Long ago I wrote a free Perl program, chex_latex.pl, to look for various problems in LaTeX .tex files. I’ve used it in writing Real-Time Rendering and in editing Ray Tracing Gems, among other works. One of my two known users, Mark Kilgard, suggested I add the ACM’s accepted LaTeX packages list to the program so that it’d check these, too. A little vibe-coding with Cursor and that feature’s now in. Enjoy!

Also, if you’re reading this post, lucky you! There’s some weird stupidity going on, some site(s) is downloading large files, like the free books we host, again and again and again, about every two minutes. Which causes the web host to throttle things and hand out “429 too many requests” errors like Halloween candy. Advice welcome! (Support so far has been not so great.) In the short term, if you run into this, hit F5 (reload page) like crazy and you should eventually, maybe, see the page.

I3D 2026 is announced. It will be at the Lucasfilm campus in the Presidio, San Francisco, which I’m happy to see. I was setting things up for it to be there in 2020, then Covid hit. It’s a wonderful location, and a great little conference. Everyone in the room is someone you want to talk with.