Custom KOMA-Script Letter 1.1

Over the last couple of KOMA-Script releases, I noticed that my custom letter format for this style package had changed its appearance. Specifically, the second page’s header and footer had moved from the margins into the page, taking up far too much space. I opened a (German) bug report on the KOMA-Script forum, including sample … Continue reading “Custom KOMA-Script Letter 1.1”

Andrew West’s BabelStone

The BabelStone complex of websites is a treasure trove for aficionados of historical and non-Latin typography. The author, Andrew West, is a published expert on Chinese and other Asian scripts. Here’s a quick overview of his major online productions: The main BabelStone weblog features incredibly comprehensive articles on historical writing and art, e.g. The Rules … Continue reading “Andrew West’s BabelStone”

Past & Present of Sharp S

Ralf Herrmann’s Wayfinding & Typography has several interesting articles concerning the infamous German letter ß, aka sharp s or eszett. What’s a Ligature, Anyway? explains the difference between typographic and orthographic ligatures, and why ß in contemporary Latin script is neither. Rather, it was defined in 1903 as a single letter in the new German … Continue reading “Past & Present of Sharp S”

Extra Spacing After Sentences

Typographical rules are sometimes based on empirically proven ease of reading, but much more often they are simply tradition or aesthetic preference. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it gets annoying when such accidental habits are declared absolute truths or, worse, justified with made-up history. And that is the case with the often-heard claim … Continue reading “Extra Spacing After Sentences”

What’s Wrong With E-books

E-books have become quite popular in recent years, largely thanks to Amazon’s Kindle promotion. I own two devices suitable for e-book reading – an iPad 3 and a Sony e-ink reader, comparable to the Kindle Touch – and tried a variety of content over the months. Sadly, the results were rarely satisfactory, and some recent … Continue reading “What’s Wrong With E-books”

TeXstudio improves XeLaTeX support

My favorite LaTeX editor TeXstudio got some significant updates in the last two months. Version 2.4 completely reworked the build system and added direct support for XeLaTeX, the typesetting engine that isn’t stuck in the 20th century and can handle modern things like Unicode and OpenType fonts. TeXstudio now features a built-in command to run … Continue reading “TeXstudio improves XeLaTeX support”

Letters with KOMA-Script

The comprehensive LaTeX package KOMA-Script comes with a fairly powerful letter class, scrlttr2, that offers a broad variety of predefined variables and layout positions for window envelopes. Sadly, unlike KOMA-Script’s default layout for normal documents, the default letter layout is rather ugly. The recipient address field is too close to the edges of the envelope … Continue reading “Letters with KOMA-Script”

LaTeX Typesetting with MiKTeX

LaTeX Typesetting with MiKTeX describes my new LaTeX setup that was first used for the revised Star Chess and Tektosyne documents. The page lists all programs, style packages, and customizations I’m using. You can also download the LaTeX sources for both documents as practical examples. Moreover, I expanded Document Standards with an overview of (La)TeX … Continue reading “LaTeX Typesetting with MiKTeX”

Star Chess & Tektosyne Guides Revised

Uploaded revised & reformatted editions of two PDF documents: Computer Player Documentation for my ancient Star Chess game Tektosyne User’s Guide for my current Tektosyne Library Why these two? Well, the old Star Chess documentation was still written in LaTeX, so I used it for refining the LaTeX document style that I intend to use … Continue reading “Star Chess & Tektosyne Guides Revised”

More on DITA Typesetting with FOP, OT & Oxygen

Just completed my planned additions to DITA Typesetting with Oxygen XML Editor. This article now covers the following aspects of creating PDF output using Oxygen and its included open-source packages, Apache FOP and DITA Open Toolkit: Support for bookmap metadata, or lack thereof Using OpenType fonts with PostScript outlines Incorporating PDF files as images in … Continue reading “More on DITA Typesetting with FOP, OT & Oxygen”