Zooooom!

[pphaneuf]

On the friday evening, there was some celebrating of blacksquiggles' birthday! There was bowling, blue balls and boobies, all good. We then headed over to iangurudata's bachelor party. He's not really getting married, but he's a bachelor nonetheless! I think we did a rather poor job, but much fun was had anyway!

Saturday, there was wandering about town for a bit with the lady azrhey, and we then went to the lanterns festival at the Botanical Gardens, with sfllaw and a few other people. angorian and Mister D were supposed to join with us, but they couldn't, as they were fighting through traffic. But we thought it'd be a good idea to go to Juliette et Chocolat after that, and they have the same idea at about the same time, so we hooked up with them there anyway! Good coincidence.

Sunday, azrhey gave me tremendous help. After helping clear out my aging and dubious wardrobe, she helped me put together the content of a resume for my job hunting. For some things, I'm very agreeable and easy to work with, but for some other things, I am not. Writing a resume is one of these "other things". Thanks again!

Tonight, after a silly day at work, I went for dinner and a few pints with gregorama and his posse. This was already rather entertaining, and then watched some Kate Beckinsale in tight leather and PVC.

I then headed home and worked on the layout and typography of my resume.

A few questions for the LaTeX hackers in the crowd (and I know there are a few!)... How do you get LaTeX to understand UTF-8? I used to use the inputenc package with the "latin1" option, but that was when I used ISO-8859-1 for my files, and I'm now a UTF-8 man. I'd also like to use a sans serif font (in the style of Verdana), with pdflatex, how would I do that (preferably using one of the standard PDF fonts). I never remember either how to change the font, or what's the PDF/PostScript sans serif font... :-)

Also, anyone know if you can have Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0 under Linux to reload a file? I found that going to another page would seem to do that, but I'd rather have a single key, or preferably, GhostScript-style "watching" the file with automatic reloading.

Comments

[gregorama.livejournal.com]

Kate Beckinsale is yummy!

[phrawzty.livejournal.com]

According to "http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html";
LaTeX has supported (ftp://ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/base/utf8ienc.dtx) UTF-8 in its base package since March 2004 (still experimental). You can simply write \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} and then encode at least some of TeX’s standard character repertoire in UTF-8 in your LaTeX sources. (Before that, UTF-8 was already available in the form of Dominique Unruh’s package, which covered far more characters and was rather resource hungry.)

*cough (http://www.unruh.de/DniQ/latex/unicode/)*

Aussi, peut-être ça va t'aider (http://zoonek.free.fr/LaTeX/FontInstallUnicode/).

[sfllaw.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, the UTF-8 support given by inputenc.sty is only good enough to express the set of characters provided by Latin-*.

You need lambda and omega to typeset real UTF-8.

[phrawzty.livejournal.com]

I wish the universe would hurry up and get with UTF-8 already. It's irritating, for example, to have to use two different iterations of x-chat to talk on IRC; one to speak to my anglo friends who are using Western-8859, and one to chat with my franco friends who are using UTF-8. :/

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

The IRC client in Gaim supports per-server charsets, came in handy. Strangely enough, the French people I chat with still use ISO-8859-1. Having programmed charset converters, I grew to hate silly 8 bit partial charsets, and I just find UTF-8 so damned nifty!

[phrawzty.livejournal.com]

Xhat supports per-server charsets too; the problem is that i don't want to open two iterations of it. I'd really rather just have one running in memory instead of two. It's a minor thing, i guess, but it just underlines my irritation with the state of charset standardisation. :P

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

I only have characters from ISO-8859-1, but my editor and everything else are set to UTF-8, and I don't want to change that. So this should be sufficient.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Oh, merci!

[iangurudata.livejournal.com]

I am hoping that I will see the both of you in exotic garb on Saturday night at onepoint, yes?