PGF and TikZ

I guess I'm just completely out of touch, but there's an excellent package that allows you to draw sophisticated graphics within LaTeX (using a graphics programming language) I hadn't heard of till recently.

It's called PGF, and the component you use in your LaTeX/TeX source code is called TikZ. You enter simple LaTeX-style commands to tell it what to draw, in an environment right in your (La)TeX code, and it does the job for you. The excellent user manual can be found here, including instructions for installing and a tutorial. (If you're a Ubuntu user, of course, there's already a package you can install with a few clicks.) Great examples can be found here. Wow! What a package.

Whizzytex on Ubuntu 7.10

Whizzytex is a pretty nifty application that updates a compiled TeX pane in real-time as you type into emacs. Under Ubuntu 7.10 it comes as a package in the repositories.

With my installation (on a Thinkpad t61) I've had an annoying problem: every few seconds, emacs will freeze completely for a 1-5 seconds (presumably doing a slice compilation or some such thing for whizzytex). This can happen right in the middle of a yank, and it can happen ten times a minute.

Here's my solution, though I can't explain why it works: put the line

(setq whizzy-load-factor 10)

in your .emacs file. The problem still occurs but very occasionally (once in 5-6 minutes, which I can live with). Whizzy is a lot more responsive now as well.

There is one downside: this really increases processor usage. My laptop runs hot and the battery doesn't last long when I have the load factor set high this way.