Month: July 2009

lyxframeend Undefined when Using Beamer with LyX

I’m using LyX for the first time with Beamer. Making the title page was smooth. But when I tried adding a new frame (using BeginFrame), I was confronted with the following error

 lyxframeend
                 {}lyxframe{Outline}
The control sequence at the end of the top line
of your error message was never def'ed. If you have
misspelled it (e.g., `hobx'), type `I' and the correct
spelling (e.g., `Ihbox'). Otherwise just continue,
and I'll forget about whatever was undefined.

After comparing my document to example (working) Beamer documents, I’ve found out that you must have an EndFrame command after your last frame. Too bad it wasn’t documented anywhere I looked, as this little thing drove me crazy.

Using Amarok Generated Playlists (m3u) on Sansa Clip

A few days ago, for the first time, I created a playlist using Amarok for files on my Sansa Clip player. To my surprise (and disappointment), when I unplugged my Sansa Clip and powered it on, the playlist showed up empty, unlike playlists that originated in Windows. As I keep my music collection organized in Amarok, the situation seemed very uncomfortable.

I’ve decided to compare one of the working playlist files and the “empty” Amarok-generated playlist. Two things were noticeable:

  1. Amarok uses forward slashes, like in a Linux environment, and the working playlist used backward slashes.
  2. The working playlist used relative paths without any prefix, directly beginning with the path. Amarok prefixed the relative paths with a dot-slash (./).

After noticing those things, I modified my Amarok-generated playlist to look like the Windows-generated one, and voila, it worked. I tried going through Amarok’s configuration dialogs to find some option controlling the format of generated m3u playlists, but I couldn’t find any (I’m using Amarok 1.4.10). So with my newly found wits, I’ve looked for a way to make using the playlists easier. I’ve come up with the following one-liner:

find -name "*.m3u" | xargs -I{} sed "s/^.///;s///\\/g" -i'' {}

The command should be run in the MUSIC directory of the Sansa Clip’s filesystem. It recursively looks for m3u playlists and, for each one, strips any leading dot-slash and replaces forward slashes with backward ones. It can be used to easily convert all your playlists to the format understandable by the Sansa Clip.

Emulating Kav-Mafrid (em-dash) for the David Font

The David font that is used in Culmus-LaTeX lacks support for Kav-Mafrid, the ligature that is created by two consecutive dashes, --. Because the regular Hebrew dash, Maqaf, is positioned near the top of the line, one can’t use it instead of the Kav-Mafrid and expect a graphically pleasant result (while Kav-Mafrid can replace Maqaf and the text would still look ok). To make things even more problematic, this ligature is supported by Culmus-LaTeX’s default font, Frank Ruehl, which means one can’t easily switch fonts without hurting the layout.
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