goodmami.org

I’ve been in the habit of using LaTeX’s CJK environment across a whole document to allow me to insert, for example, Japanese anywhere I like. However, if you want to have more than one language (not covered by the same font) in the same document (such as both traditional and simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean, etc), prepare for trouble. You cannot have one CJK environment for the whole document unless you get a font that can handle all the code points (like this elusive, half-free Cyberbit font that seems to be a pain to install).

I found, however, that there is another (and perhaps the intended) way to do it! You can create a command for each individual CJK environment you will need, and use them as needed. For example:


\newcommand{\zht}[1]{\begin{CJK}{UTF8}{bsmi}#1\end{CJK}}
\newcommand{\zhs}[1]{\begin{CJK}{UTF8}{gbsn}#1\end{CJK}}
\newcommand{\zh}[4]{\zht{#1}/\zhs{#2} (\emph{#3}) “#4”}


The \zht command is for traditional chinese characters, the \zhs is for simplified, and the \zh uses both (eg to define a word using both variants in hanzi, a transliteration, and a gloss). For example,
\zh{藝術}{艺术}{\yi4 \shu4}{art}
will produce
藝術/艺术 (yì shù) “art”
This works great, except that you have to use one of these tags every time you want to switch to a different character set.

NB: When using this method the very first line is not displayed. I got around this by having a dummy line near the top of the document. For example:
\zht{} % Dummy environment to get around display bug.
\zht{藝術} % Now this will be displayed.

What started as an attempt to make a desktop application for CEDICT turned into an ambitious attempt to create an omniformat dictionary database and interface. glot aims to be both a backend for managing and querying dictionaries of any (electronic) format–even those over network protocols like DICT–and also an intelligent interface for querying a massive amount of data.

Goals of the project include:

• allowing plugins for import and export formats and display settings
• allowing users to query not just by word, but also by source and target languages, dictionary, and more
• running glot as a desktop application, command-line application, or web server

These goals are far-reaching, but likely attainable.

The project is currently run by me and my good friend Mike. We’ve just started, so there isn’t much to show yet, but we’ll be developing along the “release early, release often” mantra, so features will be added incrementally.

CairoPlot is a Python module that uses the Cairo graphics package to produce great-looking charts easily. The results look really nice and are much simpler to create than many other packages, but up until now it has been suboptimal for use with LaTeX documents. I’ve been talking with the package maintainer and filing bugs about these inadequacies, and my concerns were quickly addressed. See the CairoPlot Launchpad page to view the bugs filed against it.

I also recently found a blog post about embedding python in LaTeX files. Using this with CairoPlot, it is easy to put the chart-producing code directly in my .tex files and compile. This reduces the extra step of making separate python scripts to produce these charts. Here is some sample code from a paper I’m currently writing:

\begin{python}
import cairoplot
cairoplot.vertical_bar_plot(
'dat/initial-grammar-stats.ps',
[ [0.87, 0.82], [0.83, 0.50], [0.70, 0.11] ],
340, 280, background = None, border = 10, grid = True,
x_labels = ['Parses', 'Generates', 'Generates Original'],
y_labels = ['%d%%' % i for i in range(0,110,10)],
y_bounds = (0,1) )
print(r’\includegraphics{dat/initial-grammar-stats.ps}’)
\end{python}

I do have some gripes about python.sty, though. I have to remember to use the latex command with the “–shell-escape” option. Also, it produces files for the python code, stderr and stdout output, and I don’t particularly care for the directory getting cluttered up with temporary files. Because of these annoyances, I might forgo the python.sty method and just keep a python script that generates all the charts.

Orange, red, and yellow maple leaves fallen to the stone walkway at a temple in Fukuoka

Homepage of Michael Wayne Goodman, computational linguist at the University of Washington.