One of my larger projects is the Celsius Library System, which manages electronic documents like pdf-files of scientific papers and keeps the associated references in order. It is specifically adjusted to the needs of a theoretical high-energy physicist, but it can easily be adapted to anybody else’s needs. Originally, Celsius was designed to allow for easy offline-browsing of papers and lecture notes I downloaded. Nowadays, one has internet access pretty much everywhere, but I still find this software very useful, as it allows me to group papers into categories and search only the subset of papers which I downloaded at one point. Celsius is completely free and open source, and an android version to use with tablets exists.

When polishing the draft of a paper, you often perform mechanical checks that are the same every time: is the punctuation in all equations correct, have I avoided common typos like “… the the …”, are the bibliography entries homogeneous, etc. These tasks should really be automated. I’ve used a ruby script configured by regular expressions for a while, but I always wanted to have an editor hightlighting potentially problematic parts of the LaTeX source. As a small holiday project, I wrote a first such editor in JAVA, and the result is the open source program Polisher.

Creating an index by adding index-tags in a tex-file can be a rather cumbersome task. Therefore I wrote the indicate-tool, a JAVA program that will go through all the tex-files in a certain directory and add index-tags for a predefined list of words. It also provides some more advanced features, which are explained in the enclosed documentation.

The largest project I’ve been involved with is certainly Craftree, a forum and resource websites for various crafts with a focus on tatting. This page is written in ruby on rails.