This post is rather meant as a memory support for me than to inform anyone else. In this post I plan to maintain a list of packages that I found interesting, useful, remarkable, funny, whatever… but actually have only seldom if ever used and hence have difficulties remembering their existence.
- abraces by Werner Grundlingh — provides a character key-driven interface to supplement new constructions of the traditional [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\overbrace[/cce] and [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\underbrace[/cce] pairs in an asymmetric or arbitrary way.
- changes by Ekkart Kleinod — markup changes of text, such as additions, deletions, or replacements
- cmdtrack by Michael John Downes — The package keeps track of whether a command defined in a document preamble is actually used somewhere in the document. After the package is loaded in the preamble of a document, all [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\newcommand[/cce] (and similar command definitions) between that point and the beginning of the document will be marked for logging. At the end of the document a report of command usage will be printed in the TeX log.
- collect by Jonathan Sauer — Provides a [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]{collect}[/cce] environment, that typesets text and saves it for later re-use. (A variant collects text in a macro.)
- cookingsymbols by Sven Harder — The package provides 11 symbols for typesetting recipes: oven, gasstove, topheat, fanoven, gloves and dish symbol (among others). The symbols are defined using METAFONT.
- coseoul by Michael Teubner — The package provides “relative” commands that may be used in place of [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\chapter[/cce], [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\section[/cce], etc. The documentation shows a number of document-management scenarios in which such commands are valuable.
- csvsimple by Thomas Sturm — The package provides a simple LaTeX interface for the processing of files with comma separated values (CSV); it relies on the key value syntax supported by [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]pgfkeys[/cce] to simplify usage. Filtering and table generation is especially supported; however, this lightweight tool offers no support for data sorting or data base storage.
- cutwin by Peter Wilson — cut windows out of paragraphs, and to typeset text or other material in the window
- dpfloat by Jim Fox — Provides [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]fullpage[/cce] and [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]leftfullpage[/cce] environments, that may be used inside a [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]figure[/cce], [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]table[/cce], or other float environment. If the first of a 2-page spread uses a [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]leftfullpage[/cce] environment, the float will only be typeset on an even-numbered page, and the two floats will appear side-by-side in a two-sided document.
- easylist by Paul Isambert — create lists of numbered items with a single active character as the only command
- engord by Heiko Oberdiek — converts numbers to English ordinal numbers
- excludeonly by Daniel H. Luecking and Donald Arseneau — The package defines an [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\excludeonly[/cce] command, which is (in effect) the opposite of [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\includeonly[/cce]. If both [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\includeonly[/cce] and [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\excludeonly[/cce] exist in a document, only files “allowed” by both will be included.
- extract by Hendri Adriaens — provides the means to extract specific content from a source document and write that to a target document.
- fancypar by Gonzalo Medina — Decorates individual paragraphs of a document, offering five pre-defined styles. The command offers an optional ‘key-value’ argument with the user may define parameters of the selected style.
- floatpag by Vytas Statulevičius — The package provides commands to specify the pagestyle to be used on ‘ordinary’ float pages and rotated float pages (from the rotating package), as well as a command [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\thisfloatpagestyle[/cce] to apply just to the float in which it was issued.
- flowfram by Nicola Talbot — enables you to create frames in a document such that the contents of the document environment flow from one frame to the next in the order in which they were defined. This is useful for creating posters or magazines, indeed any form of document that does not conform to the standard one or two column layout.
- fmtcount by Nicola Talbot — provides commands that display the value of a LaTeX counter in a variety of formats (ordinal, text, hexadecimal, decimal, octal, binary etc)
- grid by River Valley Technologies — The package helps to enable grid typesetting in double column documents. Grid typesetting (vertical aligning of lines of text in adjacent columns) is a difficult task in LaTeX, and the present package is no more than an attempt to help users to achieve it in a limited way.
- gridset by Markus Kohm — Grid setting — also known as strict in-register setting — is something, that should be done for a lot of documents but is not easy using LaTeX. The package helps to get the information needed for grid setting. It does not implement auto grid setting, but there is a command [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\vskipnextgrid[/cce], that moves to the next grid position. This may be enough under some circumstances, but in other circumstances it may fail. Thus gridset is only one more step for grid setting, not a complete solution.
- hobby by Andrew Stacey — defines a path generation function for PGF/TikZ which implements Hobby’s algorithm for a path built out of Bezier curves which passes through a given set of points.
- incgraph by Thomas Sturm — tools for including graphics at the full size of the output medium, or for creating “pages” whose size is that of the graphic they contain.
- lambda-lists by Alan Jeffrey — These list-processing macros avoid the reassignments employed in the macros shown in Appendix D of the TeXbook: all the manipulations take place in what Knuth is pleased to call “TeX’s mouth”.
- logreq by Philipp Lehman — The package will do two things: 1) enable package authors to use LaTeX commands to issue requests, 2) collect all requests from all packages and write them to an external XML file at the end of the document.
- ltxgrid by Arthur Ogawa — Provides commands [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\onecolumngrid[/cce] and [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\twocolumngrid[/cce], that switch to one- or two-column setting, balancing columns on exit from two-column setting. These commands differ from the multicols environment of the multicol package in that they impose no restrictions on the insertion of floats.
- magaz by Donald Arseneau — The current version does special formatting for the first line of text in a paragraph.
- makecell by Olga Lapko — Tabular column heads and multilined cells.
- mleftright by Heiko Oberdiek — The package defines variants [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\mleft[/cce] and [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\mright[/cce] of [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\left[/cce] and [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\right[/cce], that make the delimiters act as [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\mathopen[/cce] and [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\mathclose[/cce]. These commands address spacing difficulties in subformulas.
- nth by Donald Arseneau — The command [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\nth{}[/cce] generates English ordinal numbers of the form 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. LaTeX package options may specify that the ordinal mark be superscripted, and that negative numbers may be treated; Plain TeX users have no access to package options, so need to redefine macros for these changes.
- pagegrid by Heiko Oberdiek — puts a grid on the paper
- parnotes by Michael Hughes — paragraph notes
- placeins by Donald Arseneau — Defines a [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\FloatBarrier[/cce] command, beyond which floats may not pass; useful, for example, to ensure all floats for a section appear before the next [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\section[/cce] command.
- quoting by Thomas Titz — an alternative to the LaTeX standard environments quotation and quote, provides a consolidated environment for displayed text.
- refcount by Heiko Oberdiek — Provides commands [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\setcounterref[/cce] and [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\addtocounterref[/cce] which use the section (or whatever) number from the reference as the value to put into the counter, as in [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]…\label{sec:foo} … \setcounterref{foonum}{sec:foo}[/cce].
- rerunfilecheck by Heiko Oberdiek — The package provides additional rerun warnings if some auxiliary files have changed. It is based on MD5 checksum, provided by pdfTeX.
- schemata by Charles Schaum — facilitates the creation of topical schemata, outlines that use braces (or facsimiles thereof) to illustrate the breakdown of concepts and categories.
- snapshot by Michael J. Downes — The snapshot package helps the owner of a LaTeX document obtain a list of the external dependencies of the document, in a form that can be embedded at the top of the document. It provides a snapshot of the current processing context of the document, insofar as it can be determined from inside LaTeX. If a document contains such a dependency list, then it becomes possible to arrange that the document be processed always with the same versions of everything, in order to ensure the same output.
- spreadtab by Christian Tellechea — The package allows the user to construct tables in a manner similar to a spreadsheet. The cells of a table have row and column indices and these can be used in formulas to generate values in other cells.
- sparklines by Andreas Löffler — Sparklines are intense, simple, wordlike graphics (so named by Edward Tufte). A sparkline can be added using the sparkline environment. Also, you can add sparkling rectangles for the median and special sparkling dots in red or blue. The package requires pdflatex; sparklines cannot appear in a dvi file.
- subdepth by Will Robertson — equalises the height of subscripts in maths. The default behaviour is to place subscripts slightly lower when there is a superscript as well, but this can look odd in some situations.
- texapi by Paul Isambert — utility macros to write format-independent (and -aware) packages. It is similar in spirit to the etoolbox, except that it isn’t tied to LaTeX
- totcount by Vasileios Koutavas — The package records the value that was last set, for any counter of interest; since most such counters are simply incremented when they are changed, the recorded value will usually be the maximum value.
- trimspaces by Will Robertson and Morten Høgholm — allows you to expandably remove spaces around a token list (commands are provided to remove spaces before, spaces after, or both); or to remove surrounding spaces within a macro definition, or to define space-stripped macros.
- tcolorbox by Thomas Sturm — framed boxes with heading line
- truncate by Donald Arseneau — Truncate text to a specified width. The package will by default break at word boundaries, but package options are offered to permit breaks within words.
- wiki by Uwe Lück — wiki markup in LaTeX documents
- xesearch by Paul Isambert — The package finds strings (e.g. (parts of) words or phrases) and manipulates them (apply any macro), thus turning each word or phrase into a possible command.
- xint by Jean-François Burnol — The bundle provides four packages: — xint, which provides expandable TeX macros that implement the basic arithmetic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, as applied to arbitrarily long numbers represented as chains of digits with an optional minus sign; — xintgcd, which provides implementations of the Euclidean algorithm, and of its typesetting; — xintfrac, which computes fractions using xint; — xintseries, which computes partial sums using xint; and — xintcfrac, which deals with the computation of continued fractions.
- xmpincl by Maarten Sneep — The XMP (eXtensible Metadata platform) is a framework to add metadata to digital material to enhance the workflow in publication. The essence is that the metadata is stored in an XML file, and this XML stream is then embedded in the file to which it applies.
- xlop by Jean-Côme Charpentier — typeset arithmetic problems either in-line or “as in school” (using French school conventions)
- yax by Paul Isambert — YaX is advertised as a key system, but it rather organizes attributes in parameters, which parameters can be executed, so that YaX is halfway between key management and macro definition
- zref by Heiko Oberdiek — The package implements an extensible referencing system, where properties may be defined and used in the course of a document. It provides an interface for macro programmers to access the new reference scheme and some modules that use it.
