Updates for mmuthesis and umalayathesis

Just a quick note that updated classes of mmuthesis and umalayathesis has been uploaded at my website.

mmuthesis

Based on feedback from a MMU student who submitted her thesis recently, IPS now requires that the Publications List be categorised in to Journal Articles and Conference Proceedings, and that text in the appendices should be 10pt. Please read the updated user manual on how to prepare the Publication List under the new scheme.

umalayathesis

Bug fixes of some spacing of appendices entries in the ToC, as well as adjusting the overall line spacing to conform with the expected output by IPS. Font of the cover page now uses Arial Narrow look-alike.

New uumthesis LaTeX Class and LyX Layout

On request, I have created a LaTeX class and LyX layout for writing Universiti Utara Malaysia theses. Credit goes to Dr. Mohd. Hasbullah bin Omar for getting the output endorsed by UUM’s Graduate Office.

The uumthesis LaTeX class, LyX layout, sample files and user manual can be downloaded from my website. Happy LaTeXing to UUMians!

Putting Dates in Watermarks

It’s been rather a long time sine I last posted anything as I’ve been working on my thesis and article… sorry!

Theses and articles typically go through many versions, ding-dong to-and-fro between supervisors and co-authors. Some people keep track of the version number (or date-last-modified) by giving each draft a different file name. Personally, though, I tend to get inconsistent with the file naming, especially when it’s 2:30am. So I figured it might work better for me if the date-last-modified was printed in the PDF of the thesis/article draft itself.

One could always put the date in the header or footer, but there might already be some content in those regions. Besides, it’s probably not a good idea to mess with the formattings for a journal article. Instead, I put \today in a watermark, so the date would get updated I compile my draft:

\usepackage{draft watermark}
\usepackage{datetime}
\ddmmyydate
\SetWatermarkLightness{.9}
\SetWatermarkText{Draft\string@\today}
\SetWatermarkScale{.6}

The colour, lightness, font and other attributes of the watermark are configurable. I also used the datetime package to configure the date formatting. Here’s how the output looks like (a page from my thesis draft):

Off topic : Congratulations Dr Joey/Rizal Nor!

One of our bloggers (he was actually the one who encouraged me to use LaTeX for writing) recently successfully defended his PhD dissertation at the Kent State University, Ohio, United States. And he’ll be coming back to Malaysia soon!!! (to my office, we’re in the same department).
Here is his thesis.. enjoy.
Congratulations again, Joey!
As far as I understood his thesis was written with LaTeX and use tikz package.. need him to verify this.

LaTeX and Graphics Contest

LaTeX-Community has teamed up with Packt Publishing to hold a LaTeX and Graphics contest, where participants can write about anything related to graphics. There are 10 superb contributions, jam-packed with lots of things to take away. Readers can now vote/share/like/blog/comment on the entries, while the judges deliberate over the 2 winners.

My entry is about a technique for efficiently creating visually non-repeating tiled pattern backgrounds, while using only small-sized graphics files, which I’ll cross-post here eventually I suppose, after the contest has ended.

Beamer

Ever since I knew how to use Beamer, I try to use it every wherever I could (including my progress presentation to my supervisor). Been doing that since 2009. But as forgetful as I am, I usually save my .tex file to be recycled for the next presentation. Some of my slides are available online. You know it’s written with Beamer when looking at the template so…
Some slides:
here, here and here.. and the rest you can see from my uploads.. not a big thing just usual stuffs.

More Ways to Typeset CJK

Rather a long time ago, I wrote about how to typeset CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) in pdfLaTeX, using the CJK and ctex packages. However, the font choices are rather limited. With CJK, you have only the wadalab (3 Japanese fonts) and arphic (2 Simplified Chinese fonts, 2 Traditional Chinese fonts) packages and 1 Korean font. If you have access to Windows fonts, the ctex packages further configures 6 Chinese fonts shipped with Windows for use in pdfLaTeX (may also work with dvi output, but I didn’t test).

More Fonts in XƎLaTeX: xeCJK

If you’re willing to use XƎLaTeX, the xeCJK package makes it a breeze to typeset CJK, using any font (TTF or OTF) installed on your operating system. The following uses Chinese fonts typically found on a Mac:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{xeCJK}
 
% Sets font for Roman text.
% There are also \setsansfont, \setmonofont.
% See fontspec documentation.
\setmainfont{Baskerville}
 
% Traditional Chinese typesetting has no "bold" nor "italic".
% 黑体 ("blackbody") and 楷体 ("regular script") fonts are
% used instead.
\setCJKmainfont[BoldFont=Hei,ItalicFont=Kai]{STSong}
\setCJKsansfont{Hiragino Sans GB}
\setCJKmonofont{STFangsong}
 
\begin{document}
春眠不觉晓,\emph{处处}\textbf{啼鸟}\textsf{夜来风雨声,}\texttt{花落知多少?}
\end{document}

The fonts are identified by their names as displayed in your OS‘ font manager application. Here’s the output:

More Fonts in pdfLaTeX: zhmCJK

If you absolutely need to use pdfLaTeX instead of XƎLaTeX, the new zhmCJK package is useful for introducing more CJK font choices into you documents. It’s not included in MikTeX nor TeXLive, however; so you will have to download it from CTAN and install manually: read the instructions carefully.

The zhmCJK packages make use of the premise that all CJK fonts share the same metrics (note that this is not true for Japanese half-width characters! Use ptex if you have serious needs for Japanese typesetting), and can therefore create the NFSS font definition and actual font mappings dynamically. The consequence is that zhmCJK can use TrueType CJK fonts to generate PDF output with pdfTeX or with the dvipdfmx driver. Here’s an example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{zhmCJK}
\setCJKmainfont[BoldFont=simhei.ttf, ItalicFont=simkai.ttf]{HanNomA.ttf}
 
\begin{document}
世界,你好!
\end{document}

You will need to pass the file name of the TTF font, which must have no space characters and only ASCII characters. And for LaTeX to find the TTF files, you need to do one of the following:

  • Set OSFONTDIR in texmf.cnf
  • Move or symlink the TTF file in TEXMF/fonts/truetype
  • Move or symlink the TTF file in the same directory as your document.

A New LaTeX User’s Testimonial

Last week I received an e-mail from Bahareh Pahlevanzadeh, a graduate student at Universiti Sains Malaysia, describing her happiness at discovering LaTeX and my usmthesis class/template for writing her thesis.

Your mileage may vary, but I was a bit surprised when she expressed her opinion that

When it comes to getting my writing organised, I found LaTeX, especially with the USMthesis class template, to be actually very user-friendly.

Well I don’t know about you, but I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve heard/read in person the words “very user-friendly” being used to describe LaTeX!

You can read more about Bahareh’s experience here.