@AlanMunn But is it a grammatical prescription? Seems more to do with the meaning .... (I don't know the term here. Grammar is meaning, too. But the meaning of the grammatical atoms rather than the grammatical structure.) In any case, surely she was wrong. Your ability to have a receipt depended entirely on her, so whether you could have one or not seems a perfectly reasonable question. 'No, we don't issue receipts.' Or 'I'm afraid the tape has run out so you can't have one today.'

@cfr No, technically it's not really grammar, but meaning, that's true. But most things that get called grammar in the everyday sense, aren't (like spelling, for example.) As for whether she was wrong, she was only wrong (with respect to her version of the prescriptive rule) in the same way that the philosophers are right if they don't pass the salt...

@AlanMunn Well, no. The philosophers are definitely wrong if they don't pass you the salt. Just you shouldn't get pissed off if they say 'Yes' first ...

@AlanMunn What do you want to change in the tree exactly?

@cfr The VP node branches to the V, DP and PP are too long. If you remove the PP they get better.

And somebody will probably point out that saying 'Yes' is wrong anyway.

@AlanMunn So do you want the nodes closer together? Or do you want the edge angles to change?

@cfr I guess I want the edge angles to change. So that the tree looks flatter.

@cfr Yes, much better.

\documentclass[border=10pt,multi,tikz]{standalone}
\usepackage[linguistics]{forest}
\forestset{pad/.style={minimum width=5em}}
\begin{document}
\begin{forest}
  nice empty nodes
  [S
    [{every linguist}
    ]
    [
      [1, pad
      ]
      [S
        [ John
        ]
        [
          [T, pad
          ]
          [VP
            [V\\introduced
            ]
            [DP\\$t_{1}$, calign with current
            ]
            [PP\\{to Mary}
            ]
          ]
        ]
      ]
    ]

^^ @AlanMunn

@cfr Great. So I've added an answer to the Heim and Kratzer question. (Against my better judgement.)

@cfr I wonder if it makes sense for you to update some of your forest answers to 2.0?

@AlanMunn I have updated some of them ...

@AlanMunn I've added another. Probably also against what would be my better judgement if I had any.

@egreg Cwac.

@AlanMunn Any in particular you were thinking of ...?

@egreg It is incredible to see somebody say he did not sleep 6 days because of the shape of letter S. :D

That's some dedication/obsession. :)

Morning all

@wilx It's possibly the most difficult capital letter

@JosephWright Morning.

Yay: @StefanKottwitz is hopefully coming to UK-TUG!

@JosephWright I'd favour a better way of doing things as well. :)

@egreg oh my!

@PauloCereda I guess what I was thinking was 'all good, but you normally don't want to do anything in Excel that's not 'throw-away''

@JosephWright Yes. Although there are ways to connect Excel to a data source, so things get better. :)

ooh philosophers dining, how many spoons and forks do they have? :) I am pretty sure it's another context, but still. :)

@AlanMunn, @cfr ^^ :)

I think they don't need forks, as long as there's soup...

Need to start on UK-TUG slides soon ...

@JosephWright Me too. :)

Quaaaaaaaack

@PauloCereda Quack

@JosephWright ooh

@DavidCarlisle: Quack?

@PauloCereda 'ello

@DavidCarlisle <3

Boo!

Party ended. :) You could have seen me with a tie!

Special occasion: my parents' 60th

@egreg Pictures or it didn't happen

@egreg WOW!

@egreg Yay, congrats!

@JosephWright Exactly!

@JosephWright For the tie or the 60th?

@egreg Tie :)

@egreg I know what you look like, I've no idea on your parents

@JosephWright I'll ask for one of the pictures

@egreg :)

@PauloCereda And my sister's 25th

@egreg Cool!

@PauloCereda Made a start: have a title slide :)

@JosephWright you're already way ahead of @PauloCereda's thesis.

@DavidCarlisle Speaking of theses, I have to get the forms done for my first student: need to arrange an external examiner

@JosephWright I'm just proof reading Phil's slides for Tuesday...

@DavidCarlisle Ah, of course

@DavidCarlisle ^^^

@DavidCarlisle Trying to get the 'XeTeX is not pdfTeX' message across continues to be an issue

@JosephWright perhaps we should have made [utf8]{inputenc] stop with an error like other encodings not just give a mild slap on the wrist.

@DavidCarlisle I suspect you are right

@DavidCarlisle People need to not use inputenc (with UTF-8 engines)

@egreg We celebrated my brother's Bday that was yesterday: yesterday by painting a scout cabin today by mowing grass and doing other garden chores at our family garden :-)

@yo' We had a more regular party, after the Mass: food, wine and cake.

@JosephWright on the other hand we could just make it work, if babel's greek option with pdftex can go and find some lgr encoded greek font, it could set up a default font that includes greek under xetex/fontspec. (perhaps)

@egreg we went to the service too, then lunch, then the chores, then coffee, cakes and gifts :)

@JosephWright Joseph's Adventures in Unicodeland, part 2: The Revenge of Glyphs? :)

@DavidCarlisle oy

I just passed @GonzaloMedina in the ranks... anybody heard from him lately?

@Werner Last time I heard from him, he was very busy.

I might check it again.

@PauloCereda ...phew! He's not been on TeX.SE since Nov 2015...

Despite that, I think his answers have kept him accruing reputation like a machine!

I think he had a niche market that he covered with tikz, and his answers are still valuable for many visitors.

No sock-puppetry. :)

@Werner For some reason, i get an upvote for *smileys with LaTeX * every once in a while. I have no idea why :-)

How do people keep track of what the document-level stuff does when it is custom? That is, when it isn't the kind of thing anybody else might want so it isn't something you're going to write a manual for. Or do people write private manuals just for themselves? Or does my not remembering mean it is too complicated? (But I don't remember what my package code does without checking when I do publish it, so that is probably not a good criterion.)

@cfr You mean customizations you've done for a particular document?

@cfr I document my own personal packages (not for public consumption) otherwise I'll forget what's in them. But I don't do much about stuff I do for a single document.

@AlanMunn No. Custom class or package.

@cfr So then yes, I write regular user documentation for them and stick it in the doc folder of the local texmf so that texdoc finds it.

@AlanMunn Local rather than personal? I always keep the code in my personal tree.

@cfr My private class has a 46 page manual

@egreg @AlanMunn So it isn't crazy to consider doing this?

@cfr Personal. I don't use the texmf-local for almost anything.

@cfr It depends on whether you want to call us crazy... :)

@AlanMunn I use it for custom font packages (not custom fonts as I don't have any).

@cfr Yes, me too. That's the only thing.

@AlanMunn Agreed

@egreg Is it any use?

@egreg I mean, does it help? Was it worth writing?

@cfr It can be; I wrote it a few years ago and it's also a test document for the class.

@cfr It also depends a lot on how frequently you use something. I have some customizations for letters which I use infrequently enough that when I diverge from a standard letter I almost always have to consult the 1 pg. doc. I also have a class for a form which I use only once a semester (but to generate multiple forms) and I also use the documentation for that.

@egreg Hmm. I don't think I could make it a test document. The thing is, when I start, I never think I'm going to write anything which will be at all elaborate and then I end up having to provide a legacy option because it has all got so complicated. So I rewrite it but now I can't remember exactly what everything does ...

@cfr Don't you also document your code?

@AlanMunn Er ... How?

@cfr I just use lots of comment lines in my source. Nothing fancy, but that way I can look back at the code and understand what I did. It's a practice learned from writing code professionally I guess.

@cfr Some people like docstrip but I just find it annoying.

@AlanMunn I try to. But I seem to forget to add comments. Also, it takes a long time to find things in the code if I just want to remember how to use it, if that makes sense. Because the bits I need to look at are in different places. For changing the code, that makes sense. But for using the code, not so much.

@cfr Yes, I agree. That's why I also write user documentation for myself.

@AlanMunn I've never been very attracted by docstrip. I don't think I'd like it.

@AlanMunn Especially with key-value stuff. I try to keep all the \tl_new etc. together and all the key setting and stuff together and so on. And then I have standard definitions in a separate file. This makes it much easier to modify the code, but it is a pain if I can't remember which key does what.

@cfr I guess I don't have anything so complicated. Probably my most complicated bit of LaTeX code is the still-to-be-finished tikz-backgammon (which if it every sees the light of day will not be for personal use anyway).

@AlanMunn I have a kind of recipe for producing course packets and it has got rather more elaborate than I originally intended. It is only really a wrapper around a standard class, although I'm not sure how much of the standard class is actually left in the output.

@PauloCereda @yo' youtube.com/watch?v=RtDX1Vl-Jxk :-)

@Johannes_B lol, that is pretty good.

I have never seen this guy before.

This one is nice too. :D

@wilx Yes :-)

@Johannes_B @wilx Then you might also like this: youtube.com/watch?v=MzXoVo16pTg

@egreg your code is sufficiently convoluted to need a 46 page manual, my code is so clear it is self documenting.

@Johannes_B @wilx Or youtube.com/watch?v=KWF2gDZU52U

@AlanMunn Not so funny :-(

@Johannes_B Well it's very American. You'd need to have watched American football on TV. So maybe the second link is more to your liking. A lot more subtle.

Different kind of funny. :)

@AlanMunn not the thing i like

@Johannes_B To me there's not too much difference between the second one and what Borge does.

@AlanMunn Language. I think Borge was funnier.

@Johannes_B Well there's no language in the second piece... It's all musical jokes.

@Johannes_B One more and then I'll stop. :)

@AlanMunn Every time the guy with the yello whirt played, i somehow thought of LotR and the dwarf mine.

@Johannes_B :)

@AlanMunn This is interesting. Interestingly good.

@Johannes_B It's musically very clever.

Greetings from Venice, Italy! No harpsichord here, just MTV.

@StefanKottwitz How long will you stay?

until Friday, for now

@egreg then, I think, the whole November (business days Monday to Friday)

@StefanKottwitz Working all day long?

@egreg Currently, until 8pm or so. November may be longer, as the ship should be finished at the end of the month, so harder work.

encore.seabourn.com

@egreg Do you use BibDesk?

@StefanKottwitz Not easy to arrange for a visit

I'm hanging around in the Mc Onor pub often, in Mestre

@egreg so at the UK meeting ;-)

@StefanKottwitz :)

@egreg invite me to a GUIT meeting ;-) I already now some Italian words (gergo lavoratore)

@StefanKottwitz It will be in Brescia, end of October

@StefanKottwitz There's a midnight train from Mestre to Padova, a dinner together might be an idea. I guess you can find my email address from my profile.

@egreg I never clicked to any non-public part of a profile (logged, private, respected, secure) I know though that your address is somewhere else visible on the net :-)

have to go, after 2 birra rouge that pub will close for today

@StefanKottwitz texdoc imakeidx