Francisco Reinaldo, Paul Blaga. Software systems for document preparation, project management, and requirements analysis are continually evolving. There is no limit to how much these systems can expand and become a more significant force in computerized automation. In this issue of the PracTeX Journal we present several articles by authors involved in these areas, with the hope that their experiences and techniques using LaTeX and other TeX tools will be useful to others.

The LaTeX Community blog.

Comments on previous articles: Math formatting, missing chess piece.

Brian D. Beitzel. Journals in the social sciences typically require manuscripts to be formatted according to the American Psychological Association's Publication Manual, which is now in its 6th Edition. The apa6 class is an update of the popular apa class (often referred to as “apa.cls”), bringing it into compliance with 6th Edition requirements and adding a few new features. This article describes the major features of apa6 and presents results from testing apa6 with four bibliographic package scenarios; the output of these bibliographic packages is compared with 6th Edition requirements. The article concludes with information regarding how to easily convert a document from LaTeX to Microsoft Word for the purpose of submitting manuscripts to journals that require APA style.

Dimitrios Ververidis, Daniel Schneider, and Joachim Köhler. VocalTract.sty is a package to visualize the vocal tract. Vocal tract is manipulated by a vector of articulation parameters according to S. Maeda model. Animation can be achieved by providing a sequence of vectors over time, e.g. from Matlab©. An embedded sequence of vectors in the VocalTract.sty for certain German phonemes allows for a sequence of phonemes animation when no vector is available.

Han Lin Shang. The beamerposter package in LaTeX is an excellent tool for the creation of posters. There are several options available using the beamerposter package, when writing a poster in LaTeX. Here, I would like to present some of these options associated with the beamerposter package. I shall introduce the basics and some useful companion packages that make a poster look neat and nice.

Jim Hefferon. MetaPost is a great tool for line art. We walk through creating a rate one-to-five graphic with it, highlighting some of its advantages over a mouse-driven graphics tool.

Luca Merciadri. We discuss some advantages of using eBooks, and creating them with LaTeX. We continue by explaining technical aspects that might improve and help you with your LaTeX eBook. We end with a short discussion about the PDF file format and its use with eBook documents.

Hongbin Ma. Although there are many free and commercial TeX collections and distributions, Chinese TeXers still have many difficulties in TeXing Chinese documents. Some of the problems Chinese TeX users confront with TeX distributions are: the huge size, complex structure, nontrivial installation and configuration, lack of a full-featured Chinese editor, and lack of other needed add-ons. These difficulties may prevent many people from becoming TeXers or TeX experts. Motivated by these issues and many other practical demands, the author and several friends developed an easy-to-use and easy-to-learn Chinese MTeX Suite, which is a green, compact, free, convenient, pragmatic and powerful TeX distribution with many add-ons and unique features which are seldom available in other TeX distributions.

Yossi Gil. Active documents is an emerging technology by which the product of computerized typesetting is more than an aesthetically pleasing composition of letters, words and punctuation characters broken into lines and pages. An active document offers modes of interaction with its reader, while the document itself may change its content in response to events taking place in the external world. Bashful documents, the concept proposed by the bashful package, and discussed in this article, extend the user interaction offered by active documents to the time of the document creation.

Rayans Carvalho, Francisco Reinaldo. Many companies have evolved with the implementation of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), using the best practices and processes to achieve practical results. Good practice suggests what to do, but at the same time raise doubts about how to do it and which tools to use to get better work performance in ITIL. Noting these facts, this article presents a LaTeX-based processes and services documentation tool, as suggested by ITIL. (In Portuguese)

Lars Madsen. Whenever the eqnarray environment appears in a question or example of a problem on comp.text.tex, tex.stackexchange.com or other forums there is a high probability that someone will tell the poster not to use eqnarray. This article will provide some examples of why many of us consider eqnarray to be harmful and why it should not be used.

The article is an updated edition, first published in PracTeX Journal 2006-4.

How to customize lists and produce logos.

A very recent package, gtrcrd, by Riccardo Bresciani, some quizzes on typography terms, and a kerning test.

This new feature of the PracTeX Journal includes, from time to time, short reviews of newly published textbooks or reference books on LaTeX and friends. For this issue, we selected a Springer book, LaTeX and Friends by Marc R.C. van Dongen