TeXtalk - Interviews

Paulo Cereda

1:09 AM

@lockstep: we'd like to interview you too. :) When you have time, let us know. :)

lockstep

10:08 AM

@PauloCereda E.g., now. :-)

Paulo Cereda

@lockstep Ah great! :)

Could you tell us a bit about you?

lockstep

I've studied urban planning and am working as a zoning official in the Vienna city administration. My hobbies are biking, singing, tarock (an Austrian card game), and, obviously, (La)TeX.

Paulo Cereda

How was your first contact to TeX, LaTeX and friends?

(@Joseph: feel free to ask questions too. :) )

lockstep

In 1995, I wrote my master thesis with Word, which did horrible things to my headers and footers. Many years later, I decided that I needed something better for my (still to be written) Ph.D. thesis. I started to experiment with LaTeX in January 2008 and to delve into biblatex internals in the summer of that year.

Joseph Wright

@lockstep You seem to be the biblatex expert on TeX.sx. Do you have much to do with the development side of that project?

lockstep

10:21 AM

In 2009, I bought the "classic" LaTeX books (Mittelbach/Goossens, Kopka/Daly), and finally also the TeXbook.

Starting in 2009, I have made several bug reports and feature requests for biblatex -- e.g., the several backrefstyles are based on one of my requests. I had also hacked together a personal authoryear-icomp style, which made it into v0.9 of the core package.

authoryear-icomp-tt was also the reason that I joined my first LaTeX forum (mrunix.de), because I noticed that a forum member was looking for the very biblatex style I had created.

Paulo Cereda

As Joseph mentioned, you are the biblatex expert and the one-man tagging machine on TeX.sx. How did you become aware of this community? :)

lockstep

10:36 AM

I occasionally peruse comp.text.tex via Google (I do not participate, though). There was a post about a proposed stackexchange group dealing with TeX, and (half a year later or so) another post that the private beta had started. I decided to give tex.sx a try -- it was already in public beta then. The rest is history. ;-)

Joseph Wright

@lockstep You do a lot of tagging: what approach do you take to find material in need of attention, and what for you makes a good tag?

lockstep

I wasn't active on meta at first, and so the "big" decisions (e.g., concept tags instead of command name tags) were already made when I seriously started retagging. The "practical" part seemed to be somewhat in disarray, though -- e.g., what is sectioning today was divided into sections and headings then, with no discernible difference between the two tags.

A good tag a) should have an easily comprehensible meaning b) should be helpful in locating existing answers and avoiding duplicates.

That's for "new" users of tex.sx; for "power" users a tag should c) be helpful in notifying questions which one might like to answer.

Paulo Cereda

(Friends, I have another mass to play. I'll be back in an hour or so. Here's one question.) The idxlayout package saved me a lot of times. Could you tell us a bit about your first package?

lockstep

10:54 AM

When trying to typeset indexes, I soon noticed that the positioning of the sectioning heading was wrong (LaTeX bug 3126 in action). Mittelbach/Goosens gives the advice to use multicol to define a customized theindex environment. I wrote a small package for private use that also worked with KOMA-scripts index features. When a user on mrunix.de lamented about his wrongly positioned index heading, I decided to write something more general and put it on CTAN -- that was at the start of 2010.

Later, it turned out that my idxlayout package, which is partially a recoding exercise of KOMA-scripts and memoirs index environments, also solved issues with regard to the exact positioning of hyperlinks -- I got some unforseen praise from Geoffrey Jones, one of tex.sxs early high-rep users.

N3buchadnezzar

hi =)

lockstep

@N3buchadnezzar Hello!

N3buchadnezzar

11:16 AM

I must just say that all of you are doing an amazing job on this site. It is just mindboogling. As a soon to be mathteacher the help I am getting here is enourmus, and it seems as the more i learn about latex. The more questions arise ^^
The only downside is that i wish there were more sites like this. I know there are other SE sites, but there is still not enough!. Even for schoolsubjects it great.

Although latex is somewhat amazing, I still feel it has some quite big drawbacks... To be able to track all the different packages, and what they do. Be able to deal with all the packages confl…

lockstep

I should add that idylayout today is partially superseded by @egreg's imakeidx which makes use of the \write18 facility. And if you want \write18 plus runin-typesetting of index items and affiliated subitems, use imakeidx plus idxlayout.

Joseph Wright

@N3buchadnezzar All good points, but probably better in the general chat room :-)

N3buchadnezzar

Sorrry =)

Joseph Wright

@N3buchadnezzar No problem: it happens to us all!

Paulo Cereda

1:00 PM

(I'm back)

@lockstep: Our community is very friendly. How do you feel about TeX.sx? :)

lockstep

It's addictive, isn't it? ;-) Seriously, the stackexchange model has turned out to be very appropriate for questions/answers about (La)TeX -- fast response times, less duplicates than in traditional forums, and a "reward" system that attracts expert users.

Paulo Cereda

:-)

How do you see another year for TeX.sx? Top voter, top editor, top tarock player? :)

lockstep

1:17 PM

Top voter -- likely; top editor -- for sure; top tarock player -- there other Austrians at tex.sx, and who knows how good they are with respect to card gaming. :-)

Paulo Cereda

You need to teach me. I only know how to play truco. :)

lockstep

With regard to tex.sx in general, I'm hoping to see more "consolidated reference" questions/answers.

One has to walk a fine line between being too specific and answering too many questions at once, but I still think that tex.sx would profit from "consolidated" Q/A's.

Paulo Cereda

Ready for LaTeX3? :)

lockstep

Excited. I'm especially hoping for/looking forward to grid typesetting.

At the moment, there are partial solutions/workarounds, but several consecutive sectioning headings in larger-than-normal fontsize will destroy a grid almost for sure.

Paulo Cereda

1:35 PM

What do you recommend for a newbie eager to learn TeX, LaTeX and friends? :)

lockstep

Read "LaTeX Beginner's Guide" by Stefan Kottwitz (hello, @StefanKottwitz) -- this book features a well-considered selection of what new users need/don't need to know about LaTeX. If you speak German, also read "Wissenschaftliche Arbeiten schreiben mit LaTeX" by Joachim Schlosser.

BTW, Joachim Schlosser decided to include a chapter about biblatex in the 4th edition of his book, and more focus on biblatex is my "top request" for a 2nd edition of Stefan's book.

Paulo Cereda

Ah how nice!

I'm out of questions. :P

Thanks for your time! Tausend Dank! :)

lockstep

1:50 PM

You're welcome -- gern geschehen!

Paulo Cereda

;-)

Friends, don't forget do ask lockstep too! :)

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$TeX - LaTeX$ TeXtalk - Interviews