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Links

This—rather long—page is a collection of the links that I find useful. But not all links are very useful, admittedly, hence the page's length… However, I tried to organise the links so that the important ones came first in each category and when I could not come up with a sensible organisation, I provided short descriptions, which should help you to sort out in which links you may have some interest.

Search engines

How could one live without Google, nowadays?

• Google (French, British, Spanish).
• Google groups.
• Google Fight.

News

Remark: If you are tired of the many Flash advertisements that appear in these web sites, and if you are using Firefox, be aware of the extension called Flashblock, which can help you to get rid of this kind of annoyance. (Is there anything on earth as molesting as Flash? Wherefore has this thing been ever invented?)

• BBC news [in English].
• Libération, Le Monde, Courrier international [in French].
• El País [in Spanish].
• Cotidianul [missing diacritics!], Jurnalul Național, Dilema veche [in Romanian].
• Welt [in German].

TeX and LaTeX

You don't know what is LaTeX? You can read the introduction on the LaTeX Project site or Wikipedia's page. If you want to purchase books, I strongly recommend The LaTeX Companion published by Addison-Wesley (make sure it is the second edition). Check this entry of the English FAQ for more information. For French readers, LaTeX—Apprentissage, guide et référence by Bernard Desgraupes as well as LaTeX par la pratique by Christian Rolland are quite popular and known to be good. (I've personally only read Rolland's book, as for Desgraupes's, it is only from hearsay.) They both begin to age, though; in comparison, The LaTeX Companion is much more complete and up to date, although less understandable to the beginner. My advise would be—if you can afford it—to buy one these two obsolescent books in addition to the LaTeX companion. Indeed, LaTeX itself doesn't change so quickly, it is LaTeX's many packages which are evolving very fast. So, as far as LaTeX is concerned, you can still safely rely upon Rolland's and Desgraupes's books but switch to the The LaTeX Companion whenever you need up-to-date details about a package.

Official sites

• LaTeX Project home page.
• CTAN—Comprehensive TeX Archive Network, the repository of almost all TeX-related material.
• The Catalogue online indexes a great number of packages by category.
• pdfTeX.
• LuaTeX.

User groups

• TUG, the user group of the USA.
• UK TUG, the user group of the UK.
• GUTenberg, the French user group.
• Dante, the German user group.
• CervanTeX, the Spanish user group.
• Other user groups throughout the world.

Finding the answer

• Google groups which allows you to search the answer to your question through Usenet. To limit your research to, say, comp.text.tex, include group:comp.text.tex in your request, you will get much more relevant answers.
• The English FAQ provides the most up-to-date answers to the most common questions. The FAQ is searchable.
• The French FAQ can be useful to the French. (Ultimately, this FAQ hasn't been actively developed and is currently only available as a massive PDF file.) The old French FAQ can sometimes provide good advices but it is completely frozen and quite out of date.
• The German FAQ if you are familiar with Goethe's tongue.
• The Help on LaTeX which can be found throughout the internet by Googling Help on LaTeX.
• The GUT mailing list [in French].

Posting on Usenet or on a mailing list

• Please, respect the netiquette: Netiquette Guidelines or Wikipedia's page.
• Quote sensibly the message you're answering and, in particular, avoid top-posting. Here is an excerpt of the netiquette in this respect:

  If you are sending a reply to a message or a posting be sure you summarize the original at the top of the message, or include just enough text of the original to give a context.

• Provide a minimal, working example: see the English FAQ and a even more detailed page. (On fr.comp.text.tex and the GUT mailing list, minimal working example is often referred to as ECM, which stands for exemple complet et minimal.) Don't believe that making a minimal working example requires an expert's skills: that's easy, all you need is common sense and a little patience.

Other sites of (potential) interest

• A portal devoted to fonts on TUG. It gives many interesting links and if you are wondering which fonts you would like to use for your dissertation, there are font samplers listed therein. Most notably the Survey of Free Math Fonts and the Font Catalogue, which allows you to find out which fonts are available (you may have to install them, though) to LaTeX. As far as I can see, at writing time [14th May 2007], this site is kept up to date as the fonts of the Greek Font Society, which have been added quite recently, appear in the list.
• Thomas van Oudenhoven compiles the pearls of the Newsgroup fr.comp.text.tex in a fortune file. A few examples follow…
  • Mon frère est un abruti, il ne travaille pas en LaTeX mais je l'aime bien quand même.
  • Ah oui, t'as raison c'est bizarre de pas prendre son TeXbook au lit.
  • Bawler, bawler, o homo ignorante. Das ist tout de même incredible que le Giovanni Como no puede correctement sprechen le volapük moderno.
  • — Et la police est super laide... :|
    — C'est Times.
• Nicolas Markey has a page devoted to LaTeX and BibTeX. Particularly useful is his documentation on BibTeX: Tame the Beast, which is also available in French, though not maintained anymore.
• The list of primitives of TeX by David Bausum.
• Xindy is a programme that allows to produce indices, in particular for LaTeX. It is much more powerful than the good old MakeIndex. One feature is missing, in my opinion: it would be desirable to have the possibility of using a string location class that would be sorted alphabetically (using, presumably, the same algorithm as which serves to sort the entries).
• Bibulus was supposed to be a replacement of BibTeX but unfortunately its development seems to be stopped—this link is merely included for completeness's sake. (Remember that there exist an extended version of BibTeX called BibTeX 8, which is able to deal with accentuated letters [though its expertise is limited to 8-bit characters; note that, as a consequence, the UTF-8 encoding is not supported].)

Bibliography

• The LaTeX companion, second edition [in English].
• Le LaTeX companion, second edition, French translation of the previous one.
• LaTeX par la pratique [in French].
• LaTeX—Apprentissage, guide et référence [in French].
• The TeXbook [in English].

Science

• Pubmed, the NCBI and its FTP site. The sequenced genomes are available in the genome subdirectory.
• The KEGG web site providing, among others, a detailed description of the metabolic pathways. The FTP site is freely accessible for academic staff.
• Scholar Google, which allows to import the articles' details in BibTeX's format (go into the Preferences menu).
• The BioCyc Database collection (with an intensively curated database metabolic pathways: MetaCyc).
• The Open Proteomics Database.

Here are some other interesting links that I often find useful, though there aren't really connected to my speciality.

• Maths: Eric Weisstein's Math world.

Languages

I really, really like languages and it is a great disappointment not to be able to speak all of them; not to be as good at speaking a language as what one would wish; or to learn them so slowly and to forget them so quickly… During my high school, I learned German, English, Italian and Latin, which, apart from English, I all forgot because of the lack of practice. Meanwhile, I've learned Spanish, and now I (try to) learn Romanian, my girlfriend's vernacular. I whish I had some basics in Ancient Greek, but this is, to date, completely unrealisable.

The following links usually help me to find the answers to my questions regarding vocabulary, idioms, etc. Although I really prefer to use paper dictionaries—the bigger, the better—, I cannot carry my dictionaries with me all the time… It is my tragedy.

General

• The Language Portal of Wikipedia.
• One Look.
• The Gutenberg Project whose mission is to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks.
• A similar project is called Online Literature.
• The Lexilogos web site, chiefly in French: mots et merveilles des langues d'ici et d'ailleurs. It gathers many links related to many languages.

English

• The Free Dictionary's Idioms and phrases page.
• The Oxford Dictionaries online (features the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, the Concise Dictionary of First Names and the Little Oxford Dictionary of Quotations).
• The Cambridge Dictionaries online (features the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, which is a little bit less complete that the Compact Oxford Dictionary online but includes the pronunciation written in the Internation Phonetic Alphabet).
• The Merriam-Webster Dictionary (features a dictionary and a thesaurus) [American English].
• An Online Etymology Dictionary.
• Answers.com which is where Google gets its definitions.
• The Phrase Finder.
• More words.
• The Concise Encyclopædia Britannica online (Encyclopædia, dictionary and thesaurus).
• A French-English dictionary.
• The five hundred most common words in English at World English, the 100 most often misspelled words and the 100 most often mispronounced words on Your Dictionary.
• Miscellaneous articles found on Wikipedia: about the Genitive case, about the indifinite articles A and an, about the Phonological history of English consonants (see also the page Some English accent phenomena), the IPA chart for English.

French

• The Académie française, which is the authoritative institution in France regarding all aspects of the French tongue. Practically, its dictionary—eighth edition, the ninth being in preparation—is not very useful and I am not happy with all their revisions and recommendations regarding spelling (why on earth should one write ambigüe?).
• Gallica, the digital library of the BNF.
• The CNRTL—Centre national de ressources textuelles et lexicales—with an interesting lexical portal.
• The Littré dictionary online (learn more about Émile Littré from Wikipedia—here is the French version).
• The Trésor de la langue française.
• The CRISCO in collaboration with the ISC have provided valuable dictionaries:
  • A French synonym dictionary;
  • An English synonym dictionary;
  • A French-English dictionary.
• I found an interesting page, written by Robert Ferréol, that explains the origin of a few French idioms.
• The Oulipo's web site (see Queneau's La Cimaise et la fraction).
• The Expressio web site.

Spanish

• The Real Academia Española provides two excellent dictionaries:
  • The Diccionario de la lengua española,
  • The Diccionario Panhispanico de Dudas.
  Find out what is the RAE from Wikipedia. Here is the site of the Asociación de academias de la lengua española. I must say that the cristicism as to the alleged slowness of the Academia to integrate changes into its dictionary is not well-grounded: contrarily to the Académie française's, its dictionary is usable, complete and modern.

Other

• A Dictionary of Romanian [in Romanian].
• Translate from and to Romanian.
• A Latin grammar, [in French].
• A Latin grammar, [in English].

Typography

• The French mailing list typographie and its web site which includes a FAQ.
• Garamonpatrimoine.
• The Petites Leçons de typographie by Jacques André [PDF, in French].
• The site Planet Typography comes with many links (there is a French version Planète typographie).
• A site dedicated to Orthotypography [in French].

Software

I use my computer a lot, both for professional and personal purposes. Ninety-nine percent of the time, or more, with Linux. The following links reflect my usage of Linux: mostly for programming.

Programming

• For LaTeX see the LaTeX section, above.
• Emacs: Official page (don't miss the guided tour if you're new to Emacs).
• Mathematica
  • Have a quick access to the documentation of Mathematica's functions (version 5);
  • The Information center;
  • Mathematica Users.
• C and C++:
  • Documentation of GNU standard library;
  • The Wikibook Programmation C;
  • Bjarne Stroustrup's page on C++.
• Subversion, also known as SVN, is a version control system—just as CVS, but with many improvements.
  • The reference is the SVN book (don't forget the FAQ).
  • Nagel's book.
• (X)HTML, CSS, CGI. (Actually (X)HTML should not be listed in the Programming Section, but it is more convenient.)
  • The World Wide Web Security FAQ;
  • Perl CGI Progamming.
• The Perl programming language is an ugly language… but I use it all the time. The repository of Perl's modules is called CPAN—Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, original, is it not?
• The Python programming language offers the same facilities as Perl, except that it has a stricter and more rational syntax, which makes it befitting large projects. There's a Python Wiki.
• Shell scripting.
• The R Project for Statistical Computing. (See also the links therein.) There exists an interesting interface to R for Emacs ESS—Emacs speaks Statistics…
• Literate programming.
  • WEB, CWEB, NOWEB.
  • Skeletons for LaTeX's DTX and INS files [on CTAN].

Image processing

• Gimp is GNU's image processing software (Gimp stands for GNU Image Manipulation Programme). It is free—as in free-dom. There is a few tutorials on the official web site that describe how to achieve common tasks as, for instance, blending exposures.

Transports, maps

• Find your way thanks to Map 24.
• The RATP site to travel through Paris.
• Google maps.
• UK's National Railway web site.
• Flights:
  • Easyjet,
  • BMI Baby,
  • Expedia [UK],
  • Opodo [UK],
  • Air France [UK, France].
• This site computes the distance between the French cities. (For instance, the distance Paris–Montpellier is 597 km. Learn more about orthodromie on Wikipedia [in French].)

Humour

• The Black Knight featuring Darth Vador on YouTube.

Miscellaneous

• Wikipedia (English, French, Spanish).
• The Concise Encyclopædia Britannica online (Encyclopædia, dictionary and thesaurus).
• How stuff works.
• BBC Weather.
• The Unicode Home Page.
• Unicode's character codes of the International Phonetic Alphabet on Wikipedia .
• Currency Converter.

© Josselin Noirel 2007 — Last modified: 2007/6/3