Hello,

I'm happy to annouce the release of Clon version 1.0 beta 16.
Most notable news for this release is the support for CLISP, which comes at the expense on one dependency (over cffi).

Grab it here.

Hello,

I'm happy to annouce the release of Clon version 1.0 beta 12.
Most notable news for this release is the support for CCL.

Grab it here.

Hello,

I'm happy to announce the first public release of Declt.

Declt (pronounce dec'let) is a reference manual generator for Common Lisp. It extracts and formats documentation from ASDF systems, including the system itself and its components, the packages defined in the system and definitions like constants, special variables, macros, functions, generic functions and methods, conditions, structures and classes.

Reference manuals are generated in Texinfo format which can be subsequently converted into info, HTML, DVI, PostScript or PDF. The generated manuals are fully indexed and provide a complete set of cross-references between documentation elements. For instance, files and packages point to the definitions they provide, and those definitions point back to package and file in which they can be found.


Get it at:
http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier/softwa ... .php#declt


Declt requires SBCL to work (if you're interested in porting it, grep
PORTME in the sources). Also, ASDF 2 has not been tested yet.

I'm uploading a set of changes to the XEmacs 21.5 Mercurial repository right now. These changes implement a new face property named "background-placement" which makes an XEmacs frame "slide" over a face's background pixmap when the property is set to 'absolute.

If you do this on the default face, then you can achieve some sort of pseudo-translucency, for example by using the same (or a darkened version of) the root window's background pixmap.

Here are a couple of screenshots that illustrate this.

 

I'm happy to announce FiXme version 4.0

#### WARNING: this is a major release containing many new features and heavy
#### internals refactoring. FiXme 4.0 comes with unprecedented flexibiity,
#### unrivalled extensibility and unchallenged backward-INcompatibility.


What's new in version 4.0
=========================
* Support for collaborative annotations
suggested by Michael Kubovy
** Support for "targeted" notes and environments
(highlighting a portion of text), suggested by Mark Edgington.
** Support for "floating" notes
(not specific to any portion of text), suggested by Rasmus Villemoes.
** Support for alternate layout autoswitch in TeX's inner mode
suggested by Will Robertson.
** Support for automatic language tracking in multilingual documents
** Support for themes
** Extended support for user-provided layouts
** Support for key=value argument syntax in the whole user interface
** New command \fxsetup
** Homogenize log and console messages
** Heavy internals refactoring


Description
===========
FiXme is a collaborative annotation tool for LaTeX documents. Annotating a
document refers here to inserting meta-notes, that is, notes that do not
belong to the document itself, but rather to its development or reviewing
process. Such notes may involve things of different importance levels, ranging
from simple "fix the spelling" flags to critical "this paragraph is a lie"
mentions. Annotations like this should be visible during the development or
reviewing phase, but should normally disapear in the final version of the
document.

FiXme is designed to ease and automate the process of managing collaborative
annotations, by offering a set of predefined note levels and layouts, the
possibility to register multiple note authors, to reference annotations by
listing and indexing etc. FiXme is extensible, giving you the possibility to
create new layouts or even complete "themes", and also comes with support for
AUC-TeX.

FiXme homepage: http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier/softwa ... .php#fixme

I'm happy to annouce the first public version of the DoX package for LaTeX2e.

The doc package provides LaTeX developers with means to describe the usage and the definition of new macros and environments. However, there is no simple way to extend this functionality to other items (options or counters for instance). The dox package is designed to circumvent this limitation.

Today, I just released :o( Smilisp :o), a new dialect of Lisp featuring a new paradigm called "Emotional Programming". This is truely a revolution in the Lisp world...

The logo is not exactly like that, but my blogging software wants to put smileys everwhere...

Get it here and enjoy !

:-)

For many of my lectures, I use the Listings package for typesetting code excerpts, and include them in Beamer blocks. Providing nice shortcuts for doing that is not trivial if you want to preserve control over Listings options, and add a new one for the block's title. Here is a way to nicely wrap a call to \lstinputlisting inside a Beamer block.

First, let's use the xkeyval package to create a "title" option:

\define@cmdkey[dvl]{lst}[@dvl@lst@]{title}{}

Next, a low-level listing input command. This macro takes 4 arguments: an overlay specification, a title for the block, a list of options passed to Listings, and a file name for input:

%% \dvlinputlisting{overlay}{title}{lstoption=,...}{file}
\newcommand\dvlinputlisting[4]{%
  \begin{block}#1{#2}
    %% #### WARNING: I need this hack because keyval-style options
    %% mess up the parsing.
    \expandafter\lstinputlisting\expandafter[#3]{#4}
  \end{block}}

And now, you can define all sorts of specialized versions for different languages. For example, here is one for Common Lisp code. The block title is "Lisp" by default, and a "lisp" extension is automatically added to the file name:

%% Language-specific shortcuts:
%% The title option is used for the beamer block's title.
%% All other options are passed to listings.
%% \XXXinputlisting<overlay>[title=,lstoption=,...]{file}
\newcommand<>\clinputlisting[2][]{%
  \def\@dvl@lst@title{Lisp}%
  \setkeys*[dvl]{lst}{#1}%
  \edef\@dvl@lst@options{language=lisp,\XKV@rm}%
  \dvlinputlisting{#3}{\@dvl@lst@title}{\@dvl@lst@options}{#2.lisp}}

Which you could call like this:

\clinputlisting<2->[title={Example 1}, gobble=2]{ex1}

As you can see, "title" is an option for the Beamer block, and all the others are dispatched to Listings. Cool.


Now, things are getting more complicated when you want nice shortcuts for inline environments, because nesting Beamer blocks with listings doesn't work. Fortunately, I figured out a trick based on the Verbatim package to simulate that. The idea is to store the contents of the listing environment in a temporary file, and use \lstinputlisting as before to include it. Clever right ?
:-)
Here is a generic environment for doing that. In the opening, we read the environment's contents and store it in the file \jobname.dvl. In the ending, we call our previous macro \dvlinputlisting on that file (actually, on a dynamically created argument list called \@dvl@args:

\usepackage{verbatim}
\newwrite\lstvrb@out
\def\@dvllisting{%
  \begingroup
  \@bsphack
  \immediate\openout\lstvrb@out\jobname.dvl
  \let\do\@makeother\dospecials\catcode`\^^M\active
  \def\verbatim@processline{%
    \immediate\write\lstvrb@out{\the\verbatim@line}}%
  \verbatim@start}
\def\@enddvllisting{%
  \immediate\closeout\lstvrb@out
  \@esphack
  \endgroup
  \expandafter\dvlinputlisting\@dvl@args}

And now, we can define all sorts of specialized versions for every language we're insterested in. Again, here is one for Common Lisp.

\newenvironment<>{cllisting}[1][]{%
  \def\@dvl@lst@title{Lisp}%
  \setkeys*[dvl]{lst}{#1}%
  \edef\@dvl@lst@options{language=lisp,\XKV@rm}%
  \xdef\@dvl@args{{#2}{\@dvl@lst@title}{\@dvl@lst@options}{%
    \jobname.dvl}}
  \@dvllisting}{%
  \@enddvllisting}

Which you can use like this:

\begin{cllinsting}<2->[title={Example 1},gobble=2]
  (defun foo (x) (* 2 x))
\end{cllisting}

Don't forget that frames containing code excerpts like this are fragile!

I'm happy to announce the release of FiNK 2.1.1. This is a bugfix/documentation only release.

FiNK is a LaTeX2e package that keeps track of the files included (\input or \include) in your documents.

What's new in this version:
** Fix trailing whitespace in \fink@restore
** Added some hints about filenames with special characters