Generating Portable PDF

Yes, that's right, the subject, expanded, says "generating portable portable document format."  I got a shock this week when a PDF I had generated on a Linux system using LibreOffice 3.3.4 would not display on either of two XP systems I tried to show it on. The first time was in class, when I thought I was going to display an example. The issue is that LibreOffice used a font that the Windows systems didn't have. I googled it and installed a font with almost the same name, but it made no difference. It turns out one can force PDF to live up to its name in LibreOffice by specifying PDF/A-1a in the PDF options. Thanks to someone at a blog I can't find right now [ Jean at http://www.taming-openoffice-org.com/newsite/?page_id=77 ] for pointing out to me that the settings are persistent, so when chosen once it is unnecessary to deal with it later.

The persistence seems like an inconsistency in LibreOffice: how are we to know there isn't a configuration option buried in the myriad of randomly-organized menus? How are to know the setting is persistent? It seems most are not.

To date I have encountered no portability problems with PDFs generated from LaTeX, dvips, and ps2pdf.

OpenOffice Inserting Page Breaks

I've been using OpenOffice more than usual lately (and still greatly prefer emacs/LaTeX for speed and accuracy). One annoyance has been inserting page breaks: Insert|Manual Break|Page Break. Very clumsy and slow. There's no hint regarding an equivalent shortcut adjacent to the menu item, so I tried ^L--it is the standard ASCII page break character--but no joy. Googling led to http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=35045, where Bhikkhu Pesala suggests ^enter (or control enter for newbs). Thanks Bhikku.

LaTeX to XML

There's a LaTeX to XML converter called Tralics which is used by the folks at Inria. Expect a posting on experiences with Tralics real soon now.

LaTeX Blog

Looking for advice on including source code within a LaTeX document, I stumbled across a wonderful, though not terribly active, blog on LaTeX. It's been 7 months since the last post, but there's a lot of useful information there. The URL: http://texblog.wordpress.com/

Version Pi

Is this cool (in a geeky sort of way) or what? > latex 450mw-t2 This is pdfTeXk, Version 3.141592-1.40.3 (Web2C 7.5.6) %&-line parsing enabled. entering extended mode (./450mw-t2.tex LaTeX2e <2005/12/01>