During the Ice Storm week I learned the basics of LaTeX. LaTeX is a document preparation system. By writing a type of markup you can pass it through the LaTeX formatting engine, which, in turn, utilizes Knuth’s TeX language, and it will format it and you can output it to a variety of formats, like PDF. Update: I’ve created a LaTeX reference page. Check it out: \title{A LaTeX Demonstration} \begin{document} \maketitle When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

In an earlier post I provided code demonstrating my “functional” Perl idiom. The purpose of that code was to take a very simply formatted text file and to turn it into LaTeX Beamer formatting. Well, recently I found the application iFlipr. In addition to being a site where you can upload flash cards, it also has an iTouch / iPhone version so that you can review when you’re in the bus, in a waiting room, etc. So, I needed some code to transform my generic data set into–not LaTex–but iFlipr format. With but the most trivial of changes, I was able to accomplish this.

renewcommand{labelenumi}{Alph{enumi}.} renewcommand{labelenumii}{alph{enumii}.} This is used to define the classes of glyphs you want to use in an outline. In this case, the top-level points will be majuscule, Latin ( no for once I don’t mean the language, but the letter-forms ). The first level sub-set of that will be Latin minuscule. There are a number of classes that are available. LaTeX recognizes 4 levels of sub-idententation ( thus no labelnumxix ), but 4 is usually sufficient ( yes, I strained to type that, but if it’s not sufficient, odds are you’re not as clear in your thinking as you ought be ).

Donald Knuth started writing The Art of Computer Programming and along the way decided that technical publishers didn’t know what they were doing. Knuth’s yak-shave? Writing TeX: A 10 year yak shave that has produced the most elegant typesetting language ever. A fabulous link between the science of this book, art, and symbolic systems: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4532247 Unlikely Phrases in the Recording: Bar Coding Arabic Language Algebra Samuel Johnson Betsy Ross God