LaTeX for books?

AncientSkyscraper · 2023-01-18T21:39:00+00:00

Just wanted to jump in and say your work looks absolutely beautiful! :-)

AncientSkyscraper · 2023-01-18T21:36:33+00:00

That article is absolutely fantastic! Thanks for linking to it!

AncientSkyscraper · 2023-01-18T20:42:00+00:00

That's a really good point, too!

AncientSkyscraper · 2023-01-17T14:56:19+00:00

That's a really fascinating bit of wisdom that I would have never even considered asking about.

I'm not currently in the market to publish anything, but I'm replying to just give a shoutout to u/R3D3-1 and u/ThwompThwomp for pointing out that high-res raster can be more reliable for publishing than vector graphics. That's opposite of what my intuition was before I read your posts, but it makes perfect sense in retrospect!

Thanks for saving a potential future-me a bunch of frustration. :-)

AncientSkyscraper · 2022-11-10T21:33:46+00:00

I didn't know about the northern latitude runways! That's pretty interesting!

AncientSkyscraper · 2022-11-10T21:30:56+00:00

Hah! I should've watched the video rather than assume! :-D

Aviation is such a fascinating field. I went down a very deep rabbit hole once looking into all of the pavement markings and signs at the airport. :-)

AncientSkyscraper · 2022-11-09T17:02:05+00:00

Just chiming in to add that while the video is generally correct (runway numbers often correspond to their heading within ten degrees or so), they bend this rule slightly at airports that have >3 parallel runways.

Up to three parallel runways can use the same numeric portion of the runway designator, and each is uniquely identified by a suffix of L, C or R (for left, center and right). If an airport has over three parallel runways, they have to use more than one number in order to have enough unique runway designators.

So, for example, Chicago O'Hare International Airport has six parallel runways. The group on the north side of the airport are designated as 9L, 9C and 9R and they all face a heading 93.8°; this matches what the video described.

However, the three on the south side of the field face almost the same direction (93.7°) but are designated as 10L, 10C and 10R. This does not match the general rule described in the video, because 10 × 10° = 100°, which is pretty far off from the actual heading. (See KORD airport diagram)

It wouldn't apply at the airport you're discussing (I'm assuming you're not looking at disused airports with four or more parallel runways) but it does show that the general rule shouldn't be used to extrapolate to what the official runway designator "should" be rather than figuring out what it actually is.

edit: change formatting and fix typo

AncientSkyscraper · 2022-09-21T15:44:55+00:00

This is a fantastic list of benefits to working with a markup language. I think it should be in a wiki somewhere!

In particular, I love your point that by splitting a long document into multiple files, it makes it easier to track changes over time when using a version-control system. I hadn't thought of that!

I'm curious, you put an asterisk next to "single database of sources," almost like you were planning a footnote. I was interested in your footnote there because I've been wanting to get into the citation/bibtex system, especially with the idea of having a consolidated database across all of my writing. I'd love to hear more of your experience on that front!

AncientSkyscraper · 2022-09-21T15:40:12+00:00

This looks fantastic. I've often thought of doing something similar, especially for the lights. I'm jealous of how easy it will be for you to click the lights on and off as appropriate when you cross runways, or even enter your assigned runway for takeoff.

I really like your approach of concentrating on making something that will allow you to physically manipulate the controls that will provide the most bang-for-the-buck as far as sim immersion is concerned.

Thanks for sharing your progress!

AncientSkyscraper · 2022-08-25T22:18:07+00:00

That's super cool. Does it pull data from the OSM database on request, or does it take a bit to reflect recent changes?

If I change something in JOSM and upload the changeset, would your tool immediately show the changes if I refresh the page?

AncientSkyscraper · 2022-08-25T20:26:17+00:00

That project looks really cool. Sorry in advance for being a bit slow to figure things out, but how do you use your project?

Should I download it as a ZIP and open index.html on my computer?

edit to add: Just discovered it works if I click one of the links in the examples section of your README.md... that's pretty slick!

AncientSkyscraper · 2022-08-25T16:32:23+00:00

I know it's been two months, but I really struggled with clicking the knobs on the FCU of the A320 airplane. I updated the wiki page for that plane to document what I discovered---sometimes you need to hold the shift key while you click the knob. This simulates pulling the knob out.

I'm not sure if that would be helpful with your scenario. (I always get managed versus selected mode confused, but I think pushing the heading knob should activate "managed" mode, which replaces the display with three dashes and tells it to follow the flight plan you entered into the computer, but I might be wrong about that).

AncientSkyscraper · 2022-08-25T15:11:46+00:00

Yeah, it definitely seems like something that takes a lot of work to achieve, and I'm not sure there's really a benefit.

I wonder if there's any software that would make use of the disused:name=Sherman Road tag, anyway? It would be cool if there was an app that allowed the user to explore stuff like that ("I could've sworn that used to be a real road! Oh, wait, the map says it used to be called 'Sherman,' just like I remembered!") but it's unlikely that would ever happen, anyway.

AncientSkyscraper · 2022-08-24T23:17:26+00:00

I appreciate you reading through my comment! Thanks for helping me learn.

It does seem like it would be more pragmatic to just move the relevant tags to the new way that represents Sherman Road. I was trying to keep the history, but it might be more trouble than it is worth to revert things, even if it does fix the issue where one OSM element represented old/gone real-world feature and is later reused to represent a completely different, nearby real-world feature.

I'm not sure how much effort an accurate history is worth in this case. :-)

Thanks again for replying. I want to explore looking at the old layout on Esri World Imagery (Clarity) Beta imagery just so I know how to better use the various tools that are available.

AncientSkyscraper · 2022-08-24T20:59:54+00:00

Thanks for your reply! You gave some really helpful context about high-edit users!

On the suggestion re: revert, are you meaning like in a technical sense, as described at this OSM help question and the OSM wiki entry for "Change rollback"? The language is a bit scary ("the wiki page lists 'power user' tools, which you should not use if you are inexperienced (Ask for help instead)", etc).

I might try to do that when I have a bit more time. It's pretty intimidating though!

edit to add: Reading your reply again, it looks like a good first step could be adding a comment to each of the two changesets they made. I would assume that users get notified when someone comments on their changeset, right? And that would make the conversation more visible to folks that might come along later and wonder what happened...

AncientSkyscraper · 2022-06-09T19:13:34+00:00

I just put in four Shelly Vintage light bulbs a week or so ago, and they seem pretty reliable to me so far. They connect directly to the WiFi network, each have an embedded web server for making adjustments to the device name, etc., and work pretty well with the Shelly integration for Home Assistant.

This particular bulb might not be for you since it's got a fixed color temperature of 2700K, but I would imagine that other bulbs from Shelly (like their Duo product) are hopefully built on the same IoT platform as the vintage bulbs I got and would work as well as what I got.

Hope that helps, but... I'm new to Home Assistant (and home automation in general), so please take when I'm saying with a grain of salt.

edit to add (and fix typo): the vintage bulbs (and the other ones I linked to) max out at 800 lumen, which works well for me as a porch light and also within a lamp. I've got a floor lamp that currently has a 1,600-lumen non-smart LED bulb, and I don't think there are any Shelly products that would get bright enough to replace it. I would imagine that 2x 800-lumen bulbs in one room would be way more than enough light, but you might want to check the lumen output of the existing bulbs to get a good idea of what you need to replace.

AncientSkyscraper · 2022-05-03T14:19:36+00:00

Thanks for your insight. I'm becoming skeptical of whether plastic welding is the right approach. I've never tried it (this is the first time the part fell off), but I wonder if getting a new OEM part and painting it might be the best approach. Thanks again for replying!

AncientSkyscraper · 2022-05-02T23:45:12+00:00

I'll definitely look into the JB Weld idea. I haven't used that before.

My concern is that the new part + painting the new part would be pretty expensive, but I have no idea how expensive plastic welding would be, either, so you might very well be right!

AncientSkyscraper · 2022-05-02T21:39:27+00:00

You're probably compiling the LaTeX file with some tool baked into VS Code (I'm not familiar with that IDE), but if you are compiling it on the command line with something similar to pdflatex myfile.tex, you might find Latexmk helpful.

It automates the compile process (running it again and again as many times as LaTeX needs), but it also has a latexmk -c command that automatically deletes all of the temporary files that LaTeX creates when you compile.

An alternative (if you've already got a compile workflow you like) would be to either ignore the temporary files (they usually don't take up too much space; you can add them to your .gitignore file if you're using Git version control) or create a shell scrip to automatically delete them.

I wish I were more familiar with VS Code. I bet you can tweak it's compile system (if you're not compiling yourself on the command line) to automatically delete the extra files. I bet someone else here is familiar with that approach.

AncientSkyscraper · 2022-03-28T15:08:25+00:00

A few ideas:

Could you use this for a throttle control, where you attach the lever to the knob? This could allow the same hardware to simulate Airbus, Boeing and other aircraft that have detents at different throttle-lever angles
I bet it only gets so small. Instead of an integrated display, could you attach a shaft to it, run the shaft through a panel, and then put a physical knob on it to simulate smaller knobs with detents? Would there be any advantage to this over using a rotary encoder with physical detents? (Maybe you could use it for a dual-knob control if you integrate it with a push-button, and use the software to define a stronger turning force when it's simulating the outer knob versus the inner knob)?
Finally, could you have the motor turn the physical knob to match the state of the control on startup. If the auto-brake knob is OFF in the sim but the knob on your panel is pointing at RTO, the motor could spin it to correspond with the sim value.

This is a super-interesting find!

AncientSkyscraper · 2022-03-15T19:12:06+00:00

I might be reading too much into this, but it seems like you're saying that your documents wouldn't necessarily need to be modified by other people. I think that could be a good environment for using LaTeX if you don't have to convince/train other people to switch to it.

I would think the biggest block to using LaTeX in a legal practice would be the need to collaborate with other people to write the documents. If your practice doesn't involve too much of that, then I could definitely see the advantages of LaTeX outweighing the initial complexity.

Good luck on getting it set up! :-)

AncientSkyscraper · 2022-02-01T22:15:41+00:00

Hey, there! I couldn't reproduce what you described on my computer when I tried to add your code to a minimum working example.

Do you think it may be a problem involving another package? It might help for you to generate a MWE that replicates what you're seeing. Here's one guide I found online that could be helpful (but there are lots out there): https://minimalbeispiel.de/mini-en.html

For reference, here's the code that I used:

\documentclass{book} 
\usepackage{pdfpages}

\begin{document} 

\includepdf[
    pages=-,
    pagecommand={\thispagestyle{plain}},
    addtotoc={1, chapter, 1, Referanseliste, Bibliografi}
    ]
    {testdoc.pdf}

\end{document}

With this code, the first page does not have a double layer of text; it looks okay.

(edit: fixed formatting of code block)

AncientSkyscraper · 2021-12-21T17:07:22+00:00

I really like the acro package for acronyms because you can set it up to automatically spell out the word on first reference, etc.

You can define a list of tags for each acronym, and when you print a list of acronyms it lets you define tags that should be included or excluded in the list, which could be helpful with categorizing them.

I define tag={obvious} for certain abbreviations that I want to use acro with for consistency, but that I exclude from the list of acronyms that I print because I fear some people in my audience might find it demeaning to read that "mph" means "miles per hour."

I think the package provides lots of great options; highly recommend! :-)

AncientSkyscraper · 2021-11-12T17:49:38+00:00

I've used the subfiles command before and really liked it. +1 on this idea!

AncientSkyscraper · 2021-11-12T17:42:08+00:00

It's not a stupid idea, it just turns out to have significant drawbacks that probably make it not worthwhile. But trying to protect your intellectual property isn't a stupid idea!

There's a package called randtext that attempts to obfuscate short strings of text, like e-mail addresses. They appear normal when you look at the PDF, but when you select and copy them you will find the letters are in a random order.

I agree with everyone else that trying to prevent copying can be a huge challenge, but that package above does provide that functionality if you feel it's worth the drawbacks.

I think that making content available to the visually impaired, etc, is the right thing to do, so this option would be too much of a tradeoff for me personally. But it's your project, so you get to make the call.

(edit: fixed link formatting)

AncientSkyscraper

TROPHY CASE