Humanities Computing Testbed

Goodbye!

How to make a backup copy of your data on a Macintosh

Imagine what would happed to you if you lost all your data on your computer: your thesis, your emails, all gone in one instant. This can happen (in decreasing order of probability) because you destroy your files by mistake, because of software failure, because you drop your notebook, because of hard drive failure (hard drives are mechanical devices and eventually will fail), because of power surges, because of man-made and natural disasters (fire, flood, etc.), or even because of state action (you are a victim of identity theft and your computer get seized for two years). Don't let it happen to you! Here are some things you want to keep in mind when making backup copies of your data This article is written for Macs running OS X, but most of it applies to all systems.

Footnotes following multi-page tables in LaTeX

Q: I find that the footnotes in a longtable (but not in small tables) appear at the bottom of the page instead of immediately after the longtable. By any chance, do you have any suggestion/solution to this problem?

Setting paper sizes in pdfLaTeX

Q: I took your LaTeX minicourse this past winter quarter. I've been working
on some projects, and I realized that my margins were not correct (using
both the article and nuthesis class files). I finally learned why: the
output PDF was formatted for A4 paper, however I am printing on letter
paper. I believe, after examining article.cls, one should be able to
declare the variable 'letterpaper' or any of several other paper formats
with the following command:

\documentclass[11pt,letterpaper]{article}

but LaTeX continually forces the output in A4 formatting.

Accessing your home machine behind a firewall from the road

Many of us have broadband connections to the Internet from our home machines. But since these connections sometimes are behind firewalls that we have no control over, it is not always possible to access our home machines from the Internet. Yet, being able to do so can highly desirable in order to synchronize or back up data from a notebook computer while we are on the road. Here is one way to get around this problem, provided that you have access to at least a user account on some machine that has a direct Internet connection. It requires some knowledge about networking, but it's comparatively easy to set up, works on Windows, Macintosh, *nix, and all other major operating systems, and you can do it using only free software. It is even possible to do it without having administrative rights on any of the machines involved, although this will introduce some risks.

Slideshow Maker for PowerPoint

I am happy to announce the availability of Slideshow Maker for PowerPoint. This is a little tool that will take all the image files from a given directory and automatically turn them into a PowerPoint slide show. It is available for download under the MIT license (short summary: do with it whatever you see fit so long as you preserve the copyright notice and don't sue me or Northwestern) here.

Installing new LaTeX style sheets on the Mac

If you have the i-Installer TeX distribution installed on your Mac and you want to make a new style or class file (ending in .sty or .cls) available, the easiest way of doing this is to copy it into the folder ~/Library/texmf/tex/latex. (The tilde sign (~) means your home directory.) That's it! You won't need to update any databases or such.