@JosephWright There's a weird effect if you load babel and the first thing in the document is \cite{}, by the way. I didn't suspect babel for a while because the MWE was such a mess generally. I don't know if I caught everything, either, though I'm pretty sure my version isn't as bad as the original. (It compiles at least, which has to be worth something.)

@egreg oooh :)

@cfr Quack! :)

@UlrikeFischer I've gone for $100/h: I'll see what they say. As I do the work anyway for free I'm not sure how much will actually end up being charged!

@JosephWright Dollars?

@PauloCereda The ACS (American Chemical Society) is oddly enough based in the US

@JosephWright :)

@PauloCereda Have you seen this (still missing a TeX solution :P): codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/74212/quack-the-angry-duck

@BMWurm Oh my!

@PauloCereda The best part is the wikipedia link on Duck, apparently there are some sad sad people who have no clue what a duck is..... no wonder the duck is angry :P

@BMWurm LOL

Am I too wacky to giggle at this? :)

@BMWurm There's one answer where the bloke adds :D, so they say the angry duck is pleased and smiling. :)

@PauloCereda Saw that too :D and nope you're not too wacky... or we both are, I giggled too :D

@BMWurm ooh :)

We have an interview today!

@JosephWright: we need an online tool for prechecking potential L3-based packages in order to analyze potential misuse of code guidelines and prefixes. :)

@PauloCereda Yes, over time such things would be handy

@JosephWright :)

@PauloCereda Cwac!

@cfr yaaaaay! How are you?

@PauloCereda Er... OK, I think. In trouble, probably. (But I always think that.) I've been trying to document prooftrees. Bound to mean trouble ;).

@PauloCereda And you? How is your duckness?

@cfr ooh!

@cfr In a hurry, writing my thesis draft/proposal. :)

Oh and I will use trees (mainly forest ones). :)

@PauloCereda Those are the same? For me, the proposal came before the draft.

@PauloCereda ;) Do you have version 2.0.1?

Of Forest, that is ^^.

@PauloCereda Do you think @DavidCarlisle can draw daffodils? It's Dydd Dewi Sant in a couple of days and I gave my daffodil pin to a visiting Chinese academic but they don't seem to be selling them this year ;).

[Dydd Dewi Sant = St. David's Day]

@cfr The proposal first, actually. :)

@cfr Oh I guess I have the current from TeX Live.

@PauloCereda Should be 2.0.1 then. (At least.)

relocatable: No
cat-version: 2.0.1

Oh it is!

@cfr Yay!

@cfr In picture mode? Yes. :)

@PauloCereda Of course ... ;).

@PauloCereda It has a couple of bug fixes. Depending on which options you use, it might be less frustrating. There are more bug fixes on the way, I think. But the bugs are not as important. At least, the ones I know about are not.

@PauloCereda But there is time, I assume, if you are currently at the proposal stage for the bugs to get fixed before the thesis stage. What is your thesis on?

@cfr oh I see.

@cfr Macro expansion. :)

In a couple of hours, we will have an interview with @Mico! :)

@PauloCereda And I need to do so many things before that :) First item: install new internet connection. Check!

@yo' <3

@egreg Under what circumstances are unprotected end-of-lines actually an issue? In the case you just edited, I didn't think it would matter at all...

@JP-Ellis in "horizontal mode" macros? Always.

The particular context to this question is: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/296085/…

@JP-Ellis yeah, saw that. Well, for \newTerm it's clearly an issue since it could appear inside a paragraph, causing double space. For \termExplanation, there's probably no problem, but who can be sure? Better always catch the spaces.

@JosephWright Are you here?

@Alenanno Yup

@JosephWright In this question, the user has created another login instead of logging in. Can you merge the accounts?

He's also editing the answer instead of posting comments. :P

@Alenanno Only staff can do merges

@JosephWright Mmh I seemed to remember we could too. Nevermind, will ask the CM then. :D

@Alenanno Years ago, yes

@Alenanno They got rid of it as people were merged where it wasn't right, and it's hard to undo

@Alenanno There's a data protection issue if you get it wrong

@JosephWright Gotcha. Still...

@JP-Ellis One of them was really necessary. I leave you as an exercise to guess which one. Since it requires thinking whether the command will be called in a context where spaces are ignored, it's better to put % everywhere it is not bad (after constants, for instance)

@Alenanno I think some people were trigger-happy

@egreg Yeah, @yo' explained one circumstance where it might be detrimental. Is there a way to tell TeX to ignore new lines in \def?

@JosephWright They should have disabled only for the trigger-happy then.

@cfr vvvv

@JP-Ellis see expl3 :)

@JP-Ellis You can read my paper presented at the TUG Conference in 2015 ;-)

@JP-Ellis You'll see I cited @DavidCarlisle. ;-)

@egreg @JP-Ellis "cited" isn't quite the word I'd use, "abused" perhaps.

hmm, I can't access your paper @egreg

@JP-Ellis but you can access the video: river-valley.zeeba.tv/recollections-of-a-spurious-space-catcher

@yo' @egreg can send a copy on (there's no copyright transfer with TUG)

@DavidCarlisle Harassed?

@yo' I really need to start using expl3...

@JP-Ellis I can send you a copy, if you email me. You find my email address at the web page listed in my profile.

@egreg You can find my email address at the web page listed on my profile too :P

lol

@JP-Ellis If I have an email from you, I may be able to remember.

@egreg It's on its way :)

@JP-Ellis: I was mentioned in @egreg's talk too! :)

@PauloCereda latex3.github.io/latex-project.org

@PauloCereda (Logo still needs adjustment)

@JosephWright ooooh <3

@PauloCereda We probably need to revise the content yet, for example L3 should likely link straight to GitHub (@DavidCarlisle)

@JosephWright I was wondering if every LaTeX occurrence should be typeset accordingly (say, with some CSS trickery), but there's a lot of it in the page and it might hurt teh eyez.

@PauloCereda Never been the case on the website, and some of the team don't think that should happen in running text anyway (I wonder who!)

@PauloCereda nah if it's not typeset with latex, use latex or LaTeX

@DavidCarlisle @Joseph got it. :)

@PauloCereda and next time anyone invents some software, try to avoid silly joke names with weird capitalisation.

@DavidCarlisle How about sUpErCaLiFrAgIlIsTiCeXpIaLiDoCiOuS? :)

@JosephWright That website looks really good!

@PauloCereda No: the sound of it is simply quite atrocious.

@JosephWright I feel a luatex mail coming on :(

@DavidCarlisle touché!

\mathchardef\alpha="010B % plain tex definintion
\show\alpha

\bye

@JosephWright ^^^^ what do you get for the above?

@DavidCarlisle Headache?

@PauloCereda :)

@PauloCereda I've just spent two evenings failing to get bm to work on luatex, and just realised it's because the flippin engine is completely broken (again)

Oh no!

> \alpha=\Umathchar"0"00"00010B.
l.2 \show\alpha

@DavidCarlisle ^^^

@JosephWright yep so the character fam is always zero and the real fam is prepended to the character code, and the whole construct can't actually be used to generate a \Umathchar call that works to select char 0 from fam 1....

@JosephWright I need to go back and look at those luatex tlg which show Umathchar and check by hand what numbers it shows, i may fix the tlg so luatex fails again.

Is it a bad design decision to allow optional arguments both before and after the "main" argument (in the fontspec style)? Of course, only in places where things can be misinterpreted.

To the batcave interview room!

@PauloCereda I'm afraid I'll be a bit late to the interview room. :(

@egreg We will hold Micro prisoner until your arrival. :)

@yo' better than having two adjacent optional args (which makes the first one not optional if you use the second)

@PauloCereda -- you shrunk the interviewee!

@barbarabeeton Oh no!

@DavidCarlisle well, they both would be KV for the same interface. I just think of the problem:

@yo' oh I was going to say these days just have one optional arg and make it kv

\mymacro[zillions of KV stuff here]{THEIMPORTANTTHING}
\mymacro{THEIMPORTANTTHING}[zillions of KV stuff here]

@yo' just do the first

I found the 1st interface more natural, but the 2nd one more cleaner

@yo' trailing optional arguments are source of so many bugs if there is ever a possibility of [ as text immediately following

@DavidCarlisle that's the thing; this won't happen (these are not in-text macros, more preamble things, or things that live in special environments of their own)

@yo' oh Ok in that case do either but not both.

@DavidCarlisle I'll probably make it "trailing" and issue an error if there's ever \mymacro[

Testing new TeXworks build :-)

Just stumbled across this

Let's go, friends!

@yo' Probably :-) but the rearrangement of keyval had (some) reasons.

@WillRobertson yeah, but I feel the same reason, and I also feel that both places for the optional argument could be useful to some...

Mico's interview going on!

@Will But it's easier to add a feature than to remove it, so I'll place the KV argument after the standard one (probably)

@barbarabeeton LuaTeX post v1 is looking 'interesting'!

@JosephWright probably it'll turn into sile:-)

@DavidCarlisle !

@barbarabeeton @DavidCarlisle and I will fill you in re. LuaTeX

@JosephWright I've decided that bm is irretrievably broken with .89.2, but there's a month to go before release so I won't undo ltnews25 just yet.

@barbarabeeton French has ÿ for some place names.

@DavidCarlisle Cool! I knew you had a Welsh streak somewhere ;).

(Is that picture or paint?)

@cfr tikz

@DavidCarlisle ??

@cfr sorry, I lied. MS Paint

@DavidCarlisle I better sort the .ini file business (I'm still not 100% sure it really should go to CTAN ...)

@JosephWright i needed it to test plain luatex just now, so without I thin no one is testing it :(

@PauloCereda btw, I just remembered now: I think of you all with the new nasty virus thingy.

@yo' Zika?

@PauloCereda yes, that's the name

@yo' Things are quite scary around here indeed. :(

@PauloCereda yeah. Every single case in Europe (we've had couple of them already) seems to be in the news, but it's nothing compared to how many "broken" children in Brazil? About 5000 already?

@yo' Let me check.

@yo': 508 confirmed, 4107 in analysis.

Quite disturbing.

@PauloCereda indeed. Well, it's just to let you know that you're in my thoughts and prayers.

Thank you very, very much, Tom. <3

@DavidCarlisle Could you check you are happy with the bundle I have, then: I'll send to CTAN tomorrow

@DavidCarlisle ;). This is what Inkscape gave me:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{tikz}

\begin{document}


\begin{tikzpicture}[y=0.80pt, x=0.80pt, yscale=-1.000000, xscale=1.000000, inner sep=0pt, outer sep=0pt]

\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

@JosephWright OK, no pdf(e)tex.ini ? (I know it's not really changed but...)

@DavidCarlisle I wondered about that

@PauloCereda The last arrival in my sister's family:

@JosephWright any thoughts on the \oval thing?

@DavidCarlisle I've not really been following: I assume you are handling it!

@egreg nice :)

@JosephWright I was planning to look again after sorted out bm/luatex but I've given up that for now. It's usual problem using leaders to generate vanishingly small lines can't be that sensible (although the dvi driver could presumably just ignore it, certainly dvips has never complained) but changing the macros that survived virtuallu unchanged since 1985 or something is bound to break something

@egreg is that you in the foreground bottom centre?

@DavidCarlisle Ah, so the correct fix is 'use some newer code that generates PS/PDF graphics commands'

@JosephWright that was my answer to the bug report, yes. but they pushed back on that a bit and also said pict2e doesn't work with xetex (that must be fixable, so I guess I should start there)

@egreg -- needs a teddy bear.

@barbarabeeton well, when my nephew was born, I gave him a rubber duck -- does that count, too?

@DavidCarlisle No, maybe a relation of mine.

@yo' -- yes. rubber ducks are good for bathtubs. teddy bears are good to snuggle, but better when they can stay dry.

@barbarabeeton Definitely

@barbarabeeton :)

@yo' Every child should get a rubber duck! We took care that all newborn in our environment got one (which wasn't always easy, there was a time rubber ducks were "out").

@UlrikeFischer The one I got for him can even serve some educational purposes (for learning colours):

@JosephWright Next Saturday there should be the “unanswered” session

@yo' Rubik duck

@egreg yep yep

@yo' we go more for the traditionel "Ernies Quietscheente".

@UlrikeFischer :)