Sometimes it’s important to be extremely fussy about otherwise inconsequential things. There’s a reason why people fight over the proper pronunciation of már ‘habitation in Quenya (the m takes on an mb sound), pirates versus ninjas, and the proper placement of footnotes. It’s not that any of these particularly matter, but when pronounced, understood, or typeset correctly, such miscellanea greatly enrich the world.

For months, I’ve been distressed about how LaTeX handles footnotes. (Which, to be clear, is much better than how Word handles them.) Notes are used for subordinate details, which provide additional information, insight, and wit. In that role, they provide an important supplement to the main text.

Depending on which type of note you choose to use – foot, end, or side – there are certain rules which govern how they should be typeset. Robert Bringhurst, author of “The Elements of Typographic Style” and the authority on book typography lays it out pretty well:

Footnotes are the very emblem of fussiness, but they have their uses. If they are short and infrequent, they can be made economical of space, easy to find when wanted, and, when not wanted, easy to ignore …

In the main text, superscript numbers are used to indicate notes because superscript numbers minimize interruption. They are typographic asides: small because that is an expression of relative importance, and raised for two reasons: to keep them out of the flow of the main text, and to make them easier to find. In the note itself, the number is not an aside, but a target. Therefore, the number in the note should be full size.¹

Unfortunately, this isn’t how LaTeX does it. Instead of having a superscript in the text and a full sized numeral in the notes, it uses superscript for both.² Not only is it wrong (as far as anything can be wrong in a war of opinions), but it’s really hard to change. Most of the document classes only give you one or two options for the footnotes, and they’re not generally any better than the default. Nor does the heavy of all footnote packages, footmisc, provide a fix. Which means, if you want to adjust the way that the number appears, you have to hack the class at a lower level. (Sigh.)

Unless, you’re using memoir, that is.

It turns out that memoir provides hooks to customize everything about the footnotes. This includes the style, the size of the font, and … the numerical label. (If you’d like, you can even use symbols.) The code below will give you properly formatted references:

• superscript in the text
• full sized numeral in the note
• numeral out-dented into the margin by 1 em
• note text typeset left flush

\footmarkstyle{#1}
\setlength{\footmarkwidth}{-1.0em}
\setlength{\footmarksep}{1.0em}

The \footmarkstyle macro is used to remove the superscript, \footmarkwidth is the size of the box containing the note label, \footmarksep is how much to offset the numeral from the text.

Notes

1. The footnote is flagged by a superscript in the text, but the note itself is introduced by an outdented figure of the same size for the text of the note. (Taken from “The Elements of Style,” page 69.)

² Which is, frankly, unsightly and distracting.

Tags: Footnotes,LaTeX,LyX
Categories: Computer, Design, Miscellaneum, Typography
1 Comment »

Though it’s not really related to my work, one of my side interests is is the workflow of writers. I’m fascinated by where ideas come from, the tools we use to corral them, and how great thinkers create. While a portion of that interest derives from a practical desire to emulate their techniques, I’m also very curious about the underlying ecosystem of success, creativity, and innovation.

As I’ve traipsed across the ideas landscape and meandered the moors of their implementation, there is one lesson that rears its head over and over: great success – whether intellectual or commercial – turns on the hinges of small details. Steve Jobs and his iPhone, for example, weren’t successful because iPhone was new and innovative – in most meanings of the word, it wasn’t – but because it superbly implemented a core set of powerful features. It, in effect, got all of the important things right.

While I can (and will actually, it’s part of the promotional plan for the book) write a whole blog post on this idea, I wanted to talk briefly about one example in a Lifehack post. (This is mostly because I stumbled across it the other day and have found it to be brilliantly useful.) Specifically:

What is the best way to structure margin notes and comments in a book or report?

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Tags: Getting Shit Done,LaTeX,LyX
Categories: Lifehacks, Typography, Writing/Literature
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Note: The normal programming of the website is still temporarily on hold in an effort to finish the Open Source Writing book.  I fully intend to pick things up very soon, but I must first send a finished draft to my editor/publisher.  They’ve been very patient and I’ve been irresponsible.

While I am trying to work in seclusion (or at least a reasonable approximation thereof) in order to finish the Open Source Writing Book, I put together a layout that I wanted to share.  (Mostly because I liked it and thought it cool.)

It covers the typographical niceties that distinguish a typesetting system from a traditional Word Processor and will appear in the “Writing and Editing” chapter of the book as a double page spread.  (In this layout, the material appears as a single, long-form poster.)  I’d love to hear people’s comments, thoughts or suggestions.  Particularly if there are any additional elements that I missed and you think might be included.

You can download a PDF version here.  Many thanks to Dario Taraborelli for creating his wonderful essay, the Beauty of LaTeX, from which this layout borrows heavily.

The poster is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share and Share Alike license.  Copyright 2010, Rob Oakes.  Some Rights Reserved.

Tags: LaTeX,LyX,Typesetting
Categories: Design, rapidBOOKS, Typography, Writing/Literature
2 Comments »

Yesterday evening, I gave a presentation to the local Linux User’s Group about how to do research, write, and publish stuff using Linux.  In particular, I tried to provide a detailed summary (oxymoron?) about how many (excellent) open source tools can work together.

I think it went acceptably well.  Which mostly means that there were no death threats and few angry complaints.

Actually, that’s not really true.  Everyone was uniformly wonderful, understanding, helpful and gracious.  People asked great questions and made insightful comments.  It was wonderful a way to spend the evening.

As part of the meeting, I promised that I would share my slides and (rudimentary) speaking notes.  Thus,  as promised, you will find both in the image gallery below.  The speaking notes have been incorporated into the slideshow and can be accessed by clicking on the slide that interests you.

(If you would a PDF version of the slides, you can download those here, sans speaking notes.)

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Tags: LaTeX,LyX,Open Source Writing,Publishing
Categories: Art, Computer, Cool Stuff, Typography, Writing/Literature
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Over the past two days, there has been an interesting (and wide ranging) conversation happening on the LyX users mailing list.  Steve Litt, author of the troubleshooters series of books, started a conversation about favorite LaTeX packages.   Then, someone wrote in to ask about document classes and the best way to craft a thesis.

This finally morphed into a conversation on the aesthetics of document design.  (Or at least, that’s I summarized the main point of the thread in my head.)  It’s also the point that I decided to jump into the conversation.

I sent the following letter in response to a question about which fonts I prefer to use when writing with LaTeX.  It lays out some of my thoughts on fonts, layout and document appearance.  I liked it so much, that I thought I would post it here.  (Yes, I know you’re not supposed to smitten by your own writing.)

Enjoy!

Note: This isn’t exactly the letter that was sent to the LyX-Users list.  Just the one I wish I had sent.  It has been proofread, edited for clarifty, and expanded when compared to the original.  I have also toned down the snark (if only barely).

Image from http://new.myfonts.com/newsletters/cc/200711.html.  Shows letter form sketches from the notebook of Dino dos Santos.

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Tags: Fonts,LaTeX,Typesetting
Categories: Design, Typography
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From a structural standpoint, memos are interesting documents.  They share some attributes in common with a letter, and others in common with a structured report.  Because of this, LaTeX uses have historically used a document class meant for one of those documents when composing memos.  There isn’t anything wrong with that.  It’s very easy to begin a new “article” and then add the needed “To”, “From”, “Subject” and “Date” lines manually.

However, while this is easy, it still requires that you do a bit of “finger painting”.  As a (more or less) dedicated user of LaTeX, I dislike finger painting.  Quite a bit, actually.  It might even be accurate to say that I am philosophically opposed to finger painting.

The major advantage of using LaTeX is that, like XHTML and CSS, it can separate your content from the markup and formatting that determines its appearance.  When you fingerpaint, however, you mix them all together.  Your appearance syntax and the content of your document get inseparably intertwined.  In some cases, you couldn’t separate them even if you wanted to.  For that reason, finger painting is just wrong.  But even though finger paining in LaTeX may feel wrong, I’ve never had a reason to create a better solution.

That is, until a few a weeks ago.

Quite recently, I’ve become involved in a new project and because of what the project is and the need to official keep records of communication, I’ve found myself writing memos.  Lot’s of memos.  More memos than I’ve ever written at any other point in my life.  Moreover, I’m going to be writing (many) memos for the foreseeable future.  On Friday, after finishing (yet another) memo, I decided that it was time to create a more formal memo template/document class for LaTeX.

I’m calling it texMemo.

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Tags: LaTeX,LyX,texMemo
Categories: Computer, Programming, Writing/Literature
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Many Linux distributions package the most common LaTeX classes and utilities and then make them available through their repositories.  When you install programs such as LyX or Kile, these packages are downloaded and installed at the same time.

This is tremendously convenient.  It means that most of the software you would ever use is a simple apt-get away; and, under most circumstances, it’s a good idea to use the software available from your distribution repositories.  The package maintainers and other behind-the-scenes people make sure that the available versions are both secure and stable.

Sometimes, however, it can be advantageous to have both the “stable” LaTeX distribution and a “custom” LaTeX distribution installed side by side.  As one example of when this might be useful, consider the following: up until the most recent version of Ubuntu (version 10.04, Lucid Lynx), the only LaTeX distribution available through the package system was TeXLive 2007 (which had actually been released at the end of 2006), which was three years out of date.

During that time, the TeXLive developers had been very hard at work.  Thousands of bugs were resolved, new document classes were introduced, and (best of all) TeXLive added a package manager – which meant that you could add new packages without needing to manually download and install them.  Taken together, this meant that there were some very compelling reasons to use a newer version of TeXLive.

To simply replace TeXLive was possible, but could be difficult and time consuming.   Moreover, it caused problems with package dependencies and could break things.  There is nothing worse than trying to troubleshoot and fix a broken LaTeX solution.  The much better solution was to install only a few core utilities (thereby satisfying the package requirements of LyX, Kile and other tools) and then installing the newer version alongside the old.

This article will explain how you can do that.  It will show you how to manually install a LaTeX distribution and demonstrate how to configure the necessary variables so that the system will use it instead of the older version.

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Tags: LaTeX,LyX
Categories: Computer, Writing/Literature
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In the past few months, I’ve written several articles about the ways LyX can be customized.  These included a brief introduction to layout files and how they relate to document classes in addition to a tour of character styles and how you can add them to the LyX local layout.  What I have not written about, though, is one of the most important ways of extending LyX, the module.

Ever since version 1.6 of LyX, the core LyX developers have worked very hard to make LyX a modular system.  Instead of hard coding values and options – as they had done previously – they’ve instead placed all of the needed information in configuration files that can be edited and modified by users.  This is a Very Good Thng.  It means that (given enough motivation), you can customize LyX to behave exactly was you wish.  You can change the default document classes, styles, fonts and anything else that your little heart desires.  It also means that any extensions you create will exist as first-class citizens.  They have access to all of the internal wizardry as the default document classes and features.

In order to make this transition work, it was necessary to have certain chunks of code that could be switched on when needed and switched off when not required, and that’s how “modules” were born.  In a lot of ways, you might think of modules as document plugins.  They let you do stuff that, while not required, can greatly improve your editing experience.  (Modules are switched on and off from the “Document Settings” pane.)

They let you do things like run Sweave code, add additional theorem environments, or apply a different style to your text.  But unlike a layout file, they are not tied to any particular document class or type; which makes them very powerful.  In fact, nearly all of them they can be used with any document type that LyX supports.

There are two main types of modules:

1. Modules that contain all of the code needed to implement a particular feature (or modify an existing one) and do not reference external packages.
2. Modules that load existing LaTeX styles/packages and translate their features into insets, commands and headings.

In both cases, modules serve as a container for the code.  You can use a module to package code that would normally live in a document layout file, or you can use code that might have been placed in the local layout.  The code may be a document header, a new LaTeX command, a character style, a custom inset, or any other type of user customization that LyX supports.

The biggest difference between using a module instead of a layout, of course, is that when the code is placed in a module, you can then add it to any document on your system.  This makes modules a tremendously flexible way to reuse customizations that you’ve created.  In fact, in nearly all cases, they are the best way to package your customizations for use on your own system or for sharing with others.

In this article, I’d like to introduce the module.  I will explain its position in the larger LyX/LaTeX “big picture”, its internal anatomy and provide a few examples of how it can be used to add new features.

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Tags: Customization,LaTeX,lettrine,LyX,LyX-Outline,stringstrings
Categories: Computer, rapidBOOKS, Writing/Literature
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Cite-While-You-Write applets are extensions for word processors that give you access to your reference library while writing a research paper, book, or thesis.  They can be used to insert citations into the text and make it easy to automatically generate a “Works Cited” page.

For the past several days, I’ve been working on a book section that compares many popular Cite-While-You-Write plugins.  While trying to wrap my head around the different programs and what features they offer, I thought that an overview table would be helpful.

Note: If you see any errors, or there are other features that you think should be added, please let me know in the comments.  I will try and post regular updates.  (Last Updated: May 20, 2010; 2:55 PM)

Tags: Cite-While-You-Write,LaTeX,LyX,Microsoft Word
Categories: Computer, rapidBOOKS, Writing/Literature
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While LaTeX is a powerful way to prepare and typeset many types of publications, there are certain times when it is both more convenient and efficient to have a graphical user interface.  This is why the document processor, LyX, was created.

LyX combines many of the best characterizes of a Word Processor with the strengths of LaTeX; and the result is a program that gives you the power of semantic writing without having to laboriously climb the LaTeX learning curve.

But as wonderful as LyX might be, it isn’t perfect.

One of LyX’s biggest limitations is the relatively small number of LaTeX document classes that can be used with it.  This limitation is due to the fact that even though LyX uses LaTeX to create its final output, it isn’t able to directly read and parse LaTeX styles.  Rather, it requires a special type of file (known as a “layout”) to help translate between what a user sees on the screen and what eventually appears on the printed page.

Unfortunately, creating layout files is a bit of an arcane art; and as a result, many document classes are never adapted to work with LyX.

(For more information about how the relationship between LyX and LaTeX –including an example of how to create a custom layout from an existing document class – please see my earlier article, Customizing LyX: Create an NIH Grant Proposal Template.)

This is not something that I would like to see happen with my custom Curriculum Vitae document class, xetexCV.  I spent a great deal of time developing and debugging the document class and  as a result, I would like to see people using it, including LyX users.  As a result, in this article, I will introduce a layout file that allows you to use xetexCV from inside of LyX and I will show how LyX users can enjoy the same amenities (including an automatically generated bibliography) enjoyed by LaTeX purists.

What I will not discuss, however, are topics that I’ve written about previously.  This includes the overview of xetexCV, its use and installation; the dissection of the LaTeX code and my design choices; or a detailed set of instructions on how to automatically generate a list of references from your BibTeX database.  As some of that information is pertinent to things discussed here, you may wish to read the earlier entries in this series prior to proceeding.

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Tags: LaTeX,LyX,xetexCV
Categories: Computer, rapidBOOKS, Writing/Literature
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