For your reading pleasure, I bring you a complete French-English edition of Charles Baudelaire‘s Les Fleurs du Mal / Flowers of Evil as a PDF eBook.
Category Archives: Books
LaTeX template I used for Divine Comedy
Just realized I could share with you the LaTeX template I used for the Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy; it’s nothing special or pro, but if anyone wants to get a similar result, feel free to use the template – I added quite a few comments inside, you can delete them once you orient yourself in the source.
Also, it can be used as an example of adding poetry in verses, adding illustrations, etc.
My fave Douglas Adams quotes
– text in italic is by Douglas Adams, [comments in brackets] are mine…
this is basically just one madness I wrote for my old site as “Abouts…” page, based on the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books 🙂
About the universe
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
[Then came the great-potatoes… and everyone’s been happy – fries for free, toenails bitting for free… you name it. Oh yeah, those were happier days.]
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri.
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
[But then… All of a sudden, someone wanted a ketchup on his/her fries, and there was a big shivering. And so, people were created, and this made lotsa people really angry… especially those left out in the creation, but also those created – each of them envied the other group. To stop all this fuzz, they made them do the ketchup, and some other goods, mainly required by the too-many-hands creatures. But this made people even more sad, and the sadness spread even further…]
– “Simple. I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged myself in to its external computer feed. I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the Universe to it,” – said Marvin.
– “And what happened?” – pressed Ford.
– “It committed suicide,” – said Marvin and stalked off…
About the world today…
[Wasn’t the history of universe depressing enough???]
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.
You can get first 3 books of HHGTG here.
Complete Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy in PDF – 3 books
Bit earlier than promised, I’ve finished the Paradiso, so I bring you complete Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy in PDF for free download, as 3 separate eBooks – Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. If you’ve already downloaded the first 2 parts, feel free to re-download them, as the final versions are extended, with few mistakes corrected, plus with an enhanced layout.
Get rid of page number on 1st page of ToC in LaTeX!
LaTeX, or more generally TeX, is undoubtly the best typesetting tool available, and what’s more, it’s for free (for Windows users – check out MiKTeX!). Yet, there are few things that should work in a certain “obvious” way, yet they don’t (fortunately, there’s very few of them).
One of them is quite a surprising thing – pagestyle{empty} command does not affect first page of the table of contents. Yet, all the other pages of ToC it does! The same holds for list of figures and list of tables.
This is quite an annoyance, especially if you put ToC at the beginning of the document, and want to have all the pages, before the real contents starts, without the page numbering.
So, how to get rid of the page number on the first page of table of contents in LaTeX? You have to dig into the header and footer setting for this.
First thing is to use fancyhdr package – put usepackage{fancyhdr} command anywhere before the begin{document}.
Second, right before issuing the tableofcontents command, redefine the “plain page style” to an empty one, like this:
fancypagestyle{plain}
{
fancyhead{}
fancyfoot{}
} % clear header and footer of plain page because of ToC
And after the ToC, just get back to the “classical” plain page style (this is important – even if you use your “fancy” page style, each page containing first page of chapter is “plain”, unless you redefine this behaviour), like this:
fancypagestyle{plain}
{
fancyhead{}
fancyfoot[C]{thepage}
} % re-define plain page after the ToC
This block has to be “on a new page” – either after you issue newpage or cleardoublepage command, or after your first chapter{...} command.
Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy – Purgatorio, PDF version available
As mentioned few days ago, in my post Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy – Inferno, PDF version available, I bring you Dante‘s Divine Comedy – Purgatorio (Purgatory) in PDF format… 🙂
Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy – Inferno, PDF version available
As promised few days ago, in my post Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, I bring you Dante‘s Divine Comedy – Inferno in PDF format… 🙂
Stuperspace
Thanks a lot to Symmetry factor for posting this! 😀
Wonderful parody of the way HEP papers are written, by Warren Siegel, author of amazing book Fields – free comprehensive textbook on quantum and classical field theory.
I love especially the sentence “We begin by avoiding a discussion of the following relevant topics: …”. 😀
You can find more physics parodies on Warren Siegel’s pages.
Btw, am I the only one who finds arXiv‘s search to be really crappy?
Few Photos
First of all, photo of my favourite cat – she’s a real bookworm cat. 😀
[Info: I have no idea to whom this cat belongs, if to anyone at all, I just often see her sleeping in a window of one bookshop, just like in the picture]
(click image for higher resolution version)
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – 3 PDF Books
Few years ago I made the following 3 PDF’s of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 5-books series, for my old web site.
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