TeX, LaTeX and Friends

Martin Scharrer

00:43

Quick question: I'm using gather from amsmath and have \onehalfspacing (setspace) enabled. Not sure if it caused by it, but there is a lot of vertical skip between the leading paragraph and the top of gather.

Is this normal?

Canageek

@MartinScharrer You are a mod, right? Was I out of line to downvote this answer:

-1

A: How do I use TrueType Fonts with PDFTeX using otftotfm?

@Stephan Lehmke, of course, until someone develops a software (GUI) for all the commands above. Anyway, both the alternatives you offer: a) not installing new fonts and b) switching to another engine are: 1) easier 2) same pdf results, ergo: more rational choices. I've never heard of publishers/...

We'd already gone over the fact that I wasn't interested in switching to XeTeX or LuaTeX in the question comments more then once, and it doesn't actually answer the question.

Martin Scharrer

@Canageek Yes, I'm a mod. I added a comment already. You can also flag such posts for moderator attention if you want. Down-voting is OK here, I guess.

Canageek

@MartinScharrer I can flag it, wasn't sure what the right proceedure was. I'd be fine with it if it wasn't already clear from the question I wasn't looking for that (i.e. if I didn't know that LuaTeX or XeTeX exited and could use ttf and otf fonts nateivly)

Anyway, I just felt that the question was rather disrespectful of the very well done previous post--I can't wait to sit down and try it when I work on my adventure. I just finished my work for the night so I bid you good night.

leo

04:15

is there a command like \implies but for the other implication?

Stephan Lehmke

05:00

Is anything wrong with my use of < in the following answer (near the bottom)?

13

A: How do I use TrueType Fonts with PDFTeX using otftotfm?

Ok, so here it comes. I should declare that I'm just talking about text fonts here. But I assume if someone puts in the several person years it'll take to make a math font with all the features required by TeX, they'll also make the TeX font setup to go with it. I don't have a lot of formal kn...

@speravir did an incomprehensible edit (deleting some essential information) which I just rolled back, so I'm getting the impression there might be viewing glitches in other browsers (I'm using firefox)?

Thorsten

05:33

@StephanLehmke Do you mean because of the edit suggestion? I guess that there's a displaying issue. I see < instead of <

@StephanLehmke otftotfm -a -e ec -fkern -fliga <myfont>.ttf T1--<myfont

Werner

@Thorsten Agreed... not sure what to do about it though.

percusse

05:49

@StephanLehmke I approved that edit but didn't realize there was essential info deleted. Sorry about that. Users including me, are seeing non-parsed HTML description of < which is probably due to how things are copied to clipboard from the terminal. (I'm using Firefox too and I'm kind of surprised that it doesn't appear as < )

Stephan Lehmke

@percusse Ok, this clarifies it. I swear it looks well here on my screen (and I really typed < ) I'll try to find out how to properly input a < here or think of another notation. Unfortunately I have to go now (to hospital), so I won't get around to it before evening. If anyone knows how to do it right, feel free ;-)

Stephan Lehmke

06:32

Now I just removed the pointy braces, they were ambiguous in a command shell anyway...

percusse

07:06

@StephanLehmke By the way great answer too!

Roelof Spijker

08:41

is it me, or is there an "answers" missing in the second sentence of the blog posting?

Andrew Stacey

08:54

@RoelofSpijker *Types very quickly* No, looks alright to me.

Roelof Spijker

hehe, excellent :)

Andrew Stacey

10:32

Seeing a question about clashes of packages, I'm curious as to whether anyone's ever done a "dependency graph" of CTAN. To be truly useful, it would link packages according to "depends on", "replaces", "clashes with" (and, of course, the old favourite: "must be loaded after" with hyperref as the supremum; more interesting would be to find a loop in this particular part).

David Carlisle

@AndrewStacey easy to answer that question:-) no

Andrew Stacey

@DavidCarlisle And I guess it would be near-impossible to do.

David Carlisle

@AndrewStacey well if you could define "clash" 9one man's clash is another woman' s functional improvement) you have the problem that it's combinatorialy difficult if A and B are OK as are A and c and B and C but A B c together blow up you need to consider all ordered subsets of ctan packages which is a big number;-0

Andrew Stacey

10:47

@DavidCarlisle Well of course, I wouldn't do something like this myself. I'd get a graduate student to do it.

David Carlisle

ah yes the advantage of working in university, having slaves at your beck and call

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle @AndrewStacey don't call us "slaves"!!!

well, I mean, you're right, that's what students do

:)

percusse

11:13

At least use "modern slaves". That would leave some tiny room for dignity :)

Paulo Cereda

11:41

Grad slavery? Woohoo!

Stephan Lehmke

12:32

@percusse I received a downvote for it ;-) Without a comment, I'm a bit undecided what to improve. Is the loading time for the images too long? Or should I say more about encodings?

Patrick Gundlach

12:42

@StephanLehmke It wasn't me, i swear :) I have no clue why someone would dv that. I am always getting a bit upset if I get a dv w/o a decent explanation.

I also think the answer is very good, although the subject is difficult :)

I'd guess the downvoter didn't like the look of the fonts...

@StephanLehmke I don't think there is much room for improvement

Paulo Cereda

@StephanLehmke Your answer is fantastic! :)

Stephan Lehmke

@PatrickGundlach :-) You already made your anti-downvote attitude clear. I have somewhat been advocating downvotes recently ;-)

Patrick Gundlach

I have to admit that did 13 downvotes in the time I've been here. (But that's less than 1% of my votes)

Andrew Stacey

@StephanLehmke Clearly the down vote was because you didn't use Comic Sans in your answer.

@PatrickGundlach I'm ahead of you, then. I've 15 down votes to my demerit.

(but that comes in at a gnat's whisker over 0.4% of my total)

Stephan Lehmke

So I'm certainly not complaining. But a downvote accompanied with a comment on what can be improved is best. Just a comment would invite (from me) going into defensive position, explaining to the commenter why they weren't understanding the brilliance of the answer.

Patrick Gundlach

12:50

> why they weren't understanding the brilliance of the answer

lol

Stephan Lehmke

With a downvote behind it it's clear the criticism won't go away by clever talk, only with a real improvement.

Andrew Stacey

@StephanLehmke My default assumption is always the opposite. A 'downvote' can just be a random "I didn't like your patronising tone" (not that yours was!). It's much easier to vote than to comment, so if a negative vote is cast without a comment then I tend to disregard the vote. I figure Paulo and his sockpuppets will counterbalance it.

Stephan Lehmke

@AndrewStacey Maybe it could be done with group theory? :-)

@AndrewStacey I tried, honest! I really looked for a usable free font in that direction, but gave up. There are simply too many of them. If none matches omic or and or whatever, it's pointless.

@AndrewStacey Not much disagreement. Although, if it was easy to give up some of one's own rep for a purpose, there'd much more bounties, wouldn't there?

Andrew Stacey

@StephanLehmke I think more that it isn't in the site's pysche for individuals to reward good answers by giving bounties. That's a reasonably new feature of bounties - earlier, they were only to attract attention to unanswered questions.

tohecz

13:19

@StephanLehmke Maybe someone wanted to get Critic badge. Have you checked the "Recently awarded badges" list?

David Carlisle

13:41

@tohecz how is your bidi foo? the shadowbox longtable has resurfaced:-)

I think the right thing to do must be to flag RTL before typesetting the table rather than trying to invert the box afterwards, but...

Paulo Cereda

10

Q: Light markup languages for TeX users

I was wondering if people could share their experience with various mark up languages. In particular, I am interested in situations for which you consider light markups preferable to TeX. I am also interested in the level of TeX output support by different markups. My initial contact with marku...

markup

Patrick Gundlach

@MartinScharrer I hope I didn't do anything wrong by putting the comment there - did I?

Paulo Cereda

Domain Specific Language (DSL) anyone? :)

Patrick Gundlach

1

Q: No hyper refs from citation to bibliography using BiBTeX, hyperref and harvard

I am trying to get internal hyperrefs from citation to the bibliography page. I am using BiBTeX, the harvard package, the hyperref package with optional [hidelinks]. The latter works fine to me on the TOC and sections refs. I read in hyperref package help that it is designed to work with the har...

hyperref bibtex

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle I got a mail from the OP and I'll look into that. I believe that one should use something like \def\myshadowbox#1{\shadowbox{\RTL{#1}}} and then \myshadowbox inside \LT@output

However I have never worked with RTL hence I will use the trial-and-error method...

Patrick Gundlach

13:55

@PauloCereda I used to write ruby interfaces for DSLs

Paulo Cereda

@PatrickGundlach Really? I heard that Ruby is very easy to define DSLs. :)

Patrick Gundlach

@PauloCereda Yes, after I found out how it works I was able to write very clean DSLs (IMO, that is subjective, of course)

But I have to search my harddrive to find them

Paulo Cereda

Cool! :)

Patrick Gundlach

@PauloCereda mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/dwemthy

Paulo Cereda

@PatrickGundlach Wow! :)

Patrick Gundlach

14:02

@PauloCereda _why is so awesome. Too bad he isn't around anymore.

zeroth

Why is the chat link in the upper line next to my username always removed when the blog gets updated, then a few days later it gets back. I dont get it? Or is it just me?

Patrick Gundlach

@zeroth I don't know either. Perhaps it disappears if you are in the chat?

zeroth

@PatrickGundlach I had just logged in to TeX.SE, no direct link to chat or anything... Let me check if it disappears... :) Be right back...

nope, still not on... I have to go to meta -> chat.

I will ask in meta, once I have handed in my thesis (due on Wednesday!!!!)

@PatrickGundlach does it also happen for you?

Patrick Gundlach

@zeroth I can see the chat link only on meta. I never look for it though.

This chat is my browser's startpage :)

4

zeroth

hmm. ok.

:D

nice touch. Hmm, i will do that in opera, just pin it! :)

only i cant see the difference by icons!! Ahh, well.

That was maybe not clear, I have pinned TeX.SE, but also pinning chat.TeX.SE makes two identical tabs.... :)

tohecz

14:43

@zeroth I handed my Master Thesis today :-p Now I have to take the two copies and bring them personally to my supervisor and the reviewer...

zeroth

@tohecz CONGRATS!!! Very nice. (to be frank: you are stressing the hell out of me!!!) ;)

@tohecz what do you study?

tohecz

I do maths, specifically numeration systems (ways of storing numbers as sequences of symbols)

You can find it here if you are interested: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/…

zeroth

@tohecz something I dont have a clue in. :)

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle Don't you know how bi-directional typesetting is done?

zeroth

but looks interesting with the graphs! :) I love figures!

tohecz

14:50

@zeroth do you trust me that I believe you? :p

@zeroth way to impress people

;)

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz Congrats! :)

zeroth

@tohecz I have no other choice ;)

tohecz

@PauloCereda thx

zeroth

@tohecz Are you now chilling with a beer or just jumping around like a mad man who just handed in his thesis? Or both?

tohecz

@zeroth I have many other duties (I collaborate on a paper, collaborate on a university schoolbook, prepare some works for some competitions) so I'm busy anyways...

and I wish you the best!

what is your topic?

zeroth

14:56

@tohecz ok...

Thank you!

I study physics, mastering in molecular electronics.

tohecz

cool

zeroth

I think so! :)

and hopefully, mastering! ;)

David Carlisle

15:17

@tohecz well in theory I know some things, but in practice I know nothing.

tohecz

Ok, I tried to look into that and I failed. I can obviously make different algorithm for the first page and the other pages

Roelof Spijker

@tohecz Good for you man, looking at your thesis though... Why isn't Figure 3.4 done in TeX? :P

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle @ALL Is it possible to "split \box255 at a specified position"?

David Carlisle

@tohecz well you can ask for that (using vsplit) but you don;t always get what you ask for

tohecz

@RoelofSpijker because hand-drawn figures look good IMHO ;) and you can concentrate on the essence of the figure when you know that it is not exact

@DavidCarlisle it might work in this case since I know the height of the material above the table...

will look into that, thanks ;)

David Carlisle

15:22

@tohecz note though that vsplit is like a page break it discards white space after the split

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle it doesn't matter I hope since the split should occur between the "previous text" and "long table"

Paulo Cereda

@David: is the Firefox Beta version the same as nightly?

Stephan Lehmke

@DavidCarlisle ... but we have \splitdiscards nowadays to make up for that :-)

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda nightly < aurora < beta < release

@StephanLehmke far too modern for me;-)

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Ah thanks. :)

tohecz

15:32

@DavidCarlisle @StephanLehmke Agree with David. The whole code is in output routine and written in very plain TeX and I would not like to change that ;)

David Carlisle

@tohecz \splitdiscards is more plain than plain really it's an etex primitive so only "modern" if your point of reference is 1990's

Stephan Lehmke

@tohecz Oooh kaay. I hope you're also not using \numexpr or \unexpanded to make sure everything is completely clean and backward compatible with 20 year old TeX engines ;-)

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle i think I have it, but I can't finish it now, the current code I have would not work for longtables that does not split

David Carlisle

@StephanLehmke this is longtable code he's modifying, it's not like it has changed for 20 years;-)

Stephan Lehmke

@DavidCarlisle :-)

@DavidCarlisle So if he'll invent a time machine he can even use his modified version at the very time longtable was made :-)

tohecz

15:41

actually, this is my (completely wrong) view of "plain TeX": tug.org/utilities/plain/cseq.html

David Carlisle

@tohecz hmm despite the directory name being "plain" that's tex primitives (classic tex not etex) (best not to use plain as the word meaning tex primitives as it conflicts with "plain tex" meaning Knuth's macro format sitting on top of tex.

Stephan Lehmke

Would it be appropriate to ask a question like "What new primitives would you most want to see in an extended version of e-TeX?" in the sense that there is one answer for every new primitive? It is of the "your favourite" flavour which is frowned upon here...

David Carlisle

@StephanLehmke It might be appropriate but I'm not sure you'd get any useful answers, you can't really design a language one command at a time so the question/answer format doesn't really helo. (and you'd have to say whether you'd want existing luatex or pdftex or xetex primitives including)

Stephan Lehmke

15:57

@DavidCarlisle Well of course part of the idea would be that experts for different flavours of TeX engines edit answers to show how something currently unavailable in e-TeX could be done with another engine. This would be very valuable information to me.

David Carlisle

@StephanLehmke well don't let me stop you asking:-)

Stephan Lehmke

But in addition to that, I'm simply interested what kinds of things people who really know TeX by heart feel to be lacking (not in a revolutionary sense, just simple additions).

I, for instance, would almost kill for an \expanded primitive.

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle @StephanLehmke Can you please test this? kmlinux.fjfi.cvut.cz/~hejdato1/temp/test.tex

Stephan Lehmke

@tohecz Sorry, I don't have time right now. I might have in the night, but it would be better to ask a question or something as a reminder...

tohecz

no worries. I will get to post it in the answer tomorrow anyways as I leave in 10 minutes

David Carlisle

16:08

seems to work I get Underfull \vbox (badness 1377) has occurred while \output is active
Overfull \hbox (10.79999pt too wide) has occurred while \output is active
but didn't check whether they are from the test document or from the RTL or shadowbox insertions in the output routine, ie would that document give same warnings with the original LT code?

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle sorry, I have no time left now as I leave my office. Could you please mail me these errors to [email protected] so that I don't forget it tomorrow?

@DavidCarlisle thx got it, and bye!

David Carlisle

@tohecz done

David Carlisle

16:27

@StephanLehmke what would it do? (you mean like edef without the def bit?)

Stephan Lehmke

@DavidCarlisle Yep, like \unexpanded but fully expanding its argument upon expansion of \expanded. So that when programming expandably, you could "expand over" an arbitrary token list with \expanded{...tokens...\expandafter}.

Is there a badge for the most uses of "expand" in a single sentence? :-)

egreg

@StephanLehmke There's a silver badge if one shows a really useful macro with 127 consecutive \expandafter's. :) For the gold badge 1023 are required. The platinum badge is for 1022. :)

percusse

16:44

@tohecz I have only one super minor observation: The table is a little larger than \textwidth even without the shadow. Quite impressive though.

Stephan Lehmke

@egreg Oh well that depends on what you call "useful". In the early code for making the ERCO catalog there was the following gem:

4

egreg

@StephanLehmke 127? Silver expandafter badge!

5

percusse

We seriously need an \expandafter[n] macro :)

Stephan Lehmke

\Siebtes is an expandable macro which would return the seventh item of a tuple. All the expandafters were only there to make sure the argument was sufficiently expanded to really have turned into the tuple. You can see I didn't know a lot about expandable programming back then.

And nothing about e-TeX.

egreg

@StephanLehmke Did you solve with an \edef?

David Carlisle

16:51

@percusse that's called \romannumeral for historical reasons

Stephan Lehmke

@egreg Uh well being expandable I couldn't really use assignments inside. It would be used in larger structures which would then be expanded by \protected@edef.

@DavidCarlisle Only if you can slip a 0 in there somewhere.

percusse

@DavidCarlisle By historical, you don't mean really the Romans I hope :P

Stephan Lehmke

@DavidCarlisle Already we are discussing about situations where my \expanded primitive would be immensely useful :-)

Even better: \startexpansion ... \endexpansion in the sense that on expanding \startexpansion, every following token would be fully expanded until \endexpansion is seen.

David Carlisle

This can be closed as duplicate OP confirms tex.stackexchange.com/questions/53001/…

Marco Daniel

@DavidCarlisle Done

Marco Daniel

18:33

@JosephWright: Did you hear something about P. Lehmann?

Joseph Wright

@MarcoDaniel No, did you?

Marco Daniel

@JosephWright No. I am wondering because Philip Kime responded to one of my bug reports at sourceforge biblatex: sourceforge.net/tracker/…

Joseph Wright

@MarcoDaniel Ah, right. Blog post on the situation is pending, just awaiting one or two bits of clarification. I'll discuss again with PLK and Audrey.

Marco Daniel

@JosephWright Do you need a solution of the bug?

Joseph Wright

@MarcoDaniel PLK is working through the bugs. I'm sure he'd welcome any code that is available!

Marco Daniel

18:42

@JosephWright I will provide one. Maybe I will also try to fix other problems.

Joseph Wright

@MarcoDaniel That would be very handy. I'd suggest doing it as a fork from the GitHub dev branch, as the code can then be pulled back into biblatex easily

Marco Daniel

@JosephWright I have never had work with fork At the moment I am trying to fork @PauloCereda's arara to add some basic rules.

Joseph Wright

@MarcoDaniel Don't let the technology be a barrier: if it's a question of some 'copy-paste' code then that will also be fine :-)

Yiannis Lazarides

@egreg @StephanLehmke texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/latex/morefloats/morefloats.pdf, thinking to frame it from line 323 - to end. Diamond badge probably:)

Marco Daniel

@JosephWright If I fork a repository I will get all files to my project side. Is that correct?

Joseph Wright

18:46

@MarcoDaniel Yes, you get a copy of everything

Marco Daniel

@JosephWright Ah ok. And then I can add folders and files. Does the main repository see that?

Joseph Wright

@MarcoDaniel As long as you add them to the list of files that Git tracks, then they will show up when you push to GitHub

Marco Daniel

@JosephWright What I mean (I know it's difficult). Does the original owner see the changes?

Joseph Wright

@MarcoDaniel What you see on Git is a difference between the 'parent' and the 'child' repos. So anything that gets pushed to GitHub will show.

Marco Daniel

@JosephWright Great.

@JosephWright Please let me ask an other question. Why don't I earn a mdframed badge? tex.stackexchange.com/search?q=user:5239+[mdframed]

Joseph Wright

18:52

@MarcoDaniel Don't we need a certain number of questions? There is a flaw in the per-tag badge system in that it's very hard to get one in a topic which is not so popular but where you are the expert.

Marco Daniel

@JosephWright I got the badge table-of-contents (I don't know why :-) ) but I get no one for `mdframed :-(

Stefan Kottwitz

@MarcoDaniel 100 total questions are required.

Marco Daniel

@StefanKottwitz Nice to know. Thanks

Marco Daniel

19:06

@JosephWright: It seems to work ;-)

github.com/marcodaniel/arara/tree/master/rules/plain

Paulo Cereda

19:33

@MarcoDaniel Oh my! <3

Now I owe 5 kegs of beer.

Marco Daniel

@PauloCereda Did you notice my fork ;-)

Paulo Cereda

@MarcoDaniel Wow!

Impressive.

Peter Grill

I thought comments could only be deleted by the one who posted them, but it appears that my comments at Getting listings to highlight Func<x,x,x> got deleted. So, am wondering who can delete comments?

Stefan Kottwitz

@PeterGrill Moderators can, sometimes we do if somebody flagged a comment as obsolete and we agree (such as suggestions to add an MWE, which has been done, for example)

Peter Grill

@StefanKottwitz Ok, that makes sense.

Stefan Kottwitz

19:44

I think here it was the MWE case.

Helps to keep the problem and solution readable, if obsolete things are removed, even if they were reasonable, but incorporated now

However, I never removed comments which got several upvotes. Never had to. :-)

Peter Grill

Is there a simple check that will tell me if a character is a letter: ie, A-Z or a-z?

Stefan Kottwitz

@PeterGrill How about the catcode?

Peter Grill

Otherwise can post a question if not a simple solution.

How do I use catcode? I want something like \IfAlpha{<char>}{true}{false}

Joseph Wright

@PeterGrill I think we've had that: didn't @egreg post a charcode-based approach?

egreg

@YiannisLazarides That's only an almost trivial (gigantic) sequence of three expandafters. :)

Peter Grill

19:52

@JosephWright I will search further

Stefan Kottwitz

@egreg three is some power of two minus one, boring ;-)

Joseph Wright

Finally: blog password reset :-)

egreg

@StefanKottwitz And actually they are \xp\cs\xp\cs\xp\cs. Pfui. :)

Stefan Kottwitz

@JosephWright Congratulations! Now you can send out all the waiting posts ;-)

egreg

@PeterGrill What are you referring to?

Joseph Wright

19:54

@StefanKottwitz One to do for my own blog today, and possibly another tomorrow, but yes

Paulo Cereda

What blog? :P

Stefan Kottwitz

@JosephWright Great! Have to read your previous post, did not have time today

Peter Grill

@egreg I was looking for something that will test if a character is a letter a-z, or A-Z: \IfAlpha{<char>}{true}{false}

Joseph Wright

@StefanKottwitz I want to do a follow on on 'piling in', I think

Marco Daniel

@JosephWright: Why does it work : tex.stackexchange.com/questions/53024/…

egreg

19:59

@PeterGrill \int_compare:nTF{ (`#1 >= `a && `#1 <=`z) || (`#1>= `A && `#1 <= `Z) } {True}{False}

Marco Daniel

@egreg Cheater ;-)

Nice trick

egreg

@MarcoDaniel May give problems with special characters, of course. One has to check before if the token is a control sequence, perhaps.

Marco Daniel

@egreg Can you test the catcode?

egreg

@MarcoDaniel Also, but it depends on the context: in XeLaTeX many other character tokens have catcode 11

Marco Daniel

@egreg My first idea was \int_compare:nTF{ \char_value_catcode:n { `#1 } = 11 } {TRUE} {FALSE}

Patrick Gundlach

20:05

@JosephWright you can post it here, if you want to :-D

Joseph Wright

@PatrickGundlach I did, sort of, as @AndrewStacey relayed a post fo rme

Patrick Gundlach

@JosephWright No, I mean the password...

Paulo Cereda

I know the password!

It's a bunch of *'s! :P

Peter Grill

@egreg Missing ) inserted for expression

\newcommand*{\IsAlphaCharacter}[3]{%
	\int_compare:nTF{ (`#1 >= `a && `#1 <=`z) || (`#1>= `A && `#1 <= `Z) } {#1 #2}{#1 #3}%
}%

egreg

@PeterGrill I didn't test. Let me try.

Paulo Cereda

20:08

Dante mentioned me?!

Interessantes Tool für TeX-Automatisierung von @paulocereda: https://github.com/cereda/arara

Tweeted by dante_ev on April 23, 2012 at 7:32 PM

Peter Grill

@MarcoDaniel That seems to work. So what is the difference between the two solutions?

Paulo Cereda

Now I'm scared.

Marco Daniel

@PauloCereda Yeah ;-)

Be happy and now you must improve your tool ;-)

I will test it voluntary

Paulo Cereda

@MarcoDaniel Indeed. :) I had a project assigned to me, that's why I'm "lost" these days. But I promise to get back to the tool ASAP. :)

Marco Daniel

@PauloCereda ;-) we need the support of flags and dtx etc

The pressure

Patrick Gundlach

20:12

@PauloCereda Yes, it was me :)

("interesting tool for TeX automation")

Paulo Cereda

@PatrickGundlach awwww thanks! <3

Marco Daniel

@PatrickGundlach Of course last week we had a arara session here ;-)

@PatrickGundlach After fixing the bugs I want to write a small article about arara for our DTK.

Paulo Cereda

Now I have to call everybody to a beer house. :)

Patrick Gundlach

@MarcoDaniel Great!!

egreg

@PeterGrill It's wrong, indeed. One has to write differently the tests

Marco Daniel

20:14

@PatrickGundlach In the next DTK you will find an article about xparse ;-)

Paulo Cereda

@MarcoDaniel Stay tuned, I'll fix 'em somehow. :P

Marco Daniel

@PauloCereda I know

:D

Peter Grill

@egreg It seemed that your version would have been easier to modify to separately test for a-z and A-Z, so two tests would actually work better for me.

Paulo Cereda

@MarcoDaniel :)

egreg

@PeterGrill
\newcommand*{\IsAlphaCharacter}[3]{
\bool_if:nTF
{
(\int_compare_p:n {`#1 >= `a} && \int_compare_p:n {`#1 <= `z} )
||
(\int_compare_p:n {`#1 >= `A} && \int_compare_p:n {`#1 <= `Z} )
}
{#1~#2}{#1~#3}
}

\ExplSyntaxOn frees you from the %. :)

Peter Grill

20:19

@egreg perfect, and easy to adapt to build `\IsUpperAlpaCharacter'. Thanks...

Stefan Kottwitz

Today I celebrated a victory over Spammer, just by LaTeX's means!

On another site, on latex-community.org, we noticed about 100 spammer registrations each day. Some dozens write posts (which we disapprove), most just created silently a profile with website link and sometimes also signature spam link, generating backlinks to their site.

An the registration was protected by a hard-to-read captcha. But captchas can be broken by spambots and by humans.

Guess how LaTeX could keep them away :-)

... no, it wasn't a Cthulhu worshipping madman captcha ...

Peter Grill

@StefanKottwitz Ask a simple TeX question?

Stefan Kottwitz

20:34

@PeterGrill Yes! The captcha was removed and I replaced it by a LaTeX question, which a bot cannot just parse and answer with a question fragment.

@PeterGrill When registering, the new user was just asked: tell us any standard LaTeX document class.

Peter Grill

I was just about to say that

Stefan Kottwitz

I guess every LaTeX and LyX user can. But bots and perhaps even human spammers who don't invest time, cannot.

Peter Grill

@StefanKottwitz So have the number of spams posts gone to 0?

Stefan Kottwitz

Yes. Daily ~100 to 0.

Some new users came through :-D so I guess the barrrier is not too high, also I addes a link to the contact form if somebody really has problems

but writing "article" or "book" is much easier than decyphering a captcha

and all classes such as proc and ltxdoc etc. are accepted, also with .cls

Any idea of an alternative question? Just curious. Was proud to create that one ;-)

Andrew Stacey

@StefanKottwitz "What is Knuth's first name?"

Stefan Kottwitz

20:40

Did not want to ask for creators of TeX or LaTeX (person cult ;-) which a new user doesn't need to know

I thought "what's the file name extension of LaTeX files" but there's a string match

Andrew Stacey

@StefanKottwitz Very true! The lack of personality cults is one of the things that makes TeX so pleasant. (I was being facetious)

Next attempt: Which is better for editing LaTeX files - Emacs or Vim? (Correct answer being, of course, LyX)

Stefan Kottwitz

@AndrewStacey I admit asking for Knuth or Lamport was my first idea

perhaps playing with capitalization: write correctly: "latex tex tikz lyx miktex texmaker" the last is the hardest ;-)

Andrew Stacey

@StefanKottwitz "What is the correct kerning between the 'T' and 'e' in TeX?"

Stefan Kottwitz

@AndrewStacey Oh, that's too easy for LyX users.

Paulo Cereda

"Why does pdflatex run slower when I'm eating Pringles?"

Stefan Kottwitz

20:46

Why do I eat Pringles slower when I watch pdfLaTeX compiling :-D

Paulo Cereda

@StefanKottwitz Uh-oh. :)

Stefan Kottwitz

@PauloCereda Well, I can say "Arara" with a mouth full of Pringles. Wisely chosen name.

Andrew Stacey

"Which is worse: an overfull hbox or an underfull vbox?"

Paulo Cereda

@StefanKottwitz Yay! :)

I think the popular name is 'arara' because the bird can actually say it too. :)

Andrew Stacey

Memo to self: when adding the \\ at the end of a line in an align, don't add them inside a \frac{a}{b}. TeX doesn't like it.

egreg

20:59

@AndrewStacey \frac errors are always frustrating.

Andrew Stacey

@egreg It wasn't a completely stupid error to make. All the other lines are of the form \visible<+->{c^2 &= a^2 + b^2 \\} so when I noticed a missing \\ on the first line, I just added it inside the brace. Problem was, it was a \frac brace.

egreg

@AndrewStacey \frac and beamer: almost impossible to find out where the error was from the messages, I guess.

Stefan Kottwitz

@PauloCereda Neither my daugher nor my dog can say that. But we all exercise.

Joseph Wright

biblatex status update: texdev.net/2012/04/23/biblatex-a-team-to-continue-the-work

Andrew Stacey

@egreg Almost. Fortunately, I knew what I'd just changed and it worked fine on the previous run. *starts singing* "One more lecture to go, one more lecture to go-oh"

Torbjørn T.

21:08

@JosephWright Should that be "keen to make sure" in the second paragraph?

Thanks for the update!

Joseph Wright

@TorbjørnT Fixed

I'm mainly going to provide the 'hard-core' TeX side of things, which I hope will mean 'not too much work' :-)

Paulo Cereda

translate.google.com.br/#pt|en|arara

Click the sound button. :)

Andrew Stacey

I have now learnt about the Laplace-Runge-Lenz vector. My life is complete.

3

egreg

@JosephWright Which means: rewrite in LaTeX3. ;-)

Joseph Wright

@egreg Eventually :-)

I guess that we'll want something akin to biblatex, but that will I suspect be hard to get into the kernel

Anyway, I've got a long list of other jobs first

Audrey

21:36

@JosephWright Thanks. Just some small things. There should be a "v" after the "u" in my last name. PL's last name shouldn't have two "n"s.

user19161

@AndrewStacey When you think life is complete and you have found the answers to all the questions, the questions will change.

user19161

@StefanKottwitz I often wonder why the texmaker author writes it that way too.

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