Rahul gives unsolicited advice

Last week, I wrote that I'll be giving up to 5% of my annual salary to Free and Open Source Software , and one of the projects that I'm donating to is the TeX Users Group  (TUG). I joined TUG at the "special individual membership" tier at 50 USD  - roughly 5000 INR - per annum. The right thing to do now is to check what they're doing with my money or what they've done with funds/donations in the past. Lemme rewind a little - TUG came into my radar because I came across the TUG 2025 annual conference . I was surprised and saddened to find that it happened in Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram now), Kerala, India because it's an event that we at FOSS United would have loved to support financially. I kept the TUG 2025 tab open for multiple weeks because I wanted to watch a few of the talks . Note to self : Check if anyone from India was a part of the organizing team for TUG 2025, and reach out to them. Maybe we (FOSS United) could support them in future events. ...

So i just installed mathjax and i want to check it out and see if it works $ x^n + x_n = 5 $ and $$ a*b*c = x^a + y^b $$ And it works!  So, MathJax is a java script which can be used to write beautiful equations using TeX on websites. Read this blog post    for the installation process. Apparently there are two ways of going about it.  One is to install MathJax on the server where your website is hosted.  The other, especially in the case of blogs, is to add a certain script to the html template of the blog.  The setup instructions for a blogger site have been mentioned and i'm sure the parallels on WordPress and Tumblr can be figured out without much trouble.  Using this in the coming blogposts should be fun :D 

I've been trying to learn LaTeX for a while now but learning it from scratch without a template is very very hard. Especially for a person who insists on going through atleast a couple of manuals before he goes hands-on (that's me btw).  I've finally been able to get a grip on writing documents in LaTeX because i've been writing something in TeX for a while now. And i know quite a few people who are putting off using LaTeX for the same reason that i did. So, i thought that if i could write a good template which would encompass every basic functionality necessary for a student to write a report, i thought it'd help in getting people to start working on LaTeX.  So, here's what i've been able to come up with in one afternoon...  % each of these can be considered as commands and each command has different outputs depending on  arguments which are given in {}. Look for the different arguments each of these functions have. some have one. quite a few hav...