Latex stuff

Latex is a system for high-quality typesetting. I have written some small extra things for it. They are presented on this page. And also some additional downloads.

NOTE - If you use one of my utilities, and find it works as expected, please email me. Once I know that at least five people have used them succesfully, without bugs, then I will submit them to CTAN. Until then, I won't.

plain-csmin.bst

A variant of 'plain' bibliography style, customized for short-of-space computer scientists
Download plain-csmin.bst, 26k.
To use it, stick it in the same directory as your document, and \bibliographystyle{plain-csmin.bst}.

This is bibliography style is intended for computer scientists who don't want redundant information in their bibliographies. In particular, it introduces a compact notation for LNCS, it omits the year if that is already given in the conference title, it omits editors, it uses initials rather than first names, and it shortens "ACM, ACM Press" into just "ACM Press". For example:

[6]	P. Gardner and L. Wischik. Explicit fusions. In MFCS 2000, LNCS 1893:373-382.

Note: I see that many people are not using bibliographies properly. In a bib file, you should always store full author names ("Philippa Gardner and Lucian Wischik"), and should always capitalize the title ("Explicit Fusions"). The authors and title might be abbreviated by the bibliography-style, but you shouldn't abbreviate them beforehand.

WinEdt YandY by Lu

A simple+intuitive 'Latex...' menu for WinEdt.
Download WinEdt YandY by Lu.zip, 526k.
To use it, unzip it into ...\WinEdt\Exec and do Macros|ExecuteMacro to run the WinEdt YandY by Lu.edt macro.

This sets up a simple and intuitive "Latex..." menu:

If you compile a document that has errors, then it pops up the error log and jumps to the first error
If you try to DVI-view your document but the dvi file is out-of-date, it first offers to recompile it
There are no extraneous commands in the menu: only the few important ones.
It also adds a ShellNew option for tex documents, so you can right-click in explorer to create a new tex doc.

Note: this requires a version of WinEdt dataed at least March 2002. Visit winedt.com if you need to upgrade.

YandY updates

Patches for YandY Tex.
I got an email from YandY tech support. Apparently they have resumed operation. Hence there's no need for me to keep the patches on my site.

As well as patches, they also explained about bibtex. This applies to YandY v2.2.3. I don't know about other versions. What they said: you should not use ...\yandy\util\bibtex.exe. Instead, use ...\yandy\bibtex\bibtex.exe. This second one is controlled by the following environment variables in the [Environment] section of the dviwindow.ini file:

   BIBINPUT=c:\yandy\bibtex\bib
   BSTINPUT=c:\yandy\bibtex\bst
   CSFINPUT=c:\yandy\bibtex\csf
   BIBTEX_CSFILE=88591lat.csf

And while you're at it, don't forget these environment variables for inverse-search with WinEdt:

   EditorDDE=WinEdt;DDEServer;[Open('%s');SelLine(%d,8);SetFocus('')]
   TEXEDIT="c:\Program Files\WinEdt Team\WinEdt\WinEdt.exe" [Open('%s');SelLine(%d,8)]

PNG bounding-box fix

Adds physical-size (cm) information to PNG files, so they can be used in pdflatex.
Download pngbb.zip, 68k. Windows only, source code included.

Photoshop fails to export physical-size (cm) to PNG files, storing only pixel-size information. This means that your images come out the wrong size when you use pdflatex.

This program adds physical-size information to PNG files. It finds this from an eps file of the same name. So, if you have picture.eps with a given bounding box, then this program copies the same bounding box into the PNG.

Links to latex-related stuff

Tex FAQ. Answers to questions that are frequently asked about latex.
Latex Project home page. These people are maintaining the current version of latex (2e) and working on an all-new version 3. Bravo!
CTAN. This Comprehensive Tex Archive Network is a central repository for all latex-related stuff.
Miktex. This is a version of latex for Windows.
Short Math Guide. Explains how to write maths properly in latex. I see many people write maths badly. Everyone should read this.