TeX, LaTeX and Friends

Alan Munn

00:00

On an unrelated note, the ability to fool the answer character counter with HTML comments is gone. So no more smartass 1 word answers for any of us.

David Carlisle

@AlanMunn I could delete my answer and see if you can contact him to get a preferred site?

@AlanMunn my "emacs" answer used zero width spaces.....

Alan Munn

@DavidCarlisle No, for the moment your answer is very helpful. I just don't think that it's intended to be the actual source point, so when I hear back from him I'll post a hopefully definitive answer.

@DavidCarlisle Hmm, I didn't try that. That might still work.

David Carlisle

@AlanMunn OK

@AlanMunn there's lots of unicode characters they can't ban them all:-)

Alan Munn

@DavidCarlisle If they outlaw unicode, only outlaws will have unicode.

Zero width spaces work. Smartassery is safe for now.

David Carlisle

@AlanMunn phew:-)

@AlanMunn Although you get a banner of shame applied by our moderators (or Martin at least:-) tex.stackexchange.com/questions/85249/…

Alan Munn

00:10

@DavidCarlisle You needed to have added 400 zero width spaces. Mine was accepted: meta.tex.stackexchange.com/q/2730/2693

David Carlisle

@AlanMunn Joseph confirmed that the banner is not automatically triggered but that it was manually added some weeks after the posting, so you may still get one there (although in the context of that meta question perhaps not) Probably Martin's a vim user.

Alan Munn

@DavidCarlisle Yes, I think I'm safe. And yes, I think Martin is a vim user.

David Carlisle

@AlanMunn figures:-)

@AlanMunn I have more downvotes on that question than all others put together I'm sure. (I don't know what my total is but I have -10 there)

Alan Munn

@DavidCarlisle Wow, you have a lot overall. data.stackexchange.com/tex/query/104303/…

Actually, because that's by tag, it probably double counts things. In fact all the first 5 lines are from that one answer.

Paulo Cereda

00:43

@AlanMunn And he uses Perl, which makes him even more dangerous. :)

David Carlisle

@AlanMunn hm 82 according to this, more than I thought:-) data.stackexchange.com/tex/query/117308/…

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle I'm sure barbara undid that downvote. :)

David Carlisle

but @egreg's on 228:-)

@PauloCereda no:-)

Alan Munn

01:13

@DavidCarlisle Apparently I have 99. That's more than I thought too.

topskip

09:49

@PauloCereda vimeo.com/4707422

"This music video was created by programming simple text animations on a vintage 1979 Apple ][+ computer ... "

(from stewd.io/w/jed)

Stephan Lehmke

@topskip Yeah, the Apple hype rages on...

Marco Daniel

@StephanLehmke thanks to Windows ...

Stephan Lehmke

@MarcoDaniel Is that so? I now have the first apple computer in my life (in the form of a smartphone) but I never had a Windows one.

Marco Daniel

10:08

@StephanLehmke I think Vista was a flaw and so many users switched. On the other hand the new age of smartphones was introduced by Apple. People bought iPhones and as a conclusion a Mac ;-) However I don't think that our group here can represent the normal user. Most of us have a technical or mathematical background.

Stephan Lehmke

@MarcoDaniel OTOH, the Apple II predates Windows by at least a decade :-)

Paulo Cereda

@topskip ooh! :)

Dominic Michaelis

10:48

heylo

topskip

\hello

egreg

@DominicMichaelis Hello.

Dominic Michaelis

How are you ?

nutty about natty

hello again

any experts on microtype ?

am having slight trouble with disabling it for LOT & LOF

LOC seems fine, though

am (still) using this template: latextemplates.com/template/masters-doctoral-thesis

with

\pagestyle{fancy} % The page style headers have been "empty" all this time, now use the "fancy" headers as defined before to bring them back

\lhead{\emph{Inhaltsverzeichnis}} % Set the left side page header to "Contents"

\microtypesetup{protrusion=false}

\tableofcontents % Write out the Table of Contents

\lhead{\emph{List of Figures}} % Set the left side page header to "List of Figures"
\listoffigures % Write out the List of Figures

\lhead{\emph{List of Tables}} % Set the left side page header to "List of Tables"

being my attempt to honor the "caveat" microtype's manual

by disabling protrusion for LOX

however,

for the LOT (list-of-tables), one table is on page 8, the next on page 11, and they're not neatly right-aligned: the 8 is "righter" than the right 1

I guess it's a protrusion thing

Paulo Cereda

nutty about natty

11:02

disabling expansion reduced the "kink", but it's still not neatly aligned:

\microtypesetup{expansion=false}

\lhead{\emph{List of Tables}} % Set the left side page header to "List of Tables"
\listoftables % Write out the List of Tables

\microtypesetup{expansion=true}

see khirevich.com/latex/microtype for nice pictures on microtype :)

100 gummi points for any pointers

ps: disabling expansion produces ugly headings in the LOT, though - hence, not an option

pps:

from the Thesis.cls file:

\renewcommand\listoftables{
\btypeout{List of Tables}
\addtotoc{List of Tables}
\begin{spacing}{1}{
\setlength{\parskip}{1pt}
\if@twocolumn
\@restonecoltrue\onecolumn
\else
\@restonecolfalse
\fi
\chapter*{\listtablename
\@mkboth{
\MakeUppercase\listtablename}{\MakeUppercase\listtablename}}
\@starttoc{lot}
\if@restonecol\twocolumn\fi
\cleardoublepage
}\end{spacing}
}

this might be the source of all evil in the world and the expanse of the universe, no?

egreg

11:18

@nuttyaboutnatty The source of all evils is using setspace. But also uppercasing the headings is a good candidate.

5

Paulo Cereda

@egreg :)

nutty about natty

is the template using setspace? answer: YES, it is...

I don't really want to "fix" all evils in the template (not for this paper at least)

I'm sure it's got many "issues"...

egreg

@nuttyaboutnatty Well, \begin{spacing}{1} is revealing.

nutty about natty

\usepackage{setspace}

gee

quick fix?

could I just comment-out all \renewcommand\listoffigures{ ..

?

(and of course all other parts where setspace is used)

if there's no "quick fix" (I somehow doubt it, the template's full of patch-work it seems to me), I'll just have to live with the occasional "kink" in LOX

...

nutty about natty

11:41

@egreg (for the next time I write a thesis or similar) - Can you recommend a bullet-proof, peer-reviewed, up-to-date thesis template? Or would you generally rather recommend a bottom-up custom-build?

Marco Daniel

@egreg: The package fix-cm must be loaded before \documentclass is used.

nutty about natty

@MarcoDaniel ?

Marco Daniel

@nuttyaboutnatty The message was for egreg and is related to an answer of him.

nutty about natty

k

David Carlisle

@MarcoDaniel or at least mildly different results are possible if you don't, still basically works though,

Marco Daniel

11:50

@DavidCarlisle You wrote the documentation ;-)

David Carlisle

@MarcoDaniel did I? I know I did the older type1cm, I'll go and see what it says....

Marco Daniel

Frank Mittelbach, David Carlisle, Chris Rowley, Walter Schmidt ;-)

David Carlisle

@MarcoDaniel yes but \thanks{Walter wrote \Lpack{fix-cm}}}

Marco Daniel

@DavidCarlisle Indeed ;-(

Nasser

this is a long shot, but any one here tried tex4ht with animate.sty package ? When I run it by this small tex file (which works OK with pdflatex) then I get strange error. (I do have the animation frames in both eps and png, so all is there)

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{animate}
\usepackage{graphics}
\begin{document}
\begin{center}
\animategraphics[controls,loop]{4}{frame}{1}{5}
\end{center}
\end{document}

tohecz

11:57

@Nasser I believe it has been told here before: None package works with tex4ht unless it ~~does~~ was made to.

Nasser

Now when I do htlatex foo.tex I get this error

Searching `lm-rep-cmrm.htf' for `cmr10.htf'
(/usr/share/texmf/tex4ht/ht-fonts/unicode/lm/lm-rep-cmrm.htf)
[1 file index.html
file index.css
file index.tmp
file index.tmp
file index.tmp
--- warning --- Can't close file `index.tmp' (file is not open)
--- error --- Illegal storage address
----------------------------
t4ht.c (2009-01-31-07:34 kpathsea)
t4ht -f/index.tex
(/usr/share/texmf/tex4ht/tex4ht.env)

and the HTML file only has PIC in it, no animation

Paulo Cereda

Hey, we need to sing happy birthday to @NicolaTalbot! :)

Nicola Talbot

@PauloCereda Ahh. Thanks!

Paulo Cereda

@NicolaTalbot Happy birthday! :)

Nicola Talbot

@PauloCereda :-)

David Carlisle

11:59

@NicolaTalbot you'll soon be as old as @egreg

Nicola Talbot

@DavidCarlisle How soon have I got?

Nasser

@tohecz, Yes I know. I went to CTAN before to see if anything on this and googled. The problem is that there is no list somewhere to tell what one package works and not work with tex4ht. So one has to try I guess?

So I am using a package in latex and want to run it via tex4ht, I have no prior information if this will work or not? How would one check if a package is support by tex4ht? I know one needs to look for the package but with .ht extension? But where to check?

Paulo Cereda

Where's the cake? :)

tohecz

@Nasser Well, this would be a good question to ask on the main site ;)

@PauloCereda which cake?

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz birthday cake. :)

David Carlisle

12:03

@Nasser If a package just defines simple tex macros then it doesn't need any tex4ht support (athough you can get better results so,sometimes by having a tex4ht specific version) but for anything that needs driver back end support (clearly the case for animate) it isn't going to work unless there is a support file for that package in the tex4ht input tree

Nasser

@David, @topskip Ok, I understand, but how is a user to check if tex4h supports package X before using such package? How is a user supposed to know if a packages needs special tex4ht version or not? Just trying and getting errors like the above and then assuming these error must be becuase tex4ht does not support the package is not the right way to go about it. right?

David Carlisle

@Nasser It's what I'd do:-)

Nasser

I think there should be a tex4ht command, like

tex4ht -supported <package_name>

and then the result will be 'yes' or 'no'. When tex4ht is build, this information must be known in the build system. The above just makes it available to the end user in an easy way.

David Carlisle

@Nasser well as I say the design was that packages written in TeX should just work. That's most packages, but packages written in the graphics back end won't so animate tikz pstricks etc are clearly not going to work unless re-implemented from scratch for html.

Nicola Talbot

@PauloCereda Hold on. I'll go and take a photo of it. :-)

Paulo Cereda

12:12

@NicolaTalbot ooooooh! :)

Nasser

@DavidCarlisle I understand. But again, you have your expert hat on again and these things seem so obvious to you, but one must think in terms of the end user and assume they do not have all this knowledge you have. What might seem so obvious to an expert like you, might not be for normal users.

tohecz

@PauloCereda but I don't have a Bday :p

Paulo Cereda

@Nicola: beware of @David, he might steal your cake. :)

@tohecz Nicola's. :) And we can celebrate your birthday too! :)

tohecz

@PauloCereda it's 2 weeks too late ;)

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz Oh no!

@tohecz: happy birthday too! :)

David Carlisle

12:15

@Nasser That said, if you want to know you can do:

$ kpsewhich colortbl.4ht
/usr/local/texlive/2012/texmf-dist/tex/generic/tex4ht/colortbl.4ht

Nicola Talbot

2

(My husband bought it for me. He shares my sense of humour!)

Dominic Michaelis

Oh that is great

Nasser

@DavidCarlisle Thanks! that is what I was thinking about. Now I did:

>kpsewhich colortbl.4ht
/usr/share/texmf/tex/generic/tex4ht/colortbl.4ht
>kpsewhich animate.4ht
>

and I see there is no .4ht file, so this makes it more clear.

Nicola Talbot

@tohecz Happy birthday for 2 weeks ago! :-)

David Carlisle

@Nasser for a full list

 grep \\.4ht $(kpsewhich -all ls-R)

Paulo Cereda

12:19

@NicolaTalbot OMG! <3

tohecz

@NicolaTalbot thanks!

David Carlisle

@NicolaTalbot but are you going to let him share some cake?

Nasser

@DavidCarlisle very useful thanks. so I see this on my system

>grep \\.4ht $(kpsewhich -all ls-R) | wc
361 361 12283
>grep \\.sty $(kpsewhich -all ls-R) | wc
2292 2292 110398

Nicola Talbot

@DavidCarlisle Already have :-) We had a slice of cake, a glass of liquid refreshment and watched an old B&W film last night to celebrate.

David Carlisle

@Nasser 2292 > 361 (in case you were wondering:-)

Nasser

12:22

yes. I see, so not all packages need a .4ht, or does this mean someone needs to write about 2000 .4ht files?

David Carlisle

@Nasser one or the other, for best results, the latter.

Nasser

wow, who is going to write all those 2000 .4ht packages?

this sounds like lots of work.

David Carlisle

@Nasser whoever needs an html version of a document using them and finds that the default tex processing is not suitable for html.

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle @Nasser exactly. Even though tex4ht started as a authored project, it is more and more a contributed project

David Carlisle

@Nasser it's no different from the way there came to be so many latex packages, the community produces more packages when someone feels like writing one: there is no overall plan.

egreg

12:26

@MarcoDaniel It works for me also after \documentclass

Marco Daniel

39 mins ago, by David Carlisle

@MarcoDaniel or at least mildly different results are possible if you don't, still basically works though,

I quoted the documentation ;-)

David Carlisle

@egreg the scaling part will, the bit that doesn't is the other feature of changing some of the T1 fd file declarations to omit/change some of the font choices as some of the fonts are preloaded within some document classes.

Nasser

can I ask who is, if any, is the "official" maintainer of the tex4ht system now? It will be nice to have one known person or group for tex4ht. I am on the mailing list for tex4ht also, but it is not very busy at all.

egreg

@DavidCarlisle I know; I'll change the answer.

David Carlisle

@egreg system pinged you but reply was really to @MarcoDaniel :-)

Nasser

12:30

OK, I found this info I think on en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX4ht

David Carlisle

@Nasser see current status at tug.org/tex4ht

Paulo Cereda

13:25

<insert noise here>

David Carlisle

!!/eightball please talk to @PauloCereda, he's lonely.

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle <3

Psmith is sleeping. :)

David Carlisle

Things are really bad for you then:-)

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle :)

Rico

Death by PowerPoint

michal.h21

13:47

@Nasser to find if package has tex4ht support, run command: kpsewhich packagename.4ht

2

Holene

@DavidCarlisle Good afternoon! Do I remember right if I believe you said that TL2013 will be released in june?

egreg

@Holene The DVD should be in print, the release should be for the first days of July.

David Carlisle

@Holene probably wasn't me but egreg replied:-)

Holene

@egreg Nice, thanks 0)

@DavidCarlisle

=)

Nasser

14:02

I need to write in a note that I am using texlive. I tried \Texlive but Latex does not like it. What is the correct control sequence if any for TexLive name?

egreg

@Nasser \TeX~Live

Nasser

@egreg thanks !

Nasser

15:06

fyi, I just documented the use of pdflatex and the animate package here 12000.org/my_notes/Mathematica_animation_into_PDF_using_latex/… I used Mathematica to generate the images. Hope you like it.

David Carlisle

@Nasser for html, if you sort out (or find on the web) some javascript to flick through the images, it can't be that hard to do at least a basic tex4ht version of that

Nasser

@DavidCarlisle, yes, sure. I can easily make animated GIF files from images and then include them as normal graphics. I do that all the time. I think convert command can do that, but I use a small GUI program on windows. It just would be easier if it is all integrated in one .tex file and one command, that is all. I am just a little lazy I guess :)

But having the controls is nice below the animation that comes with the animate package.

David Carlisle

15:25

@Nasser no that's what I mean, the tex markup is pretty simple so if you find some javascript that makes a slideshow from a bunch of images with controls similar to the pdf ones it should be easy to make tex4ht generate that from the same source.

Alan Munn

15:46

@Rico Don't be fooled into thinking this couldn't just as easily be Death by Beamer.

(Even as I am working on a Beamer presentation right now.)

Rico

16:33

@AlanMunn Right, still wondering which is the more evil way to kill someone :)

Alan Munn

@Rico I guess with Beamer you go out in well-kerned style; in Powerpoint it's death by animation.

Rico

@AlanMunn Death by animation is a title owned by a tool called Prezi...

Paulo Cereda

@Rico A PowerPoint slideshow full of epic sounds per letter, and using Comic Sans.

And let us not forget those bean-like stick figures. :)

Rico

@PauloCereda I would rather cut of my own leg and beat myself to death with it than watching this PowerPoint presentation of doom

Paulo Cereda

Of course, when beamer is not an option, @Alan relies on Keynote, which is at least superior than PowerPoint and less prone to kill anybody. :)

Alan Munn

16:40

@PauloCereda Actually no. I use Powerpoint if I'm not using Beamer because Keynote is too Mac-centric, and while most everyone has Office (among non-fanatics) many people (even Mac people) don't have Keynote (including me).

Paulo Cereda

@AlanMunn Ah, I see. :) I used to have iWork on my MacBook, but I have Office in my iMac.

Pages = meh. Numbers = not bad. Keynote = nice.

Alan Munn

@PauloCereda Numbers is awful if you want to do anything remotely sciency.

@Rico I've vaguely heard of that.

David Carlisle

backboard and chalk?

Rico

@AlanMunn Prezi is kinda cool but people tend to overuse animations and zooming. which leads to headache if not braincancer ....

@DavidCarlisle if blackboard and chalk, only this way:

►

Paulo Cereda

@AlanMunn It's more business-oriented. :)

@DavidCarlisle and picture mode? :)

David Carlisle

16:57

@Rico so much more interesting than a projected presentation (beamer or powerpoint:-)

Alan Munn

@DavidCarlisle Right now I'm teaching in our Engineering building (usually I teach in Math) and they never fill up the chalk containers, which is really annoying. In Math they check the chalk after each class period.

@Rico Ah, the good old dotted chalk line. Another reason why white boards suck.

Paulo Cereda

New daily build of tikz-pgf available.

Rico

17:18

@AlanMunn I would be impressed if he does this on a whiteboard ;)

egreg

@AlanMunn We have a box of chalk sticks in the service locker (of which we have the key). If they remember to check the box we can find all the chalk we need. ;-)

Most importantly, we need to remember bringing the key when lecturing.

kan

@DavidCarlisle backboard? what is that?

egreg

@kan Maybe a blackboard? :)

Paulo Cereda

@egreg Which is actually a very dark green? :)

woohoo @NicolaTalbot is here hopefully with some cake! :)

kan

@egreg Yeah!

@PauloCereda LOL

Nicola Talbot

17:32

@PauloCereda Hello! Would you like a virtual slice?

Paulo Cereda

@NicolaTalbot ooh! :)

Guys, let's sing Happy Birthday to Nicola!

1...

2...

3..

Happy birthday lalalala Now, the cake! :)

Nicola Talbot

@PauloCereda I'm glad no one's trying to give me the bumps!

kan

:)

egreg

@NicolaTalbot Happy twin prime number birthday!

Nicola Talbot

@PauloCereda Imagination v1.0 is a prerequisite for virtual birthday cake.

@egreg :-)

kan

17:34

2*(3 - 2) -2013

egreg

@NicolaTalbot Someone around here uses to pull the ears.

Paulo Cereda

@NicolaTalbot oooh! :)

@egreg ooh when I was a kid, they used to do the same!

Nicola Talbot

@PauloCereda Here's a slice, but don't eat it all in one go ;-)

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{pgf}
\pagestyle{empty}

\begin{document}\noindent
\begin{pgfpicture}{0bp}{0bp}{146.505241bp}{220.406158bp}
\begin{pgfscope}
\pgfsetlinewidth{1.0bp}
\pgfsetrectcap
\pgfsetmiterjoin \pgfsetmiterlimit{10.0}
\pgfpathmoveto{\pgfpoint{144.52382bp}{218.774053bp}}
\pgfpathlineto{\pgfpoint{0.691491bp}{179.819464bp}}
\pgfpathcurveto{\pgfpoint{6.185087bp}{144.11109bp}}{\pgfpoint{26.661217bp}{118.890491bp}}{\pgfpoint{57.625121bp}{122.136707bp}}
\pgfpathlineto{\pgfpoint{144.52382bp}{218.774053bp}}

Nasser

any one knows if it is possible to use Latex inside Adob'e InDesign? i.e. enter Latex commands and have InDesign display the resulting Math somehow?

Using mathmagic is possible in inDesign, but I think it will be easier if Adobe would support entering direct Latex code. I use Scientific Word for all my Latex that has math, which is GUI, but SW allows one to enter direct Latex code if needed as well.

egreg

!!/battle

Nicola Talbot

17:50

@Nasser I've not used inDesign, but a quick google only comes up with converting the LaTeX equations to eps/png and importing them into inDesign, which is sub-optimal. It doesn't seem possible to actually get indesign to understand LaTeX commands as far as I can tell.

Nasser

@NicolaTalbot, thanks, yes I spend long time googling this also, that is why I asked here just in case. I can buy inDesign at school for low price since I am student and I was just thinking about it. But I think I'll stick to Latex for now.

Alan Munn

@Nasser No there's no way to do this. InDesign is really nice if you are doing posters, but for anything else I would probably stick to just using LaTeX.

Nasser

18:05

@Alan that is something I am little confused about. I read in some places one can make actual publication books with InDesign, not just posters and magazine pages and such small things. I know FrameMaker, which I used a little is used for large books. Adobe still sells FrameMaker. But was not sure about InDesign.

So I would not be interested in buying it any more if one can't make books with it.

Alan Munn

@Nasser Sure, it can be used for those things, and is often used for them by commercial publishing houses, but depending on what sort of books you are producing, you can probably achieve at least as good results with LaTeX. inDesign really excels at flowing text around images and things. Some of these things are very difficult to do in LaTeX. But LaTeX excels in other areas (e.g. citations and e.g. programmability if you include things like pgfplots.)

So a lot depends on what sort of things you want to do.

I'm writing a textbook at the moment, and it is all done in LaTeX. I use InDesign for posters, (academic posters) although after having to deal with yet another version of InDesign in our student labs compared to what I have in my lab, it became difficult to use. This is the perpetual problem with proprietary file formats, which is another reason to stick to LaTeX if possible.

Nasser

@AlanMunn ALso, Adobe as of CS 6.5, will no longer sell adobe CS for PC . it is all subscription now. i.e. lease the software. in the cloud. So one can not actually BUY CS any more. Only rent it. Yearly rent. I do not like this at all.

many people are very upset about this from what I read.

Alan Munn

@Nasser Right. That's just downright evil. It's what made me get rid of SPSS a long time ago and switch to R.

If you want an open source clone (sort of) of InDesign, you might want to check out Scribus. I haven't used it, so I can't speak for its quality.

Nasser

@AlanMunn fyi, if you use Mathematica, you can now also use R from Mathematica. wolfram.com/mathematica/new-in-9/built-in-integration-with-r

I use Mathematica for all my HW's and projects at school. But do not use R. Statistics is just too hard for me :)

Nicola Talbot

@Nasser There are some publishing houses that require their authors to provide their manuscripts as Word documents which are then imported into inDesign, but these tend to be books such as novels that don't require much typesetting effort.

Alan Munn

18:18

@Nasser I don't use Mathematica, but that looks like a neat facility.

@NicolaTalbot But to be fair, InDesign can do really nice stuff. And none of the formatting is done in Word, so that's kind of like saying "Some publishers require their manuscripts as plain text and import them into LaTeX".

Nasser

@NicolaTalbot This actually always baffled me to no end. For me, Latex is only hard when it comes to typesetting Math. If one was doing something with little or no math, why would one even think of using something other than Latex for a book or a report or anything? Latex is so easy where there is no math involved.

Dominic Michaelis

LaTeX is always easy

Nicola Talbot

@AlanMunn I think it's done like that not because of any virtue of Word over inDesign, but simply because authors are expected to have a copy of word rather than inDesign.

@Nasser Yes, it is. But trying to convince people of that is a lot harder unfortunately.

Nasser

@DominicMichaelis not if you are typesetting complicated math equations ! it really gets hard then.

Dominic Michaelis

what is complicate math for you ?

Nasser

18:23

I mean multiple integrals, partial differential equations, vector derivatives and so on. I just can't see the equestions when it gets complicated. That is why I love SW. It is so easy to write complicated math, but it generates Latex. Like Lyx, but even easier to use.

Alan Munn

@NicolaTalbot Yes, exactly my point. Whether the things require much typsetting effort or not is independent of how you get the text into the typesetting application.

Dominic Michaelis

I write in measure theory with a lots of integrals live in my lecture with LaTeX

The script

Nasser

But with SW, I can easily manipulate the equestions on the screen. I actually edit/copy/paste and do everything on the screen. There is no way to do this if I code the math in Latex. I would not be able to see the terms and subterms, copy/paste things. I tried, it would take me 10 times longer coding it in direct Latex vs. SW

Alan Munn

@Nasser LaTeX is a total pain in the neck completely independent of math if you want e.g. grid typesetting, flowing text around images. See e.g. tex.stackexchange.com/a/27849/2693 for a list.

Dominic Michaelis

Oh I never have problems with that. I can "compile" the stuff in my head

Nasser

18:27

You are so smart ! I can't do this.

Paulo Cereda

Jun 19 '12 at 1:05, by Paulo Cereda

In the year 2525,
LaTeX9 surely had arrived,
everything you need to compile
is in the preamble of a mere .tex file.

Alan Munn

And one more, on this topic:

Paulo Cereda

@AlanMunn: this is a legit YAPM. :)

Alan Munn

35

Q: Typesetting limitations of LaTeX

What are the typesetting limitations of LaTeX? In other words what are the things that desktop publishing and word processing programs do better than LaTeX? I am not really interested in things that are better left to the editor (spell check, grammar check) or some post processing program (track ...

Dominic Michaelis

@Nasser it is not that hard, you just need to train it

Nicola Talbot

18:31

@AlanMunn Yes, I agree with that mostly, but some things can slip through that the typesetter doesn't pick up. I've read books (usually non-fiction) where there's a slight change in font caused by the author copying-and-pasting a passage from another document that uses a different font. That doesn't happen when the source is plain text or plain text with markup.

Alan Munn

@NicolaTalbot At least in InDesign this is quite difficult to do in my experience, since you apply styles to everything. But I'm sure anything is possible if it involves humans. :)

Nicola Talbot

@AlanMunn :-)

Paulo Cereda

Hey that's not fair! @JosephWright can actually have a piece of the cake.

@alfC You load ten million lines of fontspec and unicode-math setup and yet you call a 2 line definition correcting one aspect "mildly involved" :-) — David Carlisle Apr 14 at 9:55

@DavidCarlisle: you sir are awesome.

Andrew Stacey

19:22

@NicolaTalbot I had that experience with a fiction book recently and it was seriously annoying.

Nicola Talbot

@AndrewStacey I think typesetting in modern books, especially fiction, is going downhill. One of the things creative writing students are taught is not to remind the reader that they're reading a book (unless it's a book like Tristram Shandy). Bad typesetting is just as much a reminder of that as bad prose.

Andrew Stacey

@NicolaTalbot Agreed. It was jarring to keep changing font and stopped me getting "into the flow" (not that there was much flow to get into; it was meant to be a spy thriller but the only tension was as to whether or not the next font would be the Dread Comic Sans).

3

Nicola Talbot

@AndrewStacey Encoding mismatches are another story jolter. I've got an ebook version of "Lord of the Rings" that really mangles some of the names with accents in. (And there are a fair few of them in that story!) I stick to the hardback if I'm reading it at home.

Andrew Stacey

@NicolaTalbot Another reason why everyone should use LaTeX to produce their ebooks ...

Nicola Talbot

@AndrewStacey :-)

Marco Daniel

20:24

@PauloCereda: The comments are interesting ;-) tex.stackexchange.com/questions/83715/…

Paulo Cereda

@MarcoDaniel Let's gather a huge userbase, then we start charging $$$ for our tool! :) bwawawawa

Marco Daniel

@PauloCereda :-)

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda You can't end display math with a single $

Holene

@DavidCarlisle Holene like this.

Marco Daniel

@DavidCarlisle I love your humor.

David Carlisle

20:28

@MarcoDaniel with a U please, I'm British:-)

Marco Daniel

@DavidCarlisle Damn. I must watch more Dr. Who.

David Carlisle

@MarcoDaniel I spent some time this afternoon patching up the section spacing after mdframed only to see your comment it was fixed in github:-)

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle oopsie. :)

@MarcoDaniel It's just the doctor. :)

Marco Daniel

@DavidCarlisle Do you know the reason for the issue?

@PauloCereda Indeed. But did you read this: bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22741493

David Carlisle

@MarcoDaniel I assumed you'd fixed it:-) (I didn't check the new version, what I was going to post was:

Paulo Cereda

20:31

@Marco: we probably will have a vim setup for our new manual. Then David could write an emacs integration. :)

Marco Daniel

@PauloCereda Great idea ;-)

David Carlisle

\makeatletter
\BeforeBeginEnvironment{lstlisting}{\global\let\zz\if@nobreak\begin{mdframed}}
\AfterEndEnvironment{lstlisting}{\end{mdframed}\global\let\if@nobreak\zz}
\makeatother

@PauloCereda You could be the first Brazilian Doctor.

Marco Daniel

@DavidCarlisle Interesting. I can't explain why this works (or not).

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle ooh! :)

►

Mozard gets mad.

David Carlisle

@MarcoDaniel the ifnobreak flag is used by \@startsection and it only puts in the space before the head if it is true (used to suppress space if one heading comes after another) but something in the listings/mdframed combination was flipping it so I just save the initial value and restore it (it's a global flag though so nested use is dangerous.

@MarcoDaniel @startsection does:

  \if@nobreak
    \everypar{}%
  \else
    \addpenalty\@secpenalty\addvspace\@tempskipa
  \fi

Marco Daniel

20:38

@PauloCereda Oh bacon with crashed glass.

Paulo Cereda

@MarcoDaniel LOL

Marco Daniel

@DavidCarlisle Thanks. I blame listings ;-)

David Carlisle

@MarcoDaniel always blame somebody else's package.

Marco Daniel

@DavidCarlisle or say it's a feature ;-)

David Carlisle

@MarcoDaniel preferably both.

egreg

20:46

!!/cricket

Paulo Cereda

@egreg ooh let me enable the bot. :)

!!/cricket

Psmith, the TeX bot, in fixed font mode: Let's take a look at the last cricket results:

- Australia 65/10 * v India 308/6
- Sri Lanka 280/10 * v West Indies 297/8
- Middlesex 250/6 * v Somerset 247/7

Our cricket expert David might explain these results later on.

egreg

@PauloCereda So few matches! It's probably raining everywhere.

My impression is that Australia is not going so well against India.

Paulo Cereda

@egreg :)

egreg

!!/battle

Paulo Cereda

@egreg Psmith, the TeX bot: The current score is egreg 260 vs. 195 David. So far, egreg is winning.

David Carlisle

20:50

@egreg I was assuming the cricket was just a ploy to get Paulo to start the bot

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Oh! Come on! I was really interested in Middlesex vs. Somerset.

I visited Somerset, years ago. I was staying in Marston Magna, a really big town. :)

David Carlisle

@egreg I was impressed that you can now follow the scores to tell who won:-)

But apparently it didn't really matter: Auuise captain said:

"It was certainly not the way we wanted to play but if you are going to have a game like that, you may as well have it in a practice game."

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Of course he was saying "gime" rather than "game".

David Carlisle

@egreg according to wikipedia it has a population around twice that of Souldern:-)

egreg

@DavidCarlisle So you get to know each one of your fellow citizens of Souldern.

David Carlisle

20:58

@egreg yes, pretty much.

@egreg population of ~250 and no through road only one way in, no shops, so it isn't exactly swarming with passers by...

egreg

@DavidCarlisle No shops, but at least a couple of pubs.

David Carlisle

@egreg It did have two (three in former times) but one closed since we have been here, so we are down to 1 (have two churches though, CofE and methodist)

egreg

@DavidCarlisle According to Wikipedia there'a also a Catholic chapel.

David Carlisle

@egreg it's a private house now.

tohecz

21:27

@AndrewStacey I would not like to get into the flow of the Vltava river in Prague. Standard flow: 150 m3/s, current flow: 3000 m3/s.

Andrew Stacey

@tohecz You'd certainly be swept off your feet by that!

egreg

@tohecz Impressive.

tohecz

@egreg Yep, it is.

egreg

@tohecz Move up to the Castle. :)

tohecz

Standard water level: 1 m, current water level: 5 m.

Well, the Prague itself is quite self, only three small quarters have been seriously flooded (Karlín, Zbraslav, Záběhlice). The situation in other cities is much worse :(

egreg

21:41

@tohecz Karlín is really low. What about the Math Faculty?

tohecz

@egreg I believe that this part of Karlín is quite safe. The Křižíkova station is closed and protected by a special wall, but this is only a prevention of the metro tubes for now. Much worse situation is around Palmovka.

egreg

@tohecz IIRC, in the 2002 flood Křižíkova was one of the places where water went into the tube.

tohecz

@egreg Yep, I think you remember correctly ;)

However, the principal structures of the stations have been quite improved since then

My sis' house in Kralupy nad Vltavou (pod Vltavou) is in a bad condition. Usually, it is 100 metres from the river bank. Currently, it is 100 metres from the river bank, just inside the river, not outside :(

mafp

@NicolaTalbot Do you know a good reference for the makeindex style files? The man page seems to be incomplete

egreg

@tohecz :( What about the hydrometer station on the road to Suchdol? The road is really level with the river, there.

tohecz

21:51

@egreg if you mean the Masaryk Institute of Hydrology, then it's flooded up to the 1st floor ceiling :(

Well, I need some sleep. Good night!

Nicola Talbot

@mafp Have you tried texdoc ind?

mafp

22:08

@NicolaTalbot Ah, ind.pdf. Thanks!

egreg

@mafp A complete reference is in the LaTeX Companion; but the article of Pehong Chen and Michael Harrison (texdoc ind) seems very similar: probably it was the source for the Companion.

mafp

@egreg Good to know, since I don't have a Companion at hand

David Carlisle

22:42

any windows users seen this?

I re-installed and found 14 instances of "I can't write on file `texsys.aux' in the install-tl.log. I checked the log file for 2011 and found no errors. — Martin Clouthier 4 mins ago

egreg

@DavidCarlisle I suspect a permission problem. Possibly the format hasn't been created at installation and a user can't write in the web2c directory when TeX tries to create the format. But it's a shot in the dark.

David Carlisle

@egreg yes that was my guess, but wasn't sure whether the default texlive windows install assumed admin rights or not

@egreg I just noticed the question as I'd almost forgotten about texsys.aux, I had some fun with that code:-)

egreg

@DavidCarlisle When adding support for the various distributions?

David Carlisle

@egreg yes trying to make it work on machines with no . in the file name so you had to have a directory sty with the files in there, then re-arrange the filename parser to match. I forget was that atari, or acorn Archimedes or something...

@egreg I was tempted to jump in with a \\* answer for that longtable question but decided that would be the sort of low trick a vim user would do, so I've left it for you...

Nicola Talbot

22:58

@DavidCarlisle Acorn Archimedes had that sort of thing except the name of the directory was whatever \jobname was and it contained a file called tex, aux etc. Whereas C code was the other way around where you had c , h and o directories.

David Carlisle

@NicolaTalbot ah. If I didn't follow the platform conventions it's probably because I was testing it on a sun unix workstation:-)

egreg

23:25

@DavidCarlisle Thanks. I just needed 15 points.

@DavidCarlisle Don't forget Textures that used file names without extension.

Transcript for

$TeX - LaTeX$ TeX, LaTeX and Friends