@Landak unless the journal actually accepts that class, won't that be confusing for people?
@MarianoSuárez-Álvarez not directly but you can look at \lastskip and see if it's bigger than some value (presumably if the thing you are boxing has any kind of space at the bottom then you don't want to add extra space. If you use \addvspace instead of \vspace the test against \lastskip is built in.
@AlanMunn In 1985 it was essential to reclaim those bytes to leave room for the document processing...
@DavidCarlisle They allow arbitrary file uploads to their scholarone site (which does just follow tex includes) and have some pretty strict (and in my mind, moderately pointless -- like end figures, restrictions on formatting requests, and so forth) typographical requirements that make the first ~500 lines of any tex submission rather ugly. My ultimate hope is that if others in the field use it they'll adopt it
LaTeX Warning: You have requested, on input line 283, version
`2018/02/21' of package l3pdfmode,
but only version
`2017/03/18 v L3 Experimental driver: PDF mode'
is available.
Why would cutting an empty string via \StrCut from the xstring package, into two macros \aa and \bb- "\StrCut{}{ }{\aa}{\bb}", yield a FALSE from "\ifblank{\aa}{T}{F}" ??
@JosephWright I'm working on this tagging and want to check that the BDC/BMC markers and the objects and dictionaries are still where they should be. But I also want log-based/\show/trace-checks to ensure that my commands still do what they are supposed to do.
@JohnDorian note however if you use the redefined command in some contexts it could comeback before the redefinition, so if you had a table caption that had ....\to ... then depending where the \renewcommand was you could find the caption had the new definition but the list of tables was typeset before the redefinition so used the original definition, so would not match the caption
@touhami OK take a simpler example. ^^25 is like % and comments out the rest of the line. \char"25 typesets the character in slot hex 25 of the current font which is most likely a %
@touhami The typeset result is the same, because ^^0a and ^^0e have category code 12 in plain TeX. On the other hand ^^0b has category code 7, ^^0c is active and \outer, ^^0d has category code 5 (end of line).
@touhami ^^xy (where x and y are lowercase hexadecimal digits) represents the character token with the specified character code (and its associated category code). On the contrary, \char<number> typesets the character with that number in the current font.
@touhami So \^^0d is the same as typing \^ (the accent command), but \\char"0d is not the same, because it is eight tokens, starting with \\
Similarly, $a^^0d{b}$ is the same as $a^{b}$, but you cannot use \char"0D" in the place of ^^0d`.
@touhami I can try going a bit slower: \char is a command, or more precisely, a TeX primitive. It expects to see a number next, and then it will typeset the character in the current font which is found at the given slot.
@touhami On the other hand, the ^^ notation is just a way to put a character into TeX's input stream of characters: If TeX sees ^^xy in the input stream, where xy are two lower case hex digits, then that is replaced by the corresponding character, before any other processing takes place. What then happens, depends on many things, including the category code of the named character.
@touhami For example, ^^5c^^64^^65^^66 is a difficult way to type \def.
@egreg -- can you please take a look at this question: tex.stackexchange.com/q/423330 . the person asking the question wants to put his index at the beginning of his document, but since imakeidx zaps the .i* files when \makeindex is issued, that won't work. maybe you can help.
@touhami If TeX finds a character token in a context where it's not looking for arguments, it simply typesets it, provided it has category code 11 or 12. And such a character token will point to the slot in the current font corresponding to the ASCII code of the character.
Characters with code <32 are not printable on the console. But TeX fonts use all the slots.
@touhami rather famously for example capital Gamma is in position 0 (ascii null) in the classic tex encodings, not all font rendering programs coped well with that in the earlier days (killed some versions of acrobat if I recall correctly)
@AlanMunn me?
@AlanMunn as established the other day, being a linguist you are expected to be good at German
@DavidCarlisle There's a famous (possibly apocryphal) exchange between Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle (two extremely important linguists) where Jacobson was teaching a class and writing down examples in Russian. Halle says "Roman, you can't write examples in Russian, the students don't know Russian", to which Jakobson replies "But they ought to should know Russian".
