Technology – Page 5 – Not Your Average Engineer

May 18, 2009November 15, 2021

LaTeX, BibTeX, and managing PDF’s

I am in the midde of writing my PhD qualifier paper and should be working on that rather than writing here. However I’ve been rather irritated lately with several things.

Of primary concern is my LaTeX front end editor. I use TeXnicCenter and have for about a year. My masters thesis and most of my term papers of the last nine months were written using it. The one HUUUUUGE problem that application has is its font choices. It only will display text in the editor using monospace fonts. Monospace fonts are horrible (for me anyway) to write with. They bother my eyes no end and make me less able to write. No, really. I’ve tested writing in Word 2007 and TeXnicCenter. My writing flows way easier in Word than in TeXnicCenter.

Lyx would be a great condender except that it is a WYSIWYG editor and not a straight LaTeX code editor. I prefer using code rather than formatted text. It also saves in a Lyx-specific file format. Yes, it can be exported back to LaTeX but I want it to be natively LaTeX.

WinEdt looks to be equivalent to TeXnicCenter except that it can use any font. Only problem there is that I have to have administrator rights to install it. And I don’t. It also costs $30 to use beyond the month-long trial period.

If only TeXnicCenter allowed fonts other than monospace!

On the BibTeX side of the equation my qualifier paper is now approaching 200 bibliography entries with associated PDFs on my harddrive. Currently I store PDF’s in directories related to what general subject the pertain. I make my BibTeX files by hand. Every entry is manually typed into a BibTeX document. I want some way to integrate all of that together.

So far I’ve tried Zotero, JabRef, and Mendeley. None are satisfactory for a variety of reasons. If all three could be blended together then we’d have something! Until then I continue to plod along as-is.

December 3, 2008July 1, 2020

Tarski 2.4 RC1 and fixing some Gravatar problems with WordPress

The guys that develop the Tarski WordPress theme released 2.4 RC1 today. I already have it running on my site and am enjoying some of the new features.

One problem I was having prior to and after the upgrade to Tarski 2.4 was my gravatar wasn’t showing up on comments I made. Granted, this isn’t a particularly popular destination on the internets but there are a couple of comments here and there. What I’ve been able to deduce was going on is that my comments had the wrong email address attached. I was using a different email account as my admin email for a while. Switching it over to the email address I have registered at Gravatar.com cleared up the problem for new comments but the old comments still refused to show my gravatar.

Some more poking around led me to realize that WordPress hadn’t switched over the email address assigned to my old comments to my gravatar-friendly account. A quick trip through the comment edit menu and everything is right in my blog once again.

An interesting note is that in the default WordPress theme, I didn’t have any problems and all of my gravatars showed up without having to edit anything. Perhaps there is some sort of unforeseen interaction between Tarski 2.4RC1 and WordPress 2.7RC1.

November 18, 2008July 1, 2020

Misc table information for LaTeX

While writing my thesis, I found need to include several tables. The standard table package included in LaTeX sucks. Doing some research, I found that the booktabs package is far superior and produces truly beautiful results.

It can be called by inserting this code:\usepackage{booktabs}

The following links are for later use:

Vertical table stuff – will be good for making Houses of Quality and other such things.
Various tabular information – Good for referencing how to make tables appear a certain way. Maybe not entirely compatible with booktabs?
Basic table info – for starting with no table experience in LaTeX.
WikiBooks table info – pretty basic but this is where I found the first info on the booktabs package.
multicolumn – explanation of how multicolumns work.

Here is an example of a table I created. Note that the “textwidth” variable is defined in my class files.

\begin{table} \caption{GLOBE Cultural Clusters \cite{GLOBE04}.} \begin{center} \begin{tabular}{l p{0.6\textwidth}} \toprule Cluster & Cultures \\ \midrule Confucian Asia & Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, South Korea \\ \\ Southern Asia & Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Thailand, Iran \\ \\ Latin America & Ecuador, El Salvador, Columbia, Bolivia, Brazil, Guatemala, Argentina, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Mexico \\ \\ Nordic Europe & Denmark, Finland, Sweden \\ \\ Anglo & Canada, USA, Australia, Ireland, England, South Africa (White Sample), New Zealand \\ \\ Germanic Europe & Austria, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany-East, Germany-West \\ \\ Sub-Saharan Africa & Zimbabwe, Namibia, Zambia, Nigeria, South Africa (Black Sample) \\ \\ Eastern Europe & Greece, Hungary, Albania, Slovenia, Poland, Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan \\ \\ Middle East & Turkey, Kuwait, Egypt, Morocco, Qatar \\ \bottomrule \end{tabular} \end{center} \label{table:cultural_clusters_GLOBE} \end{table}