@PauloCereda -- oh ye of little faith! i vouch for the ducks. but no moose; it's too heavily populated. didn't even seen any signs on the highway to watch out for deer. the last tie i was i the niagara falls area. there were not nearly so many people/tourists. but i've never really been to toronto before, except in and out of an airport. it's big. it has swallowed all of the surrounding suburbs. sprawling like los angeles.
@PauloCereda -- only here on line for a very short time. must check mail before we go on another excursion. have to get a form and fill it out so that we (both gordon and i) can go on yet another excursion when we get back to rhode island.
Python 3, 32 bytes
eval(input().translate(")("*50))
Outputs via exit code: Error for false, no error for True.
The string is evaluated as Python code, replacing parens ( for a and ) for b. Only expressions of the form a^n b^n become well-formed expressions of parentheses like ((())), evaluati...
There are some clever people out there in code golf land.
@PauloCereda Very cute. But the Debussy hands are too far apart from each other.
@Johannes_B Well maybe worse for LaTeX. I don't have much sense for the other parts. But documenting a language is not the same as documenting a mode of document creation. And therein lies the real problem.
@Johannes_B Although TeX is a language, it's function is very different, and what people need to learn is how do stuff properly much more than how the language itself works. So it's more akin to documenting data structures w.r.t particular problems than the language itself.
@Johannes_B And philosophically I have a real problem with documentation that is intended to be "unbiased". The whole notion of "best practices" is inherently biased (as it should be) and I don't think that teaching people what you can do (even when you really shouldn't) is the role of good documentation. But this is a bit of the difference between user documentation and a reference manual. But the problem with TeX is not the lack of reference manuals.
@Johannes_B That's why the LaTeX Companion was so good.
@PauloCereda Yesterday I went to Zadar (in Italian Zara), which was for a long time a Venetian town. This morning I went to the lakes of Plitviče, a truly magnificent location. Journey back through the middle of Croatia back to Rijeka and then home. In all 1133 km. Still I'm a bit worried about the car from Bielefeld.
@AlanMunn I do think, that LaTeX is quite a thing. And to use it, you need to know a bit about it. The former metioned websites confuse that, and i don't like that.
@AlanMunn I think, there is a small conflict between (Word-users* who like to do stuff and other users who want to create content. One part of them, would be lucky to use plain. And they are not, because they are using LaTeX. Different expectations ... i think
@Johannes_B My experience with Word users (which is extensive) is that they just do things without much though to how, which is really the way Word is designed (i.e., it's not their fault). But again this is a separate discussion from the issue of a documentation project for LaTeX.
@AlanMunn Yes, ok. Other thing: Difference between the standard classes, memoir and KOMA (not to metion all those more specific cases). You would need a batallion of people describin the differences. And who reads it?
@AlanMunn I had some experiences in editing the “LaTeX code” some user produced with the predecessor Scientific Word. Some bits were hilarious. But possibly it was the user's fault.
@AlanMunn I remember some simple \overline done with strings of \_
@AlanMunn s/tikz/picture mode/ but anyway I answered it, I'm sure the technique is documented on the stackexcange documentation site, although I didn't check.
@AlanMunn I was going to answer that way originally but (a) it's no fun and (b) simple hhline examples always collapse to \cline, so that may just be an artefact of the MWE and that hhline has more use in the real case.
So, a number of months back my girlfriend decided not to use LaTeX for her thesis. So I didn't have to help her with TeX. However, I also used to be a bit of a word guru, so now I'm helping her avoid widows, orphans, thinkings breaking across lines, fixing the formatting of lists, etc
@Canageek A friend of mine says if you write your thesis in LaTeX it takes a long time at the beginning, but if you write it in Word it takes a long time at the end.
@Canageek And if you're @PauloCereda it just takes a long time.
Python 3, 32 bytes
eval(input().translate(")("*50))
Outputs via exit code: Error for false, no error for True.
The string is evaluated as Python code, replacing parens ( for a and ) for b. Only expressions of the form a^n b^n become well-formed expressions of parentheses like ((())), evaluati...
