This is exactly what I wanted to find yesterday. Why didn’t Google find it for me then? I happened across it when looking at this post on side-by-side tables.

Instead of just using \begin{table}[ht] or some such to make the table (or figure) go here or at the top (I read yesterday that it’s a myth that there is any sort of order of preference in this declaration, but I don’t recall where and don’t know if it’s true), you put an exclamation mark in it, thus: \begin{table}[h!t], which apparently makes Latex try harder to put it where you want.

I just found a page by Mark Schenk who first used Latex when writing his MSc dissertation, in much the same way as I did when doing my MA. He wrote everything down on a handy web page, whereas I didn’t. I wish I had, though. Anyway, I was looking for how to flush a load of tables but didn’t find anything even remotely useful. The \clearpage command isn’t what I want but is the nearest I can get. So that bit will be reformatted. Anyway, I came across Mark’s pages on Latex, and discovered that you can make it do subtables. That’s exactly what I need for what I’m doing! I just hope they wrap onto the next page…

I have previously denied being pandamonium with one ‘m’.  This wasn’t me either.

Brandon’s Mind

Damn printers.

James Tauber : More About Twitter

I’ve signed up to Twitter. It’s all James’ fault for posting this post I’m still not convinced by it—what the point of it is. I suppose it’s like James says: it’s like the Facebook status thing. I think this sort of thing would be better if I could text for free from my mobile. As it is, all you’ll see are updates of what I’m doing at my pooter, I suppose. Or what I’m going to be doing when I finally leave my pooter.

Internet Archive

My Colin told me about this website, which is great! I found my old websites, alluded to in the history of my website - they’re truly dreadful, I have to say, but not as bad as the infamous green of the website of the company I used to work at before it was taken over by the Americans.

The point of looking here was actually to find the FGP Wiki website that seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet just because I became interested in Flash game programming. My Colin also told me about FGPWiki, and I had a quick look during the week, thinking I’d look at it properly at the weekend. But come the weekend, and it’s gone! I get the old Server not found message every time I check. What’s happened? Is the world conspiring against me, just because I found something interesting and useful? I could have written the next big Flash game to help some other PhD student procrastinate as much as I do with Desktop Tower Defence!

So anyway, now that I’m able to follow the links on the FGP Wiki (the problem with Google cache is that I’d have to do a Google search for every page I wanted to look at) easily, there should be no stopping me. Except that it’s too late on a Sunday evening to start anything like that now. It’s going to have to wait until next weekend.

I just hope that someone archives the Internet Archive between now and then….

On metadata, indexing, and mucking around with PDFs | Academic Productivity

I was just reading this, and I thought, hang on a minute, I put metadata into my PDFs, but only my name and the title of the document. I use the dreaded LaTeX to create PDFs, and it’s easy enough to fill in the other document properties visible in the File | Properties of Adobe Reader. I did so, but the keywords came out as:

"foo, bar"

including the quotation marks, which wasn’t really what I wanted, or indeed, expected. The way I’d written the value of the pdfkeywords property (I was pleased to note I’d correctly guessed the property name, at least) was:

pdfkeywords={foo, bar}

A quick Google later, and I discovered that if you don’t put the commas in, then you don’t get the quotation marks:

pdfkeywords={foo, bar} gives foo, bar

So what if I want to use a compound that happens to (still) have a space between the two component words? I experimented with putting them in curly brackets, but to no avail. It’s really weird, the way it works.