The theme for this issue is "Graphics in TeX". Even though TeX was not originally designed for graphical work, it has acquired a lot of functionality in this area over the years. ConTeXt is especially noteworthy in this respect since it offers seamless integration of TeX and Metafont.

In addition to Metafont many other graphical add-on packages exist that extend the capabilities of the TeX-engine, such as PSTricks and PGF with TikZ. This issue introduces various of these packages and shows some of their many applications.

Theme: TeX for editors
Editor: Paul Blaga

Most people use TeX, LaTeX or ConTeXt mainly for writing their own scientific articles. They don't need skills for fine tuning the visual aspect of their work, because this is what the editor of the journal does. The same goes for the books, if the publisher has an in-house TeX expert. However, sometimes the user needs more knowledge, for instance if he has to edit a volume or has to provide a camera-ready version of his book that has to meet certain standards. This issue of PracTeX is devoted to aspects of LaTeX that may be of help to these users. We have in mind, for instance, packages as geometry, caption, fancyhdr, but also explanations of the way somebody can change the aspects of chapters heads and others of the same kind, without becoming, really, a TeX wizard.

A large part of the organizational work of assembling this issue was done by production editors Joe Hogg, Lance Carnes, Paul Blaga, Francisco Reinaldo, Will Robertson, and myself. These editors spent many hours coordinating with authors, reviewers, and proofreaders to get each article into finished form. My special thanks to Paul Blaga who has done a lot of work, editing three articles, authoring one, helping out with production editing and getting the job done even if it is sprung on him at extremely short notice.

Many thanks also to the reviewers and proofreaders who checked the articles and sent comments and corrections.

Dave Walden has solved one or two problems I have encountered while keeping the journal's web site on track, even though Dave officially resigned as the Journal's web master in August 2006. Many thanks, Dave.

This raises the question of when it is worthwhile to learn a new tool and when it is not. To answer that question I would like to explore the world of Graphics in TeX (any flavour) a bit deeper.

Suppose you are asked to give a presentation on a subject rather dear to your heart — let's say the question of whether or not fish sleep. Further suppose that you are a scientist and used to working with LaTeX, but having no prior experience with Microsoft PowerPoint. The logical choice would be to use LaTeX for this presentation, since learning the Beamer class is probably going to be relatively easy, and it is much easier to reuse LaTeX material that one has used before in publications with Beamer than it would be to reuse this same material within PowerPoint.

Creating the presentation turns out to be a breeze, but a nice background image, perhaps with some fish in faded colours that do not interfere with the text, is still lacking. Which tool should you use? If you have no prior experience creating graphics in LaTeX, but you are a little bit of a Photoshop wizard, my recommendation would be: use Photoshop. Don't spend time searching CTAN or the web, printing the PGF and TikZ manuals, learning the graphics language and applying it to this problem, since that is an awful lot of work for creating one picture. In Photoshop this background graphic can probably be produced in fifteen minutes, rather than the many hours needed to familiarize oneself with the intricacies and oddities of a completely new package, even if this package has been specifically designed to work well within a LaTeX environment.

Should you wish to give presentations often, or create a lot of graphics, then learning a new tool might become worthwhile. Suppose this lecture is widely acclaimed and you receive a prestigious grant to write the definitive standard work on sleep in fish. This book is obviously going to be hundreds of pages, and contain hundreds or even thousands of graphs. These graphs are based on work of other scientists, on your own experiments, on computer simulations, and on the output of various programs for statistical analysis. In other words: all these graphs are different. They use different fonts, different scales, different ways of indicating points of interest, etc.

In this case you cannot escape redrawing all graphs in a standardized way. Of course you could refer to your trusty statistical software of choice, but in this case I would not. TeX in most variations has a strong emphasis on separating content and form. Most users consider this to be one of its main advantages. In a document that has hundreds or thousands of graphs, you could truly benefit from this separation.