12:02 AM
@egreg Far too few. :-(

12:40 AM
@PauloCereda Ok, who wants to write a TeX program to do that?

12:54 AM
@BrunoLeFloch Unfortunately not me, I (still) fail at TeX. :-)
@BrunoLeFloch: BTW, your rep is an actual palindrome (in base 10)!

pgfmath has basis conversion functions, and checking whether a string is a plindrom shouldn't be too hard.

@Caramdir I just thought of using LaTeX3's expandable \int_to_base:nn. Basically, \tl_set:Nx \l_tmpa_tl { \int_to_base:nn {<rep>} {<base>} } \str_if_eq:xxTF { \l_tmpa_tl } { \tl_reverse:o \l_tmpa_tl } { <palindromic> } { <not palindromic> }

wow, that code deserves a badge!

@BrunoLeFloch Maybe one day I get around to learning all the cool LaTeX3 stuff.

1:01 AM
And I still need to learn everything. :-P

@PauloCereda Well, that too :)

@Caramdir Oh, I meant about LaTeX. :-)

@PauloCereda It needs to be wrapped up in some nice \prg_stepwise_inline:nnnn {2}{1}{36} to loop over bases (IIRC, bases above 36 are not supported). And I guess a \seq_map_inline:Nn \l_the_list_of_all_TeX_SX_users_seq.

@BrunoLeFloch Bases above 36 should consider case sensitivity or other symbols. I think it's better to play safe and stay with 36 as the upper bound (I wrote a Python script to look for palindromes in every base from 2 to 36).

@PauloCereda How do you extract the data from TeX.sx?

1:04 AM
@BrunoLeFloch Cool, I like the list idea!
@BrunoLeFloch Oh, actually I don't. I type the reputation in the script.

@PauloCereda Thinking about it, we really want a dictionary, mapping users to their rep. That'd be a prop in LaTeX3.
@PauloCereda Ok.

@PauloCereda You could also check in balanced ternary.
2

@Caramdir lol. Is it possible to have so many down votes that a user's rep gets negative?

@Caramdir OMG, you made my brain hurt.

@BrunoLeFloch No, the lower bound for rep is 1. (But even for positive numbers, balanced ternary differs from ordinary ternary representation).

1:08 AM
@Caramdir I know the representation (I was going to write "rep") is different, just wondering whether the power of balanced ternary would be useful.

Now I want the following T-shirt: "There are 11 types of people in the world: Those who understand balanced ternary, and those who don't."

@BrunoLeFloch Useful I doubt, but it gives Paulo one more possibility for palindrome checking. (And of course is a beautiful representation.)

@Caramdir: You made my day! This representation is so epic. :-)

@PauloCereda With the second 1 underlined, I gather?

@PauloCereda You have to read the Art of Computer Programming :)

1:14 AM
@BrunoLeFloch Yes! Let me see if the chat supports that: 1<u>1</u>.
@Caramdir Alas, those books are stuck in my shelf. I need to take some time and read them.

@PauloCereda like so: 11̱?

@Caramdir o.O
@Caramdir Done! Now my script also searches for balanced ternary palindromes!
(what have I done)

@Caramdir How did you produce that underlined 1? Strange unicode glyph?

Sorcery!

1:30 AM
While I would like to claim that I can work magic, Bruno is right.

@PauloCereda Well, XeTeX tells me its char 49, so just a 1.

@BrunoLeFloch Oh.

@BrunoLeFloch U+0331 COMBINING MACRON BELOW to be exact.
Though U+0332 COMBINING LOW LINE would also work.
@BrunoLeFloch I guess because in Unicode the modifier is encoded after the character.

@Caramdir Right, I had done "\showthe\numexpr1̱\relax
(without the double quote)

It seems they represent 1̱ as n or N (probably because of "negative one"), so 11̱ = 1n.

1:33 AM
But I needed to do \showthe\numexpr\foo1̱\relax with \def\foo#1{}
@PauloCereda Well, for your T-shirt, you definitely want 1̱.

@BrunoLeFloch More magic: (this time markdown) \showthe\numexpr1̱\relax :)

@BrunoLeFloch yeah. :-P

@Caramdir Well, how else to find out the charcode of anything? I also use "man ascii" when I do some more serious character hacking in the 0--255 range.

why does  destroy the combining characters?
@BrunoLeFloch No, I meant the markdown with  included.

@Caramdir It doesn't. When TeX is looking for a number, <char> gives the character code. Then the combining mark just stopped the \numexpr, and I didn't see it because I didn't really look at the pdf output.
Test: 
@Caramdir What's magic about including a ? See test above.

1:40 AM
@BrunoLeFloch I think we are talking about different things: Markdown ... syntax seems to destroy the combining characters. And I thought you were struggling with using that syntax on a TeX expression containing .

@Caramdir Ah :).

Btw, unicodelookup.com is useful for checking Unicode characters (just don't start the search text with a number, or it will get confused)j

@Caramdir That's a cool one!

@Caramdir nice one!

2 hours later…
3:50 AM
Does anyone feel like addressing my last comment appended to
4


?
The comment starts with "Thanks, Mike."

6 hours later…
9:32 AM
@FaheemMitha Macros are expanded, i.e. the replacement text is inserted and all arguments like #1 are substituted with the given arguments. So yes, it is basically simple string substitution. There are also TeX primitives which can't be expanded but must be processed. These are e.g. assignments of any kind, box building macros, everything which adds material to the document, ...
Also please don't confuse, in writing or otherwise, \newcommand/\def with the macro these are defining.

@MartinScharrer how does your ifoddpage package relate to \ifodd{\thepage} in Koma ?

Does anyone want to provide the fifth closing vote to this question? The decision won't be too hard, I promise. :-)

anyone who hasn't voted yet ;-)

9:48 AM
@Raphink \ifodd is a TeX primitive and has nothing to do with Koma.

@Raphink I forgot about that detail. ;-)
@Raphink IIRC, KOMA's macro is \ifthispageodd.

Also \thepage doesn't have to be numeric. It can be 'iii' for example. You need to use \ifodd\value{page} instead and this isn't reliable as I explain in the introduction section of ifoddpage.

@MartinScharrer ah, good to know. So how does \ifoddpage related to the use of the TeX primitive \ifodd{thepage}?
right

@Raphink The page counter is incremented asynchronously and TeX reads often more text than it can place on one page. So the page counter doesn't have to be correct.
You need to place a label where you want to check the page number and then read the label value from the AUX file at the next compiler run.

ok

9:52 AM
Labels are written when the page is shipped out and therefore contain the correct page number for the labeled position.

@lockstep Oh I can't. Does "Flag -> It doesn't belong here -> Too localized" have the same effect? Hm I guess not...

@Raphink: There is also a changepage package which provides a similar functionality besides other things. I just wanted a small package which only does check for the page oddness.

@PauloCereda Maybe @MartinScharrer can use his mod powers?

ok

Also ifoddpage provides a second if-switch \ifoddpageoroneside which I actually need often in my other package.

9:54 AM
that sounds useful

@lockstep "closed as too localized by lockstep, Raphink, Gonzalo Medina, egreg, Andrey Vihrov just now"
I was too late.

I only use \isodd in one of my books, and it's a devotional so each section is exactly one page long and I call \isodd at the top, so I never have edge problems.

@MartinScharrer But you can travel back in time and fix that, right? You have the mod power... :-)

@PauloCereda I could reopen it and then close it again :-D

@MartinScharrer LOL

9:56 AM
@Raphink Yes, direct at the begin of a page the page counter is correct. As the page fills it becomes more and more uncertain.

10:22 AM
@Raphink: I had a look on \ifthispageodd from KOMA now and it does basically the same as my ifpageodd package. So if you are using a KOMA class and don't need to do calculation with the page margins you don't need the package.

ok, good to know, thanks
maybe that's worth mentionning in your packgae for koma users who don't know about it

10:47 AM
@Raphink Yes, I was planning to add this. I already mention changepage and memoir. I didn't knew that KOMA has something like that as well.

ok

This one may be a duplicate:
3

I want to insert an image in a LaTeX document so that it is always positioned at the top of the page and the text flows around it. I'm aware of wrapfig (and one or two similar packages) which do text wrapping - but, as far as I can tell, one can't force these packages to place the image at the t...

11:04 AM
Palindrome-related breaking news: Stop the presses! Will Robertson's rep is a palindrome in base 8 and in balanced ternary!

Raphink: o/

hi @jonalv
;)

I am heavily adicted to latexmk
it seems to not work with luatex. How do you survive without it? Are you using soemthing else perhaps?

GNU Make is my friend

@jonalv This sounds like a question for the main page.

11:18 AM
I've been using make since forever everywhere, and, too, use it for TeX

It's sometimes been a conflictual friendship, but all in all, I'm happy with make

I haven't managed to get my head around the make syntax...
+ latexmk just does it all in one command while with make you have to check all files for changes manually and then run latex n times manually...
or?

This monster shell construct compiles my TeX documents no more and no less times than needed: pastie.org/2547452 :-)

@lockstep I suppose you have a point... Feel silly to ask if latexmk in fact can do it only I don't know about it though...

11:21 AM
@jonalv If you're afraid of looking stupid because of asking a question, read this one. ;-)
5

I've switched from MiKTeX 2.9 to TeX Live 2011 (pretest version). I've managed to integrate some third party fonts (included neither in MiKTeX nor in TeX Live) in my TEXMFLOCAL tree following the instructions given here. At the moment I'm struggling to install the Luximono font which is part of M...

@AndreyVihrov Fantastic Makefile, Andrey!

@Raphink but when I ran LuaTex on the source it started complaining about strange utf8 characters. Don't know what's up with that...

@Raphink nope not yet :)

12:03 PM
@jonalv unicode/utf8 is one thing that's not necessary anymore with LuaTeX
so you can just comment out the related packages

12:18 PM
oh @Raphink it's actually not the packages it was complaining about but some characters which was not being recognized I seem to remember.

yes
but that's because of the packages

oh
@Raphink actually I am confused now. You package behavied differenlty in lua as compared to pdftex. But those utf8 related ones don't but in fact doesn't work at all in lua? do you know of a reason for this or is it just one of those sad thing one has to learn to accept?

2 hours later…
2:24 PM
@jonalv the fact that my package behaves differently is a feature (it's actually mentioned in the documentation). The feature is implemented in both TeX and Lua and the Lua version is activated when you compile with LuaTeX.
As for the utf8 encoding, it's all mentioned in the question I linked to.

2:38 PM
hum, at my place I look like a "Super LaTeX crack", when I'm here it reminds me how little I am :P

@Mvy it's a great place to learn :-) Can't say I'd know more than basic classes and PDFTeX if I wasn't here :-)

^^
Well book, article, graphics, color and PDFTeX is sufficient for research :P

It's just a bit old-fashioned now :-)

yeah I see that

Like knowing Perl 4 is sufficient for sysadmin
(or bash 2 for that matter)

2:41 PM
I would try to go LuATex but not sure my advisor can compile this on his mac

why not?

nor how much time it'll take me to convert

All you need is TeXLive 2011

Don't really know what he has
TeXShop?

and converting is mostly about getting rid of stuff (like encoding)
hmmm I'm really hoping to tackle this homeoarchy problem with LuaTeX :-)

2:43 PM
homeoarchy?

I'm pretty sure at the least the detection and highlighting can be done
12

There have been questions about rivers asked in the past. I'm wondering about words that are repeated in the same place on two consecutive lines, like "le monde" in the following example: Does this have a name? Should this be avoided? If so, how do you avoid such things (I guess in a similar ...

hm

hehe

2 hours later…
4:50 PM
This question may be closed as "too localized" or "not a real question" -- a request for a missing .bst file has been left unanswered for two weeks.
0

I am in the process of adjusting a literature list for a publication, however the journal have some standards that are not covered in the bst files I have in my collection. I have used the makebst program to make a custom .bst file, however there is one aspect that i could not do via makebst with...

@lockstep Done: I see we are now at below 200 unanswered!

Let's lock the main site, so no new questions will be posted! :-P

@JosephWright Indeed. ;-) I have started to make "requests for clarification" to some old unanswered questions which seem to be not without merit. If the OP doesn't respond, we can close them eventually.

Could anyone enlighten me on the differences between and ?

@Caramdir I see what you're up to. ;-) are those (LaTeX) manuals featuring an ISBN and listed at amazon.com. and ... I say merge them.

5:05 PM
May I suggest as a synonym to ?

There is also the issue of questions about finding documentation and questions about writing documentation.

One question tagged with was about templates for technical manuals; I retagged it with .
@PauloCereda Seconded.

I'll write a meta post.

@Caramdir There's also , but this could be regarded as a subset of ("crash course").

@lockstep I'd keep it separate. “documentation” is more of a reference document, while “tutorial” is something you read only once.

5:17 PM
@Caramdir Sounds like a tag wiki description.

0

At the moment we have three tags concerning documents about TeX: books, manuals and documentation. The only one with a wiki is books, which says that it “is for questions which deal with books about TeX, LaTeX and other topics of this site.” I just brought this up in chat and the suggestion was ...

5:39 PM
0

I am new at making presentations using Latex (Beamer). What I need is to add some videos in my presentation. How can this be done? Also, are there PDF readers which can play videos? If yes, then suggest which one preferably on Ubuntu (Windows is ok too). If no, then I can make do with an external...

5:51 PM
@lockstep: Does also include questions about biblatex-apa?

@Caramdir Yes.

6:08 PM
Seems like "not a real question":
3

A while ago I started writing some ad-hoc code to convert matrices I created with Java code into LaTeX source code, resulting in this (open source) code. However, since this is not really core business, I don't want to spend too much time on extending this code base, but it currently only exports...

@lockstep there's already a similar question on SO: stackoverflow.com/questions/4229190/…

@PauloCereda Should the question be closed as "off-topic", then?

@lockstep IMHO I believe so. :-)
@lockstep I think if the question was exactly the opposite (TeX code to create Java source code), it would fit.

I agree that this is "not a real question". It kind of would have been if it asked about a particular output/conversion problem.

@AndreyVihrov Done

6:20 PM
wow, is this correct? 158 questions with no answers

6:30 PM
Request for a MWE has not been answered for three weeks:
0

I'm using BibTeX with the alpha style to keep track of my references. Whenever there is an entry with 4 or more authors, the entry id composed of their names and publication years causes the first line of the entry to be indented, thereby messing up the alignment of the whole entry. What's the b...

And yet another missing MWE:
1

I'm using hyperref to add pdf hyperlinks to all references in my document. I am using the pagebackref option, so in the bibliography I get a nice list of links to the pages the reference appeared. The page numbers are preceded by "-> pages" but this text is a light shade of grey. I disabled col...

6:45 PM
@PauloCereda Yes, but the number usually referred to here is questions with no upvoted answers, which is at 197 at the moment.

@TorbjornT Oh I see. Thanks. :-)

@TorbjornT Still not bad -- the all-time high was about 285 (with fewer total questions).

@lockstep Indeed, the progress on that count has impressed me! You've put down some effort.

@TorbjornT A lot of people did. :-)

7:20 PM
Second call: Vote to close if you think this question is a duplicate.

@lockstep Agreed (and one to worry about for the OR!)

@JosephWright A yes, the OR ... looking forward to a time when someone asks "How to place a graphics in two columns of a three-column document?" and I answer "Just do X and Y and you're set".

7:37 PM
@lockstep I have to finish the new galley first. That's harder, in some ways, although it is rather shorter.

I hit the reputation cap again ... Now, if there was a badge for getting more reputation than @egreg on the very same day ... that wouldn't be settled yet. ;-)
A somewhat vague question; OP hasn't shown up for 4 months. I say let#s close it as "too localized":
1

I installed LaTeX2rtf 2.1.1 GUI from SourceForge. I also installed MikTeX, Imagemagick and ghostscript, which is automatically detected in the environment tab. But when I run the program on a .tex file, it shows the following error. (Not set):1 only a single file can be processed at a time....

@lockstep Working hard to hit rep cap also today. :) But I did my bike tour, so I'm afraid I won't succeed. :) Nice places and a wonderful weather; here's one of the places: comune.san-leo.rn.it

7:52 PM
Here's another "too localized" one:
1

I have context source file containing \definefont[Dings][name:MarVoSym] and I import it via \input . When I run context on my source, I always get ! Font \**Dings**:=MarVoSym at 11.0pt not loadable: Metric (TFM) file not found I wish I could recall how I made it working on Linux but this ...

@egreg Yeah, this looks great.

Here another place: a church consecrated in 549 (yes, almost 1500 years old) that's mostly in the original conditions. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_of_Sant%27Apollinare_in_Classe

And here's "not a real question":
0

First time I compile the document the font in the entire document is the one specified for the section titles (larger than it should be in the rest of the document etc.) and some characters are wrong. For example dots (in list) are exchanged for Z and scandinavian letters (ä, ö, etc) are missing....

@Raphink yes, highlighting and detecting is possible. But I am still off for the weekend, so someone else could do the job :)

@egreg This place looks so beautiful!

8:14 PM
@PauloCereda If you happen to visit Ravenna, you'll discover something very unexpected in a quiet small town. It was the last capital of the Western Roman Empire and then the seat of some "barbaric" kings. It has several religious buildings from the 5--7 century, very well preserved and still in use. Byzantine emperors enriched it because of its history; maybe the later decadence of the town helped in keeping such treasures almost intact.

@egreg I'd love to visit the whole Italy! In special, my mom's birthplace. :-) Alas, I'm still waiting for my Italian citizenship.

Is this off-topic?
1

In Lyx versions 1.6.8 and higher there is a version control toolbar. I successfully got RCS working but I cannot find any information on how to use SVN. However, there always is an "use SVN" button which is greyed out. I added the bin directory of a slicksvn installation to the PathPrefix in t...

@lockstep Where else should lyx be on topic?

@Patrick The question may well be about a problem with the operating system, but it's hard to say.

8:30 PM
@lockstep Could be, but where should this person be directed to? Stackoverflow? IMO it is OK to ask TeX related questions here and the answer could be to ask on Stackoverflow for a specific other question.

@lockstep I think it is about a feature of LyX and hence IMO on topic.

@lockstep It's just my very humble opinion.

@egreg In the US even archaeological sites like Mesa Verde aren't that old (though impressive nonetheless)

@Patrick You may well be right. Now, what to do with an on-topic question that has been lacking detailed information for about 4 months? Would someone add an "information request"? (Possibly someone who is using LyX?)

@lockstep This site seems to lack knowledgeable users who are using LyX...

8:35 PM
@PauloCereda You don't need Italian citizenship for visiting Italy! :) Where's your mother from?

@Caramdir Indeed. :-( IIRC, domwass uses LyX, but I know of no one else.

@egreg hehe I'd like to use a red passport (I think it's red). :-) My mom is from a city called Monghidoro. In Bologna, I guess.

@Caramdir Once I impressed an American colleague during a conference here in Padua: I told him that our town is 3000 years old. :)
@PauloCereda Yes, the passport is dark red. Monghidoro is indeed a small village near Bologna, in the mountains: the surroundings are quite nice.

@egreg Hm I need a bike then. :-)

@lockstep You might try with a comment addressed to domwass. But @Caramdir says he doesn't know of Version Control buttons.

8:44 PM

@egreg: which city are you from? :-)

@PauloCereda I'm from Padua (Padova in Italian). You don't need a bike, just a helmet. :)

@egreg Really?! Awesome, I'd love to visit la Basilica di Sant'Antonio di Padova.

@PauloCereda We have also many other interesting things: for example the oldest mall in the world. In the 13th century a new town hall was built (it was a free town at the time) and below it, in two galleries at street level, some shops were opened. They are still there.
But the most important thing are the famous frescoes by Giotto in the "Cappella degli Scrovegni".

9:01 PM
@egreg cool! Now I really want to visit Italy!
I'll try to go next year, in the first semester.

@PauloCereda Which means next February?

@Caramdir Nice answer, and great that you actually tinkered with LyX!

@lockstep Thanks. I just hope that it is correct :)

@egreg I hope so. :-)

I just discovered that a question that produced a "Good Answer" of Geoffrey Jones was deleted, possibly by the OP. @JosephWright can you undelete it?

9:17 PM
@lockstep It looks like the whole user account was deleted.

@Caramdir And why would such a thing happen?

@lockstep Chandru (the user) might have requested it. Not sure what the procedure for this is.

@lockstep I've voted to undelete it.

@lockstep Resurected

@egreg Ah yes .. the powers of a trusted user. I did, too.

9:21 PM
@JosephWright Can you tell us why it was deleted?

@Caramdir No sign of anything in the mod tools: very odd
We'd have to ask Jeff if we want to know

My guess is that someone used the second option listed in meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/78629/…

@Caramdir Would have to have been a the SE level: we (mods) have not deleted anyone on TeX.SX
In general, we have little recourse to the mod tools beyond 'vote to <X> immediately'

@JosephWright Maybe it was a system-wide delete due to bad behavior on a different SX site.

@Caramdir Would be my guess

9:35 PM
@lockstep I've never seen this question before. We were accused of cyberbullying... :-P`

@PauloCereda Read Geoffey's answer. As @Caramdir said in his comment, it is "easily one of the most diplomatic posts I’ve seen on the internet".

@lockstep Fantastic. I love this part, "We're here to help you, but show us that you've done your best to solve your own problems before hitting on us."

@PauloCereda IIRC (this is over a year ago) there were also some unhelpful comments by the OP.

@Caramdir In any case, the OP shouldn't have been able to delete a question that had already produced an answer with 30 upvotes. IIRC, the deletion policy of SO would also prevent it now.

@Caramdir Hm I see. Who is ""Chandru"? I don't quite understand if he/she is the OP, since I see "user641" (crossed accounts, perhaps?).

9:46 PM
@PauloCereda No when the account was deleted the name was also removed. Chandru1 was the original name of user641.

@Caramdir aaaaah, makes sense!

The url tex.stackexchange.com/users/641/chandru1 is still in my browser's history, but doesn't work anymore.

@Patrick I'm trying to implement it. Hopefully I'll have some time to finish it soon :-)

No idea if it's relevant, but the username "Chandru" sounds vaguely familiar from maths-SX. I remember reading some threads on their meta relating to someone called "Chandru" ... Ah, yes: meta.math.stackexchange.com/q/548/2907

We're down at 190 unanswered questions. :-)