Can we change padding for minipages?

@EnthusiasticStudent Hi, what do you mean by padding?

@Johannes_B hi. a white empty space after a minipage finishes

I may not know the exact term for it

@EnthusiasticStudent You can use an \hbox for spacing.

@Johannes_B could you please answer this question of mine?

No after David's answer I know how to use minipages

but I can not find the horizontal width of the top header

@EnthusiasticStudent You could use scrextend and addmargin to temporarily enlarge the textwidth.

from the figure in this wiki page

en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Page_Layout

the width should be

1in + \hofsett + \oddsidemargin

but adding this to my code, does not bring my minipage to the left side of the left margin

@EnthusiasticStudent vvvvv

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{calc}
\usepackage{scrextend}
\usepackage{geometry}
\geometry{left=3cm,showframe}
\begin{document}
\begin{addmargin}[-2.9cm]{0pt}
	\begin{minipage}{\linewidth}
		\color{gray}
		\rule{\linewidth}{5cm}
	\end{minipage}\par\noindent
	\begin{minipage}{2.9cm}
		\color{gray}
		\rule{\linewidth}{5cm}
	\end{minipage}\hfill
	\begin{minipage}{\textwidth-2pt\relax}
		\color{gray}
		\rule{\linewidth}{5cm}
	\end{minipage}
\end{addmargin}
\end{document}

@Johannes_B thanks...

can I define a minipage to end in the horizontal middle (center) of the page and another one to start at the middle of the page?

@Johannes_B it actually worked I think... but I still am not so sure about the exact lengths

@EnthusiasticStudent Why the flush environments?

@EnthusiasticStudent Guess so, but i am not sure what you are trying to achieve? Do you have margins after all? If not, remove them and everything will be much easier.

@Johannes_B yes I have margins in all my document

@EnthusiasticStudent using geometry gets you full control over the margins, hence fixed lengths. I used 2.9cm above to give a little visual as to where the minipage starts. Use 3cm and it starts right at the edge.

but I want to make a header for my first page

@EnthusiasticStudent TikZ?

@DavidCarlisle @egreg Did you know how powerful longtable can be? ;-) golatex.de/viewtopic,p,76949.html#76949

@Johannes_B I am a paint professional ^__^!

this is what I want to have

in the header I want there be a header divided into two parts

on the left side I bring my contact info

and on the right side my name and title

also, the margin and the main exist in the whole document

@EnthusiasticStudent Very important question. Do you need the reactangles?

@Johannes_B not at all. I used them to show my purpose here...

@EnthusiasticStudent So your problem is the most hard and difficult to solve. A vague idea and a question around it, instead of a basic: Aim! Solution?

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\vspace*{-4cm}
\begin{center}
	\LARGE
	\begin{tabular}{rl}
		This is my name & and my contact \\
		my address & my phone number \\
	\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\end{document}

@Johannes_B To get it properly centered (page, not text) adjust the margins using geometry.

Cool, self-ping ^^^^^^

@Johannes_B yes... probably using a tabular instead is a better idea.

but now I decided not to create such thing in my CV...

I can not really code what I want...

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{geometry}
\geometry{hmargin=3cm}
\begin{document}
\vspace*{-3cm}
\begin{center}
	\LARGE
	\begin{tabular}{r@{\hspace{1cm}}l}
		This is my name & and my contact \\
		my address & my phone number \\
	\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\end{document}

@EnthusiasticStudent You can ask a question on site. Get's you some reputation and the answerer as well.

@Johannes_B thanks... you did your best to help me :) thank you

@Johannes_B why would you have a table with every entry in a multicolumn???

@DavidCarlisle How would i know? I think it is auto-generated.

@Johannes_B ok so a meta question, why would you have a table generator that generates tables with every entry in a multicolumn???

@DavidCarlisle No idea :-) I proposed to use a list.

@PauloCereda @ChristianHupfer A few hours to go till our Kneipenrallye starts. On board are also Schnuffelentchen :-) (Drawing by Sammy le Fox)

@DavidCarlisle Hope you are enjoying my efforts to avoid SVN $Id substitution :-)

@ChristianHupfer Makes even me smile golatex.de/viewtopic,p,77060.html#77060

ELL is a friendly site. </lie>

@Johannes_B ooooooooooh

@yo' On your question there, I would use "Chapter 1" or "in the introduction" (the latter feels more normal for an article than for a separate chapter)

@JosephWright :reminds me of a comment in luaotfload:

    %% FIXME  The date is meaningless, we need to find a way to
    %%        use the git revision instead.

@JosephWright ok, thanks. I'll go with "in the introduction", to me it sounds more natural, and it should be clear (in the context in which I use it)

@cfr chrismary.com/languagekeyboard/welsh.htm :-)

@DavidCarlisle :-)

@DavidCarlisle Different philosophy entirely

@DavidCarlisle Updating the interlock business alone makes it worthwhile to script, really

@JosephWright er not looked in detail what you've done yet, just seen the message headers go by. What interlock? :-)

@JosephWright there have not been lots of screams of pain since the new luatexbase hit texlive.

@DavidCarlisle Hmm. Seems rather bizarre - lots of those accented letters are never used in Welsh and the ones which are used are not in the most obvious places. (E.g. I'd expect ŷ to share with y and not b or whatever, since the character on the y is never used.) Maybe it is intended for Medieval Welsh or something?

@cfr Fy ngwybodaeth am allweddellau Gymreig yn dod o'r un ffynhonnell fel fy gwybodaeth o'r iaith Gymraeg

@DavidCarlisle Ro'n i'n dyfalu felly ;).

@Johannes_B Oh my ... that again :D

@DavidCarlisle Try loading a new xparse with an old expl3 ;-)

@DavidCarlisle Indeed: looks good so far

@JosephWright need to push luaotfload to stop using luatexbase, I suppose I could just ask them if they'd mind if I accepted my own pull request but I'd rather they did it, perhaps it'll get done along with today's request about new Mac fonts.

Hi does anyone know of a simple way to edit/remove PDF metadata. The file I have was created by Word and all the answers here show how to do things with hyperref.

Not much action today :-(

@ChristianHupfer Yeah, almost 8pm and I'm not yet rep capped. :P

@egreg There's justice on this world :-P

@egreg: I only need 25 to get the magic 44444 ... ok, only a tenth of your rep ;-)

@JosephWright what is the way to place a text superscript at the end of a number in an S column (say, with table-format=3.2(1) but having an entry like 42*) when using xelatex? I am not having quite the same problem as this question (questions/248048/siunitx-warning-textsuperscript-invalid-in-math-mode-and-missi‌​ng-spaces). I am trying to place an asterisk after a number, and it is getting placed at the far right of the cell, not near the number as your examples in the manual show.

@repurposer Hi, I think it would be better to ask a proper question. The problem you're facing could be faced by other people. Also, it turns out it's easier to answer a proper questions than a chat question.

@yo' I am preparing one, but I have asked some really really trivial ones before, I got a little self-conscious :) so now I ask in here first

@repurposer This looks like a good question. If you ask it and it's well stated, await an upvote from me :-)

@yo' Thanks for the encouragement! Now I just have to make M my MWE

@repurposer that's the toughest part of making it :-)

Call the next deaf - end -ant @PauloCereda @JosephWright ;-)

@ChristianHupfer oh my

@yo' and its the part where I answer my own question with another, harder (or otherwise) question

@PauloCereda Still the Ducktor BeeWho? ;-)

@ChristianHupfer Quack. :)

@PauloCereda No, the elementary particles are named Quark, not Quack ;-)

@ChristianHupfer ooh quantum duck.

@JosephWright @yo' OK, I didn't read the manual far enough, again. table-align-text-post = false

@PauloCereda Schrödinger's Cat and Heisenberg's Duck :D

Here's a bad joke about Heisenberg ( I tell them to my students to 'explain' the Uncertainty relation)

Heisenberg drives with his car and is stopped by the police. The police officer asks Heisenberg: "Do you know how fast you were driving?" ... Heisenberg replies: "No, but I know where I am"

Can anyone answer this:

@Werner \includegraphics ?

@Werner Found a good duplicate

Yeah ...

@DavidCarlisle Sure... I'm just unfamiliar with the way things work in plain TeX... :-/

@egreg Thanks.

@ChristianHupfer Tell me you unaccepted an answer of mine just to achieve this. :P

@ChristianHupfer If so, it was well thought!

@ChristianHupfer I should unaccept one answer to get rid of the 2–7 cycle. Oh, wait!

@egreg Guilty :D

@egreg I did not want to downvote just for this ;-) Sorry, cheating is fun

@ChristianHupfer I had been thinking why you did it! That's typical of a physicist's devious mind.

@egreg I take that as a compliment :D

@ChristianHupfer You're allowed to. But it wasn't. :P

@egreg I should ask two questions and accept the answers, I will get in line with a pretty rep then ;-)

@ChristianHupfer Or get three downvotes. Maybe I can arrange that!

@egreg My way sounds more comfortable ;-)

Hey, does anyone know if there is anything on the site about how to iterate over a comma separated list that occurs inside of .csv file (i.e., one of the cells in the .csv file is itself a comma separated list)? Or does anyone have any suggestions about how to do this?

@AdamLiter Iterating over a comma separated list can be done with \@for (or more advanced methods).

@egreg Hmm, okay. I might have to end up asking a question. I didn't want to ask in case there was a duplicate. But I'm using datatool to read and process .csv files, and some of the cells in the .csv files contain comma separated lists. But trying to iterate over the comma separated list when passing it to another command via the datatool interface isn't working for me. I thought it was an expansion issue, but it's still not working even with some \expandafters. :p

@AdamLiter Seeing an example should lead to a solution.

@egreg Thanks. :) I'll ask a question, then.

Is this on topic? It seems to be a ShareLaTeX problem, over which we can do nothing.

@Werner graphicx works in plain tex (or at least that's what I tell plain users)

@egreg Don't think so, I voted to close.

@egreg ^^^ That's what I'm trying to do. If you think there's a suitable duplicate somewhere, I'd appreciate being pointed in the right direction. :)

@AdamLiter Solution on line. ;-)

@AdamLiter Definitely not one for the chat!

@JosephWright do you understand what happened to the \luatexcatcodetable patch

@JosephWright oh, it's just not gone to ctan yet?

@egreg Thanks! 😋 I'll have to look at it later. I'm just boarding a plane.

@AdamLiter Have a nice flight!