Open Source LaTeX environment for educational books? [closed] - latex

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Fully aware of the LaTeX features to define new environment allowing me to do about anything, I was wondering if there are Open Source packages that allows me to do book branding by predefining environments for examples, excursions, listings, question sections, etc. For example, have an example environment with a blue-ish background, sections with further details which can be skipped by the casual reader in yellow, etc.
Today, I have been playing a bit with the float package, and customized the .sty to have a environment with a blue background, but did not manage to tune the macro's such to have change the font style to sans-serif.
Now, this is just an example, but I figured that many people must have been doing this to give their book a somewhat more professional look. Are there LaTeX package around that allow me to focus on the content, instead spending time on LaTeX coding to make environments stand out from the main text?
Is there a document class that allows me to just do:
\documentclass{fancyeducationalbook}
\begin{document}
\begin[bgcolor=orange]{fancyExampleEnvironment}
% showing up in the PDF with a orange background
\end{fancyExampleEnvironment}
\end{document}
It does not have to be perfect at all, but it does need to make various boxes stand out, and immediately be recognizable for first-year students as having some purpose (example, further reading, definition, etc); The key is that it makes the book look attractive.
I do not mind some hacking, but a good basis would be nice. Very much preferred, this base would be Open Source, so that I can reshare my customizations, if any needed.
Update: I'd welcome a system which supports multipage environments.

I did ask a similar question a few weeks ago:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1783400/developing-ebooks-software
where a couple of responses mentioned some other tools and packages.
Obviously LaTeX has the book style and those sorts of things, but one must remember it's primarily a scientific document producing tool - which it's fantastic for, but for other tasks there are often tools more suited to the job:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB - the e-book publishing standard
http://code.google.com/p/sigil/ - a free GNUv3 editor for edocs
http://www.lulu.com/ - a fully integrated publishing toolset - for creating, editing and selling ebooks (if you want to go that far) - although this one's not open source of course...
Good luck, let us know what you find if you spot anything else - I'm still on the hunt for the 'ideal' tool :)

The usual recommendation for a more configurable long document class is memoir (read the extensive [manual PDF link).
Colored environment background and the like will probably have to be brought in with additional classes.

Take a look at context, a tex-based typesetting system which was designed for education publishing. It deals with page layout in a much more sophisticated manner than latex, and can give much more distinctive results.
I recommend not using anything fancy when writing the context: focus on the text and content-necessary graphics until the text is complete; get it edited and only then work through the typesetting. Trying to edit the document after it has been typeset is an invitation to redo work.
It is fairly painless to convert from latex to context. There's more work involved learning context than latex, but, well, you want good results?
Postscript: ConTeXt: An Excursion provides an introduction to the main document preparation features of context, and showcases its integration with metapost. The document has hyperlink navigation, which doesn't work with all pdf viewers.
Some of the documents on the TeX Showcase are prepared in context. There are some impressive latex examples there, too: you can get good results with latex, but it is, I think much harder work.
The contextgarden wiki has a list of official documentation, and From LaTeX to ConTeXt, the document migration advice. Migrating documents isn't hard, once you've got the hang of context.

Related questions:
LaTeX report chapter styles

Edit #2: you may want to check out http://www.math.harvard.edu/computing/latex/color.html, particularly the section about 2/3 of the way down called "Coloured box backgrounds"... also this link http://www.latex-community.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1441&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a talks about the framed package which will color environment backgrounds, apparently.
Edit: Made it into its own command.
\documentclass[10pt]{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\definecolor{shade}{HTML}{884763}
\newcommand{\uglybg}[1]{%
\begin{tikzpicture}
\node [fill=shade,rounded corners=5pt]
{%
\begin{minipage}{1\textwidth}
#1
\end{minipage}
};%
\end{tikzpicture}
}
\begin{document}
\uglybg{some text here please}
\end{document}

Profr. Jim Hefferon has written a book on Linear Algebra using LaTeX. He shares the source code in the following site:
http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/
The terms of use of the source code are the GNU Free Documentation License
(http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)
Check out his code. I like the formatting of the book.
I am doing some notes on basic math, but to be honest,
I think that the macros still need improvement.
Check out the notes (all in spanish) at
http://www.aprendematematicas.org.mx/notas.html

Related

PDF Parsing with Text and Coordinates [closed]

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I am currently using PDF Box to parse a pdf and I am trying to figure out how to retrieve data about the text such as the font (bold, size, etc) and the location of the font.
Any suggestions?
After poking around the (hard to find) PDFBox docs, I found this little gem.
Apparently one of the examples shows exactly how to do everything you asked. Basically, you subclass PdfTextStripper and override the processTextPosition method. There, you query the TextPosition for whatever information you need.
For future reference, you can find the javaDoc here: http://pdfbox.apache.org/apidocs/index.html
Edit 2018-04-02: original link is dead, but example can be found in the SVN repo here.
One of the best things for text extraction from PDFs is TET, the text extraction toolkit. TET is part of the PDFlib.com family of products.
PDFlib.com is Thomas Merz's (the author of the "PostScript and PDF Bible") company.
TET's first incarnation is a library. That one can probably do everything you want, including to positional information about each text element on the page. Oh, and it can also extract images. It recombines+merges images which are fragmented into pieces.
pdflib.com also offers another incarnation of this technology, the TET plugin for Acrobat. Obviously you'd need Acrobat as well to make use of this.
And the third incarnation is the PDFlib TET iFilter. This is a standalone tool for user workstations. Both this is free (as in beer) to use for private, non-commercial purposes.
Lastly, TET also comes with a commandline interface.
TET is really powerful. Way better than Adobe's own text extraction. It extracted text for me where other tools (including Adobe's) do spit out garbage only.
A few months ago I tested their desktop standalone tool, and what they say on their webpage is true. It has a very good commandline. Some of my "problematic" PDF test files the tool handled to my full satisfaction.
This thing is my recommendation for every sophisticated and challenging PDF text extraction requirements.
TET is simply awesome. It detects tables. Inside tables, it identifies cells spanning multiple columns. It identifies table rows and contents of each table cell separately. It deals very well with hyphenations: it removes hyphens and restores complete words. It supports non-ASCII languages (including CJK, Arabic and Hebrew). When encountering ligatures, it restores the original characters...
Give it a try.
The GetPageText function with extract option 3 or 4 in Quick PDF Library returns a CSV string for the selected page which includes the text (either individual words or a piece of text) and the related font name, text color, text size and co-ordinates on the page.
Note: it is a commercial library and I work for the company that sells it.
PDF files can be parsed with tabula-py, or tabula-java.
I made a full tutorial on how to use tabula-py on this article. You can tabula in a web-browser too as long as you have installed Java.

free visual editor for graph (dot) files [closed]

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Is there a free (as in "cheers"), linux-compatible, interactive visual editor for graphviz or other graphs? aptitude seems to be drawing a blank.
edit: "cheers" means both "beer" and "speech". meta-edit: I guess it should be "free as in beach".
edit 2: Maybe a suitable svg editor would be a more realistic goal. I basically want something that can be used to conveniently create a collection of labeled shapes and lines which connect them. Actually it would probably make more theoretical sense to extract the graph from this data, since it includes both semantic data (the graph) and presentation data (the way it's arranged on the screen, the colours used, etc). Is there a way to lay out labeled shapes conveniently with inkscape or some other free vector graphics editor? I really need rearranging of the nodes, and (re)flowing of the text in them, to happen with maximum convenience.
I've also realized that this is really a superuser question. I was going to repost it over there when I found an existing question that seems likely to provide me with an answer: dia.
edit 3: dia seems useful except that it doesn't seem to be possible to get the textual contents of node objects to wrap in any useful manner (ie any way other than by inserting manual line breaks). This is kind of a dealbreaker, since it screws most of the convenience factor that's my incentive to do things this way rather than with a text editor or a pen and paper. But it supports some sort of event model and Python-based scripting, so I'm going to dig around a bit and see if I can use python to wrap the text in response to content changes. Unless one of you lovely people has a better idea..? Basically I want to have the option to explicitly set the node size via GUI interaction, and have the contents wrap and rescale (within a certain range of font sizes) to fit it. Rich text would be pretty useful.
In other words, this is actually a valid SO question at this point, since it appears to require coding.
To save time those eager to try existing programs handling DOT graphs:
dotty can display DOT graphs and with little luck you can move its nodes with a mouse, nothing more, and you can easily segfault as a bonus (I tried latest stable graphviz)
lefty is only a special-purpose language interpreter used by dotty, nothing to look at
KGraphEditor is an empty wishful project (a QT window and a few buttons)
gvedit is not really a graph editor: it provides a simple text editor and you hit F5 to run a layout tool and open a picture; you can actually get more functionality from configuring your own favourite text editor
grappa is an abandoned java applet, which I failed to run
interestingly, dia can export to DOT ("PyDia DOT Export"), but due to its buggy printing, you have to post-process the files to use them
graphedit can read in DOT a graph and you can move its nodes around and change their colors
Eclipse people started working on DOT support in GEF4, so it can display DOT graphs
GraphUI has a very interesting demonstration video, but beware: although it might seem that the graph is being created by clicking and dragging, in reality all editing happens through the keyboard, using shortcuts. On the plus side, contextual instructions are always available showing which shortcuts do what.
DotEditor claims a tree editor, modifying node attributes/color/shape with mouse.
The graph editors mentioned in other answers, yEd (a Java application) and JointJS/Rappid (a JaveScript thing) apparently have nothing to do with DOT (tried both).
I believe there exist no working DOT-handling graph editor out there at all.
JointJS is a Javascript graph editing library based on Backbone : http://www.jointjs.com/
The author also provides Rappid, an online graph editor which might suit your needs, I don't know about dot files import though.

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.

Does anyone know resources for LaTex

I want to use LaTex to write equations faster and if it is possible to export the result as a png or jpg so that it can be used on a website.
Wikipedia (and its opensource wiki engine) uses LaTeX for that, maybe there are some resources available (at least in the code, as it is opensource).
Your question is very broad. You could start with Amazon's List of Latex Books.
You might want to investigate the StackExchange site mathoverflow.net solution - you can read about here. It uses jsMath which supports a lot of LaTeX syntax.
Assuming you already know a little LateX and your primary goal is to get images, a good high-level tool is mathTeX; there are even public servers that will convert to images for you.
If you want to do everything yourself, all the tools use dvipng at bottom.
I like both MathBin.net and Roger's Online Equation Editor. The latter lets you control the quality of the output. See also this question.
try this: http://hausheer.osola.com/latex2png
Here is a small symbol reference for LaTeX. If you are looking for something more as a general introduction, you can look at "The Not So Short Introduction To LaTeX2e". If you use Inkscape, there is built in support for rendering LaTeX and there are also extensions that do the same. You can read some commentary about it here. There are also things like LaTeX to HTML converters; However, at the time I was looking at them, they were somewhat limited in what formulas they could display.
I taught myself LaTeX using the wikibook. It's fairly comprehensive as an initial guide. I've since bought The LaTeX Companion, which is a more advanced guide to in depth typesetting in LaTeX
I use http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/LaTeX/AoPS_L_TeXer.php when I need a quick equation for a web site.
There are packages that will automatically produce images from LaTeX source, but these are often either buggy or used incorrectly. Many people install them on their blogs, for example, and the images show up if you visit the blog directly but they don't show up if you view the page via a blog reader. I'm not saying these problems can't be fixed. They can, but it often takes a few tries.
I prefer just to make a gif and stick it in the page. It's low tech and reliable.
One more tip: it's a good idea to put the LaTeX source in the alt tag of the image. This helps people using screen readers. It helps you too if you need to modify the equation later.
Detextify is a great site that lets you draw a symbol, and it will pop up a list of latex commands that may match your drawing. It's quite accurate! http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html

Which is the best import / export LaTeX tool?

Working in academia publishing CS/math, you sooner or later find yourself trying to publish in a journal that will only accept .doc/.rtf. This means tedious, boring hours of translating line after line, especially equations, from LaTeX to an inferior format. Over the years I have tried a number of export tools for LaTeX, but none, at least of the free ones, that I have been very satisfied with. I'd like this page to collect and monitor the best import/export tools for LaTeX, to .doc/.rtf, or to other useful (e.g. HTML, MATHML) formats.
Thus, what is your one favorite import or export LaTeX tool?
AFAIK there isn't really a convenient and effective way to achieve what you're trying to do. What I usually do in those rare occasions is that I export to pdf, then select all the text, and paste into word. It's horrible and messes things up and of course doesn't adjust your citations.
To this day I don't understand how people writing in scientific fields can write and publish in Word. It is common in some human-computer interaction literature but I have not seen it in other conferences and journals. May I ask which one it is?
Also, some places, once you've already been accepted, will be willing to accept a PDF if you push it with them. You may have to make little adjustment yourself. Negotiations sometimes work on this.
The UK TeX FAQ has been collecting answers on this for quite some time now. :)
See Conversion from (La)TeX to HTML and Other conversions to and from (La)TeX. There is another FAQ specifically about Converters between LaTeX and PC Textprocessors maintained by Wilfried Hennings.
For LaTeX to HTML there are LaTeX2HTML, TtH, Tex4ht, TeXpider and Hevea; in my experience TeX4ht is the best. For LaTeX to Word, you can go through RTF with TeX2RTF (not so good), or through Adobe Acrobat which can produce PDF that Word can read (not good either), or go through HTML as above, but best is to use tex4ht which can generate OpenOffice ODT format, from which conversion to Word is easy.
The UK TeX FAQ also has many other useful things; you should take a look.

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