@Caramdir: I did that now.

I'm glad the tabular question prompted some discussion here. I've changed the focus of the question a little, since I think it shouldn't just echo the tag wiki. If anyone knows of package conflicts within the tabular family, do add them!

wow, there’s actually someone online here

quel surprise

Since the elections, there has actually been quite a bit of activity in chat...

@KonradRudolph a lot older messages to read ;-)

@Stefan Should I? That’ll be a lot of work

I was actually just checking if Will or Philipp were online since I once again have troubles with unicode-math

… and I hate opening a question on tex.se for every single problem

@KonradRudolph I guess we're lucky that not everybody thinks this way ;-)

@Stefan Well … sure. But I’m already asking quite a lot of questions and questions in the style of “double quotes not working. This is probably a bug. Any quick fix?” aren’t very rewarding for the community

I prefer filing a bug. But I would love fast feedback – hence my presence in the chat. ;-)

Good try then :-)

Hm. Does the chat support github issue reports?

github.com/wspr/unicode-math/issues/188

… apparently not.

Does someone of you has experience with ConTeXt and can tell me what the equivilent to \usepackage[options]{package} is?

It seems to be \usemodule[package], but I'm not sure about the options

… out for waffles.

So... Who's working on a placekitten package?

Damn. The phaistos package for hieroglyphics doesn't have a cat symbol.

And the simpsons package doesn't have snowball III

@Seamus: Trivially solvable in 5 easy steps: 1) Download 500 lolcatz 2) Stylize and convert to vector graphics 3) Make a LaTeX font out of them 4) Enjoy 5) There is no step 5.

Of course some of the steps are probably slightly more complicated than that

@AlanMunn: Just in case it wasn't obvious, I was joking about the kittens.

I justed noticed that I exceeded the threshold of 1000 edits. Anyone of the opionion I should get a life?

@lockstep: Me!

@AndrewStacey But prior to that, I shall manually add the diagrams tag to every question tagged with tikz-pgf. ;-)

@lockstep: For the love of $DEITY, have mercy :-)

And I am going to make tags for each tikz library individually and retag all tikz questions with the relevant library tags...

The manual floats/tables/figures retag is proceeding nicely, BTW. Stephan Kottwitz probably will earn a floats badge in a few days -- this will also compensate him for not earning one for the (now rapidly twindling) figures tag.

@lockstep: I like the word "twindling", it isn't in the English language but it ought to be. In the spirit of Lewis Carroll, how would you define it?

@AndrewStacey Thanks for reminding me to triple-check not only other people's spelling.

Any good tag suggestions for tex.stackexchange.com/questions/12722/… ?

Should we introduce tags for Springer documentclasses?

I suggested closing this question: (tex.stackexchange.com/q/12693/2693). The questioner asks what happens to closed questions, and I don't actually know. I know they can get deleted and/or merged, but do they always, or can closed questions persist in their closed state?

yes they do

@Caramdir Sorry, they always get deleted and/or merged?

@AlanMunn: No. The 'yes they do' was to that closed questions can persist as closed questions.

no, they stay visible, unless they are manually merged. See tex.stackexchange.com/search?q=closed%3A1 for a list of all closed questions.

(Whoops, forgot to log out as myself and log back in as Caramdir to answer that)

@AndrewStacey Ok. Thanks. So it's still reasonable to close a question as too local, but have it remain around in case anyone else does encounter a similar problem.

I the present case, I think it is also fine to just leave the question.

@AndrewStacey Your sockpuppet was searching for links...

@Caramdir Ok. That's fine by me too. So what criteria makes a question too localised? Or is that not the point of closing? Is the idea behind closing that the question will attract all sorts of weird (non-)answers?

@AlanMunn Honestly, I have no real idea.

I usually only vote to close, when I think the question might as well be deleted (exception are duplicates where the non-deleted questions provide additional search targets).

I don't know what the official policy is though. Might be worth a question on meta.

@Caramdir Yes, I'll post a question to meta then.

re tex.stackexchange.com/questions/12693/… other sites don't have a restriction on how quickly one can accept a question. is this tex.sx specific?

@FaheemMitha I think the restriction only applies for accepting your own answer.

@lockstep: ah, i see.

thanks

I think of closing a question as saying, "This isn't the sort of question that we want here". Deleting it says also "And we never want to see it again". Closing a question also sends a signal to the wider community that this question isn't worth spending a lot of time on, so if it's been answered-and-accepted then that's almost equivalent in that respect. Since closed questions can be reopened, it can also mean "In its current state, it's not suitable, but feel free to try to improve it.".

Again, deleting it removes that possibility (well, it can always be undeleted but in the meantime it's not visible to under 10k users).

Sometimes it can be useful to have closed questions around as examples of what the community doesn't like, though I wouldn't use that as justification for their existence!

Closing as "too localised" says, for me, that here is a question that we cannot imagine anyone else ever asking, so we close it to ensure that it sinks in the system. Of course, if someone does ever ask it again then it is still there, but we really think it unlikely.

@AndrewStacey So it's generally not worth suggesting to close too local questions, since they aren't inherently "ones we don't want"?

@AlanMunn A case-by-case thing for me

@JosephWright Which is what I'm trying to get at with these questions :-) What criteria do you use to decide such cases? Or is it just that we are using the same criteria, "can't imagine anyone else ever asking it" but we have different imagination thresholds?

@AlanMunn: The example that you cite does look like a candidate for "closing as too localised" to me. I think that I'm less "trigger-happy" on the close trigger here than I am on MathOverflow and am more reluctant to close good-faith questions. But I'm not advocating that as a general policy, just trying to explain my own actions.

@AndrewStacey As I'm a mod, I only vote to close when I really mean it, of course

My take is that 'localised' means something that looks like a messed-up local installation, etc.

@AndrewStacey So maybe the real issue with the "too localised" reason for closing is that in the larger scheme of why any question should be closed, that reason doesn't fit very well, since there is no ill effect on the site to having such question not be closed.

Announcement: New tool 'texdef' published. This Perl script displays the definition of (La)TeX macros in the command line. Just uploaded to CTAN or at latex.scharrer-online.de/general/wiki/texdef

@AlanMunn: Yes, pretty much. There are small reasons for closing such, but no (as far as I'm concerned) killer reason. Small reasons include: ensuring that no-one wastes time on it, so that it doesn't keep popping up again and again, and also to discourage other similar (in form, not substance) "too localised" questions.

@AlanMunn: I agree with the sentiment that not all close reasons are alike; indeed, "close as duplicate" ought to have no negative connotation whatsoever, it's just that someone got there first!