pdfLaTeX and a0poster

Just a quick note to record something I just found out, while planning my first poster ever. Of course the first choice, as always when doing layout, is to see, whether it could be done with LaTeX. I just hate the idea of using some WYSIWYG horror, where everything will be inconsistent anyway, no matter how hard you try to Set Things Right.

The natural choice for a poster seems to be the a0poster class, which is designed to set LaTeX properly up for making these huge pages, especially regarding the font and paper sizes. To my surprise, the paper size did not work with pdfLaTeX, but the result was big text on an A4. From some source (lost the site already) I found out, that supposedly the path LaTeX -> PS -> PDF should work, but I’d rather not go there, things are complicated enough when forced to work with XP.

Luckily, the use of geometry package saved me: just include geometry at the beginning of your document with the option a0paper, and the resulting document is A0. Voilà!

XMonad and Gnome

This has nothing to do with the theme of the blog, but I just happened to find a wonderful window manager for my laptop. I’m generally using Gnome, since I like the looks, but I’ve never really liked Metacity, the default window manager in Gnome. On the other hand, I’ve lately been studying Haskell, a functional computing language. A wonderfully weird experience.

There just happens to be this new window manager written completely in Haskell, XMonad, which is a so-called tiling window manager — no empty spaces on your screen any more. I just had to try it, and believe me, it is very nice to use indeed. I wanted to integrate is with my Gnome system, and the panels especially, but that was not so easy. First I had to get very recent versions of XMonad — happily there are Debian packages, but not on the official repo — and then I had to figure out, how to configure XMonad so, that it

1. ignores the gnome panels on my screen;
2. Leaves empty space for the panels.

The instructions on the XMonad site were for the old versions and did not really completely work. The installation goes according to the instructions on that page, but what the page lacks is a complete, working example of the configuration. Here’s one:

You’ll have to create the file
~/.xmonad/xmonad.hs
where to put your configuration. A sample content for this file:

import XMonad

main = xmonad $ defaultConfig
       { defaultGaps = [(24,24,0,0)],
         manageHook = composeAll
                      [ className =? "MPlayer" --> doFloat
                      , className =? "Gimp" --> doFloat
                      , resource =? "gnome-panel" --> doIgnore ]
       }

That gives you an empty space of 24 pixels at the top and bottom of the screen, and ignores gnome-panel. In addition, it lets Gimp and MPlayer float above other windows. Some fiddling with the session setup (see the link to the instructions) and this file in place, everything works fine, at least with XMonad 0.6. I haven’t tried the 0.5 series, so I cannot say, whether this works with them, and the versions before 0.5 use adifferent kind of a configuration scheme, so this does not work for those.

Update on 2008/05/01:

There is a page in the HaskellWiki on XMonad and Gnome, which contains all the information on this page plus much more. Go there!