Chapter 19 And the Start of the New School Year · 12:03pm April 10th
Good timezone everyone! Man, am I tired today... It's a good tired, but still tired. I talked for so long. My new school which is the old school I taught at the year before last has a new hire teacher whom I did my best to help on her first day. No classes, so it was straight up a full day of just talking and talking and talking. My voice is exhausted and I am popping cough drops trying to settle it down.
Gonna be busier this year than last year. I'm the "lead ALT" meaning I'm the slightly more in charge, but not really, of the other two teachers I work with from my company. A few more things will fall to me and I'll have to prepare more things, which might affect the speed of my writing. On top of that, I think the school district is looking at its Google Drive access policy and might actually block me from adding my own accounts so I wouldn't be able to write/edit during my free time on my computer! I'd have to either bring a keyboard to use with my phone (which... silly) or just write it in a notebook, which while doable, would be less than ideal because my handwriting is awful. I also have commitment issues and constantly erase words and rewrite them. I'd tear a hole through the page!
Anyway, I'm 787 words into chapter 20 and know where I'm going with it. We'll have to see how the start of the school year shakes out to see what my writing flow will be. It depends on how exhausted I am as the school year gets into gear. I'm just glad that after I got over COVID I got 18 and 19 written pretty quickly so I could take the fic off of hiatus with a bang!
In Electro Swing publishing progress news... UGH... I don't want to watch several hours of LaTeX videos hoping to find the solution to a problem I'm having! I got Texmaker and I got MiKTeX to install LaTeX classes, but Texmaker doesn't seem to see what I put into MiKTeX. It has a whole thing for me to add classes, yet the programs don't seem to even see each other. I... I don't even know how to fix this because the options menu is so obtuse. If anyone knows anything about getting this to work, I am sending up the signal flare.
Blog Update 04/11/24:
Gave up on using LaTeX to help format things. I just don't understand it. It's meant for math anyway and it's unequivocally my worst subject. Wanna know the out-of-universe reason why I didn't add dates to any journal entries in Electro Swing? Because I would've had to do a lot of math. Basic subtraction, sure, but I would've eventually lost track and lost count, I know me. Going back to Scribus and manually doing it all. I at least understand that enough to learn it.
In other, other news... I can't find good artwork of Prim Hemline for blogs.
It's mostly just screenshots and NSFW. Blargh...
See you in the next blog!
- Rego
If Texmaker isn't seeing packages you installed with MiKTeX, you probably have two different MiKTeX/LaTeX installed in your machine.
(I'm surprised the LaTeX engine isn't asking you to install packages, last time I used LaTeX on Windows -- nearly 10 years ago
-- it would detect missing packages and ask for permisson to install if it found them on CTAN -- the largest and de-facto (La)TeX package repository)
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I already uninstalled and reinstalled twice, hoping that'd fix the issue. I think Texmaker prompted me to install something the first time after it wasn't working correctly, which wound up doing its own MiKTeX somewhere that I don't know how to look for. I gave up in frustration and started writing Unchanging Truths again.
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. If you want to use a (La)TeX IDE/editor outside of that, you need to edit the built-in workflows and provide the full path to the (La)TeX compiler(s) you want to use (
MiKTeX should've come with a, for lack of a better word, (La)TeX IDE which is preconfigured out of the box and functional enough
latex.exe,pdflatex.exe,xelatex.exe,lualatex.exe, etc).Otherwise, there’s always Overleaf
And we all appreciate that!
Quick n’ dirty primer for anybody stumbling here
:
TeX is a typesetting system (make pretty printable material) designed in the mid to late 1970s by Donald Knuth (Mathematician who wrote one of the more well-known books on algorithms/Computer Sciences) after he was appalled at the mathematical symbol typesetting of one of his then-new books. This original version is widely considered to be one of the best written programs ever (by amount of bugs). It is for our intents and purposes a markup language (think in the lines of HTML, but completely different
)
LaTeX is a modification/overhaul/superset of TeX meant to be friendlier to us mere mortals, and seemingly what most of us use
.
The point of using either system is to
There are many (La)TeX engines (converting from TeX/LaTex files to a binary); among them:
tex/latex: The original version(s), outputtingdvifiles (dvi comes from Device Vendor Independent, think of it as PDF before PDF existed)pstex/pslatex: Outputs PostScript files (one of the two -- three? -- formats most laser printers understand; PDF is based on PostScript)pdftex/pdflatex: Outputs PDF filesxetex/xelatex: Outputs PDF files; natively supports Unicode (UTF-8) and TTF/OTF fonts natively.luatex/lualatex: Likepdftex/pdflatex, also natively supports Unicode (UTF-8) and scripting in LuaMost people will get (La)TeX from a LaTeX distribution (such as MiKTeX on Windows, texlive on GNU/Linux). MiKTeX in particular has a package manager that lets you install individual packages from a GUI; GNU/Linux distros typically bundle LaTeX packages by category (ie, texlive-sciences , texlive-humanities, etc.)
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I appreciate the feedback. Been wrestling it on and off for two weeks, but I fought the programs for about two hours, watched several videos, went through definitions trying to figure out other definitions, only to wind up with things still not working. So, gave up on LaTeX. Going back to Scribus and using their default 6x9 template and manually typeset it all. It'd probably take me a shorter amount of time to do it manually than learning all of the fundamentals I'd need to grasp before even putting a single word on a page of a LaTeX document.
i.pinimg.com/originals/3e/b5/70/3eb57043cf893767f8a74e21f5651650.gif
Too dumb/impatient to go down a rabbit hole of developing an entirely new programming lexicon.
I feel like I've wasted the effort you put into the reply. I got very close, but things still weren't working or clicking for me. I'm genuinely sorry about that.