TeX, LaTeX and Friends

Paulo Cereda

12:05 AM

@egreg Oopsie, I'm sorry. :) I'll remember next time. :)

egreg

@PauloCereda When's the wedding?

Paulo Cereda

@egreg She left as soon as I started talking to her. Apparently she was going to Rio de Janeiro. :(

egreg

@PauloCereda Probably she was an Emacs user. :P

Paulo Cereda

@egreg Romeo Vim and Juliet Emacs?

:)

Mark Richman

Hello everyone!

Paulo Cereda

12:13 AM

@MarkRichman Aloha!

Mark Richman

anyone know if there is a stackexchange site for authors?

nm found it! writers.stackexchange.com

Alan Munn

1:16 AM

If phishers knew English better, they might be more successful. No, my dears, there's no such thing as "Support Apple" because English compound words don't work that way.

Paulo Cereda

8:49 AM

@egreg: 1000th day? :)

egreg

4

Paulo Cereda

@egreg woohoo! Congrats! :)

egreg

@PauloCereda I like the most the equality. :)

Paulo Cereda

@egreg :)

Johannes_B

@egreg Wow, i just earned a badge for 30 consecutive days. But 1000? Astonishing. Thanks for all your work here.

Paulo Cereda

8:55 AM

visited: 1003 days, 969 consecutive

:(

egreg

@PauloCereda Celebrations for you have been differed to your 1000th consecutive day. :P

Paulo Cereda

@egreg :)

egreg

@Johannes_B That's quite a long time indeed. ;-)

Paulo Cereda

9:49 AM

I want chocolate.

A lot.

Please.

:)

Stephan Lehmke

@PauloCereda At least you're supposedly on the right continent for this :-)

Paulo Cereda

@StephanLehmke :)

@Stephan: one of the Simpsons episodes once told me Germany is the land of the chocolate. :)

Stephan Lehmke

Though I have to say christmas time leads to almost a chocolate overload hereabouts (depending on personal physique of course).

Paulo Cereda

@StephanLehmke ooh!

Stephan Lehmke

@PauloCereda The best chocolate is supposed to come from Switzerland, so near miss :-)

Paulo Cereda

9:59 AM

@StephanLehmke oh! :)

Stephan Lehmke

There seems to be a bit of chocolate mania here: You can get chocolate in a lot of different qualities at the supermarket (up to 99% cocoa).

egreg

@StephanLehmke There's a shop that sells this in the train station; an almost mandatory stop for me.

Stephan Lehmke

This "chocolate fountain" is in the chocolate museum in cologne, right at the river rhine:

Paulo Cereda

@StephanLehmke Chocolate museum?! Oh my!

Must... go... to... Germany!

Stephan Lehmke

@PauloCereda Not small either:

Paulo Cereda

10:15 AM

@StephanLehmke Das Chocolateland!

:)

Stephan Lehmke

@PauloCereda Yes in the US this would probably be an amusement park with rides etc. :-)

It's actually rather boring, especially with kids. Well, you can't expect much more than this in Germany :-)

Lotsa info, of course. Who would want anything else?

Paulo Cereda

@StephanLehmke Free chocolate. :)

Stephan Lehmke

Ok, that's included (from the fountain).

Paulo Cereda

@StephanLehmke :)

topskip

My personal image in the doesn't have the cool sunglasses :(

(oh, yes, it does)

Paulo Cereda

10:34 AM

@topskip Super Patrick! :)

Paulo Cereda

11:15 AM

Duck time.

N3buchadnezzar

11:50 AM

How did one add files in the preamble again ? For answering questions and providing a complete MWE for example,

topskip

@N3buchadnezzar \begin{filecontents}...\end{filecontents}?

N3buchadnezzar

Yeah =)

N3buchadnezzar

12:14 PM

I had some problems with csQuotes and \citep, sigh frustrating.

Paulo Cereda

@topskip: where do I sign for the top secret speedata file hosting project? :)

topskip

@PauloCereda you should fill out the form at my new website: nsa.gov

Paulo Cereda

@topskip LOL

They already have my backup. Oh wait.

tohecz

I hope this doesn't sound too bad:

$\scaleleftright{(}{\tilde b+1}{)}\scaleleftright{(}{a_j-1}{)}$ will very likely give a very confusing result. There is a good reason why math axis exists, it's not something Knuth implemented while being on LSD. — tohecz 1 min ago

Paulo Cereda

1:12 PM

►

Do normal people hack their own tablets when they are bored?

David Carlisle

2:03 PM

@tohecz not as bad as this (from bbc):

The margins of Australia's victories tell a tale of utter woe for England. They have won by 381 runs in Brisbane, 218 in Adelaide and now 150 in Perth. Not a single match has even been close. Expect some serious soul-searching in the England camp, where the spotlight will fall on the futures of several key players

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Yup

@DavidCarlisle More a question of who has performed than who hasn't

Paulo Cereda

2:18 PM

@DavidCarlisle Oh no!

This hat thing is too silly.

Alan Munn

5

18th C Talmud, presumably not done with TeX.

tohecz

2:39 PM

@DavidCarlisle well, I'm not sure I get it: does it mean that England lost several times in a row?

Paulo Cereda

@AlanMunn ooh a maze! :)

tohecz

@egreg You've got a good data roaming, right? :D

@PauloCereda a ~~hedge~~ -maze made of little ~~hedge-mazes~~ Hebrew letters :)

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz :)

topskip

2:52 PM

@AlanMunn Don't be so sure about that, they had TeX looong time ago:

Stephan Lehmke

@PauloCereda Envy speaking.

Paulo Cereda

@StephanLehmke Hey! I got a menorah-like hat! I can't handle! :D

Greetings!

We can say with great certainty the Fedora Project is pleased to announce the release of Fedora 20 ("Heisenbug"), which coincides with the 10th anniversary of the creation of the Fedora Project.

woohoo!

@NicolaTalbot: Fedora 20 released now! :)

David Carlisle

@tohecz yes, the England team is in Australia over the winter and playing a series of 5 test matches (each 5 days) three have been played so far and we are three down, unlike golf or snooker though you don't give up: in cricket, you play on for the chance to be humiliated twice more in the coming weeks:-)

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Hey!

tohecz

3:20 PM

@DavidCarlisle in snooker you don't give up either. There were numerous matches going from 1-9 to 10-9 :D

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda We've never opted in for a reason

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright At first I thought I could get a nice hat, but only silly ones. :)

David Carlisle

3:40 PM

@tohecz yes but if you are in a "best of 19" match and are 10-0 up, you don't play the remaining 9 frames, just to give the paying public something to watch:-)

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle oh yeah, that's true :D

@DavidCarlisle however, e.g. in Davis Cup or Fed Cup you do that ;)

Paulo Cereda

4:06 PM

0

Q: How to include price in bibliography?

I have added a price attribute to my bibliography as such: @book{1578203120, Author = {Janice Reynolds}, Title = {The Complete E-Commerce Book: Design, Build \& Maintain a Successful Web-based Business}, Publisher = {CRC Press}, Year = {2004}, ISBN = {1578203120}, URL = {http://www.a...

I know you have to have a valuable set of references in your papers, but this...

Joseph Wright

4:24 PM

@tohecz Varies: rules complex!

Nicola Talbot

4:35 PM

@PauloCereda Yay!

@PauloCereda I was hoping they'd have a fedora :-)

Paulo Cereda

@NicolaTalbot Me too. :)

Joseph Wright

Hat business is daft

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright ooh I learned a new word! :)

Nicola Talbot

@PauloCereda I think I'd just look silly with a candlestick on my head.

@PauloCereda Hat? Business? Daft?

Paulo Cereda

@NicolaTalbot Me too! :) Yet it was the best hat available. :P

@NicolaTalbot daft - first time I saw it. :)

Nicola Talbot

4:37 PM

@PauloCereda They should have a duck hat

Paulo Cereda

@NicolaTalbot ooh I'd definitely wear one of those - even in real life. :)

Nicola Talbot

@PauloCereda Really? You'll have to use it all the time now. (Unless you'd think that would be a bit daft.)

@PauloCereda :-)

Paulo Cereda

@NicolaTalbot ooh a challenge! :)

Nicola Talbot

@PauloCereda Ooh, time for the thesaurus :-) The daft old flibbertigibbet, despite being away with the fairies, wasn't as dotty as the inane puddinghead.

Paulo Cereda

@NicolaTalbot Oh my!

Hammerite

4:57 PM

I'm having a problem with xparse's \NewDocumentCommand and macros that are defined with a trailing optional argument. It appears that if the optional argument appears after a single newline when the macro is invoked, it's not recognised as being an argument to the macro. Is this the expected behaviour? Is there a question dealing with this?

Johannes_B

@Hammerite Can you make a minimal example showing some code? Are you talking about a newline in the input side (\cr), or on the output side (\newline)?

The *Hot questions* on the right hand side of our page can be confusing:
http://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/22527/which-locations-are-traditionally-santas-home-i-e-where-can-you-visit-santa

Hammerite

5:14 PM

I'll have a go at an example when I get home. I mean: suppose you use \NewDocumentCommand to define a macro whose argument signature is say {mo}, and then you invoke it like this: \mymacro{x}[y] but with a single newline between the {x} and the [y] in your .tex file ), it behaves like you didn't give a value for the "o" argument and the [y] is just a literal "[y]" that comes afterwards.

Like, you might write

\mymacro{x} and then type a newline and line up the [y] vertically with the {x}, because they're both actually long arguments (not \long in the TeX sense, just lots of characters)

Johannes_B

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xparse}
\NewDocumentCommand{\test}{ m o }{#1#2}
\begin{document}
\test{hallo}[1]

\test{hallo}
[2]

\test{hallo}%
[3]
\end{document}

David Carlisle

@Hammerite I can't remember what we ended up with, amsmath changes the latex2e optional argument test that way so [ at the start of a align cell isn't taken as an optional argument of \\

Johannes_B

When LaTeX sees the space character, it thinks everything for \test is finished. You can prevent this by hiding the EOL (see example 3).

@DavidCarlisle I hope i explained that right?

@Hammerite btw: xparse provides mechanism to test, if the optional argument is empty.

David Carlisle

@Johannes_B seems like it:-)

Johannes_B

@Hammerite \IfNoValueTF

David Carlisle

5:26 PM

@Hammerite hey we have a manual:-) texdoc xparse section 0.2 says that spaces between arguments are ignored up to the last mandatory arg, but after that spaces between optional arguments are not ignored. (i'm sure it wasn't that way last time I looked at the xparse sources, but that was last century...)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle That sounds about right: still one of the 'open questions' I think

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda but then you would look like this:

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle LOL

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle :-)

Johannes_B

@DavidCarlisle I wasn't aware, that latex2e treats spaces with optional arguments this way.

David Carlisle

5:39 PM

@Johannes_B 2e doesn't but amsmath changes it within align and similar environments, but not quite like that: in amsmath you can use \\ [2pt] with a space but you can not use a newline in between

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle, @Johannes_B Thoughts on the 'correct' approach for xparse most welcome

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright The way it is now. :)

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda :-)

egreg

@DavidCarlisle I use picture mode in an answer and you don't upvote it? ;-)

Johannes_B

@JosephWright I just read section 0.2 and everything is properly documented. It makes sense when thinking about it. So i agree with @PauloCereda on that.

Paulo Cereda

5:47 PM

@egreg David is probably sad because of the Aussies. :)

Joseph Wright

@Johannes_B Good :-) The case with amsmath and \\ is tricky as TeX skips spaces after control words (escape plus one or more letters) but not after escape plus one non-letter.

We've not really addressed that as almost always xparse is used for control words

Johannes_B

@JosephWright Thanks for the explanation. I haven't got time in months to take a look into the TeXbook. :-(

Does somebody have experience with scientific workplace?
http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/150360/37907

Hammerite

6:09 PM

Thank you all for the advice. Yes I was aware that \IfNoValueTF may be used to test whether an argument was supplied. From my perspective it seems surprising that optional arguments behave differently from mandatory arguments in this respect. I take the (maybe naive) view that the syntax should not offer up any strange edge cases and surprises, so it seems the wrong approach to me.

Johannes_B

@Hammerite Section 0.2 explains it quiet nicely

quite

Hammerite

I see that Section 0.2 does explain the observed behaviour, although it doesn't make it clear whether it is due to a constraint imposed by TeX itself or due to a design choice made by the team working on LaTeX3. If the latter, I understand the rationale but politely disagree!

Joseph Wright

6:26 PM

@Hammerite What would you feel is better?

@Hammerite (This is not a 'settled issue')

Hammerite

That optional arguments should behave just the same as mandatory arguments in that if present after whitespace (but not a new para), they should be taken by the macro. (I don't know whether this is technically more difficult, or controversial for reasons besides "users might accidentally supply an optional argument when all they intended to do was typeset text in square brackets".)

Joseph Wright

@Hammerite Picking them up is easy enough, it's the business about accidental use that's the worry

@Hammerite We've argued it both ways

Hammerite

For my part, the macro that I am writing has use only inside a tikzpicture, and no-one has any business putting extra square-bracketed text after it, so far as I know. :-)

Joseph Wright

@Hammerite The only common case I know of it the \\ ... [ ] business

Perhaps I'll raise it with the team

@DavidCarlisle Any thoughts?

Hammerite

For me, in the here and now, I will just change the interface to the function to have the optional args up front.

Joseph Wright

6:39 PM

@Hammerite That is more usual in any case

I will raise this again: I can see the argument

David Carlisle

6:54 PM

@JosephWright we could have two definition forms of o that skip space or not, but then the user interface is a bit variable depending on the whim of who defined the command, probably we should just make a decision and stick to it and not have an option to change it.

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle change = more work, let's not change it. :)

David Carlisle

@egreg difficult to read your answers and drive home at the same time. Anyway how do you know how I voted?:-)

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Crystal ball strikes again? :)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle We did try that before :-)

David Carlisle

@Hammerite that's a logical position (and I don't necessarily disagree) but after seeing 25 years of bug reports asking why [1,2] at the start of an array cell produces an incomprehensible error message, ones notion of what makes sense can get warped.

@JosephWright I thought I recalled something:-)

Personally I think <test optional="2">stuff</text> looks like a good syntax.

Paulo Cereda

7:27 PM

@DavidCarlisle You are naughty. :)

egreg

8:19 PM

"The Magic Flute" by Kenneth Branagh is just starting on TV

Canageek

8:33 PM

@egreg Isn't that a famous bit of classical music? I remember having a tape of it when I was young, with some drama interspersed with the music. Also one called Peter and the Wolf in the same style.

egreg

@Canageek "The Magic Flute" is an opera by Mozart. A Singspiel, more properly. Branagh made a movie from it, the text is in English rather than German. The story is set during a war, very similar to World War I. The original was thought in some imaginary place resembling ancient Egypt. Another nice movie reduction was made by Ingmar Bergman, more respectful to the original. However, Branagh's is quite good.

The Queen of the Night has arrived, standing on a tank. :)

Alan Munn

9:00 PM

@topskip LOL Very cute picture.

Canageek

@egreg Cool.

egreg

9:16 PM

@Canageek It's one among the last compositions by Mozart, he was already working on the famous Requiem. It's classified KV 620, the Requiem is KV 626 and the catalog is in order of composition. KV 618 is the famous motet "Ave Verum Corpus", a very moving one; KV 621 is the opera "La Clemenza di Tito" (a great one) and KV 622 is the Clarinet Concerto, one of the best pieces of music of all times. All composed from mid June 1791 to 5 December 1791, when Mozart died.

Paulo Cereda

@egreg Yay, Requiem!

egreg

@PauloCereda Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis, voca me cum benedictis.

David Carlisle

I got a badge:-)

Paulo Cereda

@egreg :)

@DavidCarlisle ooh a gold one!

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda are there other colours?

Paulo Cereda

9:31 PM

@DavidCarlisle I heard there's a ecofriendly one, so it might be green. :)

egreg

Werner

@egreg Welcome to the list of voters, @DavidCarlisle. :)

David Carlisle

@egreg glad to say, none of those 600 question votes went to you!

egreg

@DavidCarlisle I'll be very glad to upvote the first question of yours.

David Carlisle

@egreg OK it's a deal.

egreg

9:33 PM

@DavidCarlisle You start.

@PauloCereda The Queen of the Night is about to sing her famous air!

Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen, Tod und Verzweiflung flammet um mich her!

Paulo Cereda

@egreg ooh that part!

egreg

►

Werner

9:48 PM

A new review queue is currently in alpha:

3

Q: Where can I access the link-validation review queue?

Today, I reviewed a post in a review queue named link validation review queue. It's very newer to me. I didn't heard this before. I got that review link from this post. After reviewing, when I click next button, it shows a message that there are no items to review. After sometime, when I lo...

support review broken-link

percusse

10:00 PM

Hi there, anyone knows the term for the hemisphere but vertically divided?

Werner

@percusse Half of a hemisphere?

percusse

not laterally but longitudidodadully.... :(

Jake

@percusse Hemisphere as well. Eastern hemisphere.

percusse

@Werner My bad. I'm not clear.

@Jake Really? Wow I didn't know that.

I was thinking something related to equinoxes and whatnot

Jake

Eastern Hemisphere

The Eastern Hemisphere is a geographical term for the half of the Earth that is east of the Prime Meridian (which crosses Greenwich, England, United Kingdom) and west of 180° longitude. It is also used to refer to Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australasia, the Western Hemisphere, which includes the Americas. This hemisphere is called the "Oriental hemisphere". In addition, it may be used in a cultural or geopolitical sense as a synonym for 'Old World'. The line demarcating the eastern and western hemispheres is an arbitrary convention, unlike the equator (an imaginary line encircling the E...

Considering that hemisphere only means "half-sphere", it kind of makes sense =)

percusse

10:04 PM

@Jake I was under the impression that geography experts can't live with that ambiguity and made something up

Jake

@percusse Hehe!

percusse

But thanks though ! :)

egreg

@Jake So Cornwall and Ireland are New World? ;-)

Jake

@egreg And New Zealand is Old World...

egreg

@Jake Of course! Also Australia; which is testified by how they play a typical Old World game, that is, cricket.

Jake

10:09 PM

@egreg Aha, yes, that does make sense!

egreg

@Jake Ask @DavidCarlisle for cricket and Australia.

percusse

10:23 PM

I think I've created my ugliest TikZ product :)

Paulo Cereda

Great, so from São Paulo, I can print stuff in my office. :)

Canageek

@egreg It seems I need to vote on about 400 more questions...

tohecz

@percusse projective geometry on the Poincaré models?

@egreg @David seems to be a late bloomer :p

percusse

@tohecz No, just mapping the right half plane onto the unit disk. Boring as hell, I need a few of these.

tohecz

@percusse oh, so no fancy hyperbolic geometry stuff? :(

Canageek

10:38 PM

@egreg And are currently the best in the world at Criket, right?

@PauloCereda Then you discovered she was laughing at you still using vim instead of emacs....

percusse

@tohecz I had some but my boss told me to take them out. :)

tohecz

@percusse ohhhh :(

percusse

@tohecz Actually he had a point. I had a side-note about projections which became a side-appendix. Then we took all out.

tohecz

well, I'm not saying "ohhhh :(" as an objective point, I can understand reasons for this and that ;)

David Carlisle

Also, is it just me, or do Japan and New Zealand look suspiciously similar? Has anyone seen them at a party together?

percusse

11:00 PM

@egreg @tohecz Is it a common notation to use T for unit circle and D for unit disc?

I learned it as such but maybe it's specific to my curriculum

tohecz

@percusse yes. T=T_1 for a torus (of dim. 1) and D for a disc

percusse

@tohecz Thanks.

tohecz

the only problem is that for many, torus has length one and not radius one, but that's quite minor in this context

Andy Clifton

evening all. Can I be boring and ask a 'tex related question?

Well, actually latex. Somehow writing an apostrophe was easier than 'la'.

egreg

@percusse Yes

@AndyClifton Sometimes we like some transgression. ;-)

tohecz

11:07 PM

@percusse However, I usually stick to \partial D for the unit circle

percusse

@tohecz I go with mathbb versions so partial D requires the closure notion etc. Opens a can of worms

Andy Clifton

@egreg as opposed to digression? OK, I shall keep it brief. I want a \newcommand{} that kills one of the arguments. At the moment, if I do... \newcommand{\testing}[1][]{}, then \testing{hello world} prints "hello world". I was rather hoping to kill that argument :(

ah, oops. Lazy coding. Should be {\testing}[]{}. I shall crawl back under my rock

egreg

@AndyClifton You can use the argument specifiers #1 and so on (how many you're allowed to use is specified in the first optional argument) in any way you like: once, twice or more, in any order. Even never. So \newcommand{\gobble}[1]{} is what you want.

Andy Clifton

11:23 PM

Yup, thanks, fixed. I was trying to kill index entries for latex2rtf. I have quite a nice set up now for converting latex to something that word can use.

sorry, I meant converting latex to something that other people can use word with

David Carlisle

11:49 PM

@AndyClifton youve got what you need, but the reason \newcommand{\testing}[1][]{} didn't work is that defines \testing to take one optional argument only so \testing or \testing[] the argument if given would be discarded, so \testing[zzz] would not use zzz the {hello world} isn't an argument it is just text in a group that follows the command so will be typeset normally.

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$TeX - LaTeX$ TeX, LaTeX and Friends