Time for a new blog post?

@Raphink I've got a couple in the pipeline.

@AndrewStacey cool. What are they about?

@Raphink One's an intro to the braids package (following up my own advice that when we get a spin-off package we should blog about it) and the other is about being a first-time CTAN contributor.

I've also been umming and ahhing about writing a post about how to get Maths on the web.

@AndrewStacey is braids your first package?

I've been thinking about making a blog post about how to contribute to CTAN using sty2dtx, ctanify and ctanupload

@Raphink Yes, it is.

@Raphink Potential for a joint post? Would seem a bit daft to have two posts, but I suspect that we have different methods (I'm always wary of using scripts) so a combined post would be more than if just one of us wrote it.

you prefer web interfaces?

@AndrewStacey I'm fine with that, we could each write a part of the blog post.

@AndrewStacey is it possible to write a post together? I don't see that option when I edit a post.

I don't know if it is possible to joint author in WP but there's no reason why we can't collaborate first and then just upload it at the end. I'll send you what I've got so far, if you like. Is email okay?

ah, sure

@AndrewStacey there seems to be a plugin : wordpress.org/extend/plugins/co-authors

but I don't think it's installed on blog.tex.sx

@AndrewStacey got your mail

Morning!

Hello @PauloCereda

@Raphink hi there. :-)

My rep is now a palindromic number, so according to the rules, I can announce it here, yay: 1331

Blog post on braids now up.

@AndrewStacey Very nice! Pardon my ignorance, it's the first time I hear about braids. Where can I use them?

@PauloCereda to do your hair, or your horse's tail

@Raphink LOL

no really

@PauloCereda In that case, maybe you can tell me if my short "explanation" was enough to convey the idea of what they are (I didn't attempt to describe what they are for!).

@AndrewStacey Yes, it was a nice explanation, and I got curious. =)

@AndrewStacey I think I'll make little posts for babyloniannum, fancytabs & fontbook as well, since they were packages that started on TeX.SX

and congrats on your first CTAN contrib by the way @AndrewStacey

I miss my horse.

@AndrewStacey how do you convert your TeX to publish on wordpress?

@Raphink It's a class that I'm developing. It's really for putting articles on the nLab, but since the main difficulty is getting TeX to produce something sensible as text then once I'd gotten a system for one then it wasn't hard to do the other. There's a slightly old version on my homepage at math.ntnu.no/~stacey/HowDidIDoThat/LaTeX/internet.html but as I'm actively using it, I keep encountering new issues and don't update that page very often (at all!).

If you're interested, I could publish the BZR repository.

sure

I'd love to test that

@AndrewStacey does it work with fontspec?

A very appreciative user to @egreg "That's freaking genius! Never thought of that! Thanks!" More enthusiasm, please, you don't seem excited enough. :-)

@AlanMunn Actually the answer was wrong, but now it's correct.

@AlanMunn haha

@AlanMunn good one. =P

@egreg: I got curious about your comment to this question, about "addiction to symbols is dangerous". Is it related to some typographic issue or the semantics itself (maybe both)?

@PauloCereda As a young aspiring mathematician I was fond of symbols and overused them; experience showed me that less symbols and more words may make the exposition clearer. In some papers one can find newly created symbols that are used only a couple of times: these are obvious signs of "symbol addiction".

So, the v1.1 of ctanupload just uploaded itself to CTAN :-)

@MartinScharrer great. Are you making the next blog post about ctanupload?

For example, long descriptions of sets with X={x\in U:...} may almost always be improved by saying the set $X$ consisting of elements $x\in U$ such that ...

@egreg : the \vrule hack ended up working fine yesterday, thank you.

I wonder why ctanify is not in MikTeX or TeXLive. I also use it in combination. Maybe, because it uses quite a bit of Perl modules.

@Raphink It's on my mental ToDo list. I wrote a short manual anyway for it.

@MartinScharrer by the way, I've made my own Makefiles using ctanify and ctanupload if you're interested

@Raphink yes, of course!

github.com/raphink/fancytabs/blob/master/Makefile

slightly adapted from yours

@lockstep: Keep going, then we get a lockstep badge someday.

(Mental note to myself: more edits! Caramdir isn't that far away)

For a mental note, it was quite physical :-)

@Raphink Look good! I was planning to make one like this as well. However, it is difficult to "get it right". Some people like to use latexmk, but it isn't fully suited for packages.

@Raphink I thought the same after I posted it :-D

@MartinScharrer that, or this chat has some kind of telepathy functionalities.

@Raphink: I now think that the VERSION field shouldn't be in the Makefile, because it will change every upload.

@MartinScharrer I totally agree. That said, parsing the dtx is a rather dubious work. There's no real standard for the info fields.

@Raphink Using the interactive prompt it is easy enough to add this data manually.

or using make upload VERSION=v2.0

yes, right, but it'd be ever nicer to get it automagically

could there be a way to call "GetFileInfo" dynamically on the dtx and get the fields?

@egreg I see. This is surely a valuable lesson. =) Thanks for the insight! Sadly, my peers always think I don't use enough formal descriptions (I like to keep things easier to understand, like the set in your example). My math is already confusing, so I need to keep it simple. =P

@Raphink yeah, I was thinking the same. It is of course possible. It would also be good to parse the \changes entries for the announcement text.

yes

is it possible to just do something like latex '\documentclass{ltxdoc}\GetFileInfo{fancytabs.dtx}'?

@Raphink You need to load the package first, otherwise the file info isn't defined.

this doesn't work, but something similar that would just output the variables, which could then be parsed in Perl

@MartinScharrer doesn't \GetFileInfo parse the file?

@Raphink No, AFAIK it reads the data defined by the optional argument of \ProvidesPackage (and friends)

Ah

Because of this you have a \ProvidesFile in the DTX.

I see

@MartinScharrer There we go:

can it really be awarded multiple times?

@PauloCereda Nice! (But "multiple times" is wrong)

@MartinScharrer Then hold on. =P

there!

(Next one on the list: Pokémon badge - Gotta answer 'em all.)

@MartinScharrer what does that do?

@PauloCereda I'd say the pokemon badge is when you've collected all the other badges

@Raphink It writes the version number from the given package (here my "newverbs" package as an example) into a text file which can then be read by ctanupload.

@Raphink Ah, much better! =)

ah, I hadn't seen the dat @MartinScharrer

:)

very nice

Can then be loaded with the '-F package.dat' option.

good idea

@PauloCereda You have #3 in it twice.

@MartinScharrer Oh, hold on².

Again. =)

@Raphink: Re fontspec. What would a latex-to-markup converter do with fontspec? Specifying the font wouldn't make much sense, would it?

@AndrewStacey no it wouldn't. But tex4ht just crashes

so ignoring it would be better already

@Raphink Ah, I see. Actually, it uses fontspec since it turns out to be important to choose a suitable font with all the glyphs in the right places for pdftotext. One thing to note is that this package isn't designed for converting existing documents (though it can do that) but is for writing new documents where it is known all along that it will be converted to, say, Wordpress.

ah

what are the things to keep in mind then?

what will make it unlikely that my existing books could or not be converted?

(eew, that's an ugly sentence I wrote there)

Basically, if you've used something that reasonably only TeX could handle. In particular, anything where knowing exactly what will be produced matters.

@AndrewStacey: I'm writing a paper right now and I'm impressed by the fact that I can actually use braids in some parts.

@PauloCereda to decorate it?

@Raphink That too. ;-)