What I learned over the last three days, mostly doing Softcover stuff:

• Don’t put tex into markdown files and then convert it to tex. It is a disaster with so many \^{} and \textbar{} and ***(&@#($8 that you will hate yourself for a little while.
• This occurs when you start with markdown in Softcover and then realize you can just use LaTeX, wonderful LaTeX, or more precisely the PolyTeX that Softcover uses.
• This mistake of putting TeX or LaTeX in markdown files also causes a lot of errors because \[ \] is changed into \[ ], which is not display math anymore.
• There is a lot of power in the Softcover setup. Power comes with pain. I set up some beautiful additions to the formatting of the pdf files, using the tcolorbox package to make pretty example formats. They look great in the pdf output. They don’t appear at all in the html, epub, or mobi output. Still worth it? Yeah…
• Some things are still missing. Wish I could embed interactive graphics. Will think about it.
• Oh. Netstat and sudo. I initially couldn’t even run the Softcover server on my computer. It uses port 4000, and running “softcover server” resulted in an error message saying that the port was in use (see previous post). The classic solution is to use ps aux | grep ruby or ps aux | grep rails to find your zombie ruby/rails processes — but I had none. The next most classic solution is to use netstat to find out what’s on that port: nothing but *.*. I tried lsof to listen. Nothing. WTF? I could start Rails on 3000, Sinatra on 4567, so it wasn’t a problem with either of those. Finally I thought to sudo netstat. Sudo! The magic handshake. Found “terabase” on there. What? NoMachine, something I long ago downloaded for VPN access to the U, was taking up port 4000 secretly. I haven’t used that in years — the math department/U switched to FastX a while back. Mystery solved — removed NoMachine and the Softcover server started like a charm without modifying the port. And I learned about netstat.

Anything else? Infinite matrices are weird. Nilpotent orbits seem useful. Givental is publishing a selection of tapas about quantum K-theory — quite interesting. Time for bed.