Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Can I Take Creatine With Superpump 250

mdwtools

In a recent message on the list Laura mentioned sptex mdwtools package, which I had already thrown out long ago, but I had completely forgotten, so it has been a happy rediscovery. This package is actually a set of them. Some with utility rather dark (except for TeXpertos), others with an undoubted utility. Here's the list: at This package allows you to define your own commands, rather than starting by \\ , starting with @ . The usefulness of this oddity becomes clear when we define a named command very short, to serve as a shorthand for one with a name larger. Then you realize that most of the commands whose name consists of a pair of letters already exists (either as primitive TeX command or as latex). Or if not, there remains the question of whether there is a package that we will use later. For example, we often \\ longrightarrow and would like to abbreviate as \\ lra Will there because this command in LaTeX? Using the package at our command also allows defining macros defined by any two characters, so we can use, for example /.../ *...* as an abbreviation for \\ textbf {...} (in fact, these two examples are pre-defined to load the package at

). No doubt you can find interesting applications.

  • cmtt . This package fixes a problem that can occur when using modern computer teletype types ( \\ texttt {...} ) because apparently this source coding is standard and some characters may leave changed. doafter . This is one of those utilities that are meaningful only for advanced programmers TeX. I do not understand what it is :-) footnote. Here reimplements command \\ footnote to behave better than what comes with latex. In particular, the new \\ footnote

    supports verbatim text, and can be used in places where the original command was not possible (as in parboxes ) mdwlist . This is one of those little gems. Sets the list type environments (itemize , description ,...) to be more compact. It also offers several solutions to the problem that, in the environment

  • description to define the term is too long (in my opinion, the description generated by LaTeX is rather ugly.) mdwmath . This minipaquetito implements a variant of \\ sqrt
  • omits horizontal line above the operation. It also provides some mathematical symbols. mdwtab
  • is a complete reimplementation new environments and tabular array , with many interesting options. Worth reading carefully the documentation. sverb code can list "verbatim", and read from a file. It also provides a demo environment
  • showing LaTeX code with the result, ideal for writing manuals for LaTeX syntax offers a set of macros to "draw" type BNF grammar diagrams. This type of diagrams abound in the documents of the suite mdwtools

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