TeX: Add blank page after every content page - latex

I'm currently writing my bachelor thesis and my university wants a one sided print. The printing and binding will be done by a professional print company. They only accept two sided manuscripts.
Because of that I need to add a blank page after every page of content. I don't want to do this manually using \newpage or \clearpage because there are too many pages. Is there any, maybe low level, TeX command or package to do this? Or can you suggest another tool that does this without breaking the PDF?
Thanks for your help!

One option you might look into is to use a double sided layout that allows separate formatting for the even vs. odd pages: e.g. the book class allows this. Then you will need to define the even pages to be blank (presumably you don't want headers printed, or the page count to increment).
An alternative (if you can't get this to look correct for what you need) would be to do the layout in single sided (so that page numbering, etc. is all taken care of), then have a separate latex document which includes the pages, one at a time (pdfpages may be a good package to do this properly), and then insert blank pages (with no headers/etc.) in-between. This may end up being more work, but if you have trouble with formatting, it may be the easier way to go.

I suspect that you'd be better off doing this by manipulating the output PDF, rather than changing the LaTeX.
For example, if you're able to print to a file on your platform, there might be options in the print dialogue to tweak this. Your PDF viewer may be able to arrange this, if only by inserting blanks every second page. Or there may be a GUI or command-line tool to do the reshuffling for you.
Having said that, I've no specific recommendations for what tool you could use. A quick look around suggests strongly that the pstops tool might be able to do something along these lines, but that only helps if you're generating your PDF from postscript.
So no recipe, I'm afraid, but this'll probably be a better direction to look.
(or, meta answer: find a different print shop, or phone again and hope you get someone who gives you a different answer!)

Related

Automatic text / HTML annotation / highlighting

Nowadays there are softwares which, when provided a text or a html document page, will output a summary.
I wonder if there exist anything to automatically annotate (or at least highlight) the same documents.
The idea is to be able to keep the full text, but highlight the most meaningful parts (somehow like a summarisation tool would do I guess). And maybe provide additional inferred insights (?)
Also I would like to know how it works if it exists :) Would it really be very different of summarization, or is it just the same principles with a different "output format"?
I'm looking for something to annotate HTML documents, like AnnotatorJS is designed for, looking like this:
This is not a complete answer, but it can lead to what you want. The first suggestion is looking at GATE. It provides a great annotation framework and as long as you don't want to program anything for it, it is easy to use. The second thing is to search for summarization plug-ins for GATE. GATE has been around for such a long time that I am sure someone has already implemented a summarization plug-in for it.

How to store math equation/symbol and display them on the web?

I want to build a website where people can create tests with questions and answers . I want people can type in math equation/symbol and equations in a textbox or something like that, and they will be store in database, it'also displayed on the web like image.
My idea is i will store the text user input in latex syntax and store it, then display it using MathJax, i don't know it's possible or will have better way to do this.
And a problem is in user input will have normal text with "math text" (latex), so how can i separate them and only save the latex text? Please give me some idea or suggest the way to solve it, thanks.
p/s: i'm building this site in ruby on rails, i found the gem mathjax-rails but it seem not working.
Consider building off Gollum. It is the backend for the wiki system Github uses and works fairly well with LaTex equations (currently their is a very irritating bug with less/greater than symbols, but is documented and likely will be fixed in the next release). I start using it this summer to take notes in a math classes, an example of a full page of rendered LaTex equations notes is here here.
Note: You must be logged into Github in order for the equation to render.

Extracting ePub Excerpt

I've read about the ePub format, standard, structure, readers, tools and available developer techniques to manipulate/convert/create ePubs but there is no such thing as a magical function (so far) to extract a particular length of characters to create an excerpt of the book. And that's precisely what I'm looking for: A way to extract the first X words of an ePub.
The first approach I'm considering (not my favorite btw) is creating a parser to read all the ePub metadata and start parsing the xml files in the right order until I have enough words to create the excerpt of a determined ePub (I will appreciate some feedback in this direction)
The second way (which I can't find so far) is an existent tool/function or parser (in any language) which returns (hopefully) the plain text of the ePub so I can collect the first X words in order to create my excerpt.
Do you know about any tool which can help me achieve the second option?
You should have a look at Apache Tika: http://tika.apache.org/
You can use it from command line, or as a java library or even in server mode to extract text from ePub.
Hope this will help,
F.
Jose,
I'm not aware of any tool to do what you want. Let me comment on your first approach, though. If you do find a tool I hope these comments allow you to evaluate it.
I think your approach is fine and, if you want to do a good job of creating an extract, you may want to own this step anyway. I would suggest you,
grab the OPF file and look for a GUIDE section. If a GUIDE section exists, check the types that are given. Some are probably not relevant for an excerpt (cover,title-page,copyright-page). Many books will not have the types explicitly stated but this should help where they do.
now go through the files in sequence in the SPINE section, excluding anything that is irrelevant, and read through enough XHTML files to get your excerpt.
while in the OPF file grab a bunch of metadata if this is relevant for the excerpt (title, creator, date are mandatory, I think, and some authors will also put in a whole bunch of other metadata such as keywords).
If you are creating a mini-EPUB with this excerpt you will need to pick up any CSS, Audio, Video, Image and Custom Font files that get referenced in the XHTML files used to make your excerpt. You may even choose to use the original cover file for the cover file of your excerpt epub.
If you working with fixed layout books with fun stuff like Read Aloud AND you want to create a mini-EPUB as an excerpt, you may be better off going with a page count rather than a word count. Don't forget to include any SMIL files into your excerpt and to make it look nice: (i) don't split a two page spread and (ii) make sure that the first page is an odd numbered page if odd in the original or even if even numbered in the original - to do this you may need to add a blank filler page (get the odd/even wrong and subsequent two page spreads won't be facing each other)
I hope that helps.

Epub: Start block on next page if it can't fit on current page

Is there a way in an epub file to say that a block should not be split among multiple pages, so that if the current page don't have enough room to show the block, then the block should start on the next page, instead of starting on the current page, and then spill over to the next page.
If this is not possible in general, a solution which work in ibooks and which don't cause problems in other readers are also useful :-}
I haven't played with them myself, but you might want to take a look at the .css widows and orphans styles. They are supported by the 2.0.1 spec here (scroll down to the paged media section). Setting the number high enough on your paragraph style might do the trick.
Use page-break-inside: avoid;. However, as others mentioned, you should not expect this to work on every platform. The only absolutely fool-proof way to get something to start on a new page on all readers is to place it in a separate XHTML file.

How to generate a document like this in Latex

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~mccallum/papers/acm-queue-ie.pdf
I want to write a document that has the style like this one.
Like having a light colored background on a page, having a big header (like the EXTRACTION) shown in this link. Do you think it is possible to something like this in Latex?
I am comfortable with doing normal things in latex.
If you download and look at the document properties, it was made with InDesign CS3. Could you do this in LaTeX? Yes. The cover page is... just a cover page. If you use fancyhdr and make a page header, you can increase the header height, then lay the page header in there as an image. Try eso-pic for page backgrounds. But in all honesty, that document is kind of ugly. :D
Your best bet for a document like this is to use a desktop publishing system. A Free/Open Source Software solution would be Scribus Desktop Publishing.
Off the top of my head:
-- check out ConTeXt, strictly speaking an alternative to LaTeX but one designed for something closer to DTP than LaTeX itself;
-- LaTeX has lots of facilities for DTP-like work, a good place to start would be the newsletter on link text
-- investigate packages such as PGF/TKZ, eso-pic, newspaper.
That document smell like made with InDesign or QuarkXPress ... I guess there is a way to do it in latex but will not be straightforward at all ...
Actually it's quite feasible using LaTeX, it's just a pity that the learning curve and the technical involvement are higher than when using DTP tools like Adobe InDesign.
This explains why few people are willing to involve the required amount of time and energy into mastering LaTeX for such kind of projects, and consequently why few introductory material is available on the subject.
One notable exception is the recent workshop given by Dominik Wagenführ at Ubucon 2009 in Göttingen. Its proceedings are freely available a the bottom of the page, as well as the related source code. It's all in German but fairly easy to understand and very educational, so I'd recommand you to study it.

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