cyocum

So, I had actually been wondering this for quite a while as I had thought that I would at some point be asked to typeset a journal or conference proceedings. I searched on Google but I could never get anything worthwhile to come up. However, I decided the time for research was over and the time to just attempt it was on me; this is also because I now have a publisher for the colloquium proceedings that I am running in the summer.

So, first of all some code

\documentclass[b5paper, 12pt, openright]{book}

\usepackage{xltxtra}

\setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text,%
SlantedFont={Linux Libertine Slanted O}]{Linux Libertine O}

\usepackage{polyglossia}

\setmainlanguage[variant=british]{english}

\setotherlanguage[variant=ancient]{greek}

\usepackage[b5paper, top=2.5cm, bottom=2.5cm, left=3cm, right=3cm]{geometry}

\usepackage[style=verbose-ibid, backend=biber]{biblatex}

\begin{document}

\frontmatter

\tableofcontents

\mainmatter

\begin{refsection}[Art1.bib]
\input{Art1.tex}
\end{refsection}

\begin{refsection}[Art2.bib]
\input{Art2.tex}
\end{refsection}

\end{document}

A few things about this code should jump out at you. First, I am using XeLaTeX rather than PDFLaTeX. I do this because it has a much, much easier font selection system than PDFLaTeX. Second, you will notice that I am using biblatex and biber. Like Modern Perl, the LaTeX community have moved on from BibTeX to biblatex and biber (the bibtex replacement) make working with bibliographies an absolute pleasure.

So, a few things to say here. The refsection is the biblatex way of breaking bibliographies across chapters. The argument is the bibliography file where the bibtex database format, which is still in use, is stored.

So, on to the problem most people have. How do I put the author’s name and the title of their paper in the table of contents? So here is some sample code from the Art1.tex file:

\chapter*{Title \\
Author}
\addcontentsline{toc}{chapter}{Author -- \emph{Title}}

So, as you can see here, using the \chapter* command which doesn’t put the chapter information into the table of contents, you can then use the \addcontentsline command to manually put whatever you like on the command line. There is one thing you need to do however unless you want all the sections and subsections to appear in the table of contents: you must use \section* in all instances otherwise things look odd. So, the last thing you need to do is put your \printbibliography at the end of the file and do the same for each article and you are done.

So, git has the —all command, which adds all tracked and untracked files for staging to commit. I really dislike this because I wanted something that would just add all the tracked files for staging to commit. So, a friend of mine in the office said that he had a shell script which did it so I give you git add for only tracked files:

git status | grep "modified: " | awk '{print $3}' | xargs git add

While I generally like Ocaml (as some of you may have guessed), there is one pet peeve of mine with the language: record fields names are module wide rather than record specific. For example:

type t = { blah : int }

The record field blah is now a module wide name so I cannot reuse it. Thus, field names that happen to be useful in two contexts are not allowed. Although, to be honest, having two record names the same is probably a sign of a refactor point.

For a very long time, I was rather stuck because, as a scholar in the humanities who uses LaTeX, I could not get people to use LaTeX because they could not annotate people’s work without a professional copy of Acrobat. Well, I have figured out how to do this using Evince. How you may ask? It is a simple process but it is rather hidden and it should be more prominent when looking at PDFs.

These instructions should work on Evince 3.2 in Xubuntu 11.10.

• Open your desired PDF in Evince.
• In the upper left, you should see the word “Thumbnails” and a down arrow.
• Press the down arrow and choose “Annoations”. This will show you the list of annotations in the current PDF.
• You should see an “add” tab. Click on the add tab. There should be a small pencil icon.
• Click on the pencil icon. Your cursor should turn into a plus sign.
• Click where you want to put your annotation. A yellow icon should appear and a small yellow window with your name in the title bar should appear.
• Type your annotation. I had a small bit of trouble getting it to recognize my typing but resizing the yellow window did the trick.
• When you are done, you will need to save the PDF as a different file. I am not sure why this is but if I saved it on top of the old file, it didn’t take the annotations.

Yay!! You can now annotate PDFs in Linux. My life has gotten so much easier now.

My GF recently published a book, The Girl in the Bunker, which has a ebook version and a physical version. This caused me to think about the future of books (also, given the fact that I will probably never get my thesis published as a monograph, I had cause to ponder). So my basic premise is that ebooks will be the larger market than physical books. The difference between the two will be that ebooks will be more like renting a book, see The Right To Read, while a physical book will be a true ownership position.

The difference will be reflected in the price. My GF’s ebook is priced at just over £1 while her physical book is priced at £10. The difference is ownership. In the case of an ebook you will never own the book itself, see Amazon’s revocation of 1984 as an example. The difference between the price of the ebook and the price of the physical book is the convenience of the digital form and the lack of true ownership of the ebook.

There is also a difference in risk. The risk of an ebook is that the proprietor of the site whence you purchased the book could at any time disappear and take your ebook with them. This means that the risk needs to be adjusted in the renter’s favor. To entice people to rent an ebook means that it will need to be priced such that if the website shuts down, the renter is not out of pocket too much and thus will take the risk of renting the ebook.

So, while ebooks will probably be the larger market, I do not expect books to disappear any time soon due to the difference in legal positions and the risk involved. As a scholar, this means that while it would be nice to have digital editions of the books that I need, I will more than likely continue to purchase books as I cannot afford to have a book vanish. Also, some people like to collect things so while the market in plain books will diminish, the market in autographed copies will probably take up some of the slack.