@PauloCereda -- golly, i knew knuth's birthday, but i didn't know that jill was born in the same year i graduated from college! oh, dear! now i really do feel like a fossil.
@PauloCereda -- didn't say i felt bad, just old. (i now have a neat picture of me with a real fossil -- a mastodon in the hessisches landesmuseum in darmstadt. i even know some of the history of this mastodon, at least its exhumation; that was the subject of a painting in a little museum in baltimore, and i visited that a number of times when i was growing up. maybe i'll post the picture to amuse you all.)
@ChristianHupfer Ah. Do you have any idea what trouble is needed to teach LaTeX in a two day course in different schools? Something like a touring lecturer.
@ChristianHupfer I think touring schools and teaching kids is the wrong approach. We would need to teach teachers and spread the word. But how to do it? We cannot force them to work with LaTeX. Lead by example?
@PauloCereda The Ice Age movies are real documentaries -- anybody who is claiming something different will be punished ...with ... working ... eh... with Microsoft Office for one complete month and pure TeX abstinence ...
@Johannes_B I agree ... teaching pupils is the wrong way because most of them do not really have the need, unless they have to provide a "Facharbeit" in Seminarkurs etc. You've to have teacher that multiply the use and power of LaTeX amongst them
@ChristianHupfer They should be familiar with the look of LaTeX generated output, compare with that of Word, followed by a Let me show you how i can easily get that nice output just like in the book. If you are not aware of a difference, there is no need to look further.
@ChristianHupfer What are the newbies here? writing bachelor/master/dissertation stuff. They really don't see the need to learn anything. After all, they have a degree soon and everyhting will work for them. If not, it's the programs fault. (sorry, i sometimes have that feeling)
@Johannes_B Yes, the newbies are such one who never used LaTeX before and demand to suck a thesis out within a week, grabbing some template of www.template-hell.org and 'use' it
@Johannes_B and @Johannes_B -- there's a really nice article received for the next (post-proceedings) issue of tugboat by a young man from vienna who has just finished gymnasium. it's entitled "tex in schools, just say yes"; it details his experience introducing tex to the faculty and students at his school, and is very well argued. can't pass it around now, but do look for it near the end of the year.
I want to disable automatic kerning for a few lines in my text as the \textwidth before kerning and after kerning is not the same. And I'm sure there is a simple command to do so, but just can't figure it out.
Which command do I use to stop XeLaTeX from doing automatic
kerning?
Or better still ...
@JosephWright We can never know what a user is trying to do. He could be preparing notes for an introductory lesson showing the difference between kerning and non-kerning. But then again ...
giving an introduction needs some familiarity with a field
I want to create a table for comparing TeX's typography with that of (approximated) other document solutions. I'd like to turn off all TeXnical enhancements for a single column of text—no ligatures, no good kerning, etc. I'm trying to use fontspec to do this, since Computer Modern simply doesn'...
Where can I find information on how the extensible brackets are built in TeX? My document looks like this: i.imgur.com/buWbwMr.png?1 and I'm not happy about the first two brackets (the third one looks fine to me).. I'm already using those amsmath improvements (amsmath is supposed to help right?)
@Johannes_B -- a well designed font should have reasonable sidebearings built into each glyph. kerning is an addition to that. i don't know how to do it (except in a font with the metrics in a tfm file, and i suspect that's not what's wanted here), but i would disable all kern pairs; that should cause the basic glyph widths to be applied, which is as close to fixed metal chunks as one can get. keep the ligatures; those would have been cast as units.
@Johannes_B -- yes. in the font metric information (probably a special table in an opentype font; i'm not experienced with otf tables) there will be information that says essentially "if A is followed by W, move the images closer by xx amount". change that dimension to zero, or remove that instruction from consideration. there are font tools available that support that kind of modification; i don't have them, but one of my colleagues does -- they're kind of specialized.
@1010011010 -- amsmath won't do anything to improve that situation; the font has to be designed to do the right thing, or the engine has to accommodate any necessary adjustments. it looks like the times font is used in your example. and there are lots of times fonts, which aren't all the same.
@barbarabeeton This isn't the Times font... Anyway, I would have to design and fine-tune my own extensible brackets to fix this? Or is it really a matter of dimensions?
@1010011010 -- it may not be times, but it's certainly not computer modern. in computer modern, the "connector" rule and the ends and middle pieces of braces are carefully positioned in the font to line up with one another. at least that's the case with the vertical components. i don't remember whether the horizontal rule is a drawn rule or is pieced together from a small repeating glyph. (cont'd)
sometimes, there is displacement at certain resolutions in the output device owing to roundoff, but the effect in your example seems a little too extreme for that.
I've taken the extensible brackets from cmex10. They're just the computer modern brackets. The font itself is different, so apparently that's the culprit (or not?).
A friend of mine has modified a biblatex style to get his professor satisfied. I suggested a blog entry, which went into a german online magazin and now the first question on TeX.SX appeared.
In order to use a modified Biblatex style with MacTex, I copied the .bbx and .cbx files to usr/local/texlive/2015/texmf-dist/tex/latex/biblatex-iest. But when I try to use it in my document with \usepackage[bibstyle=iest, citestyle=iest, isbn=false, backend=biber]{biblatex}, it won't load it, but...
@Johannes_B -- convert it using tftopl. that will give you a human-readable version, which you can fiddle with, and repack (a renamed version, of course) using pltotf. i haven't looked at a pl file for a while, but as i remember, it's pretty obvious what the elements are, remembering that the character "id" may be an octal number. best to have a printout of the font in front of you for reference.
@1010011010 but it depends what else you put into the vf, you can of course change the widths of the bracket pieces so make things not join, also the sizes of the first few brackets before it switches to a repeatable extension, are (should be) designed to fit with the body size of the main font
@1010011010 -- i've just checked cmex. there are no horizontal pieces for connecting the end and middle pieces of horizontal braces, so that's done with a drawn rule. so that rule must be very carefully positioned, and i don't know how it happens with a non-cm font. but i really don't understand why the longer brace is properly aligned while the shorter ones are not.
@DavidCarlisle -- it's horizontal extensible braces that are misbehaving, not vertical ones. a different kettle of fish.
@ArthurReutenauer How are they being used? If they may be used mid-sentence, then you can't just change the article because you don't know what to change it to without knowing the context. If they are only to be used stand-alone, then using yr when the ordinal begins with a vowel would be enough, yes.
@cfr On the tikz-qtree issue, I guess my plea is just to to not reflexively post forest answers to every tree question, especially linguistics ones if the OP uses tikz-qtree already. Because of the nature of the site, it's easy for such answers to get more votes because forest can do more things, but this has the effect of making the package seem more appropriate for linguistics, while in many cases it may not be. (Even though Sašo himself is a linguist.)
@cfr But I agree that having some drop in styles would be helpful. And I really like the stuff you've been doing with the logic trees.
this is my first stackexchange question, i hope i am in the right place.
i am using overleaf with a template but it lists bibliography in a very strange way, it looks normal when i use 'numbers' instead of 'authoryear' which i need.
this how my bibliography page looks like now
using numbers ...
Using 2.09 font commands, that immediately issue a warning (nag) is loaded. Loading of package etex and fixltx2e (ok, overleaf is still running TL14). hyperref is loaded in the middle of the preamble.
@Johannes_B Ah, that's much clearer -- not particularly wrong if there are no other packages or strange counter etc. related stuff afterwards \usepackage{hyperref}
@Johannes_B If I were a representative of the University of Bristol I would sue that guy who committed this template crime in the name of the University of Bristol
The question Followup to "How does one type Chinese in LaTeX?" raises an interesting problem. If one tries to paste the code by Leo Liu in this answer, pop up boxes saying
Body cannot contain "??".
where in place of ?? the first used Chinese character appears.
Trying to add Chinese charact...
@ChristianHupfer @Johannes_B Well if you read it with a somewhat less combative eye and comment out all the packages that aren't strictly needed it may not be so awful.
An English professor complained to the pet shop proprietor, "The parrot I purchased uses improper language."
"I'm surprised," said the owner. "I've never taught that bird to swear."
"Oh, it isn't that," explained the professor. "But yesterday I heard him split an infinitive."
Four linguists were sharing a compartment on a train on their way to an international conference on sound symbolism. One was English, one Spanish, one French and the fourth German. They got into a discussion on whose language was the most eloquent and euphonious.
The English linguist said: "Why, English is the most eloquent language. Take for instance the word "butterfly". Butterfly, butterfly... doesn't that word so beautifully express the way this delicate insect flies. It's like flutter-by, flutter-by."
@AlanMunn Point taken (previous comment). (Referred to comment) The thing with logic is that it is really not at all well supported by TeX or, at least, not by LaTeX. The packages which do exist tend to be quite inflexible, not on CTAN and not built on anything like the kind of supporting technologies which other packages tend to use. Maybe I just see more gaps because I know it better, but it seems really unsatisfactory to me. There's no standard for symbols or truth tables or anything much. :(
@PauloCereda: Your joke doesn't work really. In my point eloquent is the wrong term there... Of course butterfly, mariposa and papillon sound better than Schmetterling, but that's not eloquence, in my point of view...
@AlanMunn Yes, i am. There will be (i hope) a discussion on templates and how to get users started. I want to invite you to join as soon as everything is set up. :-)
@AlanMunn That one is ardderchog. Except that the bit about trolley carts doesn't make sense. Especially like the bit about *** (name deleted to protect the guilty and, hence, the more-or-less innocent).
@AlanMunn Aren't trolley carts what we'd call shopping trolleys? I think they mean 'trolley cars'. In that case, yes. Trolleology. The Trolley Problem. Although it is all extremely unfair: The problem was commandeered by the Americans and Americanised in the process. The original is in an article by a British philosopher who, quite naturally, called them 'trams'.
@AlanMunn Oh, yes. It would make sense if they said 'trolleys'. It is the 'trolley carts' which don't make sense. If we are on that side of Atlantic, it reduces a life-and-death dilemma requiring the reader to play god to the everyday problem of navigating shopping aisles searching for the coffee. (Not worth looking for tea of course.)
A runaway trolley cart might dent your car while you're trying to choose between a dark and medium roast, but it doesn't have the same moral force as a runaway trolley heading for 5 innocent persons who will die unless you push a conveniently positioned 'fat man' onto the track to prevent it.
@cfr I think most Americans are so unfamiliar with public transportation of any sort (except in a few places) that 'trolley cart' makes perfect sense to them. :)
I want to disable automatic kerning for a few lines in my text as the \textwidth before kerning and after kerning is not the same. And I'm sure there is a simple command to do so, but just can't figure it out.
Which command do I use to stop XeLaTeX from doing automatic
kerning?
Or better still ...
I want to create a table for comparing TeX's typography with that of (approximated) other document solutions. I'd like to turn off all TeXnical enhancements for a single column of text—no ligatures, no good kerning, etc. I'm trying to use fontspec to do this, since Computer Modern simply doesn'...
this is my first stackexchange question, i hope i am in the right place.
i am using overleaf with a template but it lists bibliography in a very strange way, it looks normal when i use 'numbers' instead of 'authoryear' which i need.
this how my bibliography page looks like now
using numbers ...
The question Followup to "How does one type Chinese in LaTeX?" raises an interesting problem. If one tries to paste the code by Leo Liu in this answer, pop up boxes saying
Body cannot contain "??".
where in place of ?? the first used Chinese character appears.
Trying to add Chinese charact...
