I mostly use Linux (an operating system) and LaTeX (a professional typesetting language). One of the charming things about these systems is their configurability. Often this is by means of scripts; short programs to automate repetitive tasks.

The dollar sign $ is not a reference to money, but to the hackers' interactive prompt ... serving humanity since punched tape went out of fashion. These scripts are provided free under the GPL for your convenience.

Note that I cannot guarantee that code will do what you expect, nor can I guarantee that code will not do what you would not expect — like e-mail itself to your friends, wipe your data, blow smoke, and die laughing. Therefore what these scripts do to you, your data, or your computer, is your responsibility and absolutely not mine.

If you would prefer it that one could make that sort of guarantee — then fund university computer science departments.

Gallerymake

I used this bash script to create my photograph galleries. Run ./gallerymake for usage.

An example gallery is here and an example of the directory structure which gallerymake expects is here.

[gallerymake] [example gallery] [directory]

Convert for web

I used this bash script to convert my photos to 1600x1200 for the web:

for i in *.dir/*[.jpg,.JPG] ;
do convert -size 1600x1200 $i -resize 1600x1200 -quality 65 $i;
echo Converted $i;
done
chmod -R o+x *.dir
chmod -R o+R *.dir/*

pdftodjvu: convert pdf to djvu

Djvu (pronounced ‘dejaview’) is a document format which is more compact and faster to view than pdf.

Unfortunately converting pdf to djvu is a bit difficult. You can use the any2djvu server, but I find it uncomfortable to use — especially for batch jobs. This script is adapted from pdfs2djvu and uses code kindly supplied by Sebastien Carlier.

Usage: pdftodjvu [-c] | [--crop] | [-h] | [--help] [filename.pdf]

This will create a djvu file filename.djvu in the current directory. If run with the -c or --crop options, it produces a djvu with white margins cropped off — useful for reading onscreen.

[pdftodjvu]

jamieslides

I used LaTeX package jamieslides to make slides of my talks. I hope you find it useful.

jamieslides uses seminar.sty and is based on Andrew Pitts's personal slides class, which he gave me years ago for my LICS'99 presentation.

More sophisticated (and in my opinion over-engineered) packages for slides in LaTeX are beamer and prosper.

[example latex and pdf] [jamieslides.tex]

No margins in LaTeX.

Am I the only person to be irritated by small letters and wide margins in documents onscreen? I can't read my own papers! So I put this in my .tex preamble —

%Small pagesize and no margins = nice big letters onscreen. 
\usepackage[paperheight=7in,paperwidth=4.7in,margin=.01in]{geometry}

— and the document fits nicely on my desktop screen in dual page mode.

Here are pdf versions: with margins and without margins. The text is an excerpt from my brother's PhD thesis.

Read double page spread on small (notebook) screen.

If you are like me, then you have a Panasonic W8 laptop computer with its relatively low resolution (1024x768) and small (twelve inch) screen, and you are writing academic papers in LaTeX while travelling. Add this to your preamble to get a nice readable double page spread:

\usepackage[height=5.42in,width=3.8in,
            paperheight=5.42in,paperwidth=3.8in,
            noheadfoot]{geometry}

Here is the same article using the modified page layout

and using the default page layout

(best viewed on a 12" 1024x768 screen).

Compact bibliographies in LaTeX.

OK. So you've typeset your paper and it's 16 pages long (one page over the limit) — because of the generous separation between items in the bibliography. The bibliography is not intended for reading as a continuous piece of text, and we should not typeset it as if this were the case. This works like a charm:

%Compact bibliography, due to Axel Reichert.
\let\oldthebibliography=\thebibliography
 \let\endoldthebibliography=\endthebibliography
 \renewenvironment{thebibliography}[1]{%
   \begin{oldthebibliography}{#1}%
     \setlength{\parskip}{0ex}%
     \setlength{\itemsep}{0ex}%
     \fontsize{8.4}{9.4} %Change these numbers to
                         %change font size
     \selectfont
}%
 {%
   \end{oldthebibliography}%
 }

I got it from here.

Put ‘DRAFT’ on your draft papers in LaTeX.

So you want to share a draft pdf with a colleague, but you're worried about incomplete versions of your paper being leaked? You can use the draftcopy package but that is not compatible with pdflatex. I prefer to add this to my LaTeX preamble:

%Put "DRAFT" in the background.  Due to Filox
\usepackage{graphics} %or \usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{type1cm}
\usepackage{eso-pic}

\makeatletter
\AddToShipoutPicture{%
            \setlength{\@tempdimb}{.5\paperwidth}%
            \setlength{\@tempdimc}{.5\paperheight}%
            \setlength{\unitlength}{1pt}%
            \put(\strip@pt\@tempdimb,\strip@pt\@tempdimc){%
        \makebox(0,0){\rotatebox{55}{\textcolor[gray]{0.95}%
        {\fontsize{7cm}{7cm}\selectfont{DRAFT}}}}%
           %Adjust 7cm to desired font size as necessary
            }%
}
\makeatother

I got it from here; it's somebody's blog, and I know nothing whatsoever about them aside from hypothesising that they are a male Croatian science student who has been blogging since November 2007. No, I'm not Sherlock Holmes, I can just follow a link.