Favorite TeX tools

Jonthan Sprinkle

I like to use LaTeX for doing cool things, such as,

• Writing papers
  • Using TeXnic Center
    • An MS Visual Studio (like) environment for creating LaTeX based documents. If you are a programmer, and you used to write makefiles for your TeX compilation, then this tool does what Visual Studio did for writing makefiles.
• Presentations
  • TeX4PPT
    • PowerPoint plugin, which creates nice DVIs which show up as Windows enhanced media.
  • TexPoint
    • Another PowerPoint plugin, but not as strong as above
  • Beamer
    • Slides format that produces very nice PDFs, when you don't know what machine you will be presenting on
  • Comparison presentation between TeX4PPT and TexPoint

• Creating .eps files from Windows Metafiles
  • Download the EMFtoEPS package, from Dirk Struve, at http://www.projectory.de/emftoeps/ and install it on you machine, making sure to choose a PostScript printer in your output settings.
  • Save your PPT, Word Drawing, or other image into Enhanced Metafile Format (EMF) as, say, figure.emf
  • Open EMFtoEPS (available on the desktop, when remotely logged in to ransom) and open the EMF file you just saved
  • Choose Convert from the menu to do either all files, or those selected by you
  • The files are saved in the same directory, with the extension *.eps, say figure.eps
  • Open the generated EPS file with GhostScript, and choose the File->PS to EPS, allow the bounding box to be automatically calculated, and save with a different filename, say, figure_use.eps
  • You may import figure_use.eps into a latex document.

Each of these requires an installation of MiKTeX.