Clustered Bar Graphs in Mac OS X

Nov 30, 2009 Latex, Visualization

I use gnuplot for most of my graphing needs, but using it for complicated bar charts has always been a pain. Fortunately, there is a very handy clustered/stacked bar chart generator which wraps gnuplot in a nice perl script to add some extra features. I’d used it previously under Linux without any problems, but to work on a Mac you need to first setup gnuplot (which can be a pain), plus you need the fig2dev utility to actually produce the final output files. Luckily, I found a copy of it compiled for OS X on the jfig webpage, and although it has a warning from 2006 that it may not work on Intel Macs, it works fine on mine. This will let you make eps/pdf versions of your graphs which will work nicely in latex documents.

Quick Tips: Adding a Fancy Header in Latex

May 16, 2009 Latex

I’ve recently been pumping out a lot of technical report versions of my papers to add to our department’s library. Here is some code I copied from a former student in my lab to produce fancy headers at the top of each page in a latex document.  This would probably work well for adding copyright notifications as well.


\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\pagestyle{fancy}
\fancyhf{}
\fancypagestyle{plain}{% define header for first page of document
\fancyhead[L]{University of XXX, Technical Report 2009-YY}
\fancyhead[R]{\thepage}
}
%Header for remaining pages in document
\fancyhead[L]{University of XXX, Technical Report 2009-YY}
\fancyhead[R]{\thepage}

You can replace the “University of XXX” bit with whatever you want to appear at the top of each page.  The first declaration defines the header for the document’s title page, the second is used for all remaining pages. More details on the fancyhdr package are here.

Quick Tips: Latex QED symbol

May 15, 2009 Latex

Some Latex document styles include a definition for a QED symbol (typically a box), but others do not.  If you are using a style that doesn’t come with one, you can quickly add your own definition of QED, just add:

\newcommand{\qed}{\hfill \mbox{\raggedright \rule{.07in}{.1in}}}

at the start of your document, and then you can use \qed to make the symbol wherever you need.

UMass Thesis Proposal Writing

May 4, 2009 Grad School, Latex

I’ve started writing my Ph.D proposal recently. It’s pretty exciting because it makes me realize that I actually have accomplished quite a bit since coming here–a good thing, since it has been 4 years already!  I also enjoy writing the proposal because you just need to cover the high level purpose of everything and can ignore all the gritty details. I’m pretty happy with the big picture I’m getting so far.

For future reference, you can get the Latex style file and template for the proposal/thesis from this site.

Tags: proposal