@CarLaTeX Maybe, maybe not. Even though I am not at all excited about this behavior, I am actually more concerned by other behavior which does not seem to cause a comparable reaction of the community: copying the answers of others and trying to sell them as your own result. Looking forward to the day on which a similar amount of upvoted comments gets placed to such posts.

hi, actually I am interested in writing a mathematics book using latex. But I want to avoid different margins for odd and even pages. I am using overleaf and the template is book. How can I do this ?

@adityaguharoy Load the class with the [oneside] option.

@marmot That is more difficult to identify, I think you could write a Meta post with some examples.

Quack!

@PauloCereda Quack

@PauloCereda Bom dia! (Boa noite pra mim.)

@JosephWright ooh a duck

@AlanMunn Bom dia, meu caro! :)

@PauloCereda Here's some music to brighten your day. youtube.com/watch?v=i_vWu0H4ghU

@AlanMunn cool, thanks!

@PauloCereda Hi and good morning from Sicily. Today is a very nice day here.

@Sebastiano Ciao!

@PauloCereda Can you explain me, please, better the badge curious? I have been registered for two years, but I have not understood how this badge works at all. I have reached 21/5. Could you explain it to me very simply? My English is really bad. :-(

@Sebastiano Sorry, I don't follow badges. For me it's all superfluous. :)

@CarLaTeX Good morning from Sicily. Have a nice day.

@PauloCereda ahahaha also for me. My is only a curiosity :-)

@Sebastiano Ciao! In Milan it's cloudy but it doesn't rain

@PauloCereda better like this ^^^?

@UlrikeFischer OH MY YES

@PauloCereda ;-). Should be actually possible with some css.

@UlrikeFischer This should be simple: we just need to edit cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/tex/img/sprites.svg and upload the new file somewhere

/* change back to old voting icons */
      .vote-accepted-on, .vote-accepted-off, .vote-up-on, .vote-up-off, .vote-down-on, .vote-down-off, .star-on, .star-off {
         background-image: url("http://cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/tex/img/sprites.svg") !important;
      }
      .vote-up-on, .vote-up-off, .vote-down-on, .vote-down-off {
         height: 48px !important;
      }

@UlrikeFischer ^^ this is the css to replace the images for voting icons, should be adjustable for badges

@samcarter can we have a badger?

And in the future, a snake.

For... reasons unknown. @JosephWright ^^ :)

@PauloCereda a badger might be doable - it might not be recognisable scaled down to the size of the badges though ...

@samcarter ooh

@PauloCereda :)

@PauloCereda mushroom

@JosephWright ooh here comes a snake

@samcarter ^^

@UlrikeFischer mmm, maybe not so easy as I thought. I was hoping that something like

would work, but it seems that somehow it cannot find the image from github.

@UlrikeFischer In theory the code works, I can get our previous icons back via background-image: url("http://cdn.sstatic.net/Sites/tex/img/sprites.svg") !important; just need to find a place to upload a svg file

@CarLaTeX Nahh, I'm not going to do this because I'd have to name names, and these people will then always go after me.

@marmot ooh pitchforks

Hey! I'm trying to make a grid out of points. Is there some go to solution for this?

@UlrikeFischer Try

@samcarter nice. Ducks everywhere ;-). What was the problem with the other url?

@PauloCereda ^^^^

@UlrikeFischer ooh

@UlrikeFischer I think the problem with the other url was that it did not really link to the image, but to the github page which showed the image.

Luckily there was a question on stackoverflow which had the answer :)

@DavidCarlisle Blog is functioning, if basic, on GitHub Pages: josephwright.github.io. Now cleaning up all of the broken stuff ...

@DavidCarlisle Then I have the look-and-feel to address ... thinking of a simple layout at present, and looking for some 'proper' help ..

@PauloCereda You've got a lot of ducks:

@samcarter awwww <3

@PauloCereda josephwright.github.io :)

@JosephWright yay!

@JosephWright no jekyll theme at all?

@UlrikeFischer Now I wonder if it is possible to exclude some users from the duck badges. Every time I see them near DavidCarlisle I'm afraid the ducks will end up as lunch...

@samcarter oh no

@samcarter feeling hungry already

@DavidCarlisle oh no

@DavidCarlisle Not yet ....

@DavidCarlisle Try now :)

@JosephWright very dark:-)

@cis yes, normally means that you have an external and internal (texlive) ghostscript and that their versions differ. Somehow on windows this confuses ghostscript.

@UlrikeFischer Can I fix that? Maybe adding a regedit entry?

@cis I did install the newest external ghostscript so that they matched again.

Mmmhh, and using the internal TeXLive2018 ghostscript is not possible?

@cis Perhaps, you can try to debug the interference. I don't use ghostscript nowadays often enough to really care about it, I simply wanted to get rid of the error and continue.

@DavidCarlisle, @PauloCereda Blog now working more-or-less correctly: I had a few dodgy chars in titles that killed some posts! Now I just need to add links to my pages, and decide if I want to have everything in one page or create archives. I'll grab the Jekyll code from texfaq.org to help, I suspect

@JosephWright oh

@PauloCereda Basics all now work

@PauloCereda Lots of clean-up: easier with a local copy of the source

@JosephWright Money saved!

@PauloCereda and he's in the benign and gentle control care of the folks at Redmond

@DavidCarlisle ah :)

@DavidCarlisle, @PauloCereda A more interesting question is whether to bother with the 'just the recent posts'/'archives' approach, or have everything in one page: the latter is a lot easier :)

@JosephWright I have a bit of both in souldern.org, I show the "most recent" (5 I think) posts on the home page but then just link to a single page for all the rest. there is a paginator plugin that will split up the main index page but I decided not to go wth that.

Hello everyone :)

I just found something that looks like a bug... Am I allowed to keep \ExplSyntaxOn during \begin{document}?

It apparently breaks when graphics is loaded:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphics}
\usepackage{expl3}
\ExplSyntaxOn
\begin{document}
\end{document}

@PhelypeOleinik user error I'd say

@DavidCarlisle I imagined something like that, but wasn't sure...

@DavidCarlisle I narrowed it down to a loop in supp-pdf.mkii that defines that \scratchcounter

@PhelypeOleinik Davidisprobablyrighti'sanusererrorohwaitthere'ssomesideeffectsondoingthat

@PauloCereda stop showing off your German skills

@DavidCarlisle ooh

@DavidCarlisle Frank is German... hmmmmm

There is something secret going on

@PhelypeOleinik you can't expect code that was written in 1993 for context should work automatically if used in a latex context with space being ignored

@PauloCereda LOL. But it works most of the time. But I must agree that it's strange usage.

@PhelypeOleinik :)

@DavidCarlisle Agreed :-) Just wanted to make sure

@DavidCarlisle some packages are timeless, like longtable. Great piece of code.

@PauloCereda clearly which is why this file is completely empty: htmlpreview.github.io/?https://raw.githubusercontent.com/…

@DavidCarlisle undocumented features

@PauloCereda Where is your bot? We could ask him whom to blame. ;-)

@marmot ooh hold on

'ello, Psmith is now fully operational.

Hi @Psmith!

Billy turned again to his post and start on a holiday, leaving no address

OH MY CHRISTIAN IS HERE

@ChristianHupfer hi!

@PauloCereda Only by accidence... I wanted to clean up my profile ...

@ChristianHupfer oh

/shutdwn

Irritating shutdown sequence. Cheerio!

@PauloCereda In a World that seems to be ruled by Ducks, Marmots and other TikZ - Entities/strange chat bots, there is nothing to do for me here :-(

@ChristianHupfer The timing is good, the tikzling package is out and provides you with several brilliant options for the profile pic. More seriously, how R U? Haven't seen U in a while.

@marmot My presence isn't needed here

@ChristianHupfer ??? What makes you say this?

@ChristianHupfer no one is needed here:-) (But nice to see you back even if only temporarily)

@marmot It is exactly this duck/pizza etc. talking in chat or at questions/answers that pushed me away. That screw is overtightened. Nothing to contribute from my side about that

@DavidCarlisle Thanks ;-)

@ChristianHupfer Sorry to hear that. Yet I am pretty sure that the intentions of these posts are not mean, nor destructive.

@ChristianHupfer You are certainly needed here - how else should we get all all the exciting news from the Black Forest and its cookies?

/shutdown

Initiating shutdown sequence. Cheerio!

@ChristianHupfer Looking at this ^^^ statement, I feel that you are precisely doing what a single (jerk) user wants you to do. Wouldn't it be better not to comply with that (jerk) user?

@ChristianHupfer -- you've given a lot of us some good times and good information. if we can't convince you that you're appreciated here, then we'll be sad to say goodbye, but wish you well. i hope you'll remember us kindly. (i would offer you a piece of baklava from a tray i have on my desk today, but i haven't mastered teleportation.)

@samcarter Would you mind sharing your code for the Venus with the OP of this question? At this point, his Venus is just an unspectacular black dot.

@ChristianHupfer The situation is quieter now, don't deprive us of our handsomest user!

@marmot I'm afraid the code does not really exist. Everything besides a standard figure was drawn by hand (you can find the image in the gitlab repo)

@samcarter I see. So it is real artwork. That's why it is so spectacular.

@marmot Drawing with tex does not mean it's no real artwork, there are some pretty impressive proofs on the main site.

I'm currently reading this tex.stackexchange.com/a/453277/36296 Very creative how to use countries of Europe to draw planets!

@samcarter True. But I really love the traditional style, but my problem is that I cannot even draw a straight line properly. (Maybe it is because of my claws? ;-)

@samcarter Which European countries? (Is the dark side of the moon already a country, I mean even before BREXIT? ;-)

@marmot You just need such a machine designboom.com/technology/… I'm sure one can write an tikz interface to operate it

@marmot Unfortunately the moon seems to be random steps. I'm not sure what the implications are that the whole Earth is Greek...

@samcarter Maybe it says something about debts.... and Marathon runners on this planet are real heroes, I guess. ;-)

@DavidCarlisle that's quite a change to index you are proposing there ...

\documentclass{article}
\makeindex
\begin{document}

bbbb\index{Grüße}

\let\zzz\index
\def\index#1{\zzz{\detokenize{#1}}}

bbbb\index{Grüße}
\end{document}

@UlrikeFischer blame @barbarabeeton ^^

@UlrikeFischer well... the first version works by accident (as the verbatim code wasn't expecting active characters..... but in any sane world the second version has a much better chance of being indexed correctly:

\indexentry{Gr\IeC {\"u}\IeC {\ss }e}{1}
\indexentry{Grüße}{1}

@UlrikeFischer does standard makeindex do anything sensible with either form?

@DavidCarlisle No, not really. I get e.g. this (without any german options which I don't remember anyway):

  \item Gr\IeC {\"u}\IeC {\ss }e,~1
  \item Gruss,~1
  \item Grzz,~1
  \item Grüße,~1

@UlrikeFischer so that last entry is sort of reasonable (but I guess sort order would be strange of combined with other entries?

@DavidCarlisle Grüße should be before Grzz. And it would put Äpfel behind all the G, which is wrong too. It looks as if everything non-ascii is simply sorted later. There wouldn't be much gain, we would still have to define the sorting as e.g. Gruesse. But the spaces after e.g. commands like \c{o} are a problem, so the change could be worth it.

@UlrikeFischer the problem @barbarabeeton was having was that if you have commands such as \textit (or as you say, \c0 you get different spaces depending if the \index is in a command argument (so verbatim is disabled) or not, so you can get two identical \index commands making two separate entries in the index

@JosephWright how hard would it be to get biber to sort an index? (xindy is just too weird:-)

@DavidCarlisle I know, I just had to explain this to a customer (he had defined his own index commands and variants). I told him to use ç. So I think it could be a good idea (but wouldn't improve sorting).

@DavidCarlisle I had a nice chat with Nicola some weeks ago about the various index programms. Her bib2gls is a quite nice option, the main problem is that you have to change the way you create index entries. It is more like the glossaries commands: write the definitions first and then use only references.

@DavidCarlisle and xindy is weird ;-).

@UlrikeFischer this claims xindy is eay to use here:

@DavidCarlisle Probably not that hard: in the end, it's likely just a question of getting PK to make a second output 'routine'

@DavidCarlisle only as long as you don't want to configure it.

@DavidCarlisle Was thinking the same

@UlrikeFischer I don't, I just want non-english people to stop complaining their index is broken. You should learn the alphabet when you are two and stick with that order, what configuration do you need?:-)

@JosephWright github.com/souldern/souldern.github.io/blob/master/… :-)

@DavidCarlisle well index is not only about sorting words. The second hard part is the sorting (and formatting) of the page numbers (including all sort of variants like bible book and so). See e.g. tex.stackexchange.com/q/356285/2388 (no I didn't try to understand why using klingon helped)

@UlrikeFischer true but that part is more or less the same as English

@DavidCarlisle not if the numbers are non-latin too ;-). But beside this setting up or changing some sorting needs the same sort of loops, there is no good documentation, the files are no real utf8, you can't put local files in a local texmf and so on. On the whole I don't think that xindy is a real alternative. It looked good when it started but unlike biber it didn't mature.

@UlrikeFischer yes I never really understood xindy enough to use it:-)

@UlrikeFischer -- i actually accept @DavidCarlisle's blame for what i interpret as a suggestion to use \detokenize. the context i'm working in requires the basic makeindex program, which handles only ascii, so in that case it's a good solution. but if other codings are used, i'm not surprised if all bets are off.

@barbarabeeton the situation is actually no worse than it is without that change (but is different) that is you need something like \index{Gruesse@Grüße} to get a half way sensible sort order in either case, although the default order if you don't provide the ascii version is different if you add \detokenize so it would probably change existing indices from being wrong to being wrong in different ways

@barbarabeeton actually I think the suggestion is sound even with non-ascii. Naturally this leads to non-ascii in the idx, but imho in the long run we need this anyway, sorting licr is no fun.

@UlrikeFischer -- one of the sorting problems i'm familiar with is the sorting of personal names for a math reviews index (although they don't do that any more, now that everything is online). that sort handles names in all kinds of languages, with conventions for ascii equivalents; it was quite interesting to define. the indexes we're dealing with now are much simpler, but with index terms buried in footnotes and captions, the space problem is real.

@UlrikeFischer @egreg one possibility would be an option on the makeidx (or imakeidx) (@egreg) that switched in \detokenize

@UlrikeFischer The third item looks like proper marmot language. ;-)

@DavidCarlisle that would probably the easiest. Then we wouldn't have to ponder if something breaks, the users could find out it for us ;-).

@UlrikeFischer and best of all, we can blame @egreg if things go wrong.

@UlrikeFischer indexes would be easier in nullfont

@DavidCarlisle ;-).

@JosephWright I just got a 3rd server in a reverse auction from my provider, a Xeon with 256 GB ECC RAM and 8 Terabyte RAID HD, backup space, and 1 Gig network with unlimited bandwidth, room to play after work

That's an already used server, fresh installed, reverse auction means that they lowered the monthly price day by day until somebody bids on it

I will move some virtual servers from older hardware to that one. They really need the RAM to breath.

Have to upgrade the OS anyway, and I should document the setup procedures for the case that somebody takes over maintainance of sites.

@StefanKottwitz Oooh

The server #3 at the bottom is my new playground :-)

@JosephWright If you would like to keep using Wordpress with same URLs and simple use, you could move to there. The only danger is that you might be lured into having an account with responsibility for further TeX sites.

@JosephWright I also wanted to have some space for an experimental StackExchange mirror and and updated online compiler and another CTAN mirror even though ctan.net is reasonably fast for installing and updating (takes me 20 min for full setup)

@StefanKottwitz Conversion to Jekyll seems to be going OK: I'm now on the 'how to I want the layout' phase, rather than the 'get the data out' phase

One cannot add a virtual server if the RAM is low so servers start using swapfiles.

@StefanKottwitz Sounds like fun :)

@JosephWright Fun is when you get rid of limits.

So it is. :-)

@StefanKottwitz :)

@samcarter Have you thought about renaming the mole to Avogadro? ;-)