In this issue
Contents |
LaTeX for teachers
The first article, Scientific Presentations with LaTeX, Marius Hofert & Markus Kohm, describes a method of making overhead presentations with a regular document style. Rather than using a style that only does presentations, the authors show how material from an article can be exported directly for making a slide show.
How many times have you visited a poster session and wondered why some posters are more effective than others. The authors of Design and Preparation of Effective Scientific Posters using LaTeX, Paulo Rogério & Rian Gabriel offer some suggestions for improving the audience experience, and show how to use a graphics tool, PGF/TikZ, to add effective visuals.
The next author, a determined math teacher, had a simple goal: provide a free text for teaching basic mathematics. He made the teaching texts configurable by using LaTeX, so that a teacher using the materials could vary the content of handouts, homeworks, and exams. However, he found that it was difficult to get teachers to use the system since it involved knowing a fair amount of LaTeX technique. The article, Configurable Materials For Teaching Mathematics, Alain Schremmer, describes how the author was able to enlist the aid of some clever people to make a user-friendly math teaching system.
The next two articles were written by PracTeX Journal editor Paul Blaga and his wife Cristina Blaga, both university professors. Their first article, Variation and sign tables with tableau, describes the use of the tableau LaTeX package for making graphics useful in teaching mathematics and science. Their second article, Preparing exam and homework material with probsoln, shows how to use a LaTeX package to make varied homework and exams.
Using R and LaTeX (Portuguese), Cassiano S. Rosa & Og DeSouza (in Portuguese) describes a method of combining data and its description in a single database, to make publication an easy and less error-prone task.
The next author offers a technical note on constructing tables with LaTeX, where cells contain blocks of text. Square, multiline cells using tabular(x), Bastiaan Jacques
Ask Nelly answers some LaTeX questions, and Distraction offers some KenKen puzzle challenges.
New web format
Over the past several years of producing The PracTeX Journal, editing the HTML pages (like the one you are now reading) has been one of the more time-consuming and error-prone tasks. Each of the editors used a slightly different HTML text editor, and it was often difficult to get a consistent and error-free result. The most challenging issue to put together was the previous one, 2010-1, which had several non-English articles. We must have re-edited the HTML pages dozens of times to put the correct non-English characters in place.
In this issue we are trying a new method. The layout and content of the issue is being maintained by our wiki (see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page). One attribute of a wiki is that it makes writing web content easy. The user doesn't need to know HTML, and it provides a nice page layout. Plus, if you want to write "Ciência da Computação" all you need to do is copy and paste it in to the wiki editor, and the wiki ensures that it will appear with all accents in proper form.
We hope you enjoy the new look.
Thanks
Many people have collaborated directly or indirectly on the success of this issue: the authors, particularly the ones who have worked with me in the revision process, the production editors, and the readers.
Paul Blaga and Yuri Robbers helped with production. Our other editor, Francisco "Rei" Reinaldo, had a busy schedule and was unavailable, but will be back for the 2011-1 issue. (What was he doing in December? He returned to Portugal to defend his Doctoral thesis. Then, after returning to his native Brazil, he defended his Masters thesis and finished his course work. To complete the month, he was married. Congratulations Rei on all these successes.)
Two new volunteers helped with reviewing and producing articles. Michael Wierzbicki and Jason D O'Conal edited several of the articles in this issue. Thanks for helping out.
Many thanks also to the reviewers and proofreaders who checked the articles and sent comments and corrections.
