Getting the total number of pages into a counter

This is the only way i know of, to get the total number of pages for anything other than mere display. Took me two hours to get just right and requires two packages. There is a surprising lot of packages that do similar things but in the end all just print. Weird. Enjoy

\documentclass{article}
\newcounter{c@LastPage}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{atveryend}
\begin{document}
a %\lipsum
%\lipsum
\makeatletter
\AfterLastShipout{\immediate\write\@auxout{\string\setcounter{\string c@LastPage} {\thepage}}}
\ifnum\value{c@LastPage}>2 foo \fi
\makeatother
\end{document}

"The save failed due to out of memory or disk space".

I had a friend come over with her new Mac because when writing a thesis Word (2007?) claimed "The save failed due to out of memory or disk space". Given that the disk had more space left over than mine ever had (>200Gb), something else had to be wrong. Different Volumes didn't do the trick, permissions were ok, the folder wasn't dangling.

Turns out she used a feature from the equation editor that was incompatible with the .doc format and would have needed to save as .docx. Way to go Microsoft - I hereby proclaim you most useless and moronic error message producer of this month.

Wrap list around a figure

I often had a need for a way to wrap a list around a figure in the past and hadn't quite found out. Wrapfig and floatflt aren't compatible with lists and break the layout in very bad ways.

Approaches with 2 minipages or tabulars are just wrong, period. There is a new package called cutwin, that you can combine with parshape (or use it without) to coerce your text to do something similar to what ultimately wrapfig should do. I didn't get it to work properly with my ams doc, which is kind of sad. I get the feeling their way of building lists is incompatible with the rest of the latex world :/.

Then i found a solution in some mean way to use minipage. It was still wrong because the type area is so different with ams but after a bit of fiddling with my stuff this works:

\begin{enumerate} 

\item some text

% Rest of old \item

\par

% New \item starts here!

\noindent\begin{minipage}{.88\textwidth}
 \begin{wrapfigure}{r}{.3\textwidth}
   \centering
     \includegraphics[width=.29\textwidth]{pic}
  \end{wrapfigure}
\item[ad d)]
\end{minipage}
\end{enumerate}

Looks really wrong, but does the right thing. Hope this helps someone. I sure would have liked to find this.

A Proof list enumerated by Arrows

Up until recently i used

\begin{enumerate} 
  \item[``$\RightArrow$"] 
  \item[``$\LeftArrow$"] 
\end{enumerate}

or description instead of enumerate which looks even worse. Both don't exactly look right, are cumbersome to type and threw warnings about missing fonts, because latex tried to set the math in bold, so today i sat down and wrote the solution:  

\def\ProofDirection#1{\expandafter\@ProofDirection\csname c@#1\endcsname}
\def\@ProofDirection#1{\ensuremath{\ifcase#1\or\Leftarrow\or\Rightarrow \else\@ctrerr\fi}}
\def\RevProofDirection#1{\expandafter\@RevProofDirection\csname c@#1\endcsname}
\def\@RevProofDirection#1{\ifcase#1\or {$\Rightarrow$}\or {$\Leftarrow$}\else\@ctrerr\fi}

\newcounter{pcounter} 

\newenvironment{myprooflist}[1][]{% 
  

\ifx\relax#1\relax
        \let\@show@count\ProofDirection
     \else
        \let\@show@count\RevProofDirection
     \fi
  \begin{list}{\hss\llap{\textup{``\@show@count{pcounter}''}}}{\usecounter{pcounter}}
  }{
  \end{list}
}

Not only does it work and is cooler, it looks better and is less work to type. Nice!