LaTeX

I had a little problem with the tocvsec2 solution to the contents' depth as presented in the previous story - the hyperref pdf bookmarks that I set up to show up when opening the pdf file appeared to use the last \settocdepth setting as it's guide, not the individual parts. Of course I wanted that it would at least show the subsections for everything, if not for those parts that also showed in the contents pages. After some trying I solved it by putting \settocdepth{subsection} after the last \section{} in the last appendix. Putting it at the end of the file didn't work - there had to be some text after the \settocdepth command (and \newpage and \vspace{} didn't cut it either).

I noticed today I had a contents four pages long. Too much, obviously. You can set the general depth of the contents listing using
\setcounter{tocdepth}{n} where n is the level, starting with 0 (chapters only)
However, this can only be done in the preamble (i.e. before \begin{document}) and goes for the whole document. I wanted to have the level up to subsection for the normal chapters but I wanted the appendixes listed only as chapters, so no sections.

I found the package tocvsec2 which allows you to change the depth level in different parts of the document. You can set the level up to sections in one part:

I did not have to look far to find a spell checker to use on LaTeX files, ispell -t filenamex.tex works fine, though it doesn't skip all things non-text, such as bibtex keys, but those are easily skipped.

I chose british english for now, might ask around and go for american if this is more appropriate.

I had a little trouble when I turned a bunch of urls in a table in my thesis into \url{http://...} url's, which are then clickable urls in PDF files. Because of the \url command, the font changed into the standard typewriter format. Though I don't mind this for the occasional url (it makes them better identfiable as urls), in this case, my nicely fitted table didn't fit the page anymore because the font was too big.

I searched around a while to find the \urlstyle{} command, for example in this pdf but it took me a little while before I got it. I finally defined a command "urlwofont" (url without font) that makes anything liek \urlwofont{http:///} a clickable url but without a font change - the font stays the same as the rest of the text:

I will quote myself on IRC at work to illustrate this week's events surrounding my thesis:

Monday, 11 Jul 2005:
15:52 < Kira> maar ik heb helaas geen tijd om me nog in LaTeX te verdiepen om het allemaal daar in te doen

Loosely translated: But unfortunately I don't have time to delve into LaTeX in order to do it (my Thesis) all in there.

Guess what? I was wrong

Monday afternoon I wasn't going to, Tuesday afternoon I had my Thesis all in LaTeX including contents, bibliography and pdf bookmarks, and today I'm continuing to customize it with growing enthousiasm and ready to lay the final hand on it contents-wise.