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Friday, November 26, 2010

Coffee stains on your PDF docs

It's funny and seems pointless, but you may want to play around

Taken from here

Here what I got:



And important point is that, it does not work with pdflatex, use latex compiler instead

(Thanks Toriq for this package. How on earth did you ever came across this package anyway? ;) )

Update: coffee2.sty works with pdflatex, thanks Sharuzzaman and Curutari for pointing that out. I didn't check the current sty after I downloaded the old one.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

“Why isn’t Arial in my LaTeX installation by default?”

“Or Cooper Black, or a bunch of other fonts? They’re free, aren’t they? They’re already there on my computer!”

If you’ve ever wondered about this, this article on Free Fonts: Free Is Not Always Free may help you understand some of the underlying issues about font licensing. (Some people would argue that the M$-bundled fonts are of inferior quality compared to the real stuff anyway e.g. Times Roman, Helvetica etc)

On the other hand, rest assured that all is not lost as there are free clones of many of such fonts that you can use in your LaTeX documents anyway.

For example, \usepackage{mathptmx} loads Nimbus Roman, a look-alike for Times Roman, while \usepackage{helvet} loads Nimbus Sans to stand in for Helvetica, which is pretty much indistinguishable from Arial — to the untrained eye anyway.

One last thing: You can still use some non-free fonts: install them using the getnonfreefonts script.

One really last thing: The last thing I want to do is to start a font war on this blog, so please spare me the hate mails! ;-)

Friday, November 12, 2010

TeX, LaTeX and Friends Out of Beta

The community-driven LaTeX-specific Q&A site: TeX, LaTeX and Friends is now out of beta and has a new design. I’m most pleased to see the Tengwar Ring-lore in the top left corner! :-D