The Contribution to Free Software

LATEX Packages

pdfx:

⦿ CTAN link for download ⦿  Latest update: 2019-03-11 ⦿ What is PDF/X? ⦿  TUGBoat article on pdfx ⦿

The pack­age helps LATEX users to cre­ate PDF/X and PDF/A compliant pdf documents with pdfTEX thereby avoiding the usage of and dependence on proprietary software like Adobe Acrobat Professional. The package has undergone several revisions by now and the newest version is available for at CTAN. (First release: 2008-12-04)

table:

Helps to make tables with captions spanning to the exact width of tabular, landscape table as a float along with text in portrait mode, and related bells and whistles. Available for download here.

rvwrite:

Helps to overcome TEX’s limitation of writing out to 16 files. Using this package, one can make TEX to write out any number of output streams. Available for download at CTAN. (First release: 2010-08-28)

pdfdraftcopy:

Helps to include strings like DRAFT or watermarks on a pdf document generated with PDFTEX. The development of package became necessary as the draftcopy package then available was hardwired with pstricks package that won’t allow documents to work with PDFTEX. Available for download here.

grid:

⦿  CTAN download link ⦿ First release: 2009-06-16) ⦿  TUGBoat article on grid ⦿ 

The pack­age helps to en­ables grid type­set­ting in dou­ble col­umn doc­u­ments. Grid type­set­ting (ver­ti­cal align­ing of lines of text in ad­ja­cent columns) is a dif­fi­cult task in LATEX, and the present pack­age is no more than an at­tempt to help users to achieve it in a lim­ited way.

copyedit:

This pack­age im­ple­ments copy­edit­ing sup­port for LATEX doc­u­ments. Authors can en­joy the free­dom of us­ing, for ex­am­ple, words with US or UK or Cana­dian or Aus­tralian spelling in a mixed way, yet, they can choose any one of the us­age forms for their en­tire doc­u­ment ir­re­spec­tive of kinds of spelling they have adopted. In the same fash­ion, the users can have the ben­e­fit of the fol­low­ing fea­tures avail­able in the pack­age: ...

• Lo­cal­iza­tion — Bri­tish-Amer­i­can-Aus­tralian-Cana­dian
• Close-up, Hyphen­ation, and Spaced words
• Latin ab­bre­vi­a­tions
• Acronyms and Ab­bre­vi­a­tions
• Item­iza­tion, non­lo­cal lists and la­bels
• Par­en­thet­i­cal and se­rial com­mas
• Non-lo­cal to­k­eniza­tion in lan­guage through Ab­bre­vi­a­tions and pro­nouns.

Available for download at CTAN.  MORE

bibcheck:

It is a utility package that will notify the user about those bibliographic items that were not cited in the document, though, they’re listed in the bibliographic listing. Standard journal publishers do want uncited reference items to be removed from the document as a pre-condition for publishing. Here is the download link at CTAN.

pdfscreen:

This is the first package that was publicly released as free software (originally developed for the University of Auckland for online delivery of lecture notes to students). The university allowed to make the package freely available to public). Available for download at CTAN (First release: 1999-03-08).

pdfslide:

Helps to make PDF presentations with heavy math content. Available for download at CTAN (First release: 1999-10-13).

pdftricks:

PSTricks package does not support processing with pdfTEX. This package helps to process any TEX document with PSTricks figures using pdfTEX. Available for download at CTAN (First release: 2001-02-13).

pdfpagediff:

⦿ Download link at CTAN ⦿ Blog article about the package ⦿  Facebook discussion ⦿ 

Suppose you have two PDF files which are supposed to be identical, but have a suspicion that there is a minute difference, e.g. one word has been hyphenated. This TEX package that will help find that change by simply superimposing pairs of pages, allowing for a quick visual check. More details and download here.

Malayalam Packages:

ithal

⦿  Download link ⦿  Documentation ⦿ 

A comprehensive LATEX package written as an extension to memoir.cls which takes care of the formatting requirements of Malayalam books for Sayahna Foundation. The package has several options to create PDF output suitable to be read on different kinds of reading devices:

• print — generate output for printing, default is false.
• proof — proof mode, allows to have line numbers, watermark and footer instruction for proofers.
• sphone — generate pdf output for standard mobile phone with aspect ratio of 16:9.
• mini — generate pdf output for phone with 5 inch screen size.
• kindle — generate pdf output for older versions of Kindle device.

Malayalam Opentype Fonts

In collaboration with the Rachana Institute of Typography (RIT), a non-profit company, we strive hard to make available good quality Unicode fonts in Malayalam and other Indic scripts under Open Font License so that the fonts can be freely downloaded and used without any restrictions by the user community. A series of fonts — both ornamental and textual — are proposed to be released in a timely fashion and the first in this series, viz., RIT-Sundar has been released on February 5, 2018 at River Valley Campus, Malayinkeezh, Trivandrum.

Documentation

LATEX Primer:

is a popular LATEX tutorial written with novice user in mind and published by the Indian TEX Users Group. It addresses most of the production problems that might be encountered during typesetting of a book with LATEX typesetting system. All the sources, auxiliary packages, and PDF output are made available for download here so that users can typeset the book themselves (First release: 2003-09-14).

PSTricks Tutorial:

Online documentation of PSTricks graphics package. Available for download here (First release: 2003-09-14).

Package Maintenance

TEX4ht:

⦿  Project home ⦿ Main information page ⦿  TUGBoat article ⦿  Extrapolating TEX4ht ⦿  Michal Hoftich’s wiki ⦿  CVR on TEX4ht — blog posts ⦿  Profile of Eiten Gurari ⦿

A highly configurable and programmable translator of documents from TEX and LATEX to SGML/XML-based formats such as (X)HTML, MathML, Open­Doc­u­ment, and DocBook. TEX4ht pro­vides a con­fig­urable (La)TEX-based au­thor­ing sys­tem for hy­per­text requirements. Authored by Eiten Gurari of Ohio State University, TEX4ht bundle contains hundreds of TEX packages, shell scripts and batch files to invoke the program, hypertext fonts and a binary post-processor with the same name as the package to process dvi output to create the final output. It is also capable of writing css files on the fly. We have been maintaining it along with Karl Berry of TEX Users Group when its author, Eiten Gurari suddenly passed away on Monday, June 22, 2009.

Dropcap support for TEX4ht:

⦿  Raphaël Pinson ⦿ Package home at Github ⦿  Package documentation ⦿ Example HTML page ⦿Annotated TEX source ⦿ 

This is a typical example of how TEX4ht can easily be configured to perform non-trivial task. Raphaël Pinson has kindly contributed the code that enables TEX4ht to support lettrine package. (lettrine.sty helps to typeset dropped capitals in a LaTeX document.) This solved the long standing problem of drop capital support in TEX4ht, even if all the options of lettrine package are not supported at the time of release.

elsarticle:

⦿  CTAN download link ⦿  elsarticle support ⦿  FAQ ⦿ 

This is a thoroughly re-written documentclass for formatting LATEX submissions for journals published by Elsevier. It is a successor to elsart.cls which was released in 1994 by Elsevier. elsarticle.cls also follows the same design goal of keeping a generic tagging and formatting scheme for author submissions across all the different journals while different packages will take care of final formatting the article as per journal’s house style. Another advantage is that it is designed in such a manner that it helps translating author’s LATEX sources to various other markup formats like XML which is a prerequisite for production of PDF outputs for print and web delivery.

CAS packages:

This bundle provides two classes, namely, cas-sc.cls and cas-dc.cls and corresponding template files for typesetting journal articles supposed to go through Elsevier’s updated workflow. One of the sets is meant for one-column, the other for two-column layout. These are now accepted for submitting articles both in Elsevier’s electronic submission system and elsewhere. Download link at CTAN.

Bibliographic styles:

A bundle of twelve bibliographic style files (BST) covering all the bibliographic models used by the journals published by Elsevier. These *.bst files can be used with elsarticle.cls and CAS packages as well. Author support and download links.

peerj:

peerj.cls is a user-friendly LATEX class for formatting documents containing technical content, particularly that of science, technology and medicine. The class uses environments and commands defined in LATEX kernel without changes to the signature so that clashes with other contributed LATEX packages will be minimal. peerj.cls is primarily built upon the default article.cls. The class is specially written for the preprint submission to the open access journal, namely, PeerJ. Download link.

nomenclature:

Pro­duces lists of sym­bols us­ing the capabilities of the MakeIndex program. Download link at CTAN.

Projects Under Development

The development of software of these projects are still going on and not yet ready for public release. However, links to the codebase will be made available as soon as a working version is ready.

ePub for Malayalam:

Packages and framework to generate ePub and PDF format outputs from LATEX sources of Malayalam documents encoded in UTF-8.

XML Packages for Malayalam Dictionary:

This is a very ambitious project aimed at capturing the entire data of Shabdataravali, the authoritative Malayalam Dictionary in XML format so that the dictionary can be preserved in future-prefect manner and reused for various computing purposes like machine translation, morphological analysis, online version of the dictionary, etc.