. It is this last quality that can be rather tricky to maintain if you are importing figures into your document. In Computer Science there's a fairly prevalent need to create illustrations of graphs-no, not the ones plotting x- and y-values on a grid, rather the one with vertices and edges-and we can use software solutions such as GraphViz to draw our graphs based on fairly concise specifications.
- Collaborative writing – posted Jan 7, 2006
I have recently been investigating various forms of online, synchronous collaborative text editing, and have in my pursuits found the less aggravating program for Windows, moonedit, that allows one party to host one or more files, and others to connect to this person and edit these files. As part of testing this editor, Jonas Öien and I have written a small short-story set in the typical crime novel style. It is, as the picture suggests, called The English Umbrella (PDF).