@FaheemMitha Certainly, up to a degree. Every government wants to control what immigrants are coming. The side aspects are probably a bit too voluminous even for this chat ;-)
Anyway, the times when people from southern Europe and Turkey were "sucked in" to feed the ever-hungry coal and steel industry are certainly over. Unemploymend in the "manual" professions is high and will stay that way. Plans to attract higly skilled specialists in engineering and research are not too effective...
@AndrewStacey I told my dad, "I bought an iPad, dad." and he gave me some sort of puzzled look. "Cool, an iPad! What does it do?" "You can do a lot of things, including browsing the web!" "hmm I shall look this iPad when it arrives!" :)
@Andrew: @DavidCarlisle threatened me, now I need to install emacs in the iPad. :)
@PauloCereda GLSL Shaders and a neat little app called Codea (note: at present GLSL shaders aren't in Codea but they're coming and I'm a beta tester so I get to play with new features to help iron out the bugs)
@PauloCereda Not really.. it's very simple. Well, I used a descriptive diagram from the smartdiagram package, but for the rest the most complicate drawing is i.imgur.com/9sHcb.jpg
So, the tikz command \draw [-latex'] (node1) -- (node2) draws a line between node1 and node2. If I omit the -- then nothing happens. What does tikz think it is being told to do then?
@StephanLehmke Interesting. Is TeX used in the backend, so to speak? I assume customers are not actually writing TeX? So, you have something like creating charts or diagrams or spreadsheets from data automatically?
@FaheemMitha Yes our product DocScape offers an XML markup layer for describing data-based document design, which is technically more or less a TeX macro package.
@FaheemMitha Yes, generally speaking the "current position" is the last specified position on the path (starts at (0,0)). There are ways to fool it and sometimes, particularly for nodes, it waits a bit before deciding just where the current position should be.
In most of the cases, we deliver a ready-to-use system, i.e. just has to maintain the database, make data selections and "press a button" to get a PDF document.
@FaheemMitha Not in relation to page prices of advertising agencies. Also, this is in some sense comparable to products like InDesign Server which is also not cheap.
@FaheemMitha Not really. It's by nature a server application which sits in the middle of a larger data-driven infrastructure, often delivering documents into world-wide networks.
@FaheemMitha We're probably in a priviledged situation in Germany, as there are a lot of "hidden champions" (small companies, in machine-building or automotive, for instance, which are world market leaders in a small segment) with a need to publish in a lot of language and neither budget to pay large sums to agencies, nor the resources to do offshoring.
As said in the comments, two approaches could be used. I first introduce them and later on I'll try to explain a bit which are the pros and cons of both.
I start with the tikz-er2 package: it's not available on CTAN, thus one should install it by hand.
The code:
\documentclass[a4paper,11pt,x11...
But apart from that, we support some 30 languages. In particular, you can generate multilingual multilayer documents such that images are on one layer and every language text on a layer of its own, so you get one document variant for every language with images in the same places for black-plate change.
@AndrewStacey not sure of the context it sets a .1pt font on a .1pt baseline except for the classical font choices the fd files won't let you go that small so it will substitute 5pt still on a .1pt baseline so you'll get lineskip spacing everywhere
@FaheemMitha It's an interesting question. :) One possible idea is to use a "regular" programming language to extract both metadata and content, then "generate" TeX code based on the data gathered. :)
This has nothing to do with TikZ and everything to do with a rather odd command in your tag style: \fontsize{0.1}{.1}. This says "Next time you select a font, make it of size .1pt." (and something else with the second .1 - I think that's related to line size). Inside the \LaTeX macro is a \sele...
@DavidCarlisle Suggests an interesting sabotage strategy: issue \fontside{.1}{.1} but don't do \selectfont and then watch doubled up in laughter as people try to work out why odd things happen with their text.
@DavidCarlisle And sanity. We used to have "tiny writing" competitions when I was at school (not all lessons were quite as fascinating as they could have been). Record was somewhere near 200 words on a single line (A4 paper, text was taken from a standard book so no cheating)
@PauloCereda I find Java's placement of UI elements somewhat frustrating, but it's easier than trying to do a GUI in C. (Which admittedly I haven't tried since last century.)
TeX II: The Revenge of OR. In last time's thrilling episode the plucky heroine defeated the mighty OR, but not for long. Now OR has captured the helpless glossaries package. Insert maniacal laughter
@PauloCereda Hmm, a name for a tortoise? "Speedy" is a bit too obvious. I'll have to put my thinking cap on.
DEK has set a challenge: "If you have been so devious as to get this message, you'll understand it, and you will deserve no sympathy." Has anyone ever had an "Interwoven alignment preambles are not allowed" error?
@AndrewStacey That probably discards the suggestions I was just about to make: If it's a fierce tortoise, it could be called Tobrecan ("destroys") or if it's clever, maybe it could be Torht ("brave") Tortoise, but if it's a peace-loving tortoise, it could be Stillman ("gentle").
How about Wilbur ("dearly loved stronghold") or Renweard ("guardian of the house")?
@percusse Hi. Trying to understand your answer. One thing that is puzzling is that this problem does not show up in the same way if one uses another shape like a regular rectangle or a circle. Why is that?
@NicolaTalbot I like "Wilbur". It has a ploddy sort of feel to it as well which is tortoil. @PauloCereda What do you think? Are you happy with Wilbur for your tortoise? (What is the duck called, by the way?)
Ok, so suppose i have \path [draw, -latex'] (r1.two north); where r1 is a multipart rectangle. What does tikz understand by this? Is this just a path of zero length with origin and destination the same?
@FaheemMitha Yes, it's a path of zero length. Every path starts with a moveto operation and you've just designated where that move goes to. Then ... nothing else happens.
@FaheemMitha If you're not scared of @ symbols, a useful thing to do might be to put save path=\mypath in the keys to a path and then \show\mypath afterwards. The macros will look a bit daunting (\pgfsyssoftpath@moveto and all that) and the coordinates are all converted to points, but it can be useful to see what everything gets converted to "under the bonnet".
@PauloCereda Wilbur and ... what for the duck? I want to say "Wallace" but I might have been watching too much of Aardman Animations.
@FaheemMitha Paths always start with a move which establishes their initial point. All subsequent operations are of the form "do X from the current point". So -- (1,1) turns into the command "draw a line from wherever you are to (1,1)".
@FaheemMitha It does - you'll get an error if you try \draw -- (1,1); (though interestingly, the error will come when you view the PDF, not when you compile the TeX file). What I mean is that if you break up a path into atoms then (0,0) -- (1,1) is two atoms: "move to (0,0)" and "draw to (1,1)".
@AndrewStacey But as you already indicated, in the case of path [draw, -latex'] (r1.two north); the to point is r1.two north but there is no from point.
@AndrewStacey @PauloCereda how about Putnam ("dwells by the pond"), Worthington ("from the river's side"), Wyndell ("drawer of water"), Douglas/Dougal/Daegal ("dweller by the dark stream") or Camden ("from the winding valley"). That's all the water-dwelling names I can think of.
@FaheemMitha Right, so the one exception to the rule is the initial move. That doesn't have to have a "from" point. (Indeed, moves don't really need initial points: it doesn't matter where you move from, just where you move to). So your first point on the path establishes the initial move.
@NicolaTalbot "Wilbur and Wyndell" has a ring to it that I like. "Worthington" is a beer. "Putnam" is a mathematical competition. "Camden" sounds too Cambridgey.
Actually I came acroos this mercurial for subversion users document this morning that seems quite good (and at the level of the article git and mercurial are the same) It's not too polite about subversion 9which I use fro my own stuff at googlecode and at work:-)
@NicolaTalbot I'm still a newbie with version control, but git is pretty much like svn. :) The only difference, as David spotted, is that you do things "twice", that is, we don't have a central repo anymore, but every node is actually its own server, so there must be a remote point in which everybody pushes their slice of the cake, thus reconstituting the whole thing. :)
@PauloCereda I've never really done collaborative repo stuff. It''s a just my own projects (code or books). I think some of my commit messages would annoy some people. Especially the "Auto commit by backup script" that occur because I've forgotten to commit my changes before the backup script runs.
@FaheemMitha Yes I gave up after the first page but I thought the hg for svn users pitch was not a bad dvcs instead of svn pich and I passed it round a few people at work, where we use svn. I use svn in my personal googlecode projects because one person projects a dcvs really does seem a lot of overhead for no gain. The more people you have on the project the more likely a dcvs is useful it seems to me (but I have a lot more experience with rcs then cvs then svn than I have with mercurial and git)
@DavidCarlisle hg is still useful for one person. I'm one person and I work alone mostly, and you can pry hg from my cold dead fingers. But I get the feeling we may have had this conversation before.
The hg people are still in active development, and doing good work on usability.
@FaheemMitha perhaps, as I say I haven't used it in anger, I suppose I could choose it over svn in my next googlecode project to give it more of a try. I used it a bit at the w3c (but mostly w3c still uses cvs)
@NicolaTalbot Neither have I. :) (Is this sentence correct?) I've been writing code together with other people, but we usually work on different APIs. It's quite amusing to edit the very same code that other person is working on. I'm learning a lot from arara, it all started with me. Now we have several contributors. :)
@PauloCereda "(Is this sentence correct?) " It's grammatically correct but you could be lying in which case it wouldn't be true so probably not correct either.
Any harm in over using \texorpdfstring{}{}? I have a macro that highlight macro names, so instead of changing all the section macros I was thinking of changing the macros that do the highlighting? I guess there will be extra overhead, but don't mind a slightly longer compile time.
Footnote counters can be reset in each page by using either zref-perpage or perpage packages but how do you reset footnote counter in each column of a two column documents?
\documentclass[twocolumn]{article}
\usepackage{zref-perpage}
\zmakeperpage{footnote}
\begin{document}
This is a test\footno...
Then \sf@two is passed as an argument. One conditional with a useless expansion, and an assignment that will make TeX perform two expansions instead of one. /me scratching head
@egreg I know a couple of years ago a lot of my code looked similar (especially putting \relax in random places to "close" things...). This is exactly the state of half-knowledge which makes finding bugs in your own code a total nightmare.
@DavidCarlisle Oh, yes! But that was in vertical mode, so it doesn't matter. There was actually a spurious space in the code: \setbox\sf@box=\hbox\bgroup} at the end of the "begin" part of the environment's definition, and the "end" part started with { \egroup.
@egreg as Joseph found out this morning things you think are in vertical mode aren't always in wacky packages like standalone:-) but even in v-mode, if it was in a definition think of that poor unused byte taking up space.
2
@PauloCereda for that, after installing emacs on your ipad, I expect a full description of exactly what this line of longtable.sty is doing, on my desk, by the morning, or no playtime.
@PauloCereda I bet M's lego mindstorms is more fun, also of course since android isn't as locked down as ios there are 3rd party bluetooth apps to control it from the tablet...
As said in the comments, two approaches could be used. I first introduce them and later on I'll try to explain a bit which are the pros and cons of both.
I start with the tikz-er2 package: it's not available on CTAN, thus one should install it by hand.
The code:
\documentclass[a4paper,11pt,x11...
This has nothing to do with TikZ and everything to do with a rather odd command in your tag style: \fontsize{0.1}{.1}. This says "Next time you select a font, make it of size .1pt." (and something else with the second .1 - I think that's related to line size). Inside the \LaTeX macro is a \sele...
