Terms of Use / Privacy Policy:

By filling out this form, you authorize [spam company], Inc to spread the word about this 100% real and upcomming Messenger Community Site.  You will receive your share of the credit in helping us spread the word.  This is a harmless Community site which is offering users a platform to meet each other for free.

Right, real and “upcomming” Community site, sounds encouraging to me! In fact, they offer to share the credit in spreading the word. What exactly are they they going to share, their revenue? They even state that the site is harmless. I feel safer already.

We do not share your private information with any third parties.  By using our service/website  you hereby fully authorize [spam company], Inc to send messages of a commercial nature via Instant Messages and E-Mails on behalf of third parties via the information you provide us. This is not a "phishing" site that attempts to "trick" you into revealing personal information. Everything we do with your information is disclosed here. If you are under eighteen (18), you MUST obtain permission from a parent or guardian before using our website/service.

Great! They state that they will send “messages of a commercial nature”, ie. SPAM, via IM and E-Mail, on behalf of third parties. The quotes around “phishing” and “trick” definitely make me feel safe. Afterall, the meaning of phishing and trick must be ambiguous, which necessitates the quotes… right?

This page is not affiliated with or operated by Microsoft(tm) or MSN Network(tm).

...

We may temporarily access your MSN account to do a combination of the following:
1.  Send Instant Messages to your friends promoting this site.
2.  Introduce new entertaining sites to your friends via Instant Messages.

Sign me up!

This is a free service. You will not be asked to pay at any time.  You will not be subscribed to anything asking for payment.  This service is made possible by many hours of human effort.

Wow, all these features… for free. Who woulde have thought? A project of such caliber, that was made possible by many hours of human effort, all for free!

Both PDFTeX and XeTeX create a PDF directly from the LaTeX source. XeTeX is built on PDFTeX, and is of particular interest since it has added support for TrueType and OpenType fonts. For beamer presentations, this was great, since it opens up a huge selection of fonts for use in presentations. To change the default font in the document with XeTeX, use the fontspec package. The xunicode package provides additional mapping between LaTeX accents and the selected font. A third package, xltxtra provides some fixes relating to fonts.

\documentclass[xetex,mathserif,serif]{beamer}
 
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{xunicode} %Unicode extras!
\usepackage{xltxtra}  %Fixes
\setmainfont{Calibri}
\setmonofont[Scale=0.86]{Andale Mono}

Of course, you should replace Calibri and Andale Mono with a font of your choice.

Another nice package to use with PDFTeX, is the microtype package, which provides better font output. Enable the package with this line:

\usepackage[final,expansion=true,protrusion=true,spacing=true,kerning=true]{microtype}

XeTeX and PGF / TiKZ

PGF / TiKZ is a TeX library for drawing graphics using the PDFTeX and XeTeX drivers. However, you may encounter the following error message when attempting to compile a presentation with PGF / TiKZ pictures in your Beamer slides:

Package pgf Warning: Your graphic driver pgfsys-dvipdfm.def does not supported marking the current position.

Unfortunately, the included TiKZ library in the TeXLive 2007 distribution does not support XeTeX. This causes cross-picture coordinates to break, which can be used to draw arrows between various TiKZ pictures in a Beamer frame.

While we wait for TeXLive 2008, you can install the new version of PGF from the CTAN which adds support for the XeTeX driver. Simply download the package, and copy the files to your local ~/texmf/tex/ directory and execute texhash to update the TeX listings.

XeTeX and Wide Pages

Although I haven’t had much time to investigate the issue, but it seems that the pgfpages package that is used with beamer, is not entirely compatible with XeTeX. In particular, the commands:

\usepackage{pgfpages}
\setbeameroption{show notes on second screen}        %beamer
\pgfpagesuselayout{two screens with optional second} %pgfpages

is enough to have pdflatex generate notes to the right of the slide, but on xelatex it doesn’t have any effect. This post by Tomáš Janoušek to the XeTeX mailing list noted that the problem was due to a bug in the pgfpages package. Adding the following snippet fixes the probblem:

\renewcommand\pgfsetupphysicalpagesizes{%
    \pdfpagewidth\pgfphysicalwidth\pdfpageheight\pgfphysicalheight%
}

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one weird movie. It’s one of those movies that get you thinking. It’s also one of those movies that doesn’t really make sense until the end. There’s just so much detail packed into it. Definitely recommended if you’re into strange artsy movies with a touch of sci-fi and romance.