Well, as long as that's clear

I mean, I was worried that intelligent design was just creationism in disguise.  But now we don't have to worry about it, because Bill Dembski rationally, intellectually defends intelligent design…from a bible.  Wait…

TeX articles moved to the blog

As you can see, I've packed up the LaTeX articles from the "Technology" section of my website and moved them over here to my blog.  Two main reasons – first, they don't really fit the rest of my professional website (they're more like blog content, if you will), and secondly, I'm about to redesign my professional website, and I don't want to make room for them.

So those three articles will be available for posterity here.  I'll be writing a few more in the coming weeks and months – I'm slowly being converted over to XeLaTeX, with its slick handling of OpenType fonts, and I'll probably write something up about it, since it smoothes over what's probably the single most annoying feature of old-fashioned PDFLaTeX.

Advanced LaTeX Typesetting

So, this is essentially the saga of how I typeset my Princeton undergraduate senior thesis. Several people have expressed interest in seeing how it was done, so I figured I’d write up my collected wisdom as an article here. I’ll present this material as an annotated version of the document preamble.

LaTeX and Tableaux

For my PHI 340 at Princeton, I found myself needing to typeset lots of tableaux-style proofs in the style of our textbook, Possibilities and Paradox, An Introduction to Modal and Many-Valued Logic by Beall and van Fraassen. The same sorts of tableaux proofs appear in Tomassi’s Logic.  Here's a tutorial teaching you how to typeset them in LaTeX, using a couple of freely-available packages.

An Introduction to LaTeX

So you want to typeset a document with lots of math, and you don’t want it to look like x + y^2 = 4z. No, you actually want it to look like your textbook. Well, you’re in luck. In all likelihood, the program the authors of your textbook used to write it is a handy little tool called LaTeX (‘LAY-tech’). There’s all sorts of history here involving LaTeX’s author (Knuth), the programming of TeX, the book that is the TeX source code (yes, the entire source code to TeX is actually a book that you can buy), but that’s for another time and place. Or some kind of computer science lecture or something. You just want to draw pretty integrals, right? Right. So let’s get to it.