TeX, LaTeX and Friends - 2012-04-13 (page 1 of 2)

Marco Daniel

8:02 AM

@DavidCarlisle: My question and your answer about penalties have been upvoted really often..

Marco Daniel

9:31 AM

I can't vote for closing. What is the problem? tex.stackexchange.com/questions/44807/…

Andrew Stacey

@MarcoDaniel Is closing the right thing for that question? At a cursory glance, it would seem that converting the comment to an answer would be better (including whatever instructions there are at the link for fixing the bug - I didn't look at that).

Marco Daniel

@AndrewStacey You are right. But it's more a general question. I have the same problem with this one: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/44200/…

Roelof Spijker

@MarcoDaniel: At what point does it stop working for you?

That is, at what point in the closing process do you encounter a problem?

Joseph Wright

@MarcoDaniel I'd try logging out completely: sometimes the system looses your credentials!

Marco Daniel

@RoelofSpijker It seems to be time limited. At questions older than XX days I can't vote.

@JosephWright Thanks I will try

Roelof Spijker

9:42 AM

I meant more like: "at which button press can you go no further", to see if I could reproduce it. But let's see if Joseph's suggestion works :)

Marco Daniel

@RoelofSpijker Joseph's suggestion didn't work. :-( I can press the button close and a new pop up window will be opened. But I can't select any reasons. For example in this question everything is possible: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/51733/… ( I don't want to vote here ;-) )

Andrew Stacey

Hmm. I can definitely select reasons on the questions you've linked to. Could it be a browser/javascript issue?

Marco Daniel

@AndrewStacey I am working with Firefox. I will try opera and google chrome

Roelof Spijker

Yeah, I can select reasons as well (firefox).

Marco Daniel

@RoelofSpijker Odd ;-) I will leave Ubuntu and try my mac.

Andrew Stacey

9:56 AM

I'm using Firefox 11.0 on Ubuntu as well.

Stephan Lehmke

Is anyone here who knows anything about what goes in a hyphenation pattern?

Especially \lccode.

David Carlisle

@StephanLehmke knows or knew?

Stephan Lehmke

If so, please please look at my question. I have everything I need apart from the meaning of things like \lccode"E0="E0.

4

Q: Hyphenation patterns / lccode / ".dat" format of hyph-utf8

I have made a new encoding for "modern" greek based on ISO 8859-7. Now I'd like to create hyphenation patterns for it, to use with pdftex (that is, 8 bit based). If I understand correctly, I can do this with hyph-utf8 by creating a .dat file mapping my encoding to unicode and then processing th...

@DavidCarlisle Anything will help ;-)

Roelof Spijker

\lccode simply changes the lowercase code of a character code.

so \lccode"E0="E0 sets the lower case code of character code "E0 equal to the character code.

Stephan Lehmke

@RoelofSpijker Ok I understand that. Now, which characters need that declaration in a hyphenation pattern?

David Carlisle

10:02 AM

ah i saw that but thought it was about the tools reading that particular format (which is all a bit modern for me) rather than aout the underlying hypenation tables the lccode relation to hypehation is unfortunate they don't actually go in the table but the distinction between "letters" and "punctuation" for what gets considered is basically that it has a lccode,

which is why you have to force eveything within a particular paragraph to use compatible font encodings (so they have compatible lccode tables) .

egreg

@StephanLehmke A character whose \lccode is zero stops the hyphenation process. The trick is used for Italian hyphenation patterns, where one sets \lccode`'=`' so that words containing an apostrophe can be hyphenated also past the apostrophe.

David Carlisle

@StephanLehmke texdoc encguide section 3.2

Roelof Spijker

@StephanLehmke I believe "E0 denotes an a with an accent grave, which also has lowercase code zero. Everything except a-zA-Z has \lccode zero in initex, I believe.

Stephan Lehmke

@DavidCarlisle Wouldn't this mean (transferring to the .dat files I'm looking at) that every .dat has to have the "1"s in exactly the same places as ec encoding???

David Carlisle

@egreg not sure which of our global newcommand answers is less readable:-) I think we did consider adding that at the time, when we added *, but it complicated the code and couldn't think of a real use case at the time:-)

@StephanLehmke probably, as I say I have never seen that actual dat format before. Although as encguide tells you latex does not support changing the lccode tables, but as @egreg just pointed out some rules are not strictly followed (rather like driving regulations if I understand my national stereotypes correctly:-)

Martin Scharrer

10:14 AM

Blog - Stack Exchange: Are Some Questions Too Simple?

Jeff Atwood on February 22, 2011

On Podcast #58, Joel and I had a disagreement. Not the first, and certainly won’t be the last:

Joel says that the only bad simple question is a duplicate simple question. I say simple questions are OK as long as they’re actually interesting (in some way) for other users to consider and answer. To prove his point, Joel actually asks the question on Stack Overflow: How do I move the turtle in LOGO? Do you think this question adds value?

We still have this disagreement. Our community is now struggling with the very same issue across multiple network sites: …

Stephan Lehmke

@RoelofSpijker Ok, this explains why "abc" etc. are not getting "1"s in the .dat files. They already have a non-zero \lccode. So would it be safe to put the "1" (activating the \lccode definition) to every lowercase letter which is not ASCII? Or is there anything else to consider?

egreg

@DavidCarlisle I don't think that a global version of \newcommand and \renewcommand is really useful in general; redefining commands with an optional argument is risky anyway. So \gdef is what's really needed.

Martin Scharrer

The funny thing is: The questions I thought would be trivial, because you find it in any LaTeX intro, got the most up-votes on this site!

I means of course:

126

Q: How does one insert a backslash or a tilde into LaTeX?

How does one insert a "\" (backslash) into the text of a LaTeX document? And how does one insert a "~" (tilde)? (If you insert \~, it will give you a tilde as an accent over the following letter.) I believe \backslash may be used in math formulae, but not into text itself. Lamport's, Kopka's,...

symbols

Joseph Wright

@egreg I'd agree - once you need to worry about scope, you are really 'programming'

Roelof Spijker

@StephanLehmke Not sure, sometimes lowercase tricks are used to get certain macro definitions to work and I can't directly tell whether or not that could cause issues. Also, you don't want to hyphenate past a ~ for instance, because it's the non-breakable space. I'm sure there are other examples.

@MartinScharrer: I presume that's because a lot of people find this site via search engines. Trivial issues imply a lot of people searching for them, which in turn implies a lot of upvotes?

N3buchadnezzar

10:20 AM

@JosephWright Hey

Martin Scharrer

@RoelofSpijker Yes, of course.

Roelof Spijker

I do think that shows that there certainly is a use for 'trivial' questions here, in the sense that they help a lot of people.

Joseph Wright

@N3buchadnezzar Hello

Martin Scharrer

So, it's not bad to have such questions and proper answers to it.

David Carlisle

@StephanLehmke safe depends what you are doing. Ie where are the lowercase non-ascii letters in your encoding with relation to the locations in T1. LaTeX does not swap lccode when swapping font encodings (unless you add this explicitly) and the lc table that matters is not the lc ctable in force at the time the font is used, but the lctable at the end of the paragraph so if you install different lc code and allow peopel to switch encodings mid-paragraph bad things happen

N3buchadnezzar

10:21 AM

Mind me asking a short question about tables? I need the first part of the table to be centered, and the bottom part to be right alligned. Any ideas?

egreg

@MartinScharrer One should know how many upvotes the question had when it was migrated here.

David Carlisle

you can use p column and stick \centering in the early entries and \raggedleft in the later ones (if I understand the question)

Roelof Spijker

@N3buchadnezzar: Use \multicolumn{1}{c}{...} in the first column?

N3buchadnezzar

I want to paste the table in here, but fear it will be too big. Is it ok ?

David Carlisle

@N3buchadnezzar ask a qn on the site, that's what it's for:-)

Stephan Lehmke

10:23 AM

@DavidCarlisle Ok, this is helpful. I'll try to make sure my encoding is compatible in this respect with T1 then.

N3buchadnezzar

@DavidCarlisle I want to try to solve it myself first ;)

Martin Scharrer

@DavidCarlisle Having some diagram which shows the number of votes over times would be nice.

Andrew Stacey

10:40 AM

I have really no idea of TeX's memory limitations. Is 10,000 \defs excessive?

N3buchadnezzar

pastebin.com/E5uG4Cv5

egreg

@AndrewStacey I get an error only somewhere between 200000 and 215000: this exhausts the hash size; but it also depends on the replacement text.

David Carlisle

@AndrewStacey you can look at the end of the log to see how close you are to your current settings 17283 multiletter control sequences out of 15000+200000

@N3buchadnezzar centering is a paragraph layout command you can not use it in a single line lrc column, for that do as @RoelofSpijker said and change the column spec to c with \multicolumn

N3buchadnezzar

okai

Patrick Gundlach

@StephanLehmke your question with the lccodes for uppercase letters: I've read somewhere that initex sets the lccode of A-Z to the lowercase variants

From the TeXbook: "When INITEX begins, all \uccode and \lccode values are zero except that the letters a to z and A to Z have \uccode values A to Z and \lccode values a to z."

Stephan Lehmke

10:56 AM

@AndrewStacey You can also set these values really large. In DocScape a lot of control sequences and registers are used. I'm setting
`export extra_mem_bot=150000000`
`export extra_mem_top=150000000`
`export pool_size=30000000`
`export save_size=50000`
`export max_strings=2000000`
`export hash_extra=1500000`

egreg

@PatrickGundlach The same is apparently done by iniXeTeX

Patrick Gundlach

See for example github.com/speedata/publisher/blob/develop/src/lua/publisher/…

That's what I do to set the lccodes for hyphenation. But this is not 100% correct (it won't handle turkish, I guess)

N3buchadnezzar

@DavidCarlisle I tried \multicolumn{1}{c}{Posisjon\\på måletav\(cm)} but this did not work...

Stephan Lehmke

@PatrickGundlach thanks for the explanation on lccodes.

David Carlisle

@N3buchadnezzar you can't have \\ in a single line column like c. (Apart from the fact that \\ ends the table row within tables, c columns are single line perhaps you want \multicolumn{1}{p{2cm}}{Posisjon\newline på måletav$cm$} but hard to guess

egreg

11:04 AM

@N3buchadnezzar It can't. In c columns you can't have a line break. But if the original one is, say >{\raggedright}p{5cm} you can say \multicolumn{1}{p{5cm}}{\centering ...}; if it's not the last column you can use \\ to end lines.

N3buchadnezzar

I am confused...

So I should use \multicolumn{1}{p{5cm}}{\centering ...} except for the last column.

Andrew Stacey

@egreg, @DavidCarlisle Okay, so it's not multiletter control sequences that causes this to crash. It is 2841944 words of memory out of 300000 which is dangerously close to the limit.

David Carlisle

@N3buchadnezzar you can do that in the last column as well but beware \centering redefines \` to center lines so it will no longer end that table row but you can use \tabularnewline` for that always

@AndrewStacey up to some actual limit you can fiddle with the numbers in texmf.cnf to give yourself more space, or I think I saw someone here mention that luatex doesn't have limits and will eat your whole machine if you let it (but I could be wrong about luatex:-)

N3buchadnezzar

@DavidCarlisle Still it is not working

David Carlisle

11:20 AM

@N3buchadnezzar question, MWE, main site;-)

N3buchadnezzar

Yeah, but I mean. It should work ^^ It worked for the first coloumn

pastebin.com/EYPU1tam

HAh! I got it to work!

Andrew Stacey

@DavidCarlisle Except that I suspect that that means I'm doing something wrong and that I should find a different way of doing what I'm doing. I guess I need to read up on TeX's memory stuff and what all of those different categories of memory mean.

David Carlisle

@AndrewStacey yes there is that (cf the question that you just commented on re tex capacity in beamer:-)

Andrew Stacey

@DavidCarlisle It is somewhat of a black box to me! I'm doing some complicated stuff with TikZ that involves building really big paths. So these get stored in memory, but presumably at some point they get written to the output file and the memory gets reclaimed. I can break up the process into chunks, but it's only worth doing that if the memory can be reclaimed between chunks.

I was hoping that if they were in different paragraphs they'd be okay (I guess that different hboxes probably isn't enough), but experiments so far don't seem to agree with that.

David Carlisle

11:41 AM

well more or less box memory will hang around until you ship out the page (you can unbox a box which will free up that box register, but the contents typically just get typed into another box so it is just shuffling memory around. memory for macros gets reclaimed at end of a group unless global unless you mix global and local definitions of the same thing which tends to trash the save stack, or you could do the graphics as Word clipart instead of tikz

Andrew Stacey

And then I could have a paperclip saying helpful things like "You appear to have an underful hbox. Would you like to a) fill it, b) ignore it, c) complain to TeX support?".

N.N.

So, it is either go insane trying to understand TeX's memory handling or get lynched by members of this community for using Word clipart?

Paulo Cereda

Editing David's interview.

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda s/interview/interrogation/

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle :set interview-mode=interrogation :P

David Carlisle

11:55 AM

@PauloCereda (setq not :set please

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle <3

Ariel

finaledit <- ifelse(tex$inthechair == "DCarlisle", tex$event == "interrogation", tex$event)

shows you how many more lines of code you write in R. But writing in C or C++ is unfriendly for most analysts.

Speaking of verbose, how is the log file that comes up during compilation generated? It seems like someone is talking instead of the terse error messages you usually get elsewhere. But if you look close, its a weird kind of talk. It makes it look like its easy to troubleshoot whatever the error is because the message is, on the surface, friendly {but murkiness lies underneath}

David Carlisle

@Ariel If you are finding the log messages too terse, I find that putting \tracingall at the top of the document tends to help

Ariel

12:12 PM

@DavidCarlisle sorry - my earlier message was worded very badly. The log is really verbose. I am always surprised that it almost feels like the tex machine is talking to you. Who designed that? And did they have to write a lot to get all those structures in there?

Roelof Spijker

@Ariel You must be using a different engine than I am.

Ariel

@DavidCarlisle I think my difficulty in troubleshooting comes mostly from a complete unfamiliarity with what's really going on under the hood. I should take a hint from your interview yesterday and spend some time reading the TeX book :)

@RoelofSpijker - this is the log generated by TeXstudio

David Carlisle

@Ariel I was being deliberately unhelpful:-) (although adding \tacingall is often as not the first thing i do to a user supplied MWE if I can't immediately fix it. The log comes from all kinds of places some comes from the guts f the tex engine (like the file paths starting with ( some comes from latex packages or some just comes from people putting \typeout{hello world} into their document.

Ariel

facepalm, of course. :)

@DavidCarlisle so - some of those are written by the package creators?

@DavidCarlisle my committee head just emailed to say that those longtables are one of the clearest and most well-laid out she has ever seen in the program {considering mostly everyone uses word, I am not surprised, but I cannot help grinning ear to ear} :-D

2

David Carlisle

If you write a package and put \ProvidesPackage{kdfs}[1886/02/03 sds awdqag] at the top then a line with that information gets written to the lhe log, but in general any macro can write to the log using \typeout or \PackageInfo or \write-1{stuff} (which is what all these commands do really) some people like to add a lot of tracing to their macros, some less so, it all depends.

Paulo Cereda

12:27 PM

I want a T-shirt with David's suggestion for a question: "I started using latex yesterday how can I use lfgwhqhdq font at 12.8888 pt in alternate headers on a translucent pink background."

2

egreg

@PauloCereda Changing lfgwhqhdq into Comic Sans, of course. :)

Paulo Cereda

@egreg Uh-oh. :P

David's interview: Word count: 4176

wow.

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda what's your average?

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Around 2k, I guess. :P

Martin Scharrer

12:42 PM

In addition to the "This question lead to a new package" label we could also add "This question lead to a bugfix in an existing package" or "This question lead to a new feature in an existing package" ;-)

2

I just found a minor bug in standalone while answering a question ;-)

David Carlisle

@MartinScharrer I need a "this question lead to inserting a new bug in a package" label.

4

N.N.

We also need "This question lead to lfgwhqhdq font at 12.8888 pt in alternate headers on a translucent pink background."

Marco Daniel

Are any mac-users here? What do you recommend MacPorts or Fink?

N3buchadnezzar

Hi =)

\begin{tabular}{r r r r r r r r r r r} works but why does not
\begin{tabular}{@r*{10}@} work ? =)'

Roelof Spijker

why are you inserting those @'s ?

normally you would use @{} if you don't want any spacing.

Ariel

12:53 PM

how abour \begin{tabular}{@{}r*{10}}

Paulo Cereda

@MarcoDaniel TBH I never tried any of them. I've heard better things from Fink than MacPorts. I was suggested to try other alternatives like Rudix and Homebrew.

N3buchadnezzar

Using that r*{10} I keep getting the error "! Paragraph ended before \NC@find was complete."

Roelof Spijker

also, chat really isn't for questions. Ask on the main site, that's what it's for. Other people might benefit that way.

Patrick Gundlach

@MarcoDaniel I use MP for quite some time and like it. I've used fink before, but MP was much better. Nowadays there is homebrew(?)

David Carlisle

@N3buchadnezzar as @RoelofSpijker, but you have the arguments in the wrong orderr *{10}{r} makes 10 r's

N3buchadnezzar

12:56 PM

@DavidCarlisle Thanks

Marco Daniel

@PauloCereda and Thanks. @PatrickGundlach I will try homebrew

N3buchadnezzar

@DavidCarlisle But I need to write \begin{tabular}{@{} r @{} ...} in order to remove all the space right ? (\begin{tabular}{@{} *{10}{r} @{}} did not seem to work)

Paulo Cereda

@PatrickGundlach I'm still scared to try them on my Mac. :P

egreg

@N3buchadnezzar @ wants an argument: @{}*{10}r@{}; if you want no intercolumn space, then @{}*{10}{r@{}}

N3buchadnezzar

@egreg =)

Patrick Gundlach

1:01 PM

I don't know anything about homebrew. But MP is easily uninstalled.

it puts itself into a separate directory (/opt/local) and you just rm this directory, and thats it. So nothing to be scared of :))

Paulo Cereda

@PatrickGundlach Really? I'll try it. :)

N3buchadnezzar

Paulo Cereda

My favorite directory is /opt <3

Marco Daniel

@PatrickGundlach Me too

user19161

I thought MP = MetaPost. Upon reading the transcript I found out it was MacPorts. :-)

Martin Scharrer

1:06 PM

@NN lol

N.N.

@MartinScharrer and "This question lead to lots of reputation, REPZ, BADGES, GOLD, SILVER!... and an answer"

egreg

@N3buchadnezzar It's all wrong.

N3buchadnezzar

I know...

Martin Scharrer

@NN "a failed thesis, lost girl-friend, ..." ;-)

6

user19161

@MartinScharrer A better one will come along!

N.N.

1:08 PM

@MartinScharrer It is amazing how many consequences TeX.sx questions have! There must be something special about the site.

Martin Scharrer

@JasperLoy @NN No, no, I was kidding.

N.N.

I wonder if any question lead to someone finding a partner

Patrick Gundlach

@PauloCereda As I said, I don't know anything about homebrew, but it got much attention these days, so it might be worth a look

Paulo Cereda

@PatrickGundlach :)

N3buchadnezzar

@egreg I still can not seem to find the mistake

Ariel

1:13 PM

what happens if you replace the r with c in the tabular definition and maybe use siunitx to line up the decimals?

N3buchadnezzar

It messes up all the numbers.

Paulo Cereda

146

Q: How many levels of pointers can we have?

How many pointers (*) are allowed to use in a single variable? Let's consider the following example. int a = 10; int *p = &a; Similarly we can have int **q = &p; int ***r = &q; and so on. How many * are allowed in a single variable? For example, int ****************zz;

c++ c pointers

egreg

@N3buchadnezzar The alignment of the numbers is wrong with respect to the headers.

Paulo Cereda

"You can keep adding levels of pointers until your brain explodes or the compiler melts - whichever happens soonest." Epic. :D

N3buchadnezzar

@egreg But I do not know how to fix that =(

Ariel

1:16 PM

@N3buchadnezzar the last time I had this problem - I had r in my tabular definition and c in my multicolumn arguments

N3buchadnezzar

But I can not use the \newline with the multicoloumn enviroment

user19161

While asymptote is good for 3D, pgf has full support for direct pdf output, pstricks has many add-on packages, and xypic is good for special diagrams, I can't really think of any reason to use metapost. Any metapost users want to say anything?

David Carlisle

@N3buchadnezzar ask on the main site, asking questions here doesn't really work, you want @{}r@{}r@{}r@{}r@{} so that's r@{} followed by 4 copies of r@{} so @{}*{4}{@{}} *{n}{...} simply does simple text replace of n copies of ...

user19161

@DavidCarlisle Yes be sure to post this as an answer so that we can give you more rep!

egreg

@N3buchadnezzar Check siunitx features for tables

Gonzalo Medina

1:21 PM

@MartinScharrer: Hi, Martin.

N.N.

Apr 4 at 8:15, by N.N.

There are really nice figures in http://www.texdoc.net/pkg/featpost. Seems quite complicated compared to TikZ though.

user19161

@NN You use MP quite a bit?

N.N.

@JasperLoy Never used it. Got dizzy when looking at the code.

Paulo Cereda

Editing David's interview while Rule Britannia is playing in the background. :)

user19161

@NN I just about looked through all the documentation I could find for the 5 major graphics programs. I guess maybe I missed this one. :-)

N.N.

1:26 PM

@JasperLoy Seems to just be an extension to metapost. But the pictures in that manual are really nice and impressive.

Gonzalo Medina

@PauloCereda Hi, Paulo. Do you know how can I reach one of the Moderators?

user19161

@GonzaloMedina You can just ping them here or flag for attention if it is about a post.

Paulo Cereda

@GonzaloMedina Hi Gonzalo! Martin was here a few minutes ago.

user19161

@PauloCereda If he just says hi Martin will not know there is a problem.

Paulo Cereda

@GonzaloMedina: oops I didn't see the GMail chat. Now I'm online.

Paulo Cereda

1:42 PM

@AlanMunn, @lockstep: I guess I finished organizing our new interview. When you guys have some time, could you take a look on it? Thanks. :)

egreg

I've marked this question as duplicate (the linked one is much more informative IMO)

13

Q: No room for a new \dimen when including TikZ

I have a fairly large document which uses 30 or so packages. I was going to add some TikZ graphics, so I added the following to my header file: \usepackage{tikz,pgfplots} However, this gave me a lot of errors of the type ! No room for a new \dimen . After looking around, this seems to be re...

tikz-pgf

Paulo Cereda

@egreg Voted. :)

Roelof Spijker

Same here, it's even the (almost) same title... Don't you get some kind of message before you post, saying: "Hey, have a look at these questions right here, they look mighty similar to the one you are about to ask." If not, there should be.

Brent.Longborough

@RoelofSpijker Yes, I think that, as you're typing your question, possible duplicate titles appear automagically in the LHS margin.

Stephan Lehmke

@BrentLongborough True, but as you're just about to type a breathtakingly new and interesting question, you naturally have no intention to look there ;-)

Roelof Spijker

1:56 PM

@BrentLongborough: Hmmm, I would not have guessed that based on the amount of duplicates I see posted every day.

Stephan Lehmke

@RoelofSpijker You're not regularly reading ctt, are you ;-)

Roelof Spijker

@StephanLehmke: Based on the fact that I have no idea what ctt is, I suppose not. :)

could it be the newsgroup? If so, no :).

Stephan Lehmke

@RoelofSpijker The TeX newsgroup comp.text.tex. At a rough estimate, 99.99879% of all questions there are duplicates (considering the history of the newsgroup probably goes back even beyond Davids involvement with TeX). Dealing sensibly with duplicates is one of the great advantages of TEX.SX.

Ariel

hmm.. there is now going to be ubuntu for android! ubuntu.com/devices/android

Roelof Spijker

@StephanLehmke: I'm not saying that the current handling is bad, not at all. It usually succeeds in quickly redirecting the OP to an answer to his question. Still, some of these duplicates seems like they can be very easily avoided.

David Carlisle

2:06 PM

@StephanLehmke actually no, I was already using comp.text when comp.text.tex split off (mainly so that roff and tex users wouldn't have to speak to each other, as I recall)

6

Paulo Cereda

New CTAN Package: lfgwhqhdq

Stephan Lehmke

@DavidCarlisle I stand corrected ;-)

David Carlisle

but the dynamic of a newsgroup is different, there may be archives (but even google hasn't been able to make a usefully searchable archive) so it's more a stream of consciousness thing. It's annoying if questions get asked the same day, but after a timespan of more than that, duplication is inevitable.

egreg

2:28 PM

@PauloCereda Which chooses a random font (with a preference for Comic Sans) at a random size over a random (preferably pinkish) background.

Paulo Cereda

@egreg True! :) For every run, a new style! :D

egreg

@PauloCereda For every paragraph would be better. :)

Paulo Cereda

@egreg LOL! :)

Stephan Lehmke

Uh Oh, we're getting into the vincinity of @Canageek's thread again ;-)

Ariel

2:42 PM

What is the dotted line in chat? The end of aeon of talk?

user19161

@Ariel I think it represents a long pause in the conversation...

user19161

@Ariel Maybe I will give 12.04 a try again.

Ariel

@JasperLoy its strange because its position keeps changing.

user19161

@Ariel Yeah I am not sure how the pause is defined in the code.

Ariel

@JasperLoy I was just in the ubuntu room (something gives me an impression that everyone there is in high school. :)) I really want to switch soon. I was asking if ubuntu had a stable release with updates incorporated into it - something like Fedora. People pointed me to the daily builds - but they are unstable, and not quite stable + updates. Would you happen to know of any such images? I really hate having to update some 400MB after a "clean" install.

user19161

2:50 PM

@Ariel Why not wait for 12.04? It's just a few more days...

Ariel

@JasperLoy really when? {being lazy when I could click on the ubuntu website}

user19161

@Ariel 26 April.

Ariel

13 more days..

Can submit a few more chapters...

user19161

@Ariel Debian Wheezy should be out this year hopefully. The freeze is supposed to be in June which makes December a likely release month.

Ariel

@JasperLoy you know what they say... once bitten.. In my case painfully bitten by the R chaos.

@PauloCereda where is the blog? I can't see the link.

Paulo Cereda

2:56 PM

@Ariel It's still a draft. :) We need to review the text.

user19161

@Ariel Also you may stick to the Ubuntu LTS if you don't want to upgrade so often.

Ariel

Ooh, heavy censoring? I hope not ;-)

@JasperLoy yeah, that sounds very attractive. Inertia governs my OSes. Its probably not everyone's reason to switch to linux but I switched 80% because all the security patches and chaos in windows drove me to the edge.

The benefits were so overwhelming, I never looked back.

N.N.

@Ariel I think its logic is to be position at the last message shown when the tab containing the chat lost focus. I think it is to make it easier to find the last message you have read.

Ariel

@NN ah, that makes sense.

N.N.

@Ariel The Ask Ubuntu community is nice. I made a similar comparison and was told off by Jeff Atwood:

I think it is a completely unfair comparison, like comparing a PhD student to a high school student.. — Jeff Atwood Jun 22 '11 at 5:50

Ariel

3:06 PM

@NN I definitely don't disagree. Most of the folks actually try sincerely to help you out. :) its just that the contrast in chat strikes you more forcibly when you move from here to there. In fact, the admin just committed to devote his entire weekend to building a stable + update release.

Stephan Lehmke

@JasperLoy 12.04 is LTS.

N.N.

@Ariel I agree. To the AU folks this chat might be felts as stale. A better comparison of this community to that community might be that this community has people with similar backgrounds while the AU community has people with varied backgrounds.

Paulo Cereda

Fedora <3

Ariel

@NN " people with similar backgrounds" heh, people with extreme disillusionment with other typesetting systems {or rather non-existence of any other elegant solutions!}

N.N.

@Ariel I mean people using TeX are either technical geeks or academic geeks. People using Ubuntu is a much more varied bunch, from the guru to your grandma.

Ariel

3:22 PM

@PauloCereda I think my basic problem with Fedora is it limits what kind of extensions and support your system can get. I admire their devout no non-free non-open-source byte approach. But sometimes, you want to get your job done rather than get on a high horse to make a statement about how you abhor and will not support anything that is remotely non-opensource.

there are additional non-free (eg. fusion) repositories etc. but the constant stream of dependencies you need to install for even a small sneeze is somewhat time inefficient. Yum downloads a 13 meg repository update everytime I install a small package. Its absolutely annoying. And then there is the resource greedy anaconda. The less said the better. I hear the new version (beefy miracle?! I still can't get my head around that name!) will bring improvements though. /end rant of F16 agony.

Stephan Lehmke

@Ariel Ubuntu is no cure for resource greed, that's for sure. After not shutting down my laptop for several days, I could behold a compiz process of more than 8GB size, 5GB of which resident ;-)

N.N.

@StephanLehmke Never had such problems. Got a special configuration?

Stephan Lehmke

@NN Nope. It's 11.04 though I can't for the life of me switch to Unity.

Ariel

@StephanLehmke The grass is not greener this side. Top frequently shows the Gnome 3 shell ballooning to ~3GB at the end of 2 days or so of R computing.

N.N.

3:38 PM

@StephanLehmke I think Unity is great. More screen space and it can be keyboard driven. I think I am more effective in Unity than in Gnome 2. The greatest down side of Unity is that you have to get used to it and learn it just like any other new and different interface.

Ariel

@NN So you like it more than Gnome3? Just as an aside, are you used to mac systems?

Stephan Lehmke

@NN Ok then you are the very first I know who can cope with it. To me it seems to invite a smartphone-like "one application at a time" philosophy which is totally alien to the way I work. I have restarted my system this morning and am at 24 xterms, 3 firefox windows, 8 emacs frames plus acroread. It will get much much more in the coming days depending on which projects I work on in parallel.

N.N.

@Ariel Never tried Gnome 3 and not used to Mac. I have used Ubuntu for some years so I was used to Gnome 2. First I thought people were right in Unity having less functionality and more eye candy and mac lookalike. Then as I tried it and got used it I liked it for its efficiency.

@StephanLehmke It has good support for having windows side by side and such. As I see you use Emacs I think Unity is closer to Emacs than Gnome 2 is in it being more keyboard driven and less obtrusive. I believe that much of the complaints of Unity comes from people who have not given it a real chance and tried to learn it. It is like people complaining that Emacs is bad because they have not taken their time to learn it. It takes time to learn new interfaces and ways of working.

Even if it is old and does not include some of the newer features in Unity the following video is a good example of Unity:

blip.tv/jorge-castro/how-i-multitask-in-unity-5015448

Ariel

@NN As an experiment I am thinking of trying 12.04 with unity in my oldest laptop {I cannot get away from gnome for my production system}

Stephan Lehmke

@nn true but you need evidence it is worth the effort. While at University, I had a colleague who would try a new window manager every week, always searching for the best usability, configuring everything to his needs. Im a bit more the type who got used to CDE 20 years ago and would like to keep things that way :-)

Ariel

3:49 PM

@StephanLehmke what did he settle on? :)

Stephan Lehmke

@ariel nothing, ever.

Paulo Cereda

@Ariel I see. I'm not a Fedora advocate, but it works perfectly for me. The opensource-only inclusion policy looks fine to me, and installing third-party stuff is not a burden for me - the post install part is the one I love more. If one can't do it by hand, there are tools that are suitable for that purpose, like Fedora Utils - it installs Skype, MP3/DVD support, Chromium, etc.

The "problem" with repositories is related to how often the system is updated, and even for that there are yum plugins that solve this issue. Sadly delta info only makes sense if you can diff them to the last one, otherwise it simply has to get the whole stuff. I never had problems with Anaconda but I know there are some issues. I'm not a fan of Ubuntu but it's just a personal taste. I can blame Canonical for lots of decisions as well but I'll just spread the fire in the distro flaming wars. :)

Can you guys have Cinnamon in Ubuntu?

Stephan Lehmke

@nn Thanks, that looks EXACTLY like the type of demonstration of the next window manager I used to get once a week :-)

Ariel

@StephanLehmke Re: docscape.de/opencms/web/docscape/en/product/casestudy.html that fits to a T for dissertations as well. :)

replace trade fair with conferences or registration deadlines for defenses. :)

N.N.

@StephanLehmke For current functions of Unity askubuntu.com/a/28087/19490 might be a better guide.

Stephan Lehmke

3:55 PM

@Ariel :-) I should also go and read all that stuff once ;-)

Ariel

@StephanLehmke the first paragraph = exact picture of committee revisions. If they change one thing, I have to go and retypeset a million longtables.

so you have a system that automates it? :)

Stephan Lehmke

@Ariel No, other people writing it :-)

Ariel

@StephanLehmke hahah, you have a massive market of desperate phd candidates. :)

Stephan Lehmke

@Ariel LOL I'm not sure "market" is really the correct description :-) Though I have to say DocScape's table model could make some LaTeX people's mouth water ;-)

Peter Grill

I guess SO does not consider TeX.SE as programmers or tech related (but WordPress is!!). Fine print about the SO meetups on 4/28: "...we're inviting not only Stack Overflow users, but also members of Super User, Server Fault, Programmers, Ask Ubuntu, Unix & Linux, Wordpress, Sharepoint, Game Development, Drupal Answers, DBA, Webmasters, IT Security, SQA, Cryptography, and Code Review! If you're a hacker or programmer of any type who uses one of our tech-related SE sites, please join us"

Paulo Cereda

4:05 PM

@StephanLehmke Any code available? :)

Ariel

@StephanLehmke I have 6 longtables per chapter and counting. So naturally the whole case-study targeted my inner anxiety very well. :)

Stephan Lehmke

@PauloCereda I'm afraid not. DocScape has a younger brother by one guy you recently interviewed though ;-)

Paulo Cereda

@StephanLehmke Ah. :)

Stephan Lehmke

@Ariel we've done some catalogs which are basically one table broken over several hundres pages :-)

egreg

@PeterGrill We're typographers. :) By the way, what about the \grenewcommand?

Peter Grill

4:16 PM

Both your's and @DavidCarlisle's solutions work great. But can't decide which one is better?

David Carlisle

@StephanLehmke The first time I realized people were using longtable on seriously large documents was when i got a bug report which (after several emails and no test data) turned out that initial versions couldn't handle more than 1100 tables in a document (as the internal macro using \romannumeral reached \LT@mc and over-wrote lontables internals...

@PeterGrill @egreg was one ahead last time I looked

Stephan Lehmke

@DavidCarlisle I'd never compare my own creation with longtable :-)

Peter Grill

@DavidCarlisle Yeah based on voting, but any reasoning to choose one over the other that I can come up with is kind of trivial.

David Carlisle

@PeterGrill you should go with @egreg because he needs to reach 100k before he can take his summer holiday

Ariel

@egreg Speaking of typography, I find this one of the most awesome examples of how good typography can help you just whizz through contents. pnts.us I want my thesis to look like that! (but the lfgwhqhdq font at 12.8888 pt on a translucent pink background is a close second)

Peter Grill

4:22 PM

@DavidCarlisle Ok, at least the logic in that (unlike my initial thoughts), and means @egreg be well rested so we can look forward to even more answers once he returns. And also gives you a chance to catch up to him while he is on vacation. :-)

egreg

@Ariel It's quite nice a blog.

Stephan Lehmke

Paulo Cereda

@StephanLehmke Very nice!

David Carlisle

@PeterGrill as it happens i think it's mostly my code that is being modified there, as far as i can remember:-)

Stephan Lehmke

In the image you can see a 4-layer scheme of repeating table heads. "Heads" of every layer can be used arbitrarily inside the table, and at every page break DocScape will repeat the last-seen head of every layer, in the right stacking order.

David Carlisle

4:27 PM

then I checked the sources , which it turns out has code to do the global definition in there `% The |\aut@global| command below is only used in the autoload
% format. If it is |\global| then a global definition will be made.
% \changes{v1.2q}{1995/10/02}
`

not many people use the latex autoload format these days probably

egreg

Close as too localized?

0

Q: Gummi breaking on inclusion of bibliography

Gummi is refusing to compile whenever I include the line \bibliography{bibliog.bib}{} I've tried with and without the .bib and it doesn't seem to matter what the contents of the file are (I've even tried with empty files). In addition it doesn't matter whether there are citations in the text o...

bibliographies bibtex

Stephan Lehmke

Also, observe that DocScape will apply a slight amount of letter spacing to table cells, to avoid unneccessary line breaks. Although line breaks are possible if the predefined minimum of negative spacing is exceeded.

Ariel

@StephanLehmke Wow - I am drooling. this is unfair! you are making me less satisfied with mine!!!!

Paulo Cereda

@egreg I think so. :)

Stephan Lehmke

@Ariel no kudos on design - we are just implementing customer's specifications.

I think the most convenient property of DocScape tables is that you almost never have to give a column width. There is an "intelligent" heuristic which will find proper column widths in almost all cases - though line breaks are allowed everywhere.

Paulo Cereda

4:34 PM

@StephanLehmke That's surely a life saver. :)

@MarcoDaniel: the kbd tag does not work in the chat room. :(

Ariel

@StephanLehmke Now I want your software. that is a really attractive feature!

Marco Daniel

@PauloCereda I recognized this ;-)

Canageek

@egreg Oh, I think I helped with that answer, since the writer had never looked at the font code!

Ariel

@egreg Yes, the posts are often insightful and inspiring so its not just empty design. My recent favourite was this one: pnts.us/quote/always-write

David Carlisle

@Ariel you could try tabulary (which has a not very intelligent heuristic to set column widths automatically)

Marco Daniel

4:39 PM

The whole day I torture my with mac. Most of my problems were solvable ;-)

Ariel

@DavidCarlisle I briefly looked at the tabular family - ALL my tables are multipage though. Does tabulary handle multipage well?

David Carlisle

@Ariel I can say with confidence that it has never failed on a multipage table.

Ariel

@DavidCarlisle I am reading the manual as I type. :) thanks for that tip.

David Carlisle

@Ariel beware of xkcd.com/1033

Ariel

hahahah

Stephan Lehmke

4:46 PM

Example of a table without explicit column widths.

Ariel

@StephanLehmke you take the meaning of tables to new dimensions!

Stephan Lehmke

Note that this catalog is produced in different languages with black plate change (?), so you get slightly different column dimensions for different languages.

Paulo Cereda

5:10 PM

Those drills look like the ones from Bosch. :)

Stephan Lehmke

5:21 PM

Well Wolfcraft is a rather well-known DIY brand in Germany. Catalogs in 18 languages :-)

Paulo Cereda

@StephanLehmke Oops my bad, it seems the brand arrived recently in Brazil. The only German company I knew was Bosch. :)

Stephan Lehmke

@PauloCereda :-)

Paulo Cereda

@StephanLehmke WOW!!!!!!!!

@Stephan: now I want those items. :P

egreg

@PauloCereda That's the purpose of having nice catalogues: people will want the items!

Paulo Cereda

@egreg It's working! :) Maybe it's the TeX effect. :P

Stephan Lehmke

5:35 PM

Something for real men ;-)

Paulo Cereda

@StephanLehmke If I cut wood here, I'd be arrested by the environmental police. :P

It's not fair, we don't have cool things like those. I wanna be German.

egreg

5:52 PM

How much rep is needed for a self-answer?

Peter Grill

@jake: Sorry I cancelled the -1 downvotes at tex.stackexchange.com/questions/51770/… before i saw your comment. Since this is a new user I thought it was a good idea to give some more time to fix the question.

David Zaslavsky

@egreg You can always self-answer, you just have to wait 8 hours if you don't have enough rep, where I think "enough" is 300 or something like that (but don't take my word for it)

Martin Scharrer

6:11 PM

0

A: Text building blocks

About: [Welcome to TeX.sx!](http://meta.tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1436/welcome- to-tex-sx) Your question won't be seen by many people here, so it would be best to repost it as a fresh question. [Follow-up questions](http://meta.tex.stackexchange.com/questions/2117/ive-just-been-told-i...

Any suggestions about it? I will phrase something by myself when I find the time.

@PeterGrill That's now +2/-2=0. Actually down-voting a question to quickly will usually only lead to someone up-voting it to cancel that one out (like to move it from -1 back to 0). This actually leads to more rep for the OP than getting no votes at all!

Peter Grill

@MartinScharrer So, should I unupvote? Not sure if that is what you are suggesting. I just feel that having a negative score on a question might irritate a new user.

Brent.Longborough

@StephanLehmke That is so true...

Martin Scharrer

@PeterGrill No, your action is fine. My comment was more for the people which down-voted.

Paulo Cereda

@StephanLehmke: I simply looked at every single item from the Wolfcraft online catalogue. :P

lockstep

6:33 PM

Can we pretty please close this?

0

Q: biblatex-apa: undefined references thread, same problem, fixes not working

I have the same problem as the previous thread on this, but that thread's fixes aren't working for me. Running the same code as in that thread, \documentclass{article} \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} \usepackage[german, ngerman]{babel} \usepackage[babel]{csquotes} \usepackage[style=apa, backend=bib...

biblatex apa-style

Paulo Cereda

@lockstep Voted. :)

Paulo Cereda

6:49 PM

@egreg: congrats for the new bounty. :)

Andrew Stacey

7:02 PM

@MartinScharrer What I like about the existing text, which isn't in your current version, is the fact that it is in the best interests of the person posting to post it as a new question. I feel it is better to say, "You'll be more likely to get an answer to your question" than "This is how things are done here". The first emphasises the positive, the second is just laying down the rules. I know that I react better to the first than to the second, and I suspect that many others do too.

I forget - do we have a canonical "What's wrong with my TikZ coordinateZ?" question? I'm thinking of this new one tex.stackexchange.com/q/51814/86 and it ought to be linked to all the other ones.

Peter Grill

@GonzaloMedina: Damm!! Wish this question had pooped up a few hours ago. Took me over an hour to get this exact same thign to work -- resorted to defining a macro outside, but would have been better to just use four ####.

Paulo Cereda

7:20 PM

Another name change:

Moderator, underground

664 2 25

pstricks diagrams tikz-pgf macros miktex compiling key-value

egreg

@PauloCereda Thanks, but you shouldn't have done that. :)

Paulo Cereda

@egreg The Fibonacci Fountain is fantastic! :)

Martin Scharrer

I like the advances search options. I just thought "I answered once a question similar to this" and "user:2975 [tikz-pgf] [coordinates] is:answer isaccepted:1" returned it to me (together with six others; I answer a lot of TikZ questions ;-) ). The user:2975 was originally user:me, but this is always automatically updated.

@PauloCereda I already noticed. Some of my @user comments look now funny. That user changed his name twice during the comment conversation (which took several weeks, though) ;-)

egreg

7:36 PM

@MartinScharrer I revoked the downvote, since an example has been provided.

Paulo Cereda

@MartinScharrer :P

@egreg: now you are close to 81k. :)

Martin Scharrer

8:03 PM

Registered user egreg, member for 1 years, last seen -256 seconds ago, reputation 80.8k

4

Aha! @egreg is a time traveler! That's why he can answer so many posts! ;-)

egreg

@MartinScharrer That means the site can forecast the future?

I've been discovered. :)

Martin Scharrer

@egreg No, but that has issues with clock drift ;-)

@egreg You are the new Dr. Who, right ;)

egreg

I still can unveil my already made 42 answers at due time. :)

Martin Scharrer

I just now saw Jeff's post about your text building blocks:

5

A: Text building blocks

I'm not a huge fan of any automated "one size fits all" processes like this, but as an experiment to see what happens, it's OK. You might also be interested in this script http://stackapps.com/questions/2116/pro-forma-comments Which would make it easier to refer and use to this set of standard...

The mentioned app seems to be really useful:

91

Q: AutoReviewComments - Pro-forma comments for SE

No more re-typing the same comments over and over! This script adds a little 'auto' link next to all comments boxes. When you click the link, you see a popup with 6 configurable auto-comments, which you can easily click to insert. This script was inspired by answers to this question on meta....

script

I already configured it with the most frequent comments:

If anyone wants to import that, here the text version (use the import/export link at the button)

###MWE required
[Welcome to TeX.sx!](meta.tex.stackexchange.com/q/1436) Please add a [minimal working example (MWE)](meta.tex.stackexchange.com/q/228) that illustrates your problem.

###Follow-up question posted as an answer
[Welcome to TeX.sx!](meta.tex.stackexchange.com/q/1436) Answer posts are intended for solutions to the original question. If you have a similar question which is not answered here, please post it as a fresh one using the "Ask Question" link above. [Follow-up questions](meta.tex.stackexchange.com/q/2117) like this are more than welcome! Please…

2

Roelof Spijker

@MartinScharrer: Excellent! :D

Andrew Stacey

8:31 PM

Curses! Foiled again. TeX's memory runs out when rendering about 100 letters as TikZ paths. So my plan to rewrite the American constitution with path morphing decorations will have to wait until I figure out how to increase TeX's memory sufficiently.

4

Martin Scharrer

@AndrewStacey ymmd!

@PauloCereda: I'm going to loose most of my reputation on stackoverflow!

They want to migrate the following question I answered there to us!

28

Q: Standalone diagrams with TikZ?

I'm using TikZ to draw diagrams in LaTeX that I then want to isolate as image files to put online. My guess is there is a way to extract these diagrams directly without having to tease them out of the finished .pdf file. How would I go about doing that? (If it matters, I'm using TeXnicCenter.)