Having fun with LaTeX

LaTeX - Pronounced Lay-tec ( as in tech ) as in don't pronounce the X like X-Ray but rather as a soft c as in tech.

Ok so now we have the way to say it under control, I thought I might describe it a little. LaTeX is a document mark-up language based on Tex. ( just look this stuff up on Wikipedia cos I am too lazy tonight to starting collecting references and formatting them correctly and worrying about how the document is structured etc... ) Its all so boring - Enter LaTeX to save the day.

On Fedora you can download the LaTeX plugin for Gedit and start editing your next book, thesis, report or article. Basically it provides a mark-up language not unlike that provided by MediaWiki. It lends itself nicely to multiple document type conversions as the content formatting is described rather than embedded.

LaTeX takes this one step further by handling all your references inside a separate file compiled by the companion application called Bibtex. The Gedit plug-in will actually prompt you for all the reference fields then when you cite a reference in your document, LaTeX will format the bibliography correctly according so some kind of standard.

It's been a while since I was in tertiary education but my good friend wrote his thesis with it and he actually has a PhD.

So there you go.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Automatically mount NVME volumes in AWS EC2 on Windows with Cloudformation and Powershell Userdata

Introduction This post explains how I go about with AWS Cloudformation and Powershell userdata scripts. attaching EBS volumes to Windows EC2 instances identifying them in the OS initializing them formatting them and assigning labels and drive letters. Prerequisites You should know something about Cloudformation and Powershell. The AWS Image you use for your EC2 instance should be one provided by AWS and should have the following utility already deployed to  C:\ProgramData\Amazon\Tools\ebsnvme-id.exe AWS Cloudformation Step I typically do not declare EBS Volumes together with the EC2 Instance declaration in Cloudformation but prefer to declare them as separate resources along with their own ebs attachment resources.  Here is an example EC2 instance with three additional volume declarations on top of the root volume which is automatically mounted on C:\ WindowsServerInstance: Type: AWS::EC2::Instance Properties: BlockDeviceMappings: - DeviceName: /dev/sda1
Read more

Extending the AD Schema on Samba4 - Part 2

Importing LDIF files into Samba4 and Active Directory This is part 2 of the Extending AD Schema on Samba4 series.  The examples below are tested using the Samba4 LAB I created.  If you want more information on how that works then please read  http://david-latham.blogspot.co.nz/2012/12/samba4-ga-release-virtualbox-lab.html For part one, please read http://david-latham.blogspot.co.nz/2012/12/extending-ad-schema-on-samba4.html Unfortunately the format of an ldif file for creating new attributes and classes in the Schema Configuration are differ between Samba4 and Microsoft. The tools are slightly different too.  So this article will attempt to make it all clear. Find all the latest versions of code on this post at  https://github.com/linuxplayground/yubikey-ldap/tree/master/microsoft-schema Samba4 - ldbadd & ldbmodify As far as I can tell the only way to create a new class with a custom attribute in Samba4 (on the Linux command line) is first add the attribute with ldbad
Read more

Python + inotify = Pyinotify [ how to watch folders for file activity ]

Sometimes it just might be handy to be able to watch a folder on a hard disk for changes. For example: A client app might drop small files on a shared folder. A server app might be watching the folder for just such an event. Once the file is created, the server will kick into action and perform whatever tasks are required. This all comes from my CD burning application. I am currently thinking that the client apps will drop small xml files containing information about what to burn onto a folder the webserver has access to and the cdburner service will be watching... The linux kernel provides inotify. This from wikipedia : notify is a Linux kernel subsystem that provides file system event notification. It was written by John McCutchan with help from Robert Love and later Amy Griffis to replace dnotify . It was included in the mainline kernel from release 2.6.13 (2005-06-18), and could be compiled into 2.6.12 and possibly earlier releases by use of a patch . Its function is essen
Read more