Catching up on the news about the election of the new Fifa president, Gianni Infantino. He's from the same town as my mother was, Brig, in the canton of Valais. May his time in office be successful and scandal-free!
I liked the latest Star Wars movie a lot, but I still thought that it lacked a truly fabulous villain... -- something like my illustrious, tragically mis-understood ancestor...
(hmm, the message I just typed just vanished. starting over...)
I'm an economist. and I've been using LaTeX for almost 25 years. My first experience with LaTeX was right after graduate, when I was busy revising a couple of chapters of my dissertation to issue them as working papers.
I'm no longer an academic economist, but I have the good fortune to work for an organization that values scholarly research and expects its professional staff to keep doing -- and publishing -- high-quality research. Hence my continued interest in LaTeX.
@barbarabeeton - Indeed, I still do lots of research in economics, attend academic conferences to present my papers and to act as a discussant of others' papers, etc.
@barbarabeeton - I really like teaching. Last month, I taught a lecture course at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and very much enjoyed reliving the full-monty teaching experience.
@barbarabeeton -- "fully monty" being purely a figure of speech...
@Mico -- when we first "met" (in email), it was about hyphenation exceptions. you've since expanded on that with the selnolig package, which deals with impliementation and restriction of "archaic" ligatures (and the concomitant hyphenation problems). what got you interested in that?
@barbarabeeton - Believe it or not, it was reading the TeXbook that introduced me, inter alia, to ligatures as a typographic device. I then started thinking about how to program up selective ligature suppression...
@Mico -- well, tex has been the downfall of i don't know how many grad students! (a marvelous distraction.) it's a good thing that you had already completed your ph.d.
@PauloCereda - I believe, deep down, that DEK didn't bother providing a method for programming up ligature suppression rules simply because the need to do so for English language documents isn't all that pressing. It's a very different matter for German language documents.
@barbarabeeton - I couldn't put it better, "a marvelous distraction". :-)
@Mico -- ligature suppression, it seems to me, is intimately connected to something missing from the tex hyphenation approach -- the ability to apply multi-level choices for break-points that take into account a language with heavy compounding. (it would be useful in english, but is vital in german ... or chemistry.)
@Mico -- your name isn't in the "erdos1" file (files.oakland.edu/users/grossman/enp/Erdos1.html) that lists co-authors with erd\H{o}s himself, and the "next generation", namely their co-authors. but that list may include just actual mathematicians.
@barbarabeeton - One of the things that's really neat about LuaTeX is that it has opened up the paragraph building algorithm. There's a group of German language specialists that's been assembling advanced hyphenation patterns. By "advanced", I mean that there are more desirable and less desirable potential break points within compound words.
@barbarabeeton -- A good challenge for some smart computer science wiz kid will be to write an hyphenation algorithm that incorporates information about the more and the less desirable break points
@barbarabeeton - I've thought about it some more, and I now think my Erdos number is 3, not 2. One of my co-authors published a piece with a person with computer science/math background, who, you guessed it, published a piece with Erdos.
@Mico -- yes, that's a good start on the problem. but there's an information gap, i think, which is the lack of good references that are authoritative in showing "staged" hyphenation points. actually, the compact british word list that i have (which was allegedly the source of the british patterns) does show preferences.
@barbarabeeton - Thanks for the link! The #1 person is Ed Howorka, and he published a piece with Alain Chaboud, with whom I published a piece. So my number is 3!
@barbarabeeton - Sorry, I didn't mean to slight your contribution! It's just that I'm more directly familiar with the work of the German hyphenation working group.
@yo' - Well, the accident (involving the left knee...) put an end to any pretenses to being competitive. I still enjoy sailing as a marvelous way to blow off an entire afternoon, or even a whole day. :-)
@barbarabeeton - Funny you should ask! I did teach myself the basics of celestial navigation, but that was at a time just when GPS-based navigation became widely available, so I never really got to practice reading a sextant and all that very much.
@Mico -- the u.s. navy seems to have re-instituted the teaching of celestial to their prospective officers. (concerned about what to do when the satellites are jammed.)
@PauloCereda - I suspect there are some much bigger Star Wars fans in this group than I am. The idea of using Jabba as my SE avatar was a lark. A couple of years ago, my daughters gave me a lego set of Jabba's sail barge (yes, there is such a thing!) as a birthday gift, complete with a figurine of Jabba. Oh, my daughters are huge SW fans!
@barbarabeeton - Indeed, it's a valid concern. Reintroducing a good working knowledge of celestial navigation may be a good idea for the navy, but I doubt it'll make much of an impact in aeronautics.
@barbarabeeton - Shortly before my older daughter was born, our friends, my wife, and I painted the nursery. I painted a sailboat on the wall right next to the crib. I suspect that's how she got her introduction to sailing!
@Mico -- probably so. i still remember heading toward a gate at laguardia airport, when you could still see outside, looking down into a cockpit, only to see a road map (from a now-defunct gasoline distributor) on the dashboard.
@barbarabeeton - Among the graphic arts, my strongest affinity is to photography. I remember being reasonably good at free-hand drawing in middle and high school, but I didn't pursue it further. A shame, maybe.
@PauloCereda - I'm going to have to look up when I joined tex.sx...
@PauloCereda - I recall now: It was in the spring of 2011. I was searching how to implement a TeX macro, was googling for help, and that's when I learned about TeX.sx. I was "lurking" for a few weeks at first. The very first answer I ever posted, it turns out, got accepted by the OP, and I was hooked!
@PauloCereda - And what was more, you issued a kind "welcome to TeX.sx" to me, and you edited my posting to indented the LaTeX code by four spaces! I've never forgotten your kindness!!
@PauloCereda - I'm very gratified that several of my answers have been upvoted a lot. Maybe my personal favorite is the answer to Show inline math as if it were display math. :-)
@AFeldman - My dissertation was in applied time series econometrics, so I had to acquire some reasonable programming skills. The Lua stuff has come only recently, kind of a side product of building up the 'selnolig' package. I should hasten to add that I received some amazing, vital, crucial help from some truly gifted programmers who provided most of the lua code for selnolig. I'm just a rank amateur, in comparison.
@Mico -- that is indeed a very nice answer. and i like your caveats, especially the one that says "Using the \displaystyle command (to force the creation of large symbols) while in inline math mode is an even worse idea than using \limits." (i think we need to conscript you into a "best practices" coven.)
@AFeldman - Another thing that I find appealing about Lua as a programming language is that it's definitely not built around a macro expansion paradigm. Nothing wrong with the macro expansion paradigm, of course!!, but I've never found it easy to master. In constrast, I find programming up various tasks in Lua beautiful and easy.
@AFeldman - In recent months, as some of you have no doubt noticed, I've made it a bit of a hobby to post LuaLaTeX-based solutions to complement the more "standard-line" solutions. :-)
@egreg - That's a good question! My parents were from the canton of Valais and spoke Walliser Deutsch with me -- my mother and Gianni Infantino have the same home town -- but we lived in many different places, and I remember speaking Indonesian, Dutch, French, Swahili, and Dutch more fluently than my parents' dialect of German. My first school was an American international School in The Hague, Netherlands.
@egreg - We also lived several years in Germany (a small town on the Rhine, half-way between Dusseldorf and Cologne). My parents got married in the Duomo of Milan and spent their honeymoon in Venice.
@egreg - My maternal grandmother was from the canto of Ticino, where Italian is the main language. Even though she was born and raised in Brig, in a nominally German area of Switzerland, she didn't speak German, really, until she was about 5 or 6.
@egreg - Ma si, ma si. Capisco l'italiano perfettamente, ma ci sono gia tanti anni che non o piu parlato in italiano. :-( My sister, though, is married to an Italian, and she and her family now live in her husband's home town in the Romagna. :-) Her Italian is flawless; I'm envious.
@Mico Your Italian is better than my German. ;-) Have you ever thought to make some notes about table typesetting, especially for economics? You should have several examples at hand.
@PauloCereda - I keep thinking that what Lua(La)TeX really needs to take off, i.e., to become the engine of first choice, is a couple of "killer packages", which would do something in a way that pdfLaTeX simply cannot do. However, I haven't figured out yet what these killer packages may be! Maybe an advanced hyphenation algorithm, maybe a good suppression of "rivers".
@egreg - Thanks! I do work frequently with my fellow in-house economists to improve their table-related skills, but I haven't thought about writing this up in a systematic way. :-)
@Mico -- (pardon my cynicism) what it needs first is to become fully stable. once that's in place, then both hyphenation and "hydraulics" are good topics.
@egreg - As you and others can probably tell, I actually quite enjoy simplifying and clarifying tables so that they become visually appealing. if something is visually appealing, it's much more likely to be noticed and absorbed. There's a connection to Barbara's earlier question about my interest in graphic arts!
@PauloCereda - Somehow, don't ask me how, I haven't gotten into TikZ and PSTricks so far. I've taught myself some of the basics, for sure. However, maybe because of the research I do (various forms of applied empirical economics), I haven't felt the need to become truly proficient.
@barbarabeeton - I agree that some more stability in LuaTeX would be welcome. That said, the past year has seen some very significant progress toward version 1 of LuaTeX -- in no small part because of gentle and constructive pressure exerted by David Carlisle.
@egreg - It is indeed surprising, and frankly discouraging, how little effort some researchers appear to put into improving the visual appeal of their tables.
@Mico I can confirm this so much! (I think about 80% of articles I meet as a typesetter fall in the category "we do not care about the visual appearance")
@yo' - Oh boy, I like so many dishes! Having spent a few years in Hong Kong, I can no longer go without frequent consumption of Chinese dishes. The spicier, the better! But I also like Japanese food, central American and TexMex -- and, last but certainly not least, just about everything Italian. And, next weekend, I'm going to host a cheese fondue party for twenty [20!] people! :-)
@egreg, @yo' - I was recently re-reading a couple of papers published in the 1950s, and I was very impressed by the typographic quality of the pieces and by the conciseness of the tabular material.
For a Swiss male, preparing a fondue dinner is the ultimate in showing off one's ...hood. Sort of like doing a great BBQ for North American and Australian men! It's the wine (must be bone-dry), the individual cheeses, how the cheeses are mixed, etc.! Great fun!
@Mico Speaking of ancient papers, I was particularly pleased with this wonderful answer of yours: tex.stackexchange.com/a/201006/3094 I even checked with my English copy! :)
@Mico interesting. Sounds a great fun indeed! (Interesting how this differs culture by culture, in Czech, you'd most want to show your pastry abilities)
@Mico Good dry wine indeed! Orvieto is on my list for a tour, but it requires two days. Which makes it good for tasting the wine and have a good dinner. :)
@PauloCereda Only a real German speaker could recognize a “y” in that lettershape. ;-)
@egreg -- I won't get ahead of myself in terms of rep count. :-) About the rep system: it's addictive, no doubt about it. There's immediate gratification for getting a few up-votes, but also longer-term satisfaction from helping solve real tasks. Equally importantly, I'd say, is that i feel that my own LaTeX-related skills have improved a lot over the past four or five years. As a result, the LaTeX code in my own papers has become a lot cleaner.
@egreg -- Now if only I could say that the economics in my papers was showing an equal amount of improvement!!
@Mico Writing lot of code for other to understand is a good way for improving one's style. The same for writing mathematics or any other subject, provided one likes being understood.
@egreg -- yesterday, i saw a letter combination that i'd never seen before. it was in a book from the time of galileo, in what appeared to be part latin (late latin?) and part italian. the combination was an almost-ligatured "ij", but in a scripty shape that i would bet is a reason for a y-dieresis to be included in unicode.
@barbarabeeton if it's the ij in Dutch, then this has a status similar to eszett I think -- it's not a ligature anymore. (Ah sorry, I misread you, forget my comment)
@PauloCereda - TeX.SE is a simply wonderful community. I mentioned earlier that my own LaTeX skills have improved a lot over the past 4+ years. To a large part, this is because of all the stuff I've learned from the regular (and sometimes the not so regular) members of this community!
@AFeldman - I certainly think that the tables in my own papers have become a lot better. And, preparing bibliographies has become much less of a dreaded chore than it used to be. :-)
@barbarabeeton - I did pay attention to the econ.sx group for a while, but I've come to conclude that the stack exchange model is not a good model for serious economics. Economics is a fairly subtle science, and developing new ideas (or refuting the ideas of others!) is not something that can be done cleanly in only a paragraph or two of space.
@PauloCereda - About books -- I have two copies of the TeXbook, and I think I can say that I've read just about every single chapter of the LaTeX companion many times. I also have lots of books about typography; my wife thinks I'm somewhat crazy in this regard...
@barbarabeeton - About tex resources for beginners: Tobi Oetiker's "Not so short introduction to LaTeX" is a great point to start, though I wish from time to time that he and his co-authors would streamline and simplify further some of the material.
@Mico -- if you have concrete suggestions, i'm sure they'd be happy to receive them. (as it is, "not so short" creeps into the "less and less short" category as time goes on.)
@PauloCereda - One of the things I really like about TeX (and LaTeX, etc) is that it treats you like an adult: no condescension, no "let me hide the tough stuff from you because you're not smart enough, and it's up to me to decide if you'll every be smart enough."
@Mico -- ah, thanks for the good words. it quite accurately follows the ams requirements. a 5th edition is due out soon, but unlike the previous editions, i didn't see this one beforehand, so i can't give an opinion.
@PauloCereda - There aren't things I truly dislike about TeX, but I'll confess that macro expansion just isn't something I can easily get my mind around. A few \expandafters and a few \noexpands here or there, and I'm quickly lost. That's probably also why I've made an effort to learn Lua and LuaTeX.
@yo' - I must confess that I have not. Maybe my impression is not correct, but my sense is that the learning curve for LaTeX3 is quite steep. Maybe we need something like Frank et al's LaTeX guide, but this time for LaTeX3. :-)
@PauloCereda - I'll admit that one of the most amazing and entertaining games ever was Germany-Brazil at the World Cup in 2014. I'll understand if you personally felt it to be not so entertaining...
@PauloCereda - I suppose I can't help but root for the Swiss, which is easier these days now that the Swiss national team is decent. Ever since the days I lived in Germany as a child, I've also enjoyed watching the German national team.
@PauloCereda - I'm afraid I haven't attended any TUG events yet. (I am a TUG member, though...) Last July, when the annual TUG conference was held in Germany, I happened to be on an assignment in Singapore. :-(
@PauloCereda - I will actually be in North America in late July -- but not in in Toronto. I'll be attending a huge family reunion on my wife's side, in Sheboygan, just north of Milwaukee. My mother-in-law, still alive, had 8 siblings, they all had a quite a few kids, who had quite a few kids, etc. I think there will be more than 200 people attending! Help!
@barbarabeeton - That's a really neat and unexpected connection! My mother-in-law's parents were born in the Netherlands and moved to Wisconsin when they were young kids. Sheboygan had a reputation for a while as being quite rough, as the place where "the Germans" and "the Dutch" were constantly fighting with each other...
@PauloCereda -- that's "meese", and sheboygan is almost certainly too citified for that kind of large wildlife. (no, it's not "meese"; "moose" is plural as well as singular. but it's fun to try to corrupt your english.)
@Mico -- at least they distinguished between the two origins. one of my mother's brothers was always called a "block-headed dutchman", even though that side of the family came from hesse (grossmom) and saxony (grosspop).
Back to the question about TeX.sx as a community: One of the reasons I've hung around for some time now is that it's truly a community, with a common focus but also with a sense that people appreciate each other as real persons, rather than posers of questions and providers of answers. Also, it's also a place without flame wars, thank goodness.
@Mico -- we get those in too many other places. tex.sx is peaceful, while often posing interesting challenges. i've met some of my most valued friends through tex contacts, and somehow expect the rest of the tex world to be as community spirited.
@PauloCereda - For the most part, I use my personal 13" MacBookPro and MacTeX for my TeX-related work. I use TeXworks as my main editro. At work, I do have a PC (sob), with MikTeX 2.9 and WinEdt 9.1. However, because of corporate policies [!] MikTeX only gets updated every 9 to 12 months, and I don't like the fact that as a result, various LaTeX packages can be seriously out of date on my PC. Sigh.
@barbarabeeton - I'm sure I speak for others as well when I say that it's a special gift and blessing to have you be a part, and a very important part!, of the TeX.SE community!
@Mico -- thanks for the kind words. it's surely a place where i enjoy spending time. kind of a like an on-line tug meeting. (you really must try to come to toronto.)
@PauloCereda -- i think we've imposed enough on his time and good will. thanks, mico!!!
