Older blog entries for karlberry (starting at number 209)

So today is the FSF's Day Against DRM.

I just wish some megacorporation would realize there is a market for DRM-free ebooks and the like, and offer an alternative. At least, I have to hope that people would choose books they can loan to friends, etc., given the choice.

Started trial TL builds. Seems to be going ok.

Fixed a bug in kpsewhich that has been latent for 20 years or so, only discovered when kpsewhich -show-path=clua actually showed the path for "lua" instead of "clua". Can't just check that the suffixes are the same, have to check the whole strings. Fun.

Bumped version number for Dvips and XeTeX -- just a few bug fixes for those this year. Taco has already committed the new sources for LuaTeX and MetaPost (lots of changes as usual), and Jerome has updated SyncTeX (internal changes only, I believe). Just a few more pending updates and we can start the builds ...

Replaced MusixTeX's musixflx binary in TeX Live with the new Lua scripts. Always nice to see the build get simpler for a change.

Following up on the TUG newsletter I just sent: with regards to the upcoming election, I'm planning to step down as TUG president and just run for a position on the board this year. Long-time TUG board member Steve Peter has expressed desire and willingness to serve as president, and will be running with my support, FWIW.

For anyone who may be curious, I expect to keep working on TeX Live, TUGboat, and my assorted other TeX and TUG activities. After four terms as president, it just seemed like time to shake things up a bit :).

The It's All Text add-on for firefox and seamonkey lets you edit browser <textarea>s in Emacs. Why didn't I know about this?!

I saw a question in another blog (sorry, I neglected to write down which one) about pdfTeX's \pdfnormaldeviate primitive (also exists in MetaPost). Since I feel semi-responsible for the pdfTeX manual these days, I looked into the sources, talked to Thanh and Taco, refreshed my memory of normal distributions via wikipedia :), and came up with this:

\pdfnormaldeviate

Generate a normally-distributed random integer with a mean of~0 and standard deviation 65\,536. That is, about 68\% of the time, the result will be between $-65536$ and $65536$ (one standard deviation away from the mean). About 95\% of results will be within two standard deviations, and 99.7\% within three. This primitive expands to a list of tokens. \introduced{1.30.0}

Feel free to send me any questions/comments about this or other bits in the pdftex manual. Simplest to email me directly.

Not sure if it will matter to anyone reading this, but I guess I'll mention that the early bird discount on TUG membership goes away after March 31. Please join or renew if you haven't already, and thanks.

in response to will and randomdeterminism who replied on their blogs to my post. (btw, randomdeterminism, who are you, if you don't mind telling me? just curious.)

1. it's not the state of affairs of tables in latex is so bad. please try to avoid such flame bait :). it's a matter of what i know in my head -- i know \halign and i don't have anything but the simplest table constructs in latex and context in my head. i didn't doubt that both latex and context can do the job; anything can do the job. as always, my goal was to get it done as quickly as possible so i can go on to some other overdue project :).

2. as for pdfpages, it (specifically, \includepdfmerge) seemed like the natural choice; perhaps that is just my ignorance.. the real case is not one image, it is 33 different images. 33 different \useexternalfigure commands doesn't sound fun.

3. you finessed the question of scaling by explicitly specifying arbitrary sizes. part of my problem was that my sizes were not obvious, the scaling is not the same in all cases, and i didn't want to compute a bunch of five-decimal place numbers by hand.

4. the real figure will appear in the next tugboat, we can debate it further then :).