@egreg Closing is not deleting. but preventing additional answers plus providing a link. So, we will see, if there's a third answer or further, now that this question has been reopened, which is about finding a symbol and furthermore about combining two symbols. Pretty new stuff, so let's wait for additions complementing the two combinations of the symbols mentioned in the title. ;-)

@StefanKottwitz The problem is that the link is completely inappropriate for the specific question. Would you tell “go to the general store” to someone asking for something that you know is not at the general store?

For those interested in a site-wide change, currently in beta...

@StefanKottwitz Closing as duplicate means: "an answer to this question can be found elsewhere" and this is not the case.

@Werner The colors are awful

@AlanMunn Alan but with a code snippet, no preamble, no \enddocument ;-)

@HarishKumar Yes, I realized that after I posted the praise, but too late to delete.

@AlanMunn :-) But the statement of question and presentation is really good.

@HarishKumar Yes, that's what I saw, and I didn't look at the code as carefully.

@AlanMunn I do exactly reverse. Read the statement and jump to the code ;-) But if the explanation is short. I will go thorugh.

I should be sleeping...

Just got up :-)

@StephanLehmke That's cheating. :)

I'm afraid that due to the sperical nature of our home planet, you're bound to miss some of the discussion in this chat whatever you do...

Anyways, time to answer some question...

@StephanLehmke Every morning I have to catch up. :)

2:05AM here. :)

Writing a paper is quite tiresome.

And the IEEE template doesn't help at all.

@PauloCereda What about?

@StephanLehmke An automaton with persistence layer. :)

@PauloCereda Oh wow. Be careful not to inadvertently construct a Turing machine :-)

@StephanLehmke Now that you mentioned it (and I was quite suspicious while writing some parts), I wonder the impact of its expression power. :)

I'm done with Turing machines these days. I had to prove the equivalence of those μ-recursive functions with MT. Very stressing. :)

Oopsie, TM. I'm thinking in Portuguese.

I'll write about ducks. :)

Furthermore, TM are boring. Too complicated.

@StephanLehmke Agreed. :)

showing off my tikz diagrams :D

@egreg Mods are meant to deal with issues 'community' discussion works badly for. This one looks 'community led' to me, which I tend to feel means as a mod I should be wary of answering: don't want to be seen to 'impose' something.

@egreg Action was taken by people voting on the actual question

@JosephWright: Morning! :)

@PauloCereda Hello

@JosephWright Do you like Fawlty Towers? :)

@PauloCereda Yes, but I'm not such a big fan as some people are

@JosephWright Neither am I, but at least you know the show. :)

@RealzSlaw Nice!

Hey, this is great! Almost everybody I know is still here :-)

@StephanLehmke Yay!

Hello

I have a question

@user43418 Morning

When I write in LaTeX $f$

it still appears in text form

it's not the "curly" f

does anyone know why ?

@user43418 Should be italic, but does depend on your set up. Can you create a complete example?

@JosephWright Well even though I write $f$ in my code, it appears like this: f

Nevermind

I had this f in two places in the sentence

and was correcting in the one which already had $f$

Thank you though

duck duck duck duck duck duck duck duck duck duck duck duck duck duck duck duck duck

@PauloCereda Your duckomaton got into an endless loop.

@StephanLehmke LOL a Moore machine that says quack. :P

@tohecz the

@tohecz Turing was right: at the end of the day, everything is bounded by the halting problem. :)

(a reference to the never ending problem of articles) :)

@PauloCereda Man, this is thin ice on so many levels :-)

@StephanLehmke I know, it's deliciously evil. :P

@PauloCereda vvv

\count0 1\the\ttfam\uccode92 100\uccode110"63\uccode'145
'165\uccode"64'153\loop\uppercase\expandafter{\meaning\end}
\advance\count0\delcode\lq+\ifnum\count0>\delcode\lq.\repeat\bye

@DavidCarlisle Wow!

@PauloCereda 1\the\ttfam is the best bit, I lost inspiration after that:-)

@DavidCarlisle LOL

hi guys

Does anyone know how to create options for a package? I want to use something like \usepackage[author=name of the author]{mypackage}

I like English definition names -- sometime they are really simple: Progressive Elaboration ;-)

@MarioS.E. It's called key-value

@MarcoDaniel How can I create custom keys?

@MarioS.E. There are lots of examples. E.g.: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/5279/…

@MarioS.E. You need a package that handles this: which keyval implementation do you want to use?

See

@MarcoDaniel Thanks! I'll take a look at it

@MarioS.E. Also note that for creating key-value package options, a package like kvoptions is required.

@MarcoDaniel @StephanLehmke Let's imagine I want to create a package where I can input values such as name, institution, date, title, etc. so I can use it in my .sty file for copyright stuff. Is it possible my .sty file to "read" these strings?

Furthermore, does it matter that I use "pre-existing" keys such as \author, \institution, etc?

@MarioS.E. Possible is it.

First of all you have to pick up a keyval package. I prefer either kvoptions or l3keys.

@MarioS.E. The easiest is to look for packages which do something like this and check how they're doing it.

@StephanLehmke a practitioner solution.

@MarcoDaniel I was trying to understand with kvoptions, but the documentation is not so good... It seems kvsetkeys has better docs

@MarioS.E. See tex.stackexchange.com/questions/30013/…

@MarcoDaniel What's the family=ML part? Does ML mean anything?

@MarcoDaniel I thought there was only one?

@DavidCarlisle Indeed -- keyval ;-)

@MarcoDaniel I wonder who's the author.

@MarioS.E. No. It's your choice. However it's import to select an unique family.

Who am I kidding. Half of LaTeX core packages is @David's. :)

@DavidCarlisle PStricks?

are/is d'oh.

@PauloCereda Who knows? The package is part of an old era ;-)

@MarcoDaniel Do I HAVE to select a family and prefix?

@MarcoDaniel oh no, he can hear you!

@MarioS.E. I recommend, otherwise kvoptions uses the package name

See documentation at page 4

@MarcoDaniel On the last example you pointed me, why are you using \DeclareStringOption[english,ngerman]{languages} if you are latter going to declare frenchb

?

@MarioS.E. The first optional argument is the value for the initiating.

What's wrong with me? I forgot to vote!

@PauloCereda I have a couple of zero score accepted answers, if you want to use those votes.

@TorbjørnT. links please. :)

@MarcoDaniel I'm not understanding the "family" part. Why do you need it? what does it set?

@PauloCereda It was kind of a joke, there is no shortage of good answers around, but since you asked: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/127299/… tex.stackexchange.com/questions/144637/… and tex.stackexchange.com/questions/63893/…

@MarioS.E. It's used for setkeys{<family>}{<allowed options>}.

@TorbjørnT. Done, done, done. :)

@TorbjørnT. I have 25 of them! Not accepted, actually.

@egreg Working on them. :)

@egreg: oh my, I'll tackle them tomorrow!

@PauloCereda Don't worry; your votes have better uses.

@egreg like downvoting @David. :)

@PauloCereda Oh, yes! Do it! ;-)

@egreg You also have about 12 times as many answers as me.

@TorbjørnT. Really? :P

Guys, in other news: I was thinking of a name for our next interviewee.

@PauloCereda And?

@JosephWright I'd like to hear your thoughts. :)

Jean-François Burnol

aka jfbu

@TorbjørnT. I have about $2^{12.5}$, you are almost at $2^9$.

:12187529 tex.blogoverflow.com/2012/03/…

:)

@PauloCereda ???

:-)

@MarcoDaniel You pesky naughty anime fan. :)

@PauloCereda If you visit Germany, we will watch One Piece ;-)

@MarcoDaniel I finally managed to do it! Thank you very much! Now I just have one little inconvenient: the string cannot contain accents, right?

@PauloCereda I'm at 968 days: on December 17 it should be 1000. You should be near it.

@PauloCereda Excellent idea.

@MarioS.E. Why not?

@PauloCereda Yup

@MarcoDaniel I tried with my last name, Sáenz, but it wasn't displaying properly. I typed it S\'aenz

@egreg just 3 days ahead of you. :)

@jfbu Are you up for being the next interviewee?

@MarioS.E. Try:

\RequirePackage{filecontents}
\begin{filecontents}{mypack.sty}
\ProvidesPackage{mypack}
\RequirePackage{kvoptions}
 \SetupKeyvalOptions{%
   family=mario,
   prefix=mario@,
   }

\DeclareStringOption[Mario]{author}
\ProcessKeyvalOptions*
\newcommand\printauthor{%
   \begin{center}
     \huge \mario@author
   \end{center}
}
\end{filecontents}
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[]{mypack}

\begin{document}
\printauthor

\setkeys{mario}{author=Sáenz}

@MarcoDaniel Could it have something to do with Joseph's warning here tex.stackexchange.com/questions/5279/…?

@JosephWright Thanks. :)

@MarioS.E. Normally no. It's more related to non robust commands like \raggedleft.

@DavidCarlisle ok thanks, I never know, since our language editor strikes out "the" in cases like "set $A$"

@egreg: list down to 17. :)

I don't understand English. At all. :)

@PauloCereda Simple in this case: The Tower of London as there is only one, while there have been several 'London Bridge' constructions

@JosephWright Hey the London bridge is falling down. :)

@JosephWright Now seriously, when in doubt, I go with the one that sounds better in my head. :)

@egreg @PauloCereda's a vim user so I expect such things, of you I'd hoped for better

@DavidCarlisle <3

@PauloCereda I remember Michel Goossens once asking if the possesive should be Michel Goossens' or Michel Goossens's I think he'd hoped to be told rule 4.5.6b would specify which to use, I consulted various Oxford and Fowlers guides and they all said use whichever sounds best, and since I didn't really know how to pronounce Goossens I couldn't help:-)

@DavidCarlisle LOL

@DavidCarlisle What we've learned -- English is a difficult language ;-)

@MarcoDaniel No German is hard: lots of rules, English is easy, just do what sounds right

@JosephWright thanks, I feel honored by the proposal but I prefer not. I do enjoy the site and the community, I did enjoy reading (some time after the interviews took place) some interviews, I do spend quite some time on tex.stackexchange and got involved in writing two or three packages, but somehow I feel my relation with TeX to be too uncertain to merit being an interviewee and be up to it. Again thanks for the very nice proposal!

@DavidCarlisle Go with Czech: Whatever sound more complicated :p

@MarcoDaniel Did you like the generic interface for primed commands?

@DavidCarlisle Yeah, downvoting you this month is not worthy the labor, as you're 1000+ behind.

@egreg WOW

@MarcoDaniel That's what I like about LaTeX3: no more worries with nested calls of \@ifnextchar

@egreg The trick using \peek_charcode_remove:NTF is really great.

@egreg Indeed.

@egreg Surprised I'm that close actually, this month, not really been paying attention to the site:-)

@JosephWright @PauloCereda I hate to burst your bubble, but that can't be the explanation: there has only ever been one Tower Bridge, but we don't say the Tower Bridge. The issue here is whether the phrase is a proper name or not. "London Bridge" and "Tower Bridge" are names, but "The Tower of London" isn't one (at least syntactially). Compare with the band Tower of Power of which there is also only one, but has no article.

@AlanMunn Band names are more about fashion than anything: they used to follow the 'The XXX' pattern but seem to have dropped it ;-)

@AlanMunn So what's the deal with Pharaoh? or Cathedral?

@JosephWright Sure, but the fashion is in choosing which of the available syntaxes to use, not in varying the syntax arbitrarily.

@AlanMunn Yes that's what I was trying to allude to (although actually I messed up the example by switching from london to tower bridge mid sentence:-) but it still leaves the question as to why the bridge gets a name "tower bridge" but the tower of london doesn't get a name london tower

@DavidCarlisle Yes, that's a more interesting question. I don't know what determines that choice. Perhaps just historical accident.

@MarioS.E. I'm not sure what you're referring to here.

@MarioS.E. Pharaoh is like King (or Queen) the current one gets "the" dead ones don't. Cathedrals get the if used in "the protestant cathedral of Liverpool" but not in "Liverpool Cathedral"

@AlanMunn Funny, we use weird capitals in Spanish for certain titles

@AlanMunn You're supposed to say "Catedral central" not "la catedral central"

@AlanMunn And we kill the article as well, as you can see

@egreg I've attempted to answer your meta question

@JosephWright Thanks; I hope that other answers follow. I'm not claiming to be right, just I'd like to discuss the matter.

@MarioS.E. Probably because it's treated as a proper name too.

@AlanMunn but catedral is a noun... as well as faraón... as well as palacio, yet they are used in capitals, without article and is something very very specific for some countries

@AlanMunn for example, Palacio is used in Peru for the peruvian "white house", but everywhere else it is "el palacio de..."

@DavidCarlisle Actually, King and Queen split independent of death. We say "Queen Elizabeth" not "the Queen Elizabeth", we only use the 'the' when we have "the Queen of ..."

@MarioS.E. All names are also nouns (that's why we can talk about "the Mario who inhabits this chatroom"); but some can also be used as names, in which case they can appear without an article.

the green Mario = Luigi

@AlanMunn "Él regresó al palacio" in peruvian: "Él regresó a Palacio"

"Los cuadros fueron subastados en la venta de Catedral".... and it sound weid, and without the article it becomes ambiguous if either the pictures were auctioned at the catedral or if during the cathedral's sale. I don´t know, you are the linguist :P

@MarioS.E. And in American English: "I'm going to the hospital" but British English "I'm going to hospital". These types of variations are not uncommon.

De la Sierra Morena, cielito lindo, vienen bajando un par de ojitos negros, cielito lindo, de contrabando.

@PauloCereda Não faço ideia do que é isso... mas pronto, pelo menos parece-me que é uma canção... se calhar até é mexicana (eles que gostam tanto das "rancheras")

@MarioS.E. Sim, é uma canção tradicional mexicana. :)

Hil folks, when we only want to extract all images specified with \includegraphics[< key-value specifier for image dimension>] with preview package, how can we cancel the key-value specifier for image dimension such that the extracted images have the same size as their original ones?

@DonutE.Knot you could redefine the scaling handler not to scale, but isn't that the same as just using the original image file and not using latex at all?

@DonutE.Knot \define@key{Gin}{width}{}

@AlanMunn I was thinking of the usage without a name, as in "The Queen visited today". (there is only one queen because other royal families in other countries don't count:-)

@DavidCarlisle OP wants to convert EPS to PDF for all \includegraphics defined in the original input file (without editing the code heavily) and save them in a single file. Thank you.

@DonutE.Knot well the definition above (and similar for scale and height) would probably do it (but it still seems odd to me:-)

@DavidCarlisle OK. I will try it now.

OT, but does anyone here use a dvorak keyboard?

When \i goes from 0 to 15, is it possible to reduce the number of keystrokes in the following code snippet?

		\ifnum\i>7
			\ifnum\i<13
				\psset{xlabelsep=-17pt}
			\else
				\psset{xlabelsep=5pt}
			\fi
		\else
			\psset{xlabelsep=5pt}
		\fi

@DonutE.Knot Remove indentation? :)

I don't know wheter there is a compound conditional expression in TeX such as using logic relations AND and OR.

@PauloCereda My characters counter does not count the whitespace by default. :-)

@DonutE.Knot :)

@PauloCereda :-)

@DonutE.Knot Usual trick is a two-part job \ifnum1=\ifnum\i>7 \ifnum\i>13 1\else 0\fi\else 0\fi ... or similar

@Paulo: Watt is love? hertz me, no mores (no moore)... I gibbs you my love...

@JosephWright OK. I will try. thanks

@DonutE.Knot LOL

@Joseph: I'm pretty sure David is a ManUtd fan, right? :)

\psset{xlabelset=\ifnum \ifnum\i<13 \i \else 0 \fi > 7 5 \else -17\fi pt}

@DavidCarlisle Thanks. It save many keystrokes.

@DavidCarlisle: The position of -17 and 5 must be swapped to be exactly equivalent to my code above.

@DonutE.Knot yes I did wonder while typing it but I couldn't be bothered to check, it's like reading my english,you may have to permute some of the letters to get what was in my head rather than what my fingers produced on the keyboard:-)

@DavidCarlisle OK. Thanks.

@DonutE.Knot so is the new image finally the real you?

@DavidCarlisle :-)

Houston, we have a problem. :)

@PauloCereda Italy-Germany 1:1; England-Chile …

@egreg :)

@egreg Chile??? CA Invitational XI 304 & 153-4 v England 418

@DavidCarlisle I was referring to a match played on a rectangular field; at Wembley, to be precise. Two eleven man teams, playing with a ball larger than the one used in cricket. Do you know?

No bats and no pause for tea.

@egreg never heard of it

Pringles time, yay!

@PauloCereda theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/02/usa2

@PauloCereda beware what you find in a pringles can

@DavidCarlisle A true American hero. :)

@DavidCarlisle Potatoes. :)

Is the following easy in LaTeX? I would like to have a labelled formula like x = a^2 where a = 1. The three parts, x=a^2, the word where and a=1 should appear on three lines and where should be centred like the equations.

The multiline environments I looked at (e.g. split) don't quite create the same layout. The point in doing this is having a single labelled equation while not running out of space on a single line (two-column layout)

@Szabolcs gathered in an equation environment.

\begin{equation}
\begin{gathered}
x=a^2\\
\text{where}\\
a=1
\end{gathered}
\end{equation}

Use \begin{gathered}[t] or \begin{gathered}[b] if you want the number aligned with the top or the bottom line.

@egreg Yes, thank you, that's what I needed. I just needed a minute to actually try. The keyword would have been enough, thanks for the detailed example.

@Szabolcs Not too much to write. ;-)

gathered turns out to be useful also for one line things: it's the easiest way to center an xy-pic commutative diagram with respect to the equation number.

@egreg: imakeidx is helping me tame svmono. :)

@PauloCereda Good to know. Why svmono?

@egreg A requirement from a course. :(

What fonts are there that are easily installable for the operating systems (some convenient format like OTF), and are also available for LaTeX with some matching math fonts? I mean something else than the boring Computer Modern and Times.

So far I found Charter and Adobe Utopia (the latter e.g. with fourier package and the Heuristica variant as the OTF system font)

tug.dk/FontCatalogue