Paul Sutton

latex

A week of LaTeX related activities

Last weekend July 24-26, 2020, saw this years TUG conference go virtual. This was great for those of us who can't normally attend these sorts of events.

A good few interesting and useful talks. I didn't attend all of them, but the ones I did included:

  • Eric Mc Sween – Integrating a new TeXLive in to Overleaf
  • Jim Hefferon – A new set of LaTeX packages

As the videos are going to be put online, I will catch up lter. Joseph Wright's talk on LearnLaTeX is interesting too.

Following this, on Thrusday 30th July I attended the webinar on “How to Create Professional Looking Documents In-House”. This was interesting but a little bit beyond my use case.

However it did demonstrate what Overleaf is capable of, so something I would recommend to others.

The webinar also refereed to the Jupyter editor which again looks interesting. The Overleaf webinar, will be available online soon.

In all an interesting week, I need to catch up on the talks, I have downloaded the pdf on LaTeX packages, as I took notes so now have a nice list of useful packages that can serve quite a few use cases when creating documents.

#latex

TUG 2020

This years Tug TeX User conference is between Thursday 23rd to Sunday 26th 2020.

The schedule is up on the Tug website.

#tux,#latex,#conference,#2020

Overleaf Webinar write up from 09/7/2020

I attended another Webinar presented by Overleaf, the cloud based, collaborative text editor.

This webinar focused on “Organizing and Managing your Overleaf Projects”.

Again really well presented and it covered project ownership, and the rights this gives you, e.g you can't rename a project that has been shared with you.

Also covered folders and tags, the differences between project archiving and deletion. Along with more about what is found on the dashboard, searching for projects for example. Well worth taking a look at in the previous webinar recordings.

In the meantime there is a TUG virtual conference near the end of July (24th –> 26th). Please see link below for details.

Next webinar

The next Webinar is on 30th July and will cover How to Create Professional Looking Documents In-House.

References

#Overleaf,#LaTeX,#Webinar,#organise,#project,#management, #typesetting,#document,#documents

Writefull

Writefull is a plug-in for Google Chrome designed to complement the cloud based Overleaf LaTeX editor by facilitating the checking of your document for errors such as grammar and spelling.

You can read more about this here

This is a really valuable tool if you are involved in writing academic texts, as it designed for that level of text processing in mind. However it is a welcome tool if you're using Overleaf in general.

References

#LaTeX, #overleaf, #writefull, #typesetting, #spelling, #grammar, #error, #checking, #academic, #text, #textprocessing

Collaboration with Overleaf

I attended the Overleaf Effective Collaboration webinar on Wednesday 20th May. This proved, once again to be very informative, useful and complements the other webinars nicely.

This webinar, specifically covered the features available to the different users of the system, the main difference with the free accounts includes the number of user who can collaborate and version history tracking.

I recently came across an excellent Overleaf curated article / report from 2017 on The Connected Culture of Collaboration Report

The document (pdf) can be downloaded free from the website and there is a citation guide too, if this is needed for your own articles or papers.

The webinar will be available on demand in due course.

References

#LaTeX, #overleaf, #collaboration, #report, #digital, #science,#writing,#publishing

More Trinket Coding

Trinket is a web based development platform. One of it's features is the programming language blocks, which is in fact a block based front end and creates Python programs.

I am sharing these on my blog today, even though I also shared earlier in the week on LinkedIn and also on Twitteras part of the Paignton Library Virtual Code Club.

Drawing a circle

circle1

And the associated output

circle1

Drawing a star

star1

And the associated output

star2

I am working on a book to update my previous Nested loops guide I wrote a few years ago. This needed updating anyway so it would cover Scratch 3.0. This book / guide is work in progress, and will be typeset in $\LaTeX$ using Overleaf

#programming, #trinket, #Blocks, #python, #WebIDE, #LaTeX, #Overleaf, #nestedloops, #loops, #codeclub

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In an update to my previous post the learn LaTeX resource is progressing really nicely.

This site is designed to give people a basic introduction to LaTeX, and it does a really good job of doing this. It also integrates with Oveleaf which which a really useful feature.

Resources

You can connect with me on LaTeX forums here

Note: I am just trying to promote the above websites, I am hoping that my basic chemistry tutorial can complement.

Happy to help give support people via IRC too.

#LaTeX, #learning, #lessons #typesetting, #document, #preparation, #academic, #writing, #journal

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LaTeX and Chemistry

LaTeX is very useful for typesetting Chemistry.

A few examples are below

Normally we would the chemical formula for Methane as

$CH_4$

How do we achieve this in LaTeX? We to use maths mode.

$CH_4$

So the underscore gives us the required Subscript 4. The $ tells latex to use maths mode.

If we want to include both the Atomic number and Mass of an element. For example Hydrogen.

$H^1_1$

$H^6_12$

Or Carbon (illustrating how to type 2 numbers)

$C^6_{12}$

$C^6_{12}$

Puts one number above the other. So in the case the ^ gives us our superscript.

If we wanted to write Sodium as an ion we would put

$Na^{1+}$ Note that the 1+ has been put inside curly braces {1+}

$Na^{1+}$

So far this is pretty straightforward

You can also type chemical equations, which is a little more involved:

$H_2O(l) \hspace{0.5cm} \xrightarrow[\text{}]{\text{heat}}\hspace{0.5cm} = \hspace{0.5cm} H_2O (g)$

The first \text{} would put any text under the arrow, while clearly the second puts the text on top.

As per instructions you need to tell LaTeX to use the package mathtools

\usepackage{mathtools}

I have also added some horizontal spacing so the equation is not squashed together.

however writefreely does not seem to render this fully. You can view this equation in Overleaf here

#LaTeX, #Learn, #typesetting, #chemistry, #basics

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Tex Live 2020

TeXLive2020 available today 10/4/2020

TeX Live is an easy (we hope) way to get up and running with the TeX document production system. It provides a comprehensive TeX system with binaries for most flavours of Unix, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and also Windows. It includes all the major TeX-related programs, macro packages, and fonts that are free software, including support for many languages around the world. Many operating systems provide it via their own distributions.

As I am now using LaTeX for more documents. I have decided to download the TeX Live iso as this is a useful resource to have.

TeXLive is about 3.3gb in total.

I will have a copy of TeXLive 2020. However due to covid-19 physical meetups are off for a few months. I will however endeavour to have a copy for the Tech Jam when it starts up again, hopefully later in 2020.

I can also be contacted in #latex IRC channel on Freenode

#LaTeX, #CTAN, #Linux, #Mac, #Windows, #Typesetting, #download

You can find me on Friendica at [email protected]

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Learn LaTeX is a new website that aims to give users enough information to get started.

It looks very good so far and hopefully will help build up skills in this area. It won't cover everything but doesn't need to. Hopefully some of my posts will also complement this website.

It is great to see so many fresh resources out there. With the upcoming release of TeX Live 2020 the timing for this could not have been better.

Resources

#LaTeX, #Learn, #typesetting, #lessons, #basics

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