By Assad Ebrahim, on September 7th, 2010 (11,818 views) |
Topic: SWEng--Toolbox
(Technology Infrastructure Series)
In case you’re taking seriously guarantees about uptime, reliability, or backups advertised by website hosting companies, you should know that most guarantees of service are an idealized concept, especially if you use a low-cost web hosting service. Now, this doesn’t mean you should avoid low-cost web hosts. What you should do is give a little thought to the “what if’s” that may arise, and what you can do before they arise to minimize the pain when they do.
In this article, I’ll go through a few situations you might want to consider, and some options you can use to reduce your risk.
Continue reading this article…
If you haven’t done so already, you may want to start by reading the Preface to the Computing Series: Software as a Force Multiplier, Sections 1-3.
Introducing the LaTeX typsetting platform
If symbols, formulas, and equations comprise a large portion of your professional communication, then you will gain significantly by becoming proficient with the LaTeX (pronounced “lay-tech”) document preparation platform. With the right tools and a little practice, the relative ease of creating beautiful mathematical documents with LaTeX will likely mean that you leave Office in favor of LaTeX for your technical writing.
This article introduces the LaTeX platform (short for Lamport-TeX, after the mathematician Leslie Lamport), illustrates its capabilities, and highlights the key differences between using LaTeX or WYSIWYG “what you see is what you get” word processing systems such as Office.
For those that like to know the human side of the tools they use, we provide a brief history of the legendary TeX (pronounced “tech”) platform, which underpins all variations of which LaTeX is one, looks at the philosophy motivating the development of TeX, and something about its legendary creator Donald Knuth.
 Don Knuth, Leslie Lamport, and an illustration of of why writing mathematics in LaTeX is easier than in Word.
Continue reading this article…
By Assad Ebrahim, on May 20th, 2010 (14,356 views) |
Topic: Maths--Tools, SWEng--Toolbox
(Mathematical Toolset Series: TeX & LaTeX, Part 3 of 3)
If you write frequently, it is likely that you have certain stock or administrative material that is included in each of your documents. You also likely spend a substantial portion of your overall effort re-writing, editing, or re-arranging material. In this situation, one of the best ways of preserving your time and your sanity is to adopt a modular approach to document development.
In this final article of the three part series on LaTeX / TeX, I will discuss a modular approach to document preparation using TeX. I’ll also provide modular templates that should make your use of TeX more efficient.
By Assad Ebrahim, on May 18th, 2010 (22,908 views) |
Topic: Maths--Tools, SWEng--Toolbox
Writing Beautiful Mathematics: Getting Started with LaTeX on Windows
If you haven’t done so already, you may want to start by reading the Preface to the Computing Series: Software as a Force Multiplier, Sections 1-3.
2nd ed. Revised with new templates Sep 21, 2019, 1st ed. May 18, 2010.
Getting Started with LaTex
LaTeX (open source, free) is an essential tool to write beautifully formatted mathematics efficiently. If you have extensive mathematical symbology and have been using MS Word for this, you are using the wrong tool for the job (see Figure below). Setting up LaTeX should take no more than an hour, after which you can produce publication-ready mathematical documents quickly and reliably. This article walks you through setting up a working platform for Windows, and provides the LaTeX templates you’ll need to produce your first examples. Also shared is the source code and compilation instructions for an example paper, which you can download and modify for your own use, containing several advanced stylistic elements (endnotes, figures with captions, URLs, code listings, and epigraphs).
 An example of mathematics written in LaTeX, from Finite Summation of Integer Powers (Part 3), A. Ebrahim, C. Ouellette, 2010. Continue reading this article…
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