Hey guys, I was retagging all my old questions and have finished doing so. Sorry if I undid some of your edits on my posts. I just wanted a minimum number of tags on my own questions.
user19161
I feel that having too many tags diminish their specificity. If you really feel the burning need to retag again, of course you are free to do so.
Hi all! I have completely reformulated a question I asked yesterday tex.stackexchange.com/q/68030/16865 I belive that now the question is much clearer and also much more interesting for other people. Unfortunately, Heiko Oberdiek's answer now seems to miss the point. Is that a problem? I have adjusted my own answer to the new question and unaccepted Heiko's answer and added a note that the question has been edited. Hope that's OK.
@Paulo Cereda: By the way, have you ever ordered from squeakyducks.com? :-D I like the classic line quite a lot ;-) If I was American I would only consider the "Hatched in the USA" line, of course!
@Canageek MathML is an output format. LaTeX is an input format. My guess would be that they needed an output format rather than an input one.
@lpdbw You should add a comment to Heiko's answer explaining that you've edited the question. You should also phrase it in such a way that it's clear to a passerby that Heiko's answer was to the original form of the question - this is to stop people voting it down thinking that it is an answer to the current form of the question.
@DavidCarlisle You know what I mean! For others, I mean that no-one ever writes MathML: you write something else that gets translated to MathML. MathML is an output format in the sense that PDF is an output format: you still need a program to translate it into "pixels on paper". It might be that tex is involved in that, but that's because tex can be both input and output.
Is there any easy way to put a small number in the margins of latex? I tried \newcommand{\number}{ \begingroup \thefoo \hspace{-2em} \endgroup } but this also moves the text after the number into the margin. (\thefoo is just a simple counter)
@AndrewStacey yes but.. we used to have sgml (then xml) with tex fragments for the maths but when we (I) switched it to have mathml fragments (just entered directly in emacs) our (human) editors liked the change, if the rest of the document and authoring tools are xml aware (and the mathematics is all gobldygook anyway) then editing mathml is easier than editing tex
@N3buchadnezzar are you sure you want to redefine \number (think carefully before giving a more than two letter answer)
@N3buchadnezzar you have redefined the entire latex kernel to have different names including tex primitives? that is a project on the scale of latex3, I'm impressed!
Name of contribution: The chkfloat package
Author's name: Tomas Hejda
Package version: 0.1
Location on CTAN: tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/chkfloat/
Summary description: Warns whenever a float is placed too far from its origin.
License type: lppl
@N3buchadnezzar if your numbers are at beginning of paragraphs then simpler is to use \noindent\llap{\thefoo\hspace{something}} although it ought to be a redefinition of \section or \paragraph or something of course really
@N3buchadnezzar \section and \paragraph in latex mean "numbered logical unit" and that is (I assume) some kind of numbered logical unit or enumerated list or...
@tohecz I assume your host will care for that. Maybe you can get a place in student's accomodation? I once got one when I was in Toulouse as a visiting researcher, and it was a memorable experience ;-)
@StephanLehmke I go there for PhD. I have government scholarship, but I have not been given any confirmation letter yet. The deputy attache of French Embassy has just written me that he now forwards my case to Campus France and they will "organize me an accommodation". My only option now is to wait and hope...
I am trying to put a line over a paragraph in LaTeX.
I tried this code:
\noindent\makebox[\linewidth]{\rule{\textwidth}{2pt}}
\noindent\colorbox{gray}{\parbox{\dimexpr\textwidth-2\fboxsep\relax}{\textbf{Text}}}
But there is a small space between the line and the paragraph as shown in this imag...
The Catacombs of Paris or Catacombes de Paris are an underground ossuary in Paris, France. Located south of the former city gate (the "Barrière d'Enfer" at today's Place Denfert-Rochereau), the ossuary holds the remains of about 6 million people and fills a renovated section of caverns and tunnels that are the remains of Paris's stone mines. Opened in the late 18th century, the underground cemetery became a tourist attraction on a small scale from the early 19th century, and has been open to the public on a regular basis from 1874. Following an incident of vandalism, they were closed to th...
@tohecz Accepted without upvoting, which seems to be normal at SO proper and is the very precondition for the BADGE WHICH WILL NEVER BE AWARDED AT TeX.SE.
Kontroll is a Hungarian comedy-thriller released to theatres in 2003. Shown internationally, mainly in art house theatres, the film is a darkly comic thriller set in a Hungarian Metro system.
"Kontroll" in Hungarian refers to the act of ticket inspectors checking to ensure a rider has paid their fare. The story revolves around the ticket inspectors, riders, and a possible killer.
The film was written and directed by Nimród Antal and starred Sándor Csányi, Zoltán Mucsi, and Csaba Pindroch. The film was entered in a number of film festivals in Europe and North America. It won the Gold ...
@StephanLehmke but well, having the badge on an SX site means something is wrong, doesn't it?
Apparently I cite just as I vote. Is there any update on editors which can read biblatex syntax and offer auto-complete lists? I can switch to Linux just for this detail if something is available. hell, I'll buy a mac too and write two blog comments daily about how awesome it is, my kingdom for a horse!
@PauloCereda Isn't it strange that my Wikipedia link got a picture of the Arc de Triomphe which doesn't feature anywhere in the Wikipedia article itself ;-)
@AndrewStacey No no: They use it as an input format. You hit input equation and it has you type mathML. I think I still have some documents I wrote in high school where I wrote page after page of equations in it.
@percusse Isn't the biblatex syntax the same as LaTeX? Emacs will highlight it. I think notepad++ will do autocomplete once you've written one entry. What are you citing?
@Canageek well it was true a few years ago when I last looked at openoffice.org. Not sure I have it or libreoffice at the moment (I know I have emacs:-) I'll have a look...
@Canageek If you put \addbibliography{mybibfile} in the preamble for biblatex (which is already bad to use it as such but have to for the BibTeX spoiled editors) TeXnicCenter, WinEdt and maybe others no more collect the citation keys in the project. So I have to look up for the keys in my bib file from JabRef.
@Canageek Thanks a lot for the offer. But I populate the bib file on-the-fly if I find something else. I really overuse JabRef's IEEE search a lot, so the cheat sheet needs to be updated too for such use.
@DavidCarlisle I recall Zawinski's words: "Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing"
@percusse I don't add them until I use them, so I can't really help you. The one I did for my thesis I just made a 'Primary Authour Date' system, so 'percusse2012' so I could guess the key from the paper
@percusse I disagree. Linux for basic use is no more time wasteful then Windows. It is just that people who like Linux are more likely to think spending time on it has value in itself.
@percusse I've also seen that quote used to describe LaTeX, since it takes so long to learn.
I need a 'LaTeX for Word users who have never seen markup' stat! I've got intrest from someone in my lab!
@Canageek the ODF format that openoffice sort of uses stores its mathematics in mathml but the openoffice math editor predates that and uses an eqn like linear text format and internally converts that to mathml and stores both in the odf file. so if you give the odf file to some other odf system (like word) it probably reads the mathml but openoffice itself actually reads the star math (as you can see if you edit the odf file in emacs and make the two forms non-equivalent
openoffice was called star office before oracle bought sun who bought star and open sourced it, hence the name of the math format
@Canageek because latex is just rubbish as a format for a word processor. It has \newcommand which means that you think you have a wysiwyg interface to "latex" and someone tries to load in half a million lines of tikz code....
@Canageek yes same there, so you define an interface to \frac and then the latex ends up being ams align of mhchem something or any random answer from this site.
Star math doesn't scale very well. " {}=1- overstrike 1 over overstrike 3 + 1 over 2 - 1 over 4 + overstrike 1 over overstrike 3 "..." - 1 over n - 1 over {n+2} newline newline"
I would like to make a 3d plot containing the 3d axis and a convex polyhedron or better a Dodecahedron on the positive side for which one of its boundary edge points on its top is annotated e.g. \hat{x} "chosen" or "selected" and draw a line segment from that labeled point towards the origin. Th...
@DavidCarlisle I didn't mean put LaTeX inside it. Just put a similar, minimal markup based on it. Also there is a program to embed LaTeX into OpenOffice
@AndrewStacey Time is taken in the context of switching to another system and still keeping productivity, in other words, not stalling too much until you get the basics and find your way around etc.
Linux is not the best thing to fiddle with if you don't know what you are doing.
@Canageek things are always possible (see how mathjax copes with an ever expanding subset) but the issue is always basically there that a language like latex that gives you the flexibility to define everything down to the lexical categories of the characters isn't an ideal format for a word processor to handle. I wasn't there, the real reason might have been they just preferred nroff to tex.
@percusse You've not used it for a few years, have you? These days unless you have really odd hardware it comes all set up and ready to use.
@DavidCarlisle Sure, for laying out a full document. But what about just the default math that goes between $ and $? That supports all the same stuff star math does, but has less oddities.
I'm speaking as someone who learned and was quite dedicated to star math for a long time, then moved to LaTeX: Speaking with someone whom has used both to typeset formulea: The LaTeX syntax is better. Just copying the input syntax in the same way that say, codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php does would be a wonder.
mathjax only supports math and the number of requests to support one package after another is never ending. you can put a blockarray inside math in latex but blockarray is... strange.. and I wouldn't want to support its syntax in any non-tex system. I suspect (since wysiwyg editing is what they really interested in) that they assume most ppeople use the template driven visual math editor
Hi guys, a question that has nothing to do with the current discussion: I see many people using the fp package and its macros. Would it be useful to provide a package defining the fp macros by translating them to corresponding l3fp functions?
I've got interest from someone in LaTeX, but she's not a computer person. She is smart, very smart, but not a computer person. i.e. She didn't know that typing something on the command line ran a program, she thought they were all part of the command line. Is there a really basic introduction to ...
@BrunoLeFloch fpu library of Christian Feuersanger has a similar objective, would that be helpful to reduce the doubling the effort? See section 36 here texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/generic/pgf/pgfmanual.pdf
@cmhughes I think the new question isn't really a duplicate because it also asks for ways to highlight the intersections of a line and the polyhedron. To which the answer, unfortunately, has to be "Can't be done with reasonable effort in TikZ", I believe.
This is a community wiki since there is no "one true answer"- if you find an answer that contains a lot of your choices, but is missing something you feel is incredibly useful. Feel free to add it. A short description of what topics the reference covers would be nice as well.
Organize by subje...
@percusse Ah, I suppose something useful would be to provide a TikZ library which would change pgf from using its own computations to using l3fp. It should be roughly as fast as pgf, and much more precise (basically, fp's accuracy with pgf speed). I'll look into that.
But that would be a different project than just defining \FPadd and friends.
@BrunoLeFloch That's interesting too! I was thinking something like generalizing that library functionality (without using it of course) as a standalone tool l3xxx.
@BrunoLeFloch In other words, yes that would be great! and my comment should read as maybe you can benefit from that library to ease the pain of recoding everything :)
@BrunoLeFloch I swear, I was writing a message for you here about it right now! I have some ideas on what we could do, can I send an email to you later on? :)
@PauloCereda I'd add something explaining that \emph stands for emphasis, and show the output. You write a lot of code; I think you should show what it does in the slides.
@Canageek Mostly to learn how compilers work. Also because then anyone can use any language from within TeX, since every language has a compiler written in C. Really, I just need to write an x86-assembly-to-TeX compiler.
But C is funner.
@JosephWright Yep. The C compiler idea is not LaTeX3-related :)
@Canageek: I stopped asking myself why I was reinventing the wheel. Sometimes I think we need some crazy stimuli to develop our skills. That's why I decided to focus on the how part. It's far funnier. :P
@PatrickGundlach If I understand correctly, Go has good support for paralellisation. Would it make sense to make TeX more paralell. [Disclaimer: I really haven't thought about this much.]
@BrunoLeFloch Well, if I had enough time, I would also integrate PDF(TeX), and nice fonthandling, but I know that I should be happy if one day I could run plain.tex on top of it
@BrunoLeFloch I think that there can by quite some interesting things. For example: calculate paragraphs with different parameters in parallel or such.
.. or dvi/pdf writing should be done in another thread
@BrunoLeFloch Because it is as radically different from C as you can get. The review of Go I read thought it was too similar to C and C++ to really do anything radical
"Despite the large amount of enthusiasm for language design, modern mainstream programming languages don't fall far from the C tree. The best that Microsoft, Sun, and Apple have to offer are just variations on that theme, with the addition of predictable object models and conveniences like garbage collection. The slim minority of language geeks who have rebelled against bracist tyranny and stumbled over to innovative languages like Haskell and Erlang are doomed to toil in relative obscurity."
[...] "When I learned that Google was going to announce a new programming language, I was hopeful that the search giant would bring something truly novel to the table. They haven't, but the result isn't bad. Although Google's new Go programming language is yet another take on object-oriented C, it's got some nice features."
....Worst. Sentance. Ever. "To a solution of 3 in dry THFunder argon stirred at −78 °C was added dropwise tert-butyllithium (1.35 mL of a 1.5 M solution in pentane, 2.02 mmol) over 40 min." ......The writer BETTER not have English as their first language.
@BrunoLeFloch I wonder if you could integrate the multipass system of latexmk into it, and have the second pass start before the first one is done. So the second pass always says one page (or more) pages behind the first, but runs at the same time.
It is really interesting to read the Pascal code. For example the strings are removed from the Pascal code and written to an external file, only to be loaded again during runtime.
@PatrickGundlach ...that sounds painful. Easy to edit the text later without having to go into the source code though, as long as you can document the external file. Could see that leading to really easy localization.
@Canageek Most of the code is like this (after translating from WEB)
c:=tfmfile^;
qw.b2:=c+0;
get(tfmfile);
d:=tfmfile^;
qw.b3:=d+0;
fontinfo[k].qqqq:=qw;
end;
if a<>0 then begin begin if(a<bc)or(a>ec)then goto 11 end;
qw:=fontinfo[charbase[f]+a].qqqq;
if not(qw.b0>0)then goto 11;
end;
@Canageek Remove the "La" and you're almost right. LaTeX, pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX are the LaTeX macro package (written in TeX) using different engines (TeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX).
@BrunoLeFloch No idea how hard that is. I want something as easy as when I use PNG. PDF and Postscript are bad since they are page layout formats, so you have to mess around with page size and bounding boxes and such.
@PatrickGundlach What is that, and what systems does it run on? It just strikes me as really cludgy, since if I'm putting it on the web I can use SVG quite nicely, but I can't use PDF.
@PatrickGundlach How fast does PDFTeX run vs. TeX? Wasn't PDFtex written in C from scratch?
@Canageek If you have a PDF that is paper size but only parts of the page is used, you can call pdfcrop to set the crop box of the PDF. After that the PDF has the size of the material on the page
@Canageek AFAIK PDFTeX is also automatically converted WEB code
@PatrickGundlach That is downright impressive. Why does no one use his implementation?
@BrunoLeFloch Yeah, but I suspect the speed difference between Lua and C is a lot worse then good handwritten C and automated C. Or does it run noticeably faster?
@Canageek LuaTeX tends to be a bit slower than pdfTeX simply because characters take up more memory. I don't know whether the change from automated C to handwritten C changed the speed. Presumably a reason was to make changes easier.
In particular, LuaTeX provides access to many parts of TeX, but it can probably add such hooks in hand-written code.
I believe that if you run your usual document through LuaTeX, no (or very little) Lua code is run. Lua is only used if you (or packages) call \directlua.
@Canageek Because of Unicode. TeX and pdfTeX only know about bytes. In particular, there are only 256 catcodes to keep track of, only 256 lccodes, uccodes, etc. LuaTeX (and XeTeX) have to keep track of 100000s characters. They may be clever about storage of the catcode info, for instance saying "the range ^^^^0123 to ^^^^0234 is all letters", but it still takes a bit more time to start.
@Canageek Presumably yes. Open a terminal, type pdftex, then <enter>, then \relax (or whatever), then <enter>. This will very quickly go from the ** line to a * line. If you try the same with luatex or xetex, you'll note a delay.
@BrunoLeFloch Now if we wanted it really fast, someone could write a hand-optimized version of it in x64 assembly..... Who needs portability, or maintainability? ;)
@Canageek TeX itself is so damn fast. Several hundred pages per second is no problem. The problem is the extremely slow macro language on top of it. Implement more functions in the core, and you get back your high speed.
@PatrickGundlach The hand optimized assembly was a joke. It is done for video codecs though; it seems C isn't fast enough for real-time decoding yet. The last bastion of speed matters.
@PatrickGundlach Also, there are people here rewriting compilers for fun. I figure one of them might make something awesome I can use ;)
@Canageek I don't think so. I think we might end up with the same problem: you have a IO limitation somewhere, even talking about memory. IIRC TeX flushes pages as they are done, and I'm not sure if keeping them on memory will suffice - for our documents, maybe it's ok, but think of some of Patrick's manual, which might reach a +1Gb final PDF.
@BrunoLeFloch Could be, I have no real comparison. But it really adds up. I guess you could give some estimates how much faster floating point calculus would be if taken directly from the processor (by calling c routines)
@Canageek TeX had a state of the art linebreaker in 1982 which is still state of the art but its page breaker was so-so back then and really is rubbish now mainly because it is designed to ship out pages as fast as possible so can make no global optimisations of breaks over a chapte.
@DavidCarlisle Right, but it still can't go back pages right? So unless we rewrite TeX to look at several pages at once (which would rock), this wouldn't CHANGE anything TeX is doing.
@Canageek in tex-the program almost none, just in glue stretching mostly and any fp calculations are deliberately made inaccessible from the tex macros to ensure portability
@DavidCarlisle And portability is one reason I wrote a TeX macro package for floating points rather than for instance relying on Lua to do computations for us (plus, there is the fact that we don't assume LuaTeX).
@BrunoLeFloch yes but vsplit doesn't have all the feature of the page breaker. notably it doesn't do inserts. latex2e doesn't use insertion much but does a bit so it depends how far you want to go
@BrunoLeFloch one or the other. You can always move the descision maker off tex-the-program in to the macro layer but as noted already in this thread there is a time/complexity price to pay. At some point you have to ask how much of a price you want to pay for sticking on an unextended tex program.
@BrunoLeFloch in 2e footnotes use the insertion mechanism in a non-trivial way (in particular because footnotes themseleves can split) other float types dont really althoiugh they use \newinsert as a convenience to get a bunch of connected registers
@BrunoLeFloch most do I think as that is the easiest way of getting the page breaker to leave space (and getting the notes onto the correct page, er usually)
I think the discussion is a bit "one way". While I agree that it might be hard to change TeX it is now and keep compatibility, "we" should think in more directions. Using TeX's algorithms to typeset paragraphs (boxes and glue) without sticking to the input language and processing model.
There are so many PDF generators out there that produce ugly PDFs, TeX would be a perfect drop in for these generators. But the way TeX is now, it is almost impossible to embed this in any program.
@PatrickGundlach There's also the question of whether there are better paragraph breaking methods anyway: there's a link on one the river questions to an alternative multi-variable model for 'goodness'
@PatrickGundlach I've said several times to him that the issue is that someone would have to do the non-TeX part, and that's not easy and I see no volunteers
@JosephWright LuaTeX is getting in this direction. I only use the LuaTeX for generating PDF with TeX's awesome algorithms. No more. No format file, no tex files, no sty, no whatever, only Lua code
@PatrickGundlach For example, I asked Taco about the verbatim-in-arguments challenge, and whether ConTeXt was going to move to argument parsing in Lua not TeX. Doesn't seem to be the case
@DavidCarlisle Right, the big-unbroken-vsplit model has a big flaw that there is no way (with current TeX) to know on which page a given piece of code ends up.
@PatrickGundlach As I've said to Jonathan, I have sympathy with the idea of using an alternative input methods, 'TeX as a service' as he calls it, but don't have the necessary skills to tackle such a project.
@BrunoLeFloch But we are still thinking in "primitives" and "macros". While this is good for our input, it is incompatible to the rest of the world (for example word processing tools)
@JosephWright LOL!
@BrunoLeFloch Imagine Libre Office including TeX library and making use of boxes and glue model and using that for aligning things.