Great, I'm on the internet and half-drunk.

I should try to read xii.tex right now.

Get half off the internet @PauloCereda, you are half-drunk.

@ForkrulAssail LOL

@PauloCereda, maybe you can hit that Balmer peak and code your greatest package yet.

@ForkrulAssail Au contraire, mon frère. :)

@PauloCereda, what's your choice of poison?

@ForkrulAssail I actually had two dark beers. That's all. :)

@PauloCereda, then there can be no balance in the force, as I'm sitting here parsing R data, you'll have to head back to the bar.

@ForkrulAssail Nah, my date went home, I cannot go back to the bar. :)

R is in my list of things to seriously consider in 2014. :)

@PauloCereda, I'm 3 months into it, after 7 months of hating SPSS for not having simple regex subsets, and now the last week I've been eyeing python's panda set of libraries, I'm thinking I might be more comfortable there. R integration into LaTeX with knitr, makes my life a lot easier though.

@PauloCereda, I think I need a blink rate checker that locks me out of computer when attention wanes and I'm breaking more than building. :)

@ForkrulAssail :)

I can highly suggest itc.nl/~rossiter/teach/R/LDA.pdf if you ever get around to it. I'm going to crash, 4 am. Have a good one.

@ForkrulAssail Thanks, I'll take a look. Good night, buddy. :)

@PauloCereda looking for a Job with Marienplatz?

@DavidCarlisle I'll pass. :)

Barbara did ask for that correction when the thing was published in tugboat, I told her she had editorial discretion to fix it but apparently she declined as it was published unchanged.

@DavidCarlisle :)

@PauloCereda Good morning! The radio has Handel's Hallelujah in this precise moment. :)

@egreg Good morning! Yay! And he shall reign forever and ever!

@egreg: my favourite part of Handel's Hallelujah is where the timpani does a syncopated compass. :)

@PauloCereda Years ago, the Messiah was played in our church by the British orchestra “The Sixteen”: sixteen players and sixteen singers. A magnificent execution, in spite of the small numbers of players. I listened to it also in the “Basilica del Santo” with a larger orchestra; the director was Reinhard Göbel, who guarantees emotions.

@egreg Oh my, I've never seen it live. :(

Timpani guy at 2:55 in the right lower corner. :)

@PauloCereda I'm trying to identify the church

@egreg Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. :)

@PauloCereda when we lived in Manchester used to see it every year by the Hallé Orchestra (who probably make more noise than the 16:-)

@DavidCarlisle How nice! :) Sadly, living in a countryside area, there's not much cultural activities to join in. :(

@PauloCereda Yeah, really! Next to Campidoglio; very impressive stairs to climb.

@egreg Awesome! :) I want to visit it someday. :)

@PauloCereda, this your work? youtube.com/watch?v=nIwrgAnx6Q8

@ForkrulAssail Oh no, that part of the Internet again.

@PauloCereda, can't trust YT recommendations anymore, came up with your link (up right) :)

@ForkrulAssail LOL

@PauloCereda Oh, no! I was mistaken. It's another church than the one I was referring to.

@egreg Oopsie. :)

@PauloCereda The one next to the Capitolium is Santa Maria in Aracoeli

Too many churches in Rome. ;-)

@egreg :)

@DavidCarlisle How can an expert in TeX go wrong in such a way?

I'm not referring to my answer. ;-)

Hi @AndreaL. Ciao!

Hello...@egreg ehm... Salve!

@AndreaL. Ciao is sufficient. ;-)

@egreg: speaking of which, I have no posts in the GuIT forum. :P

@PauloCereda You're lazy.

@egreg :)

Ah... Now it came to my mind! It's been two weeks that I wrote to sign up on GuIT! Being to busy as a freshmen tends to make you forget almost everything...

Speaking of which, I tried to see some LyX questions, but now that I wrote my first dissertation entirely with TeXworks, now it seems that the first editor is only gathering dust (at least it was a lot easier with full control! :-) )

@AndreaL. It can appear simpler, because you see an approximation of the printout; but as soon as you need something they didn't think of, it becomes unbearable.

@egreg You're right, although it may simplify document handling and WYSIWYG mathematical typesetting for lighter documents.

A serious IDE like WinEdt remains unmatched in relation to LyX

@AndreaL. Maybe. But a lighter document can be typed with TeXworks (or any other front-end) with the same ease. Just learn to see math when you type it. ;-)

@egreg front ends again....

@egreg The interesting thing is that when I started LaTeXing a year ago, comments like this really made me laugh, I thought "nah...these people are half-nuts!", but after all of this time I had to prove me wrong because It does actually make you see the real inputs.

@DavidCarlisle I think I'm still a Plain TeX virgin :-).

@AndreaL. The advantage with LaTeX is that you don't need to be an expert in low level TeX programming: just leave the hard work to someone else who writes a package.

@AndreaL. That's one of the aims of the LaTeX3 project.

@egreg Until now I was brave enough to make my first package (with the support of the experts on TeX.SX of course...), but seeing *.sty files like amsmath.sty still gives me chills!

@AndreaL. Indeed; indentfirst is a bit simpler. ;-)

@egreg Hehe...

@egreg It's brilliant though and has the highest documentation to code ratio of any package out there.

@AndreaL. A case where the information part about the package is longer than the code it provides.

@DavidCarlisle A stroke of genius. :P

@egreg Yeah :)

@egreg Speaking of packages, I still don't believe that one of my "colleagues" (student, for now...) at the Uni, is a package writer (non-availabe on CTAN because of personal use... but it gave me the source code :P), I wish that more people would gain this curiosity...

^^^ @PauloCereda

@AlanMunn OMG!

@PauloCereda It was pretty cool. I'll put some more pictures up on Picasa when I get back from the conference.

@AlanMunn Don't forget a selfie near the duck. :)

@PauloCereda I didn't. :)

@AlanMunn C'mon. :)

@PauloCereda Now I have Haydn's “Farewell” symphony. I remember it played by the Solisti Veneti. Very funny.

@egreg :)

Geany can be a lightweight alternative for a TeX editor.

@PauloCereda Do you need a lightweight alternative? :) Game's starting, bye. :)

@egreg Nope. :) Ooh there I go to the TV!

@JosephWright: Hello! How's the flat? :)

@PauloCereda Very nice

@PauloCereda Need to buy a few things still, most importantly curtains

@JosephWright Party? :)

@PauloCereda Once I have the curtains: about a month

@JosephWright I need to buy the plane ticket then. :)

@JosephWright so is it east anglia or northampton?

@DavidCarlisle East Anglia: Norwich

Home remains near Northampton

hi

could you look for this tex.stackexchange.com/questions/139679/… thanks

@LukaToni you could use standard latex picture environment or even tabular, or fancier effects with tikz but yout probably need to give more of a hint of exactly what features you are looking for, and why not the package that is apparently designed tor that use.

@StefanKottwitz Hi, just finished digesting your book; and I have to admit, I say this rarely, but a Graham's Number of thanks wouldn't be enough!

@AndreaL. Oh, thank you very much!

@StefanKottwit One of the things I've enjoyed is the complete step-by-step instruction on installing a LaTeX system, (I've seen other HowTo's but this helped a lot).

@AndreaL. I provided screenshots to make it easier. I wish, the publisher would allow me to update the book (at least the ebook version) with the most recent information regarding TeX Live 2013

I hope for a reprint because they messed up the image quality ;-)

@StefanKottwitz The effort on writing down these books has been reflected into a simple story that happened to me. A year ago I started from 0 the language of LaTeX, and in just 4-5 months I completed my matura thesis & a particular book in collaboration with my Chem teacher. I'd be lost in advance without the experts, so you deserve my gratitude.

@StefanKottwitz BTW, you can have a look to it here (filedropper.com/pagelayoutready)

@AndreaL. That's very nice to know! I hope you have further occations for using LaTeX, so it was worth the effort of learning it.

@AndreaL. I will have a look, in the moment my kids just keep me busy, allowing some seconds at the keyboard from time to time :-)

@StefanKottwitz Hehe... I'm not in hurry so you can take the time you want :-)

Oh my, I need to print this:

I could do a review: It’s solid: loot it now, bust extra donations ta tha authors
muthafucka! vim not mentioned hommie! (Dizzy Carlisle)

and of course

I’m aiiight ta announce dat there is finally a eBook version of “Da LaTeX
Companion, 2ed” available. Dat shiznit was a rather challengin exercise
cuz of tha nuff examplez up in tha book n' tha need ta reproduce tha example
output faithfully on dat media. Originally we thought dat anythang other than
plain PDF aint goin ta be possible; however as it turned up both ePub n' mobi
(Kindle) came up surprisingly well. (Frank Mittelbach)

@egreg: a game to forget. :(

@PauloCereda I suppose you have given up with gizoogle and penned these masterpieces yourself?

@DavidCarlisle Nah, I ain't talk street. :)

This could be some TeX gang slogan: LaTeX isn’t fo' mah playas but it could be fo' yo thugged-out ass

Holy cow! @percusse: sir that a look at this. ^^

@PauloCereda What game?

@egreg Nothing. :)

@egreg let me jog your memory

football-italia.net/40800/incredible-viola-comeback-sinks-juve

@PauloCereda lol this is epic!

@DavidCarlisle I don't follow gossip sites.

@cgnieder :)

I've got this expression:

$\frac{1}{L} \mathlarger{\mathlarger{\sum}}_{j=1}^{L} I\left(\sum_i T(\x_{\Si}^{(j)}, \p_{\Si}^{(j)}) \geq \sum_i T(\x_{\Si}, \p_{\Si}^{(j)})\right)$

I'm wondering if there is a good way to make the size of the indicator function I larger.

This seems kind of trivial for the main site.

@FaheemMitha Avoid \mathlarger{\mathlarger\sum} and all will be OK.

@egreg So, use just \sum instead?

I tried with just \sum, but I kind of like the outside sum to be larger. Is that considered bad style?

@FaheemMitha I would never increase the size of a big mathematic operator ;) (ok, maybe on slides I would, but that's a completely different story)

@tohecz This is mostly an aesthetic decision, right?

@FaheemMitha yes, esthetic and sort-of typographic I think.

IMHO even if you sum 10x10 matrices, you don't go for larger than \displaystyle

@tohecz ok. the larger size still looks good to me, but maybe I'm being perverse.

@FaheemMitha I think it would look great to me 5 years ago too ;)

@tohecz heh

@FaheemMitha I quite changed my opinion on good typography. I understood that people who made LaTeX knew better than I do, and that "there's a LaTeX package for it" doesn't mean "it's good"

@tohecz Did you change your opinion recently?

@FaheemMitha well, around the time of my first thesis, which is 4 years ago

@tohecz Ah.

Hi @MartinScharrer, long time no see!

How are you, buddy? :)

@FaheemMitha you're in science?

@tohecz Kind of. I guess you could say that.

@FaheemMitha ok :)

Mostly I seem to write lots of code...

I wish I had some slaves to write code for me.

@PauloCereda I'm well enough, a little sick through

and my girlfriend takes up a lot of my time ;-)

@MartinScharrer :)

@FaheemMitha well, I know that feeling. That's why I've dropped the desire to be a programmer

@tohecz So you don't write code as part of your research?

@FaheemMitha I would never do it.

@FaheemMitha I do, but the research is not aimed at it ;)

@tohecz Ok, so no code that is actually part of the research?

@FaheemMitha well, just now I prepare a first article with really states some "computer-helped" results, but I don't have to publish the code, it doesn't need to be efficient etc. (in the end, it treats set of triples of integers and the set is never larger than 30 elements or so, and I have like 50 sets to do, in the end I'd be able to do it by hand)

@tohecz I see.

but we do "mathematical experiments" -- before you start to prove something, you make sure it's true :D

Silly newbie question: is there, by chance, any way of defining the width of all the table columns to be the size of the widest column avaiable?

@tohecz My current project involves insane amounts of (statistical) computation. No way I could do it by hand.

@FaheemMitha don't say "statistics" aloud

@tohecz Why not?

@PauloCereda what? like "all same width, and as narrow as possible" ?

@FaheemMitha I hate it :p

@tohecz Oh. Sorry to hear that.

Any particular reason why?

@FaheemMitha I dunno, it seems to me that you can make whatever "correct" conclusion of whatever you want, and that this is the only purpose of statistics. I know it's not true, but still. And secondly, I wasn't ever good at it.

@tohecz The term statistics covers a wide area. Research statistics can be reasonably interesting. Of course, much of it isn't.

@tohecz I think so. :)

@FaheemMitha Yeah I know. But in the end, much of the statistics is "we need our new medical substance to pass the tests"

@tohecz Well, depends where you are working and what you are doing. Are you in the biomedical field?

@PauloCereda I think some simple tweak into longtable should allow this, but I doubt it exists ...

I thought you were a mathematician

@FaheemMitha I'm in the theoretical informatics field :)

@tohecz Ok.

@tohecz hmmm. :)

@PauloCereda because you need to know the width of the widest element at the beginning I believe, and that's exactly what longtable does

@tohecz Oh I'll take a look at the documentation. :)

I'm not sure that the author thought about this possibility, so I'm not sure how successful you're going to be :)

@tohecz :)

@PauloCereda one table in a document or many tables?

@tohecz Just one. :)

@PauloCereda ok, I'm getting there :)

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{array}

\newlength\newmylen
\newlength\oldmylen
\oldmylen5em

\newcolumntype{C}{>{\setbox0\hbox\bgroup}c<{\egroup\ifdim\wd0<\newmylen\else\global\newmylen\wd0\fi\hbox to \oldmylen{\hss\box0\hss}}}
\newcolumntype{L}{>{\setbox0\hbox\bgroup}l<{\egroup\ifdim\wd0<\newmylen\else\global\newmylen\wd0\fi\hbox to \oldmylen{\hss\box0\hss}}}
\newcolumntype{R}{>{\setbox0\hbox\bgroup}r<{\egroup\ifdim\wd0<\newmylen\else\global\newmylen\wd0\fi\hbox to \oldmylen{\hss\box0\hss}}}

@PauloCereda ^ :)

@PauloCereda if you made it a question, we'd both have some nice rep points now ;)

@tohecz just noticed this comment do I need to follow the thread or is it sorted now?:-)

@DavidCarlisle it seems to be sorted out. @Paulo just wanted table with equal-width columns and as narrow as possible :)

@Paulo There was a small mistake, the correct version is:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{array}

\newlength\newmylen
\newlength\oldmylen
\oldmylen5em

\newcolumntype{C}{>{\setbox0\hbox\bgroup}c<{\egroup\ifdim\wd0<\newmylen\else\global\newmylen\wd0\fi\hbox to \oldmylen{\hss\box0\hss}}}
\newcolumntype{L}{>{\setbox0\hbox\bgroup}l<{\egroup\ifdim\wd0<\newmylen\else\global\newmylen\wd0\fi\hbox to \oldmylen{\box0\hss}}}
\newcolumntype{R}{>{\setbox0\hbox\bgroup}r<{\egroup\ifdim\wd0<\newmylen\else\global\newmylen\wd0\fi\hbox to \oldmylen{\hss\box0}}}

\begin{document}

@tohecz \global and \oldmylen are unexpandable, so \string is not needed in front of them.

@egreg I knew someone would start checking for these little things :D

@egreg I seem to like the following even a bit more for the column specs:

...

\makeatletter
\let\eqcol@bc\hfil
\let\eqcol@ec\hfil
\let\eqcol@br\hfil
\let\eqcol@el\hfil
\newcolumntype{E}[1]{>{\setbox0\hbox\bgroup}r<{\egroup\ifdim\wd0<\newmylen\else\global\newmylen\wd0\fi\hbox to \oldmylen{%
 \csname eqcol@b#1\endcsname
 \box0 %
 \csname eqcol@e#1\endcsname
 }}}
\makeatother

\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{|El|Er|}

...

@tohecz Well, I don't really know what's the problem

@egreg well, I have no problem :D and the problem is to make the table columns have equal width

@egreg I did as I was asked and didn't look:-)

anyways, I hope that the code works for @Paulo and I'm off to bed

@tohecz: sorry, I was absent for a while. :) Wow, thanks, I'll write a question, so you can harvest some juicy points.

@PauloCereda I planned to leave. ..

@tohecz oh no!

I'm having dinner right now, I promise to test your code in a couple of minutes. :)

but I can stay and try to improve it, I don't need to go to bed just now

@tohecz Ah thanks, gimme just a couple of minutes then, please. :)

@tohecz: wow, it works!

@PauloCereda is it wrong to say: Of course? :)

@tohecz of course! no. :)

@PauloCereda btw, improved version, supports as many tables as you wish ;)

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{array,xpatch}


\makeatletter
\newlength\eqcol@newlen
\newlength\eqcol@oldlen
\eqcol@oldlen5em
\let\eqcol@bc\hfil
\let\eqcol@ec\hfil
\let\eqcol@br\hfil
\let\eqcol@el\hfil
\newcolumntype{E}[1]{>{\setbox0\hbox\bgroup}#1<{\egroup\ifdim\wd0<\eqcol@newlen\else\global\eqcol@newlen\wd0\fi\hbox to \eqcol@oldlen{%
 \csname eqcol@b#1\endcsname
 \box0 %
 \csname eqcol@e#1\endcsname
 }}}
\newcount\eqcol@count
\def\eqcol@readlen{\global\advance\eqcol@count1 \csname eqcol@def@\romannumeral\eqcol@count\endcsname}

@tohecz Wow, wait I'll write a proper question, so you can post your awesome code in there. :)

@PauloCereda well, I have a feeling that this goes to CTAN as well, once I add the support for multiple column-groups in one table

@tohecz Ouch, I think my question might be a dupe!

@PauloCereda with three tabularx answers:-)

@DavidCarlisle :)

@PauloCereda it's not exactly a dupe, because there the widest column is not the one you wish to equaly distribute. Your problem is similar, but completely different (and cannot be solved by tabularx ;) )

@tohecz aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

@tohecz intrigued now maybe I will look at your code, see if I can work out what the question was:-)

btw, there's a guy who wrote purely TeX QR-code generator. I'm trying to understand how to run the code just now ;)

@DavidCarlisle that doesn't look that much like a challange. Well, maybe it's challanging without trying to compile it :)

@tohecz wasn't there a question asking for QR codes here in the unanswered list for a long time?

@DavidCarlisle it was. The problem is that the code is fucking long, and I don't have a permission to post it (yet)

@DavidCarlisle I even pre-offered a bounty there

@tohecz oh I see it got a lua answer, I didn't see that.

@DavidCarlisle but that's quite cheating :p

@tohecz yes just saw it was you that offered the bounty:-)

@DavidCarlisle and now I'll likely be the one to answer :p

@tohecz: ^^ :)

I should wait couple minutes or it'd be too obvious :p

@tohecz LOL

@tohecz @egreg quick we have two minutes to jump in with some table code for @PauloCereda and steal a tick from @tohecz

@DavidCarlisle ooh a race!

^^ too late :p

@tohecz gave you both a vote:-)

Actually I was just looking for an old answer for a similar question but can't find it:-)

\thicklamb ;)

Found it. This is essentially three equal-width columns as narrow as possible, but it's math mode and data entry is column-wise not row-wise

\unskip\unskip\unpenalty\unskip\unpenalty -- WTF?

Well, actually:

@tohecz I could have avoided that using \lastnodetype but etex is still a bit modern for me

@DavidCarlisle well, whatever blows your *TeX mind, sir :)

Tell me, is the code I posted worth being in some package?

@tohecz oh sure, If I was answering Paulo's q I'd probably do something based on the above but it wouldn't actually work out of the box and changing the entry order to be column based would be inconvenient (and keeping the usual tabular row order syntax would be possible but tiresome to code) so having code that actually works rather than a vague idea of a plan, is probably more useful to most people:-)

@DavidCarlisle lol. I actually think that a simple tweak into longtable should be possible and sufficient, since you store the widths of the columns anyways in that package, the only difference is that you want to store and restore only one value ;)

@tohecz yes, longtable, colortbl, tabularx and tabulary all (in incompatible ways:-) measure the cells and could probably be used as a basis for this;-)

@DavidCarlisle well, I added a 5th incompatible way :)

btw, @Paulo, what did you need it for?

@tohecz For a... /blushes ... Pokémon table.

:)

@PauloCereda lol :)

I've never understood the Pokémon thing, but might have bet that you follow it :)

@tohecz Actually I don't. :) But I needed a game to play while traveling. :)

Expect a Pokémon-related blogpost. :)

@PauloCereda lol

ok, time to go, good night, everyone!

@tohecz The race has started. ;-) I'm waiting for @DavidCarlisle who'll use (buggy) code from longtable.

@egreg we've discussed it's possibilities before :)

@egreg in this case I don't think you really need to have a seperate environment. I only add one aux-write and one length assignment in the case the table doesn't contain any special columns ;)

anyways, I gotta go, so good night!

@egreg there is no buggy code in LT (good night @tohecz)

@PauloCereda I hope you vote for elegance not speed:-)

@DavidCarlisle Oh my, peer pressure. :)

@DavidCarlisle You define three macros, I have six, but only to comply with the recommendations. It would be easy to decrease the number to three (with the trick of using the scratch sequence \l_tmpa_seq).