Friends, thanks for joining the interview room. :)
Our interview with Gonzalo Medina is about to begin. Feel free to ask questions. :) There's no particular order, so you can ask as much questions as you guys like. :)
@GonzaloMedina: Could you tell us a bit about you?
I am a 42 year old Colombian mathematician and father of two (a 16 year boy, Olmo and an eight year girl, Sara) and I am currently a professor at Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where I teach some math courses to undergraduate and graduate students; I also teach a LaTeX course every year since 2009.
I belong to the Scientific Computing and Mathematical Modelling research group of my Department. My main interest is in algebra, but recently I am beginning to catch an interest on history of mathematics.
LaTeX is my main hobby. I love reading; I also play classical guitar and used to play basketball. Unfortunately, due to that combination, ten years ago I injured my left hand pinkie and now I can only play simple scores in the guitar.
I joined the party a little late. Back in 2000 I started using LaTeX for writing exams and lecture notes; in 2003 I started my first "big project" writing an introductory text about the theory of representation of ordinary posets; I finished the text and used it in one of my courses, but unfortunately, I lost the files in 2007.
Until 2007 I was only a "final user", but then I needed to do something I didn't know how to achieve, so I found a forum on internet and asked the question there; the question remained unsolved, so I started searching for myself until I found the answer, and that's where it all begun!
I started reading package documentations, and answering questions on that forum (where I met Stefan Kottwitz) and then I found latex-community.org, so I became a member also and participated actively.
In 2008 I bought the LaTeX Companion and started reading it and learned a lot from it. Last year I finally bought the TeXbook and I am starting to study it.
Of course, during that time I also read and studied some code (the standard classes, some packages).
@PauloCereda Two years ago or so I, for an unknown reason, stopped visiting latex-community.org and the forum where I gave my first steps disappeared. Someday I googled something I needed and found a reference to TeX.SX so I took a look, and I liked it. My first post here was a question. Then I started answering questions... and here I am.
@Gonzalo: I am always impressed with the vast knowledge you have about packages and their use. Out of curiosity, how many packages do you know by heart?
I don't think I have such a vast knowledge; I simply know some of the packages that are around and read the documentation and code of some of them. To be honest, I only know just two packages by heart and they are precisely my own packages.
And even with my own packages I keep forgetting things and have to reread the code ;-)
The background package was born out of personal needs. Someday I needed a background image for some pages of a document, so I took a look at the available packages; for some reason or another, none of them were fit for my problem and I noticed that none of them used the power of TikZ, so I decided to write a package and background was born.
The fancypar package was born out of a challenge. Someone asked a problem in a forum about automatically getting a zebra-like pattern for text paragraphs, so I started reading and trying to find a solution to the problem. At some point I got stuck, so I asked a question in c.t.t. and Philipp Stephani pointed me in the right direction: a method described in TeX by Topic to dissect paragraphs. A few days later, fancypar was born.
My contribution is the little package gridleno.sty whose code I include below. This package was designed to enhance the functionality of grid.sty regarding the difficult task of grid typesetting in double column LaTeX documents. The package still needs a lot of improvements, this is only a start...
Very beautiful typography!
Do you use this template in your lecture notes? :)
@PauloCereda I don't really know myself ;-) Whenever I can, I try to provide complete answers (although sometimes I wish I had more time to improve them), and I guess the community notices it.
The first one that comes to my head is the answer to Pretty Table of Contents . I liked its simplicity. There are some other answers that I like, but I cannot remember right now which ones exactly.
I like a lot of things. Perhaps I can summarize all the things that I like in a (very well known, even "cliché") affirmation: LaTeX gives complete control over the attributes of the documents.
And perhaps one thing I don't like is the coexistence of fragile and robust commands.
I should mention that I don't fully agree with the use of "complete" in the affirmation I mentioned above ;-)
No, not really. A couple of times I've used the features provided by xparse and I really like the increased functionality and easy of use. However, I still haven't ventured with the new syntax; I once took I quick look to the code of egreg's kantlipsum and found myself lost, although the general idea was understandable. I have to start reading new documenation! Anyway, I am really happy to see that LaTeX3 has made some big progress and hope to see it "presented in society" pretty soon.
@Gonzalo: We've seen great keynotes about TeX and friends presented by TeXnicians all around the world. Do you think Latin America could host a TeX User Conference? :)
Yes, I positively think so and I think it would be really important to hold a TUG conference in Latin America. I had some ideas about proposing Colombia for the 2013 meeting, but due to some issues beyond my control, this idea will have to wait a little bit more before becoming a reality.
1) To take their time; if they want to learn LaTeX for a project due in two days, it's gonna be a nightmare. 2) If taking a course is not an option, then they should get a good manual (there are some really good ones around). 3) Not to use "templates" from other people; this will prevent them from really learning or, even worse, will show them bad practices.
4) Experimenting. This is how you really learn everything. 5) When problems appear, they should try to solve them by themselves and if they can't, then seek advise somewhere with quality answers (in this community, for example).
@JosephWright For an intermediate-advanced level in LaTeX, I would suggest The LaTeX Companion.
It was a nice experience (I learnt one or two things about LaTeX when I did it) and I did it hoping to make this document more accessible to Spanish speakers who can't read in English, German, French or Italian. The translation now is obsolete (it doesn't correspond to the new version of l2tabu) and I will have to update it.
