21 years with Emacs; streamlining writing/publishing with LaTex

I have been using computers for a long time (in the early 1960s my Dad got access for us to a timesharing Basic system on the Darpa Net), but I only have been using Emacs for 21 years :-) LaTeX and TeX are also old but great software, but I am fairly new to LaTex - I used it a few years ago to write the first version of my free web book Loving Lisp. The Saavy Programmer's Secret Weapon but had not used it again until this last week when I started to setup a more streamlined writing environment (more about that later).

I still think that IntelliJ is the best Java development environment, but I am trying to not do so much Java anymore - this year I have been developing mostly using Common Lisp and Ruby. Emacs is a natural fit for Lisp development, and is good for Ruby (but Ecplise+RDT is a bit better). It feels strange to still be using the same software (sort of) that I have been using for a good part of my life!

Just in the last few days, I have been finding Emacs recently to be the best environment (that I have found) for working with LaTeX - AucTeX was a 1 minute install in Ubuntu and I liked the way that it gives limited preview right in an Emacs buffer, and it takes only a few keystrokes to run LaTeX and get a real preview.

I have a good reason for getting back into into LaTeX: I love to write but I am not as enthusiastic about going with the established publishing industry anymore (I have written 14 published books, with another in progress, so "been there, done that"). I am much more enthusiastic about web publishing and alternative print on demand publishing outlets because a lot of things that interest me enough to write about are niche markets. In order to more easily write more (but much shorter) programming texts, I want to streamline and automate generating high quality text with embedded programming examples and equations. It took very little time this afternoon to set up an automated system for embedding program listings with generated output in LaTeX. Saving lots of "busy work" time lets me spend more time writing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ruby Sinatra web apps with background work threads

In Java-land, I have often used the pattern of writing a servlet with an init() method that starts up one or more background work threads. Then while my web application is handling HTTP requests the background threads can be doing work like fetching RSS feeds for display in the web app, perform periodic maintenance like flushing old data from a database, etc. This is a simple pattern that is robust and easy to implement with a few extra lines of Java code and an extra servlet definition in a web.xml file. In Ruby-land this pattern is even simpler to implement: require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' $sum = 0 Thread.new do # trivial example work thread while true do sleep 0.12 $sum += 1 end end get '/' do "Testing background work thread: sum is #{$sum}" end While the main thread is waiting for HTTP requests the background thread can do any other work. This works fine with Ruby 1.8.7 or any 1.9.*, but I would run this in JRuby for a lon
Read more

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a way,
Read more