admin

If you look to the top of the left sidebar, you'll see that I've enabled a search box. This is a pretty good search function, I've been testing it for some time.

The search on the old system never worked very well, so I'm sure many readers didn't even notice it was gone.

But over the past few weeks I've gotten a number of requests for info that might be found deep in the site -- now it's only a search away!

Some people wanted to know what I am using to enter my LaTeX code into Drupal. There are several Drupal modules that can deal with some LaTeX, but none of them really suited my needs.

The most important advantage of LaTeX blogging is that I’m able to use my reference database seamlessly in my blog with BibTeX. Another is that I can generate PDFs of my posts from the same source as the blog (believe it or not, I get a lot of PDF requests). Slightly less important, I can repurpose text more easily. DruTeX and other Drupal-centric solutions are especially good if you want to use LaTeX code as a Markdown-like shorthand instead of HTML, but don’t fill my requirements.

To generate HTML from LaTeX, I depend on Tex4ht. I also use this to transfer LaTeX to RTF for publishing articles and my textbook, and it does an excellent job for most purposes.

No matter your destination format, TeX4ht always seems to take some tweaks to get everything converted. The strict XHTML produced by Tex4ht works fine in a browser, but it contains a number of elements that stymie Drupal’s “Full HTML” filter, including lots of HTML comments and superfluous newline characters (Exactly why “Full HTML” doesn’t mean full HTML, I don’t understand.) I wrote a short Python script that strips these things out. At the moment it’s just a hack, but it works.

Styling: For whatever reason, TeX4ht doesn’t like the simple bold and italic tags of standard HTML and instead applies styles with SPAN tags and custom classes like “cmbx-10,” for the LaTeX-native Computer Modern fonts. It’s simple enough to include these classes in your CSS file, and apply whatever styling you like. If you really don’t like it, you could always rig up a custom config file for TeX4ht.

Math: Math goes to PNG pictures by default under TeX4ht; I keep all graphics in a common directory on my server. Copying the PNG files, and updating references in the HTML source (again, that Python script), is all it takes for equations to come out right.

Hyperlinks: The hyperref package for LaTeX does a nice job with links and internal references (including bibliography references). Links come out the same whether through Drupal or PDF.

So, that’s easy enough, but probably not recommended unless you’re ready to do a little scripting.

UPDATE (2008/08/24): A reader writes:

Not sure which Drupal version you have (it might not be in 4.x), but if you go to Administer -> Input Formats; and then click on 'configure' near 'Full HTML' you can disable the HTML filter and line break filter altogether and it might remove the necessity for your intermediate step.

That will probably do the trick for a lot of people.

As you can see, the site has changed! I've moved to a new server, and I've taken the opportunity to move to a new content management system along with it. I've been running the new site as a shadow for a while, and everything ought to work (although there will be some funny-looking things here are there). Almost all permalinks to the site will still work.

I'll have some more details about the move and some of the new features that it should enable me to build. In the meantime, please notice my new affiliate links on the right side of the page. I won't be having any pledge drives or advertising anytime soon, but if you're buying a book anyway remember that you can direct a percentage to support this site.

You had to go and do it, didn't you?

Well, what you've done is find the some of the very earliest posts on the blog. You'll find that my writing has gotten, well, a lot bloggier over time. That's a good thing, I'd say.

Many of the posts with very early dates are administrative -- you'll find the FAQ here for the time being, for example. I'll probably change that in the near future -- when I was on the old blogging platform, giving things early dates was a good way to write them without them showing up on the front page.

You'll also find stuff abstracted out from my courses. And of course, the Flores FAQ -- really the regular updates on the Flores hominids were the way I got started writing for the broader audience of the blog.

So look around and enjoy. And then go up to mid-2005 or so, when the blog really started getting interesting.