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Publications in 2014

UK-TUG meeting in 2014

Some video footage from the meeting in November 2014 on LaTeX2e and LaTeX3 development topics.

Fixing LaTeX2e (video)

A talk describing the plans for a better maintenance approach (compared to fixltx2e which doesn’t work)

Reliable releases: l3build (video)

A new build environment for LaTeX packages and documentation (works with all flavors)! Unfortunately, the demo session on l3build is not visible in the video as it only provides audio and displays of the slides used.

Case changing in the Unicode world (video)

A companion to Joseph’s talk on l3build is the published paper on this topic by Will and Frank.

How to influence the position of float environments like figure and table in LaTeX?

In 2012, a question “How to influence the float placement in LaTeX” was asked on TeX.stackexchange and as there had been many earlier questions around this topic I decided to treat the topic in some depth and explain most of the mysteries that the underlying mechanism poses to people trying to use it successfully. Once my answer appeared on the web, people asked to see this converted into an article and I foolishly replied “only if this answer ends up becoming a `great’ answer” (gets 100 votes). At the time of writing this article, the answer stands at 222 votes, so I had better make good on that promise.

l3build — A modern Lua test suite for TeX programming

Regression tests are an important tool in any moderately complex programming environment. They allow the programmer to make extensive changes to their code while providing confidence that something that used to work still does. Extensive regression test suites have been an essential component of the maintenance and development of LaTeX2e and LaTeX3. A regression test suite is typically composed of a number of individual files that contain one or more testable units of the code being tested. A testable unit might be either a certain computation with an expected outcome, a series of logic tests, or—in particular for TeX-based code—material that is typeset and intended to achieve some particular formatting. During code development and before any new code is released to the public, this test suite can be compiled to ensure that any changes to the code have not introduced bugs or changed the behaviour compared to previous versions. As bugs in the code are reported, minimal examples demonstrating the bug often form test files of their own, showing that the bug has been fixed and won’t re-occur. As TeX-based code operates in at least three different `modes’ (mouth, stomach, and output), regression testing is more complex than simply asserting the outcome of certain programming logic. As part of the work of the LaTeX3 project, a new Lua-based testing environment has been written to support ongoing development. This testing environment, presented at the 2014 TUG conference in Portland, is suitable for use by the general TeX community.

TUG 2014 Conference (Portland, USA)

A Modern Regression Test Suite for TeX Programming (slides)

LaTeX3 and expl3 in 2014: Recent developments (slides)

Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) Version 3.0 2nd Edition

This specification defines the Mathematical Markup Language, or MathML. MathML is a markup language for describing mathematical notation and capturing both its structure and content. The goal of MathML is to enable mathematics to be served, received, and processed on the World Wide Web, just as HTML has enabled this functionality for text.

This specification of the markup language MathML is intended primarily for a readership consisting of those who will be developing or implementing renderers or editors using it, or software that will communicate using MathML as a protocol for input or output. It is not a User’s Guide but rather a reference document.

MathML can be used to encode both mathematical notation and mathematical content. About thirty-eight of the MathML tags describe abstract notational structures, while another about one hundred and seventy provide a way of unambiguously specifying the intended meaning of an expression. Additional chapters discuss how the MathML content and presentation elements interact, and how MathML renderers might be implemented and should interact with browsers. Finally, this document addresses the issue of special characters used for mathematics, their handling in MathML, their presence in Unicode, and their relation to fonts.

While MathML is human-readable, authors typically will use equation editors, conversion programs, and other specialized software tools to generate MathML. Several versions of such MathML tools exist, both freely available software and commercial products, and more are under development.

MathML was originally specified as an XML application and most of the examples in this specification assume that syntax. Other syntaxes are possible most notably [HTML5] specifies the syntax for MathML in HTML. Unless explicitly noted, the examples in this specification are also valid HTML syntax.

XML Entity Definitions for Characters (2nd Edition)

This document defines several sets of names, so that to each name is assigned a Unicode character or sequence of characters. Each of these sets is expressed as a file of XML entity declarations.

Publications by year

By selecting an entry in the table of contents you will find links to Portable Document Format (PDF) versions of various articles and papers published by the LaTeX3 project and links to videos of their conference presentations. Some of this list has been assembled 'after the fact'; please inform us if you notice anything missing.

Publications by topic

A different view is given on Publication by Topic page where the Publications are ordered by important topics.

Books by project members and others

A list of books that we think are useful is given on the Books Page. By buying documentation through this website you support the volunteer work of project members to keep LaTeX useful for you.