A Gallery of PGFPlots Examples

Posted on by Malaysian LaTeX User Group

TeXample.net has been a great gallery and resource of TikZ examples, curated by Stefan Kottwitz. Graph plots were included on TeXample.net, but as the pgfplots packages became more flexible and feature-rich, Stefan has decided to dedicate a separate gallery to it — and thus was PGFPlots.net born!

The graph plot examples are already looking delicious, so head on over and take a look. Do share your own examples as well!

Authoring Examination Papers using LaTeX (and a GUI front-end for non-coders)

Posted on by Malaysian LaTeX User Group

Part of my current job involves preparing examination papers, which is supposed to follow certain formatting guidelines. During my first time doing it, I used the sample Word document file everyone else is using. Suffice to say that once was enough. (￣▽￣)

So I wrote my own LaTeX document class based on exam.cls for authoring our examination papers. I held a basic LaTeX workshop for my colleagues, and one of them was game enough to dive right into it and started using my document class for setting her exam papers too (and loved it).

Other colleagues enquired about the possibility of having a GUI front-end, so that they wouldn’t have to deal with the code at all. The idea was turned into an undergraduate final year project. My student built a examination paper preparation system which saves the questions as XML, transforms them using XSLT into a LaTeX file, an then generates PDF file by invoking pdflatex on it. You can read more about the project in this paper.

A Light Colour Theme for Beamer Poster

Posted on by Malaysian LaTeX User Group

(Yes it’s been a while. I’ve started working and adapting to the new pace!)

So quite a (long) while ago, I posted my sample beamer poster, while preparing for a conference poster. Now I’ve got another poster to present, and the previous colour schemes just did not go well with the logos. Hence I started tinkering around with the colours, and finally settled on this light, subtle palette:

Blown_Entrepreneur
Color by COLOURlovers.

The sample poster looks like these (shown together with the existing two other colour themes):

And here’s a thumbnail of the actual poster:

Source code of the sample files (including Beamer themes and colours) can be downloaded here.

Extracting Only Cited Bibliography Entries

Posted on by Malaysian LaTeX User Group

Occasionally, while exchanging files with collaborators or submitting articles, I’d like to extract a smaller .bib file from my main, “hold-all” bibliography file, i.e. containing only the entries that I’d actually cited in my document.

Fortunately this can be done fairly automatically using the bibexport tool. Quick rundown:

  1. Compile your document, say myarticle.tex the usual way, with your “big” allrefs.bib file.
  2. Run bibexport with the following: 
    bibexport -o extracted.bib myarticle

    extracted.bib should now contain only the bibliography entries that were cited in myarticle.tex.

  3. Change \bibliography{allrefs.bib} to \bibliography{extracted.bib} in myarticle.tex.
  4. Send myarticle.tex and extracted.bib to collaborator or editor!

Quick Diagrams with SmartDiagrams

Posted on by Malaysian LaTeX User Group

It all started with a question on TeX.SX: Namely, is there any quick way to draw diagrams from a list of items, similar to the ‘Smart Art’ feature in PowerPoint 2010?

It wasn’t long before the package smartdiagram was born as a response, using TikZ to do the actual drawings. The basic syntax is:

\usepackage{smartdiagram}
\smartdiagram[diagram type]{list of comma-separated items}

Here are some examples (based on material from here):

\smartdiagram[circular diagram]{Assess,Plan,Implement,Renew}

\smartdiagram[flow diagram]{Assess,Plan,Implement,Renew}
\smartdiagram[buggle diagram]{Planning Cycle,Assess,Plan,Implement,Renew}

If you happen to be preparing a Beamer presentation, replacing the \smartdiagram command with \smartdiagramanimated will result in an automatically ‘animated’ diagram, with each item in the list appearing one at a time as you advance through the slides:

See the manual for other digram types and customisation options (colours, shapes, sizes, etc).