Stockholm 5:th of May 2009.

KTH regulations: This is a personal web page created by Lars Jonsson. More information. You can contact me at ljonsson AT kth DOT se. This page contains a cookie, used for visitor statistics.

Lars remarks on Printing, LaTeX, ...

... as well as links, macros and suggestions around and about producing, printing and presenting your results in LaTeX. First, links to others: A good latex reference is Introduction to Using TEX (Harvard Mathematics). It contains lots of details which we will not try to reproduce here. The 3300 most used latex symbols and how to access them are avalable from CTAN.
What this page does provide is:

An example of a LaTeX file with theorems, references, bibliography and a time mark or time stamp printed in the foot of the document.
Detailed route to typeseting a LaTeX document, producing a postscript or a pdf file.
Provide the macros: Time-stamp, two pages on a page in LaTeX, with the upside-down problem solved.
An example of slides in LaTeX.
A few important guidelines
Comments upon the subject of Back-of-the-book indexing
Printing tools for two-page on a page, as well as other postscript tools under linux.
Errors and some solutions is a short collection of buggs in LaTeX and solutions.

An example

Here is a simple example that answer some basic questions about the use of macros and headers in LaTeX:
The file test.tex contain examples of references, macros, how to make sections as well as a time-mark at the bottom of each page. The time-mark macro(s) are in the file now_macro.tex and some basic 'replacement' macros are in the file macro_dyn.tex.
To handle reference to papers, books etc. I have attached a bibliography file: stein.bib.

Basics: To make a LaTeX document --- under Linux

Store the files from the section An example above in a separate directory,

Typeset the file test.tex, from above e.g.

latex test

bibtex test, either through emacs menu TeX or from command line e.g

bibtex test

Typeset twice again (to get the bibliography correct) e.g.

latex test
latex test

If all worked out well, you now have the result in an dvi file. I provide mine here test.dvi. To display it use

xdvi test

To translate it to postscript, use

divps test -o test.ps

To create a portable document file (pdf):

ps2pdf test.ps

Sometimes the resulting pdf-document has dropped its margins. This will occure even if we specified a4 paper format in the latex. The resulting pdf-file does not remember this latex setting. It looks as if the whole text moved up to the left top corner. This is typical for the problem of paper size. One solution is:

ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=a4 test.ps test.pdf

Sometimes one can use as an alternative:

pdflatex test

to directly create a PDF-file. This is supposed to have some better searching and display properties than the file created by ps2pdf.
Note: to use the typesetter all your .eps-files has to be .pdf:

epstopdf  figure.eps

For more details on pdflatex see eg. prepare pdf-files form LaTeX. One often occurring problem while useing pdflatex or direct conversion to pdf-formats is that some useful tools like psfrag do not work anymore, and as of yet (2007-08) there is no pdffrag nor pdfrag tool. There are some routs around see pdfrack Home page and fragmaster Home page.

One work around is to use ps2pdf. A better alternative is to use Latex create a single -.ps document containing the figure with its psfrag replacments and then to use the ps2eps package e.g.

ps2eps filename.ps

and then

epstopdf filename.eps

It is a roundabout way to solve the problem, but it works.

Upon submitting your manuscript to an archive, I recomend to use the style file habbrv.bst which provides eprint and can be used to include internal links. The style file you can find here with an explanation of how it works.

Guidelines

If you use a symbol, say energy, more then three times in the text, think of a name to call it, (here) En, and the we define the following macro:
```
\newcommand{\En}{\mathcal{E}}
```
Normally one will have several such macros, and therefor it is a good idea to put it in a separate macro file. (include the file with 'include filename'). See how the files macro_dyn provides macros for test in the section 'an example' above
If there are several people who work on the manuscript, it simplifies the work if one partitionate the manuscript into several filesi. This way, by telling each other which file I work on, several people can contribut to the same project less physical file blocking. The appropriate command in the main text file is
```
\input{filename}
```
or with page breaks etc.
```
\include{filename}
```
Another rule of tumb, is to stick close to the LaTeX standard when introducing the macros. As an example of macros that may increase the difficulties to co-workiers, is the (popular) renaming of the equation enviroment. If writing goes to slow to suit, I recommend you an editor, such as Emacs, that has the capabilities to define macros. This way enables the final LaTeX code to be (more) readable to fellow (La)TeX-coders.

Remarks on slides in LaTeX

To make slides I use the slides macro to get an appropriate font, and some additional macros of my own. Here is an example: slideshow.tex.
After typesetting (latex slideshow): slideshow.dvi
To display the show use:

xdvi -paper a4r slideshow

To translate .dvi -> ps, use:

dvips -t landscape slideshow -o slideshow.ps

The special command:

\special{landscape}\special{! /landplus90 true store}

in the file, makes sure that the file does not turn upside down. It might still cause some trouble when printing (using e.g. psnup) more than one page, since the pages may appear counter clockwise. The counter to these troubles is to write

psnup -l -4 filename newfile

It works like a dream.

Back-of-the-Book Indexing

Indexing a LaTeX document with help of the program MakeIndex with syntax

MakeIndex filename

is straight forward on a superficial level. The program solves the technical part of indexing i.e. how to associate the position (page) with a desired word or concept in the text is there solved. The keyword to use in the LaTeX document is

\index{favorite word}

It is also neccessary to include

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{makeidx}

in the preamble as well as

\printindex

where you want to print the index.
I also recommend the additional package \usepackage{index} which have a number of nice shortcuts like not having to retype the word upon indexing.

However to produce a good index, that is how an index is organization and structured and typographically presented is less that trivial. One document that discuss the idea of organizing (book indexing and/or back-of-book indexing) a text (or texts) is TAO-maps. Which discuss the model Topics Association Occurrence Maps, it clears some of the idea structure of how a text can be indexed.
Models which answers or suggest

how to choose qualifiers for main topics and subtopics of index
how to associate the main occurrence in front of other occurrences
typographic appearance of the index.

is still largely left to the individual. I am still searching for a good description on how such an organization should look like. A webpage with an introduction to back-of-the book index theory would be desired.

From my point of view, a simple index which only lists one level of topics is the easiest to construct. On the other hand, one might get several very similar words scattered through the index: e.g. surface current density, volume current density, current density, will all be split into several places e.g. under the letters c,s and v. An alternative might be to list all three as subtopics to of e.g. current density. Such a subtopic listing often have troubles with associations. E.g. imagine that we choose current and density as two separate topics, should then a current density subtopic (of density, and of current) have mutual associations between density and current (see also...)?

Ideally an index is to be a concentration of the information in a text. This ideal requires an iterative procedure to extract an appropriate set of pointers to the text, almost like constructing a miniature abstract for each paragraph.

Printing

psbind. Supersedes psnup. It finds and removes large margins, arrange for two or more pages per page. Its a great tool. You find it at psbind's homepage. There is now a ported version for Mac owners. Usage:
```
psbind test.ps new.ps
```
new.ps will have two columns (each column containing one of the pages of test.ps) on each page of paper.
```
psbind -3 test.ps new.ps
```
would try to make three pages per page.
EPS files, psnup and printing on HP LaserJet 4250 caused the printer to crash. A work-around is available at the computer groups help files. This work around, makes the pages formated with psbind printable, but unfortunately some size parameter gets wrongly set and printing typically slizes of the last line of the page. If the latex code is awailable you below find another way of inserting two pages on one.
A suggestion to fix the crash of laserjet printers upon using psbind (not psnup) is
```
psbind --fix=force' 
```
which forces the document through gs before combining multiple pages.
psresize. Helps resizing a4/letter postscript files.
```
psnup -2 filename.ps to_filename
```
Puts two pages to each page. Save a tree, print smaller:) Even better use psbind above.
When printing four or more files in for e.g. slides with paper in the landscape direction, either of the following two solutions works well:
```
 psnup -4 -l landscapefilename.ps out_file.ps 
```
or
```
 psbind -4 --psnup="psnup -l" landscapefilname.ps out_file.ps 
```
The option '-l' tells psnup that the paper is landscape and improve the ordering that the papers are displayed. Many thanks to KenShan for providing this solution.

When you have the .tex-code the following addition/replacement to/of the header makes two column, landscape and fit most to your A4-page while keeping readability:

\documentclass[10pt,twocolumn,landscape,a4paper]{article}
\special{landscape}\special{! /landplus90 true store}
\setlength{\oddsidemargin}{0mm}
\setlength{\evensidemargin}{0mm}
\addtolength{\textheight}{55mm}
\addtolength{\textwidth}{43mm}
\setlength{\topmargin}{0mm}
\setlength{\headsep}{4mm}
\voffset=-20mm
\hoffset=-20mm
\columnseprule=.01pt

The length parameters are optional the key is the 'twocolumn'. But this set of parameters work fine on A4 paper.

Two or more pages per page with Acrobat 7.0. Under the menu File, submenu Print, there is an option, called 'Page Scaling', where one can choose 'Multiple pages per sheet', and a line lower: Pages per sheet. Using this setting, is roughly equivalent to the psnup tool, and often creates to wide margins.
To obtain bigger textarea and smaler margins there is a fix in certain versions of the Acrobat program: Under the menu:
Tools : Advanced Editing : Crop Tool
a tool, that can crop margins is provided. Simply mark the text that you want to remain, on one page in your PDF document. Double click on the frame that appears. In the option window, called 'Crop Pages' that appears, there is a button, 'Remove White Margins' and we can apply it to the Page Range option 'All'.
Printing the resulting document (with the above described 2 pages per page), is roughly equivalent to psbind for pdf files.

Bugs, errors and some fixes in LaTeX and related software

\qed-in the middle of the page error:

The command \qed, as implemented by amstex has a minor bug. If the file ends with \qed, the type-setting does not move the box all the way to the right-hand side of the page, but stops somewhere in the middle. This problem might be fixed by inserting one or two carriage return after the command \qed.

Upside down landscape ps-files from LaTeX

Upon typsetting dvips of the dvi file from a latex document with a header of the type \documentclass[landscape]... through

dvips -t landscape document

causes the resulting postscript file to display upside down. One quick fix for this is to insert the command

\special{landscape}\special{! /landplus90 true store}

immediately after \documentclass in the tex file.

For printing landscape oriented fiels with psbind/psnup see the printing section.