Because I’m a classicist by training, I have been wanting to broach the topic of how to typeset Ancient Greek in LaTeX for a long time. So today comes a short post on the topic. There are a number of ways you can approach this but most importantly, you need to decide whether you need just any Greek letters or Ancient Greek letters. Because Ancient Greek has diacritics which aren’t featured in all (“normal”) Greek keyboards. This blogpost covers the three sub-topics I deemed relevant to the question and they are: How do I get my Greek letters in the first place? (related to 1) How/Where do I get a Greek keyboard and which one to choose? How to typeset Greek in LaTeX? How to get your Greek letters If you’re just adding, say a note on the origin of a word to your text, you might not even need to install a Greek keyword at all. When I just
Tutorials
A category so you can have quick access to all my tutorial posts.
Teaching Materials: A German intro class to XPath and XSLT
Since you all probably already know that I’m a bit short on time but trying to keep this blog alive
read more Teaching Materials: A German intro class to XPath and XSLT
The most important tip for confident LaTeX newbies: Don’t reinvent the wheel! (and try a Minimal Working Example instead)
Today I wanted to address a common issue I see in troubleshooting LaTeX errors, on StackOverflow and in personal questions. It usually stems from newbies who aren’t yet aware of all the functionality provided by standard packages and thus, try to reinvent the wheel when something doesn’t work the way they expect. Why reinventing the wheel is a problem In my experience, even from me helping people with packages that I’m not all that familiar with myself, it’s always best not to reinvent the wheel (even if you succeed, the result is likely sub-par unless you’re actually really good at what you’re doing). Ask yourself if the functionality you want is something that’s likely to be a common problem. Then maybe somebody has already solved it in a comprehensive way! That’s what packages are for and that’s why they’re (hopefully) maintained by people who have given the problem at hand a good bit of thought. It is very likely that
Amateurishly beautifying event photographs
Do people think that you, as a DH person, are also responsible for your project’s outreach activities yet nobody considers
An amateurish but functional tutorial to make (logo) vector graphics from photos
Do you need to make a vector logo for your project but have no idea how? Do you want to
read more An amateurish but functional tutorial to make (logo) vector graphics from photos
Create your Tweepy/AWS-powered Twitter bot in a day
This post wants to convince you to try out creating a Twitter bot using Python Tweepy and AmazonAWS Lambda because it’s easy and fun. Of course, you can use any other utilities but Tweepy and AWS Lambda are the ones I tried. This is not a full tutorial but I can make one if anyone is interested. Inspired by the #100DaysofDH challenge In this post, I will just give you some basic Twitter knowledge, links for what you need to know to get it done and a link to the github of my #100DaysofDH challenge for which I implemented such a bot. If you want more guidance, please let me know. Also, read the post on the challenge because I noted down some restrictions I realized the Twitter automation guidelines impose on bots as I went along. In my example, I think I’m in fact doing one or two things which you actually shouldn’t do (I think bots shouldn’t like
read more Create your Tweepy/AWS-powered Twitter bot in a day
Your first time tweaking a .cls file on the example of creating switchable colour themes
Today at 14:45, I would have given a talk at the 2020 DANTE spring conference in Lübeck which had to
read more Your first time tweaking a .cls file on the example of creating switchable colour themes
Teaching Materials: Intro to basic NLP in CLTK for Classicists
Dear people, today I wanted to point you to a new github repository where I started to share some of
read more Teaching Materials: Intro to basic NLP in CLTK for Classicists
Strategically Using Search-And-Replace for LaTeX documents. Part I
In an earlier post, we talked about the perks of using search and replace wisely on XML documents. Here I want to argue that search and replace might be even more powerful when used in LaTeX. The power of search and replace Imagine your thesis advisor decides last minute that they don’t like the way images are typeset in your thesis. It happens. We are speaking from our friend the Noob’s experience here. So imagine your advisor decides the images in your archaeological catalogue are too small, at the very last minute. In Microsoft Word, problem No. 1 you would have already encountered before now is that the document probably wouldn’t even open anymore (what with 200 pages full of images etc.). The second problem would be that you’d have to change each image size by hand, clicking and dragging around, cleaning up after the horrible mess and destruction your changes are leaving behind. In LaTeX, thanks goodness we
read more Strategically Using Search-And-Replace for LaTeX documents. Part I
An easy intro to 3D models from Structure from Motion (SFM, photogrammetry)
Using photogrammetry to obtain 3D models has become one of those ‘hot topics’ lately. For that reason, I wanted to
read more An easy intro to 3D models from Structure from Motion (SFM, photogrammetry)
Automating XML annotation: Get more done using RegEx Search&Replace and xsl:analyze-string
Annotation is a fundamental part of the DH. But often, us DH people don’t actually do the annotation. We do
read more Automating XML annotation: Get more done using RegEx Search&Replace and xsl:analyze-string
How to historical text recognition: A Transkribus Quickstart Guide
Today I wanted to share a little quickstart tutorial for the Transkribus Software. Its purpose is Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR)
read more How to historical text recognition: A Transkribus Quickstart Guide
Algorithms, Variables, Debugging? Intro to Programming Concepts
Since I am about to prepare a workshop on natural language processing and a pre-workshop-workshop where I need to quickly/crashcourse introduce my (non-digital) Classicist friends to some basics on programming, let me share a list of programming concepts I compiled with you. I would be happy for your suggestions and comments regarding mistakes. I will probably publish this together with some key concepts of quantitative text analysis (blogpost to come) on a cheatsheet or as slides for you later 😉 Intro to key concepts of programming This list of concepts is not super-structured and meant to work as a ‘reference tool’ as well as a text to be read, so I tried to give it a more or less useful ‘chronology’, meaning that later parts kind of build on earlier ones. I start off with what a computer program or algorithm actually is and how we translate between source code (the code we write) and the code which gets fed
read more Algorithms, Variables, Debugging? Intro to Programming Concepts
Cheat Sheets and Study Summaries
This is a quite long post about cheatsheets and also about effective studying. When you need a cheatsheet, chances are
Typesetting Code in LaTeX
Since I recently pulled a few all-nighters to prepare code slides to teach my students R and they were less
Two basic image manipulation life-savers
In this post, I wanted to share a few tricks for simple image manipulation (with the goal of making pictures
Hipster CV – A Template
Dear all, sorry you haven’t been hearing from me so much lately. It’s been quite busy. To make it up
Simple XML to LaTeX Transformation Tutorial
Today, I wanted to share this super simple XML to LaTeX tutorial. Using XSLT, you are going to transform XML data to LaTeX output which you can then go on to compile into your desired output PDF. There will be no fancy stuff whatsoever in this post, just the basics and what to keep in mind with these transformations. It is the quick intro to XML to LaTeX I did with my students a while ago which was done one day after they had their first contact with XSLT, so it should really be beginner-friendly. I labeled it “Advanced LaTeX” anyway because I think starting to automate things is always a step in the right direction 😉 Edit March 2022: Sadly, with WordPress changes (and source code support never working all that well to begin with), the code formatting of this post is pretty broken. Since it tends to re-break soon after I fix it, here is a similar /
A Humanities’ seminar paper with LaTeX – in 10 minutes
Don’t believe me when I claim you could write a whole seminar paper in 10 minutes? I wouldn’t either 😉
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The power of simplicity, or: How to use tutorials
This is just a quick post, telling you to use tutorials selectively. If you don’t have time, don’t burden yourself with the not-so-short intro to LaTeX or 30 min introductions. Jumpstart in 3 minutes and go. This morning, I realized one thing: depending on what you want to do with LaTeX, you only need a very limited amount of commands. Even I use a very limited amout of commands for everyday tasks. Going through a whole tutorial might actually be a waste of time for you. You only need 3-5 go-to commands What you always need (and, for example, an Overleaf blank document already supplies): You will typically need the general document setup (minimal example), \newpage, \maketitle, \tableofcontents, and \sections and \emph{}. For teaching documents, I will additionally need \textbf{boldface}, enumerate and itemize environments. Then maybe \href{http://latex-ninja.com}{links} (\usepackage{hyperref}), \texttt{typeface} for code or the verbatim environment. And, of course, I often use my cheatsheet template. For writing scientific articles, I
LaTeX Ninja'ing and the Digital Humanities 