@Mohan You could just enter a tab directly but then if the code goes through any kind of editor white space normalisation the tab my get changed to a space
although I don't understand why I needed that -- surely the whole point of the lccode trick was to give me a way of getting hold of an active ^^I without actually writing ^^I.
%: sorry, I'm being dense: should I write \def&{\qquad}% ?
@Mohan by the way I think the idea of the cw is that you make the answer but an answer rather than part of the question (not sure really how these things work, @JosephWright ?)
@Mohan the lccode stuff lets you define the behaviour of an active tab at the point of definition but separately in \begin{vb}you need to make tab active otherwise teh definition you made would not beused
@Mohan without it it puts a space into the definition which produces a space in the output if it is in horizontal mode. In fact I think \vb has already done \par so you are in vertical mode so it will not affect the output just use up a pointless byte of memory, but if you don't get in the habit of putting % there you will get bad spacing. I got about half my rep by answereing "missing %" to random questions here
@Mohan he's an old man, he forgets these things. (Or if you want to show more respect you could say that he can be trusted to use a % when needed and not when not)
From what you've said, I infer that the category codes for the material inside the \newcommand are determined at the time the code is first encountered, not the time the the \newcommand is processed. (Otherwise one could write \catcode`\^^M\active \def\^^M{\par\leavevmode} and the catcode change would make the def work.) is that right?
@Mohan yes (thats why \verb doesn't work in the argument to another command) catcode affect the conversion of input characters to character tokens but taht is a once only parse stage what are passed around by macros are token lists but token keep their codes they are never re-tokenised (unless explicitly by the etex scantokens primitive)
What are the concrete effects that can only be reached with LaTex systems?
I am not asking if some LaTex systems are more userfriendly, or if you can work faster with wysiwy*m* systems, once you learned them. It's about a comparison between results using LaTex (with Kile, for example) and using ...
@JosephWright There are nine names and 8 slots. So as I see it, you have to choose between me and Patrick to boot out, since we were the most explicit existing membership holders who said we would bow out to new people. Since Patrick got more votes than me, boot me out. :)
@AlanMunn Oh, this is like the moment when the main character unwillingly gives the grenades to the wounded sidekick and walks away with the main girl...
Last year StackExchange became a member of TUG. With that come eight individual memberships, that were given out to some members of the community. The time has come to select our representatives for 2013.
Following the model from last year, I'd like to ask people to put themselves forward. 'High...
@AlanMunn Well @tohecz had already pulled out once, and had to be talked back into actually making a vote, and he did then come ninth, so it seemed reasonable
I was trying to make sense of these two lines in the verbatim invariant @David Carlisle and you recently made;
\catcode`\ \active \catcode`\\\active
I've just that realise that the second one is actually aliased to lowercase ~, so I shouldn't have asked about that. But the first line was clearly referencing some sort of ' active space' that already existed.
@Mohan You "reply" by clicking on the arrow at the far right of the line you want to reply to, which is visible when you hover above it with the mouse pointer.
@Mohan The standard verbatim environment absorbs one line at a time and then checks to see whether it starts with \end{verbatim} (all characters). Here the job is slightly different.
@percusse Maybe the OP wants something else and that's a stripped down version.
@egreg And if it's equal to end{vb}, you execute \@firstoftwo, which is \end{vb}; if not you execute \@secondoftwo to put the seven characters back in the input. Is that right?
@egreg Well maybe I meant his unstripped case by my stripped case via posting my stripped case to emphasize the stripped case so I hope when he reads my stri...... wooo I think I got high....
I think that the only thing I don't understand (after all the help) is
\let\do\@makeother\dospecials \let\@xobeysp\ %
In the first line, you are defining \do but not using it anywhere else in the macro. That suggests it's a standard command, but I can't find it in http://www.tug.org/utilities/plain/cseq.html#d-ai
@Mohan You have to look in source2e.pdf; \dospecials is a collection of the special character in the form \do\\\do\#...; executing \dospecials uses the current definition of \do, thus \@makeother\`, \@makeother\#` and so on are performed.
@Mohan less of a strain is just put latex.ltx into your text editor (I always have a copy there) latex.ltx is the stripped version removed of comments that is the source of teh latex format (source2e is the typeset documented form of the same thing)
@Mohan The reason for using an active space let back to a normal one is related to the 7 param command that checks for the end, spaces are not seen by delimited arguments 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 would be eaten by #1#2#3#4#5#6#7 discarding the spaces so as they are not end{vb} they would be put back but teh inter word spaces would be gone. As is they are seen and put back
