Not Quite a Blog

I'm done with PowerPoint. It's just stupid.

Instead, I'll do my talks in LaTeX with the beamer presentation class. This allows me to use familiar LaTeX markup and build a PDF slide presentation that I can then use in any PDF viewer with a full-screen slide mode (like Preview.app, Adobe Reader, etc.). For the record, I owe this decision to Philip and Eric.

Ping, in turn, got me into Lucida fonts. I really like the lucimatx package from PCTeX; this package provides a lucida font family that is just gorgeous (here's a recent example: "On the Margin: The effects of introducing or swapping votes on election margins").

Unfortunately, there's a conflict between beamer and lucimatx.¹ beamer loads the amssymb package by default to provide math fonts. In that package \digamma is defined and lucimatx attempts to define \digamma also, resulting in a conflict and the following error:

! LaTeX Error: Command \digamma already defined.
               Or name \end... illegal, see p.192 of the manual.

It's pretty easy to fix this error by redefining the \digamma command before loading lucimatx²:

\let\digamma\relax
\usepackage{lucimatx}

The first line redefines \digamma and the second loads our lucimatx font package. The redefinition uses the TeX command \let to redefine \digamma as the LaTeX command \relax. \relax does nothing, so we're essentially redefining \digamma as nothing, so that lucimatx can do what it wants with it.

With that, it just works.

¹ I found this explanation here.
² I got this idea from this post (in German).