Printing books and such in color can be expensive. So here is how to count the color pages using a recent version of GhostScript and a UNIX shell:
gs -o - -sDEVICE=inkcov input.pdf | grep -v "^ 0.00000 0.00000 0.00000" | grep "^ " | wc -l
Category: LaTeX
Precompiling LaTeX preambles
Very neat thing indeed: It seems one can precompile the LaTeX preamble, to speed up LaTeX runs. Useful for repeated LaTeX runs, or for generating large amounts of similar LaTeX documents.
Online LaTeX editing
There is a nice service over at LaTeX Labs, which lets you edit and compile LaTeX just using your web browser.
BibTeX bibliography title
The other day I was using the moderncv document class to create a CV. I also added my publications to the CV, which was supposed to be in German. BibTeX created a section “Literatur” for this. Obviously, I wanted the title of the bibliography to be “Publikationen” instead. When using the german package of babel, you can change the bibliography title like this in the LaTeX preamble:
addtocaptionsgerman{renewcommand{refname}{Publikationen}}
Emacs: Convert current buffer to utf-8
I just opened an old TeX file, which was still encoded in latin1. Now I wanted to re-save it as utf-8 in Emacs. This turns out to be very simple, as someone on #emacs at freenode told me. Just hit C-x RET f, and type utf-8 RET. On the next save (C-x C-s), the file will be written as utf-8.
LaTeX formulas in gnuplot
As a reminder to myself: On the TeX Stackexchange, there is a nice question and discussion by me and some helpful people on how to use LaTeX code in gnuplot / how to embed LaTeX equations in a plot. A copy of my revised answer:
First, we set up a gnuplot called test.plt:
plot [-5:5] [-1.5:1.5] sin(x+pi) title "$\sin(x+\pi)$"
Then we also set up a small Makefile:
.SUFFIXES: .plt .tex .pdf
%.tex: %.plt
gnuplot -e "
set format '$%g$' ;
set terminal epslatex standalone color ;
set output '$@'
" $<
%.pdf: %.tex
pdflatex $<
all: test.pdf
Running “make all” will produce this plot:
Recursive Makefile for LaTeX
I wanted to make a Makefile for a seminar report. This report contains all the sub-reports of the students. So the Makefile needs to recurse into subdirectories to compile all the contained LaTeX files there. So, given a file reports.tex which will include some PDFs in subdirectories 00/ to 10/, we get a Makefile that looks like this:
#####################################################
# A small LaTeX Makefile
#####################################################
PREFIX=reports
CHAPTERS=00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10
all: subdirs $(PREFIX).pdf
#####################################################
.PHONY: subdirs simple
subdirs:
@for i in $(CHAPTERS); do
(cd $$i; $(MAKE)); done
#####################################################
$(PREFIX).aux: $(PREFIX).tex
pdflatex $(PREFIX).tex
$(PREFIX).pdf: $(PREFIX).aux
pdflatex $(PREFIX).tex
#####################################################
simple:
pdflatex $(PREFIX).tex
#####################################################
clean:
@for i in $(CHAPTERS); do
(cd $$i; $(MAKE) clean); done
rm -f $(PREFIX).aux $(PREFIX).bbl $(PREFIX).blg
$(PREFIX).idx $(PREFIX).log $(PREFIX).out $(PREFIX).tcp
$(PREFIX).toc $(PREFIX).tps $(PREFIX).prf $(PREFIX).lbl
rm -f $(PDFFILES) *.aux