Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
At the CTAN site, there are quite a few topics listed under B when I select Browse > Topics > B. As with the A topic, there are various language packages: Bahasa, Basque, Belorussian, Bengali and four more. Eventually I will get around to exploring the Babel package – which can control many features of documents written in languages other than English. For these columns, I will skip over the language packages. Bebel takes up one full chapter in The Latex Companion (Mittelbach and Fischer, ISBN 978-0-201-36300-5 chap 13). I am also going to skip over the twelve topics concerned with bibliographies. These are obviously very important for some writers. Currently there seems to be two dominant models for generating bibliographies in Latex: BibTex and BibLatex. It is a topic that requires more than one dedicated column.
The background topic contains ten distinct packages for adding backgrounds to documents. Two of them state that they generate watermarks, one makes graph paper-like images behind text, another generates the page grid behind text, another allows for a Postscript image behind text. The bidipagegrid package makes the standard pagegrid package work properly when the document requires bidirectional printing. The gradback package generates gradient backgrounds in dvips output, which does not matter to me; the package also has no documentation.
AeB-Tilebg uses a rectangular image and tiles it behind page contents. Tiled backgrounds are often generated electronically for desktops and web pages. Here is an excerpt from the documentation: “Download your favourite tiled background swatch from the Internet or create one yourself, convert it to a .eps or a .pdf format (if you use distiller or pdftex, respectively), then place that image in the same folder as your text document. Anywhere in your document, use the command \setTileBgGraphic to bring in your tiled background using the graphicx package; for example, \setTileBgGraphic[scale=.5]{graphics_file}”. The usepackage instruction must include the name of the driver (dvips, dvipsone, pdftex) and the option usetemplates. For other options, read the documentation that is part of the package download. See the code below and Figure 1 (below).
The background package is more complex, more flexible, and has thirteen pages of documentation. The content of the background initially is “Draft”. After skimming through the documentation it is obvious that this package inserts what are usually called watermarks; text behind the main text. I did not see any mention of the capability to use an image with this package. See the code below and Figure 2 (below left).
There were two other background-generating packages I thought interesting: gridpapers and fadingimage. The first generates what I know as graph paper, although the styles available are different from the graph paper I used at school. The second does what its name suggests: it places an image that fades from one edge of the page to the opposite edge. Let’s look at gridpapers first.
Gridpapers can generate eleven possible grid patterns. Read the documentation which comes with the package to find out what they are. There are six possible preset color combinations which control the major grid color, the minor grid color and the background color. The user can stick with one of the built-in color combinations or dictate colors for any or all three possible choices. The size of the pattern can either be one of the predefined sizes, or customized. If using the “dot” grid, the size of the dots is also controllable. The pattern (or grid) can either fill the area where there is text, or fill the whole page. Gridpapers can even override any page geometry settings from the geometry package if the gridpapers package is loaded before the geometry package.
Here is the code (above) and the result for some simple syntax (Figure 3 - below).
The next group of fifteen packages were designed to generate barcodes and other machine readable coding in documents. Barcodes appear on almost all consumer products. They are used in warehouses, in retail stores, and many other places. CTAN has packages for generating barcodes for various standards: Code 128, EAN, EAN Code 13, UPC, U.S. ZIP codes, and QR codes. I assume all my readers know what barcodes and QR codes look like, so no sample for these packages. Again I urge you to read the documentation for whatever package you use before you use it.
There are eleven packages grouped under the bidi topic. They all have to do with printing text right-to-left as well as left-to-right (i.e. bidirectional). This is necessary when writing Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic, and was normal when writing Chinese for a few thousand years until recently. Mittelbach and Fischer mention only the bidi package. I cannot write Hebrew, Syriac or Arabic, so no sample. I assume if you write in these languages you know what they look like.
The biology topic contains fifteen packages. Five of them are specialized versions of bibliography packages for specific journals. Several of the others are to assist in typesetting scientific names for specimens in collections or in reports and articles. Two are used for typesetting bracketed dichotomous identification keys. If you know what a dichotomous key is and need to set them up, these packages could be very useful.
There is a topic called Blank Pages which seems out of place but can be useful when producing longer documents. One of the two packages ensures there is always an even number of pages in a document. The other says it fills documents with notes pages and notes areas. That sounds useful for textbook authors and teachers. The abstract from the 47-page documentation says “the NotesPages package provides one macro to insert a single notes page and another to fill the document with multiple notes pages, until the total number of pages (so far) is a multiple of a given number. A third command can be used to fill half empty pages with a notes area.” Putting an image of an empty page into FCM is a waste. I leave it to your imagination or experimentation to learn how this package works.
There are 48 packages in the Book Publication topic. Some are samples of books in various languages or for particular publishers. One offers to set up your book in a colorful way. A couple set up crop marks so the final printing of a book can be cut to the appropriate size. If you are writing or plan to write a book, one or more of these packages could be useful and help save time in page design. I chose the flippdf package as an example of the many possibilities available in this topic.
Quoting from the package documentation: “The pdfflip package extends pdfLATEX and LuaLATEX making it possible to typeset a “mirrored” version of the document. This is sometimes required by publishers who use photographic printing processes that need “camera-ready” documents to be printable on transparent films”. The code for a sample is below, see the image for the result.
I have reached the end of my exploration of the B section of topics of Latex packages. Next issue, I will review some of what is available in the next section.