Automate Document Generation From Latex Part 2

Introduction

In Part 1 we looked at how we could use the Linux make program to automate latex tasks.

In this part of the tutorial we will take a look at the Apache Ant utility to do the same.

There is an in depth manual here about what Ant is and how it works.

So anyway. Ant uses an XML file to describe the tasks it needs to perform. The default name of this file is build.xml.
If you have several project specific properties than you can put them in a file called for example build.propreties and load it in with ant.

Add PL/PGSQL to the PGSQL database

Here is a quick SQL statement to add PL/PGSQL to the available languages.

--
-- Definition for language plpgsql : 
--
CREATE TRUSTED PROCEDURAL LANGUAGE plpgsql
   HANDLER "plpgsql_call_handler"
   VALIDATOR "pg_catalog"."plpgsql_validator";

That’s it :)

String Buffer updated to work with UTF-8 character encoding and source download link

I’ve updated the source for the String_Buffer class, a PHP 5 implementation of the Java StringBuffer.
It now works with UTF-8 encoded strings.

The updated source code can be found here

Automate Document Generation from LATEX files Part 1

Compiling a LATEX document

Every time I wrote a .tex file and wanted to print it I had to compile it rst using LATEX. So I went and wrote this in a terminal on my Linux box.
$ latex something.tex

This is not much if it is a simple file, but what if it gets more complex. Like we want to have a table of contents and include some bibliography references and citations and want to make an index as well. We could just go and write all the commands into the terminal like:
$ latex something.tex
$ bibtex something.tex
$ makeindex something.tex
$ latex something.tex
$ latex something.tex


Fun isn’t it? writing these lines all the time. Well one could write a bash script to automate this, but why not use make for this job? Wouldn’t it be just easier to write
$ make all

and make would create a dvi document from all our LATEX files in the directory? It sure would be nice and elegant.

StringBuffer for PHP

Okay this is not a big thing. I tried to implement the java StringBuffer in PHP5. It is meant to be a proof that it can be done. If anyone needs it feel free to use it.

Freetds and windows :)

Well I was trying to set up freetds to work with PHP5 on my Windwos XP development box with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express.

This is the SQL server I get here at my workplace so I have to work with this.

Changing Authentication mode for SQL Server 2005

If you ever need to change the authentication mode for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 after it was installed and you don’t want to install it then do the following:

Change the registry entry at \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQLServer\

Registry key: LoginMode – REG_DWORD – 0×00000001

So change it to LoginMode – REG_DWORD – 0×00000002

This changes the authentication mode from “Windows authentication” to “Mixed (Windows authentication and SQL server authentication)”