A possible candidate to be closed? tex.stackexchange.com/q/29428/3954

The OP found an answer elsewhere, and it was nor a LaTeX problem.

@GonzaloMedina: I don't think it should be closed: There's no harm in duplicating the answer here, and since Scientific Workplace is (among other things) a LaTeX editor, and PGF/TikZ is an important LaTeX package, it belongs on this site.

@Jake: right. I'll ask the OP to post his update as an answer instead of as an addendum to his/her question.

Ah, you've already done that.

@GonzaloMedina Yeah =)

LaTeX Hits - Songs to listen while you are TeXing.

@JosephWright We'll also hit 30k total posts pretty soon (currently at 29606, counting deleted stuff)

@PauloCereda I always listen to radiosvizzeraclassica.ch during work. Presently they are broadcasting Čajkovskij :(, but the program features many good pieces.

@egreg Awesome! Added to my bookmarks.

@PauloCereda Also check out wqxr.org

@AndreyVihrov Thanks Andrey! Another one to my bookmarks! :-)

Herbert seems to be ignoring my request for him to comment, despite having notified him with @.

@AlanMunn I thought @ only worked if the user already posted something in the thread.

@PauloCereda Oh, if that's true, then that would explain it. Maybe I'll add a comment to another answer of his instead. In chat it will work even if the person hasn't been chatting, so I assumed it worked in comments too.

@AlanMunn I was going to mention that. It seems SX tweaked the notification system, so it's now far more integrated.

@PauloCereda But now it looks like he has commented on the linked question, and acknowledged the issue.

@AlanMunn Yay! :-)

@Caramdir Thanks for posting the link on the other question. Maybe a solution will be forthcoming. I messed around a bit with powerdot.cls without any luck, but I'm no Herbert, that's for sure (nor Heiko, since hyperref is also implicated.)

@lockstep Any word from Lehman on your feature request?

@Audrey No -- it seems Philipp hasn't posted any updates for about two weeks. (It wouldn't be the first time that he is absent for a few weeks.) We'll see.

@lockstep OK. I was wondering about use of the comma in the final delimiter... Would that mainly be specific to English? I noticed in answering one of domwass's questions that the comma isn't used in finalnamedelim in German.

@Audrey Correct -- no comma before the closing "and" in German.

@Audrey @lockstep While there are a couple of biblatex experts in here, I have a question about moving from bibtex to biber: do I need to worry about how my bib file (I use one big master file for everything) is encoded (currently MacOS Roman) so that I can maintain functionality with both biber and bibtex (for older documents)?

@lockstep Were you wanting a less English-specific solution? I think we could mimic comma use as in finalandcomma.

@Audrey It would indeed be great if the solution was not language-specific.

@lockstep OK. I think I'll take another look some time soon.

@AlanMunn I guess it should work if you specify the encoding. See section 2.4.3.4 of the biblatex manual.

@Audrey Are you Philipp Lehman in disguise? ;-)

@lockstep Sorry, no. I think all my bad edits would indicate that.

@AlanMunn I don't know - I actually use one giant bib file myself and haven't run into any problems.

@lockstep Time to get back to work. Thanks for the info.

Relevant to the subject:

I love that quote.

@Audrey Yes, that seems to be my experience too. There's an extra layer in the way here since I'm using bibdesk to manage my references. Now a bit of investigation shows that in its current settings on my system it translates all accented characters into their latex equivalents, so from bibtex's point of view it's an ASCII file. Biber can also deal with that I guess.

@lockstep Yes, but the biber manual seems to imply that it correctly converts the records on the fly to UTF-8 anyway, so I'm not sure I need to specify that.

@AlanMunn I said "I guess". :-) When switching to biber, I decided also to switch to utf8 and be done with it.

@lockstep Yes, but you're hardcore (cf. my previous quote that Paulo conveniently revived) :-). I still have too much old stuff around to do that, and I don't want to have two bib files if I can help it.

@AlanMunn Hardcore? ... Okay, I have been using biblatex since mid-2008 (the version number was 0.7 in those times).

@lockstep Only then? It seems that my first biblatex document was from 2006, and I've been using it intermittently since 2007. So maybe I'm the hardcore one! But for me the issue is less about biblatex but with switching to biber, which I certainly haven't done yet.

@AlanMunn My first LaTeX document was from January 2008. :-)

@lockstep Decided to procrastinate a little longer and edit the post - it was easier than I anticipated.

@Audrey Great! (And let's hope your tweaks make it into the core package.)

@lockstep Ah, so that explains it. You come without "baggage".

@AlanMunn I just stick with ASCII because journals that I'd eventually like to submit to use bibtex and bst files. biber seems to handle everything just fine. But I write in English and not many of the authors I cite have accented names.

Why does SX say there are 7 questions tagged automata, but no one is listed?

Besides, I'd love to see a tikz-automata one. <3

@Audrey Ok. That seems to be my experience too so far. So I really don't need to do anything special. (And I have fairly similar requirements to you.)

@AlanMunn At least you can submit .bib files. Here in chemistry-land, I have to stick with Word (my boss thinks I'm odd for using anything else!)

@JosephWright sometimes I feel like an outcast. I'll probably end up sit in the corner crying.

@JosephWright So far, yes. I worry that that will change with time. On the other hand, the more we encourage our students to use LaTeX, the more chance we have that the field will continue to accept it. But we're still unfortunately a minority within the field as a whole, although there are sub-areas in which LaTeX use is common.

@lockstep We'll see. I wouldn't be surprised if Philipp has a better solution.

@AlanMunn It is very area-dependent: I'm certainly trying hard on the training new users front (must organise another 'LaTeX for Beginners' course!)

@PauloCereda What do you mean, no one is listed? (Apparently I'm the top answerer in the tag.) I hope I'm not deterministic.

@JosephWright In my department I have a deal with the students: they teach each other the basics, and every year I run a workshop on honing their skills and filling in more advanced things. I find this easier than running pure beginner workshops, which require one to deal with multiple OSes and other stuff. (Right now I'm sitting in on a R course that a colleague is teaching, and it took 30mins to get all the Windows users to find the csv file that they were supposed to use for the class.)

@AlanMunn Odd. If I click "top users", you are there. But I can't see the questions.

@AlanMunn We've been working hard on the cross-platform nature of our course (github.com/uktug/latex-beginners-course), and using TeXworks and TL means we don't have too many problems

@PauloCereda Right, because you're on the FAQ view. If you click on votes or newest, you'll see them.

@AlanMunn aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

Alan Munn earned the Drink badge.

@JosephWright In the CS departament, only a few people - including myself - used LaTeX.

@PauloCereda It's surprising where LaTeX is popular and where it is not. We get a lot of linguists and copy-editors on the course.

@JosephWright That's a very nice course. I especially like the idea of workflow diagrams.

@AlanMunn Those are Nicola Talbot's

She did the hard-graft writing the first version of the slides

@JosephWright Ah, right. She has a big course herself; I forgot about that.

@AlanMunn The UK-TUG one came about because someone asked Nicola about 'open' events, and she and I then worked out how to take on the issue (we work at the same university)

That's why I don't have Kinect: michaelphelpsgame.com

@JosephWright There's a person here in the math dept who runs a beginners course in the summer, but it's unfortunately full of bad practices, and also somewhat out of date. It would be nice to collaborate, but I'm not sure how to approach it without appearing totally obnoxious. Of course, that wasn't an issue with Nicola.

@AlanMunn Unfortunately, you do see out-of-date stuff a lot, in online tutorials and (well-meaning) 'advice'

@AlanMunn In the case with Nicola, she e-mailed me :-)

I'm hoping other people will take up the UK-TUG slides as a base for their own courses, and perhaps feed back in to our GitHub repository

@JosephWright I'd love to translate them to Portuguese.

@JosephWright And it is well-meaning. There's a lot of "old dogs new tricks" syndrome as well.

@AlanMunn Quite. That's I guess what makes TeX.sx a good approach, as it is possible to revisit questions as the best answer alters

@PauloCereda Feel free: they are meant as a 'community resource'

There's not too much text, I hope: the aim is very much to keep the talking/pointing at the screen down, and focus on examples

@JosephWright I have a bunch of things that I use for my post-beginners workshop. They're not very organized at the moment, but they deal with e.g. using booktabs and array, enumitem and titlesec, simple macro writing along with some more specific linguistics stuff such as formatting examples and drawing trees and bracketed arrays.

@GonzaloMedina: thanks a million for pointing me to the correct page in the TikZ manual. I swear I tried to find something meaningful, but since I'm a newbie and I stick only with the automata library, I didn't know about those tweaks. Too bad my automata drawings are usually complex.

@AlanMunn That would be useful to see. We've promised to try to run an intermediate course, and so I need to sort out some material

@AlanMunn @JosephWright: it seems to be a universal phenomenon... it's the same around here.

@PauloCereda: you're welcome!

@AlanMunn We put booktabs in the beginners course this time: tables seemed to be needed, so I ignored \hline and just said 'use booktabs, no arguments' :-)

@JosephWright The way I do it is everyone shows up with their computer and I connect mine to the projector and I literally build examples right before their eyes, and everyone can try stuff too. It works quite well.

@AlanMunn Sound about right. the way I've run the recent courses is with TeXworks open, and flick back-and-forward between the slides and examples. Good for things like SyncTeX, or quick notes

@JosephWright Have you seen my Dictatorial Guide to LaTeX Packages. It's named that way for exactly that reason!

@GonzaloMedina Yes, that's why I like this site, since the combination of continued editing (as Joseph noted) and also voting really keeps best practices in the forefront to a large extent.

@AlanMunn Nice, although we (UK-TUG) favour KOMA-Script for long documents

@JosephWright: do you introduce KOMA classes to the beginners or do you start with the standard classes?

@GonzaloMedina Standard classes (Nicola wanted to use just KOMA and avoid packages, but it's not realistic)

@Paulo Cereda: may I ask (well, I already did it) what does the automata do?

@GonzaloMedina I personally stick to article/report and add whatever I need, so I'm more comfortable with that method

@JosephWright We (all of us, not you and I) have had this debate here before. Unfortunately for me I find the KOMA English documentation awful, even for someone experienced like me. Also, for most documents, I find article+titlesec does everything I need, and the large document that my students write is their thesis, for which I have written a memoir-based class.

@AlanMunn See my reply to @GonzaloMedina :-)

@GonzaloMedina Sure! Well, that automata is just an example, but I have a similar one with a proper meaning. Let me create an image.

@AlanMunn You`re listing a natbib package. Is that biblatex misspelled? :-)

@lockstep I've been wondering about making that switch for the course: the worry is that at present 'real world' users are more likely to use natbib (or nothing at all).

@PauloCereda what is that for?

In the same way, we may yet drop KOMA in favour of memoir (it might be a bit easier to explain)

@lockstep LOL. I'm commitment-phobic. :-) But more seriously, the issues that we were just discussing vis a vis submitting to journals make recommending biblatex somewhat problematic at the moment, especially since my guide is aimed a students.

@AlanMunn Same issue for me

@JosephWright: Most LaTeX users have not had the time to get to know Koma just yet, they still use the base classes.

@GonzaloMedina, @Raphink: this automaton is used to find a person (or a group) according to certain attributes. Let's say I want to find how many persons have green eyes, so I submit a query to it. Every person is represented by an accepting state, and the f_n notations are adaptive functions trigged to modify the topology. Only the persons which have the attributes I'm looking for will be "reached" through a transition.

@JosephWright There's another advantage to not stressing the comprehensive classes: so much of the available advice is based on the standard classes+packages, so if you train people too early on either KOMA or memoir they become less adaptable, which isn't a good idea, I think.

I should probably study theorical CS one day

@AlanMunn We mainly use it as an example of 'design is dependent on the class'

I could pick a journal class, but that would be too specific

@JosephWright Right. And for large documents like books, either KOMA or memoir really is a must.

@Raphink some parts are cool, others I don't like. ;-)

@AlanMunn I've never written a proper book, but I suspect I'd just use book and fiddle about

You can't vote for your own post. - Oh.

@JosephWright Well with your skills, I'm sure you could. I wouldn't want to spend the time. It took me less than a day to set up my thesis class in memoir. (Not that it was bug-free but the main formatting was dead easy.) The book that I'm currently writing is also formatted with memoir.

One problem that I see looming on the horizon with the rise in popularity of {Xe|Lua}latex is lack of portability. Once people start using any font on their system, documents become a lot less portable than with traditional latex.

@JosephWright: ManUtd supporter?

@PauloCereda ???

@JosephWright Hm I guess not. :-P - ManUtd = Manchester United.

They are winning the game.

@PauloCereda Yes, I know that

@PauloCereda Game? (I assume football!)

@JosephWright yep, Champions League.

@JosephWright Paulo now knows what it's like when I bring up linguistics here. :-)

@AlanMunn LOL

I'll shut up now.

@PauloCereda I have a former student, who if anyone ever asked her about any sports team, would simply reply "Sorry I don't follow women's volleyball" (no matter what the mentioned team was.) Stopped such conversations dead in their tracks. :-)

@AlanMunn haha! It's funny how people in Brazil take football too seriously. You must have a team, even if you don't follow games. And foreign students are forced to pick up a team, at the risk of being excluded from the group!

I watch several leagues: ours, Premier, Calcio, la Liga, Bundesliga, Ligue 1 and Primeira Liga.

@PauloCereda I guess I should choose Palmeiras. :) You're always watching TV! Time to work! Your automata are waiting for you.

@egreg Yay! Oh wait, I need to work.

@AlanMunn:How would that make it any less portable then having a figure in it? Sure you can't just distribute the code anymore, but couldn't you just zip up the otf or ttf file with it?

@Canageek Yes, that's true. I'm not saying that there's no portability, just that portability of the source becomes more complicated, compared to standard latex. (Of course, that came at a price, since there was a relatively smaller set of available fonts.) (Also, this comment was made in the context of teaching beginners.)

Anyone, is it possible to chat with a < 20 user if I make a room myself?