Tex Cheat Sheet

Submitter Martin Jansche writes:

Here's an example of TeX formatting many many equations under tight spaceconstraints: Steve Seiden's theoretical computer science cheat sheet,which used to be available from http://bit.csc.lsu.edu/~seiden/#cheat.Quoting the web page:

I grant permission for you to reproduce this cheat sheet, and redistribute it for educational purposes only. You may not reproduce it for profit. If you reproduce it, you must not alter or delete my copyright.

GW 2013: I have been informed by Raphael Reitzig of two errors, which have been fixed (notes in the .tex files)

GW 2016: The current distribution does not properly compile, Escher's Knot is missing. I include a fixed pdf, but the source still needs repairing. Help welcome.

This is an example of the mathematics quizzes we are using at MacquarieUniversity, Sydney, Australia. It uses JavaScript inside a PDF document, sothat the questions are automatically marked, and on completion of the quiz,the correct answers and fully worked solutions become visible.

We have set up an automated system which generates random parameters forthe questions, pdfTeXs the quiz and serves a unique and personalisedversion of it to the student. The demo quiz here is fully self contained,but the quizzes we use for the students send the scores back to our serverto be recorded.

It is based on DP Story's exerquiz package, along with some customizationswe have made, and pdfscreen. There are more like this here.

Submitted by Jochen Skupin

Embedding 3D objects in LaTeX. Note: does not display in Safari. Doesdisplay in Adobe Acrobat

Paolo Cignoni writes:

We have developed MeshLab, anopen source tool that can be used to convert 3D object in a format that isdirectly embeddable into a pdf through the movie15 latex package.

Attached a pdf produced with the above tools and a zip with the latexsources for re-creating it

Submitter Orlando C.Rodríguez writes:

This is another submission, which combines the hyperref and the insdljspackages, to create an interactive document that performs simple vectorcalculus operations.

Submitter Orlando C.Rodríguez writes:

I'm sending you an interactive periodic table written in portuguese, usingLaTeX with the color and hyperref packages.

Ignacio Fernández Galván writes:

Tengwar is an alphabet invented by the J.R.R. Tolkien, which he used forrepresenting fictional languages in his novel The Lord of the Rings andrelated works. There are many fonts freely available for this beautifulscript, and I've created a package (tengwarscript, available at CTAN) whichmakes it easy to access some of these fonts in a standard way. This sampleshows three short texts composed with different fonts and the tengwarscriptpackage

Submitted by Norbert Preining.

This is an example of how well TeX can be adapted to all differentlanguages. I do not know what it says here, so do not hold me responsible.

This is an example of how well TeX can be adapted to all differentlanguages, even typesetting from right to left. I do not know what it sayshere, so do not hold me responsible.

Alan Hoenig has recently released version 2 of hisMakor system. Makor is a system for high-quality Hebrew typesetting, whichruns under Omega.

As an experiment, I typeset the second chapter of the book of Esther from theHebrew Bible. This essentially involved downloading the BHS (Biblia HebraicaStuttgartensia) version of Esther from the web, changing all instances of ~ to@, adding a few lines of boilerplate to the top and the bottom of the file,and running it through omega. BTW, I'm running MacOS X 10.2.4 on an 800MHz G4iMac, along with your latest i-Installer distribution of the TeX stuff.

I'm attaching two files that use the CJK package totypeset Chinese. Note that you don't see anything likeincludepackage{CJK} in the LaTeX source, since it has to first beexported in cjk-encoding by Emacs, at which point the appropriatecommands are inserted. The process is described in the file. Thetight integration of CJK and Emacs makes it especially easy to mix andmatch different scripts and/or character sets.

This is a set of maps that I made for the frontispiece of a bound volume ofmy mother's journals that she wrote during a sailing trip in the Greekislands. My fiancée and I put the whole thing together for a Christmaspresent last year. Key ingredients are WARMreader for the route labeling andbabel for the place names.

There are some errors in the route [probably doesn't matter to you 8^) ] andthere's a lot of extraneous stuff in the preamble because it was cut andpasted from the manuscript. Further, I don't know squat about Greek, so Iundoubtedly made errors in some of the labels.

The map was produced in IGOR Pro from coastal data I found someplace online(I don't remember where offhand). I supposed If I'd been truly masochistic,I would have used XYpic to produce the whole thing...

I'm sending you a one-page excerpt from a paper of mine that was publishedin the American Journal of Mathematics. Hope you will find it useful. I'm sureRoss Moore and others can provide more interesting examples of the power ofXy-pic.

my contribution is actually nothing special in the world of TeX. I'veused the cd-cover class and the tiling macros from PSTricks to producenice looking enclosure for my sample cd. The idea for the cover isbased upon a title page by Imre Reiner.

The interesting point, I think, is the use of ornaments. Ornamentshave accompanied the letters through the whole history of the book.Being once *the* typographer's adornment for centuries, ornaments arenowadays -- where books are made by graphic designers -- almostforgotten and replaced with blurred meaningless color spots (quotingthe german typographer H.P. Willberg: 'visuelles Hintergrundrauschen'[visual background hissing]); maybe because it's not easy to makepatterns and borders by clicking around with the mouse.

So I think it is a great chance for TeX to bring back ornaments in thebooks. There are enough tools to do that in TeX/PostScript/MetaPostetc. and fortunately there are still many ornamental fonts available.

P.S. I know, there are some articles on tiling with TeX, but they are mosttechnically oriented. Mine is a real life example.

Submitter Kester Clegg writes:

The labels are designed to be cut out and put round the neck of beerbottles (my home brews as it happens!). One thing I like about usinglatex instead of a normal graphics program is that I get minute control,I can work on a single label for speed, and when I'm finished, Iuncomment my 'block' of labels and bingo! I get the whole lot at once!

Kanji characters, slowly fading out to help you practice. This has beencreated with ConTeXt and Metapost.

Christopher Creutzig writes:

I needed some practice sheets for my Japanese handwriting and cooked upthese files.

This is a Metapost program and wrapper TeX document that generates abaseball scorecard, as well as demonstrates the scoring from the gamewhere Mark McGwire broke Roger Maris' season home run record in 1998.The Metapost code includes a variety of locations, paths, and functionsto make it easy to generate nice-looking baseball scorecards with orwithout the scoring.

I've included the Metapost source, as well as the wrapper file I use toproduce PDF versions for printing on letter sized paper.

Hi. I thought this might be of interest, primarily because it shows whatcan be done *without* WYSYWYG tools. The source consists of just 148lines of LaTeX and uses John Reynolds's fine macros package for diagrams(diagmac). The diagram was designed to be viewed on the web.

This contribution is a little bit unusual. It is a cave map produced byTherion, free cave mapping software. It uses MetaPost for drawing of mapsymbols such as passage walls or lakes, and pdfTeX for all the typesetting.It demonstrates the incredible flexibility of TeX and MetaPost.

I hope it will be interesting, although there is no source code included.(Therion uses its own input language; MetaPost and TeX files are generated atthe run-time.)

The Therion homepage is on the http://therion.speleo.sk

Note: the file is 5.8MB

Christopher Creutzig writes:

It shows a Metapost-generated background, XeTeX-set text, everything combinedwith ConTeXt using pdfTeX. I've used Acrobat to extract only a part of thewhole file, mostly because the complete thing makes sense only if you cut andfold it the right way

It's a poster I made for presenting at a linguistics conference. I waswary about trying to do something like this with LaTeX at my level,but I was astonished at how easy it turned out to be (even though itis in places a bit of a hack...)

Submitted by Christopher Allen.

Submitter Ulrich Dirr writes:

Here are a few pages of 352 from a chess book (Kindermann/Dirr:Französisch Winawer, Band 1: 7. Dg4 0--0). Typesetting was done byPDFLaTeX (then v0.14h). Printed on art paper using a two colour setup (blackand a spot color), the book was published in 2001 by Chessgate AG.

The interested TeXie will recognize the creation and utilization of specialfonts (Adobe Jenson (with special ligatures and kerning for german), ITCLegacy Sans, Castellar (initials), and self-made chess fonts for figurinenotation and diagrams )

I've downsampled the images to 96dpi. Otherwise the file would have been3.2MB.

Submitter Karl Berry writes:

Peter Flynn's LaTeX brochure is pretty amazing, IMHO.

Here are the source files and PDF output for a monthly newsletter. Theremay be better ways to do this, but it works okay and Alt-N is happy with it.

Some of the word spacing in the narrow columns is a too large. I reduced itfrom terrible to livable by rewriting and doing copy fitting. The newslettermakes extensrive use of minipage and has lot of links. I would not call itinteractive, however. It's more of a practical way to communicate with ourdistributors and resellers.

It is not pretty like lots of things on the showcase, but it does show apractical way of using LaTeX for a newsletter. It is certainly easier for meto do this than with a page layout program where all of your content istrapped inside the document.

How to make two different types of output from one source with LaTeX. This issomething that for instance ConTeXt has been built for, but it is possiblein LaTeX as well. Click the image for the screen version. Click the link in thebox to the left of this text for the print version. Enjoy reading it (if you can read Finnish, that is).Juhapekka Tolvanen writes:

This Master's Thesis has no math at all. This is my Master's Thesis forsociology. I am Master of Social Science now. Language is Finnish.

There is not very clever LaTeX-trickery, but it is really big cavalcadeof LaTeX-packages. I was able to create two different layouts from sameLaTeX-source. I learned very much LaTeX in that process when I wrote myMaster' Thesis. Sources are available under the DSL (Design ScienceLicense). Yes, my Master's Thesis is free in the sense of freedom andprice!

This is a nice screen-oriented document. Note: this document is 2.4MB insize.

António Almeida writes:

I submit here a document that I wrote using pdfLaTeX with somepackages. It has the peculiar characteristic of being written witheasy to get fonts, besides the CM family and the 35 standard fontsAdobe.

This is a document that introduces Early Music to all audiences. Itcan be found in http://perusio.com

Submitter Larry Tseng writes:

[This is] an example of what TeX can do, when used by people who make theirliving setting type to implement the type specifications and layout of adistinguished book designer.

The book is Exiles from a Future Time by Alan M. Wald, University of NorthCarolina Press. The design is by Richard Eckersley, whose achievements in bookdesign have earned him the designation of Royal Designer forIndustry by the Royal Society of Arts. His work is also in several museumcollections, including the Cooper-Hewitt NationalDesign Museum, Smithsonian Institute.

The sample is in the form of double-page spreads, intended to be viewed withAcrobat version 5 and above. Acrobat's full-screen mode with text-smoothingare recommended for best results. Some restrictions have been placed on thepdf content to discourage printing and extraction.

Included also are the type specifications in a separate pdf -- perhaps a much more interesting alternative to style filesand other sources given that the book was set with Buffalo TeX, an in-housepackage that has its own special control sequences and syntax.

For people who would like to see more of this sort of thing, we've set up akind of 'extension to the official TeX showcase' to show the work of otherbook designers that we have worked with in the past, all typeset with TeXof course. Simply log on to the showbooks page at http://www.tsengbooks.com/.

It is a small French gatefold card which one can print to fit any decent sizepaper and then fold in half twice to get a card.

It is typeset in Zapfino using Omega and techniques which I hope to documentand present presently.

I hope everyone will enjoy it in the spirit in which it is offered.

Yesterday I was playing with the Ubuntu Font Family with LaTeX, and I came up with a pretty neat layout.

The complete book (including the graphics shown in the icon) can bedownloaded here(2.7MB)

This is some rather old trickery, using Plain TeX and a readily resizablePostscript font, based on the length macro example on p. 219 of the TeXbook.The result would be the complete decimal expansion of some prominent rational,irrational and transcendental numbers, in a finite area, except that of coursethe digits become too small to see (or print) rather fast. (Some of it appearswithin the cover design for our textbook, Essential Mathematics for EconomicAnalysis.)

Senthil Kumar Murugapiran writes:

I work as a Postdoctoral Research Fellowat Ajou University, South Korea. I would like to submit two examplesthat highlight the use of LaTeX packages: TeXshade and TeXtopo.Inclusion of these submissions in the TeX showcase might be helpfulfor biologists to venture into learning LaTeX, once they understandwhat they can do with this wonderful software.I made these figures for an article that was published in The PracTeX Journal.

Senthil Kumar Murugapiran writes:

I work as a Postdoctoral Research Fellowat Ajou University, South Korea. I would like to submit two examplesthat highlight the use of LaTeX packages: TeXshade and TeXtopo.Inclusion of these submissions in the TeX showcase might be helpfulfor biologists to venture into learning LaTeX, once they understandwhat they can do with this wonderful software.I made these figures for an article that was published in The PracTeX Journal.

It's designed to be printed all on a letter-sized sheet of paper and foldedinto a small booklet.

Submitter Orlando Rodriguez writes:

The following contribution contains a Beamer presentation, containing a spinning globe. It combines POVray with SWFTools, pdfTeX, Beamer and (hacked)flashmovie.The earth texture is rather large, so it's not included, but a suitable substitute can be found in the web.

Submitter Mark G. writes:

In order to play songs on the ukulele, I devised a set of macrosin (plain) TeX and typeset a few songbooks that show lyrics and chords(and sometimes tablatures).

I've attached another PDF which doesn't really have a TeX source becauseit's automatically generated from data, but I find the application itselfquite excellent. You can find it among around 800 siblings at www.erco.com(for instance /download/data/_lsp/indoor/system/fr/fr_pollux_119.pdf).

This example is a funny MPEG movie, created with METAPOST, which is part ofthe TeX family of programs. It has been submitted by HartmutHenkel. He writes:

I have created a small technical movie (premiere) about acertain species of liquid Indium ion emitter (Liquid Indium MetalSource, LIMS), which sometimes is used in space for propulsion orscientific experiments (e.g. by the company www.vh-s.de where I work).

The movie shows the heating of the Indium reservoir until the Indiummelts. Forced by a strong electrical field (not shown) the Indium creepsto the tip of a Tungsten needle and builds a so-called Taylor conethere. From the tip of the cone Indium ions are extracted by the samefield. --- After some operational time the In reservoir gets empty.Don't take this part too serious :-)

It's some 600 frames, drawn by MetaPost one by one,printed, put sheet by sheet on the scanner. Just kidding, it goesthrough a shell script (under debian Linux) starting with MetaPost,blows up to over 1GByte of .ppm files by ghostscript and then shrinks tothe mpeg by mpeg_encode.

I am not sure if this paper qualifies as a TeX showcase example, sincenowadays everybody who is writing mathematical papers is using TeX, and thesepeople need not to be convinced, but it might be a showcase for the beauty ofhyperref.

This example is just an ordinary article with some math in it. However,using the htlatex tool from the TeX4ht suite, the same TeX source hasbeen used to produce the PDF file you see when you click the icon as well asthe web page you see when you click on the EulerGibbsDuhem.html link in thesecond column.

Submitted by Stephen Addison

Here is a contribution to your TeX showcase, if it seems appropriate.I do genealogy as a hobby, and I have kept the results of my work inbook format almost from the beginning. I used Word for the Macoriginally, but maintaining the document through the constant updatesresulting from new information was not easy. I wanted something alittle more automatic. This was accomplished using a database (4D) tokeep the basic information (names, dates, and family groupings),individual text files for the narratives about each individual, andthen having the database generate a LaTeX file, which TeX wouldprocess and put together in book form, generating a TOC and an indexin the usual manner.

There is not much fancy TeX code involved, but the result seems toimpress even experienced amateurs who have looked at it. It seemed tome that this might be interesing because it is an application which isa bit far afield from the usual disciplines where TeX has taken hold.

The example is anexcerpt from the genealogy.