cameron.bracken.bz

This is one way to check for the version of PGF that is installed in an automated way. First create a tex file with the following contents: \documentclass{article} \usepackage{tikz} \batchmode \makeatletter \typeout{PGFVersion=\pgfversion} \@@end Say you named it test-pgf-version.tex. Then: pdflatex test-pgf-version.tex cat test-pgf-verson.log | grep PGFVersion | sed ‘s/PGFVersion=//’ should display the version number. I [...]

This is mostly a reference for a me but also a good reminder for those using TeXLive on Mac OS X (a.k.a. MacTeX). From the document “What Is Installed.pdf” in /Applications/TeX: Incidentally, if you want to add files to TEX Live for one particular user, install them in a similar tree ~/Library/texmf where ~/Library is [...]

At long last pgfSweave has finally made its way to CRAN. http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/pgfSweave/index.html The pgfSweave R package is about speed and style of graphics. For speed, the package provides capabilities for “caching” graphics generated with Sweave on top of the caching funcitonality of cacheSweave. For style the pgfSweave package facilitates the integration of R graphics with [...]

The tikzDevice package provides a new graphics device for R which enables direct output of graphics in a LaTeX-friendly way. The device output consists of files containing instructions for the TikZ graphics language and may be imported directly into LaTeX documents using the \input{} command. The beta version of tikzDevice is now available here. An [...]

Development of the R package tikzDevice has been underway for about a month now. This package allows for the output of R graphics as TikZ commands. Charlie Sharpsteen and I have gotten it into an alpha stage. There is no real documentation but there is plenty of comments in the code. We have a R-forge [...]

I recently had to write a memo. After playing around a bit, I decided on the amsart documentclass. I wrote a style file to define the memo header; I think it looks good with the general style of the amsart class. The contents of the style file are: \ProvidesPackage{memo} \RequirePackage{setspace} \newcommand{\memotopline}[2]{{% \noindent\sc #1}{\begin{quote}#2\end{quote}}} \newenvironment{memoheader}[1] { [...]

The Blog post Online LaTeX is a great overview online of the services available for typesetting LaTeX. There are a lot of sites providing inline equation compilation which one is the best in terms of quality and ease of use. I wanted to give a visual comparison of all of the service which provide inline [...]

I finally got around to tweaking some of the the default Beamer themes that I like and putting together my own template. It is very subdued but stylish with a bit of flare. I does not include a footer but does include a running section header from the miniframes outertheme. Other than that it contains [...]

Sweave is an awesome utility for including the output of R code in a LaTeX document which I have started using regularly. TeXShop is my favorite editor/viewer for LaTeX under Mac OS X for many reasons. One of which is the speed of the edit -> compile -> view process which it enables. Therefore, I [...]

The xtable package in R can output R data as latex tables. Used in conjunction with Sweave it is possible to automatically generate tables in a report. Needless to say this provides a really appealing possibility of never typing data into a table again. The only problem is that I think the default latex tables [...]