TeX, LaTeX and Friends - 2016-05-31

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12:29 AM

@UlrikeFischer I had to start a dedicated chat room for donkey code because the system wouldn't let me post the source for my donkey :(.

Anonymous

1:27 AM

@DavidCarlisle Actually it's not quite working. If I put a text inside a e.g. rectangle in a SVG (center the text exactly in the middle, using a Inkscape command), and export it via Inkscape into a pdf_tex, then that text (when put inside \parbox{3cm}{\centering will be nevertheless a little bit off-set to the right. It will not be centered exactly in the middle of the rectangle.

Anonymous

2:38 AM

@DavidCarlisle It can be fixed by altering the text into a single punctuation point. And then centering that text in Inkscape. Then past your real text into that. Then, convert to tex_pdf, and just delete the [lb] from the makebox. That's the only way I have found to really get the text centered. If you center the complete text in Inkscape first, (then you'd use [l] in the makebox) you'll have minor horizontal alignment offset problems.

3:30 AM

In this series of revisions: http://tex.stackexchange.com/posts/312310/revisions
the user posted some fairly personal information. I lorem ipsum'ed it to protect their privacy, and they quickly reverted the edit.
Did I overstep? I admit I'm not the best at determining what counts as personal information.

Independently of that, the user re-added the latex3 tag, which looks irrelevant to the question. I'd remove it but I don't want to start a back-and-forth edit war. What's the best way for me to proceed here?

3 hours later…

6:04 AM

@ArunDebray I removed the tag, it clearly doesn't fit. And for that matter, the question is on the verge of being closed as opinion-based at the moment.

Christian Hupfer

6:30 AM

@DavidCarlisle Apparently, yes

@ArunDebray I don't think it's personal information: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman

6:55 AM

@ArunDebray Personal info is down to the poster: if they are happy for it to be there, I'd tend to leave it. If they request removal, ping/flag for the mods: we can redact it out entirely of the history

7:23 AM

Hi folks, I have a question regarding the linked question. There is one (accepted) answer, which in my opinion is not really helpful (using the url package (\url{\#}) to escape the # character). The question is marked as a duplicate of a question with the correct answer (use \#). Now, if somebody comes Google and sees \url{\#} as accepted and upvoted answer, they might use that, while \# is probably what they need. tex.stackexchange.com/questions/312226/insert-in-bibtex-entry

Am I wrong, and you need \url{\#}? Should I (or somebody else) leave a comment, that \# is enough? Or just leave it that way?

7:38 AM

@egreg Klaus and Zeman?

@yo' :)

@hbaderts The accepted answer is the answer that helped the poster. It doesn't need to be correct/good.

@egreg Hello!

user image

@egreg ^^ just compare :)

@PedroTamaroff Hello!

7:39 AM

Suddenly my compiler is giving me this error:

This is BibTeX, Version 0.99d (TeX Live 2013/Debian) The top-level auxiliary file: Especies.aux The style file: amsra.bst I found no \bibdata command---while reading file Especies.aux Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "Joyal" Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "Weibel" Warning--I didn't find a database entry for "CE" (There was 1 error message)

=(

I was just correcting typos, however.

@PedroTamaroff try deleting the aux file.

Process started

I couldn't open file name `Especies.aux'

Process exited with error(s)

@hbaderts No, \url is too much; I left a comment.

@PedroTamaroff You have to recreate the .aux file before running BibTeX

@PedroTamaroff I mean, remove aux file, and compile the latex file. Then run bibtex

@egreg How is that done?

I am trying to compile.

I guess my compiler is trying to do both at the same time?

7:43 AM

@PedroTamaroff seems so. You probably use one of the "clever" tools :-)

@yo' I'm using TeXMaker.

Should I comment the place where I add the bibtex package?

@PedroTamaroff bibtex package? I don't know any bibtex package. It seems that if you want to solve your issue, you better ask on the main site, making your question detailed about how you compile, because the issue seems quite complicated

(also, I unfortunately have to go in a short while)

OK. I found someone asking something similar, but I don't understand the ansqer.

Oh, this was stupid.

I accidentally changed the compile option to BibTeX.

SIGH.

8:09 AM

@cfr :)

@UlrikeFischer It is similar to that cartoon Cown and Chicken. :)

@percusse ooh I have the duck here: gist.github.com/cereda/3136565

@runartrollet It would be difficult to spot the looney in here! :)

Hello. Can someone kindly help me with digging up a question How to print beamer slides in a4 format one slide per page?

(obviously in landscape)

"The easiest way to print a presentation is to user the Acrobat Reader with the option “expand small pages to
paper size” form the printer dialog enabled." (From [beameruseguide](ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/TeX/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/beamer/doc/beameruserguide.pdf).

Crazy.

8:29 AM

@Matsmath Crazy? Isn't that a quite simple printer setting?

8:55 AM

@JosephWright I'll reopen tex.stackexchange.com/questions/312226 just to add a CW answer; can you close it back? The suggestion about \url{\#} is very silly. It's a duplicate of tex.stackexchange.com/questions/39930

@egreg OK

@JosephWright See also the doubts by @hbaderts above; thanks.

@cfr I got the code and already printed it out (I made a collection of images and will now bring them to the reponsable).

9:28 AM

A student got 32/100 in a test, with the limit being 50. They ask whether there's any chance that they passed (like, that the person grading the test overlooked 18 points). Sigh.

Anonymous

Bug report: If you have the following loaded:
         \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}  %%% to access \textquotedbl
then the following:
         \section{``Some" anything
won't give you the curly double quote-marks (it lacks the closing ones). How to fix please?

@VincentVerheyen not a bug, a feature. Use '' (two standard apostrophes in a row) for closing double quotes.

@VincentVerheyen I lose you. The code shall be: \section{``Some''}

Anonymous

@yo' Ok thanks, I understand now.

@VincentVerheyen you're welcome

Anonymous

@yo' Now, for another use, I am just looking for how to produce straight double quotes: as "Some". --- Ok, not so difficult to find. tex.stackexchange.com/questions/52529/straight-quotes

9:35 AM

@VincentVerheyen the question is: what do you need them for?

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\begin{document}
"
\end{document}

Anonymous

@yo' I want to reproduce the handwritten caption of an image. Facsimile.

Anonymous

@yo' Or maybe just $''$?

@VincentVerheyen no, please.

Anonymous

@yo' If end-users will use CTRL+F, then they'll rather type " then a curly quote. Otherwise, it can prevent them from finding what they look for.

@VincentVerheyen there are tools for that. (Sorry no time to look for that now as I really have to go, but it's doable to have different things showing up and different things indexed)

Anonymous

9:38 AM

@yo' Ok, yes. I have thought about that. It might be a prettier option indeed. The annoying thing is I'll have to edit a lot of sub-documents, as the text is situated in many different pdf_tex's.

@JosephWright was reading some of the older latex source code, that had proper documentation comments:

%   %% NOTE: THE ACTUAL TEX CODE TO EFFECT THE NEXT THREE
%   %% LINES IS THE BIGGEST PIECE OF KLUDGERY I HAVE EVER SEEN.
%   %% IT IS BASED UPON A HACK OBTAINED FROM KNUTH THAT I DON'T
%   %% UNDERSTAND IN THE LEAST.

7

10:02 AM

@DavidCarlisle Leslie?

@JosephWright yes that was from % LATEX VERSION 0.9 - FOR USE WITH TEX VERSION 0.95

@DavidCarlisle :-)

10:40 AM

@PauloCereda I remember cleaning that up with proper coordinates but was it the cake? Hmm, I don't remember exactly

2 hours later…

Christian Hupfer

12:18 PM

@barbarabeeton: The latest TUGboat 37/1 arrived this morning. No further worries from my side ;-)

@ChristianHupfer -- glad it arrived. thanks for letting me know -- i'll pass the word along.

Christian Hupfer

@barbarabeeton Thanks! I assume the delay was due to regional holidays etc.

@barbarabeeton As we're on the subject, mine arrived yesterday.

2 hours later…

Christian Hupfer

2:26 PM

@DavidCarlisle: Why did you delete your solution?

@percusse Sir, I cannot remember a cleanup. Maybe it was some cake...

@ChristianHupfer it was same as yours more or less

Christian Hupfer

@DavidCarlisle Ah, I see. Well, the question is not really well designed, in my point of view

@DavidCarlisle But I am a little proud of myself that I remembered the \def\foo#1\label#1 splitting stuff way ;-)

@ChristianHupfer you are probably more used to @egreg trying to steal a tick rather than answers being deleted:-)

Christian Hupfer

2:43 PM

@DavidCarlisle A fate I share with many other users here ;-)

2 hours later…

Christian Hupfer

5:03 PM

@jotagah: Hello

5:40 PM

@ArunDebray Hi Arun, I see you seem to be editing old posts to add language-particular code formatting markup. These are really pretty trivial edits, and they will fill up the front page unnecessarily. It's fine to make such edits if you happen upon such a question and are providing a new answer, for example, but to seek them out isn't really the best practice.

1 hour later…

7:08 PM

Evening all

Allegedly it is June tomorrow

@JosephWright indeed; this sudden change seems to happen periodically year after year

@yo' Where are you ATM?

@JosephWright Prague

@yo' Oh, so bad there too

@JosephWright you can't escape it :-)

7:11 PM

@yo' Probably you can: Saudi Arabia or whatnot

@JosephWright no, thanks.

@yo' Didn't say it was a good plan

@JosephWright didn't say you'd said :)

@JosephWright How do you do, btw?

@yo' Fine, working on some format-mode experiments (@DavidCarlisle might guess what)

@JosephWright ah, formats :)

7:18 PM

@yo' Indeed

7:30 PM

@JosephWright I just wrote a list of all the things I need to get done this summer and it filled my whiteboard.

@AlanMunn You wrote Publish papers, get grants in REALLY big letters?

@AlanMunn Or you have a very small whiteboard?

@AlanMunn too bad, with a cluttered whiteboard, you can't do any job done.

@JosephWright I have a 4' x 3' whiteboard. But the "publish papers" part is broken down into actual papers. There's also a column for house maintenance and another for bureacrashit.

@AlanMunn :-)

@AlanMunn I have 'fill out form to complete probation', which I guess would go in your latter category

@JosephWright But I think your comment about June was more about weather than time passing?

7:34 PM

@AlanMunn Yes: it's pretty cold here

@JosephWright Exactly. I have to close my last grant, which also means writing my final report.

@JosephWright Here's it's 27 and beautifully sunny. Sorry. :)

@AlanMunn Units?

@JosephWright If it were F we'd be in big trouble...

@AlanMunn Could be kelvin ;-)

@JosephWright :D

7:36 PM

@AlanMunn I work with people who say things like 'At high temperature, 300 mK, ...'

@JosephWright Context is everything. ;)

@JosephWright It's a well known property of gradable adjectives. A big ant is much smaller than a small elephant.

@JosephWright how are you still on probation? Haven't you been in post for a while?

@StrongBad Probation for a lecturer in the UK = 5 years

@AlanMunn Indeed

@JosephWright At Nottingham it was only 3.

I thought it got hard to make people redundant after 4 years.

@StrongBad Used to be 3, but the issue with that is you can't be sure people will get grants, etc. (you actually have to make a decision during the last year, so really a 3 year probation is 'really' only 2 years)

@StrongBad Wouldn't be redundancy (job still exists), would be not extending contract

@StrongBad I have a reasonable grant and some papers going off to good journals (fingers-crossed), so I'm relatively laid back about it; the form though is depressing and I can't imagine why people choose to fill it in (it's the same one as for promotions)

7:41 PM

@JosephWright sounds like they change the "terms" since I went through it. I had an open ended contract from the get go.

@StrongBad in some countries, universities and the academy of sciences have an exception from the employment laws. Here for instance, academics are the only people who can be repeatedly hired fixed-term.

@StrongBad I think mine says open-ended but subject to the probation being passed

@yo' Not here

@JosephWright I had craziness when I started. They gave me 2 contracts so that I could still apply for fellowships. The first one was 3 years and was subject to passing probation and the second one started immediately following the first.

@StrongBad Like I say, we've moved to 5 years as 3 years wasn't realistic (or at least the university had to take more risk, which they didn't like)

@JosephWright if you change the job description, you can still repeatedly hire people on fixed term contracts. Last last person in the chain can get whacked for years of redundancy pay.

7:46 PM

Funny (sad) thing: there's nothing like probation actually at the universities here; it's only the academia that applies this.

@JosephWright 5 is a lot more realistic to judge someone. Trying to get a grant right off the bat can be hard.

@StrongBad Yes, certainly, except at least where I've worked the redundancy has to come from the central pot (part of the top-slice the uni takes), so it doesn't affect the PIs responsible for the grant that happens to be paying you when you finish

@JosephWright Nottingham dumps it on the school budget. They didn't let much come out of the central pot.

They tried to dump it on the PI and then they realized grants didn't work that way.

8:09 PM

Still on the train after a long day. I had to go to Milan for a long meeting. But I had two glasses of wine on the journey back. :)

@egreg you just reminded me I shall have something to eat :)

@yo' To bed without dinner, you naughty boy!

@AlanMunn sorry about that. I was trying to do them in small batches so as not to clutter up the frontpage, but I will stop.

@egreg oh no!

@ArunDebray No problem. It's not a big deal, but I think if you're searching out such questions to edit them for language code, it's probably not terribly useful given that it can bring obscure questions to the front page.

8:41 PM

@egreg a large bowl of salad it is :)

9:23 PM

@Paulo What can you say to this? :-O (Brazilian State names translated literally into English)

user image

5

Q: A note with the dangerous bend symbol: how to vertically center text and symbol?

I want to make a command (to be used mainly with the beamer class) which typesets a text note with a dangerous bend sign \dbend on the left, the two vertically centered with respect to each other. I've used a tabular environment with the m column provided by the array package: \documentclass{st...

> How much quacks would a TeXduck chuck if a TeXduck could chuck quacks? Would a TeXduck chuck quacks if quacks could chuck TeXducks?

@Paulo and then, this: ^^

10:05 PM

@yo' Some are close, others are just a poor attempt to be funny.

@yo' ooh <3

10:22 PM

@PauloCereda what a pity :(

:D

@yo' :)

@JosephWright: do you think we could delete this answer: meta.tex.stackexchange.com/a/6678/3094

10:37 PM

I know we've spent more time on the top-user's-rep question in Meta than we probably ought to have, this comment makes me wonder if the real issue is something like our proportion of 'engaged' users, i.e., users with more than some threshold of questions and/or answers. It's very likely that drive-by questioners don't vote much at all.

But if you hang around, you're more likely to vote more. So more questions and answers get votes because we have overall a more committed user base.

@AlanMunn We have 108 users who delivered at least 2000 votes. SU has 86 of these; given they are much larger, this figure is very poor.

@yo' Yes, that supports this idea, I think.

For 500 votes, the figures are 349 here vs. 469 there, still pretty similar figures

For 100 votes, it's 1311 here vs. 2800 there

@Alan ^^

@yo' Interesting. What's their total user base?

@AlanMunn I've got no idea. Let's say that to be a user, you have to give 11 votes (this is the data I can easily collect). They have 26415 of these, we have 7487. So they are almost 4 times larger.

Also: 314k Qs there, 113k Qs here. Note, however, that the unanswered rate is much higher there, I think they get more rubbish to deal with than we do, even relatively

10:53 PM

@yo' So the conclusion is that we're actually more of a community than the other sites. :)

@AlanMunn well, we vote a lot, deal with rubbish effectively and we moderate ourselves. The only drawback I see is that in some sense, there's a strong clique of people who are friends via the chat, and these people are "always right", and it's not clear how many people actually disagree because it's difficult to raise your voice against this group of users

we can't judge since we both belong to this group, right :)

@yo' I guess the question is what sources of disagreement there could be. For example we have very thankfully not turned into de.text.tex...

@AlanMunn late closure, hate of reviews, on-topicness of certain things, etc.

@yo' hate of reviews? you mean we hate robo-reviews?

@AlanMunn not only that. You have people here hating the close review queue as is, because it often leads to questions "prematurely closed" (in their opinion)

10:59 PM

@yo' Late closure is probably the key to our success and friendliness.

@yo' Guilty as charged. :)

@AlanMunn yeah, I don't disagree

@AlanMunn no, not "guilty", I only point out what I see could be a source of ... disagreement

@yo' I think the perception of a clique comes about from heavy handed moderation which we very thankfully do not have.

@yo' Just kidding (it's really an idiom).

@AlanMunn no, indeed not. I think that Joseph really does only the things nobody else can, like reopen and close at once, tag synonyms etc.

Needless to say, some other sites do similarly as we do, and only close fast really bad questions, and also rarely downvote (Academia, I'm looking at you)

@StrongBad ^^ see :)

@yo' And how's the atmosphere there? I read things but don't post.

@yo And I'm constantly amazed by the "Should I talk to my advisor" questions...the answer is almost always Yes. :)

@AlanMunn similar to ours: people often comment on answers, tend to answer in comments, you rarely see lower than -1. Note that these two communities have one thing in common: they are largely occupied by academics people

11:04 PM

@yo' Indeed. I hadn't thought about that. (And Math too I would bet).

@AlanMunn Mathematics is a lot about hischoolers and undergrads asking rubbish. MathOverflow is different (I mean, similar)

@yo' Yes, that makes sense. It's true that our questioner base is also quite narrow and more similar to our answerer base.

@AlanMunn it always amazes me that people don't know that they should always talk to their advisors.

@AlanMunn yeah

@yo' we don't downvote at AC.SE much, but we do have users who close questions quickly.

There is a fear that if anything even remotely undergrad related was allowed, that we would get swamped.

11:07 PM

@StrongBad as long as the advisor is easy to talk to. I mean, my advisor (one of them) replies usually within 10 minutes to mails, even now after I graduated. The other one is not that fast, but also replies within a day if she can.

@StrongBad this is understandable (and similar to our point about MathJaX, for instance, though this is a minor thing)

@yo' but I would doubt MathJax questions could over run the site.

But for instance this needed not be closed quickly (IMHO it's on-topic, so if it's not a dupe, it shouldn't have been closed at all):

0

Q: How can I create a DOI for a paper that was uploaded to arXiv but not published somewhere else?

I wonder whether there is any way to create a DOI for a paper that was uploaded to arXiv but not published somewhere else, and have the DOI points to the arXiv URL (e.g., not pointing to some researchgate page).

@StrongBad Hi, so you're the guy with the stripper student. That was one of the weirder questions I've seen there. :)

@StrongBad Did she graduate?

@AlanMunn I am and she did.

@yo' yeah, I am inclined to reopen that question. Just because the answer is on the FAQ of some website, doesn't make it a bad question.

@StrongBad exactly. You know what? I'll pull the strings :)

11:13 PM

@AlanMunn it is by far one of the weirdest teaching experiences I have had.

@StrongBad So the problem solved itself I guess.

Something being on an FAQ somewhere doesn't mean it's off-topic. For one, the FAQ does not open for me at the moment. Voted to reopen. — yo' 18 secs ago

@AlanMunn she was offering her services to everyone. Eventually the head of school stepped in. I think in response to a faculty member taking her up on her offer.

@StrongBad It's definitely a weird situation. I take it she was trying to drum up business for herself rather than to influence people's grading?

I also had a student who would routinely unbutton her blouse before meeting with me. She would stop just outside my door on the way in and way out.

11:16 PM

@StrongBad wow. The most I ever got was bars of chocolate (rejected them) and then, an offer from a student to go to a tea place together, note that the student got about 8/100 in the tests :-)

@AlanMunn it was creepy, but yeah it was just advertising to her.

@yo' As an American working in the UK I experienced all sorts of weird stuff.

Then I rejected free drinks from my students at an almost-official school party where most students and teachers meet together

@StrongBad I guess for her it was not different than if she were selling Avon or Mary Kay or something.

@AlanMunn this was in a psychology department so our students had all sorts of issues. I took it as if she was telling me what restaurant she worked. It was just that the menu was a little exotic.

@yo' Really? We routinely get small gifts from students (usually after a course) and there's never really a sense in which it seems unethical to accept them. Do you have an explicit policy or is this your personal view?

11:20 PM

@AlanMunn my personal view really. Unless it is shareable in the class, I reject.

@yo' Very principled I would say.

31

Q: Is it ethical to accept small gifts from students?

Is it ethical to accept small gifts from students? In past years I have one or two students have given me small gifts, generally a box of chocolates. I judge the size of gifts on my internatinal beer scale where things that cost less than 4 beers (maybe 10 USD) are small token gifts. These have a...

ethics etiquette gifts

@StrongBad the accepted answer pretty much sums up my point. We gave a box of chocolates to one of our profs for his 70's Bday.

Also, I believe the thing is different in first grade course for 1000 students, and a 4th grade course for 4 students where the whole air is very friendly and stuff.

@StrongBad Interesting views there. I certainly haven't received that many gifts. Also it's very common in some cultures (Asian in particular) to give small gifts which it's quite rude to refuse.

@yo' yeah it can be messy. I always cringe a little when it is not a graduating student.

@AlanMunn I think universities really need to do a better job of making a blanket no gift rule. Then it is not rude, but the rule.

11:26 PM

@StrongBad you can always refuse saying that "it is the rule". You don't have to specify what kind of rule it is.

@StrongBad I wonder if that's necessary. My impression is that US universities are much less concerned about this.

@AlanMunn imagine a Student X suing the university for that you did a favour to a Student Y because he gave you a box of chocolates :D

@StrongBad btw, I show some similar thoughts in a Workplace.SE answer:

3

A: How should someone respond to sudden small gifts after a promotion?

In addition to the other answers, I would say that: Non-sharable gifts should be kindly refused, and one should be clear and clean about the reasons: "I don't think that I should accept this gift." The only exception is when it is a "community gift": If most of the department collect money to g...

@yo' But it doesn't take student gifts to trump up false charges. Administrators are good at that all by themselves. So on a likelihood scale, I'm much more worried about real abuse of power.

@AlanMunn yeah I know, but do you know the lawyers, they love stupidity

@StrongBad funny thing is: I wouldn't be able to count the occasions at which I had dinner at my advisor's home.

anyway, I had my night coffee and I'm off. Good night

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