Week 31 of 2022
Everything
- Although registered to participate in TUG 2022 (TeX User Group meeting), I couldn't attend it due to Francisco's birth. But now I'm starting to catch up on my activities and process items from my backlog. TUG 2022 is available on Youtube.
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- Nice to hear about an alternative TeX and LaTeX engine written in Rust: Tectonic. Its source code is openly available and of course, I tried it! After building it (
cargo build –release), I run it against the paper for SAST. It through an error:error: amssymb.sty:261: LaTeX Error: Command `\Bbbk' already defined`. Some research on StackExchange showed it was related to the packageamssymb, which was used by the .tex (but not by the .cls). As the paper did not require that package, I simply removed the dependency on that package.
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- Nice talk by Ulrike Fischer and Joseph Wright on news about LaTeX: several improvements that make old packages obsolete! Some examples:
- Several packages are not required anymore in latest LaTeX, as they are part of core LaTeX and UTF-8 is the default encoding: inputenc, expl3, xparse, textcomp, grffile.
- Hook management has been improved, with new commands (\AddToHook, \DeclareHookRule, \ShowHook) and hooks everywhere (file, package, environment, command, document, paragraph, etc.
- Several commands related to text case change were created or improved: \MakeUppercase, \MakeLowercase, \MakeTitlecase, \CaseSwitch, \AddToNoCaseChangeList
- Some interesting packages for debugging: structuredlog.
- Some interesting commands for debugging: \ShowCommand
- Commands to create commands: \NewDocumentCommand, \NewCommandCopy.
- Other interesting commands: \DeclareDocumentMetadata.
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- I learned about a LaTeX compiler in Python: https://github.com/plastex/plastex. Nice to hear about this! Most LaTeX engines are based upon original LaTeX or mix parsing and rendering. This project has a very clear distinction between parsing and rendering, which make it much more useful for text proofing and further processing.
- Another option to LaTeX parsing is pandoc, but it is written in Haskell.
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