TeX, LaTeX and Friends

9:35 AM

Hi. I need help to understand the following code (I expect it to be too localized for a question at tex.stackexchange so I give it try here) :

`\begingroup
\catcode`|=0
\catcode`[=1
\catcode`]=2
\catcode`\{=12
\catcode`\}=12
\catcode`\\=12
|gdef|myvr@xverbatim#1\end{myverbB}[#1|end[myverbB]]
|endgroup`

Confer with my question [Defining a new environment extending a verbatim environment](http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/114643/defining-a-new-environment-extending-a-verbatim-environment) for more information.

How do I enter links in chat? It seems I used a wrong syntax..

I understand that "|" is now equal to an "\", and "[" is an opening "{" and "]" is a closing brace "}"..

From [http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/TeX/def](http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/TeX/def)

The definition of \def (and \gdef) is:

\def <command> <parameter-text>{<replacement-text>}

@HåkonHægland You want to define a macro \myvr@xverbatim whose only argument is delimited by the string \end{myverbB} where all the characters have category code 12.

Hi. According to definition of \def, what is the "parameter-text" (see my post above) in the above example?

You can define it more easily with features not available in Knuth TeX:

\begingroup\edef\x{\endgroup
  \gdef\noexpand\myvr@xverbatim##1\string\end\string{myverbB\string}}%
  \x{#1\end{myverbB}}

@HåkonHægland The parameter text is #1\end{myverbB} where the tokens after #1 have category code 11 or 12 (the backslash and the braces have 12, the letters 11).

9:52 AM

What is actually the purpose of the parameter text? I thought it was only to tell how many parameters I would use?

@HåkonHægland You have to read about delimited arguments; you can find them in TeX by Topic.

@HåkonHægland If you say \def\foo#1bar{...} then the argument #1 is everything from \foo up to the first occurrence of bar at the same brace level.

Ok I see, thanks :)

Why do you use two consecutive # in your example above, i.e ##1 ?

@egreg: Do you use MacTeX 2013 pretest?

@MarcoDaniel I'm testing it.

@HåkonHægland Because that part is inside the replacement text of the macro \x, so when the macro is stored it will become #1; otherwise it would be illegal, because \x has no argument.

@HåkonHægland If you click on the arrow at the far right of a line, the user you're answering to will be notified.

@egreg Does pdflatex work for you. If I use the following example I will get a damaged pdf.

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}
adsad
\end{document}

10:04 AM

@MarcoDaniel Sorry, at the moment tlmgr is running.

@egreg I did the same few minutes ago ;-)

David Carlisle

@egreg good job one of us has a grasp of English grammar:-)

@DavidCarlisle The dreadful apostrophe in that famous three letter word.

@DavidCarlisle ???

David Carlisle

@MarcoDaniel egreg edited one of my answers to be a closer approximation to my native language:-)

10:09 AM

@DavidCarlisle :-)

David Carlisle

@egreg Silly thing is that really annoys me when I read it (but I can never read what I type)

Q: Title page report with TikZ

I thought the French had given up their bad habit of castrating accented capital letters, but lo!, here we are again:

0

I want to make the front page shown in the attached PDF. Someone! help me?

@Brent.Longborough I too believed it. :(

@Brent.Longborough But bureaucrats are always far behind.

@egreg Amazing the chaos that causes with \MakeLowerCase

@MarcoDaniel I get a perfectly legal PDF. What OS are you using?

10:20 AM

@egreg Ought to be an OpenType font feature: "unac: UNAccented Capitals"

@Brent.Longborough Horrible. ;-)

@egreg Which viewer do you use. If I use adobe pdf It fails. If I use the internal viewer it works.

pdfTeX 3.1415926-2.5-1.40.14 (TeX Live 2013) on 10.8.3

@egreg Doesn't it just churn your guts as violating every kind of symmetry, mathematical propriety, and so on?

@MarcoDaniel With Adobe Reader 11.0.03 it has no problem

@Brent.Longborough It's simply stupid: if accents are needed they should be kept. Actually, when I took French (several years ago) I was taught to remove accents from all capital text. But probably my teacher was far behind too.

@egreg I will install 11.0.03. At the moment 11.0.02 is installed.

10:24 AM

@DavidCarlisle My deepest sympathy. Nowadays I find myself accidentally writing grocers' apostrophes far too often, to my great loathing.

@egreg I get: This file is damaged -- TeXWorks the same Failed to load..

@MarcoDaniel Here's the output of qpdf --check mdtest.pdf

qpdf --check mdtest.pdf
checking mdtest.pdf
PDF Version: 1.5
File is not encrypted
File is not linearized
No syntax or stream encoding errors found; the file may still contain
errors that qpdf cannot detect

@egreg Me too. Was it origirıally to make typesetting easier‽

@MarcoDaniel My TeXworks opens it.

@egreg What is qpdf?

10:27 AM

@MarcoDaniel It's a general purpose utility for working with PDF files. Similar to pdftk

@egreg Ok. I will install it ;-)

@egreg Odd!

marco@imac:~/Desktop/test$qpdf --check test.pdf
WARNING: test.pdf: file is damaged
WARNING: test.pdf: can't find startxref
WARNING: test.pdf: Attempting to reconstruct cross-reference table
test.pdf: unable to find trailer dictionary while recovering damaged file

Here the complete way:

marco@imac:~/Desktop/test$pdflatex test.tex
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.5-1.40.14 (TeX Live 2013)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
(./test.tex
LaTeX2e <2011/06/27>
Babel <3.9e> and hyphenation patterns for 77 languages loaded.
(/usr/local/texlive/2013/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2007/10/19 v1.4h Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/local/texlive/2013/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size10.clo)) (./test.aux)
[1{/usr/local/texlive/2013/texmf-var/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap/pdftex.map}]

@MarcoDaniel I get exactly the same size for the PDF.