Latex

Presentations

I presented a number of talks on behalf of the Netsoc society, and one on behalf of the DUCSS society in Trinity. You can download the slides below.

Netsoc Part I is an introduction to Latex. It covers most of the basics you will need to know to start using Latex, including using graphics and typesetting computer code listings.

Netsoc Part II covers more advanced topics, such as more complicated maths (the introductory talk covers some too), using a bibliography, advanced listings typesetting, creating an index, using floats and creating simple custom commands and environments.

Netsoc Part III explains how to use Latex to make pretty pictures. It covers drawing diagrams using Xy-pic, using PStricks to draw trees, DAGs, graphs of mathematical functions and plots of a collection of data points, and finally circuit diagrams and timing diagrams. Note that this talk refers to a tool called psfc, available below.

Finally, I gave a talk for DUCSS a while ago, which covers most (but not all) of the topics covered in the Netsoc talks, and a few other topics too (it was a very long presentation :-)

Hopefully this is useful to someone.

Postscript Formula Compiler

If you want to use the Latex PStricks package to typeset formula, you have to code the formula in PostScript (see my talk about pretty pictures in Latex for more information). Unfortunately, PostScript isn't the easiest of languages to use. So, I have written a very simple compiler called psfc that translates a small functional languages to PostScript, that you can use with PStricks. As an example, here is the defintion of the factorial function (n!) in PostScript:

/fac {
1 dict
begin
/n exch def
    n 0 eq {1 } {n n 1 sub fac mul } ifelse 
end
} def

fac(n) = if n == 0 then 1 else n * fac(n - 1) endif

Slightly more readable IMHO :-) See the psfc man page for more details; to use, download psfc.tar.gz, untar, and run make to compile (needs gcc, flex and bison, which should be available on all Unix/Linux variants). Alternatively, you can use it online by typing your program into the box below and selecting “Compile”.