The Akashic Field Chronicle

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As promised, I’ll be trying to blog with a little more semblance of regularity. I figured, what better way to get back into the zone than by bringing back a regular blog segment. Fortunately, I had just the thing in my archives, the AFC Pick-of-the-Week (P.O.W)!  But a weekly segment seems completely unrealistic at the moment. Perhaps bi-monthly sounds a little more practical (we’ll see). Anyway, it’s still a week and I still pick something, just not every week, so there.

This week, I’m picking…

Beamer

LaTeX Beamer to be exact. What’s Beamer you ask? Well technically it’s just another LaTeX package, but a pretty awesome one if you ask me. A friend introduced it to me while I was doing my MS at  UP Diliman and I’ve been a huge fan ever since.

It’s basically a package (i.e. an extension) to LaTeX in order to make presentation slides using standard LaTeX syntax. If you already write papers or dicussion notes in LaTeX and you’re familiar with its syntax then Beamer is definitely for you. If not, then it’s a perfect opportunity to start learning LaTeX. I previously wrote about how useful it is in this post, and I still believe so.

Why Use Beamer

Here are some reasons why I’d recommend using it:

• LaTeX – It’s built on top of LaTeX and if you think LaTeX is great (esp. for rendering math) then this reason is pretty self-explanatory.
• It Looks Great – It’s hard to sell this claim, esp. to people who are obsessed with PowerPoint. But you have to see it to believe it. Here are some great Beamer examples:
  • A Sample Presentation by Till Tantau (creator of the Beamer class)
  • Demo of different features
  • My MS thesis defense presentation (ok, maybe it’s not great, but it has sentimental value)
• Portability - A Beamer presentation is essentially a PDF file so it will work almost anywhere (and preserve ‘animations’).
• Reusability - the LaTeX code in your paper, discussion notes, book or whatever, is exactly the same code used in Beamer. Including the structure (section, subsection, etc.). This means formulas will render perfectly whether you originally used it on a paper or a presentation. If you’re cramming a presentation, you can even make it straight from your paper (just put \begin{frame} … \end{frame} on certain segments)
• Structure - Beamer, without messing with the nitty-gritty, enforces a certain style to your slides as you will see if you look at the examples I have above. Some PPT users might see this as very limiting, but after a while you begin to realize that this actually forces you to adhere to certain rules (font size, image placement, margins, etc.) that actually make your presentations look very professional.
• It’s Free - and not the ‘illegal’ kind of free

Did I mention they look great?!

Who Should Use Beamer (and who might not want to)?

If you regularly write research papers and make presentations (Faculty, Grad Students, Researchers, etc.) then I definitely recommend you at least try it out. If you’re already familiar with LaTeX then I recommend it even more. Also, if you find yourself rendering mathematical formulas very often, then the LaTeX equation rendering is the best there is.

Still, there are some who might not see the point of using Beamer and might not necessarily benefit from the things I listed above. These include:

• People who can’t invest time learning LaTeX - I admit, the learning curve is a little steep and for some people it just isn’t worth it.
• People who want their presentation to focus on the animations – although beamer has some animation capability, it won’t give you that nasty ‘Swivel” animation. Sorry.
• People who need their content to  be accessible to their superiors - and by this I mean, people who are expecting their bosses to re-purpose their hard work to please their respective bosses (you know who you are). You can’t expect the bosses to learn LaTeX. Sorry.

How can I learn?

I won’t go into a tutorial of Beamer, much less LaTeX. Fortunately, Google is your friend. To save you a little effort, here are the tutorials I really like:

• A Beamer Quickstart – this should get you started real quick (huh? wait?)
• Beamer v3.0 Guide – the most comprehensive one I’ve found besides the user manual (also, it’s made with beamer)
• Beamer User Guide – the manual
• LaTeX Tutorial – by Eudean Sun, presented (using beamer!) in a seminar sponsored by the UCLA Graduate Students Resource Center. Specially targeted to Grad Students.

So there. Start making professional looking presentations and make your adviser think you’re actually making progress on your research

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On my previous post, I showed you why you should be ditchin’ MS Word and instead learning LaTeX. In this post, I’ll give a very short glimpse of my basic workflow when using LaTeX. Which programs I use? Is there any particular way I use them? Hopefully this will get you started (if you haven’t yet) on mastering LaTeX for those technical papers.

I run all these programs in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), either on my laptop or on a desktop PC. They are all free and open source software (FOSS). Don’t worry if you don’t use Linux (although you should), because most, if not all of the programs run in other platforms (Windows, Mac, etc.). That, or they probably have counterparts that behave very similarly.

PDFLaTeX

This is the program I use to generate the actual PDF file from the .tex file. Yes it’s command line only and doesn’t have fancy graphics. But if you’re converting a .tex file, do you really need fancy graphics?! Just run pdflatex [filename] on your trusty console and voila! You’ve got a perfect pdf every time. I also like the fact that it’s very fast and simple and could easily be added into scripts for batch jobs or what have you. You can even run it remotely if you ever find a reason to do so. Try that with a graphical program!

Vim

This is what I “should” be using to type the actual .tex manuscript. This is the editor that I’m trying to master. As of now, I suck and would rather edit my manuscript in gedit. I have to admit, Vim is very very very powerful and once you learn most of the tricks it has up its sleeves, then you’ll definitely regret not having learned it earlier. So this is what I’d recommend for the people who are willing to invest some time on learning a true blue text editor. There’s a pretty good tutorial here.

LyX

Although we love the CLI and would love to master LaTeX in its raw and true form, there are just some tasks when a graphical interface is best. One very good example I’ve seen, is trying to create tables. If you’ve ever created tables in HTML then you know that it can be a pain in the *rse.

There are also some formula formatting whose syntax are really hard to remember in LaTeX. For these special circumstances, I use the program LyX, which I’ve mentioned on my previous post. It’s a GUI for LaTeX and it does a very good job at it. However I seem to get better looking results as well as more customization when using PDFLaTeX. What I do is to use a raw .tex file for the stuff I know, and then use LyX to create tables, formulas and such. These snippets can easily be exported to pdflatex by going to File > Export > Latex (PDFLatex) in LyX.

JabRef

Now this program is seriously a Godsend. No more worrying about whether a reference was cited properly. No more fumbling around at the last moment for a reference that you forgot to jot down. This program will keep a database of all your BibTeX entries. That is to say, all your reference including most data required for a citation. It has all the powerful features of most databases, such as searching and replacing. Did I mention that these BibTex entries are available from CiteSeer and IEEEXplore? Head on over to sourceforge to get your copy.

OpenOffice.org Drawing and Dia

The easiest and best way to embed pictures onto your PDF document is to also have them in PDF format, or some other vector format such as EPS. This way, you don’t get pixelized output even if you resize your pictures unlike when using bitmap based pictures (.bmp, .gif, .jpg). These formats are frowned upon by journals and conferences because they don’t scale well.

For my drawing needs, I use OpenOffice.org Drawing, as well as a very neat diagramming program called Dia.

That’s all there is to it and you could have this system up in a few minutes. I recommend that you install LyX first because this would install all the required LaTeX components. Also, if you are in Windows, you could also try out TeXnicCenter according to a comment from my previous post.

Happy TeXing!

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P.S. I’ve upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.6 (from 2.5.1). So far I haven’t noticed anything different. But at least I learned the upgrade process and didn’t mess it up.

If you’re doing research work (in school or otherwise), or if you’re seriously considering a career in the field of research or maybe the academe, then you probably know by now how important it is to publish your work. As they say, in the academic world, it’s “Publish or Perish”. Basically, you’re only as good a researcher as the output you produce and the papers you publish. That isn’t entirely true of course, but it definitely helps if you publish frequently.

I’ve recently been working on a paper about my preliminary thesis results and plan to submit it in an IEEE Conference. There is a certain pride in publishing one’s work to an international conference. Especially if you get to travel and present it. Even though I’ve only done it once before, I can definitely say that it’s one of the highlights of my career so far.

ICIAS 2007 – KL, Malaysia

LaTeX

If you plan to write a technical paper for a conference or even better, for a journal, then I definitely recommend that you invest some of your time to learn LaTeX. It’s the best way to create great looking papers that conform to all formatting standards, without having to worry about every single detail. LaTeX allows you to instead focus on the content of your paper. Similar to how Content Management Systems (CMS) allow you to produce great looking websites without having to deal with the nitty-gritty of web design.

The basic concept is to let the computer handle the formatting of your paper through a set of typesetting algorithms. As the writer, all you have to do is to tell the LaTeX system which parts of your paper are to be formatted with which styles. Be it a figure, a table, a title page or actual content. Almost all major journals and conferences have what we call LaTeX classes or templates. Just download the particular template you need, and it will have all the formatting instructions to give you a perfect paper (at least as far as looks are concerned, the content is still up to you of course). For those in the Electronics field, you’ll probably be interested with the IEEEtran LaTeX Class.

What about MS Word?

Ok, so you’re more familiar with word processing in MS Word. Or maybe the LaTeX code you’ve seen so far seems to be a bit scary. That’s why I say learning LaTeX is an investment. The learning curve is a little steep, but that’s only at the start. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll discover that a lot of you’re time in MS Word is spent moving stuff around and trying to fit figures and text where they’re supposed to go. Instead of worrying about what to write, you’re wasting you’re time changing font sizes, alignment, pagination, and other stuff that the computer is supposed to handle for you.

Even though the code maybe a bit daunting, after trying it out for a few days, you’ll learn that the syntax is actually quite simple. Plus, most of the code is provided for and can be downloaded straight from the net.

Still not convinced?

Here are just some of the features I love about LaTeX:

• You worry about content, not formatting. That way you end up with good content with perfect formatting that’s going to adhere to standards.
• Rendered formulas and equations just look stunning (see image below).
• BibTeX (part of LaTeX) allows you to manage all you’re references in a database and not have to worry about creating your bibliography.
• Citations in BibTeX format are available in CiteSeer databases and even in IEEE Xplore. So you don’t even have to type them.
• Figures are arranged by the computer. No more worrying about moving stuff around only to find that a single paragraph you inserted made everything move around again. (Waaaah! Don’t you just hate that?!)
• It’s open source and it runs on virtually all platforms. No need to “borrow” a copy of M$ Word from a friend.

Samples!

Here are a few snippets of actual LaTeX documents:

The Fast-Fourier Transform in all its pristine LaTeX beauty

Look Ma! No typing required. Thanks to BibTeX.

To see more examples, I suggest you look at the official IEEETran Documentation, since it was created entirely with LaTeX.

LyX

If you want to try LaTeX right now but don’t want to learn all the commands. You can install LyX, which is a graphical front-end to LaTeX. It runs on Linux, Windows and a lot of other platforms and it’s very easy to learn. Just run through the tutorial that’s included with the program. I do have some issues with it, and I tend to get better looking results, especially with IEEE papers, when I hardcode in LaTeX. But it’s definitely a great way to start learning about LaTeX and start producing some good looking documents.

Once you’re comfortable with LyX, you can start playing around with the code. It’s a very easy transition since LyX has the ability to export directly to LaTeX code. If you don’t know how to do something in LaTeX, just use LyX and then export the code. That way you learn even more and eventually you don’t even have to go back to LyX anymore.

Hopefully I’ve convinced you by now why you should be learning LaTeX and throwing away MS Word. Watch out for my next post, where I’ll be showing you the programs I use to write IEEE papers as well as provide you with a few insights on how to get LaTeX up and running on your system.

Click here to read Part II of this post