Doctoral students at EE

Software for research: TeXworks

Camille Hamon — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:46:03 +0000

This is the first article in a new series of articles about useful software for research such as LateX editors, reference managers and note-taking applications.
Feel free to comment the posts and to present other software you use yourself!

There is a comprehensive table which compares many LateX editors on Wikipedia, but I will talk more about my personal experience of using TeXworks.

TeXworks is inspired by another editor, TeXShop. I personally like the uncluttered environment that it offers. TeXShop is shipped with the main LateX distributions such as TeX Live and MiKTeX. It is multiplatform so that once you get used to it (which doesn’t require much time) you’ll be comfortable on Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

TeXworks: the LateX editor and the PDF viewer side-by-side

One of the best things about TeXworks is its integrated PDF reader. On Windows, for example, many LateX editors rely on YAP for viewing DVI files. Just as a reminder, PDF files are usually what you would like to get (although IEEE requires you to upload PS files) and there are mainly two ways to get PDFs when using LateX: either you run latex + dvips + ps2pdf or you run pdflatex. Most of LateX editors on Windows use by default the first solution, and actually by default stop after the latex step, thus giving out a DVI file, which you can then preview with YAP. I think everybody has experienced frustrating glitches or lags in scrolling when using YAP. TeXworks, on the other hand, has chosen to be PDF centered, and thus gives out a PDF file by default. The PDF reader is integrated while other editors usually rely on an external PDF reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader. The nice thing about having an integrated PDF reader is that you don’t have to close your PDF file before running LateX. Indeed, if you view your PDF file in Adobe Acrobat and make some changes in the LateX source file, you need to close the PDF file before running LateX. Otherwise, having the file opened in Adobe Acrobat will prevent any other program, and in particular your LateX editor, from writing in the file (Edit: although apparently some LateX editors automatically control your PDF reader to close it, run LateX and open it again, more on that in another post). Nothing like that to worry about with TeXworks, and this is really a time saver.

The PDF reader integrates forward and reverse search so you can control-click (apple-click on Mac) somewhere in the source file and that’ll take you to the corresponding line of the PDF file, and vice versa.

Some tips and tricks

Completion

Another handy feature is that you can define your own completions so that if you type, for example, bfig and TAB, TeXworks will automatically replace bfig with a whole figure environment:

\begin{figure}
\end{figure}

It is easy to define your own completions, or to modify the existing ones. To do so, go to the Help menu and click on Settings and resources. A window appears with two links. Click on the second link Resources. This will take you to a folder. Open the completion folder. This folder contains text files which define the completions. If you want to add your own completion, open, for example, tw-latex.txt in a text editor. Then follow the instruction in the manual (Help menu ->/A short manual for TeXworks/ -> Section A.3 Roots for completion). See also the wiki.

Easy configuration of run modes

If you are just interested in getting a PDF out of your LateX code, the most straightforward way is probably the default use of pdflatex. It is, however, possible to run latex + dvips + ps2pdf if you wish (and you probably do, for example when you send a publication to IEEE). The procedure is well explained in TeXWorks’ wiki.

Templates

If you start writing a lot of LateX documents, you’ll probably want to have default templates for articles, presentations, …
In these templates you define which packages you would like to load, which commands you would like to be defined and so on, so that you can start off writing a new LateX document comfortably with everything already set up.

So you can just create your template (that is a LateX source file with everything – preambles, packages, … – but the main content) and save it in the folder templates in your Resources folder (already discussed above).
You might need to create the folder templates if it doesn’t already exist.
Then you can create a new document from this template by clicking on File -> New from Template….

EE PhD Council 2013

Pia Grahn — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 15:45:58 +0000

A new EE PhD council for 2013 was elected 2012-11-28. The representative positions and members were elected as follows;

Chair Pia Grahn (Electric Power Systems)

Vice-Chair Nicolas Schrammar (Communication Theory)

Employment committee Kristina Östman (Electric Power Systems), Richard Scharff (Electric Power Systems) and Mariana Dalarsson (Electromagnetic Engineering)

Undergraduate education Camille Hamon (Electric Power Systems)

Graduate education Davood Babazadeh (Industrial Information and Control Systems), Per Westerlund (Electromagnetic Engineering)

Member Andreas Krings (Electrical Energy Conversion), Antonios Antonopoulos (Electrical Energy Conversion)

We thank Kun Zhu for the two years with us in the Council and wish him the best of luck for the future!

Also, a warm welcome goes to the new members Kristina Östman, Davood Babazadeh and Per Westerlund!

Please feel free to contact us if you have questions in any of these areas.

Fika for all PhD Students and Post Docs from the EE school

Camille Hamon — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 12:42:11 +0000

All PhD students and Post Docs from the EE school are warmly welcome to drop by for a coffee break on Wednesday, 21 March at 15.00 in the entrance floor of the Q building.

PhD Council 2012

Pia Grahn — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:53:06 +0000

Before Christmas, the EE PhD council held the yearly election meeting for the next period.

The new EE PHD council members for 2012 are presented here:

Chair Pia Grahn (Electric Power Systems)

Vice-Chair Kun Zhu (Industrial Control Systems)

Employment committee Camille Hamon (Electric Power Systems), Richard Scharff (Electric Power Systems) and Mariana Dalarsson (Electromagnetic Engineering)

Undergraduate education Camille Hamon (Electric Power Systems)

Graduate education Antonios Antonopoulos (Electrical Machines and Power Electronics) and Nicolas Schrammar (Communication Theory)

Member Andreas Krings (Electrical Machines and Power Electronics)

We thank Leefke for her efforts as chairwoman during last year, and wish her the best.

Kind regards,

Pia Grahn,

Chair of the EE PhD council 2012

Updated web pages for the new doctoral program

Leefke Grosjean — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 11:57:06 +0000

Here you can find all information about the new doctoral program: http://www.kth.se/ees/utbildning/forskarutbildning/doctoral-program?l=en_UK Including basic and advanced courses per track. Unfortunately there is still no course list for the general skills….

Innebandy on Tuesdays again

Andreas Krings — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 10:15:07 +0000

Innebandy (also known as floorball or street hockey) has started again for all employees of the EE school. We play every Tuesday morning from 8:30 to 9:30 in KTH Hallen. All PhD students are very welcome to join!

PhD courses in general skills fall 2011

Leefke Grosjean — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 12:24:39 +0000

Within the new doctoral program there are 2 courses in general skills planned for the fall 2011:

LH200V Grundläggande kommunikations- och undervisningslära (GKU) 3hp

Pedagogical course. Given in the fall. In Swedish. Doctoral students from the School of EE can participate. For more information and how to apply see http://www.kth.se/ece/avdteach/ped/kurser/grundkurser/LH200V/HT11-1

(This course will be revised and given in English in the spring 2012. More details to follow later.)

Forskningsmetodik 3 hp – Hösten 2011

Starting date and course information to be announced later. Interested students should contact Kathy Hammar kathyh@kth.se

Waffle and Icecream for those work hard in step competition

Kun Zhu — Sun, 15 May 2011 09:02:41 +0000

EE PhD council is planning an Waffel and Icecream event in the middle of June for all PhD students and Postdoc. Special awards will go to our colleagues who have been working hard in step competition. Let us decide a … Continue reading →

IEEE PDF eXpress: problems and solutions

Camille Hamon — Wed, 11 May 2011 14:14:27 +0000

Some of you may have run into the following problem: you have been accepted to an IEEE conference but your paper cannot be published on IEEE Xplore because it does not fulfill the requirements for publication on this website.

You can check whether your paper fulfills these requirements by uploading it on the IEEE PDF eXpress Plus webpage (you need a login usually provided by the conference you registered to). Then you get a report stating what you need to change to make your paper compatible, if it is not.

IEEE has some guidelines to help you solve compatibility issues. However, they were not useful in my case. My paper did not fulfill the requirements because of two main reasons: bookmarks were found in the pdf file of my article and some fonts were not embedded in the pdf file.

If you ever have the same problems, here are some solutions I found.

[Edit: The solutions below apply when you create a pdf file through latex + dvips + ps2pdf. Those of you who use pdflatex can try Sébastien's suggestion in the comments. Thanks Sébastien for sharing this!]

For the bookmark issues, you need to load the hyperref package with the option “bookmarks=false”. This means that you need to write this in the preamble of your latex file:

\usepackage[bookmarks=false]

For the font issue, the problem seems to arise when converting the ps file to pdf. On this website, a solution is given by running gswin32 on your ps file with some options:

gswin32c.exe -dSAFER -dNOPLATFONTS -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dSubsetFonts=true -dEmbedAllFonts=true -sOutputFile=mypaper.pdf -f mypaper.ps

Where you replace mypaper.ps by the name of your ps file.

This is not very simple because you have to invoke the command line. Most latex editors let you customize the ps to pdf process. Here is how I have done it for winedt:

You have to change the execution mode for conversion from ps to pdf. It is in the menu “options”:

There you have to change the field named “switches” with the following line:

-dSAFER -dNOPLATFONTS -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dSubsetFonts=true -dEmbedAllFonts=true

That’s it!

Try now to reupload your new pdf file to the IEEE PDF eXpress website. You should now have got rid of both bookmark and font issues.

Election meeting on Wednesday 11th

Leefke Grosjean — Mon, 09 May 2011 11:49:59 +0000

The election meeting for the two vacant positions in the employment committee is going to be on Wednesday 11th at 17:30 at Osquldasväg 10, 8th floor.