Monday, October 04, 2004

The Progress Pen Diary

I love my fountain pen, and I love LaTeX, but I think it's as well that I haven't found a way to combine them...

Day 1:
Just bought a new Progress Pen. Here's what the advertising brochure says:

Congratulations on your purchase of the Millennium Progress Pen. This state-of-the-art fountain pen has a built-in typesetting engine based on the popular and powerful LaTeX program. Bring the typeset beauty of LaTeX to your handwritten documents!

How exciting!

Day 2:
Just booted my new pen. Waited an hour while it dialed up and downloaded all the latest security patches. By that time, I forgot what I was going to write.

Day 3:
I've decided to install Linux on the pen. Hope it goes well.

Day 4:
It didn't go well. Turns out that my pen nib is only supported by an experimental kernel version, and it took some time to cross-compile the kernel on my desktop (I didn't want to install the Pen version of gcc). I'm going to try again this evening.

Day 5:
I wrote Hello World! It took me a while to figure out that I had to specify the document class before I could actually start typing, though. Also, my pen kept complaining about a runaway argument the first time I tried to make my document.

Day 6:
Today, I wrote a Makefile for my pen, so that I don't have to remember as long a sequence of Morse code to be tapped into the button at the top of the barrel in order to get the ink to start flowing.

Day 7:
With the help of The LaTeX companion, I figured out how to adjust the margins when I write lists with my pen. I still haven't figured out how to place figures, though.

Day 8:
I wrote a letter to a friend today. Won't she be surprised at how clear my handwriting has become! I can produce neat documents so much more quickly with my Progress Pen!

  • Currently drinking: Coffee