Geek Glee: LaTeX

Despite the deadline madness, I was able to attend the free workshop day of TUG 2009, the annual TeX Users Group conference. There were issues with the computer setup, so the presenters didn't have a working build of LaTeX to demonstrate for the first half of the day -- but that was okay, neither did I. Rather, I had the editing program but not the add-ons that allow you to actually "TeX" and view your formatted document. Still, after all the glitches, I did manage to get a full build on my laptop after lunch and then finally got to see what the coding I'd been faithfully copying down actually produced.

I am impressed and a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of tags and such in the language. One of the presenters made a point of commenting that LaTeX is much better at handling auto-numbering for sections and subsections than MS Word, but I'd have to dispute that point -- they both seem to work equally well, if you know what you're doing.

Another staffer of one of the academic departments attended the workshop as well, much to my delight. I don't generally have much contact with them outside of answering dissertation questions and fishing for publication updates. She offered to send me some files to practice my TeXing, so I'm looking forward to that. I'm also looking forward to deconstructing the dissertation class files and such that we have posted on our website to see if I can figure out how to fix the most common glitches. Better hurry on that though -- I have a standing offer from one of the presenters to try to catch her over the next few days for help if I can't figure it out on my own.

Also: I've been reading up on Visual Basic in MS Office and dang ... I think I've found my next project. Apparently I could write a macro to auto-format all the tables in a given document.

Glee!

In other news, going to see Harry Potter tonight with Edige and his sister. Should be fun!