August 15, 2022

Vim: Study on constructing Regular Expressions to delete or reduce blank lines with Global Command

Preface

On the topic of this article you may find interesting the following one: “Vim and Regular Expressions for removing redundant whitespace”.

Unlike the previous article, here the presence of whitespace causes different solutions than blank lines regardless of the number of their occurrences.

The study in this article is focused on both the analysis of “regular expressions” and Vim’s global command.

Vim and the Global Command

The Global Command in Vim is the g key.

August 5, 2022

What is intended by "line" in Vim? How to configure a dual alternate mode of movement between lines?

Why is the Vim line definition “special”?

In Vim a “line” is a set of characters that ends with a return line.

Is that all?

It seems obvious, but how does it differ from the definition of “line” in other writing systems?

Simple: in other environments usually “lines” break at the right margin of the monitor. In Vim they don’t.

Nothing changes for short lines, that is, lines that do not exceed the margin right margin.

July 19, 2022

Vim and Regular Expressions for removing redundant whitespace

Introduction and structure of the article

I wrote this article to practice “in situ” formula construction of Regular Expressions also called RegEx in Vim.

In particular, the goal is to “clean up” documents with excess whitespace at both the beginning and end of each line.

A basic knowledge of Vim and the Regular Expressions built into the editor is sufficient for understanding the article.

The various formulas are applied to whole documents but, since they are very normal search commands in Vim, they can be applied to individual rows or to specific ranges of rows in the context of the document.

July 11, 2022

Jumping between matching pairs of characters and tags in Vim and Emacs

It is very useful to jump through corresponding pairs of characters, such as parentheses or tags, when coding or writing in a markup language such as HTML, Markdown or LaTeX.

Both Vim and Emacs have dedicated commands for this purpose.

To jump between matching pairs using Vim

Vim uses a “single character” command to jump to the nearest pairs of corresponding characters and to place the cursor into the closing one: %.

May 2, 2022

Text documents: from PDF to vector images

Subject of this article

Recently I needed to convert some documents from PDF format, containing text generated by LaTeX in GNU/Linux operating systems, into vector images.

While avoiding conversion from online services, I basically found three interesting solutions: two in command-line mode (pdf2svg and pdftocairo) and one, very famous, in graphical mode (Inkscape).

In this article I report my evaluations highlighting some differences deriving from the source of the PDF documents and the behaviour of three Linux distributions.

April 8, 2022

LaTeX, three packages for one document

The standard version of LaTeX has a “state of the art” typographic quality, suitable for any type of document.

For those who want to try different typographical solutions it is, however, possible to use packages that modify the basic settings.

The result may be more or less preferable to the standard version but it is, however, interesting to make some comparative tests.

In this article I compare the title page of an agreement document in the standard version, in the version named koma-script and in the further version named ArsClassica.