@DoorknobofSnow kool. Well, I came to the conclusion that the cause of the smoke is the waste pump, I poured some boiling water in today and maybe that's wrong. However, there's nothing to assure me about it :-/
@JosephWright OK, when you are back, please see my comment on biber question. Also, I have added answers for texmaker and texniccenter. But I am a windows user and hence answers meant to be for windows. Can you (or somebody) check whether they work for linux and/or Mac too? That will be great.
I have dropped a mail to latextools developer msiniscalchi for an answer to biber question with sublimetext/latextools. He is a member here too. @JosephWright Can you ping him using your mod hammer?
I will try to add something on inlage too. But what about vim, the great! @PauloCereda @NicolaTalbot @cmhughes Where are you guys? I am waiting for an answer to vim and biber. :-)
@HarishKumar Hi Harish :) I use arara exclusively, regardless of the editor I use- I could give details of how I use it with vim, but it might not be universally appealing :)
@cmhughes Hi Chris. Still awake ;-) Your answer with that would be very useful for me though. I still have trouble with vim and choosing engines (especially arara). May be another occasion. We may go for How to integrate arara with different editors on similar grounds :)
I want to buy a new router to manage the bandwidth. I want to know the terminology used to describe a router that can evenly divide the incoming and outgoing bandwidth among the number of online devices.
For example, if the up and down bandwidth are 2Mbps and 1Mbps, respectively, and there are ...
Most of my past experience with Latex has been on the Mathematics site, but I recently signed up for WriteLatex. I was trying to use that to write an integral, but it's so long, it scrolls off the right side, but there seems to be a huge left margin I can do without. Any way to shrink or eliminate the left margin?
@Mike Each package has a corresponding user manual. :) If you use TeX Live, you can issue texdoc <packagename> and get the manual. :) Here's an online version of geometry: texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/latex/geometry/geometry.pdf
But windows sucks sometimes. Don't tell any body that I am of this opinion.
@PauloCereda Uh. Thanks Dear Paulo. :)
@PauloCereda For the past two years I am the member of our PG admission committee. I used LaTeX to publish the merit list. I was thinking whether it will be appealing if a blog is written on it. What is your opinion?
@Harish: I should've asked Psmith about your time. :)
@HarishKumar Go for it! :)
!!/answer what time is it in Pondicherry, India?
Psmith, the TeX bot, in fixed font mode:
current time in Pondicherry, India
3:35:31 pm IST | Sunday, January 19, 2014
+7.5 hours
Pondicherry, India
3:35:31 pm IST
Sunday, January 19 Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil
8:05:31 am BRST
Sunday, January 19
10:05:31 am GMT | Sunday January 19, 2014
Psmith, the TeX bot, in fixed font mode:
current time in São Paulo, São Paulo
8:06:47 am BRST | Sunday, January 19, 2014
10:06:47 am GMT | Sunday January 19, 2014
Do my guidelines about build tools make sense? My feeling is simply saying 'use arara/latexmk/...' is not going to help someone who needs basic help setting up their editor.
@PauloCereda I am very curious about vim and emacs. But terribly scared of them. Now with winedt I am using, changing engines and like is very easy and I have Karl behind me :) The day when I feel comfortable with either vim or emacs, I will switch to linux. I don't want to use anything else like Texmaker. :)
Now the question is who will corrupt me? I am willing to get corrupted ;-)
@N3buchadnezzar /running away I don't understand a bit ;-)
@JosephWright I think we can have a similar question on How to integrate arara with my editor? similarly. Though the beautiful manual discusses it, I feel that it is better to have a reference on site. Now they are scattered, if any.
@HarishKumar Let me enlighten your path: N3buchadnezzar: Sup -> Hello gentlemen, what's up? || Paulo: nm u? -> 'ello there, my fellow TeX friend! /takes top hat off Nothing much, I'd say. And you?
What is the proper way to allign minipages? pastebin.com/y3YE2ZcF I've done it here by subtracting a small space from the last line eg \[-1em] but this seems quite manuall and ugh, any pointerS?
@JosephWright That would be very nice. Thanks. But I feel that we can make it separate questions per build tool - arara and latexmk. The latter already features in some editors.
My feeling is that for newer users, the idea of running LaTeX/BibTeX/LaTeX/LaTeX is understandable, so LaTeX/Biber/LaTeX is also understandable if they can get Biber set up
@HarishKumar Not everybody likes the idea of a build tool, and they surely work differently for every people. :) For example, you guys use arara way more than I do. :)
> As I mentioned in the last newsletter, we've had some discussions on the TUG Board about trying to solicit more volunteers. We have volunteer opportunities in a variety of areas, from serving on committees to heading up projects to writing up documentation and creating artwork.
> There's still a need for additional volunteers for other committees and projects. If you have any time at all to give back to the TeX community, feel free to contact me (president (at) tug.org).
I have reinstalled gentoo linux system on my notebook. I have installed texlive using gentoo's package manager. It seems to be working. But for a particular document, latexmk does not stopped cycling compilation. It is very strange because it was working before gentoo reinstallation.
@PauloCereda A build tool is really useful with editors like vim and emacs. With winedt, it may not be as it is very versatile. But build tools, like arara, they are indispensable.
@PauloCereda, I tried writing a MWE but it seems related to some package combinations. So I do not have a really minimal woring example. But I can send the whole document, which is small. It consists of two small files: practice.cls and p12-funcoes-2.tex.
Here are they:
@PauloCereda I have yet to figure out how to send files here...
@PauloCereda The files are stored in a NTFS partition which is shared with WIndows 7. I have just found that when they are moved to an ext4fs partition the problem is gone!
@PauloCereda But prior to the operating systems re-installation, I was using this same configuration without problems.
That is very weird!
Before talking here I was installing TL without using the gentoo package manager. I have done a small installation. I intend to install more packages is the need for them arise.
When I compile a document and its compilation fail because of a missing file, I want to know which TL package provides that file. How can I get this information easily?
@JosephWright This time I am not using TL installed by the linux package manager. I have installed it manually using install-tl. Isn't there a way for TL to tell me which TL package provides a given file?
@HarishKumar I just have vim running in one terminal and type make or arara in another terminal with okular in the background. I'm old-fashioned and not very fancy :-)
@NicolaTalbot Hi Nicola. I am really lazy to have many terminal open :) I wounder how you guys manage it (even though I started like that in good old days).
@PauloCereda Kids are kids. They can't be evil :-) Only grown ups ;-)
@HarishKumar My default desktop layout has three terminals open: a tall one that I use vim in on one side and two short ones on the other for running commands, such as make or arara. I wouldn't know what to do with the computer if I didn't have any terminals. ;-)
@HarishKumar Actually I did read it as wonder :-) I wondered what you were commenting about for a moment ;-)
Release Notes of TeXShop 3.26: " 5) There is a new arara engine by Alan Munn in ~/Library/TeXShop/Engines/Inactive/Arara. The arara program is part of TeX Live 2013. Documentation for it is included in the above folder. Roughly speaking, it is a replacement for both latexmk and parts of the TeXShop engine mechanism." @PauloCereda @AlanMunn :-)
@Papiro You're welcome. The TeXShop engine system is quite flexible and so most of the time arara isn't needed (at least for my use) but I find it useful to have for some things, and having the engine available to everyone makes it easier for all. I find arara especially useful for switching on and off --shell-escape on a per document basis, since the one thing the engine system can't do is pass arguments.
Regarding my comments on latexmk running undefinitely on a document of mine, I have found the problem occurs with the NTFS file system. This happens in linux.
What I have just found out is that this is also happening with miktex on Windows, in my new installation.
Firstly I thought the problem would be related to NTFS being a foreign file system for linux. And I hoped it would work flawlessly in Windows. So I went to try it.
When using titletoc and appendix together, it lists my appendix items in the partialtoc I display for my final chapter. Is there a way to disable inclusion?
@raphael On the Biber question: which editor do you use? I don't know of any that don't let you do things by the LaTeX/BibTeX/LaTeX/LaTeX route and which also don't use a build tool that will already know about Biber. Can you point to one?
@JosephWright I use Gedit and Geany. It's possible that they do support compiler access (plugins?) but honestly, I never bothered. I found both specialised (LaTeX) editors and compiler integration to be more of a nuisance than help, at least for small projects. (TeXlipse is nice for larger stuff and auctex has nice features, but I'm not an emacs guy.) So I started using external build tools years ago (and wrote my own, which may make me a special case). Which means I might as well Notepad by now.
I don't want to hijack your question; if you think that my use-case is too niche or too far away from the purpose you had in mind with the post, I'll back off.
@Raphael My idea with the question was a focus on TeX-focussed IDEs. If you are happy using a general editor, then I'd expect you to be running latex and biber at the command line. I think that's how for example @NicolaTalbot uses vim.
@JosephWright Well, I don't: I run my build tool from the command line and it does all of the heavy lifting. If the document uses bibtex, it runs bibtex. If it uses biblatex, it runs the backend used. So, it's really somewhere in between: the editor is dumb, but so am I (the user).
@Raphael You slightly miss my point: you could in principal run latex <filename> && biber <filename> && latex <filename>, which in an IDE may not be quite so easy
Wow, I remember why I did not try using any LaTeX build tool back then. latexmk: >50p doc, never got it to run. arara: >130p doc, basic explanation of the tool's premise only from page 29.
@JosephWright Yea, which renders many a package completely unusable. Good thing we have tex.SE with many competent people that tell us how to get anything moving.
@JosephWright I did count the front matter. (Never mind that no documentation is immediately accessible from the Github page -- you have to know to go look at CTAN...)
@Raphael Remember TeX is for typesetting: docs = books = print and read
@Raphael It's very hard to find a balance: what I think of as the most useful features of code I write don't necessarily match up with what my users think!
@JosephWright I don't see how this relatex to providing tool documentation that informs the user quickly about a tools purpose, features and assumptions.
A lot of people write makefiles that say something like
paper.pdf: paper.tex
pdflatex paper
bibtex paper
pdflatex paper
pdflatex paper
To handle re-running TeX to get new/changed references and so forth. Is there a better way to do this?
@Raphael I was meaning more that, at least with siunitx, what I find is that each user has their own idea of 'normal use'. So whatever I put near the start of the docs I am bound to let some people down, as they'll want stuff only covered in the details.
@Raphael I tend to try to 'front load' usable examples in my docs, with all the 'boring' stuff near the end :-)
True. What I was looking for was more along the lines of "this package solves problem X in this way". Hawk-eye overview, if you will. It's fair that every user has to find the macros they need themselves.
Take, for instance, the [doc of adjustbox](http://mirror.physik-pool.tu-berlin.de/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/adjustbox/adjustbox.pdf). I really like this package, but the abstract does not tell me anything. The second sentence of the intro, however, is spot-on and what I'd like to read in a package description right at the top. So, arguably, that's a well done documentation.
@JosephWright I never built a LaTeX package (I needed to document) so never thought about it from a dev perspective. As a user, however, I've had many an unpleasant experience with package docs. Worse, however, is the state of web content on LaTeX: lots of deprecated info, outdated packages don't vanish, etc. That's a big issue for beginners.
Wow, I'm ranting here. :D Uncalled for, sorry.
Part of my frustration is probably that using LaTeX has a steep learning curve (the build process is part of it), and not only at the beginning. It's hard to convince people they'd be better off using it instead of WYSIWYG products if you have to say "Sure, but ..." all the time.
@Raphael I guess you can tell I was jesting about the book business, but there is an element of truth in saying that you do have to expect a certain amount of reading up-front.
@JosephWright Yes. I guess my point is, why? And why is that mindset accepted? Well, I know why: the people who could make LaTeX easier to use in, say, version 3, are in so deep that they can no longer change it. That's just the way it is, and I'm not angry at anybody about it. It's just ... frustrating.
@JosephWright And I really appreciate that, the effort many people invest.
To be honest, I'd probably not use LaTeX the way I do (for about everything) were it not for tex.SE. I'm willing to invest some time in learning stuff to be productive, but from documentation along, it's hard to see the light in things LaTeX.
@Raphael Much of what the team want to do is hard, but would make some things easier for users. You're still looking a a code in, compile, doc out workflow though.
@JosephWright Sure, but the amount of things you need to know and do in order to be moderately productive (and avoid the most basic trapdoors) is ... not trivial.
@Raphael It's the complexity I guess. Even after years of using LaTeX and having read a number of books I still find myself learning new things on a regular basis... I doubt it'll ever be possible to write a good introduction with good advice on packages where a newbie will not have further questions afterwards...
I guess one personal issue of me myself is that I know how to program (on an amateur level). I have a feeling how a programming language should work. And (La)TeX violates any number of best-practices.
@cgnieder It's not about further questions. It's about, how much reading does my un-techy sister have to do in order to write her masters thesis in LaTeX? Custom titlepage, font changes, umlauts, hyphenation rules, citations, footnotes and basic image inclusion is probably what we are looking at.
LaTeX does a bad job of providing an abstraction anybody can work with without known the core. The moment you want to define a non-trivial macro you need to worry about expansion. (Maybe that's me being in the zone of hell between "just using" and deep immersion, me trying to write non-trivial macros).
I want to buy a new router to manage the bandwidth. I want to know the terminology used to describe a router that can evenly divide the incoming and outgoing bandwidth among the number of online devices.
For example, if the up and down bandwidth are 2Mbps and 1Mbps, respectively, and there are ...
A lot of people write makefiles that say something like
paper.pdf: paper.tex
pdflatex paper
bibtex paper
pdflatex paper
pdflatex paper
To handle re-running TeX to get new/changed references and so forth. Is there a better way to do this?
