Sorry, I couldn't follow this discussion about screenshots completely. One problem is that we're not in control of what packages are on that server. Often it's needed to have up-to-date distributions to get the correct answer.
@JohnHammersley Sorry for the delay but I think that's a fantastic initiative. It's already implemented in latex-community.org/forum . Great accomplishment.
@percusse thanks for the support! We'd be keen to work with SX developers to help add something similar to SX, if it's what the community wants (as has been suggested above, we could start with a minimal option to test the water)
@JohnHammersley I'm quite impressed that you can actually track down the changes in the document. I don't know how deep you want to go with package support etc. (as imgur did with the stackexchange) but still it's very very nice.
@JohnHammersley Do you have any outlook on security issues etc. already ? I know it's ridiculous but you know nerds being nerds etc. I'm asking because our @PauloCereda came up with a super nice tool called arara which is now integrated into TeXLive but I don't know how secire it would be
2013-03-06: Update:
It seems that there was a recent update to xstring. Just updated all packages and the MWE below now produces:
It seems as if I am having a problem understanding \StrGobbleRight. The intent of the the \RemoveTrailingSpace is to do what it says, that is remove trailing s...
@PeterGrill Yes, I refreshed the page after you wrote here. But if it was as you say …
@PeterGrill I wrote it already some days ago: Very frequently I open a question and see, that someone had voted for closing, but this was not shown on the review page.
@PeterGrill Someone voted for reopening (this time it is in the review page) … _Aaah, don’t mind: „The posting was edited after closing, do you want it to reopen.” Something along these words
@Speravir Huh? I don't see it. I did edit it to clarify that it was indeed fixed so perhaps that triggered it.
@Speravir Perhaps. No I don't want to reopen it. I would have thought it would have asked me as I edited the changes? Must be an automatic thing then once you close a question, if the OP edits it that the ones that closed it get notified..
@Speravir @PeterGrill I have the feeling the Review system is not that ... precise (maybe it is just slow). I have often seen questions I could vote on but they didn't show up in the Review system.
Recently, a journal I have some editorial involvement with has decided that for its 'rapid publication' outlet, it will no longer accept submissions where LaTeX has been used to format the document. They now demand everything be submitted as a (sigh) Word document.
After much whining, bitching ...
I'm a children's book writer and illustrator, and I want to to create a book for young readers which exposes the beauty of Mathematics. I recently read Paul Lockhart's essay "The Mathematician's Lament," and found that I, too, lament the uninspiring quality of my elementary math education.
I wan...
@AndrewStacey Maybe Pythagoras' theorem, some simple facts about the multiplication table or 1+2+…+n; Mandelbrot set pictures are nice, but their connection with math is hard to understand for young kids. Most of the answers are rubbish.
Many people think that showing pictures of fractals is a good way to build interest in mathematics. I disagree. Saying that a coastline is a fractal is a gross lie, for instance.
@egreg yeah, my thought exactly. Somehow for me, really the consistency of maths impressed me (even as a small child when I didn't know what it is), but it's impossible to express it for small children I think.
@egreg I agree. I liked the fractal pictures when I was a kid, but it made me more interested in programming than in maths as I wanted to draw them myself. I don't think that I really got a glimpse of what maths is really like until my third year of university (studying a maths degree).
@tohecz The fractal pictures, you mean? But the best looking are usually the hardest to explain. Things like the Cantor set or the Sierpinski triangle are okay to explain, but look a bit dull.
@AndrewStacey what about: find a picture that if you make 2 copies, rotate by 3/8 of the full angle, and scale down both of them, you obtain the original one? (And there's only one such shape of a set)
I was once asked to give a talk to some bright maths school kids. Shudder Boy, did I pitch that wrong. Even their maths teacher didn't grasp what I was talking about.
On the math question, by far the funniest is the comment to the person who was enamored by the angles of the triangle:
"I found it completely amazing that the angles in a triangle always added up to 180 degrees. No matter how you drew a triangle, you could measure the angles with a protractor and they always add up to about 180 degrees, like magic. Even more amazing when I realized it wasn't some rule of thumb or approximation, but true in some deeper sense for the ideal, platonic triangle."
Comment: When I came home and told my father, he drew a triangle on the skin of an orange. All angles were 90°. I was deeply disturbed.
@egreg Yes and no. Alexis and I have been talking about writing a new version using enumitem but we've both been busy. There's John Frampton's ExPex which is quite complex and uses non-LaTeX syntax, and linguex which uses semi-non-semantic markup. I still prefer gb4e to either of them.
I would like to define a command that accepts a variable number of arguments:
\menu{foo}
% would result in \emph{foo}
\menu{foo}{bar}
% would result in \emph{foo} $\to$ \emph{bar}
\menu{foo}{bar}{baz}
% would result in \emph{foo} $\to$ \emph{bar} $\to$ \emph{baz}
and so on. Is this possible,...
@egreg It's a community decision on whether something is a dupe: the underlying idea in both is to have an option {...}, which I can see is the same 'basic concept'
@egreg: Oh, it took me forever to find that other question, and now you say I found the wrong one :-( I'm not sure who's right. I see that the goals are different, but isn't the question just the same?
@Brent.Longborough In the eighties, the majority of operating systems were able to deal with long file names. IBM mainframe OS and another OS (which I won't mention) decided that sticking to 8+3 file names was the best thing to do in order to save the world, so the standard for CD-ROM inherited the limitation. Moreover, file names of all multiplatform software had to comply, so Karl Berry devised a clever (but cryptic) way to encode information in font file names remaining below the 8 character limit.
Just recently I was looking for some questions with a particular word in the title or the main text, but search no longer seems to find them. For example searching for the word "gender" yields nothing, yet there are 84 hits from Google of questions containing that word. This used to work as far...
@egreg Yes, I realise that, but TeX.SE doesn't recognise \mbox{8 + 0} to stop it splitting. Just for a test, here it is with a non-breaking space, too: ( 8 + 0 )
Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender implies promoting language usage which is balanced in its treatment of the genders. For example, advocates of gender-neutral language challenge the traditional use of masculine nouns and pronouns ("man", "businessman", "he", and so on) when referring to both genders or to a person or people of an unknown gender in most Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages.
Overview
The situation of gender neutral language modification in languages that have masculine and feminine grammatical genders, such as French, German, and Spanish, is very d...
mayor is original translated by Bürgermeister (master/boss of the citizen). Parodizing it you can do Bürgermeister, Bürgermeisterin, Bürgerinnenmeister and Bürgerinnenmeisterin (depending on the gender (sexus) of the Meister and the Bürger.
I think it is just stupid and very annoying. Genus and sexus are two different things.
And to add something to your discussion: Somewhere I have read something along the lines of: The masculine form should be seen as a variable that can be assign a different person/gender/whatever
@Qrrbrbirlbel I'm not that opinionated on that one. In the end it's a language and they are the way it is(?!) . I wouldn't come up with French if I tried 1500 times though. :) But some structures are seemingly getting old and I have no expertise how to handle it.
@percusse Yes, language has changes, does change and will change. But do not force it on people and make problems where they aren't any. To each its own, right?
especially if the context is becoming unfit for the contemporary political and social issues, it's rather uncomfortable to insist. But in terms of what the gender represents in a sentence I couldn't care less. I just want to see if something like googling or tweeting exists for such issues.
@percusse The ligatures are cute, although the lowercase one looks too much like he. The use of [θ] for the pronunciation will violate a deep lexical generalization about English: the voiced interdental fricative is only found in function words and the voiceless one in non-function words. There's likely a historical explanation for this, since the voiced and voiceless versions used to be allophones of a single phoneme. (I.e. they were two pronunciations of the same mental sound).
@percusse The problem is that the gender neutral plural is already in use and has been for many centuries, so there's no incentive to invent a new one.
@PauloCereda Apparently I try to hard and they come out much too emphasized.
@AlanMunn Actually, the problem is that I'm looking for an easy exit not a correct one. A modern stupidity would serve just as well since I don't expect anybody over 40 reading it, heh.
Now this is an interesting idea: :) (from a comment on meta.so) "You'd be surprised how much rep you could gain by writing a bot that pastes the title of every new question into Google, and pastes the first result as an answer. "
@AlanMunn I'm not sure about the ethical implications of deliberately poisoning Google's search results by injecting links to questions in which we could benefit from reputation harvesting. The question is: what will be our bot's name? :)
@tohecz I agree. Unless the poster is actually Claus Gerhardt (the author of Flashmode) they may not know the details of what the update fixes, but just know that it works for them.
@AlanMunn My flag was that it was of "very low quality" since, by definition "This answer has severe formatting or content problems. This answer is unlikely to be salvageable through editing, and might need to be removed." (emphasis added)
@tohecz To me there's no merit in an answer like that. It doesn't even state, however simplistically, that the "lastest version" solves the problem.
Assuming that is "answers the question", there's no need for it, I guess.
@tohecz: And, as you commented, we need a little meat around the bones in that one...
@AlanMunn What I find strange is that I flagged it as "very low quality", and the tag accompanied at the bottom of the answer echoes the idea behind the post being "of low quality", yet the flag was disputed.
I don't know whether that banner was inserted automatically or not.
In this situation I don't find it a very bad answer. There's no change history on the Flashmode site and the documentation doesn't even match the actual version number being distributed. So there's very little to add other than "I tried it and it worked for me.", which is pretty much implicit in the actual answer.
Actually the distributed version is 7.1.5 so maybe it's a bit inaccurate. I'm still running Snow Leopard on my main machine so I can't verify the answer.
As per the discussion on Why do “Invalid Flag” flags get disputed?, the "helpful"/"disputed" resolution of "invalid flag" flags is giving limited or zero value on whether the "invalid flag" flag was justified. I therefore suggest to exclude "invalid flag" flags completely from the flag statistics...
@PauloCereda Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Utah, South Carolina, Wisconsin, Wyoming.
@TorbjørnT. I missed four, three of them because of the spelling (Iceland is Island here, Moldova is Moldava, Bosnia is Bosna, I really missed only Macedonia)
Adding a bit of TeX to our chatroom, KOMA is awesome.
I think I'll write a second bot to harvest questions in our site and feeds Psmith with meaningful info, so we can use the bot to look for duplicates. :)
@JosephWright my ISP suggests I switch to ADSL2 and get a cheaper deal and faster speeds but the exchange can't cope, BT only put broadband to the village at all because they were mandated to by gvt. For years they claimed it "not economically viable" so I'm stuck at 2Mb on a good day and less if it's windy
@DavidCarlisle Here in my flat (Norwich), I've just moved to fibre from ADSL2. My parents house is in a village, but luckily a large one with a telephone exchange. So there we have ADSL2, although I think fibre is not likely. So I can't really complain :-)
@JosephWright Ah, I thought there was something "odd", but Wikipedia just listed Amsterdam in the info table, and I didn't see the footnote about the parliament at first.
@JosephWright The Wikipedia entry says that it's constitutionally the capital even though the seat of the government is in the Hague. I'm not sure what that quite means, but I suspect it's a bit more than just the cultural capital.
@tohecz I don't think Moldovans are very happy to hear their capital city called with the Russian name. The country was subject to heavy russification in the past.
A Bohemian () is a resident of the former Kingdom of Bohemia, either in a narrow sense as the region of Bohemia proper or in a wider meaning as the whole country, now known as the Czech Republic. The word "Bohemian" was used to denote the Czech people as well as the Czech language before the word "Czech" became prevalent in English. "Bohemian" may also denote "a socially unconventional person, especially one who is involved in the arts." (see Bohemianism).
Etymology
The name "Bohemia" derives from the name of the Boii, a Celtic tribe who inhabited that area towards the later La Tène p...
@egreg just looked at the source, it just saves the value away for use in the depths of the ams measuring code, so in equation it doesn't do much useful:-)
@egreg It probably ought to have a default definition that generates an error then the ams alignments switch to the real definition but it may not be safe to do that after all this time as it could make documents that "work" not work.