February 3, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

The procrastination exercise for today involved converting my thesis into a more readable form than requested by the graduate school. I find double-spaced text and narrow margins to be rather irritating to read. And the surprising lesson of the exercise was that good typography and margins does not necessarily save you much in paper. What you save by single-spacing is lost to the sensible margins. (I could go even more sensible, but I really don’t want to plow through and reformat all the tables and graphics.)

In the process I found TeXniscope which is a nice pdf/dvi viewer for OS X. It automatically reloads changed pdf files, an issue that drove me crazy with OS X Preview, and it has functions that allow to click on a section of a PDF document and automatically open the LaTeX source file. There is also a function that will automatically open a PDF file to the proper section from an Emacs LaTeX buffer. Unfortunately this doesn’t quite work out of the box with Aquamacs. I hacked together an alternative configuration file (11KB zip) that should do the trick. Unzip and follow the directions in the txs-search.el header.

Posted in software, geekstuff, the dissertation | No Comments »

January 26, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

A while ago I switched my email over to Apple’s creatively named Mail.app to take advantage of applescript integration with other software packages. One of my frustrations with it though was the poor performance of the default junk mail filter. Over the last two weeks, JunkMatcher has proven to be an effective bit of software for catching those unwanted spam messages. I am also interested in the fact that it’s developed using PyObjC which builds applications with the Macintosh look and feel in Python. I’ve been wanting to get into Macintosh GUI programming but have not wanted to learn yet another language to do it.

Another bit of freeware/donationware I’m experimenting with is RPN Calculator which is purely a geek thing. It is a nicely well-designed cross-platform Reverse Polish Notation calculator which will probably be very handy when I start my taxes.

Posted in software, geekstuff | No Comments »

January 8, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

My complaints about Microsoft Word are rather legendary among my friends. I use Microsoft Word when required by clients or contacts. But I find it doesn’t well support my needs as a writer, often gets in my way, produces documents in formats that are unusable by the rest of my system, and is overkill for many of my needs.

About once a year, I go looking for a possible alternative or replacement. For compatibility openoffice.org and the OS X version NeoOffice provide the ability to import and export many MSWord documents and also export to the OASIS open document format (ODF). However, the openoffice and NeoOffice writing environment brings with it much of the frustrations I have with MSWord. NeoOffice also opens and runs sluggish on every system I have used it.

I craft my dissertation using LaTeX. LaTeX supports a number of critical itches I have. First, focus on the words and structure of a document rather than the appearance. Second, push off the final decisions about appearance to the stylesheet. Third, offer rich support for bibliographic citations, endnotes, indexing, floating diagrams and cross references. Fourth, output beautiful well-formatted PDF.

LaTeX fails though when it comes to the ability to convert between different document types. Existing document conversion tools such as tex4ht cannot handle the stylesheet I use for my dissertation, and the conversion process of LaTeX to MSWord or ODF is going to be painful. Ideally, something like DocBook is going to be a good solution but it’s not quite there either.

Once upon a time, I was a big fan of Nisus. Nisus just announced Nisus Writer Pro which might be worth trying when it is released. Another alternative I look at now and then is Mellel which offers better structured writing support.

Still however, it seems that the best workflow for now is to use a text editor such as emacs and deal with the formatting later.

Posted in creative process, geekstuff | 1 Comment »

January 8, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

One of the problems with reading Usenet is that I find myself tracking down the solutions to problems. It must be my experience working on an email helpdesk. But the problem of the other day is how do you import words from an article into an aspell personal dictionary. Here is my command-line solution.

#back up your dictionary
cp .aspell.en.pws .aspell.en.pws.old
#dump new words onto the end of your personal dictionary
aspell -H list < Article.html >> ~/.aspell.en.pws

This does of course assume that you trust the copy-editor of the article.

Posted in geekstuff | No Comments »

December 19, 2006 by kirkjobsluder.

One of the things I tend to do in my spare time is quite a bit of twiddling with software and stuff. I must admit that I’m a bit of a free software and shareware trial junkie. All of this stuff is for OS X unless otherwise specified.

WriteRoom is a “minimalist” text editor similar to TextEdit with the additional option of throwing the user into a full-screen mode with no menus, toolbars or buttons. Perhaps the thing that won we over on it was that the current beta version allows you to open the contents of any text field from a cocoa enabled application (such as mail, or Safari) in WriteRoom. One of the irritations though is that it doesn’t have a proper user manual.

About once a year I go on a quest for web browser nirvana which has brought be back to Safari. The primary reason is that I’m back to fiddling with DevonThink as a supplement to my brain. Pimp My Safari provides links to several plug-ins including the add-blocking software SafariBlock and the search plugin sogudi.

Posted in geekstuff | No Comments »