TeX, LaTeX and Friends

I've set up things so that draft gets all sort of annotations typeset, and final hides them all; but I want to make a special version which has no annotations except the labels

David Carlisle

8:31 AM

hmm the author of showkeys clearly didn't want you to do that:-) simplest is just to make a copy into your main document directory and delete \DeclareOption{final}{%
\providecommand*\showkeyslabelformat[1]{}%
\endinput}

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Five tokens instead of seven in the \defun redefinition.

1010011010

@DavidCarlisle I deleted all the files from yesterday night and reran the batch file to install the fonts... Seemed to work. I'm very much confused, though. Maybe I just failed to install one of the fonts correctly... No holes or anything now

David Carlisle

@egreg ah attempted tick stealing again

egreg

@DavidCarlisle You had \protected\def\defun{<seven tokens>}, I just five (with \aftergroup)

David Carlisle

8:47 AM

@egreg yes hadn't seen you'd posted an answer.:-)

@egreg Federico Poloni ought to get the tick:-)

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Indeed! Did you upvote him?

David Carlisle

@egreg not yet, I was just wondering about leaving a comment..

@egreg I just voted and got told off by the system for not voting on enough questions again. I should clearly vote on less answers if it is going to do that.

egreg

@DavidCarlisle It's easy: upvote the questions you answer to (if they aren't really silly).

David Carlisle

@egreg nah, I upvote questions that I don't know the answer to initially.

1010011010

9:05 AM

I do have another question .... how do I count the penalties contributing to the error "Overfull vbox while \output is active"?

And store it in some dimen or whatever

David Carlisle

@1010011010 ?? penalties don't cause that, boxes do (usually)

1010011010

Okay, rephrasing.... the contributing factor to the "badness" that leads to that error

Right now I have adjusted parskip to have some stretch and shrink... if that doesn't suffice I'd like your fancy solution here tex.stackexchange.com/questions/62296/… to kick in

David Carlisle

@1010011010 not sure what you mean, normally the cause is that a box in the page head is bigger than the allotted space so no penalty/badness calculation is involved.

1010011010

@DavidCarlisle So what you're saying is that the "badness 10000" has little meaning? I mean, sometimes I get badness 2717, sometimes 10k, sometimes something else, etc.

Say I wanted to address only parts where this badness value exceeded 1000, otherwise it'd be "fine"... that seems like something that would be possible in TeX?

David Carlisle

@1010011010 10000 is infinite (but any overfull box is infinitely bad) you only get badness values on underfull box warnings (and you said overfull in the comment above but then later linked to a question a about underfull boxes:-)

1010011010

9:14 AM

Oh, controversial.

I guess I'm not entirely awake yet:-)

David Carlisle

@1010011010 Just set vfuzz

1010011010

My bad.... so moving forward...

@DavidCarlisle According to barbara beeton, vfuzz is for overfull boxes?

David Carlisle

@1010011010 Just set vfuzz if it is overfull or \vbadness for underfull

Johannes_B

Looks like winter outside, snow everywhere.

David Carlisle

65

Q: Do I have to care about bad boxes?

When I compile my PDF from LaTeX source, do I have to care about all the messages (currently 28) about 'bad boxes'? The PDF seems fine to me.

warnings

1010011010

9:17 AM

And in a conditional that would be \ifnum\badness>1000{\def\@textbottom{\vskip \z@ \@plus 1pt}
\let\@texttop\relax}\fi or something

David Carlisle

@1010011010 no it's \vbadness (I edited my typo above:-) and that test is too late.

1010011010

I figured...

David Carlisle

@1010011010 there is no point testing, just always do it (if you are ever going to do it)

1010011010

@DavidCarlisle Right now there's no need for it, but I don't want to change anything about the document if it's not strictly needed..

It seems too easy to assume that your intervention of \def\@textbottom{\vskip \z@ \@plus 1pt} \let\@texttop\relax does not affect the document in any way unless the badness is exceeded, as you said there's no testing involved in your MWE.

David Carlisle

@1010011010 why?

1010011010

9:23 AM

Since an unconditional intervention is... well... unconditional? :-)

I'm not sure about the exact meaning of \@plus though... if it's plus then it may be conditional after all... err

Don't see the point of defining a macro for that kind of thing though... or was it to gobble stretchability on demand? e.g. \renewcommand\@plus\@gobble (or whatever the gobble cmd is)

David Carlisle

@1010011010 \def\z{0pt plus 2pt} has 12 tokens in its definition \def\z{\z@\@plus2\p@} has 3 that saves 9 tokens which is a lot of memory in 1982

Johannes_B

Do you guys know how i can access the log of overleaf stuff to inspect a decent file list?

David Carlisle

@1010011010 If you want to left align something do you measure it and then say \foo if \wd\foo<\hsize \hfill \fi or do you just do \foo\hfill ? This is same thing.

1010011010

@DavidCarlisle Yeah, stretchability is conditional based on the necessity in that context, so it really only reduces the rigidity that Barbara Beeton mentioned in that question, without giving up much.

David Carlisle

9:44 AM

4 not 3 tokens in the above comment, but 8 bytes is still a lot.

Johannes_B

10:13 AM

I spoke with professor Knuth only once, I was sent to invite him as honored guess to the Europython in Florence. His answer was on the line of: "Sorry, I don't have time. I have to write the art of programming." And considering his age, he might meant it literally, so I guess his presence on the Internet is indeed limited.. However he added a great remark: "anyhow, I know python. I studied it and it was a nice afternoon." If you want to have contact with him, your best bet is learning how to play the pipe organ. — Paolo.Bolzoni 9 hours ago

Paul Gessler

10:44 AM

@Johannes_B there might be a faster way, but to get the full log, the only way I know is to click the arrow next to "Download as ZIP" and choose "Input and Output Files". Then you can open the archive and inspect the log file directly. I rarely use Overleaf.

Johannes_B

@PaulGessler Thanks, I downloaded as zip, but didn't know about the little arrow. All this trouble to get a file list.

Paul Gessler

@Johannes_B well, we can't be showing those ugly, archaic, extra generated files to the user now, can we!? ;-)

It has to be user-friendly!

Johannes_B

@PaulGessler I hacked an undef'ed command in there and it gave me the possibillity to download the log. Nou diffable file list, though.

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Should one of us add an answer to tex.stackexchange.com/questions/46512/… to point to the new \extrafloats mechanism?

David Carlisle

11:01 AM

@JosephWright probably, also somewhere there is an answer of mine to a duplicate question that has the original definition of \extrafloats..

4

A: Using a lot of marginpars

morefloats only allocates floats from the classical tex counter range 0-255 and as LaTeX uses many of those registers in the format you only have around 100 at maximum, But as etex is usually available really you can allocate floats from the extended range and so have around 32000 of them if you ...

@JosephWright I added a note to ^^^^

@JosephWright done

Paul Gessler

11:34 AM

Spam: tex.stackexchange.com/a/241007/21344

Johannes_B

11:52 AM

@ChristianHupfer Templates make gunnar mad

KOMA script provides many many many features to help you using a simple interface. You on the other hand are setting stuff by hand, You want to set the toc singelspaced, that is fine. KOMA gives you quite a simple hook for that. You (or the initiator of that code) is whacking KOMAs definition to death, implementing its own version using a corkscrew and some gaffa tape. — Johannes_B 22 secs ago

yo'

12:25 PM

How to align multiple eqnarrays? Simply align them.

Anonymous

Hi there, I am wondering if anyone has some advice on creating an interactive PDF-outline (like the one you can have in your PDF-reader, showing the chapters & sub-chapters for easy navigation) ...

I was thinking of using \label{sec: Part 1}
&
\hyperref[sec: Part 1]{Part 1.}
inside the .tex (for in-document hyperlinking) ...

But then ... as for the PDF-outline: just add the interactive PDF-outline (for the PDF-reader) outside of Tex, e.g. using a PDF editor like Adobe Acrobat. Would you have any better way to do this? Or perhaps some reading material to suggest?

yo'

@VincentVerheyen you mean the thing that's created automatically if you load \usepackage{hyperref} and compile 3 times?

Paul Gessler

@VincentVerheyen hyperref with option bookmarks=true (the default) should do this for you automatically, unless I'm misunderstanding your needs

yo'

@PaulGessler you owe me a beer :)

Anonymous

@yo' & @PaulGessler Thanks for that, will check that out. =D Great fix.

Paul Gessler

12:37 PM

@yo' in three months' time I can hopefully fulfill this obligation in Darmstadt :-)

yo'

@PaulGessler :-) (btw, I hope you know I wasn't serious; it's a common thing you say in Czech if two people say the same thing at the same time...)

Paul Gessler

@yo' yes, I know :-)

yo'

12:56 PM

please, which is correct?
"Is there any specific related work to refer during the talk?" or
"Is there any specific related work to refer _to_ during the talk?"

1010011010

You're always referring to something... as far as I know.

David Carlisle

@yo' I think the second, but it's a bit twisted either way

yo'

@DavidCarlisle yeah I know, it's just an informal mail :-)

David Carlisle

@yo' ok first is wrong and second is probably correct but I won't bother thinking of a re-wording:-)

yo'

@DavidCarlisle mail sent, so please do not bother :)

thanks!

I'd reward you by some "Winter-Mandeln", but they don't fit in my ~~coffee holder~~ CD reader.

David Carlisle

1:07 PM

It's always good to see code with usage documenting latex 2.09

Anonymous

Hey @yo' &/or PaulGessler ... After compiling > 3 times, I still can't get a TOC in my PDF-readers using \usepackage[FOO, FOO, bookmarks=true]{hyperref} ...

Perhaps I'll discover what's going wrong when trying this in a different document ... in a bit.

yo'

DAMNED UNICODE!

David Carlisle

1:28 PM

@yo' 😢

yo'

1:38 PM

@DavidCarlisle lol

well, you copy a normally looking C into a document just to get an error that this Unicode C is unknown to [utf8]{inputenc}?

Anonymous

Seems like someone else was having the same issue (tex.stackexchange.com/questions/82921/…).

Paul Gessler

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{hyperref}

\begin{document}
\section{Test}

\subsection{A Text}

\section{A Test}
\end{document}

@VincentVerheyen ^^ works fine for me. As always, we need an MWE if we're going to be able to help.

yo'

Now this is a very original unit: $0.5 \, \mathrm{g} \, \mathrm{g}^{-1}$ @JosephWright

Anonymous

@PaulGessler Thanks a lot; yes, your MWE works fine for me as well. The problem of course (as always; no =) just sometimes) is that it's hard to find a MWE, since the application is not Minimal. ... I'll try, thanks.

Anonymous

___
Another question: can
\label{sec: Part 1}
only be used for sec'tions'?

Should e.g.
\label{cha: Part 1}
be used for cha'pters'?

David Carlisle

1:50 PM

@yo' they are all normal C ?

Paul Gessler

@VincentVerheyen just make a copy of your file and start hacking away at it piece by piece until the problem goes away, then you know the problem was in the piece you just removed.

David Carlisle

@VincentVerheyen the label string is just an opaque label (it's a bad idea to use the section number)

Anonymous

@PaulGessler :D Will do.

Johannes_B

0

Q: dantelogo.sty missing

I have a Latex template which I need to follow, however, when I am compiling it to obtain the pdf I am getting the error: "LaTeX Error: File `dantelogo.sty' not found.Type X to quit or to proceed,or enter new name. (Default extension: sty)Enter file name:! Emergency stop. \RequirePackage" What c...

packages

Anonymous

@DavidCarlisle Thanks, you mean in my case, it would be bad to use "Part 1"?

So, \label can only used with \label{sec: FOO}, not something else than "sec"?

Anonymous

1:53 PM

@Johannes_B You might need to download the package dantelogo, no?

Johannes_B

@VincentVerheyen Yes.

Paul Gessler

@VincentVerheyen as David said, the label string is irrelevant; some authors choose to use conventions like that simply for source readability.

David Carlisle

@VincentVerheyen latex doesn't care what you use: you can use \label{zzz} but it's confusing to humans if the section numbered 2 has label \label{sec:1 }

Anonymous

@DavidCarlisle @PaulGessler Thanks a lot, crystal clear; thanks.

yo'

@DavidCarlisle they looked like normal C in LibreOffice, but I dunno how the authors molest Word to cause this :D

David Carlisle

2:03 PM

@yo' 𝘗𝑒𝐫𝚑𝖆𝔭𝔰 𝒕𝚑𝘦𝙮 𝙪𝖘𝙚 𝐭ℎ𝔦𝐬?

Sean Allred

2:46 PM

baltimore is in shambles :(

David Carlisle

@SeanAllred is that where you are?

Sean Allred

@DavidCarlisle It's where all my family is

egreg

@SeanAllred :(

Sean Allred

The national guard is apparently on its way and they've brought in tanks. The police have been militarized. Small riots breaking out everywhere.

A friend of mine from college lives in an apartment right above a convenience store that was looted for everything it had. Really scary stuff.

twitter.com/wbalradio/status/593056850326777857/photo/1

Strike that, the national guard is already lined up in the inner harbor. This is absolutely insane -- it's terrible anywhere, but it's very different when you grew up there. There's fire and smoke and broken glass on streets I remember -- streets I know.

Werner

Is anyone having problems adding tags to a question?

By just clicking on "Ask Question" and then filling in tags... do they auto-suggest or not? I'm not getting any auto-suggestions, and therefore it assumes I haven't entered anything and doesn't allow me to ask.

barbara beeton

2:54 PM

@SeanAllred -- yes, i grew up there too. this makes me very sad indeed!

Sean Allred

@barbarabeeton It's terrifying. :(

barbara beeton

@SeanAllred -- when i visited a few years ago for a high school class reunion (western high, still all female), i learned that the students now wear uniforms (well, prescribed garments in the school colors), and the principal said that it was so they could be recognized and protected if they got stuck in a troubled situation. so different from when i grew up there. (no family there any more. still terrifying.)

egreg

@Werner Sorry, never found that button.

yo'

@Werner works fine here it seems.

Werner

@egreg I understand - too risk averse...

...but you have found it on TeX - LaTeX Meta! Hmmm, I'm suspicious now...

yo'

3:18 PM

@SeanAllred wish you and your family the best!

egreg

@Werner Yes, strange, isn't it? ;-)

Anonymous

I wish peace to Baltimore as well.

yo'

@egreg I think I found a table in which multirow makes sense...

Anonymous

I'm trying to "hack" \section, such that adding a section just doesn't change the document visibly at all. A.t.m., I'm down to this: (forgot why I added the *)

\section*{\normalsize{\textnormal{{\label{SeCtIoN-NaMe}}}}}

However, there is still some vspace added. Anyone has an elegant workaround for this? Of course I could just add a vspace{-2em} or so after the code above ...

yo'

@VincentVerheyen Have you seen the package titlesec?

Johannes_B

3:26 PM

@VincentVerheyen May i ask, what the use is in this?

Anonymous

@yo' I haven't yet, will look it up, thanks.

egreg

@yo' Probably it's something that doesn't need a table. ;-)

yo'

Johannes_B

Can anybody give some useful hint here? tex.stackexchange.com/questions/241033/dantelogo-sty-missing

Anonymous

@Johannes_B I'm creating a side-by-side translation, which has the title of e.g. a section both in Latin & in English. If i e.g. used the normal automatic \section, then all my numberings would go off, I guess. Instead, I now have added my section titles manually, in each language respectively (but they are not \section's). Then, I will add an invisible \section to have just a TOC in the pdf.

egreg

3:28 PM

@yo' Top align. End. ;-)

Johannes_B

@VincentVerheyen \addcontentsline{toc}{section}{your section title}

yo'

@egreg without the boxes, that may be confusing... I'll more likely add two lines "Average" :D

Johannes_B

@VincentVerheyen If you don't want to print a section title. don't print any. If you want to have an entry in the toc, add one ;-)

Anonymous

@Johannes_B Thanks, and by "add one", U mean using your code above?

Johannes_B

@VincentVerheyen Yes. Finally

@VincentVerheyen Babel confusion in my head.

Anonymous

3:33 PM

@Johannes_B Speaking of that, how is Texwelt compared to SE?

Johannes_B

@VincentVerheyen More german ;-)

Anonymous

@Johannes_B Haha, yes, obviously. But are they equally active?

Johannes_B

@VincentVerheyen The system is the same. Not as many users, since obviously you need to speak german to participate. Unfortunately, no chat.

Anonymous

@Johannes_B The same system? So is SE's Q&A open-source?

Johannes_B

@VincentVerheyen The same as in question-answers. The software in the background is different. SE is a multi-million commercial company.

@VincentVerheyen TeXwelt is run by @StefanKottwitz, he is also running texdoc and texample and other stuff.

Anonymous

3:38 PM

@Johannes_B I just got side-tracked. What if the whole world was working inside a company, would it still be considered a company. ... Thanks a lot though for the ref to Stefan.

Johannes_B

@VincentVerheyen Too philosophical for me, sorry.

yo'

Sometimes I don't understand it. A table in an article and 2 equations that are only used inside this table, and there is no reference to either of these two things from anywhere else, and they don't fit in the text at all. I think I'll just remove them and see if the authors even realize they are not there.

David Carlisle

@VincentVerheyen whatever the aim is, putting font changes into the argument of \section can't be the answer.

egreg

@VincentVerheyen \addcontentsline{toc}{section}{...}

David Carlisle

xetex v luatex:

\def\a{^^^^^1d400}

\def\b{𝐀}

\edef\c{\string𝐀}

\edef\d{\detokenize{𝐀}}

\edef\e{\string^^^^^1d400}



\ifx\a\b \immediate\write20{A=B}\fi
\ifx\a\c \immediate\write20{A=C}\fi
\ifx\a\d \immediate\write20{A=D}\fi
\ifx\a\e \immediate\write20{A=E}\fi
\ifx\b\c \immediate\write20{B=C}\fi
\ifx\b\d \immediate\write20{B=D}\fi
\ifx\b\e \immediate\write20{B=E}\fi
\ifx\c\d \immediate\write20{C=D}\fi
\ifx\c\e \immediate\write20{C=E}\fi
\ifx\d\e \immediate\write20{D=E}\fi

\bye

Joseph Wright

4:05 PM

@DavidCarlisle Have you been following SVN checkins today? l3build improvements (I hope)

@DavidCarlisle :-(

! Undefined control sequence.
l.7 \edef\c{\string𝐀
                       }
?
! Undefined control sequence.
l.11 \edef\e{\string𝐀
                        }

Alan Munn

Mac users: does anyone know offhand if defaults read <app> will show all the possible things that can be set?

David Carlisle

99 times out of a 100 when someone configures tex to write the output somewhere non standard people get error messages with one or other of the auxiliary programs not finding stuff. It is so much easier just not to do that, and to let Tex write stuff where everything expects things to be written.... — David Carlisle Jan 7 '14 at 14:07

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle That's not the reason I'm changing this ;-)

@DavidCarlisle I did consider not copying everything to the test dir with the new approach: it works but you end up with e.g. ../localdir in the log, which I think we want to avoid.

@DavidCarlisle I mainly went with the older approach for convenience: I did know it was not ideal

David Carlisle

@JosephWright ah just realised that's sort of spurious if you add space after \string you get

A=B
C=D
C=E
D=E

which is still wrong

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Well it's concerning that you don't get that error with LuaTeX

David Carlisle

4:18 PM

@JosephWright sets them up catcode 12 I think, I just posted an updated file to tl list that forces that so you should get same.

@JosephWright seems whichever way you look you find one of them doing something strange, probably that's why I jumped on the jsbox comment so grumpily:)

egreg

@AlanMunn I don't think so; it lists what's set.

Alan Munn

4:35 PM

@egreg That's what I thought. Do you know of any way to figure out what's settable?

egreg

@AlanMunn No, sorry.

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Ah, got it: bug in luatex-unicode-letters.tex

@DavidCarlisle See mails to TL list

@DavidCarlisle Plain should use unicode-letters.def: maintained by some people we know ;-)

Via tex.stackexchange.com/questions/241070/… I got to tug.org/TUGboat/tb10-1/tb23knut.pdf, which is an interesting read but I think particularly in the last paragraph

> ... I implemented a subset of LaTeX's picture environment and used it ...

Christian Hupfer

5:04 PM

Good maen

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle is I am sure very happy with such statements

Christian Hupfer

@Johannes_B You should look for another occupation definitely.... hunting down bad templates is no well-designed spare time work ;-)

@AndrewCashner: Why did you delete the macro wrapper answer?

David Carlisle

5:23 PM

@JosephWright yes that was my thought to, will catch up on mail, just driven home..

@JosephWright I'll add some catcode tests to the utex collection

Andrew Cashner

6:05 PM

@ChristianHupfer Because @egreg superceded my answer by incorporating the suggestion in your comment. {som}

yo'

I'm leaving, see you tomorrow probably!

Christian Hupfer

@AndrewCashner: That's no reason, in my point of view. You were the first one to answer, so you were in the lead ;-)

yo'

@ChristianHupfer you know very well that this is a non-constructive approach :-) We don't care for rep value really other than trying to hit every palindrome, so it is only about a little credit for something; while this is important, I don't think it's that much important.

Christian Hupfer

@yo': It did not mean the rep, but Andrew proposed the first answer ;-)

David Carlisle

6:21 PM

@JosephWright trying to understand ltunicode.dtx which classes get catcode 11 exactly, eg why this one:

      <character id="U1F000" dec="126976" image="none">
         <unicodedata category="So" combclass="0" bidi="ON" mirror="N"/>
         <description unicode="5.1">MAHJONG TILE EAST WIND</description>
      </character>

Anonymous

Hmmm ... so the \addcontentsline{toc}{chapter / section / ...}{FOO} creates a TOC-entry in the PDF, but it doesn't bring you to the right part of the page. Perhaps this is because I have a single page PDF?

Johannes_B

@VincentVerheyen Might be, but you also need to add \phantomsection if using hyperref.

Andrew Cashner

@ChristianHupfer I had just learned that trick from @egreg in his answer to my recent question, so it was really his answer to begin with. And I didn't know how to add in the starred variant.

Anonymous

@Johannes_B That will highly likely solve the issue. Thanks.

Johannes_B

6:37 PM

This template uses up-to-date technology like pdflatex,...

yo'

@Johannes_B Ask @JosephWright and @DavidCarlisle why sticking to PDFLaTeX might be a good idea :D

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Data from LineBreak.txt makes this an ideograph, which based on unicode-letters.tex/Jonathan Kew's Perl script needs to be catcode 11

Johannes_B

@yo' I am sure they will first fix XeTeX, then LuaTeX and finally the world ;-)

4

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle See for example github.com/khaledhosny/xetex/blob/master/source/texk/web2c/…

@Johannes_B @DavidCarlisle is on the first one at least

David Carlisle

@JosephWright it's a weird kind of letter:-) Just noticed as I picked out some random characters of class L* and not L* and they all came out catcode 11, I'll look at the perl version again, thanks

Joseph Wright

6:43 PM

@DavidCarlisle There aren't really any notes on why some of these things are needed, so I aimed to do the same as the existing script at the moment

David Carlisle

@JosephWright yes fair enough:-)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle It would be reasonable to revisit this (much more than the Han business)

David Carlisle

$ git commit -m "catcode tests"
[master fb971e7] catcode tests
2 files changed, 62 insertions(+)
create mode 100644 testfiles/catcode-001.lvt
create mode 100644 testfiles/catcode-001.tlg

Werner

Does anyone have a reference to a post where the OP specifically wants a description of the \newcommand interface?

I recall seeing something like that...

...but I might also have been dreaming.

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Will sync my fork :-)

David Carlisle

6:46 PM

@JosephWright well at least it'll flag that the engine plain formats are (not) the same. (Getting some things lined up to pin jsbox once it appears in public:-)

Joseph Wright

@Werner You mean like an xparse spec (so+O{}+m+m or similar)

Werner

@JosephWright Well, specific to \newcommand{<cs>}[<num>][<stuff>]{<stuff>}...

David Carlisle

@Werner \show\newcommand what more could they need?

Werner

@DavidCarlisle Moaaaar mortar! :)

@JosephWright This is not really what I meant:

197

Q: What's the difference between \newcommand and \newcommand*?

I just spotted someone use \newcommand* in an answer and realised that I'd never quite sorted out in my head what the star (asterisk) was there for. (This one is practically impossible to search for on the internet so this is a good place to record the answer!)

macros starred-version

...nor is this:

58

Q: What do newcommand, renewcommand, and providecommand do, and how do they differ?

What do newcommand, renewcommand, and providecommand do, and how do they differ? I think \newcommand overwrites any previously existing command, while \providecommand creates the command only if it does not already exists. Does \renewcommand only work on already extant commands?

macros

...nor is this:

153

Q: What is the difference between \def and \newcommand?

Inspired by a question about \let and \def, I have some that essentially all boil down to asking What are the differences between \def and \newcommand? In particular, I wonder Is it possible to have parameters passed to \defed commands, both optional and required? Is there a \redef command eq...

macros

...and source2e is not all that explicit in terms of the combination of usages when you have an optional argument with \newcommand.

This looks promising:

9

Q: Where do I find the documentation for writing \newcommand's ?

At what level of the TeX system heirarchy is \newcommand? Where do I find documentation for these kinds of macros (e.g. \renewcommand, \def, \parskip, etc.)? My objective is that I will be able to take an existing package or document class and customize it to my needs. As much as possible, kind...

macros documentation

...that's it, yes.

David Carlisle

7:03 PM

@Werner answers just give links to tutorials though

@JosephWright tlmgr update just gave me a xelatex.ini with my name in it. Fame at last?

Joseph Wright

7:18 PM

@DavidCarlisle Running here now

David Carlisle

@JosephWright I wonder if people are not around, didn't get much feedback on team list about what to do about \xe@alloc@intercharclass

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle No

@DavidCarlisle Though Chris would pop up

David Carlisle

@JosephWright I'm tempted to put in in ltfinal anyway, can always take it out again if controversial...

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Yes, would be my plan :-)

@DavidCarlisle When will you publicise utex?

Werner

@DavidCarlisle True.

Joseph Wright

7:24 PM

@DavidCarlisle Growing into a good set of tests (if the appropriate people are interested)

David Carlisle

@JosephWright I mentioned it on luatex list (a bug report with no reply so far:-) I was going to let the waves from Khaled's announcement die down a bit on xetex list.

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Indeed

@DavidCarlisle I meant though something specifically 'announcement-like'

David Carlisle

@JosephWright yes but its only 11 tests not sure a big announcement due yet, I was just going to send bug reports to appropriate lists referencing the test failed in each case

michal.h21

7:53 PM

Hi all, I was successful in integrating SILE's Harfbuzz binding to LuaTeX, using simple custom font loader:

at the moment I am just generating nodes from Lua code, but it is interesting proof of concept I think

David Carlisle

@michal.h21 ooohhhh

michal.h21

@DavidCarlisle the hard work would be to make it work with real nodes from TeX, and then bidi

David Carlisle

@michal.h21 more than interesting...

michal.h21

I'am going to post it to Github

David Carlisle

@michal.h21 if you can do that you might have killed xetex

3

michal.h21

7:57 PM

@DavidCarlisle I don't want to kill XeTeX :( although I know it doesn't look good at the moment

with Khaled's decision

David Carlisle

@michal.h21 I don't want to lose xetex features, but I don't particularly want two (or three or four) competing unicode TeXs forever either. So a "creative merger" of the two systems would be good I think (Khaled indicated he hoped to use a luatex font loader using xetex style font library support in his tex.sx interview last year)

michal.h21

@DavidCarlisle I saw some really depressing tweets from Khaled yesterday, saying that he will look for completely different typesseting system next time he wants print something :(

David Carlisle

@michal.h21 It's hard as latex use brings lots of users and so lots of compatibility issues which severely constrains what you can change even when it's clearly wrong, I think backing out the etex-xet stuff hurt, not that he was forced into doing it, it was his decision, just the realisation that whatever you change breaks something.

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Indeed. As you know, my concern is that a desire to maintain forever older documents unchanged may kill TeX as it will eventually prevent any new users taking it up.

David Carlisle

After ~7 years of fiddling with TeX derivatives and still no decent Arabic support, I came to realise that I was barking up the wrong tree.

Tweeted by KhaledGhetas on April 25, 2015 at 6:47 PM

Joseph Wright

8:13 PM

@DavidCarlisle I thought that the entire reason LuaTeX exists is because they got money for exactly this problem

'Exists' as in where they found the resources, not the ideas

David Carlisle

@JosephWright maybe Khaled has higher standards (I can't really judge how luatex or xetex rate on that score)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Same problem here, of course

@DavidCarlisle My understanding is they got money to worry about the font shaping business, which is extremely complex for Arabic (glyph shape depends on context in a very tricky way)

David Carlisle

@JosephWright running 2e test suite for ltfinal change...

yo'

8:30 PM

@JosephWright not only glyph shapes ... you use inter-letter stretch text to line, rather than the inter-word one

Joseph Wright

@yo' Yes, I know there is a lot of complexity (from memory you have to stretch/alter glyphs overlapping with other glyphs, move them above each other, ...)

@yo' The take-home I though was that no computational system can currently do it properly, or at least when I looked at it last that was my impression

yo'

@JosephWright yep, the "a letter becomes an accent" stuff is rather complex. Also, the initials and terminals are much richer than the only one I know, which is sigma

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Based on Frank's e-mail, once you check-in the \xe@alloc... change I guess I can send to CTAN

@DavidCarlisle Or you can of course

David Carlisle

@JosephWright but the ctan people so like it when you upload stuff;-)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle I know: I'm a regular, after all

Johannes_B

8:38 PM

@ChristianHupfer Seems i am not only a penguin, but some sort of ugly cockroach ... ats20.de/blog/index.php?/archives/…

egreg

@JosephWright I saw that Karl Berry already added it to xelatex.ini

Joseph Wright

@egreg Yes, but that's back with being the wrong fix: we are on it

egreg

@JosephWright OK

Joseph Wright

@egreg Once I have something off to CTAN I'll let Karl know

David Carlisle

@JosephWright it'll be too late tonight probably, I'm running build check (I can't see how it'll fail as we haven't any tests testing that code I think) but seemed the right thing to do so then I'll check in but probably a full build ctan willtake too long, anyway gives a bit of time to do some ad hoc tests of the xetex stuff

Joseph Wright

8:40 PM

@DavidCarlisle Fine: I can send to CTAN tomorrow once you are happy

@DavidCarlisle I always run the tests before sending to CTAN [it's part of build ctan ;-)]

David Carlisle

@JosephWright yes I know, but I like to run build check before svn checking in rather than you find out it broke just before you ship to ctan

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Yes, I tend to do the same (that's the point of tests, after all)

@DavidCarlisle I do a really paranoid set for expl3 :-)

David Carlisle

@JosephWright because obviously it's less important to break latex than expl3

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Based on the Khaled situation, perhaps we should just break everything and start again

David Carlisle

@JosephWright I vote for using Word

Johannes_B

8:45 PM

@yo' @JosephWright In case you haven't seen it yet: river-valley.zeeba.tv/arabic-script-typography

2

Joseph Wright

@Johannes_B That's the video I was thinking of

yo'

@Johannes_B this should go on my to-read (or to-see) list.

Johannes_B

@JosephWright We have a linux user here, currently learning arabic for fun. I should poke him to work on this :-)

David Carlisle

@JosephWright phew I just got a shock, the build check finished and in the corner of my eye I saw a screenful of diff files scroll past with the failed tests...

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Eek

David Carlisle

8:47 PM

... I have all three engines in my local config:-)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Ah

David Carlisle

@JosephWright thought I'd share the pain

@JosephWright Committed revision 684.

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Build underway

michal.h21

10:03 PM

Here is the Harfbuzz sample

github.com/michal-h21/luatex-harfbuzz-shaper

David Carlisle

@michal.h21 thanks

baxx

just making a new command but it's not working - is the syntax off? \renewcommand{\code}[1]{\verb{#1}}

David Carlisle

@baxx yes you can not use \verb in the argument of another command, and the syntax is \verb|...| not \verb{...}

baxx

@DavidCarlisle oh thanks, is there an alternative to using \verb?

David Carlisle

@baxx lots, it depends what you want to do, but if you need to make special characters like _ and & safe then it will always need some special syntax rules. \verb or listinline from listings package are usual things, or if you don't need special character handling \texttt{...}

baxx

10:18 PM

@DavidCarlisle cheers - for now \texttt{} will do so I can write it out then edit the macro after. Cheers!

David Carlisle

11:41 PM

sourceforge.net/p/xetex/bugs/108

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