TeX Hacks

Only time for a short post. Foreign words are italicized frequently in English; however, et al., i.e., e.g., and etc. probably should not be...

This is silly . There are better ways to do it. Still, it was sort of fun to write. \endlinechar=-1 \newread\in \newwrite\out \message{Plea...

University thesis committees are fairly well-known in the typesetting world for having the most absurd requirements. One example requires h...

One thing that I dislike about LaTeX's output—especially in two columns—is that lines of prose are not typeset on a grid. I'm hoping...

It's probably fairly uncontroversial to say that floats are one of the main areas where LaTeX performs poorly in comparison to WYSIWYG e...

Somewhat mysteriously, in the middle of the chapter on macros in The TeXbook , Knuth defines \rhead —the macro he uses to keep track of the ...

Recent versions of pdfTeX contain primitives for generating random integers. \pdfuniformdeviate num generates a uniformly distributed rand...