On this entry I'll document what I did to generate a genealogy graph. I'm doing this after having done one for the department of pure mathematics in Sheffield whereas what I should have done is started documenting when I started doing that graph. Ah well, better late than never. This is the steps for generating the graph of an Important Mathematician.

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I found that I spent ages deciding exactly which picture to have as my backdrop but then never saw it as there were too many windows on top. However, those windows tended to be Emacs or Xterms and so thanks to this version of Emacs and to Mrxvt I can make both of those transparent.

This is not true transparency but only pseudo-transparency. That is, if there is another window behind the Emacs one then it does not "shine through". I prefer this as my main reason for having transparency is not so that I can see the other windows but so that I can see the background image. There is an experimental line of the XWindow system which does true transparency but it was really slow on my system the last time I tried it.

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Documents produced by LaTeX tend to have a lot of whitespace around them when produced with a "standard" paper size such as A4 or USLetter. When viewing such documents on the screen I tend to zoom in to make the actual text fill the window. When changing the page it is nice if the viewer program displays the next page in the same position as the previous one. With XDvi this is achieved with the resource xdvi.keepPosition (and toggling this feature is usually bound to the key k). GV can also be easily configured to do this. However although XPdf has this feature, it is only enabled when the NumLock is on. Who uses NumLock these days? Not me. This behaviour is coded in so to alter it required altering the source code. Here's how to do it.

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UPDATE 2008/01/14: New version of XPdf out soon