Drawing Periodic Table with Tikz

I got this link from WriteLaTeX FB this morning..

Nice ha?

WriteLaTeX - cloud based LaTeX compiler/editor

I found out this online service. Anyone is currently using it? Please drop your comment here.

I currently still prefers github for LaTeX collaboration - or mercurial, subversion. 

But somehow you may have specific reason for using any cloud based LaTeX editor/collaboration service.

Extracting Only Cited Bibliography Entries

Occasionally, while exchanging files with collaborators or submitting articles, I’d like to extract a smaller .bib file from my main, “hold-all” bibliography file, i.e. containing only the entries that I’d actually cited in my document.

Fortunately this can be done fairly automatically using the bibexport tool. Quick rundown:

1. Compile your document, say myarticle.tex the usual way, with your “big” allrefs.bib file.
2. Run bibexport with the following:
   

   bibexport -o extracted.bib myarticle

   extracted.bib should now contain only the bibliography entries that were cited in myarticle.tex.
3. Change \bibliography{allrefs.bib} to \bibliography{extracted.bib} in myarticle.tex.
4. Send myarticle.tex and extracted.bib to collaborator or editor!

tlmgr and Debian variants

It's quite frustrating knowing that your working Linux distro does not have tlmgr and needs you to install the vanilla TexLive instead, as discussed here

It should be as easy as Python's easy_install and Ruby's gem install way..

Transcribing Doodled Equations to LaTeX (and MathML)

Here’s another useful website to bookmark: Web Equations lets you doodle a mathematical equation, then transcribes it into LaTeX or MathML. And it’s fast, too!

Quick Diagrams with SmartDiagrams

It all started with a question on TeX.SX: Namely, is there any quick way to draw diagrams from a list of items, similar to the ‘Smart Art’ feature in PowerPoint 2010?

It wasn’t long before the package smartdiagram was born as a response, using TikZ to do the actual drawings. The basic syntax is:

\usepackage{smartdiagram}
\smartdiagram[diagram type]{list of comma-separated items}

Here are some examples (based on material from here):

\smartdiagram[circular diagram]{Assess,Plan,Implement,Renew}

\smartdiagram[flow diagram]{Assess,Plan,Implement,Renew}

\smartdiagram[buggle diagram]{Planning Cycle,Assess,Plan,Implement,Renew}

If you happen to be preparing a Beamer presentation, replacing the \smartdiagram command with \smargdiagramanimated will result in an automatically ‘animated’ diagram, with each item in the list appearing one at a time as you advance through the slides:

See the manual for other digram types and customisation options (colours, shapes, sizes, etc).

Seems Texlive 2012 is in Ubuntu 12.10/Linux Mint 14

najmi@mint:~$ dpkg -l|grep texlive
ii  texlive                                     2012.20120611-4                           all          TeX Live: A decent selection of the TeX Live packages

Been stuck on 2009 version ever since. 

Good news.