Digital Typography News

Firefox version 19.0 comes with an embedded PDF viewer. However, this viewer failed to properly display PDF files that have Greek text and have been prepared with XeLaTeX. I have contacted the PDF.js developers who were very helpful and suggested to install the development version: http://mozilla.github.com/pdf.js/extensions/firefox/pdf.js.xpi to solver the problem. Indeed, this version solved the problem and now I can read my PDF files with no problem. Thank you people for this great piece of Open Source software!

ShareLaTeX is a collaborative online LaTeX editor.  It seems more and more people are getting disappointed with word processors

PDF scissors is a site that allows users  to crop a PDF file. This is particularly useful when working with pdfLaTeX and XeLaTeX since these systems can include PDF files as images. One can download a link to her desktop. Note that the application should be opened with /usr/java/bin/javaws, just in case your browser does not know how to handle the application.

A friend of mine tweeted about a new site that allows people to prepare their LaTeX files online! The site is called writeLaTeX and it is free to everyone. From what I have seen, one cannot prepare XeLaTeX documents. Well,  I believe it would not be that difficult to modify the page so to allow people prepare XeLaTeX documents.

GMailTeX is a new browser-addon (works with all browsers!) that allows users to enter ordinary TeX/LaTeX commands in their e-mail messages (OK you are supposed to use GMail!) that are rendered as inline or display math text. Very useful tool!

Victor Eijkhout has written a book that is available online and is called The Computer Science of TeX and LaTeX. The book is very interesting as it discusses various “advanced” topics in computer science while it uses TeX and LaTeX as teaching vehicles.

MathJax is a relatively new web technology that allows people to easily add mathematical content into their web documents. For example, the following display

\begin{align}
\dot{x} & = \sigma(y-x) \\
\dot{y} & = \rho x – y – xz \\
\dot{z} & = -\beta z + xy
\end{align}

was generated by adding the following code into the web content

\begin{align}
\dot{x} & = \sigma(y-x) \\
\dot{y} & = \rho x - y - xz \\
\dot{z} & = -\beta z + xy
\end{align}

That’s simply great! People willing to add mathematical content into their wordpress blogs, should check out the MathJax-LaTeX page.

Last February, an interesting book was published entitled “Helvetica and the New York City Subway System: The True (Maybe) Story” by Scott-Martin Kosofsky. The book is about how the Helvertica typeface took over the New York subway.  It seems that very few have anticipated the impact of typefaces in our lives!

Suppose you want to use a symbol in your LaTeX document, but you don’t know the corresponding LaTeX command, then you can use the following URL:

http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html

Just draw the symbol and presto the system will show you a number of commands that produce a symbol that looks like the symbol you have drawn! Kudos to the people who have created this web page!

The new issue of Eutypon has been published and it is available from our web site. In fact, this is a double issue―it includesissues 24 and 25. Happy reading!!!