VLUG Meeting Notes 2003.01.14

TOPIC: LaTEX

Presenter: Daniel German

Attendance Figures:
Total	35
Non-members	10
First-timers	16

NEWS

• Jon Johansen exonerated
• Bruce Perens deal to publish via Prentice hall
• Apple Safari browser based on khtml
• Red Hat corporate desktop delayed to last quarter
• kernel news - lmsensors now part of 2.5.x kernel thanks to Linus
• Legal beagle stuff:
  - music side of open source movement decides on not pushing ahead with poking DMCA
  - MPAA decides not to continue harassing the public
  - positive outcomes of Elcomsoft trial and Jon Johansen trial seem to brighten things
  - US supreme court decision due in April wrt copyright extension
  - strong move in non- North American countries, esp. India
• Barbara comments:
  - Linux heading into enterprise
  - Linux appearing in banking, financial and POS
  - Linux desktop penetration in corporate environments
  - Linux Desktop Summit happens at the end of February in San Diego
  [ed.] Barbara informs us that there have been further developments on this last point since the last VLUG meeting:
  

  ... a number of folks have pulled out (Bruce Perens, Desktop.com among others) because the sponsor of this Summit (Lindows), apparently did not live up to their original intent of having a vendor-neutral conference. Also, Lindows CEO, Michael Robertson, substituted himself to give the welcoming keynote speech instead of Perens. So, it may turn out to be a non-event in furthering Linux on the desktop.

Other Tidbits:

• the group "gobbles" claims to be hired by RIAA (unproven)
  - claiming back-door in mpg123 code (and more) which sends digital content info back to RIAA
• Seattle Times article predicts the end of the monopoly
• Apple to release precompiled headers
• IBM Power4 release rumours courtesy of David Bronaugh
• Intel releases C++ compiler ... see Steve Paul Shack for details

Main Presentation: Writing in LaTeX by Daniel M. German

Points of interest

• as proof of concept --> Daniel did his entire PhD thesis in LaTeX (this was passed around)
• Donald Knuth wrote TEX to make good typesetting (10 years) due to his anal retentiveness even to the point of building his fonts
• much PS font technology came from Donald Knuth's research
• Leslie Lamport did the LaTEX build on top of TEX
• main focus was to make mathematics to look beautiful, and hence the result that LaTEX produces the arguably slickest, formula-laden docs for scientific and mathematical publications
• FrameMaker was the only other typesetting software similar, in terms of power, to LaTEX
• license is free, more in the spirit of BSD than GPL
• extensible framework, similar to that of emacs; hence it's scriptable!
• encourages document design flow of content separate from and before the formatting
• benefit in designed-in ability for labeling, reference, etc
  --> auto gen of tables of contents, list of figures/tables, etc
• style control features; multicolumn, page, headers, footers, page #ing, ref style, etc.
• note that docs are saved in plain-text format (although marked-up)
• Digital Typography by Knuth describes the typesetting algorithms in great detail and producing a recognizably better output
• comparison between LaTEX and WYSIWYG editors (ie Word)
• the versions of TEX are discussed
• example of markup, showing use of styles and classes - a mathematical expression
  (see page 12 of this document - might not render in xpdf)
• breakdown of document content
• document essentially compiled into DVI from source file
• review of numerous support tools, ie: BIBTEX, xfig, dvips, etc.
• note that all markup commands start with \ as the demarcation indicator
  ie: \bibliography{}
• Daniel did the presentation, as well as all of his class mat'l using LaTEX... WHY?
  - easy to reuse common content included in different documents
  - CVS can be used to manage large, multi-contributor documents
  
• cons
  - huge learning curve
  - WYSIWYG would be easier if using an image that needs to be positioned exactly
• references
  - LATEX Companion (with the dog on the cover) <-- Daniel's recommendation
  - Leslie Lamport's manual
  - check /usr/share/tecinfo for (possibly installed) documentation
• demonstration of varied document types
  - UML diagram done in LaTEX is shown, illustrating the use of the UML class
  - lilypond output is also shown, illustrating musical score typesetting
  - chess output for documenting moves in a game
  - 3D rendition of points in space
  - CD sticker pattern
• demonstration of varied document types
  - auc-tex was used with emacs to generate the document
  - xfig does WYSIWYG
  - LaTEX allows use of eps diagrams within it's
• xdvi is used to view the output compiled from within emacs in the encore
• relation of make file discussed wrt LaTEX; example shows a formatted document including an SQL statement, as well as the (Perl-assisted) SQL result which gets munged into being a TEX formatted table for inclusion into the final doc
• encouraged audience to use their editors of choice, and learn compiling TEX docs, instead of fighting with learning emacs concurrently with learning TEX

for more points go here:

the full text (pdf) for Daniel's Writing in LaTeX Presentation

and here:
the tarfile with an example from the presentation

Meeting Adjourned  to Boston Pizza.

Next Meeting:

Where: University of Victoria, Cornett Room B-108
When: February 11, 2003
Topic: MacOS X and Linux by Thomas McVeigh

Notes from Mike Pfleger - VLUG Secretary.
secretary@vlug.org