TeX, LaTeX and Friends

12:00 AM

\newcount\foo

\foo=\maxdimen
\multiply\foo by 2
\message{->> \the\foo}
\advance\foo by 1
\message{->> \the\foo}
\advance\foo by 1
\message{->> \the\foo}

Here's the output: ->> 2147483646 ->> 2147483647 ->> -2147483648

David Carlisle

a few seconds to go and 120 behind @GonzaloMedina for the day:(

yo'

@egreg cool thanks :) What is the extra bit in \dimen for, then?

David Carlisle

12:16 AM

@yo' null_flag I think mostly the unspecified dimensions in vrule or hrule, and the widths of unset table cells (could be wrong though tex-web isn't always easiest to follow:-)

yo'

@DavidCarlisle oh no, I remember now I think! It's the fil and fill, no?

David Carlisle

@yo' begin q:=new_rule; {|width|, |depth|, and |height| all equal |null_flag| now}

yo'

@DavidCarlisle ok :-)

David Carlisle

The problems of dealing with large character sets:

@ The original \PASCAL\ compiler was designed in the late 60s, when six-bit
character sets were common, so it did not make provision for lowercase
letters. Nowadays, of course, we need to deal with both capital and small
letters in a convenient way,

@yo' that doesn't mean it isn't fil as well tex never lets a bit go to waste if it can be overloaded:-)

egreg

@yo' It's for being able to do some computations that might require one bit more.

Good night all.

yo'

12:27 AM

@DavidCarlisle :)

@egreg night

yo'

1:36 AM

@PauloCereda Quack! What're you doing here that late? :)

Paulo Cereda

2:23 AM

@yo' coming back from SP. :)

yo'

@PauloCereda isn't it almost midnight down there?

Paulo Cereda

@yo' close: 23:24. I will arrive home about 1:00. :(

yo'

@PauloCereda :(

Paulo Cereda

@yo' c'est la vie. :) Quaaaaack!

yo'

I'm working on the template ...

Paulo Cereda

2:28 AM

Which template, Tom?

yo'

@PauloCereda the one for the theses at my university

45kB of LaTeX3 code so far :)

Paulo Cereda

Cool! :)

yo'

@PauloCereda can you open PDF files?

and yeah, L3 is cool, once you learn it :-)

damn why A4paper even exists?

David Carlisle

11:14 AM

@yo' someone's going to love that:-)

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle ooh I know sir sir sir I know!

/raises hand

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda finished that manual yet?

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle which manual? :)

@JosephWright Yep. :) If I couldn't make to Darmstadt, I'd like to go to Peru. But sadly I don't know Spanish. :( (expecting an amusing language remark from @David)

David Carlisle

Jun 30 '12 at 21:25, by Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Oh no! :P The funny thing is that arara - the software - is ready at least from two weeks ago, but arara - the manual - is still incomplete. :P I'm terrible at writing documentation. :D

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle 2012?!

Holy cow.

yo'

11:43 AM

@DavidCarlisle "not my problem", it's even written in the project specs :) sorry, it's not written there, but I mentioned it somewhere.

David Carlisle

12:18 PM

anyone tried latex 2015/01/01 yet?

yo'

12:46 PM

@DavidCarlisle ummmm not

David Carlisle

@yo' why do we bother?:-)

Johannes_B

@yo' The little bug seemed to be quite happy in that ear. Disgusting anyway.

yo'

@Johannes_B yep, truly disguisting. But anyways it looked like some interesting insect species :)

Johannes_B

@yo' I don't like insects and stuff stat crawls on the floor.

yo'

@Johannes_B you've never been for 3 weeks in a row to a summer camp, have you? :-)

Johannes_B

12:54 PM

@yo' No, i haven't :-)

I see the List of LaTeX books qustion got closed again. :-)

David Carlisle

@Johannes_B dinner:

bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-31589764

yo'

@Johannes_B too bad for you then...

Johannes_B

1:09 PM

@DavidCarlisle Have to say, i would try to eat it. But i don't know if i would really do it. @yo' Have you been eating grubs as well at the summer camp?

yo'

@Johannes_B funny

Paul Gessler

@Johannes_B yes indeed, and my answer garnered an unexplained downvote. :-(

Johannes_B

@PaulGessler Well, we can do something about that ;-)

@PaulGessler Some people just don't understand the voting business. I wouldn't worry ;-)

yo'

@PaulGessler Well, I would have expected you to make the answer cw, but I didn't downvote this time (the answers I mean, the question I did for sure).

Paul Gessler

1:29 PM

@yo' why would I make the answer CW? That was the result of my own research work. If the question were made CW (as I thought it should have), the answers automatically become CW, don't they?

yo'

@PaulGessler they do. That's one of the problems I have with these questions: the answers are basically "I googled this nice PDF for you"

Paul Gessler

@yo' then what about the questions where the answers are basically "I googled/opened this fine manual for you"? (AKA many)

yo'

@PaulGessler well, there's at least only a few correct answers. That's not the case here, the correct answers here could easily be hundreds or thousands. The reasons why IMHO these questions are bad are numerous.

Paul Gessler

@yo' indeed, that's why I suggested big-list and CW for the question... but no matter now as it's been closed again.

yo'

when I came here, there was I think only the one question like this. When I got to know the format of the site, I thought "ok, this probably doesn't exactly fit in", it was about the time when discussions about big-list were on SE-wide. When the "calendar" question appeared, I raised my eyebrow since I saw where's this going to lead. And here we are, getting stupid big-list questions. Howgh

Needed to say: I'm all in for helping people with their daily problems, so while I personally ignore do-it-for-me questions, I have understanding for them. I do not, for big-list.

clemens

1:49 PM

@DavidCarlisle you probably know this: why does \@array do \lineskip\z@skip\baselineskip\z@skip?

yo'

@clemens ah yeah, that annoys me all the time :D

clemens

@yo' I stumbled upon it by chance lately... made me curious

yo'

@clemens I dunno really, but there's probably a reason, as always. In the end, "historical reasons" cover anything :D

clemens

@yo' :)

@yo' our {tables} expert (tex.stackexchange.com/tags/tables/topusers) should know :)

yo'

@clemens 777 answers, that 1/7th too much :D

clemens

1:55 PM

@yo' lol

David Carlisle

2:22 PM

@clemens so it works:-)

@clemens you have to have no space between rows so that | rules join together but it also simplifies keeping rows of consistent height, plain tex does same in its matrix macro even though it hasn't got vertical rules

clemens

2:37 PM

@DavidCarlisle OK. I was caught by this when I tried to use \\[\baselineskip] in a tabular. Removing \lineskip\z@skip\baselineskip\z@skip from \@array didn't seem to have any sideeffects... but I admit I didn't test thoroughly.

@Johannes_B chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/20301647#20301647

Johannes_B

@clemens Wow, i even know why i was pinged :-) Thanks.

David Carlisle

@clemens there is a question on exactly that the other day, it wasn't you was it?

Johannes_B

@clemens You got an exsheets question on main.

David Carlisle

7

A: Baselineskip not interpreted in a tabularx keyvalue environment

You need \\[10\normalbaselineskip] as \baselineskip is 0pt in tabular enviornments so that rows (and especially vertical rules) have no gaps. It sort of works by accident if the final column is a p (or here X) column as locally within that column the baseline is reset for normal typesetting...

@clemens you don't want to remove those zero settings;-)

Danu

Hi guys, I've got a short question

Joseph Wright

2:44 PM

@Danu Indeed

Danu

I'm editing a decently long document (~80 pages), and I will be making a significant amount of mostly quite minor changes

@JosephWright lol

I was wondering whether there is any standard way to 'highlight' such changes in LaTeX so that the result can be easily compared to the original

Either in the .tex file or the resulting .pdf

Joseph Wright

@Danu Are you using version control for your source?

David Carlisle

@Danu lots of ways, latexdiff for example or just normal diff and some post processing, or hand markup with todonotes or similar or...

Danu

@JosephWright What's version control? I haven't really done anything yet, btw

@DavidCarlisle latexdiff, interesting, thanks!

That's just a package or something?

David Carlisle

@Danu any system that lets you check in each version of a file and compare to previous versions. svn, git, are most common these days

Joseph Wright

2:48 PM

@clemens I see you updated acro to use \tl_mixed_case:n :-)

David Carlisle

eg I changed a file yesterday and you can see the changes here

code.google.com/p/dpctex/source/…

Danu

Alright

Joseph Wright

@clemens I've got another addition to expl3 to make this weekend that I'll contact you about (for something you do in chemgreek)

Danu

@DavidCarlisle Looks pretty good

David Carlisle

@Danu I hadn't changed that file for a while:-)

clemens

2:49 PM

@JosephWright yes :)

@JosephWright ok

Johannes_B

@JosephWright tex.stackexchange.com/questions/135845/…

Danu

I've gotta run for now, but I'll probably be back in a bit with more questions. If not, the problem is solved ;)

@DavidCarlisle Heh, better late than never!

clemens

@DavidCarlisle don't tempt me :)

Johannes_B

@JosephWright SPAM

-2

A: What is the most practical method to write a book of math or physics problems?

THERE IS A CANDIDATE WHO HAS PLANNED TO WRITE A BOOK OF 8 CHAPTERS, SHE IS PLANNING TO USE RED AND BLACK COLOURS FOR WRITING THAT BOOK, HOWEVER ONCE IT GETS RELEASED,YOU CAN CONTACT HER ON +34489252871583 IN CASE YOU ARE IN DOUBT ABOUT THE CONTENTS OF THAT BOOK, HOWEVER THAT BOOK SHALL BE PRINTED...

clemens

@Johannes_B :)

Joseph Wright

2:55 PM

@Johannes_B That's not right

Johannes_B

@JosephWright What do you mean?

Joseph Wright

@Johannes_B The font part

@Johannes_B The business about using a symbol for some cases and powers for others I really don't like

@Johannes_B I guess I might implement it at some stage (it's not the only thing people do I don't like)

Johannes_B

@JosephWright It was more a get your attention on this kind of thing. If it is right/useful or even worth implementing, is not my decision. :-)

@ChristianHupfer YEAYYYYYY, another one tex.stackexchange.com/questions/134188/…

Johannes_B

3:32 PM

How would we treat that one?

0

Q: Roboto Font doesn't work

I'm using a template in which the main font is DejaVuSansCondensed. I'm trying to switch from that font to the Roboto one. It's been more than two hours that I'm trying and I'm still getting errors. For sure I'm doing misteakes into: \usepackage[ nochapters, beramono, eulermath, pdfspa...

yo'

@Johannes_B it's a poor question, partially unclear (the preamble is messy and incomplete), and actually not answerable. I would zap it

Joseph Wright

Closed

Johannes_B

Thanks.

Another one derive from my favourite template

0

Q: 'Missing $ inserted' error after adding Slovak language

I am creating derivative work of classic thesis template from Andre Miede (http://www.miede.de/index.php?page=classicthesis). What I have done was: changing the title in file "classicthesis-config.tex" from "A Classic Thesis Style" to "Periodický výskyt básnikov v dejinách Číny". adding option ...

babel classicthesis latex-project

Periodic appearance of poets in the history of China :-)

barbara beeton

4:26 PM

@PaulGessler -- i still think this would be a useful list. maybe a topic for a blog? a [big-list] does have the advantage that entries can be up- or down-voted, but a blog could be compiled with editorial overview. (just a suggestion; i'm not about to undertake it. i did, however, in the dim, distant past, promise to prepare a blog entry with an annotated list of the books/other published resources dealing with the composition of mathematics, and i do intend to deliver. sometime.)

Johannes_B

4:40 PM

@DavidCarlisle The official line is you should always use *latex* commands li*n*e minipage

David Carlisle

@Johannes_B you have edit rights:-)

Johannes_B

@DavidCarlisle Nah, you can do it yourself ;-)

David Carlisle

@Johannes_B I lost it, got a link?

Johannes_B

1

Q: Keeping a chapter on a single page

I'm writing a class for our firm's reports. I'd like to provide an environment overview that puts a chapter heading "Overview" and then keeps the text in the environment on the one page (as best as it can). Right now, my class essentially mimics: \documentclass[a4paper,11pt,titlepage,headings=b...

page-breaking

David Carlisle

@Johannes_B or we could leave it to @barbarabeeton to sniff it out and fix it along with cutting remarks in the edit log:-)

Johannes_B

4:44 PM

@DavidCarlisle :-D

David Carlisle

@Johannes_B fixed thanks

barbara beeton

@DavidCarlisle -- oh, the agony! nothing i said was untrue.

David Carlisle

@barbarabeeton not untrue doesn't mean not cruel and hurtful:)

barbara beeton

@DavidCarlisle -- if you feel hurt, then i apologize.

David Carlisle

@barbarabeeton Oh don't do that:-)

barbara beeton

4:51 PM

@DavidCarlisle -- why not? do you wish to live with unintentionally inflicted pain?

David Carlisle

@barbarabeeton perhaps.

Paul Gessler

@barbarabeeton you're preaching to the choir... I'm not one who voted to close (either time). I wouldn't have written the answer if I didn't think it would be useful.

barbara beeton

5:33 PM

@PaulGessler -- i know you find this idea useful. maybe you could help persuade other likely "suspects" to consider the blog idea? if someone comes forward to put one together, i'm willing to help locate candidates for listing, and maybe even comment on their "suitability" (i.e., adherence to "best practices", clarity of "author interface", etc.). just because the final document "looks nice" doesn't mean it isn't a real beast internally.

i favor books that are both attractive to readers and internally easy to follow.

David Carlisle

@egreg reading documentation again.

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Just a look at the TOC.

David Carlisle

@egreg I only got as far as a picture of the installer:-)

egreg

@DavidCarlisle I was in a good mood because Italy beat Scotland at Murrayfield. :)

A well deserved penalty try at the last minute. :D

barbara beeton

@GonzaloMedina -- here to discuss theorem numbering.

David Carlisle

5:47 PM

@egreg yes I switched on 5 minutes before the end and was all set to ping you with a sarcastic comment. Good job I waited for the final whistle.

@barbarabeeton will we do? @GonzaloMedina's not here:-)

barbara beeton

@DavidCarlisle -- topic of discussion: How to Nest Proofs in a Useful Way; @Gonzalo invited me to discuss in chat. he uncovered some problems, and wasn't entirely specific what they were; suggested chat. so if you know what he found, ... (i haven't tried running the test yet.)

egreg

@barbarabeeton How to nest proofs in a useful way? Don't nest proofs, that's so easy!

@barbarabeeton A long subdivided proof should be a section by itself.

barbara beeton

@egreg -- true enough, but i've seen it happen in real books. (well, if you consider books published by ams to be real.)

David Carlisle

@egreg you'd never get far in the automatic theorem community with that attitude:-)

barbara beeton

@egreg -- i don't disagree, but since i'm not a mathematician, and lots of authors don't ask for "author support", i usually don't have any way of influencing them.

Christian Hupfer

6:02 PM

@Johannes_B: Oh f..., it's already closed ... I wanted to Vtc so deeply ;-)

Sean Allred

6:39 PM

@DavidCarlisle Ahh – my university's project page 404's, but not the link I was referring to.

I'll update the project page link anyway.

David Carlisle

@SeanAllred yes I just made a comment "last" isn't very specific if you don't notice every link on a quick scan:-)

Sean Allred

@DavidCarlisle Fair enough :)

David Carlisle

@SeanAllred so have they deleted you? You think they'd raise a statue or something.

Sean Allred

@DavidCarlisle It was unceremonious.

David Carlisle

@SeanAllred I was looking for the full text of the Anne Brüggemann-Klein paper, It's on research gate but I don't want to send people there. (you need to have an account which is free but...)

Sean Allred

6:46 PM

@DavidCarlisle And my, Springer asks a steep sum for the text :(

@DavidCarlisle I'm magical cutebugs.net/files/pagination/tr234.pdf

Whoops – not the same paper, it seems. Same authors… different years

David Carlisle

@SeanAllred yes I wondered about that, I bet it's same just republished in the springer lecture notes later. The house on page 6 though is rubbish i should send them my house drawing

@SeanAllred I suppose I could log in to RG and check the text that is there...

@SeanAllred ah RG has it from two sources, one the cutebugs link you showed and the other from AnneB. submitted in 2014. So I guess that's the paper.

Sean Allred

7:07 PM

@DavidCarlisle Behold, the power of the internet! But what's RG?

And I think the house is lovely.

David Carlisle

@SeanAllred research gate: it claims to be the network of choice for connecting academics, but actually like all the rest it just sends increasingly annoying emails telling you you haven't used it recently:-)

@SeanAllred one of @PauloCereda's favourites I think.

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Also encourages questionable uploading of copyright material

Paulo Cereda

7:49 PM

@DavidCarlisle Surprisingly I don't have a duck photo in my profile.

I blame my dept for forcing us to keep track of our activities.

@JosephWright Pretty much. :) But I love to fool them. :)

@JosephWright: e.g, researchgate.net/publication/…

Check the "Full text". :)

Joseph Wright

8:54 PM

Looks pretty certain I'll make the TUG meeting :-)

Sean Allred

9:30 PM

Woohoo!

git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/auctex.git/commit/…

Also, @JosephWright :D I wish I could make it to Darmstadt – it's a long way away

But I'm looking forward to next year's meeting :)

Joseph Wright

@SeanAllred That one I won't make, I think!

Sean Allred

@JosephWright :) You're a fair bit closer to Darmstadt ;)

Next year's is going to be on the east coast of the US, right?

(As I understand / recall)

Joseph Wright

@SeanAllred Canada I think

Sean Allred

@JosephWright As it so happens, I'm actually closer to Canada these days… still not sure how I feel about it :) It gets very cold this far north.

But good to know, thanks :)

1010011010

9:52 PM

Is there any typographical term for balancing interword spacing evenly across paragraphs rather than across a single line of a paragraph?

percusse

@1010011010 There is a design book of someone that I forgot but he does it manually and meticulously. It should be here somewhere. I don't think there was a name for it though

Very helpful comment there. Super concrete. Sorry

1010011010

@percusse I know it. "Trees maps and theorems"

percusse

@1010011010 Ah yes. I think that's it.

I think the proper name would be Justification OCD

1010011010

@percusse In other words, there is no parameter in TeX/LaTeX that could do anything for me here?

percusse

10:08 PM

@1010011010 I'm almost sure that you can't do it as line breaking algorithm doesn't look ahead.

But I'm not 100% sure.

Paulo Cereda

@SeanAllred yay moose!

percusse

And to be honest, it is über-ultra-clean. I somehow don't find it so appealing to read the text as boxes like that. It needs some sort of dirt somewhere to make it feel like not-a-glossy-magazine page.

Maybe it is the magazines' bad reputation of overdesigning the page that makes me feel like that.

1010011010

@percusse I'm experimenting with typographical design and I this very style could very well appeal to me, but if TeX doesn't have any implementation for it, I won't bother to spend an extra hour per paragraph to make it a perfect square

egreg

@1010011010 TeX's algorithm does it! It tries to avoid incompatible lines next to each other; lines can be tight, decent, loose or very loose, depending on the amount of interword space stretching or shrinking and the algorithm's job is to ensure that consecutive lines are not more than one degree apart.

@1010011010 So tight can follow or precede a decent line, but not a loose or very loose one.

@1010011010 Dividing the interword spacing uniformly across the whole paragraph is simply impossible, unless all words have equal length.

@1010011010 Of course, the algorithm may not succeed in realizing its objective, and in this case overfull or underfull lines may appear (with warning).

1010011010

10:25 PM

@egreg How can I tell TeX my aim is rectangular paragraphs? I know parfill but what else can do it? Do I have to play with spacefactor locally? (Sounds horribly fishy but got to start somewhere.)

egreg

@1010011010 A battle lost in advance.

@1010011010 The space factor has nothing to do with this. The parameters you need to act on are \tolerance and \parfillskip. With suitably long paragraphs you can get what you want, but if paragraphs are less than, say, six lines, you'll get horrible spacing.

1010011010

@egreg Such small paragraphs don't look appealing to begin with.

egreg

@1010011010 Try this :)

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{microtype}
\usepackage{kantlipsum}

\begin{document}

\parindent=0pt
\parfillskip=0pt
\parskip=6pt % to show paragraph breaks

\kant

\end{document}

@1010011010 If I try with \usepackage[numbers]{kantlipsum} and \kant[1-160], only paragraph number 154 can't be typeset as a rectangle (it's seven lines long).

@1010011010 If I add \tolerance=850, also that paragraph typesets as a rectangle, but with large interword spaces

1010011010

10:42 PM

@egreg Interesting. Maybe we'll find Kant's work in a magazine soon @percusse. :-) Anyway, I'll write up some text and test your document against it. Thanks egreg. :-)

David Carlisle

10:58 PM

@1010011010 \raggedright?

1010011010

@DavidCarlisle I'm looking for left and right justified text which also has balanced interword spacing across all lines. egreg's example is actually pretty explanatory for visualizing the desired result.

David Carlisle

@1010011010 but egreg was showing something different (that you asked for later) \parfillskip=0. that does not force the inter-word space on lines to match. You can not have the same interword space on all lines unless you give up justification.

@1010011010 \parfillskip has essentially no affect on interword space (other than affecting the total amount of space that the text has to fill)

1010011010

@DavidCarlisle Good point. I suppose balancing within reason is a more accurate but also more confusing phrasing.

David Carlisle

@1010011010 well as @egreg said tex already tries not to have very tight and very loose lines next to each other. But \parfillskip=0pt is likely to force more rather than less variability in word space, as it removes the major contributor to stretchable space, so stretchable word space is the only thing tex has to vary to achieve justification (ignoring microtype for now)

1010011010

@DavidCarlisle I know the risks. Textual rewriting may be unavoidable. It's just a concept. I might abandon it if it ends up hurting the information transfer.

David Carlisle

11:24 PM

@egreg try your last answer in 2015/01/01

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Will it break? If so, it's better to rethink to it.

David Carlisle

@egreg It breaks on line 1:( ! LaTeX Error: Command \@textsubscript already defined.

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Nice improvement indeed!

David Carlisle

@egreg I just switched my format to use 2015 for testing here and that was the first one that came up. So 100% failure rate so far...

@egreg it would have failed even with the old fixltx2e method (if that package was loaded) \textsubscript was added to fixltx2e last year sometime (but after tl2014)

Should be OK though we just need to ping memoir to get a conditional guard added. I hope....

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Packages and classes trying to be smart and not using \providecommand.

David Carlisle

11:30 PM

@egreg well yes but you could say that about any package defining any command. if the kernel updates and adds the command... Good thing was \RequirePackage[2014/05/01]{latexrelease} worked as advertised and made it work again, undefining \@textsubscript

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