Category TeX Talk (Stefan Kottwitz)

The TeX Users Group (TUG) meeting 2025 will take place in Trivandrum, Kerala, India, from July 18-20 (Fri-Sun), 2025. It is hosted by TeXFolio, an institutional member and sponsor of the TeX Users Group. Conference information and the registration form… Continue Reading →

The following text is in German because it’s about the German language user group meeting 2021. Im vergangenen Jahr sind leider beide DANTE-Tagungen wegen der Pandemie ausgefallen. Die Frühjahrstagung fand wegen der Kontaktbeschränkungen komplett online statt. Auch die Herbsttagung wird… Continue Reading →

The following text is in German because it’s about the German language user group meeting 2021. Im vergangenen Jahr sind leider beide DANTE-Tagungen wegen der Pandemie ausgefallen. Dieses Jahr wird die Frühjahrstagung stattfinden, jedoch wegen der Kontaktbeschränkungen komplett online. Anmelden… Continue Reading →

Now there are only a few days left until the TeX Users Group meeting 2020 starts. As it happens online with more than 220 registered participants world wide, following the schedule in some other time zone may be a challenge…. Continue Reading →

On LaTeX-Community.org, founded January 2007, many authors published articles about LaTeX and related tools. The article database has been changed from Joomla to a modern WordPress CMS, mainly because of security concerns. The site has been renamed to LaTeX.net. The… Continue Reading →

Today I browsed through unanswered questions on LaTeX.org. Perhaps you got an idea how to help a user? Some randomly chosen examples: Plot with months and years as x-axis (from today)The goal is to get a plot like this: ntheorem… Continue Reading →

Today I celebrate my 9000th post on LaTeX.org. I don’t have the patience to wait until it’s 10k. In 2008 I joined the forum, when it was maintained by Sven Wiegand, the creator of the TeXnicCenter editor and forum founder… Continue Reading →

The backbone of the TeX world is the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN). The single server dante.ctan.org is the core, this one and the content is maintained by the CTAN team. It provides more than 5000 TeX packages for installing… Continue Reading →

I like the idea of local TeX communities, and of TeX support in native language. It provides people who don’t read and write English fluently with access to TeX and LaTeX. Also, feeling ok with English, I enjoy reading TeX… Continue Reading →

TeX Live 2018 was released on 28 April 2018. I waited some days until I did the update (and to write here) to see if there might be any issue regarding setup or function. A few points were posted on the TeX… Continue Reading →

The iX, magazine for professional IT in German language, started a tutorial about LaTeX. The current issue 1/2018 deals with it at an advanced level: Marei Peischl introduces LaTeX based on newest features. (German blog post: on TeXwelt.de) The first part starts with a new package, that even… Continue Reading →

As I wanted to write a post about benefits of joining the TeX Users Group, I did a routine check. So I found Greg’s post and Jim’s answer on tex.co/q/217685/213 – click the link to get the full view. I… Continue Reading →

The first public release candidate of LyX 2.3 is available with an amazing amount of new features, such as native biblatex support multiple bibliographies with biblatex native microtype support dynamic quotation marks subequations left aligned equations Inkscape figure template better… Continue Reading →

Norbert Preining announced the release of a new graphic user interface for TeX Live, the TeX Live Cockpit. The TL Cockpit works on top of the TeX Live Manager aka tlmgr provides an interface to TeX Live options gives a… Continue Reading →

I just noticed, that today there is a Back to School sale at Packt Publishing: each LaTeX ebook (and other ebooks) are available for just $10 today. You can also bundle two LaTeX books and a third book for $25 all-together…. Continue Reading →

Day 2 of the SHA hacker camp. Coffee, breakfast, Internet. For the latter, I pulled a long Ethernet cable extension reel to a “datenklo”. To be safe, somehow, I installed a Cisco ASA firewall for wired access, via a dedicated… Continue Reading →

Late this year, but I’m happy to have renewed my membership in the TeX Users Group. I became a member in 2011 as part of the institutional membership of StackExchange I suggested on meta. I had a joint membership (DANTE and… Continue Reading →

Just 5 days to go, then the hacker camp SHA2017 will start. The name stands for “Still Hacking Anyway”, and the camp  belongs to a string of hacker camps that happen every 4 years. This year we will meet in… Continue Reading →

Do you know this delicious German pastry? (Photo by Guido Draheim). It’s called “ Spritzkuchen” or “Spritzring”. I thought of it when I was toying with TikZ and pgfplots. It’s similar to a twisted torus. Today I dealt with it… Continue Reading →

TeX Live 2017 has been published today. Note, we may need to wait a bit though, until the CTAN mirrors have replicated the software. Also, MacTeX 2017 is not yet ready for download, but it will follow very soon. Follow… Continue Reading →

(This article in German – auf Deutsch) At first I read it on LaTeX.org: there’s a Kickstarter project for creating a free and open source table editor for LaTeX. It’s written in JavaScript and can be web hosted. The goal of the project… Continue Reading →

It’s winter here, and we are waiting for snow. So we will use TeX instead of snow to build some fancy snowmen. For the impatient, there’s an Unicode snowman: . It’s U+2603. Copy and paste to use. For us TikZ… Continue Reading →

Happy Christmas to everyone! For all, who don’t celebrate christmas, have a great holiday season too! The picture of this greeting card was made in TikZ by cfr, our catcode specialist. (You noticed the cat.) What would christmas be without… Continue Reading →

Why do we make fancy things with TikZ? Because we can. Nils Fleischhacker created tikzpeople, a package for drawing people shapes with TikZ. It was heavily inspired by Microsoft Visio’s people shapes. It provides real pgf shapes with anchors for… Continue Reading →

Computer games and science fiction movies use procedural landscapes. Why not use TeX to generate some. The approach is: Using the diamond-square algorithm for generating the height map Using Lua for implementing the algorithm Print with pgfplots, that provides a comprehensive interface for… Continue Reading →

Since TikZ provides a mindmap library, drawing them is pretty easy: Define your styles Use the tree syntax for nesting nodes and children I liked to produce this drawing: And that’s the short code: \documentclass{article} \usepackage[landscape]{geometry} \usepackage{tikz} \usetikzlibrary{mindmap} \usepackage{dtklogos} \begin{document}… Continue Reading →

Just testing this blog, why not writing a post as an exercise. In big projects I have hundreds of sub networks. There’s a lot of small transport networks with small subnet masks, that partition a summarizing net, and there are gateways…. Continue Reading →

Here is a small report about the TUG meeting we had during the TUG 2016 conference in Toronto. I already posted it on LaTeX-Community.org, where we collect TeX conference reports since years. At 4:15 the TUG meeting started. Jim Hefferon… Continue Reading →

Every tried running LyX on a Blackberry phone? Or iOS? No problem. Scott told us at LaTeX-Community.org, that there’s a cloud service for running LyX. He and me tested it, and it seems to work well. You can reach it at:… Continue Reading →

Several virulent diseases have broken out simultaneously all over the world – that’s the board game Pandemic Legacy. Your team of players travel around the world as disease-fighting specialists, researching cures for the plagues and treating disease hotspots. Dominik Wagenführ played that… Continue Reading →