Typography with TeX and LaTeX

## Texmaker 1.7 released

April 25th, 2008 by Stefan Kottwitz

The version 1.7, released April 24 2008, provides new features and changes:

• Spell checking is now based on hunspell and uses OpenOffice.org dictionaries
• New LaTeX log errors detection
• New “search” interface
• Indentation “memory”
• Code completion

Texmaker is a free LaTeX IDE running under Linux, Mac OS X and Windows and is published under the GPL 2.

## Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS released

April 24th, 2008 by Stefan Kottwitz

Ubuntu Linux version 8.04 (code name Hardy Heron) with Long Term Support has been released today. It brings TeXlive 2007-13, KILE 2.0 and Texmaker 1.6.
It still comes with pgf/TikZ version 1.18, I recommend to install version 2.00 (2008-02-20).

Category: Linux/ Ubuntu Linux | No Comments »

## How to declare the appendix

April 13th, 2008 by Stefan Kottwitz

Some LaTeX tutorials and at least one wellknown online reference manual explain the declaration of an appendix by an environment, they recommend to write: \begin{appendix} … \end{appendix}. Though this will be compiled without error it actually is not functioning like we expect of an environment. Everything that follows \end{appendix} will also be treated as part of the appendix!
The correct usage is:

\appendix

This command is defined by the standard classes by \newcommand, not by \newenvironment, there’s no \endappendix. For example here’s the original code of book.cls:

\newcommand\appendix{\par \setcounter{chapter}{0}% \setcounter{section}{0}% \gdef\@chapapp{\appendixname}% \gdef\thechapter{\@Alph\c@chapter}}

If you want to end the appendix and add further chapters or sections like list of figures etc. you would have to undo the changes made by \appendix or use just a common chapter or section labeled as appendix.

The appendix package provides more facilities for typesetting appendices and even allows subappendices.

This topic was discussed in the LaTeX Community Forum and on Matheplanet.

Category: Sectioning | 1 Comment »

## eqnarray vs. align

April 12th, 2008 by Stefan Kottwitz

There’s a lot of freely available documentation for LaTeX, but there’s a pitfall: some documents that are still online are outdated and therefore contain obsolete information. Documents like “Obsolete packages and commands” (”l2tabu”) address the need of up-to-date information.

For instance the obsolete eqnarray environment frequently appears in questions of new LaTeX users and many people including me usually answer: don’t use eqnarray and give advice how to use the align environment of amsmath instead.

Here’s a summary of the problems with eqnarray:

• the spacing around relation symbols are inconsistent,
• long equations might collide with the equation numbers,
• there could be problems with labels and references.

Here is one small example document just to illustrate the space inconsistany problem:

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article} \usepackage{amsmath} \begin{document} \begin{minipage}{0.5\textwidth} equation: \begin{equation*} z_0 = d = 0 \end{equation*} \begin{equation*} z_{n+1} = z_n^2+c \end{equation*} align: \begin{align*} z_0 &= d = 0 \\ z_{n+1} &= z_n^2+c \end{align*} eqnarray: \begin{eqnarray*} z_0 &=& d = 0 \\ z_{n+1} &=& z_n^2+c \end{eqnarray*} \end{minipage} \end{document}

Compile for yourself and examine it, if you want. For a quick look here’s a screenshot of the output:

Notice the difference of the spacing around the equal sign in the eqnarray environment compared to equation and even compared to the other equal sign inside the first eqnarray line.
If you try to repair the spacing by adjusting \arraycolsep you will notice that all other arrays including matrices will be affected too. So the best solution is to use amsmath, this package provides even more environments useful for multiline formulas and a lot more enhancement for mathematical typesetting.

See the amsmath user’s guide.

For further information regarding this topic you may have a look at the article “Avoid eqnarray!” by Lars Madsen published in the PracTeX Journal 4 2006.

This topic was discussed on MatheBoard.

Category: Mathematics | 87 Comments »