TeX, LaTeX and Friends

Canageek

00:30

How hard it is to make the \section headers smaller?

Alan Munn

@Canageek \usepackage[small]{titlesec}

Canageek

00:50

@AlanMunn Damn, you were right about citations. Lazyness never pays off.

Alan Munn

@Canageek I do this stuff for a living. (I'm a professor, as are many of us here, you'll find.)

Canageek

@AlanMunn Ahhhhh. I'm a science major taking a history course for fun.

Alan Munn

@Canageek But the rules are the same in science. And I'm not really in the humanities.

Canageek

@AlanMunn We use ACS style predominantly, and only cite books once in a new moon in chemistry- I can't remember doing it in a long time, and can only think of one paper citing a book off the top of my head.

@AlanMunn Any idea what Bibliography string 'cbyeditor' undefined(biblatex) at entry 'Burroughs' on input line 83. Means?

Alan Munn

@Canageek Sure, that's not surprising, but the fact that you don't cite book chapters doesn't remove the rule for them. :-)

@Canageek Yes, it's because you're loading biblatex-chicago as an option to loading biblatex, I bet. In my example that I made in answering your question, I used \usepackage{biblatex-chicago}, not \usepackage[chicago-notes]{biblatex}. You should use my method.

Canageek

01:02

\usepackage[notes,natbib,isbn=false,backend=biber,url=false]{biblatex-chicago} is how I am loading it.

Alan Munn

@Canageek So I bet wrong. :-). Then I'm not sure.

Canageek

@AlanMunn I already checked that as it is the first thing to pop up on google. Also: I copied it straight from your example to make sure it worked.

Alan Munn

@Canageek Good. (I just thought you might have still had the other version, which someone else had suggested at that time.)

Canageek

@AlanMunn Time to make a MWE

Alan Munn

@Canageek What does the bibentry for Burroughs look like? Is it your edited book?

Canageek

01:08

@AlanMunn Yeah: @incollection{Burroughs,
author = {Burroughs, Peter},
editor = {Chandler, David and Beckett, Ian},
title = {The Oxford history of the British Army},
publisher = {Oxford University Press},
year = {1996},
address = {Oxford, New York},
isbn = {0192853333}
}

@AlanMunn Found the problem: Doesn't work with the 'canadian' option set in bable.

Alan Munn

@Canageek Good work. It's a bug in the lbx file, I would think. So I guess you'll have to live with using American for the moment.

Canageek

@AlanMunn british doesn't work either.

Alan Munn

@Canageek Right. Because the cbyeditor is defined in cms-american.lbx; there is no ukenglish or canadian version. (And there probably shouldn't be, since all of the terms should be the same.)

You can solve the problem (and use UKenglish or canadian) by adding this line to your preamble:
\DeclareLanguageMapping{UKenglish}{cms-american}
or
\DeclareLanguageMapping{canadian}{cms-american}

Canageek

@AlanMunn So given that I'm a linguistic anglophile, how much is using American English settings going to set my teeth on edge?

@AlanMunn That works. So am I using American settings now or ?

Alan Munn

As I think I mentioned before, it mainly affects the style of the spelled out in words date, but in Canada we use the American style anyway for that. (Not the numeric date, which we use the British order). Other than that, it will be differences only in the hyphenation of certain words. See this question: tex.stackexchange.com/q/12775/2693

@Canageek Well you're using whatever is canadian (which I think is american date + british hyphenation, and all of the bib strings defined in cms-american. But it's unlikely there are any differences there, unless there are any words spelled with 'or' that should be 'our'.

Canageek

01:25

@AlanMunn Thanks for your help. Is there somewhere I can report that bug to?

Alan Munn

01:36

It's not really a bug, I see. It's documented on p. 95 of the documentation. (Which also shows that the fix I gave you isn't quite right. You would need to modify the .lbx file itself as well so that it contains the line \InheritBibliographyExtras{british} instead of \InheritBibliographyExtras{american}. You can do this by making a copy of the file, editing it and putting it in your local texmf folder. It should go in tex/latex/biblatex/lbx.

Martin Tapankov

08:36

@JosephWright: Got a quick question about siunitx: I try \si{\m\per\s} and it renders it as ms^{-1}, while \si{\kg\per\m^3} works as expected. Am I doing something wrong, and if not, how can I override it to get m/s?

Joseph Wright

@MartinTapankov Standard settings use power for \per as well as everything else. You want \sisetup{per-mode = symbol}

Martin Tapankov

@JosephWright: Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks!

Martin Scharrer

09:27

Does the Necromancer badge make you automatically a TeX wizard? ;-)

3

Paulo Cereda

:-P

Bruno Le Floch

Is it morning already? :-s

(5 am on my side)

Paulo Cereda

@BrunoLeFloch Yep! :-) (at least here)

Martin Scharrer

@BrunoLeFloch It's 11:36 here, so I just woke up and had breakfast :-)

Andrew Stacey

Students! I've already given a 2hr lecture this morning.

Paulo Cereda

09:37

@MartinScharrer :-D

Bruno Le Floch

@PauloCereda That's no good news. Coffee again. Third night in a week :(. Oh well. At least I did some work for my phd.

@AndrewStacey Poor students :)

Paulo Cereda

@BrunoLeFloch That's good news. :-) Let me guess: 90% l3 stuff, 10% phd. :-)

@BrunoLeFloch mathematicians are sadists. (kidding!)

Bruno Le Floch

@PauloCereda No l3 stuff. Lots of nothingness, and I tried my hand at one of Raphink's hard questions.

@PauloCereda I once was one.

Paulo Cereda

Oh.

:-)

Raphink

@BrunoLeFloch: you're brave :-)

and the result is quite nice :-)

Andrew Stacey

09:41

@PauloCereda No, it's the university schedulers who are responsible for that. I'm just as reluctant to be there as the students! (*looks around and hopes that no-one from this university read that*)

Bruno Le Floch

@Raphink Thanks. I definitely don't know enough about the output routine to do things more properly. The LaTeX3 project once had some partially working code for a very powerful output routine, I believe (written, of course, by Frank Mittelbach (Joseph, correct me if I'm wrong)).

We'll revive it at some point.

Paulo Cereda

@AndrewStacey I see. There are some crazy schedules out there. They say it's good to do math in the morning, but we need to fully wake up before. :-)

Andrew Stacey

@PauloCereda I do my best work between 9am and 10am. That hour is worth about 3 at any other time of the day.

Bruno Le Floch

Jeff Atwood's 2 yo son has a twitter account!?

Paulo Cereda

@AndrewStacey cool!

Raphink

09:46

I think @BrunoLeFloch deserves a lot of +1 for his answer tex.stackexchange.com/questions/27998/…

I'd give him +10 if I could

Patrick

@Raphink Just create some fake accounts - I have 25 of them to vote for my questions and answers, because nobody else does.

(just kidding, of course)

Raphink

ah, I was wondering how you got this rep

Patrick

Handling the fake accounts is harder then answering questions, so I should get a badge for it.

Paulo Cereda

@Patrick at least you've got your T-shirt. :-)

Bruno Le Floch

@Raphink Thanks again, but I think you're over estimating my solution: it only works with plain text (and I mean "plain text", as in no figures, probably no table, nothing else than lines of words), and given that the document you're showing has many of those, it's not going to help you much. It is a first step, though.

Raphink

09:51

@Patrick: have you considered hiring indian guys to vote you up all day long?

Patrick

@PauloCereda As if I had known this in advance

Bruno Le Floch

@PauloCereda Patrick should give you his t-shirt.

Patrick

@Raphink Good idea!

Martin Scharrer

@Patrick Actually there are some automated scripts in place to avoid just that.

Paulo Cereda

@BrunoLeFloch :-P

Martin Scharrer

09:52

The votes would disappear over night.

Patrick

Oh well, you have exposed(?) me

Joseph Wright

@BrunoLeFloch Yup, xor works but needs revising

Bruno Le Floch

@AndrewStacey I'm reading some random comments on the Cthulu worshipping madman question. Some of them want to have the thing carved in stone. Can you do that in TikZ?

3

@JosephWright As many other things alas.

Joseph Wright

@BrunoLeFloch True

Martin Scharrer

@BrunoLeFloch :-D

Joseph Wright

09:54

I am working on it!

Paulo Cereda

"carved in stone" - epic!

Bruno Le Floch

@JosephWright On xor??

Patrick

@BrunoLeFloch LuaTeX can do that, I am sure.

Joseph Wright

@BrunoLeFloch Not at present: I meant 'on other things'

Paulo Cereda

I want to see how long it will take until Sesame Street has a Cthulhu sketch.

Bruno Le Floch

09:57

@Patrick Should I ask the question? "How do I make my document look like it was carved in stone by an Cthulhu worshipping madman?"

Andrew Stacey

@BrunoLeFloch Surely the carving-in-stone bit is a property of the printer. Apparently we have a 3D printer here so I could have a go at it.

2

Patrick

@BrunoLeFloch Sure. I'll post a LuaTeX answer, cause LuaTeX is the new Mac Gyver.

5

Paulo Cereda

What if we use stone image, a semi-transparent font and an outline to make the emboss effect?

@Patrick LOL

Bruno Le Floch

@AndrewStacey oO I was just thinking of getting a pdf output which looked like something carved in stone

What about producing a new engine: stoneTeX?

Paulo Cereda

@AndrewStacey please please please please do it!

Andrew Stacey

10:01

@BrunoLeFloch Oh, I see! Well, I'll have a think about it. What would be sufficient as a proof-of-concept? How about a line style that looks like a carved line? Hmm, have to go out into the forest and see if I can find some of the old troll documents - those were carved in stone.

Bruno Le Floch

Not sure what question I should ask. The Cthulhu part is completely irrelevant. Something like "Can I use TeX to control a 3d printer?"

@AndrewStacey Well, if you can do it on a 3d printer, I'm definitely asking for that :).

Patrick

I wonder if there is a color profile for "stone".

Paulo Cereda

3d documents? Of course we need to use iTeX*.

3

Andrew Stacey

@BrunoLeFloch Depends on whether you want a serious answer or not! That, I think, will just get silly. If you ask, "Can I make my lines look as though carved in stone" then we might get some serious answers (as well as the silly ones).

Patrick

Bruno Le Floch

10:05

@Patrick I guess there should be various colour profiles, depending on the type of stone. Then someone can implement a map of the world and you'd do \setstone{origin=France, type=granite, embedded-fossils=true}.

Paulo Cereda

@Patrick o.O

Bruno Le Floch

I forgot \setstone{footsteps={dinosaurs, humans, gnu}}.

@Patrick Where does that image come from?

@Andrew How do you usually talk to your 3d printer?

Patrick

@BrunoLeFloch From Uwe Ziegenhagen, a TeX German enthusiast (posted on google+)

Paulo Cereda

When looking for Stone pictures, Sharon just owned my results.

Andrew Stacey

@BrunoLeFloch In words of one syllable or less. Seriously, I've no idea. I just know that there is a 3D printer hereabouts. I've never used it, and I imagine that the people in charge are very particular about the input format. But I've no idea what that should be.

Bruno Le Floch

10:09

@AndrewStacey So I guess the first step would be to find out what is the standard input format for 3d printers

Patrick

@PauloCereda images.google.de/search?q=steine&tbm=isch

Bruno Le Floch

It seems that the file format is such that it could be written by TeX... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STL_%28file_format%29

Paulo Cereda

@Patrick ah thanks! :-)

Bruno Le Floch

I'll think about what to ask on 3d printing. Expect a question soon. In the meantime, phd.

Paulo Cereda

10:28

Friends, my user area will be down for some time while they change the infrastructure. The TeX.sx world map will be temporary unavailable, but I'll manage to host it somewhere.

Raphink

github?

Paulo Cereda

Indeed! I just learned about gh-pages yesterday.

Raphink

Yes, very useful.

Paulo Cereda

Do they support markdown? I read somewhere you need to set up something.

Raphink

hmmm

github supports Markdown in general

Paulo Cereda

10:30

It's probably easier to drop the html files.

Raphink

but for gh-pages, it's just HTML

you create an index.html, and then you do whatever you want

Paulo Cereda

ah I see.

;-)

Raphink

github.com/raphink/CV/tree/gh-pages

produces raphink.github.com/CV

just noticed my README is not up-to-date :S

Paulo Cereda

Good idea!

Raphink

the tex + PDF are in the master branch, and the page is in the gh-pages branch

and the index.html links to the raw exports in the master branch for the PDF files

Paulo Cereda

10:34

nice! So it's always updated!

Paulo Cereda

10:52

Now, a TeX related question: is it ok if I post a question on how to add white microdots inside font glyphs? It's like an emulation of EcoFont: ecofont.com

Patrick

@PauloCereda Sure you can if you can live with downvoting :)

I can't see a reason why not to post it? It's slightly off topic IMO, but still OK to ask here.

Paulo Cereda

@Patrick hehe :-)

@Patrick I need to figure out a better way to ask it. :-)

Alan Munn

11:18

@AndrewStacey There's a pending edit of one of your answers you should probably take a look at.

Andrew Stacey

@AlanMunn Thanks. That would be a useful feature: if there's a pending edit on one of my questions/answers then I should get a notification. (The edit was fine, by the way.)

Alan Munn

@AndrewStacey I figured it was, but thought it would be better if you approved it. (And I suspect most of the rest of us who saw it thought the same.)

Andrew Stacey

0

Q: How about a notification if there's a pending edit on one of my contributions?

I'm not a great one for checking the "pending edit" queue, as I find myself rarely able to decide so leave it for someone more knowledgeable. But if the edit is on one of my contributions, I'd probably be able to decide on it so would take a look. So, as a feature request, how about a notificat...

Martin Scharrer

11:56

@AndrewStacey Duplicate of:

10

Q: Notify users about edit suggestion on their own posts

At the moment normal users do not get notified if someone suggests an edit on their own question or answer. I'm not even sure if they can see these suggestions if the do not have the corresponding privilege. I think users should get notified about pending suggested edits on their own posts and a...

feature-request suggested-edits

:-D

Joseph Wright

What do people think of my potential dupe for

0

Q: Fit given text on a user specified number of pages

Is it possible to make a given text fit on n pages, where n is a number chosen by the user? Preferably by diminishing the margins first (up to a certain point). Changing the fontsize is acceptable too but only after the margins have their minimum values. The document is plain text. There are no...

margins fontsize fit

Andrew Stacey

@MartinScharrer Evidently a good idea! Now, was it "Great minds think alike" or "Fools seldom differ"? (I've added a comment to mine to link it to yours)

3

Martin Scharrer

@AndrewStacey Nice saying! I didn't know them before

Andrew Stacey

@JosephWright Looks good to me.

egreg

@JosephWright It's not exactly the same, but the question has really no answer different from "no, you can't do it with one run of TeX unless the document has very simple structure".

Joseph Wright

12:08

@egreg That's why I asked: the answer is the same but I'm not sure the question is a dupe

Just rather similar

Paulo Cereda

12:33

@egreg: rep cap? :-)

egreg

@PauloCereda Today's slow (I'm at 7 upvotes), but the day is long. :) I've lectured all morning to the future elementary school teachers; tomorrow I'll talk about "Romeo and Juliet", Piero della Francesca and Giotto. :) Do they pertain to math?

Paulo Cereda

@egreg Piero della Francesca I remember! When he began losing his vision, he dedicated himself to math, I think geometry. I was good in the Renaissance subject at school. :)

egreg

12:51

@PauloCereda Yes, he wrote a math treatise about perspective. It's a strange coincidence that another mathematician, Luca Pacioli, was born in the same small town (Sansepolcro). It's easy to remember Piero's day of death: October 12, 1492. In Monterchi, near Arezzo, there's perhaps the smallest museum in the world: it contains only a painting by Piero, the "Madonna del Parto" artleo.it/alarte/imgdb/piero_madonnaparto.jpg

Paulo Cereda

13:07

@egreg How nice!

Raphink

13:49

There's like 4 pages of users with 1 reputation

About 75 pages of users under 101

And only 16 pages (out of 173) of users above 200

Andrey Vihrov

14:31

@Raphink Discovering the joys of the Gaussian distribution? ;-)

Paulo Cereda

Is it me or the swag package effect had an effect on our users? It seems people are returning from their fortresses of solitude and beginning to contribute again.

Andrey Vihrov

@PauloCereda The information has been here and on meta, and I suppose not many people frequent these places, nor do I think that this might have such great effect.

Raphink

@PauloCereda: Sorry, its' too late

Paulo Cereda

@AndreyVihrov I see. Good point.

@Raphink :-P

Raphink

There's no beer pint anyway, like @MartinScharrer pointed out ;-)

(I don't really care, I don't drink beer)

Paulo Cereda

15:06

UbuntuOne now on multiple platforms.

lockstep

@Raphink You can. It' s called a retroactive bounty. ;-)

Andrew Stacey

16:02

@PauloCereda: Any chance you could write that iPad app for me! I am getting lost in a sea of apps that do half of what I need, but none that appear to do it all.

Paulo Cereda

6

Q: Destroy a hard drive without proper equipment

I need to make two hard drives unreadable. Unfortunately, I have some constraints which make this harder than usual (in particular, they rule out the answers to other questions): I don’t have a computer to mount the drives and erase them (weird, right?) I don’t have a strong magnet I don’t have...

hard-drive security privacy

@AndrewStacey UbuntuOne?

Andrew Stacey

@PauloCereda Huh? What has UbuntuOne to do with an iPad?

@PauloCereda Years ago, I saw a website with a series of images where someone had used a tank to destroy a hard drive. Just tried to find it again, but to no avail.

Paulo Cereda

@AndrewStacey I don't know! I thought you were quoting my last message. :-)

@AndrewStacey haha thats epic!

Andrew Stacey

@PauloCereda No! Earlier today you said something about writing an iPad app. If you were serious, I can tell you what app to write.

Paulo Cereda

@AndrewStacey I've been waiting for some time to write Android and iOS apps. It would be a nice "homework" to see how things go. I might give it a try. I have a platform to develop in, but unfortunately no actual device to deploy an app.

@AndrewStacey: I found apple.stackexchange.com/questions/26651/… . Is this app?

Andrew Stacey

16:29

@PauloCereda That's it! If you're serious, I can give you a more detailed list of what I'd like it to do, but you can get the basic idea if you think about it being an app for displaying beamer presentations with the ability to write on and highlight bits of pages.

Paulo Cereda

@AndrewStacey Cool! I need to take a look on the documentation first and see how the stuff works. It's been quite a while since I played with ObjectiveC. I'll see what I can do and then I'll tell you: :-)

egreg

18:00

@PauloCereda See? Now I got it.

Paulo Cereda

@egreg Congrats! :)

Legendary badge here you go. :)

Fedora 15 was supposed to carry my name suggestion. It was awesome.

Martin Scharrer

Ah, just found this interesting post about badges:

119

Q: List of all badges with full descriptions

What are badge name's requirements? Why didn't I get badge name? Which badges can I earn multiple times? Jump to: Regular badges A-L and M-Z Tag badges Badge families Area 51 badges Note: Some badges are awarded based on score. The term score means the total number of upvotes minus the t...

support faq tags badges

Joseph Wright

19:22

I wonder if

8

Q: slashbox alternative

Is there a better way to label both axes of a table at the same time rather than using slashbox? It looks kind of ugly.

tables

and

2

Q: Inclined line between two cells in a table

How can I put an inclined line between two cells in a table? I know that \cline{i-j} put a partial horizontal line, but I want that this line is inclined... Can somebody help me?

tables

should be made dupes of

10

Q: Diagonal lines in table cell

I need this table: (each row and column should have the same height and length, last cell should be divided by diagonal line). I tried the following code: \documentclass[11pt]{article} \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} \usepackage{array} \usepackage{makecell} \newcolumntype{x}[1]{>{\centering\let\n...

tables

Paulo Cereda

19:35

@JosephWright Apparently they look the same, for me.

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda That's what I thought. I'll wait to see if there are other opinions before acting

Paulo Cereda

0

Q: Using external tables in TikZ

How do I use tabela.xls as a data source to a LaTeX table or even a table made with TikZ with the following command? Note: I wanted to use tabela.xls as a data source for multiple files. Tex and that it is synchronized when I change the tabela.xls. \documentclass[a4paper]{article} \usepackage{ti...

tikz-pgf tables external-file

When I read this question, it reminded me of a nice library I used in the past: Apache POI. POI stands for "Poor Obfuscation Implementation". :-)

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda Post your comment as an answer, I think. .xls is a binary format, so direct use is out. (Depending on the context, pdfplotstable might help with displaying the data)

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright Aye Captain!

Paulo Cereda

20:01

@JosephWright Done. :-)

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda I saw that. Note that xlsx is not the same as the Open Office format, although both are ZIP containers for XML data. (As they are ZIPs, direct TeX processing is still out)

Argh, only two votes left today

egreg

@JosephWright I think that the use of slashed boxes (and possibly also of vertical rules in tables) should be banned by law. Those are very much alike, a merge can be done, I believe.

Joseph Wright

@egreg Okay, we have agreement - done

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright Ah thanks. I'll update that.

@JosephWright Ah, we are talking ODT x OOXML!

:-P

I understood xlsx was not OOXML.

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda A quick check on WikiPedia is in order!

Office Open XML

}} Office Open XML (also informally known as OOXML or OpenXML) is a zipped, XML-based file format developed by Microsoft for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. The Office Open XML specification was initially standardised by Ecma (as ECMA-376) and later by ISO and IEC (as ISO/IEC 29500). Starting with Microsoft Office 2007, the Office Open XML file formats have become the default target file format of Microsoft Office, although the Strict variant of the standard is not yet fully supported.{{cite web |url=http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news...

egreg

20:13

@JosephWright Doesn't LuaTeX have a library for zip files?

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright Ah! :-)

Joseph Wright

@egreg Quite possibly. I'm thinking of processing from within the TeX environment of primitives and macros. Lua-based work is different

Paulo Cereda

@egreg Lua has one. As Patrick said, LuaTeX seem to be the new MacGyver.

Raphink

Well Lua is a quite generalist language, it's not limited to TeX. So when you integrate it into LuaTeX, you gain all the dev done in other fields with it.

Paulo Cereda

Trivia: Lua is the Portuguese word for "moon".

Andrey Vihrov

20:22

@PauloCereda Now the Lua logo makes sense!

Joseph Wright

@AndreyVihrov It's also the reason for all of the 'Howling at the moon' business

Paulo Cereda

@AndreyVihrov :-)

egreg

@JosephWright Of course in pure TeX it's impossible (at least one has to unzip the file); AFAIK ConTeXt has also some XML processing module.

Joseph Wright

@egreg I suspect it's still easier in most cases to convert the data with an external tool to CSV or tab-separated. That's certainly what I do.

Paulo Cereda

A nice brazilian countryside song about moon, "In the track of the full moon": youtube.com/watch?v=5mtkq5Ai6xc (the sound is from a viola caipira)

He's playing here: youtube.com/watch?v=dC-iOtYsI9A&feature=related

Paulo Cereda

20:55

@AlanMunn: Have you heard Bachianas Brasileiras No. 2? It's from Villa-Lobos. I love "Trenzinho caipira", which is the subtitle for the toccata movement that concludes that suite. It's fantastic, the idea is to resemble a train in movement. There's an "unplugged" version played in a viola caipira here. I already played with the violeiro in the right, it was a piano/viola duet. :-)

egreg

@JosephWright What's really missing is a live link between the TeX table and the worksheet. One might conceive a shell script run via shell-escape that converts the worksheet file to CSV and input this one.

Joseph Wright

@egreg It depends on the ultimate source of the tabular data. Systems I'm familiar with don't spit out Excel worksheets

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright I used Apache POI in the past to convert xls to a csv file, but I had to know beforehand what I was doing. It's funny because they call it HSSF: Horrible Spreadsheet Format. :-)

Joseph Wright

My point being that in my experience one has to convert from <original format> to Excel by hand anyway

Paulo Cereda

21:16

datatool is funnier than I thought. :-)

Canageek

21:37

@AlanMunn Hey, if you are around I have a question for you.

Alan Munn

@Canageek Yes?

Canageek

@AlanMunn After that stuff we did to BibLaTeX-Chicago yesterday Ibid has been changed to Ibidem in my document. Any idea why?

Alan Munn

@PauloCereda Yes, I know it. I have all of Villa Lobos' guitar works played by Turibio Santos on CD.

Paulo Cereda

@AlanMunn Really? How nice! Turíbio is a genius.

Alan Munn

@Canageek No, but it could be a difference between InheritBibliographyExtras{british} vs. {american}. Ibid. is an abbreviation; the full form is ibidem, so maybe British usage is to spell out the whole word.

Canageek

21:42

@AndrewStacey If you show me how to render 3d Cthulhu documents in LaTeX I'm going to start saving to buy a 3d printer.

Martin Scharrer

I forgot that this is still on my ToDo list for svn-multi :-(

1

A: Customize displayed time zone with svn-multi and \svnfiledate

I'm the author of svn-multi. There is currently no feature for this included in the package. I was planning to add something like this for a while and asked the question Handling different time zones here to get some help for the conversation. The code I posted there in my self-answer could be a...

Canageek

@AlanMunn Huh, interesting. I wonder if my TA will take Ibidum or if I should use American settings?

Alan Munn

@Canageek That I have no idea. I've never written a paper using ibid. ever, so I have no clue what's accepted practice anywhere. But my guess would be that despite our Canadian penchant for not being American, we tend to pattern most often with American practice in these matters. Sadly, many of you younger people are even abandoning 'zed'. Luckily you seem to recover as you get older. Warning: sunglasses required for this link: zee and zed

Paulo Cereda

@AlanMunn You were certainly not kidding about the sunglasses. o.O

Alan Munn

@Canageek It depresses me to think that your TA should actually care about such matters.

Martin Scharrer

21:56

Always these people with their old installations:

3

Q: Compile a file when images are missing/not available

I don't have access to my image files so I want to only compile with the text. I figured using draft mode would solve this problem but I still get a "cannot find image file" error. How can I compile without having to copy some random picture I do have. Here is my header \newcommand{\rootFolder...

graphics draft

Canageek

@AlanMunn Yeah, I give it 90% chance he doesn't care.

Alan Munn

@Canageek Well that's good, because he shouldn't. What really matters is the content of your work, not silly details about formatting citations.

Canageek

@AlanMunn I'm just cautious as I've been told humanities people are crazy about such things. Normally I'd only be this careful when submitting a paper, as they do care.

Paulo Cereda

@MartinScharrer This sounds like a "Update your install or GTFO!" ultimatum. :-)

Canageek

@PauloCereda Not all of us are on systems with nice apt-get update/upgrade commands.

Alan Munn

22:00

@Canageek True, and also depending on where in the world the OP is, bandwidth may be at a premium. The linux packagers don't help matters either.

Paulo Cereda

@Canageek I know. That's why we insist on people installing the official TeXLive instead of relying in the one package with their distros.

That's not a distro issue per se, though some package managers are greedy on taking care of every single bit in a distro, including LaTeX packages.

(Ewww apt-get!) :-P

Canageek

@PauloCereda Which works really well as long as those are updated, as I always remember to run that update. The problem happens when it takes years to get a new version of TeXLive into the system.

Alan Munn

@Canageek Yes, that's why I found it depressing. There shouldn't be this fetishization of citation practice, but there is, and it's ridiculous, IMO. I think it's a bit of power trip on the part of such people. I'm happy that my students actually read and cite stuff at all; formatting their citations is irrelevant icing on the cake.

Canageek

@AlanMunn I kind of get it for publications, who want everything to look the same, so my eye always knows where to go in the citation box to find something. I am more annoyed by how slowly they change: No use of DOI numbers for example.

Paulo Cereda

@Canageek True. Unfortunately, sometimes you face an issue caused by an outdated or even obsolete package. :-(

Canageek

22:05

@PauloCereda Like the fact that TeXLive is well out of date on ubuntu right now?

Paulo Cereda

@Canageek Beats me, I'm not a Ubuntu guy. :-) But I think the "current" one is probably dated 2009, I guess. :-)

Canageek

@PauloCereda As I recall, yes.

Here is a question: How fast is LuaTeX being updated? Should I be holding my breath for it getting mircotype support soon?

Paulo Cereda

@Canageek I have no idea, but I'm also interested. :-)

@AlanMunn Out of curiosity: in general, do humanities people use LaTeX?

Canageek

I just finally got the joke on the right side by Jin, since I never pronounce it like the polymer.

Alan Munn

@Canageek Yes, for actual publications including theses, it's important (although it's clear that there are more or less sane systems around.) But for term papers, it's really quite silly to be so finicky. Although to be fair, the humanities generally, the range of sources being cited is massively more complicated than in the sciences. As you we mentioning last night, in Chemistry, you rarely even cite books, much less anything as weird as newspaper article or some old document.

Canageek

22:11

@AlanMunn Yeah, I cite papers, papers...I think I cited a report once. In my personal reports I've cited textbooks and lab manuals, though not according to the proper style guidelines, just a 'close enough' kinda thing.

Paulo Cereda

@Canageek: In which area are you working on? (sorry, English fail)

Canageek

@AlanMunn I actually talked to the editor-in-chief of Nature Chemistry once, he agreed that adding DOIs to citations would be a great idea, but said getting authors to obey the formatting guidelines was like pulling teeth.

@PauloCereda Chemistry. I'm on the last year of my B.Sc.(Honours Chem.)

Paulo Cereda

@Canageek Ah! How nice. :-)

Canageek

And to answer anyones question: People have heard of LaTeX in chem, but very few use it that I've seen.

Alan Munn

@PauloCereda In general no. In specific areas, somewhat. It's fairly popular in linguistics (although that's a science that just so happens to be though of by the outside world as part of the humanities). In the humanities proper, I know that there are a fair number of XeLaTeX users who are working on ancient languages.

Canageek

22:17

@AlanMunn Also the reason I'm being so careful is that if I can raise my cumulative average by 0.04 points out of 12 I qualify for WAY more scholarships when I get to grad school next year, so every mark counts.

Alan Munn

@Canageek Well you'd be surprised at how many people still do bibliographies by hand. So typing all that info is not anyone's idea of fun.

Paulo Cereda

@Canageek Really? I thought it was the other way around.

Alan Munn

@Canageek Are you sure of that? Although GPA matters in grad school, it's not nearly as important as letters of recommendation (and in some cases GRE scores.)

egreg

My comment here reminds me about the quote from "Spaceballs": "That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage."

0

Q: What is the best symbol for vector/matrix transpose?

What is the best or most popular symbol for vector/matrix transpose? I have used simply ^T, for example $c^T x$. I thought it is ugly, but I was too lazy to think about alternatives. Can you suggest a better one?

mathmode symbols

Paulo Cereda

Well, TBH in my dept. there were only 3 or 4 that actually used it.

Alan Munn

22:20

@PauloCereda Right, and you were in CS, which should be more aware of it.

Paulo Cereda

@AlanMunn Indeed! But it was quite a shock.

Alan Munn

@egreg And we know that you are a bastion of good taste, given your comment here: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/30432/styling-the-part-page/…

Paulo Cereda

@egreg "one, two, three, four, five"?

:-)

Alan Munn

That answer was in the "I was only following orders" category.

Paulo Cereda

@AlanMunn or "an older kid just told me to do that way". :-)

Alan Munn

22:25

To any PC users: do you have any suggestions for good netbooks?

egreg

@PauloCereda Which, coincidentally, is the combination in my luggage!

@AlanMunn I find the chapter styles of fncychap preposterously horrible. Is there a stronger adjective?

Alan Munn

@egreg absolutely f*cking awful?

egreg

@AlanMunn I'm happy to see that I'm not left alone in the battle.

Alan Munn

@egreg No, as I said, "I was only following orders". But it didn't seem nice to answer the question and then stomp all over the OPs sense of aesthetics. That's what the comments are for. :-)

Paulo Cereda

@AlanMunn My dad has an Acer Aspire One 751h. It's quite good. Small and "honest" performance.

egreg

22:38

@AlanMunn On the GuIT forum I always say not to use fncychap. Once a student wanted some hint about a passage in a proof and handed me the lecture notes written by a colleague: the first thing I told the student was "Never use such an awful style", pointing at the chapter title. :)

2

Alan Munn

This is one of the hazards of being LaTeX users: we feel entitled to point out all manner of misadventures in formatting, to everyone. Every so often I get students who seem to like bold underlining (or even just underlining.)

I actually had to fight with my university thesis office when I deposited my dissertation to be able to use italics. They tried to make me use underlining. Barbaridade.

Paulo Cereda

@egreg And the student probably followed your train of thought. :-) Per un buon intendidore, basta mezza parola. :-)

@AlanMunn I can't emphasize barbaridade enough. :-(

Alan Munn

@PauloCereda Unfortunately you and I are probably the only ones who know what it means. (Although others' guesses are probably more or less correct.) I just couldn't resist. It's such a satisfying word to use.

Paulo Cereda

@AlanMunn So true! I use it a lot. And it's one of the most used words in the South region (followed by tchê ?) :-)

Alan Munn

@PauloCereda You must be right on the edge of where people don't really use it, no?

Paulo Cereda

22:49

@AlanMunn :-)

@egreg: speaking of the GuIT forum, I once saw a post in there about TeXPrinter. I was so happy. :-)

@AlanMunn Here we stress the R in every single word. So imagine me saying barbaridade like baRRRRbaridade. :-)

egreg

@PauloCereda I should use it more frequently. Good night!

Paulo Cereda

@egreg Night! :-) (wow, 1am, I guess?!)

Canageek

23:36

I take it that biber only works with BibLaTeX?

Crud, whomever told me that achemso would work with biber was wrong

Paulo Cereda

I don't know. (But I want to try BibLaTeX in the future).

Alan Munn

@Canageek Yes. But there is a biblatex-chem. It's also written by @JosephWright so I'm sure it does what achemso does (except for use with actual submissions to the journals, I suspect.)

Canageek

@PauloCereda Currently not, since you can't use it with BibTeX files. There is a chem-BibLaTeX package, but the dev blog says it is currently broken.

@AlanMunn texdev.net/2011/08/14/biblatex-chem-updates

Alan Munn

@Canageek Oh. That's too bad. But it's only a single change in your editor to switch between the two, no? In fact, you could probably write a script that would check for the presence of a bcf file and if so, run biber, and if not, run bibtex, and have that be the script that your editor links to bibtexing.

Canageek

@AlanMunn Sadly I work in TeXStudio (Fork of TeXMaker) which just has a command line. It wouldn't be too bad if I wasn't switching between the two on a regular basis, as it only has one quick compile button that I can set with multiple commands.

Paulo Cereda

23:53

Time for me to go to bed. :-)
\newcounter{sheep}
\stepcounter{sheep}

See ya, friends!

Alan Munn

@Canageek You could try latexmk as the quick command. On my system, provided the aux files are properly deleted, it will automatically choose biber for bcf files and bibtex for the others.

Torbjorn T.

@Canageek If it is the same as TeXmaker (as I believe), you can set up five "User commands", with keyboard shortcuts Alt + Shift + n. See User --> User commands. That looks to work the same way as the quick build.

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