@GonzaloMedina: I don't think it should be closed: There's no harm in duplicating the answer here, and since Scientific Workplace is (among other things) a LaTeX editor, and PGF/TikZ is an important LaTeX package, it belongs on this site.
@PauloCereda I always listen to radiosvizzeraclassica.ch during work. Presently they are broadcasting Čajkovskij :(, but the program features many good pieces.
I use Tex Live 2011 and test a simple example:
\documentclass{powerdot}
\begin{document}
\begin{slide}{a slide}
Contents of the slide.
\end{slide}
\section{first section}
\begin{slide}{another slide}
Contents of the slide.
\end{slide}
\begin{note}{personal note}
The note. \end{note}
\section{the...
@PauloCereda Oh, if that's true, then that would explain it. Maybe I'll add a comment to another answer of his instead. In chat it will work even if the person hasn't been chatting, so I assumed it worked in comments too.
@Caramdir Thanks for posting the link on the other question. Maybe a solution will be forthcoming. I messed around a bit with powerdot.cls without any luck, but I'm no Herbert, that's for sure (nor Heiko, since hyperref is also implicated.)
@Audrey No -- it seems Philipp hasn't posted any updates for about two weeks. (It wouldn't be the first time that he is absent for a few weeks.) We'll see.
@lockstep OK. I was wondering about use of the comma in the final delimiter... Would that mainly be specific to English? I noticed in answering one of domwass's questions that the comma isn't used in finalnamedelim in German.
@Audrey @lockstep While there are a couple of biblatex experts in here, I have a question about moving from bibtex to biber: do I need to worry about how my bib file (I use one big master file for everything) is encoded (currently MacOS Roman) so that I can maintain functionality with both biber and bibtex (for older documents)?
@Audrey Yes, that seems to be my experience too. There's an extra layer in the way here since I'm using bibdesk to manage my references. Now a bit of investigation shows that in its current settings on my system it translates all accented characters into their latex equivalents, so from bibtex's point of view it's an ASCII file. Biber can also deal with that I guess.
@lockstep Yes, but the biber manual seems to imply that it correctly converts the records on the fly to UTF-8 anyway, so I'm not sure I need to specify that.
@lockstep Yes, but you're hardcore (cf. my previous quote that Paulo conveniently revived) :-). I still have too much old stuff around to do that, and I don't want to have two bib files if I can help it.
@lockstep Only then? It seems that my first biblatex document was from 2006, and I've been using it intermittently since 2007. So maybe I'm the hardcore one! But for me the issue is less about biblatex but with switching to biber, which I certainly haven't done yet.
@AlanMunn I just stick with ASCII because journals that I'd eventually like to submit to use bibtex and bst files. biber seems to handle everything just fine. But I write in English and not many of the authors I cite have accented names.
@JosephWright So far, yes. I worry that that will change with time. On the other hand, the more we encourage our students to use LaTeX, the more chance we have that the field will continue to accept it. But we're still unfortunately a minority within the field as a whole, although there are sub-areas in which LaTeX use is common.
@PauloCereda What do you mean, no one is listed? (Apparently I'm the top answerer in the tag.) I hope I'm not deterministic.
@JosephWright In my department I have a deal with the students: they teach each other the basics, and every year I run a workshop on honing their skills and filling in more advanced things. I find this easier than running pure beginner workshops, which require one to deal with multiple OSes and other stuff. (Right now I'm sitting in on a R course that a colleague is teaching, and it took 30mins to get all the Windows users to find the csv file that they were supposed to use for the class.)
@AlanMunn We've been working hard on the cross-platform nature of our course (github.com/uktug/latex-beginners-course), and using TeXworks and TL means we don't have too many problems
@AlanMunn The UK-TUG one came about because someone asked Nicola about 'open' events, and she and I then worked out how to take on the issue (we work at the same university)
@JosephWright There's a person here in the math dept who runs a beginners course in the summer, but it's unfortunately full of bad practices, and also somewhat out of date. It would be nice to collaborate, but I'm not sure how to approach it without appearing totally obnoxious. Of course, that wasn't an issue with Nicola.
@JosephWright I have a bunch of things that I use for my post-beginners workshop. They're not very organized at the moment, but they deal with e.g. using booktabs and array, enumitem and titlesec, simple macro writing along with some more specific linguistics stuff such as formatting examples and drawing trees and bracketed arrays.
@GonzaloMedina: thanks a million for pointing me to the correct page in the TikZ manual. I swear I tried to find something meaningful, but since I'm a newbie and I stick only with the automata library, I didn't know about those tweaks. Too bad my automata drawings are usually complex.
@AlanMunn We put booktabs in the beginners course this time: tables seemed to be needed, so I ignored \hline and just said 'use booktabs, no arguments' :-)
@JosephWright The way I do it is everyone shows up with their computer and I connect mine to the projector and I literally build examples right before their eyes, and everyone can try stuff too. It works quite well.
@AlanMunn Sound about right. the way I've run the recent courses is with TeXworks open, and flick back-and-forward between the slides and examples. Good for things like SyncTeX, or quick notes
@GonzaloMedina Yes, that's why I like this site, since the combination of continued editing (as Joseph noted) and also voting really keeps best practices in the forefront to a large extent.
@JosephWright We (all of us, not you and I) have had this debate here before. Unfortunately for me I find the KOMA English documentation awful, even for someone experienced like me. Also, for most documents, I find article+titlesec does everything I need, and the large document that my students write is their thesis, for which I have written a memoir-based class.
@lockstep I've been wondering about making that switch for the course: the worry is that at present 'real world' users are more likely to use natbib (or nothing at all).
@lockstep LOL. I'm commitment-phobic. :-) But more seriously, the issues that we were just discussing vis a vis submitting to journals make recommending biblatex somewhat problematic at the moment, especially since my guide is aimed a students.
@GonzaloMedina, @Raphink: this automaton is used to find a person (or a group) according to certain attributes. Let's say I want to find how many persons have green eyes, so I submit a query to it. Every person is represented by an accepting state, and the f_n notations are adaptive functions trigged to modify the topology. Only the persons which have the attributes I'm looking for will be "reached" through a transition.
@JosephWright There's another advantage to not stressing the comprehensive classes: so much of the available advice is based on the standard classes+packages, so if you train people too early on either KOMA or memoir they become less adaptable, which isn't a good idea, I think.
@JosephWright Well with your skills, I'm sure you could. I wouldn't want to spend the time. It took me less than a day to set up my thesis class in memoir. (Not that it was bug-free but the main formatting was dead easy.) The book that I'm currently writing is also formatted with memoir.
One problem that I see looming on the horizon with the rise in popularity of {Xe|Lua}latex is lack of portability. Once people start using any font on their system, documents become a lot less portable than with traditional latex.
@PauloCereda I have a former student, who if anyone ever asked her about any sports team, would simply reply "Sorry I don't follow women's volleyball" (no matter what the mentioned team was.) Stopped such conversations dead in their tracks. :-)
@AlanMunn haha! It's funny how people in Brazil take football too seriously. You must have a team, even if you don't follow games. And foreign students are forced to pick up a team, at the risk of being excluded from the group!
I watch several leagues: ours, Premier, Calcio, la Liga, Bundesliga, Ligue 1 and Primeira Liga.
@AlanMunn:How would that make it any less portable then having a figure in it? Sure you can't just distribute the code anymore, but couldn't you just zip up the otf or ttf file with it?
@Canageek Yes, that's true. I'm not saying that there's no portability, just that portability of the source becomes more complicated, compared to standard latex. (Of course, that came at a price, since there was a relatively smaller set of available fonts.) (Also, this comment was made in the context of teaching beginners.)