Editors

[Frank Bennett]

Members of the group might be interested in Fidus Writer, a new project this is nearing its public release announcement:

    http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/07/27/2153258/fidus-writer-open-source-collaborative-editor-for-non-geek-academics

The platform uses the citeproc-js formatter for citations, and exports to LaTeX. Although not specifically designed for law, with those foundations it has the potential to move in that direction.

Frank

[Joseph Mornin]

This is pretty cool. I've just played with the beta a bit. I think I
still prefer writing straight LaTeX in Vim, but this looks like a good
tool for collaboration and for those who prefer WSYIWGs.

> --
> LaTeX for Lawyers: http://www.latexforlawyers.org/
> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "LaTeX for Lawyers" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
> an email to latex-for-lawy...@googlegroups.com.
> To post to this group, send email to latex-fo...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
>
>

[A Feldman]

I think the editor is excellent and has a lot of potential, especially for those lawyers who are not inclined to write LaTeX code. I made them aware of our group and the interest in their project. 

Aaron

[Johannes Wilm]

Hey guys,

I am Johannes from the Fidus Writer team. First of all: thanks for considering us!

As for the details of Fidus Writer and the latex support it has:

We knew we wouldn't be able to support all available latex packages and compilers, so I chose the ombination that seemed to be most "future proof" -- which was Lualatex for compiling and Biblatex for bibliographies. That way there is no problem of using exotic character sets and msot things can be cited. This is what I used myself as an anthropologist. I even contributed some translations to biblatex a while back

But of course it can be extended (and should be, if for example, biblatex cannot adequately cite the sources you need to cite). Fidus Writer tries to not use a lot of resources on the server, so lots of things, including export is delegated to the client in the form of a javascript program, which would need to be extended.

In this case, look at https://github.com/fiduswriter/fiduswriter/blob/master/text/static/js/exporter.js which contains all the export functions and would need to be extended if one wanted to support other Latex packages.

[A Feldman]

Thanks for your excellent editor and for joining the group. I have started to use XeLaTeX, mostly for the ability to use tt and ot fonts that have been installed as system fonts in Ubuntu and for its high compatibility with existing LaTeX packages. What are your thoughts on the possibility of incorporating XeLaTeX into your editor?

[Johannes Wilm]

Hey,
as I understand it, there are no advantages to using Xelatex these days. Lualatex unites the features of Xelatex and pdftex and adds a number of extra features, mostly relating to scripting. This also includes loading TT and OT fonts. I have never had problems using system fonts either (I am also running Ubuntu). But maybe I am missing something? Is there something you know Xetex can do that luatex cannot do?

As I mentioned -- it shouldn't be that hard to extend the latex export filter to provide for more options and latex packages, but it probably makes sense to keep the amount of choices as low as possible while not compromising functionality too much. At least in the man version that is.

On Mon, Aug 19, 2013 at 6:04 PM, A Feldman <aaronfe...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for your excellent editor and for joining the group. I have started to use XeLaTeX, mostly for the ability to use tt and ot fonts that have been installed as system fonts in Ubuntu and for its high compatibility with existing LaTeX packages. What are your thoughts on the possibility of incorporating XeLaTeX into your editor?

--
LaTeX for Lawyers: http://www.latexforlawyers.org/
---

You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the Google Groups "LaTeX for Lawyers" group.
To unsubscribe from this topic, visit https://groups.google.com/d/topic/latex-for-lawyers/LPOEFFioJcU/unsubscribe.
To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to latex-for-lawy...@googlegroups.com.

To post to this group, send email to latex-fo...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

--
Johannes Wilm
http://www.johanneswilm.org
tel: +1 (520) 399 8880

[A Feldman]

Johannes,

Thank you for responding.  I think that this is a dialogue worth having.

 

From my understanding,

 Lualatex can do everything that Xe

La

Te

X

does,

and more,

but you have to learn

how to write in

 Lualatex

and Lualatex has its own unique package system and way of going about things

.

Now I know I cannot speak from experience here, as I have never used Lualatex.  So I might very well be wrong about this.

However, from experience if you know some LaTeX, I know that in

 using

XeLaTeX

 

you really do not have to relearn how you code

your files.  There are just a few extra things to put into your header.  I

n addition to that

advantage

since XeLaTeX is mostly backwards compatible with LaTeX 

it means one can still use the

 

huge library of

already

existing

L

a

T

e

X

packages

.  This is important to me not only because of the variety of the packages, but also because of the

correspondingly large Internet community that supports use of those packages.

 

For instance, 

if I do not know how to do something, there is almost always someone who has asked the question and it has been answered on stackexchange. At this point if you want to know an answer to how to do something in XeLaTeX/LaTeX, it's as simple as asking the question on google and the answer usually pops up in the first few results. I am one of those who needs to stand on the shoulders of giants, having no real programming skills of my own.  I believe most lawyers will be in the same unenviable situation.

For me it means that I do not have to abandon the way I have learned to do things, including how I learn how to do new things, and yet I can use the fonts, and special characters I need, and in addition use those new XeTeX packages that are being written. 

Is Lualatex compatible with LaTeX in the same manner as XeLaTeX?  If so then I think that I may have to rethink my decision not to use Lualatex.

[Johannes Wilm]

Hey again,

yes, lualatex should be -- likely with the exception of some exotic examples -- be compatible with the older latex engines. Most libraries should just work. 

As I understand the current engine landscape is like this:

latex -- produces dvi files which hardly anyone uses these days. this engine is no longer being used.

pdftex -- a replacement for the latex engine. It produces pdf files and has some advanced features related to that. Unfortunately it does not have good support for third party fonts and utf-8

xetex -- another replacement for the latex engine. It is really good at UTF-8 and using other fonts

luatex -- the replacement for pdftex and xetex. It is still not labeled as finished, but has been in a more than usable state for more than five years.

All the later three pdftex, xetex and luatex are included in the main distribution (texlive). I assume that xetex and pdftex will be thrown out over time. But I may be wrong. Who knows more?

[A Feldman]

You know I think that you are right, mostly.  The only thing that stops me is the endless beta status of LuaTeX and that I've become dependent upon the convenience of using the xesearch package to designate shortcuts for party names.  Sadly xesearch only works using XeTeX.  Do you know of any similar search and replace package for Luatex?

[Johannes Wilm]

Hey again,

yes I think that is one of those exotic cases. Xesearch is unmaintained and hasn't been updated for 4 years, correct? That would explain why it hasn't been converted to work with luatex.

In Luatex's chickenize there is an example of something that replaces words. What command(s) are you currently using?

[A Feldman]

I'm using the following:

\usepackage{xesearch}

\SearchList{list1}{John Doe}{JD}

\SearchList{list1}{Johannes Wilm}{JW}

Then anytime I want the party name in the document itself I write "jd" or "jw" which then expands to the full party name upon compilation.  It is particularly useful when I have lots of parties and long corporate names.

The software is from 2009.  But I would not assume that it is unmaintained  http://paulisambert.free.fr/ .  I think it is a XeTeX package that was not designed for LuaTeX.  I noticed from his website that he also authored a XeIndex package.  I have not fooled around with that at all, but it looks like an interesting alternative indexing system based on XeSearch http://paulisambert.free.fr/xeindex.pdf, http://paulisambert.free.fr/xeindex.sty, http://paulisambert.free.fr/xeindex.tex, http://paulisambert.free.fr/README-xeindex.txt

[Johannes Wilm]

Hey,

I went to that website and it seems to say that he has stopped working on this. Other places on the internet I found that no new maintainer has been found. Try to google "xesearch unmaintained" and you will find several hits regarding that. 

I actually did something similar  when writing my master thesis in anthropology about a small village in the USA as I needed to anynomize a number of names in the entire text, so I changed the names, but I wanted to write the original names.

I did this without any packages. I have addd the description of this below.

For lualatex there is however a package that does this -- chickenize. Unfortunately Ubunut doesn't have the current version of that packaged, but if you include the attached file with a simple

\include{substitute} it works the same (I just put this together tonight)

\addtosubstitutions{Fisher}{Hawthorne}

and then once:

\substitutewords

This will replace all instances of "Fisher" with "Hawthorne". I have also attached an example file (letter_to_fisher.tex) to demonstrate how to do this.

Googling further, it seems also Xetex is kind of going towards unmaintained. One of the main reasons I started Fidus writer was precisely that the 1500 ways one can create a PDF file with LyX are just too much for any normal user. For the user who is able to navigate all those and does write latex code and absolutely needs to use an older latex rendering engine, the best is probably too use search and replace on the latex output files of Fidus Wirter and turn them into what one needs them to be. 

-----

My thesis way of doing things:

The way I did it was like this:

\def\anonynomize#1#2{\expandafter\def\csname #1\endcsname{#2\xspace}}

\anonynomize{John}{Curtis}

\anonynomize{Fionna}{Maggy}

\anonynomize{Vera}{Michelle}

\anonynomize{Angela}{Maria}

\anonynomize{Garst}{Daniel}

\anonynomize{Julius}{Jonathan}

\anonynomize{Jacob}{Garst}

\anonynomize{Abraham}{Alex}

In the text I could then write

"And there \John came" and in the output it would turn it into "And there Curtis came".

And yes, I realize that is one "\" more than in your current setup. The advantage is that you don't accidentally convert something that wasn't meant to be converted. 

[A Feldman]

Very very cool. Thanks for sharing this with me and the group.