TeX, LaTeX and Friends

I was very much impressed by the clarity of expression and romantic beauty of Jean Sibelius' 1893 The Swan of Tounela as performed by the Gothenburg Symphony under Neeme Järvi and as featured on France Musique's Venez quand vous voulez the other day (it starts approx. 90' into the podcast). Pres...

egreg

@percusse I can't even make a sense out of "The Swan of Tuonela". Or Sibelius's music in general.

percusse

@egreg :-) I would be happy if I can get something out of Stravinsky too.

egreg

12:29 AM

@percusse I'm sure there is no sense in his music.

percusse

@egreg Sometimes I feel the same but then I don't get what others get out of that.

Obviously it might also be something like wine tasting or hifi experts that taste/hear things that are not there but ... yeah.

Alan Munn

@percusse Hmm. This seems like the wrong question. I'm not sure I'm listening for things, but listening to see what effect the music has on me.

percusse

@AlanMunn If you claim yourself as a connoisseur of anything you start to amplify epsilon differences into millions. A very common phenomenon among audiophiles as they call themselves. They do claim that they hear frequency ranges that are physically impossible to notice to justify why they have paid 20000$ for a pair of speakers.

So I think it applies to some classical music that people tend to discover nonexisting patterns because they think it's complicated so it must be superior

egreg

12:52 AM

@DavidCarlisle I'm collecting tikz points, too. :)

David Carlisle

@egreg yes but using L3 that's cheating

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Look, ma! No assignment! (Explicit)

Good night all!

David Carlisle

@egreg night

user19161

6:41 AM

Wow, I am the only person in this chat. The bikinis must have frightened everyone away.

Faheem Mitha

8:56 AM

Is there some canonical method to do templating with latex? I've got two similar captions, with some minor word differences. I'd like to have some way to use the same string in both, and then adjust the words as necessary.

maybe i can just create a latex command and pass in arguments

David Carlisle

9:15 AM

@FaheemMitha yes tex is a macro expansion language, what you describe is its main execution model, whether you define the macros with \newcommand or \def

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle Why would one use \newcommand vs \def? Is this just TeX (\def) vs LaTeX (\newcommand)?

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha yes

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle Ok. I used \newcommand.

@DavidCarlisle Oh, and happy new year.

David Carlisle

yes happy new year to you (I guess it is at least the same year for everyone today, was very confusing earlier with everyone being in different timezones:-)

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle True. The whole world is now officially in 2013!

user19161

9:50 AM

@FaheemMitha Unless we live in another world...

Jake

10:12 AM

@DavidCarlisle: Regarding the answers to tex.stackexchange.com/questions/88898/…: Which one's better, yours or egregs?

David Carlisle

@Jake silly question:-)

@Jake er well it depends really, on whether you are using l3 anyway

Finding the . and padding is, as you see only a line or two of tex code, latex executes more than that just working out which file it is supposed to load when you add \usepackage{xparse} but if you are in (or expect to be in) a world where the l3 code is already in the format then using the facilities it offers makes sense of course. Not really stress tested either answer for edge cases with dubious input such as empty or no digits before or after the point

Jake

10:31 AM

@DavidCarlisle =) thanks

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle, @egreg Speaking of xparse, what do you think of the suggestion that \levavemode should be available as a optional argument to \DeclareDocumentCommand

Something like \DeclareDocumentCommand { \foo } [ hmode = true ] ...?

Reasoning here being that \leavevmode is not really part of the code of the command itself but a property of the command (similar for \@bsphack, etc.)

egreg

@JosephWright The problem is uniquely due to \(h|v|)phantom that doesn't initiate horizontal mode.

David Carlisle

@TorbjørnT. sorry didn't notice your comment on the wrapfig qn, if you want to make it an answer I'll delete mine (I think you were first:-)

Torbjørn T.

@DavidCarlisle Nah, doesn't matter.

Joseph Wright

@egreg Understood in this case: I'm thinking much more generally

David Carlisle

10:36 AM

@TorbjørnT. oh goody more tikz points for me:-)

@JosephWright don't like it much:-) As @egreg notes if the command is defined using latex level command then (most of the time) you wouldn't need leavevmode anyway

egreg

@JosephWright Text producing commands should by default start horizontal mode, IMO. And \phantom is a text producing command. I guess that defining an \LRmode user level command for the borderline cases can be better. Actually, \phantom{0} could be replaced by \makebox[\widthof{0}]{} or similar, which hasn't the problem.

A user level \makephantom command may be added in a breeze; optional arguments h or v: \newcommand{\makephantom}[2][]{\leavevmode\csname #1phantom\endcsname{#2}}

Of course the optional argument check may be better. :)

Joseph Wright

11:25 AM

@DavidCarlisle I was thinking more that at some stage in a format or LaTeX3 reimplementation you need to cover all of the cases where LaTeX2e uses \leavevmode

egreg

12:00 PM

@JosephWright Basically when \mbox, \parbox and similar macros are involved

Joseph Wright

@egreg Quite. Something like

\DeclareDocumentCommand { \mbox } [ not-vmode = true ] { m }
  {
    \mode_if_math:TF
      { \hbox:n {#1} }
      {#1}
  }

Well, not quite that but the general idea is there!

Paulo Cereda

1:11 PM

Hi @AndrewSwann! Welcome to the chat! :)

egreg

Again!

1

Q: Numbering macros

I'm trying something that I thought would be simple \def\test{Hello} \def\test2{Hello again} \test \test2 Since I cannot control the naming I need to do some hacks. \catcode30 = 11 \catcode31 = 11 \catcode32 = 11 which works for 0 and 1 but not for 2 I have also tried the \catcode´1 etc w...

macros

Does anybody remember what's the canonical reference?

Paulo Cereda

@egreg Oh my!

Joseph Wright

@egreg I have a feeling if we see the real issue the solution won't be to sort the catcodes out

egreg

@JosephWright Surely David remembers it

Found!

9

Q: \newcommand name cannot include numbers, e.g., \Mycomand123

I would like put picture into table, and my idea is define new command as below> \newcommand{\EJ471}{\includegraphics[scale=0.150]{EJ_471.jpg}} But compiler reports an error. If I use the command name for example \EJa, everything is all right. I've read similar questions as Definining comma...

macros numbering

Paulo Cereda

3:25 PM

@JosephWright: perhaps close this one: meta.tex.stackexchange.com/questions/2836/…

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda Done

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle I thought you didn't do TikZ :-) Is this a new David for the New Year?

egreg

@FaheemMitha Jake's question received two answers from well-known TikZ masters. ;-)

user19161

4:05 PM

@egreg Wow, you call them TikZ masters!

user19161

TikZperts also sounds nice.

David Carlisle

4:46 PM

@FaheemMitha The new years resolution is to get a tikz gold badge by answering tikz question with tex primitives, picture mode, or if really pushed pstricks, doing quite well so far this year.

user19161

I am always waiting for the next version of TikZ to be released, I predict it will be later this year...

egreg

@JasperLoy Well, I have 75 answers (and 379 upvotes) in tikz-pgf; none of the answers shows a deep knowledge of TikZ/PGF, of course. :)

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle You are the TeX James Bond.

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda hmm licence to kill.... I'll have to draw up a list....

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle License to use picture mode. :)

Faheem Mitha

5:00 PM