Mathematical Pamphlet

There's a really nice presentation package for LaTeX called powerdot; I moved to it directly from Prosper - I never got around to using Beamer or HA-Prosper - and it rules. But it requires versions of auxiliary bits that are not in the latest teTeX distribution, so I needed to have my local versions override the official ones (I was a bit frightened of actually overwriting the texmf directory, since I am on many deadlines)

Kind of lame, but it took me a minute to figure out: To get TeX to search different directories, you need to set the TEXINPUTS or TEXINPUTS_latex to a normal colon-separated path. That Kpathsea is its own library shows how much higher-level modern languages are!

In my poking about I also discovered that teTeX is no longer updated, and it seems TeXLive may be the most "modern" tex distribution. It appears to have the relatively insane distribution method of downloading a DVD image and mounting it locally, probably related to being kind of Windows-centric, but also downright weird and old-fashioned (who installs from anything but the net?). The XeTeX program looks nice for being able to input unicode to TeX, something that I failed to figure out a couple of years ago. Since I have various TeX-involved deadlines, I won't be trying anything new for a couple of weeks.

Filed under: LaTeX by Kenn