What editor do you use for LaTeX?

 emacs

Does everything I want it to do. Been using it since the 80's and expect it will be there until I die. Is on every system I use or will likely ever use, either in a GUI form or in a terminal form, and probably in both forms. Has never, ever, lost or corrupted anything I ever wrote.

Asymptote and opacity

 I am a terrible draw-er.  When I first started using computers, I got a tutorial for MS Paint, which wanted to walk me through drawing a picture of a magician's hat and wand.  "First use the Ellipse Tool to draw an ellipse" it said, and there was an accompanying picture.  I complied and got a pretty good copy.  "Now extend to get the body of the hat."  I could not.  No matter how many times I followed the steps, the body of the hat did not look right and I was unable to figure out how to change it to make it look like, you know, a hat body. In between my ears, where there ought to be a place to draw pictures, there is a gap.  A hole.  A yawing chasm.

I now rely on using systems where you say, "Put the camera at (10,5,4), point it at the origin, and show the extended elliptical surface."  This way, I am sure I get a good picture.  Specifically, I use Asymptote.  It is a programming language that outputs graphics, which are suitable for mathematics writing (including that it integrates with LaTeX).  One of its strengths is a great tutorial.

But all software has glitches and there has been an issue with opacity.  Opacity is partial transparency.  An example of using it is when you draw a plane in 3-space and you want see the axes when they are behind the plane.

Asymptote relies on Ghostscript as a back end, to handle the initial graphical output.  Some time ago, years ago, Ghostscript had a security issue affecting the Asymptote graphics that use opacity.  For a few years, the workaround was to call Asymptote with `asy -nosafe filename'.  No longer.  Here is part of a post I recently made to the Asymptote mailing list.

With this test.asy,

import settings;
settings.outformat="pdf";
settings.render=0;

unitsize(1pt);

draw((0,0)--(1,1), red+opacity(0.7));
// draw((0,0)--(1,1), red);

I get the GS failure

Loading test from test.asy
gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -P -dALLOWPSTRANSPARENCY -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dEPSCrop -dSubsetFonts=true -dEmbedAllFonts=true -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dEncodeColorImages=true -dEncodeGrayImages=true -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dAutoRotatePages=/None -g612x792 -dDEVICEWIDTHPOINTS=3 -dDEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS=3 -sOutputFile=test.pdf test_.eps
Error: /undefined in .setfillconstantalpha
Operand stack:
   0.7
Execution stack:
   %interp_exit   .runexec2   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   2   %stopped_push   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   false   1   %stopped_push   1990   1   3   %oparray_pop   1989   1   3   %oparray_pop   1988   1   3   %oparray_pop   --nostringval--   1977   1   3   %oparray_pop   1833   1   3   %oparray_pop   --nostringval--   %errorexec_pop   .runexec2   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   2   %stopped_push   --nostringval--
Dictionary stack:
   --dict:739/1123(ro)(G)--   --dict:0/20(G)--   --dict:79/200(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Current file position is 284
GPL Ghostscript 9.50: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
  _shipout(prefix,f,currentpatterns,format,wait,view,t);
          ^
/usr/local/texlive/2021/texmf-dist/asymptote/plain_shipout.asy: 104.11: runtime: shipout failed

The error happens whether I use the -nosafe option or not. If I comment out the opacity-containing line and uncomment the other, then the error goes away and a correct .pdf comes out.

I recognized the `Error: /undefined in .setfillconstantalpha'.  My old nemesis is back.  Turns out, recently the Ghostscript people have implemented different operators to avoid the security issues.  So the option `-nosafe' no longer works, because you can't just ignore the security issues with the operators, since those operators are gone.  Instead, you have to worry about using specific versions of Ghostscript.  Yech. 

Anyway, the point of this post is to spread spread the word from the mailing list about the work-around.  (1) Download a known-good Ghostscript, as with gs 9.52 (watch out, 9.54 is back to not working, for instance).  Then for compiling with Asymptote, you can specify an alternate ghostscript location with settings.gs, or with the -gs command line option, or with the ASYMPTOTE_GS environment variable.  

Thanks to John and the other Asymptote folks for really useful software!

Why TeX Live?

I am sometimes asked why I recommend that people install TeX Live, even on the Windows platform, to people installing a TeX distribution.

Of course, on Windows people could choose the MiKTeX  distribution.  There is no doubt about it: lots of people around the world use this system and it does great for them. 

The two have essentially the same software (MiKTeX is somewhat more relaxed about license requirements and so carries a few packages that TeX Live does not).  So what is it about TeX Live that tips the scale for me?   I see two differences.

1) The first is that MiKTeX can do the on-the-fly installation of packages. That is, if you get a LaTeX source file from someone that uses a package that your MiKTeX does not already have it installed then it goes out on the interwebs and gets it (from the MiKTeX repository, not just from any old place).  That's neat.

(MiKTeX can do this but TeX Live cannot because MiKTeX is a one-platform system.  So it knows what supporting software, and what version of that software, is installed.)

But, although on-the-fly is neat, I personally don't find that I need it. My practice is to install the full version of TeX Live and I almost never need anything else.

Sometimes people respond that TeX Live full is very big.  It is, in 1995 terms. But today is today.  My kids download whole movies and think nothing of it. I use TeX during perhaps 20% of my waking day, so the size seems to me to be not much. (And, frankly, my TeX Live installation is a couple of years old. My work buys me a new computer every three years and I install then and forget about it.)

So doing on-the-fly, while cool, is just not relevant to the great majority of my work. I suspect that it is not relevant to the overwhelming majority of the people who ask me which distribution they should install.  If you need it, well then of course I'm sure it is important to you.

2) The second difference is that TeX Live is an example of a good project in Free stuff.  There is an understanding that handing people bits, even bits that are Free, does not suffice.

MiKTeX is really a one man show. A very admirable project, for sure, and I don't know how he does it, but a person worries about errant busses. 

Said in a less flippant way, the TeX Live project is connected to others.  There are core people, but there is an understanding that connections bring real benefits.  For example, it is coupled to the TeX User Group and other such organizations. These are folks who provide a forum such as the annual TUG meeting and next year's Pratical TeX for interested parties to get together, provide a journal, and provide financial development support to the extent that they can. In my experience all this stuff matters, a great deal, in ensuring that TeX and friends continue to be there, and to be relevant, for years to come.

It is reason number 2 that persuades me.

Curated list of LaTeX packages

I have been asked what are the core packages that a LaTeX user should know.  Not often, but it has happened.  

Here is my list. These are personal choices so folks may disagree, but what can you do with opinions besides spread them around? In any event, I think these are popular and reliable packages.

• To change margins, page size, orientation, etc., use geometry
• To make headers a person reaches for fancyhdr
• Tables of contents, lists of figures, etc. tocloft
• To make titles, think of titlesec
• Make an index with makeindex
• To get arbitrary fonts use XeLaTeX and fontspec 
• Personally, more than BibTeX I like BibLaTeX but I know next to nothing about it
• Math amsmath (I load this by instead loading mathtools which makes some improvements), and amsfonts, as well as theorem environments with amsthm
• To make lists use enumitem
• Make captions with caption and control float placement with float (I may be wrong about this last; I don't typically use floats.)
• Make cross-references with the one-r-ed cleveref
• Links with hyperref (but load it last of all the package you load)
• URL's and filenames and file paths with url.sty (but hyperref makes some improvements, so if you are using hyperref just go with that)
• For colors use xcolor
• Load graphics with graphicx
• Code listings and verbatim text with listings. (Make single quotes come out right in verbatim with upquote)
• Many people draw in-place graphics with TikZ (Personally I use Asymptote)
• Make presentations with beamer
• Make PDF file do copy and paste, and search with cmap
• If you are making a PDF, you can toss in microtype for improvements that I am too thick to see, but I put it in because what the heck?
• I like footnotes at the page bottom so I use footmisc (but I hack to change the spacing, which is not doable otherwise)
• Make an index with makeindex
• Write answers to exercises to external file with answers

Administering TeX Live on Ubuntu

The TeX that comes in the Ubuntu package manager is a couple of years old (I have Ubuntu 12.04 LTS here in 2012 and the package manager has TeX Live 2009).  For many people that won't matter but for my text Linear Algebra I needed some more recent packages, which needed a more recent LaTeX kernel ... . So on the urging of a number of smart folks I installed TeX Live 2012 from tug.org.  Here is my experience.

I kept the package manager's packages installed.  One reason is that I know from past experience that if I drop those packages then when I want to install related materials from the package manager, such as AUCtex or Asymptote, then the package manager will complain about unmet dependencies, and I'll try a --force install  and later there will be an update ... and anyway at some point so that chaos sets in.  (Lars Madsen posted a way to avoid this with his knowledge of the package system but of the choices available I went another way, partly because I didn't entirely understand his process and so would have trouble adjusting it if I needed to.)

A first go

I downloaded TeX Live.  It put things in the default of /usr/local/texlive.   My local files go in /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local.  I changed the PATH variable in /etc/profile (maybe I should have used /etc/environment instead, or in addition?) and logged out and back in again.

To check  my setup I copied some personal styles and classes.

    ftpmaint@millstone:~$ ls /usr/local/texlive/texmf-local/tex/latex/local
    charis.sty  gentium.sty  memo.cls  present.sty
    conc.sty    jh.sty       mins.cls  pyweb.cls

I tried to remake the file database

    ftpmaint at millstone:~$ sudo texhash
    [sudo] password for ftpmaint: 
    texhash: Updating /usr/local/share/texmf/ls-R... 
    texhash: Updating /var/lib/texmf/ls-R-TEXMFMAIN... 
    texhash: Updating /var/lib/texmf/ls-R-TEXLIVE... 
    texhash: Updating /var/lib/texmf/ls-R... 
    texhash: Done. 

but after then issuing kpsewhich conc.sty failed.  Why?

Turns out (I am skipping over a great deal of head-scratching and googling here), on Ubuntu the sudo command was using the Ubuntu tex's texhash

    ftpmaint at millstone:~$ which texhash
    /usr/local/texlive/2012/bin/i386-linux/texhash
    ftpmaint at millstone:~$ sudo which texhash
    /usr/bin/texhash

rather than tug.org's because it has its own PATH.

    ftpmaint at millstone:~$ echo $PATH
    /usr/local/texlive/2012/bin/i386-linux:/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
    ftpmaint at millstone:~$ echo 'echo $PATH' | sudo sh
    /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin

Oops.

I got around it by calling the program with its full path.

    ftpmaint at millstone:~$ sudo /usr/local/texlive/2012/bin/i386-linux/texhash
    texhash: Updating /usr/local/texlive/2012/texmf/ls-R... 
    texhash: Updating /usr/local/texlive/2012/texmf-config/ls-R... 
    texhash: Updating /usr/local/texlive/2012/texmf-dist/ls-R... 
    texhash: Updating /usr/local/texlive/2012/../texmf-local/ls-R... 
    texhash: Updating /usr/local/texlive/2012/texmf-var/ls-R... 
    texhash: Done.

The answer

The above was an answer, but it obviously wasn't the answer.  Lars commented, "On my systems I have a specific LaTeX user who owns the LaTeX installation, thus I do not have to run anything as root."  This seemed right.

I created a new user texlive to own the material in /usr/local/texlive.

    ftpmaint at millstone:~$ cd /usr/local    

    ftpmaint at millstone:~$ sudo chown -R ftpmaint:ftpmaint texlive

A comment about this user: I don't want texlive to appear on the choices on the login screen so I gave this account a user id below 500: sudo usermod -u 499 texlive (I got the parameter 500 from /etc/lightdm/users.conf).

Several people cautioned me to watch the umask of this user but because the system sets the default at 022 I was OK. 

 Lars mentioned that he may have multiple TeX Live trees under /usr/local/texlive, say /usr/local/texlive/2011 and /usr/local/texlive2012.  He has a soft link that points to the current one.

    texlive at millstone:~$ ln -s 2012 current

I often have trouble remembering what command options to run, etc., so I like to put that stuff in .sh files.  Here the soft link does its magic; no need to change the script when I add another tree.

     ftpmaint@millstone:/usr/local/texlive$ ls -l
    total 12
    drwxr-xr-x 10 texlive texlive 4096 Aug 17 07:05 2012
    lrwxrwxrwx  1 root    root       4 Aug 16 17:47 current -> 2012
    drwxr-xr-x 10 texlive texlive 4096 Aug 17 07:05 texmf-local
    -rwxr--r--  1 texlive texlive  181 Aug 16 17:48 update.sh
 
    ftpmaint@millstone:/usr/local/texlive$ cat update.sh
    #!/bin/bash
    # Update the current TeX Live installation
    # 2012-Aug-16 Jim Hefferon jhefferon@smcvt.edu
   
    PATH=/usr/local/texlive/current/bin/i386-linux:$PATH
    tlmgr update --all --self

The only remaining hiccup is to remember the password for texlive.  This is the kind of account that a person only uses every couple of months where I could easily forget.  But I use a password keeper program KeePassX to store my passwords so I put this user's information in there.

    
 

Looking for a new Linux dist

Too bad.  Ubuntu was good for a couple of years.  Now, I just spent an hour online trying to spelunk how to disable the bootup sound.  No one on the interwebs knows.  It clearly should be in a menu.  It was in a menu.  But now it is not.

I often get up at 4:30 and turn on the ham set, and the computer.  My wife doesn't have to hear the bootup sound at that hour.  But there appears to be no reasonable way to turn it off.

This is not the first time I have spent a frustrating hour on such a task.  I must have spent twenty of them in the last couple of months. Ubuntu was good, but now it is not.

Ah well.  Gotta get a new distro.

Installing MicroPress's Computer Concrete fonts onto TeX Live under Linux

 I own the Computer Concrete fonts from MicroPress. These are outline fonts so they look nice at any magnification. Because I use a concrete font in my Beamer presentations, the characters get blown up to a good size and I'd like them to show well, so I wanted to install these.

I have Ubuntu 11.04 with a current TeX Live that I installed off the web.  I looked in my local TeX directory /usr/local/share/texmf/fonts (I used this location instead of /usr/share/texmf because it will survive if I install a later version of TeX Live.)

I loaded the vendor's CD into the machine, where it showed up as /media/CFonts/CFONTS.dir.  I see directories for afm, inf, pfb, pfm, setup, and tfm.  There are also some .zip files containing LaTeX styles that I don't think I need as they come with TeX Live.

1) As sudo, I copied the files from /media/CFonts/CFONTS.dir/afm and /media/CFonts/CFONTS.dir/inf into /usr/local/share/texmf/fonts/afm/public/cfonts after making that directory. I was told to put the inf stuff in there also by the TeX Directory Standard document. I made the file permissions rw for the owner root, r for the group, and r for others.

2) I copied the files from the CD's pfb and pfm directories into /usr/local/share/texmf/fonts/type1/public/cfonts after making that directory. As above, I combined the file types in the one directory on the advice of the TDS document, and changed the permissions as above.

3) I copied the files from the CD's tfm directory into /usr/local/share/texmf/fonts/tfm/public/cfonts after making the directory, and I changed the file permissions as above.

4) I copied the CD's /media/CFonts/CFONTS.dir/setup/dvips/CONCRETE.MAP into /usr/local/share/texmf/fonts/map/dvips/cfonts/oncrete.map after making that directory.  I changed its file permissions.

5) On the advice of TUG's font installation page, from the directory /usr/local/share/texmf/fonts/map/dvips/cfonts I ran "sudo texhash" and also "sudo updmap-sys --enable Map=concrete.map"

It worked. The next time I compiled my .tex to a .pdf I could see in the File > Properties > Fonts tab that the cc fonts were included as Type 1.

By the way, I use this LaTeX style to get the concrete fonts.

% From Walter Schmidt post on ctt Jan 10 2005

\renewcommand{\rmdefault}{ccr}

\usepackage[euler-digits]{eulervm}

\linespread{1.04} % approximately

\renewcommand{\bfdefault}{sbc}

% \usepackage{mathdots}

Put it in /usr/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/local/conc.sty and run "sudo texhash" to have it be available as a normal LaTeX style.