Software Tips and Tricks

• Beamer: Removing the headline and footline from the title page
• Beamer: Removing the navigation symbols
• Emacs: Fixing trailing whitespace issues
• Files: Guidelines for naming files
• GHC: Using different versions of GHC
• LaTeX: Do not use \bf, \em, \it, \rm, \sf, \sl or \tt

Beamer: Removing the headline and footline from the title page

Tested with Beamer 3.4.1.

Use the plain option for removing the headline and footline areas from the title page:

\begin{frame}[plain]
\titlepage
\end{frame}

Beamer: Removing the navigation symbols

Tested with Beamer 3.4.1.

Write in the preamble the command \setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{} for suppressing all the navigation symbols.

Emacs: Fixing trailing whitespace issues

Tested with Emacs 24.4.

Add to the .emacs file the instruction (setq-default show-trailing-whitespace t) for showing trailing whitespace and run the command M-x delete-trailing-whitespace for removing them.

Files: Guidelines for naming files

1. Use mnemonic file names.

2. The names of your files should not include references to your corrections (e.g. great-name-final-correction.pdf) nor version numbers (e.g. great-name-version42.pdf).

3. The files names should contain only English letters, digits, or hyphens (-), that is, the files names should not include white-spaces, accent marks (e.g. à), tildes (e.g. ñ), punctuation symbols, parentheses nor other unusual characters.

4. For avoiding issues when handling your files (e.g. in Office 365) or if your files will become part of some Web page’s URL (suggested by Google) note that underscore (_) is not a character suggested for naming your files.

GHC: Using different versions of GHC

N.B. The following instructions assumes you have root privileges.

Let’s suppose we want to install GHC 7.8.4 and GHC 7.10.1 then following procedure can be followed:

1. If you installed GHC using your software distribution, remove it.

2. Install stow from your distribution.

3. Create the stow directory:

   $ cd /usr/local
   $ sudo mkdir stow

4. Download the binary version of GHC 7.8.4 for your platform. (In our case, the file is called ghc-7.8.4-x86_64-unknown-linux-deb7.tar.xz)

5. Install GHC 7.8.4:

   $ tar xJvf ghc-7.8.4-x86_64-unknown-linux-deb7.tar.xz
   $ cd ghc-7.8.4
   $ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/stow/ghc-7.8.4
   $ sudo make install

6. Download the binary version of GHC 7.10.1 for your platform. (In our case, the file is called ghc-7.8.4-x86_64-unknown-linux-deb7.tar.xz)

7. Install GHC 7.10.1:

   $ tar xJvf ghc-7.8.4-x86_64-unknown-linux-deb7.tar.xz
   $ cd ghc-7.10.1
   $ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/stow/ghc-7.10.1
   $ sudo make install

8. Using GHC 7.8.4:

   $ cd /usr/local/stow
   $ stow ghc-7.8.4
   $ ghc --version
   The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System, version 7.8.4

9. Using GHC 7.10.1.

   Before using GHC 7.10.1 it is necessary unstow GHC 7.8.4 and stow GHC 7.10.1:

   $ cd /usr/local/stow
   $ stow -D ghc-7.8.4
   $ stow ghc-7.10.1
   $ ghc --version
   The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System, version
   7.10.1

10. The above step can be tedious when using various versions of GHC. We can use the following bash script instead:

    $ cat ghc-change.bash
    #! /bin/bash
    
    cd /usr/local/stow/
    sudo stow -D ghc*
    sudo stow ghc-$1

LaTeX: Do not use \bf, \em, \it, \rm, \sf, \sl or \tt

The above commands have some issues. For example, how produce bold italic text?

Both {\bf \it Hello World!} or {\it \bf Hello World!} do not work. You should use \textbf{\textit{Hello World!}} or \textit{\textbf{Hello World!}} instead.

See What’s wrong with \bf, \it, etc.?

Generated with pandoc 2.9.1.1

Andrés Sicard Ramírez

Last modified: Sun Jan 19 18:58:18 -05 2020