My favorite LaTeX font

My favorite LaTeX font is the so-called "palatino." Apparently, it's not really palatino, but a clone. Still, I use it on CVs and resumes to impress people. I especially love the "old style" numbers where the "6" and "8" are shifted up. It's hard to find information about this font. The only substantive page I found was from the LaTeX font catalogue.

pdftex versus latex

I'm still trying to figure out whether one should use pdftex or latex when compiling .tex source files.

It seems like there are a few advantages to using pdftex over latex. 1) It's faster, 2) Leaves behind fewer junk files (like .dvi and .aux) and lets you go directly to .pdf which is a more modern file format than .ps, 3) Apparently it works better with the hyperref package (hyperlinks inside the .pdf document), 4) The .pdf generated by pdftex is guaranteed to look great whereas you might get an ugly .pdf if you use the command ps2pdf on your .ps output file from latex. The only advantage of latex over pdftex is that there are some packages which are incompatible with pdftex, most notably psfrag.

A short discussion can be found near the bottom of this blog post.

Editing TeX in text editors

I recently wrote a LaTeX document with the help of AUCTeX. This add-on software to Emacs allows the user to create macros for TeX commands and compile TeX code right inside the Emacs window. If you're not an Emacs user, there is also Vim-LaTeX for vim (though I have not tried it).

Tech: LyX text editor

Do you like LaTeX's beautiful output but hate its nasty scripting syntax? Well, maybe LyX is the software for you. It tries to give the user-friendliness of WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") editors like Microsoft Word but keep the power and uniform elegance of LaTeX. The authors of LyX call their philosophy WYSIWYM ("What You See Is What You Mean"). Check out a review of the program here. Available for Mac, UNIX/Linux, and Windows.

I haven't tried it since I'm old fashioned (I still code webpages by typing the HTML tags.)