@AlanMunn She says her Dad got his PhD at U. Chicago
2 hours later…
user147690
1:59 AM
A professor at my university said something along the lines of amsart is the 'new' latex. Is this really the industry standard document class now? If so, what is so great about it?
@AlexClark I don't think there's any such thing as an "industry standard" document class. Each publishing house/professional association has its own style. The AMS because it depends so heavily on TeX invests in maintaining the ams styles, but that's about it. And as for new, it's written in current LaTeX not LaTeX3, which is currently under development. @barbarabeeton, who works for AMS may have more to say (or not...).
@AlexClark -- i'm not sure how this got to be considered the "industry standard" article document class. some possibilities: except for the top matter, the structuring and command usage is essentially identical to that of article, so a file prepared with article + amsthm + amsmath can be processed instead with amsart with only the top matter retagged but no other changes. second, amsart is the only document class for articles described in the book "more math into latex".
third, it has a long record of successful use in a production environment.
@AlexClark I like the look of amsart and amsbook, but I wouldn't say it's “the new frontier”, as amsart has been basically the same since 1982 (when AMS-TeX was being used) or, if you prefer, 1995. Not that being twenty years old should be regarded as a flaw: to the contrary, it is good and stable. But it's just a typesetting style and there are others as good as amsart.
@egreg -- remind me, please, when i get back to providence. the text-only pages are a known problem, but i don't remember any particular complaint about always underfull first pages.
@egreg -- maybe something can be done about the underfull condition, but the page number is in exactly the location decreed in the formal specs, and has been there since at least the 1950s. a change there requires a policy decision. where would you like it to be located?
@egreg -- lower, closer to the edge of the paper, or lower, with more separation from the last line of the body? (in the latter case, part of that problem is new, since now a second line is permitted in the copyright block. i've forgotten exactly when that became possible, but it was in this century; nobody thought about the consequences relative to the position of the page number.)
@barbarabeeton The computations by \calclayout result in 584pt (letter paper) or 632pt (A4 paper) for the text height, which is 2pt short of an integral number of lines.
@egreg -- that's true, and it's annoying. but the insistence from "above" was that the last line on a "normal" page (which almost invariably includes math) has to fall at an exact measure when checked with a pica ruler. and there was to be no compromise in the position of the top line of the text block relative to the running head (\topsep). (yes. i know. some people can't count. i've had this argument before, but i'm willing to try again.)
@Johannes: I went to the Gaming chatroom to see about a flagged message, and said a couple of random duck-related sentences. After I left, someone wrote, That guy is weird. :)
@PauloCereda Do ducks have short memory? :) The ones in the lake I saw yesterday were quietly swimming above hundreds of fish, but didn't seem much interested in them.
@AlanMunn If you undeclare commands of some font encoding, you lose them for all fonts in the document. I'm really mystified about the carelessness the GFS Didot font has been packaged with.
@AlanMunn You can remove encoding dependant definitions and then latex falls back to the default definition. latex contains an \UndeclareTextCommand (example below) and egreg has posted a similar \UnDeclareTextComposite. But it is of not use here as gfsdidot redefines all OT1 accent positions and so you wouldn't get an accent either if you fall back to OT1.
This question relates to one about getting a vertical bar longer than \mid.
How to get a vertical bar which is longer than \mid ?
However while the given \middle| solution works for me, it no longer behaves as a binary relation and so loses the space to the left-and-right of it that \mid puts i...
According to texdoc symbols:
\mvert and \mid are identical and produce a relation. \vert is a synonym for | and both produce the same symbol, but should be used in the context of an ordinal, and should be used as an operator, not as a delimiter (p54, bottom). \divides once again produces the sam...
@cfr -- congrats! an interesting feature of the last talk at today's tug session was a reading comprehension "test" of the name of a welsh train station, the one that must have a sign that's longer than the platform.
@AlanMunn -- falling horses, yes. cotton shirts, no. presented two words by two words: "the girl knew the answer was wrong." another sentence that i don't remember accurately enough to quote, but probably not new to you; about people who trusted their ears. general topic: reading comprehension.
@barbarabeeton I like it better than the falling horse.
@barbarabeeton For the temporary ambiguity ones, you can construct really interesting ones with questions. Who did John persuade Bill that Mary would tell Fred to visit. for example, where at persuade and tell you try to resolve the who but fail.
@AlanMunn -- agree. some interesting "markup" added for clarification in examples similar to your later sentence. all based on testing with dyslexic students. seems to make sense; of course, more testing is always a good thing.
