I have been using Kile for a while for my LaTeX editing needs but after getting a new netbook (running Ubuntu 9.04 netbook remix), and not wanting to install the KDE libs I decided to switch back to texmaker.

I installed it and loaded up a document to start doing a bit of work in it and the typing was extremely slow. I also noticed that the CPU usage shot up whenever I was typing. I tried the same on my desktop with the same results.

I did a bit of searching and it appears this is a known bug.

The only workaround I can find is to use the following command to run texmaker.

texmaker -graphicssystem raster
This seems to work but isn’t ideal. I would quite like to know what actually causes this. Of course there is every possibility that this will be gone in 9.10. I will find out soon when I upgrade but the Ubuntu server traffic is ridiculous today with it being the release day so I think I’ll leave it a while before I do any upgrades.

I just had the need to enumerate a list of numbered bullet points in reverse order within a Latex document I am writing. I suppose this is a feature that isn’t hugely needed so it isn’t contained within the standard Latex feature set.

After a little searching I came across this style file which will create the \begin{revnumerate} environment which can be used to easily create a reversely enumerated list. An in depth description of how to use this style can be found here.

I recently had a look around for a nice way to create tables for use in a latex using some sort of WYSIWYG editor and came across this elisp package for xemacs.

Having never used an elisp package before I did a bit of searching around and it proved to be a bit tricker to find how to install it thatn I thought it would be. Anyway, here are the simple steps needed to get one running.

First of all create a directory somewhere for your elisp files to reside in, I chose ~/elisp. Then open your xemacs slisp config file, for me this was located in ~/.xemacs/custom.el – Then add the following lines to it :

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/elisp")
(require 'table)

In the second line, ‘table’ refers to the elisp file excluding the ‘.el’ file extension, so ‘table.el’ in this case. Simples…