The Annals of the UK-TEX Users' Group uk.tug.org ISSN 1354-5930 Edited by Vol. 10.2 Jonathan Webley October 2009 Baskerville Contents Joseph Wright (Membership Secretary and Webmaster) 1 Editorial 2 John Trapp (Training Officer) 2 Events 2 Jonathan Underwood 2.1 TUG 2010 . .2 Charles Goldie 3 News 3 Simon Dales 3.1 The TEXFAQ.............3 Jonathan Webley (Baskerville Editor) 3.2 MathTran . .3 The committee can be contacted at: 4 The Hound 3 [email protected] 5 siunitx:ALATEX Swiss army knife for units 3 1 Editorial 5.1 Introduction . .3 5.2 Background . .4 Welcome to my second edition of Baskerville.I 5.3 Units in print . .4 have been working on this edition, on and off, for 5.4 Enter siunitx ..............4 months with various interruptions. It's been hard 5.5 Conclusions . .6 work and I've learnt a lot, but, finally, I've managed to pull everything together, and now we're up to 6 LATEX for chemists: filling in the gaps 6 twelve pages. I'm mentally planning the next edi- 6.1 Introduction . .6 tion for early next year, though that does depend 6.2 Bibliography tools . .6 on my availability and the quality and quantity of 6.3 Utilities . .7 contributions. 6.4 Graphics: the `scheme' . .8 Jonathan Webley 6.5 biblatex bibliographies . .8 [email protected] 6.6 Further afield . .8 7 An Introduction to the Greek Alpha- 2 Events bet 9 7.1 Math mode . .9 2.1 TUG 2010 7.2 Babel . 10 TUG 2010 will be held 7.3 The Letters . 10 in San Francisco, Califor- 7.4 Bold Greek . 11 nia, USA, from June 28{ 7.5 Obsolete letters . 11 30, 2010, in the Sir Fran- 7.6 Greek Diacritics . 11 cis Drake Hotel in San Fran- 7.7 Some uses . 11 cisco. 7.8 Greek Arithmetic . 12 Don Knuth and other members of the original 8 The Hound Answers 12 Stanford TEX Project will be there. There will be several special events, including the conference 9 Contributions 12 banquet, to honour their work and celebrate TEX's 32nd anniversary. UK-TUG Committee 2009 Abstracts and presentation proposals are wel- come at any time, and hotel reservations are avail- Jonathan Fine (Chair) able. The registration form will be posted soon. David Crossland (Secretary) The official website is: David Saunders (Treasurer) tug.org/tug2010 -2- Volume 10, Number 2 3 News Across 3.1 The T X FAQ E 1 Inside the saucer, I see, is cherry-coloured. The UK List of TEX Frequently Asked Questions (6) on the Web was updated in June this year and now 3 Requests are listed in the task sheet. (4) contains 438 questions (and answers). The FAQ is 6 I bought a bag in the Trossachs. (3) maintained by Robin Fairbairns and is for English- 8 Sadly, use a gas mask to relieve pain. (7) speaking users of TEX. The questions cover a wide range of topics, but the actual typesetting issues 10 Large hat, squashed, has okay from me. (5) are mostly covered from the viewpoint of a LATEX 11 Species, drowning without a ship, have no user. part. (5) The FAQ can be found at: 12 This type of chart sounds like 3.14159 . (3) www.tex.ac.uk/faq 13 There's an obelisk of steel, rusted. (5) Any errors, corrections and potential new topics 14 Lost in Iran, unknown at the end, wet. (5) should be sent to: 16 Quicken the best, but meant badly. (7) [email protected] 17 So you want a coin? (3) 18 Duck mews annoyingly. (4) 3.2 MathTran 19 Ah, the post was mislaid because it contains MathTran is a website that can be used to create, potassium. (6) store and translate mathematical content. It trans- Down lates mathematics entered using TEX notation into 1 Kegs for 100 demands. (5) images for inclusion in web pages and on emails. 2 Sapper, with a double-O rating, watches a The latest version now allows users with an account show. (4,5) to save their formulas. MathTran is funded by the OU and JISC. The 4 A skin pest disfigures in dangerous places. website can be found at: (5,4) www.mathtran.org 5 European sounds like leather. (5) 7 You! Extinguish the flames and stop fight- ing. (9) 4 The Hound 9 Robin is found washed up on pure shore. (9) Jonathan Webley 13 Cormorants burp gas. Sh! (5) 15 Why art thou so young? (5) 1 2 3 4 5 5 siunitx:ALAT X Swiss army 6 7 8 9 E knife for units 10 11 Joseph Wright 12 13 14 15 5.1 Introduction The siunitx package is a complete system for type- 16 17 setting units in LATEX. It provides a large number of settings, allowing the user complete control of 18 19 the output for a fixed input. The package grew out of SIunits and SIstyle, but covers many additional -3- Baskerville areas. This article provides a brief overview of why the desired output style. It also includes basic abil- the new package was written and some of its key ities to include units with these numbers. features. 5.4 Enter siunitx 5.2 Background Given the existing range of packages, the question In November 2007, a seemingly simple query about arises `why another package?' The answer is that, a bug in the SIunits package [6] was posted to although there are several other packages, none comp.text.tex. I suggested a bug fix, but on con- covers everything. For example, SIunits provides tacting the author of SIunits found he had no time macros such as \metre to maintain consistency, for further maintenance. I therefore found myself but is poor on control of numbers, whereas SIstyle somewhat accidentally as the new package main- is stronger on numbers but does not provide unit tainer. After fixing the bug at hand, I decided to macros. So a combined package, which can do ev- have a good look over the code, and to ask for sug- erything, seemed desirable. Many of the ideas that gestions for improvements. It soon became very I and others had were also well beyond anything available in the existing solutions. That said, a lot clear that unit support in LATEX needed serious at- tention, and that tweaks to SIunits would not be of the internals of siunitx is taken more-or-less ver- enough. At that point, siunitx was born. batim from the existing packages. The numprint system has been extensively recycled here; most of the number-interpreting system is based on the 5.3 Units in print numprint method. Indeed, while the initial aim of the new package was to deal primarily with units, The need for packages to control printing units is much of the work I have undertaken has been con- not immediately obvious. However, the existence cerned with numbers. of SIunits, SIstyle [3], fancyunits [1], unitsdef [4] and The design of siunitx is intended to be flexible. units [8] attests to the desire to go beyond direct Almost everything is made available as an option, input of units (and values). and given the number of options, key{value con- Units are important, and without clear rules trols were the only way to do this. The package problems almost automatically arise. There are documentation covers (hopefully) all of them, but therefore internationally agreed units: the Syst`eme a few examples here will illustrate the ideas. International d'Unit´es [2], usually referred to as SI units. To go with the agreed units are a set of 5.4.1 Some basics rules on how to print both units and the associ- ated values; the National Institute of Standards The basic macro of the package is \SI. This takes and Technology (nist) have a good set of guide- a unit and a value, and typesets them together. lines for authors [7]. Doing this properly and con- The font used for this is controlled, and the space sistently is much better achieved using pre-build between them cannot be broken. Thus for exam- macros, rather than checking every single use by ple \SI{10}{\metre} gives `10 m'. The second ar- hand. gument is a unit, which can be given as a series At the same time, different publishers have their of macros, or can be literal text: \SI{2}{N.m^2} own conventions. These do not always follow the gives `2 N m2'. Here, there is no need to instruct the ‘official’ rules, and authors do not want to change package to use maths mode for superscripts: this is their source for every different use. This again handled automatically. makes the strong case for using adjustable macros Both the number and unit parts of the input for writing units; changing the style is then only a can be used independently, with macros \num and question of altering the definition. \si, respectively. The \num macro can inter- Finally, values as well as units have rules, and pret and format a wide range of numerical in- these rules vary depending on publisher and coun- put. So \num{1e2,3} gives `1 × 102:3' (when us- try. The numprint package [5] provides a range of ing U.K. settings, at least). As with the rest tools to automatically format numbers, to match of the package, the way that numbers are inter- -4- Volume 10, Number 2 preted can be adjusted by setting the appropriate \SI[seperr]{1.23(4)e5}{\candela} package options.