Interactively setting a variable

Add similar lines before \documentclass

\typeout{Please enter a value for var}
\typein{\var}{var=}

Including pages from other PDF documents

\usepackage{pdfpages}
........
\begin{document}
\includepdfset{pages=-}
\includepdf{cv.pdf}
\includepdf{pubication1.pdf}
\includepdf{pubication2.pdf}

pdfpages provides lot of flexibility with selective
inclusion of pages, landscape mode, etc.

Adding directories to package search path
(from Paul Jolly)

% The trailing colon indicates the standard search
% path should be appended to the user specified
% TEXINPUT variable

% Paths are ':' separated
export TEXINPUTS=".:~/path/to/add:"
export TEXINPUTS=".:~/path/to/add:/second/path/to/add:"

% Trailing '/' for directories is optional
export TEXINPUTS=".:~/path/to/add/:"

% double trailing slash indicates this directory is
% to be search recursively
export TEXINPUTS=".:~/path/to/add//:"

Input files with relative path

\input and \include are well known commands for
preparing larger documents from smaller files. However, if
these smaller sections of text are organized within a
directory with its own \input, \include,
\includegrapics, etc., \input won’t work. For such
cases, LaTeX package import can help.

\usepackage{import}
\import*{/play/act1/}{act.tex}

On encountering \input{scene1.tex} in act.tex, LaTeX
will now search for scene1.tex in /play/act1/ in addition to
the local directory

Embedding fonts

Give -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress option to ps2pdf and
verify final output with pdffonts

In my case, gnuplot was the culprit that was not
embedding the fonts in figures. A more effective but
time-consuming way of correcting it is to specify tex
font file to gnuplot as specified
here
or in more details here

Editing textarea with your favorite editor

Very often one would prefer to write in a text area on the web using
ones favorite editor. For example, if you use Gmail you might like to have
the power of vim or emacs while composing mails. You can do that with
It’s All Text that displays an edit button that pops up your
favorite editor.

• Getting it to work with cygwin and vim
  Create a file gvim.bat (in notepad) with the following text

  @echo off
  C:\cygwin\bin\run.exe -p /usr/X11R6/bin gvim -display
  127.0.0.1:0.0 %*
  

  set editor to C:\path_to_gvim.bat

Quickly accessing commonly used bookmarks

Use keyword bookmarking. Access any bookmark’s property ( Ctrl+Shift+B
and then the bookmark you are interested in or right click toolbar
bookmarks and then Properties) and set keyword for any character or
sequence of characters. Now you can access this bookmark by pressing
Alt+D or Ctrl+L (to jump to the address bar) character [Enter].
Further customization with string substitution is possible. However,
using keyword with bookmarklet is still an issue.
More Information

In order to replace a text in a set of files

:args <list of files>
:argdo %s/search/replace/ |w

Adding simple syntax highlighting on the fly

Using the syntax command, syntax rules can be added to vim
to improve readability of the file. While there are many
options available (see :h syntax), I found the syntax
region option fit for my use. Say we want to turn every
line starting with ** into a different color. We can do
that using command

:syntax region Nontext start="^\*\*" end="$"

The above command says that any line starting with **
should be displayed in the color pattern as defined by the
group-name Nontext. A syntax region description like
above needs to specify a start pattern (a regex) and an
end pattern (another regex). In the example above the
start pattern is ^**, i.e., any line starting with **
and the end pattern is $, i.e., end of line. (since *
needs to be escaped in vim, a regex ^** becomes ^\*\*
in the above example). Vim has some standard color names
define that can be used to define the appearance of
selected region. Try :hi to list all the group-name and
how they would look on the current terminal. This example
uses on of the standard group-name define as Nontext.

Recently, I had to submit some reviews and I choose to
submit it using a text file (reviews.txt) provided to
me. The file has a large number of section in the
following format:

@paper: xyz
@type: paper
\*\* SOME TITLE:
@T1
<replace with one or more lines of review text>
@@
\*\* SOME TITLE:
@T2
<replace with one or more lines of review text>
@@

In order to quickly identify places that I need to add
text, I added the following lines to a file (hi.vim)

syntax region Nontext start="^\*\*" end="$"
syntax region Question start="^@" end="$"
syntax region Diffchange start="^-" end="$"

and edited by file by opening it as

gvim -S hi.vim review.txt

Try it and the usefulness of these line will be apparent.

Avoid typing long svn commands by defining appropriate function in your
.bashrc

export SVN_PATH="svn+ssh://path_to_svn/trunk"
function sl () { svn ls ${SVN_PATH:?"SVN_PATH is not unset
or empty"}/${1:?"Insufficient arguments"}}

You can now list trunk/projects as

sl projects

Using CDPATH can save a lot of keystrokes. CDPATH is to cd what
PATH is to command completion. For example,

export CDPATH=.:/home/joe/projects:

will allow you to cd into a directory /home/joe/projects/wordpress from
any directory using

cd wordpress

$'STRING' can help you print anything you wish. In STRING escape
' by \'

$> echo $'foo\'bar'
foo'bar

Check variables as

${VAR_NAME?"VAR_NAME is not defined"}
${VAR_NAME:?"VAR_NAME is not defined or empty"}

bash_completion allows you to go beyond command completion to listing
options available for the command. For example, on the latest version of
unbuntu (8.04) add source /etc/bash_completion to your .bashrc. If
subversion is installed on your machine then $> svn <tab> will
list all possible options in svn as:

add        co         -h         log        pedit      proplist   rm
annotate   commit     help       ls         pget       propset    status
blame      copy       --help     merge      plist      pset       switch
cat        cp         import     mkdir      praise     remove     unlock
checkout   delete     info       move       propdel    rename     update
ci         diff       list       mv         propedit   resolved   --version
cleanup    export     lock       pdel       propget    revert

It supports many other commands. It’s auto-completion of
directories on a remote server for scp is really useful.

Prevent annoying ssh disconnection by

alias ssh='ssh -o TCPKeepAlive=no -o ServerAliveInterval=15
-o ServerAliveCountMax=10'

Alternatively, you can set these options in your ssh_config ($>
locate ssh_config) file. You can also try

alias ssh='ssh -o TCPKeepAlive=yes

But it didn’t work for me. For further information and for putty
settings see

http://drupal.star.bnl.gov/STAR/comp/sofi/facility-access/ssh-stable-con

Bash has some lesser know command that provides exactly what you might
sometimes be looking for. A quick read of info coreutils is recommended.
Few such commands are

• pr can help you paginate or columnate text. For example,

  pr -2 <filename>
  

  will generate a two column output of the text with page boundaries
  delimited with page headers and footers

• paste to concatenate files vertically

• tac to concatenate files in reverse order.

  tac <filename>
  

  to print file <filename> in reverse order

• Get a quick directory overview to a depth of <n>

  tree -L <n> <dir_name>
  

Video Lectures
Thanks Abhishek

Research Channel
Thanks Nilesh

Parc Talks