Use eps files with pdflatex

From http://www.trevorrow.com/oztex/ozfaq.html#pdfeps:

Not directly, but you can tell pdflatex to convert eps files to pdf files on the fly. Edit your LaTeX file and add these lines before \begin{document}:
\ifx\pdfoutput\undefined
% we are running LaTeX, not pdflatex
\usepackage{graphicx}
\else
% we are running pdflatex, so convert .eps files to .pdf
\usepackage[pdftex]{graphicx}
\usepackage{epstopdf}
\fi
If you have an existing document with commands like \includegraphics{foo.eps} then LaTeX will include foo.eps but pdflatex will automatically convert it to foo.pdf and include that.
Note that it is better to leave off the extension; ie. use \includegraphics{foo}. Then pdflatex will include foo.pdf if it exists, but if not it will look for foo.eps and call epstopdf to create foo.pdf.

Read more here.

Writing USC Thesis with Lyx

The key issue is how to use LaTeX style file “USC-Thesis.cls” with Lyx. Read following
http://wiki.lyx.org/Layouts/CreatingLayouts
And you will understand.

Manage reference and eprints like we manage media files

update:
Check these out:
http://mekentosj.com/papers/
http://www.smileonmymac.com/PDFpen/
http://www.sintraworks.com/

We have all kinds of applications now to help us manage media files, picasa(windows), digikam(KDE) and F-stop(Gnome) for digital photos; i-Tunes(windows), amarok(KDE) and Banshee(Gnome) for music files. These applications are quite similar, basically, you have a database at the back storing all the metadata(tags) of all the files, then in the front you have a nice GUI to manage this information, moving, deleting, renaming and tagging. Digital photos will have info like time and place it’s taken, the camera and setting used. Music files on the other hand have info like title, artist, album, year, genre and so on. And as an graduate student, here is my idea, why don’t we have an application to manage the papers(pdf or ps files, maybe other formats too) we are interested, we’ve read. They have metadata too, author, journal/conference, year, title and so on. We have bibtex and other things like Endnote, but we don’t have something as good as what we have for media files. Work is as serious as fun stuffs, right? 🙂

update: Apparently somebody had the same idea before I did. Check it out.
http://freelancepropaganda.com/themp/
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-metadata/2003-October/000189.html

An interesting guy’s webpage

Helmer Aslaksen

Lyx Quickstart

If you are sick of M$ Office and want to try TeX/LaTeX, but the transition is too abrupt for you somehow. Try lyx, it hides all the details of TeX behind a nice GUI, provides similar WYSIWYG experience to M$ Word and at the same time preserves high-quality typesetting of TeX. It’s a perfect stepstone into the world of TeX!

http://www.troubleshooters.com/lpm/200210/200210.htm

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/documents_with_lyx
http://www.tldp.org/linuxfocus/common/src2/article368/lyx_article_lyx.txt
http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/lyx/

Tex和Presentation

在LaTeX里，可以使用一些package来写Presentation用的slides，可用的包有seminar，prosper，beamer，pdfslide+ppower4，pdfscreen。我用过Prosper，还不错，是从这里起步的。

emacs on M$ windows with auctex

cvs version of emacs (22.0.50) with auctex 11.82
http://mirrors.ircam.fr/pub/gnu/alpha/gnu/auctex/

TeX->Html转换

试过不少TeX->Html转换的工具，各有千秋：

• TexToWebPublishing(ttwp)：每一页都是一个图片文件（目录页有连接），实际上是latex在后台生成ps，然后变成png，好处在于这样只要latex能处理的文件都能接受，但问题在于文件之内的链接就无效了，像引用，www地址等等。
• TtH: 可以转换tex为纯html，但数学公式是借助特殊字体(symbol8859)显示的文本，不能保证在所有机器上都能看到，而且即使有这种字体，显示质量比TeX生成的Pdf还是差一个档次。
• Tex2Web：看介绍相当不错，结果也很漂亮，高度可定制，支持CSS，但是，好像不支持AMS-Math，这样对于数学公式比较多的文件就不太适用了。
• Latex2Html：元老级的转换器，曾经是唯一的选择，转换公式为图片，生成的html比较简单，或者说很“朴素”。
• tex4ht：TexLive里有, 暂时没有测试。

相关网页：
http://hutchinson.belmont.ma.us/tth/webmath.html

Effective scientific electronic publishing

一篇关于如何更好的在网上发表科技文章的东东，写的清楚明了。推荐！

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/publ-tips/

Bibtex 2.0

最近读了不少paper,需要建一个bibtex库，如果只是Standalone的软件，JabRef是个不错的选择，但是手工编辑开始还行，但数量一多，问题就来了。于是考虑Bibtex->LAMP，用MySQL建数据库，PHP来存取，编辑。这样通用性应该好很多，google了一下，找到这些信息：
“However, I think it would be better to have a real relational database, with a userfriendly frontend, for instance a html page with an input form. The data would be entered in the database (e.g. a mysql database) with a perl script. That would be a convenient solution on a Linux/Unix system, and it has the advantage that you could use it on the internet. In the MS world, an Access db with forms might be the best solution. Then, there should be a way of outputting bibtex files with all or a selection of records from the database. So you don’t edit bibtex files, but instead you enter your data in a db, with the advantage that you have speedy and easy access to your data, and that you can perform complex searches. When your thesis is finished, you let the system spit out your .bib file and you run bibtex-latex-latex and that’s it! Data belongs in databases, not in simple text files. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of know-how to realise all this… ” –Kastor
“I would add two more tables. First is an author table. Each author of each document gets a record specifying (ref_id, first, last, von, junior, etc.). This will help you search by authors. You may also want to create a table to track all the variation of each person’s name: D. E. Knuth, Donald Knuth, etc.
Second is a journal table that records (journal_id, full_title, short_title, ISSN, etc.). Storing both the full and abbreviated journal titles gives you more flexibity formatting the bibliography. ” –James J. Szinger

“Keep in mind there are multiple discipline specific lists of short titles, and the lists do not all agree. Eg, for journals indexed in Science Citation Index use ISI’s list; for botany use Botanico-Periodicum-Huntianum (BPH); for medicine use Index Medicus. ” –Una Smith

还有几个可能的candidates:
http://biborb.glymn.net/doku.php
http://refdb.sourceforge.net/
http://docdb.sourceforge.net/

Update:
对Bibtex的另一种扩展是XML，网上也已经有了几个不错的尝试
http://dret.net/projects/bibtexml
http://bibtexml.sourceforge.net