Typing Special Characters on a MAC
Written on February 19, 2006 – 9:06 pm | by ash.matadeen |There are two ways you can key in special characters on your mac.
1. Use the Character Palette
2. Use the Keyboard Viewer
| Posted in » The # (hash/pound) Key on Apple Keyboards
Written on February 19, 2006 – 9:03 pm | by ash.matadeen |Where is the ‘#’ key on a mac keyboard?
The ‘#’ key which usually appears in the corner between the ‘enter’ and right ’shift’ keys on the typical UK keyboards is absent on apple keyboards. So, how do you key in the ‘#’ key if you are using a mac?
LATEXiT + Pages
Written on February 13, 2006 – 5:10 pm | by james.lawton |
As we saw in a previous post, LATEXiT can be used to place professionally typesetted equations in Apple’s Keynote. In fact, LATEXiT has an even better integration with Apple’s Pages word processing application. Continue reading for a demonstration of what you can do with LATEXiT and Pages…
Keynote Secrets: Pt 2, LATEX+Keynote
Written on January 13, 2006 – 5:20 pm | by james.lawton |
As promised, here is the second installment of our Keynote Secrets post from a few days ago! This post will deal with Keynotes ability to work natively with PDF files.
PDF Handling in Keynote
The second feature of Keynote is its ability to accept PDF documents when placed on a slide (PowerPoint first converts the PDF to an image file resulting in a major loss in quality). This is particularly useful if you have LATEX installed when combined with a freeware program called LATEXiT. As illustrated on the LATEXiT homepage, you can quickly typeset equations and then drag-and-drop them in PDF form on a slide. Part of the beauty of this is that the resulting equation can be scaled to huge proportions, rotated and have shadow applied from within Keynote and still maintain excellent image quality. The image below of a Keynote slide illustrates this (click for a larger version).
Furthermore, if you have a PDF document from which you wish to display a particular part, you can open the PDF in Preview.app and use the copy selection tool and paste into Keynote. Again, the beauty here is that you can scale the PDF snippet and zoom in on the interesting parts without losing image quality!
Keep a look out for our next LATEX (on OSX) related post, we shall expand upon the use of the freeware application LATEXiT and the other Apple iWork application, Pages…
Keynote Secrets: Pt 1, Keynote+Quartz
Written on January 6, 2006 – 4:45 pm | by james.lawton |
For Mac owners the choice of presentation software generally comes down to either Microsoft’s PowerPoint or Apple’s Keynote. Without getting into an in-depth comparison of the two, I would just like to highlight two features unique to Keynote which are not widely known but can greatly increase the quality of a presentation and make it look more prefessional.
Calibrate your Mac’s display
Written on November 25, 2005 – 7:36 pm | by james.lawton |
Whether you have a Mac or a PC then you will most likely benefit from calibrating your screen. For the Mac, you can use software such as SuperCal. You will only need to spend about 10 minutes with the software and follow the simple on-screen instructions and the software will create a new display profile for you. The display will then be calibrated personally for yourself and how you perceive different colours etc.
If you are unsure about the change, you can go to System Preferences>Displays and select the color tab. Here you can compare the profile you have just made to the predefined ones that come with your Mac and view the changes instantly. After making a new profile my 12″ powerbook screen seems less washed out and has richer colours!
SuperCal can be used for free but it is shareware and so you are encouraged to buy a license for $19 if you find it useful.