Weeding out Bugs

If programming is like gardening, then weeding has much to teach us about debugging.

Fueling Development

Laptops need power. Fuel cells generate power. Fuel cells burn organic fuels. Many developers have excess body mass. Seems like a perfect fit…

Sometimes ideas come together so naturally, and in such a balanced way, that it’s clear that they were just meant to work together. Apparently unrelated concepts and problems fuse into a single tidy solution so perfect that, when looked at in hindsight, the only possible reaction is “well, of course, it’s obvious.” Two problems that share a single solution: a fusing technology. The technology that solves one of your problems serendipitously solves the other (apparently unrelated) issue.

The New LaTeX Companion

I love the output produced by TeX, and I love the flexibility I get typesetting from plain text input. However, TeX isn’t trivial. The new edition of The Latex Companion is a godsend.

I love type. Ever since I got into computers, back when high resolution was a 132 column printer, I’ve tried to find ways to play with typesetting and fonts. I wrote a basic layout system in OMSI Pascal that drove daisywheel printers. I got to be quite an expert at nroff and troff. I used to hunt (without success) for a free copy of Scribe. I played with Lout, and a dozen other packages. But nothing, ever, helds a candle to TeX when it comes to the quality of the output it produces.

Ignore for the moment some of the uglier fonts than some TeX users employ, and look instead at the pages. Hold them up at a distance and admire the uniformity of the gray: no rivers of white to be seen. Look at the bottoms of the page: if the typesetter didn’t totally goof off, they’ll be vertically balanced: an open spread is the same height on both pages (TeX’ll add tiny amounts of leading to make it happen). Dig into the line-breaking, and you’ll find optimization algorithms, which shuffle words back and forth trying to minimize the badness of the appearance.

The output of TeX gives me a lot of pleasure.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for its input. Don Knuth is clearly a genius, but as with all wizards, his creations can be tricky. In the case of TeX, we have a typesetting engine driven by a macro processor whose interpretation of syntax can be changed while it is in the middle of processing individual commands. Raw TeX is scary to deal with, so people don’t deal with it. Instead, they use its power to write macro packages, abstracting the low level commands into something more palatable (and tractable). The most widely used of these is Leslie Lamport’s LaTeX. LaTeX is at its heart a logical mark up system, documented in an admirably short and lucid book, LaTeX: A Document Preparation System.

But when you want to use LaTeX to do serious work, you need more than this small book. When you want to set complex tables, or handle floating material a certain way, or get your index looking just right, you need the real scoop. And you turn to just one book.

The original LaTeX Companion was one of those books that never got returned to my bookshelf. I used it almost every day for 4 years during the typesetting of five books. Thanks to its wealth of detail, I was able to create press-ready files straight from my computer to the exacting specification of the production departments of three separate printers.

But now, the bible has been retired. Mittlebach and Goossens have produced a second edition of The LaTeX Companion, and it’s better in every possible way. In the ten years since the first was published, a lot has changed, and the book captures it all. New packages, improvements in encodings, font handling, xindy: the book describes it all. My copy arrived a couple of weeks before Mike Clark’s Automation book was due to go to the printers. I devoured it, and immediately used its advice to improve the appearance of ragged-right text, fix up some font issues in the code listings, and improve the handling of included graphics. Since then, it’s been a true companion as I’ve worked with the typesetting of the new edition of Programming Ruby.

I don’t often gush, but if you use LaTeX, or if you’d just like to produce great looking typeset output, you owe it to yourself to get this book.