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Read number lines in a file - in LaTeX

nospam@example.com (Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 19:05:00 +0100

Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum

Probably a rare needed feature, but i had to count the number lines in a text file - in LaTeX.
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Generate random number in LaTeX

nospam@example.com (Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 20:51:58 +0100

Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum

It is possible to generate random numbers in a TeX document. For a gimmick i wanted a random line from a text file in my slides. The first step was to find a random number.

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Include and exclude latex-beamer frames

nospam@example.com (Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 22:46:46 +0100

Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum

For my slides i sometimes want to disable parts of the presentation, as example: if the operating system is Linux, i don't need Solaris installation instructions. The \ifthenelse{<condition>}{...true...}{...false...} from the ifthen package works very well for normal frames, but it fails, if there are examples (verbatim environment) in the code.

In such a case \iftrue and \iffalse are much more lazy than \ifthenelse and compiling the examples results no longer in latex parser errors. The downside of this solution: i need to predefine the condition, but in my case i have them in a separate file anyway.

The definition looks like:

\newboolean{usesolaris}
\ifthenelse{\equal{\targetos}{solaris}}{
  \setboolean{usesolaris}{true}
}{
  \setboolean{usesolaris}{false}
}

I have defined the variable \targetos, which contains a string with the currently used platform name for my presentation. If the string matches "solaris", the boolean \usesolaris is set to "true", else to "false". Latex compiles the "\ifusesolaris" definition from the boolean, which i later can use to include or exclude frames:

\ifusesolaris
\begin{frame}[fragile]
  ... frame content
\end{frame}
\fi

In addition, it is also possible to add code for the case where \usesolaris is false. Just add \else and the code before \fi.

Create a newspaper in TeX

nospam@example.com (Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum) — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 12:58:53 +0200

Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum

My problem: for our wedding i need a small magazine with a foto in front, the flow sheet, some notes for the music and some more additional informations. The decision was to create A5 sheets and print them doublesided on an A4 paper, so you actually need at least 4 A5 sheets to fill one paper.

The first attempt was OpenOffice, but if you have more than one A4 paper, it's really hard to have the sheets in the correct order. For one paper you need sheet 1 and 4 and sheet 2 and 3 adjoin each other. If you have 8 sheets, you need 1 and 8 together, 2 and 7 and so on ...

Thats complicated to do in OpenOffice (maybe there's a way to do this, but i don't know it).

So after some minutes i changed over to Tex, took one of my existing makefiles and modified it a bit. With the following makefile you can just create sheet after sheet in your TeX-file, type 'make' and you get 2 PDFs, one with the odd pages and one with the even pages. Thats all, what you have to do.

Oh, make sure, you have an exact number of pages (4, 8, 12, ...) ;-)

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itemize in tabular

nospam@example.com (Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum) — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 00:36:35 +0200

Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum

If you want to put an itemize list inside a tabular environment, the tabular column must be a \parbox typ (thats: p{...}).