Recently, I've had the pleasure of having to write many short
documents in LaTex (short as in 1 to 6 pages). I haven't written a lot
in LaTex since my school time, so this was a very nice flashback to
those times.
However, since then PDF is the new "standard" format, not PostScript,
so I had to do a bit of adjustement. The biggest change is that
pdflatex doesn't "like" EPS files for images, so what to do?
As usual, the road to enlightenment has many turns
First, reading docs, I said simple, create a PNG file, scaled at high
resolution, then include it scaled down so that it
kind of loses the
ugly scaled-bitmap feel.
But that's not a nice solution: it is still bitmap, just looks like
aliased. So I wanted another solution and threw
gnuplot's
set
terminal png and
fig2dev's
-L png out the door.
Next was, of course, embedding PDFs, since
pdflatex supports
that. However, gnuplot's
pdfcairo output is not as nice as I
wanted. It works, but only kind of. Issues with font consistency and
scaling, etc.
Then I remembered the nice
pslatex output from xfig, and learned
that there's a
pdftex output. And that
gnuplot also can generate
.fig output. So I went and redid my Makefiles and gnuplot command
files and everything, and suddenly all looked almost right. There are
still a few issues:
- if you select an invalid font in gnuplot (
set terminal fig font
"foo"), it will simply ignore that font, without any warning
- while you can tell it to set the "special" fig flag on the emmitted
text (
set terminal fig textspecial) , you can't give gnuplot a
LaTex font name, since it only has definitions for the normal
PostScript fonts; this can be worked around via giving it a
PostScript font that has the same index as the desired LaTex font
- the font size specified in gnuplot is not really influencing the
actual fonts used in LaTex
- as xfig doesn't know the actual font rendering box as computed by
LaTex, you lose the (simple, but good) WYSIWYG features, and need to
go back and forth between the created PDF and xfig to change the
actual layout
- if you use a
\resizebox around the inclusion of the pdf_t
file, the fonts are scaled too, which is plain wrong 
So while this setup has some drawbacks, it works well enough. I was
happy to simply have a well defined workflow.
But then I wanted to do a simple graph (of a 3-wire sorting network),
and I realised that positioning all of that using xfig will be
painful. I kept stumbling upon
pgf and
tikz during my previous
investigations, and I said I should check it out.
Wow.
tikz and
pgfplot. While you lose a bit on the graphing
capabilities, you also gain
a lot. Basically one can replace both
xfig (instead of hand-drawn diagrams you can actually write them in
code, programatically, no more guessing) and
gnuplot (so that you
have consistent fonts/scaling). I was so amazed at this excellent
combination that I've converted for all my new docs to this.
And now I have the problem that I keep wanting to write LaTex code in
ikiwiki
PS: Yes, I've been busy lately, so busy that my Debian work has
mostly been suspended. Should be back in about a month or so.
I've just put the slides of
my LOADays kerberos/ldap talk online. The talk wasn't recorded, and most
of the interesting bits were in what I said rather than what's in the
slides, but maybe someone finds them interesting. There's also slightly
more information in the handouts,
though even that doesn't contain everything I said during the talk.
I'll also point to these three articles in
my blog, which I wrote a few years ago, and which explain how kerberos
works and how you should set it up.
If all else fails, and you have a budget, I do have rates. Or catch me on IRC
:-)
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So we're just over 2 weeks away from our next set of local
elections in the UK (May 5th), and alongside those elections we're
also being asked about switching to a new voting system for future
elections. For a long time we've used the simple First Past The Post
(FPTP) system here, but now we have the possbility of moving to
Alternative Vote (AV) instead.
First Past The Post
FPTP is simple to understand - the person who receives more votes
than any single other person wins. But that simplicity is the only
good thing, and there are many problems with it. It's unfair: in an
election with 10 candidate, it's possible for a winner to have just
11% of the vote, even in the case where the other 89% of voters would
consider them to be the worst option. It's also very susceptible to
tactical voting, leading to nasty tactics in parties' election
literature like claiming "party foo cannot win here, so don't waste
your vote on them - vote for us instead!". See
this 
After two weeks of work, I've just released
(This is part of a series of posts on 
Another Friday night at the Chicago Symphony with some live jazz, and once again
I've just voted
Stefano Zacchiroli for Debian Project Leader (DPL). The voting period closes tonight, so if you are a Debian developer and haven't yet voted, please do!
Debian uses a 