What is the state of HTML interpretation in TeX? canvas, anyone?

@FrankMittelbach @DavidCarlisle: \PassOptionsToPackage and \PassOptonsToClass do not check, weather the package is already is already loaded, Does it make sense to add a warning?

@StephanLehmke I guess I'd look for a ConTeXt solution or some form of converter

@HeikoOberdiek Probably not for this LaTeX2e fix round!

@HeikoOberdiek possibly it would have been but I'd be very worried to change any of that package loader now, too many people (like you:-) have patched it in multiple ways over the years. Certainly not for the 2014 release (which I think is done now)

@DavidCarlisle Sounds about right

@DavidCarlisle What a pity.

@JosephWright Any chance to get the spammer account 50381/ling closed?

@HeikoOberdiek most of LaTeX is the way it is because we can't change it.

@HeikoOberdiek Done

@JosephWright Thanks.

@JosephWright What can canvas stuff be converted to? I'm a bit intimidated by the fact it's all "programmed" in JavaScript, but maybe it can be converted to some vector format?

@StephanLehmke It changes by the day, the original canvas model was essentially a javascript programmed bitmap plane and it had methods to return a bitmap image (and vector data wasn't retained in the internal model) but gradually they have been trying to converge to a more svg model with methods that retain path data internally. So it all depends....

@DavidCarlisle Hmm, seems to be hard to come by real/useable info on this. Existing Q&A on SO do not look encouraging :-(

@StephanLehmke I'll dig out a link to the whatwg spec...

@StephanLehmke well there is an uptodate list of references here: (but what you want tex to do if the canvas is a real time 3d animation, I'm not sure:-) developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Canvas

@egreg: are you around?

@DavidCarlisle Well that was exactly the document I was looking at. Which is all complete gibberish to me, so I was looking for a solution made by someone else ;-)

Actually I'd be content with getting 2D stuff.

I wonder whether one could get away with not rendering the canvas stuff at all, but execute the JavaScript inside the PDF reader?

The HTML folks' obsession with bitmaps and pixels is a real nuisance :-(

@StephanLehmke I wouldn't expect there is any chance to get the javascript to run in the reader. pdf javascript might be javacsript but it isn't the same DOM as in a browser and as in most OO languages the basic language syntax is the easy part the hard part is the assumed availability of a gazillion objects with thousands of methods each

@DavidCarlisle One alternative which could really work would be to run the JavaScript as a standalone program and provide an implementation for the context stuff which will emit TikZ...

@StephanLehmke yes, using something like phantomjs (which is a webkit browser without the browsing part) a quick google for phantomjs canvas svg turned up tian-yi.me/…

@DavidCarlisle At a quick glance I could not figure out what happens to canvas stuff. On the site it's only mentioned as one supported feature (alongside svg, not as in converted into). From what I saw in relevant SO answers, my expectation is that canvas elements get converted to png bitmaps.

@StephanLehmke in general png is best you can get from canvas. as I say there are methods in newer implementations that have svg like drawing primitives designed to retain the paths but in general canvas can have bitmap operations like image masks and stuff on the image rendered so far so getting a scalable form would be hard

@PauloCereda I am, now.

what do we do with crystal ball answers in comments, close the thing as "off topic?" which seems a bit unfriendly to a new user, or answer it anyway? tex.stackexchange.com/questions/175148/dot-before-numbering

@DavidCarlisle Answer it, I guess

@DavidCarlisle This is so sad. One would expect more from a "standard" aiming at abstract structuring, separation of syntax and semantics, "responsive" rendering etc. I mean, PostScript is ultimately rendered to and is dealing with bitmaps since 30 years and does not have these issues.

@StephanLehmke well it does really there was a question here not so long ago about converting eps to a scalable pdf so it didn't look jagged, comments were saying that should be easy until the EPS was posted which was a bitmap in an EPS wrapper,

@StephanLehmke But anyway 30 year experience isn't relevant the current web platform design is driven by browser implementers, and they are considered old if they are out of their teens...

@DavidCarlisle :-)

@ereg so long as you define "add" carefully:-)

@DavidCarlisle That's the spirit of the command. ;-)

@DavidCarlisle If the implementation is wrong, it's not my fault. :P

@egreg well I get the tick anyway.

@JosephWright: Get Constrast for the PS3. :)

@PauloCereda he needs to finish L3 first

@DavidCarlisle :)

@PauloCereda Catania-Roma 4:1. :)

Any PGF wizards in here? tex.stackexchange.com/q/175228/17423

LaTeX2e update has gone to CTAN

@egreg Then, tomorrow: the scudetto? :)

Phew, got to find a bug in 10k lines of code in less than 5 minutes. The result: I want to kill one of my colleagues, since the bug was in the test, not in my code! Argh!

@JosephWright we work for months for a new release and the first comment after you say its there is about football:(

@PauloCereda Oh that's terribly fun >:)

@JosephWright: get CoDMW3 for the PS3. :)

@SeanAllred Now it is. :)

@DavidCarlisle :-)

@DavidCarlisle You've worked on it for months: I do my best to stick to L3 stuff!

@JosephWright Oh my!

@JosephWright and @PauloCereda and @egreg just watch football

@DavidCarlisle oy

:)

@JosephWright mail on xetex list

@DavidCarlisle move it to spam. :)

@PauloCereda oi it's from me

@DavidCarlisle uh-oh unmark spam. :)

Hey, don't star that!

@PauloCereda I'm not to blame

@DavidCarlisle Oh no! :)

@Joseph: I wanna buy a L3 shirt, when will the L3 store be opened? :)

@PauloCereda lmgtfy.com/?q=latex+shirt

@DavidCarlisle Promoted ad: T-Shirts For World Hunger - iheartorphans.org‎ LOL

@David: apparently in Germany you can buy LaTeX stuff (I meant the case-sensitive LaTeX). :)

@PauloCereda Already today!

tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/doc/ltnews21.pdf

for those interested

@egreg ooh!

Hmm, I see the rest of the team have jumped me on my upcoming expl3 announcement!

@JosephWright ?

@JosephWright oh you mean expl3 in ltnews?

@DavidCarlisle Yes

@JosephWright not me, I thought it was you:-)

@DavidCarlisle The generic loading bit: waiting to hear from @HeikoOberdiek about one thing before I upload to CTAN

@DavidCarlisle Must have been Frank

@DavidCarlisle I don't do LaTeX2e ;-)

@JosephWright not even read ltnews to look for dreaded american spellings:-)

@DavidCarlisle Nope

@DavidCarlisle Well there of course we have standardised: hopefully the expl3 stuff is self-consistent, if slightly annoying to all of the native English speakers on the team!

@DavidCarlisle Clearly one for you: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/175240/…

Why do I get `! Missing } inserted.`?

    \documentclass{article}
    \usepackage{graphicx}
    \makeatletter
    \newcommand*\uell{\mathpalette\@uell}
    \newcommand*\@uell[1]{\hbox{\tt\string#1}}
    \begin{document}
    $\uell$
    \end{document}

Nevermind, got it. I should have read the TeXbook more closely.

@JosephWright Is it available on CTAN or on the way? ctan.org/pkg/latex shows the old version.

@StefanKottwitz Try Cambridge

@StefanKottwitz Files on ctan.org look correct to me, e.g. classes.ins 2014-04-29 02:39:13

Am I missing something? See comments on my answer

No match for classes.ins with the CTAN search feature

@JosephWright Which of the links on ctan.org/pkg/latex leads to the files?

@StefanKottwitz ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/base

@JosephWright Ok, I did not go there because ctan.org/pkg/latex-base (leading to that directory) shows version 2005-12-01 :-o

@StefanKottwitz I'm not sure, but I think those version dates have to be updated by hand rather than from the file meta data

@StefanKottwitz Yes I've flagged that with Robin, but I don't know where those texts come from but there were releases in 2009 and 2011 so it's been wrong for a while:-)

@JosephWright What have I missed/what do you want to hear from me?

@HeikoOberdiek It was about the 'generic' loader for expl3: we think its good-to-go to CTAN, but before I upload Frank suggested we make sure you are happy with the interface :-)

@HeikoOberdiek I was slightly caught out that the generic loader got mentioned in LaTeX2e News!

@HenriMenke also don't use \tt

@StefanKottwitz base unpacked tools doc graphics and cyrillic are updated (babel now goes on its own update cycle)

@DavidCarlisle Have we said what the cycle is?

@JosephWright which babel or the core?

@DavidCarlisle In general

Another tag gold badge arriving. :D

@JosephWright see ltnews21 :-)

@egreg some people make new software releases, others collect badges:-)

@DavidCarlisle I had to profit from you being engaged. ;-)

@egreg now you'll get loads more points describing all the new bugs I expect.

@DavidCarlisle @egreg has a book to finish :-)

@DavidCarlisle Just wait for the next update ...

@DavidCarlisle I only used \tt for debugging and it was shorter to type than \texttt{...} or \ttfamily.

@HenriMenke :-)

@JosephWright I am looking at it and have already found two issues, sending mail soon.

@HeikoOberdiek OK

@HeikoOberdiek Heiko, sorry we had to brush off your request for a hook, but feature requests coming in just as we were mailing Robin asking him to move to ctan wasn't good timing, we have to stop somewhere:-)

@DavidCarlisle Sort it now the release is done :-)

@JosephWright see my inputenc experiments:-)

@DavidCarlisle No problem. The new release of latex-tds is already on its way to CTAN.

@JosephWright The email is send.

@HeikoOberdiek Yes

@HeikoOberdiek One issue fixed, thinking about second one

@HeikoOberdiek is that a fully automatic script to repackage? Did we ought to do it?

@DavidCarlisle We could easily extend our script in any case: we do create TDS-style zips for expl3, etc., after all

@JosephWright yes we could, I just meant should we (initially we didn't use any non core stuff so the core was self-standing so no hyperref etc, but we seem to have slipped in hyperref to ltnews so it's less of an issue these days

@JosephWright pdflatex l3drivers.dtx: ! LaTeX Error: \begin{implementation} on input line 155 ended by \end{macro}.

@HeikoOberdiek Will fix this too :-)

@JosephWright What do you prefer for the small issues, chat message or email?

@HeikoOberdiek If they are things I can fix more-or-less 'live' then chat is fine

@HeikoOberdiek If the team as a whole need to know then clearly by mail

@JosephWright Ok.

@DavidCarlisle Well yes: we need more 'core' stuff :-)

@JosephWright l3candidates.dtx, line 198: the box is places in the output file. s/places/placed/

I can't find any documentation in the etoolbox manual so I'll ask here --> I came across something strange.. I have a macro here that will print the counter of the current section... if I try to use ifnumequal and compare it with any section number (1,2,3,...) it will always show that the equality is false.. why?

@Euryris what do you mean by "print" \mbox{2} prints as 2 but isn't equal to 2

i.e. \ifnumequal{\number\value{CurrentSectionCounter}}{2}{\cfoot{\number\value{Curren‌​tSectionCounter}}}{\cfoot{Wrong number}}

\cfoot{\number\value{Curren‌​tSectionCounter}} yields expected results, shows 1,2,3,4 in the footer as expected

@Euryris sorry can't decode the fragment in my head, ask a question on the main site with a full document that reproduces the problem, then it should be easy to answer

Thanks for your suggestion, it's actually me getting side-tracked on a possible solution for an existing topic.

@Euryris The time, \ifnumequal is evaluated is a different time, when \cfoot prints the number. Maybe you want to put \ifnumequal inside \cfoot. But your intention is unclear, there could be a "right" and "wrong" section at the same page.

@HeikoOberdiek I've considered it, but the condition I want to evaluate is whether this section is the last section, so I can save this last section name and use it for the last page, which will not have the pagestyle applied, that I declared in my appendices.

@Euryris It is still not clear to me, what you want to achieve. It sound like a job for a reference mechanism (\label, \ref) and last pages issues (package zref-lastpage, ...).

@HeikoOberdiek When declaring a \pagestyle in an environment (in my example "appendices"), the \pagestyle will only have effect within the environment. The result is that the last page of my appendices does not have the pagestyle applied (but instead the last \pagestyle that I declared between \begin{document} and \begin{appendices}). I want to automatically apply the \pagestyle in my appendices to be applied to the last page (between \end{appendices} and \end{document}).

What about \thispagestyle inside the end part of the environment? \thispagestyle has global effect.

I'm copying bibitems over from one file (where they work) into another and this gives me the error message "you cannot use \relax after \the" - does anyone know what this means? (It also says "Something's wrong - perhaps a missing \item" although everything looks good to me.)

@Euryris why make apendices an evironment (and if you must do \pagestyle{headings} say after the group just do \aftergroup\ps@headings

@Pickett it means you used \relax after \the and it's not allowed:-) probably it used \the \csname something\endcsname where \something is a counter or length in one document but undefined in the other (where it ends up being defned as \relax

I guess this is my way of forcing myself to look at the way taking macro's cross-environment works, but admittedly I'm at wit's end now. The most viable solution so far seems to embed a macro with a name inside both pagestyle and thispagestyle, and including thispagestyle in \end{appendices}, if that's even possible

@DavidCarlisle What would you do if you had this error to make the references work?

I think I'll settle for that solution. Thanks, @HeikoOberdiek @DavidCarlisle.

@Pickett so you're not using bibtex, just moving the actual entries?

@Pickett only dubious thing is ná what encoding is that text in (and does it match the declared encoding in the two files)

@DavidCarlisle Just copy&paste into a colleague's document. I'm going to try to rewrite a reference in the document and see if it's an encoding/hidden characters issue.

@Pickett yes but you need \usepackage[something]{inputenc} to use accented characters and the something needs to be the right thing (I can't tell what that is as teh site normalises the encodings as you paste into here)

@Pickett but anyway TeX would have shown the location of the error, where did it say it was

@DavidCarlisle At this line: \bibitem{cometsJovianOrigin}

@Pickett No it gives more detail than that, what was the exact error message from ! to ?