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12:15 AM
@PauloCereda clearly a fake, there is writing on the page
 
@DavidCarlisle LOL, but he was fast on that
 
 
5 hours later…
5:01 AM
@DavidCarlisle @HaraldHanche-Olsen, don't listen to David, I was on holiday, too, and I didn't discuss ducks during the last two weeks :):):)
 
5:12 AM
@JosephWright — hmmm, there's an idea :) tex.stackexchange.com/questions/432766/…
 
 
2 hours later…
6:59 AM
Do I understand correctly that \peek_meaning:NTF is the l3 equivalent of \@ifnextchar?
 
7:12 AM
@Skillmon Not quite: you want \peek_meaning_ignore_spaces:NTF - we are currently looking at some issues concerning spaces and what 'ignore' means ...
 
@JosephWright thank you very much!
 
7:41 AM
@JosephWright Regarding argument naming convention: If I write a macro that reads two consecutive weird delimited arguments, should the argument part of the name be ww or w? E.g. should it be \cs_new:Npn \foo_bar:ww #1 - #2 \q_stop or \cs_new:Npn \foo_bar:w #1 - #2 \q_stop?
 
@Skillmon Just :w - once an argument is non-standard, there is no pattern one can impose
 
@JosephWright ok. I think it is more intuitive to write :ww because it has two arguments, not one, but I obey the conventions:)
 
@Skillmon We've had this discussion on the team :)
 
@JosephWright Imho, then the discussion had the wrong result and I should have joined the team just for that discussion :)
 
@Skillmon Frank is pretty clear: the point of w is that the argument grabbing is non-standard, so can be anything with no necessarily link to how many things are grabbed. A lot of TeX primitives, for example, are w.
@Skillmon Problem is how do you tell from the signature where the arguments start and stop? You can't ...
 
7:49 AM
@JosephWright I know (the latter part), and as I said, I'm going to use the convention. Arguments for both sides are plausible to me, but the non-convention would have been more intuitive for me personally.
@JosephWright is \group_begin: exactly the same as \bgroup, so I could check whether there will be a group with \peek_meaning_ignore_spaces:NTF \group_begin: { <true> } { <false> }?
 
@Skillmon \group_begin: is \begingroup (we don't use braces for grouping in code). You are looking for \c_group_begin_token.
 
8:16 AM
@JosephWright 88 commits and counting:-) how's the markdown doing, I was half watching the commits but haven't tried it...
 
@DavidCarlisle More-or-less done
@DavidCarlisle I think most of the remaining oddities are best handled by hand
@DavidCarlisle A few things to decide on: do we keep &nbsp, do we use &mdash or swap to ---, how do we mark up \meta by default
@DavidCarlisle I'm keen to remove the stray empty lines, but I'm not finding that so easy ... may leave it for a second pass with a simple 'do cleanup' script
@DavidCarlisle I'm checking over by hand now: once a decision is made on \meta (which at present is probably go with what there is now), I'll commit the .md files and start cleaning up by hand. For example, there are things like \csx{`} that need fixing, but occur only once in the entire source.
 
@Skillmon I think if everything had been a macro and then www told you you could use #1 #2 #3 that may have been the plan, but many things with :w aren't macros and don't have #1 eg \if_catcode:w
@JosephWright that is the downside of markdown, it is rubbish as a markup language compared to latex or html:-)
@JosephWright who makes the decision by the way is it still uktug committee or is it time to relieve them of that duty?
 
@DavidCarlisle it is faster to be input than LaTeX if you're equally skilled in both of them. You can do much more stuff in LaTeX or HTML, but if I protocol a discussion, I usually use markdown, as I don't need the advanced stuff of LaTeX or HTML but the speed.
 
@Skillmon yes but since the document in question is averaging less than 1 edit per year speed of typing isn't a major consideration here:-)
 
@DavidCarlisle that's a valid point you made there :)
 
8:27 AM
@DavidCarlisle Practically, it's down to people doing the work :)
 
9
Q: Some of them would say I'm half a duck

Nank Some of them would say I'm half a duck I may be used if you want to try your luck I inspired your sweetest dreams, will say the most accurate But for only 15 of them, it was worth a rate Some of them tend to collect me Even if I'm usually just worth a few penny Ilia L found ...

 
@JosephWright yes but here I wonder if it should be formally handed over to a "github tex-faq organisation" (or something) so control could include people who are not on the committee (me, Karl, @egreg, ...)
 
@DavidCarlisle Good question: the text is basically Robin's so the link to UK-TUG is pretty tenuous anyway
@DavidCarlisle I might check in the Markdown at this stage: I think the script does as much as is sensible. Any further tidy-up is likely as fast done by editing the Markdown as anything else.
@DavidCarlisle My plan then is to clean it all up before squashing back into the gh-pages branch and actually getting something working
@DavidCarlisle I'll email
 
@JosephWright if you wanted to retain the styling you could generate inline html say <span class="meta">... and style it globally, although lots of inline html makes hand editing the markdown in future a bit more weird
 
@DavidCarlisle Quite: I'm thinking we want basically 'vanilla' Markdown
 
8:41 AM
@JosephWright yes so long as that isn't too restrictive (a lifetime of working on markup languages and in the end it comes to this: the most complicated markup we are allowed is *foo* :)
 
@DavidCarlisle Sure
@DavidCarlisle The content of the FAQ is pretty simple in formatting terms: I've kept things like &nbsp; precisely because that is easy
@DavidCarlisle I've checked in the Markdown files: I'll do some cleanup later today, but hopefully we won't need to rerun the scripts
 
@JosephWright OK, thanks
 
@DavidCarlisle There are a lot, but I hope I can get through them quite quickly to do fixes
@DavidCarlisle I'll probably do them in batches of 10-20, alphabetically. I've already spotted a few oddities, for example places where we probably want blockquotes. Shouldn't take too long.
 
@JosephWright is there any markdown validator anywhere or is it just a case of sticking it on gh and seeing if it looks OK?
 
@DavidCarlisle That's my plan :)
@DavidCarlisle GitHub use there own 'flavour' of Markdown (with the three backtick and code highlighting keyword business)
 
8:55 AM
@DavidCarlisle what does \CT@arc@ do in \@cline do?
 
@JosephWright 1998 was the dawn of a new era, the world would be free of unregulated markup, everyone could use xml and get a helpful fatal error if they put a foot out of line. whatever happened?
2
@Skillmon CT@ = colortbl internal, arc = arrayrulecolor
 
@DavidCarlisle thx. Just found it in the documentation (it get's let to different things so many times that I first didn't find the definition inside \arrayrulecolor->\CT@arc).
 
@Skillmon I'm upset you don't find my command naming system self documenting and intuitive, @JosephWright would have used something really obscure like \colortabl_sometimes_locally_holds_the_arraycolor_settings_when_its_not_relax:
3
 
@DavidCarlisle People
 
@JosephWright I'll be back....
 
9:03 AM
@DavidCarlisle since colortbl is not in l3 I guess that name should be \colortbl@sometimes@locally@holds@the@arrayrulecolor@settings@when@its@not@rela‌​x
 
@DavidCarlisle You miss the fact it is a variable, rather than a function, so it should be \l__colortabl_sometimes_locally_holds_the_arraycolor_settings_when_its_not_relax‌​_tl
Much more informative and with three more underscores!
 
9:24 AM
@egreg better perhaps would be \__keep_out_of_my_stuff:D
 
Hello! It looks like that the automatic EPS-TO-PDF converter, creating files such as file-eps-converted-to.pdf is buggy. I have a simple image with a few points and lines which gets converted incorrectly. Is there a standard repository (like imgur for images) where I could upload this sample eps file so that others may inspect it?
 
It's very cold today!
 
@Matsmath no if you think it's ghostscript bug then you could report it there otherwise you can put the file on any public server (github, dropbox, whatever) and ask on stackexchange (but stackoverflow rather than this site it would be off topic here I think)
@PauloCereda -40C?
 
@DavidCarlisle is that the SI definition of "very cold"?
 
Ah, I see, so it is a sort of 3rd party plugin. OK, I will look into it, thank you!
 
9:31 AM
@DavidCarlisle Or is it something related to the imperial system and you converted it for us?
 
@DavidCarlisle not that cold. :)
@DavidCarlisle, @Skillmon ^^ :)
 
@Skillmon conversion for -40 is particularly easy :-)
@Matsmath it just runs the epstopdf script on the eps to make a pdf file (and epstopdf is a very thin wrapper around ghostscript) so latex isn't really involved at all other than including the generated pdf.
 
Sure thing, it is all clear now. Thank you!
 
10:14 AM
Is there any possibility to find out whether the current item in a \clist_map is the last one?
I currently use \int_set:Nn \l_tmpa_int { \clist_count:n { #1 } } \clist_map_inline:nn { #1 } { \int_decr:N \l_tmpa_int ... }
 
@Skillmon Are you sure you don't want to do \clist_use:Nn?
 
@egreg You mean something like \int_set:Nn \l_tmpa_int { \clist_count:n { #1 } } \int_step_inline:nn { \l_tmpa_int } { \clist_use:nn { #1 } { ##1 } ...? Is that faster? (it doesn't need to be expandable)
 
@Skillmon I mean \clist_set:Nn \l_tmpa_clist { #1 } \clist_use:Nn \l_tmpa_clist { material between items }
@Skillmon There's also \clist_use:Nnnn for finer control.
 
@egreg not possible, because I need to extensively parse the contents of each clist item. That's why I map to it
 
10:31 AM
@Skillmon I'd convert the clist to a seq: \set_seq_from_clist:Nn \l_tmpa_seq { #1 }, then pop the last element \seq_pop_right:NN \l_tmpa_seq \l_tmpa_tl, do \seq_map_function:NN \l_tmpa_seq \skillmon_process:n and finally do \skillmon_process_item:V \l_tmpa_tl
@Skillmon \skillmon_process_item:n should do the parsing of the item as you wish; you can define \skillmon_process:n to call the previous function and then add the material in between items.
@Skillmon Generally, sequences are more flexible than clists
 
@egreg the version I currently have uses my clist approach with a decreasing counter and does work pretty well. I can't use the map_function ones without further complicating stuff, because I need to give an argument to the parsing function. So in fact I use something like \clist_map_inline:nn { #2 } { \skillmon_parse:nw { #1 } ##1 \q_stop }
 
@Skillmon Not what I'd do, but it depends on the target.
 
10:47 AM
@egreg perhaps I'll show the code later this day or tomorrow. I'm trying to fix some issues with \cline and \rowcolor while automatically format some rows as head rows (\hline above and below the block of head rows, each row with \rowcolor{gray}). There is one thing currently not working which I need to solve and at the moment no key=value interface, which I plan to implement.
 
11:01 AM
@Skillmon I never use colored tables /harsh voice à la Bela Lugosi
 
@egreg I never use colored tables if I have the choice, but since my Prof. doesn't share my typographical taste (BAD TYPOGRAPHY EVERYWHERE (which I wrote completely in uppercase letters to clarify that)).
 
11:18 AM
@DavidCarlisle ooh
 
@PauloCereda I think he'll be especially proud of the font use.
 
@DavidCarlisle fantastic
 
11:35 AM
@barbarabeeton This link ^^^ gives this vvv
 
12:06 PM
@CarLaTeX tug.org/TUGboat/tb39-1 exists, so I think it's just a wrong link. :)
 
12:20 PM
Daily joke for @PauloCereda: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/432740/… "My crystal ball is on holiday".
 
@Joseph LOL
 
I've seen the results of using German-style sarcasm south of the Equator.
;-)
 
@Joseph oopsie
I had an HP 10s+ with me yesterday...
Someone said, "that's a strange cellphone".
/facepalm
 
@PauloCereda I am sure you can get an HP simulator app for your phone:-)
 
@DavidCarlisle :)
@DavidCarlisle perhaps I could write a phone emulator in this calculator too? :)
 
12:39 PM
@PauloCereda You should port TeXLive to it!
 
@mickep ooh
@mickep funny enough, I once managed to install TL 2009 in a Debian install running on my Wii console!
 
@PauloCereda Cool, did you write your thesis, dancing using the Wii controls?
 
@mickep it would be awesome, but no. :)
 
@mickep it is true to say that all the pages of @PauloCereda's thesis that have been written were written on a Wii
 
1:05 PM
@PauloCereda Thank you, however the broken link should be corrected, that's why I told Barbara :):):)
 
@PauloCereda I found yet another weird JDK at Gitlab CI :D
 
@DavidCarlisle Working :)
 
1:23 PM
@JosephWright so it is:-)
 
@TeXnician ooh I have interesting news for you! In a couple of minutes... :D
 
1:52 PM
@DavidCarlisle I think almost everything actually works!
@DavidCarlisle Looking over the questions, we need some cleanup ...
@DavidCarlisle I wonder if I should say that we'll not commit directly to master (after this initial set up): we can have a 'staging' branch and then give version numbers to the FAQ ...
@PauloCereda, @StefanKottwitz As you are interested too: tex-faq.github.io
@DavidCarlisle I get a feeling this is a lot easier to edit than the old scheme ...
 
@JosephWright awesome
 
@PauloCereda Looks good, doesn't it?
@PauloCereda I plan to clean up a bit more, come up with some guidelines for changes, then look into getting tex.ac.uk redirected
 
@JosephWright it does!
 
@PauloCereda :)
@PauloCereda The content needs a good overhaul: as I've noted, I think that might be best done using a formal second branch and a logged merge approach (@DavidCarlisle?)
 
2:14 PM
@JosephWright yes I saw some fixltx2e etc...
 
@DavidCarlisle Exactly, plus inputenc, stuff on engines, etc., and still has material on ANT!
@DavidCarlisle I'd like to do a 'purely mark-up' sweep first
 
@JosephWright do you need a staging branch or just do it via prs from branches in forked copies?
 
@DavidCarlisle Still wondering about \meta: making it just <_foo_> or even _foo_ is easier
 
@JosephWright yes
also the google search goes to my fork
 
@DavidCarlisle Don't think you need a staging branch, not sure how PRs go in terms of building (we just use master as the live branch)
@DavidCarlisle In other news: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/432833/…;. I think I'll have to strip back out ISO dates in expl3 ...
 
2:18 PM
@JosephWright why do people do that rather than doing a miktex or texlive update?
 
@DavidCarlisle Because TeX distros obviously do lack a big button with "Click here to update, every other way will destroy your system"…
 
@JosephWright if you backed out the iso format dates wouldn't it just die somewhere else if you update expl3 by a couple of years without updating any of the packages using it?
@JosephWright I wonder if the title ought to be "The English Language TeX FAQ" rather than "The English TeX FAQ"
 
@DavidCarlisle Perhaps 'The (English Language) TeX Frequently Asked Questions'?
@DavidCarlisle At some stage yes, but I'm mindful of the Linux distro approach to TeX system update
 
user image
6
@samcarter @PauloCereda ^^^^
\documentclass[parskip=full]{scrartcl}
\font\duckchessfamily = "file:luafont-duckchess.lua:mode=node;+liga;+tlig;original=latinmodernsans" at 20pt
\begin{document}

\sffamily
We proudly preset the duck chess font:

{\duckchessfamily
1. Nf3 nf6 2. e4 e5 3. Bb5 lb4 4. Qe2 qe7 5. Rg1 rg7 6. Kf1 kf7
}

\end{document}
 
2:33 PM
@UlrikeFischer oooh
 
@UlrikeFischer ohhh
 
@JosephWright you could add a moment of surprise by writing "The (French Language) TeX Frequently Asked Questions" ;-)
 
@UlrikeFischer Je pourrais répondre à toutes les questions françaises
 
@DavidCarlisle j'en suis sure ;-).
 
@DavidCarlisle As a question of historical development, do you know when the geometry package added support for \newgeometry or if it came with version 1.0? I couldn't find any development history in the documentation.
@DavidCarlisle I have a user's log file complaining about \newgeometry and I found that their version of the package is from 2002 (v3.2), if that helps narrow it down. Basically, I would love to hear, "it was added after 2002." That would provide me an easy course of action with the user. Otherwise, I have to figure out why a version that should support it, doesn't.
 
2:43 PM
@samcarter neat isn't it? It is a pity that I can't use "b" for the black bishop, but I see no good way to avoid it, and probably one should anyway define a "useblack" "usewhite" option.
 
@StevenB.Segletes I have no idea:-)
 
@DavidCarlisle Thanks.
 
@StevenB.Segletes get @egreg to grep for newgeometry (he had texlive installed for years going back to around then)
 
@StevenB.Segletes Check the TL SVN? Goes back a reasonable way, though perhaps not to 2002
 
@StevenB.Segletes vvv
 
2:46 PM
@UlrikeFischer Are the colours hard coded in the font?
 
2010-02-12 Release 5.0
  * Changing page layout mid-document.
    The new commands \newgeometry{...} and \restoregeometry allow
@StevenB.Segletes the package has changes.txt ....
 
@DavidCarlisle Awesome! Thank you so much.
 
@samcarter sorry wrong completion on @s :-)
 
@samcarter Yes, the chess figures are actually pdf-images.
 
@JosephWright Don't forget about the new EU GDPR for this web service including data processing by Github, run by a society and not a private hobby person anymore ;-)
 
2:48 PM
@StefanKottwitz Luckily, there is no personal data at all here (have done GDPR training for work)
 
@JosephWright perhaps (logging of IP addresses? user personal data registered for the back end?)
@JosephWright can be github responsibility but they would refer to the clients using github
 
@UlrikeFischer You should propose to the international chess organisation to switch to yellow vs. black - otherwise they may get confused if suddenly all chess players want to use your cute new font!
 
@samcarter oh chess player are quite relaxed regarding colors. One of the first things I explain to beginners is that the field are named black and white even if they are actually brown and beige ;-).
 
Do the "duckhorse" walk as the usual horse?
 
@StefanKottwitz You are the expert here, but I didn't thing IP addresses per se were covered. In any case, as a user of GitHub I can't access the data, so I don't think it is an issue.
@StefanKottwitz We've had a discussion on the team about IPs: if they are included, basically every website in the world is in trouble. The feeling was that they don't seem to be.
 
2:56 PM
@JosephWright Every website is in trouble until things are made clear, people don't feel safe for now and wait what happens.
@JosephWright Just thoughts. I did some GDPR preparations that I will put online and hope for the best. Luckily I don't have any ads etc. so can go as a private person and maybe commercial "competitors" could send complaints but who shall this be.
 
@StefanKottwitz Like I say, as a GitHub user one can't access the data at all, so I don't think it's a significant concern.
 
@mickep Depends if the duck horse is on land or on water :)
 
@samcarter Oh, I love new rules!
 
@JosephWright Sure! Just mirroring a bit what I read everywhere about people having fear of what may start in a few days. But this may affect online shops etc. that actually works with personal data.
 
@UlrikeFischer Oh, good. One thing less to worry about :)
 
3:00 PM
@StefanKottwitz Exactly, and even there the rules allow you to hold data where you are actually using with permission: you'd have fun running an online shop with no addresses to post to!
 
lol
 
@StefanKottwitz Like you, my personal blog has no ads or similar, so I think I'm also OK
 
@JosephWright A statement about Privacy protection would be good (or needed?) even if it just claims that no data is stored or processed (could be a formally required information to visitors)
 
3:42 PM
@StevenB.Segletes 2010/03/13 v5.3 Page Geometry
@StevenB.Segletes Actually it was added in version [2010/02/12 v5.0 Page Geometry]
 
57 mins ago, by David Carlisle
2010-02-12 Release 5.0
  * Changing page layout mid-document.
    The new commands \newgeometry{...} and \restoregeometry allow
I believed the documentation:-)
 
@DavidCarlisle Oh, did you read it?
 
@UlrikeFischer only the changes.txt not the actual package doc, of course.
 
4:30 PM
I feel like I read somewhere that once the text is finalized that it is sometimes necessary to do some final small tweaks to get line breaks and the such just right (sometimes going as far as rewording a difficult sentence/paragraph). Is there anything "authoritative" on the subject (maybe Knuth wrote something)?
 
@StrongBad Knuth wrote something and also Frank wrote quite a bit at the back of the latex companion detailing how many pages he manually adjusted
@StrongBad texbook touches on that in quite a few places eg: Therefore if you are fussy about the
appearance of pages, you can expect to do some rewriting of the manuscript
until you achieve an appropriate balance, or you might need to fiddle
with the ^|\looseness| as described in Chapter~14; no automated system will
be able to do this as well as you.
 
@DavidCarlisle thanks. that will do. Time to go ask a question on academia ...
 
4:46 PM
ello' @DavidCarlisle, @egreg Can we get a quick L3 answer to this one ?
3
Q: \pgfplotsforeachungrouped: how to escape & and \\

ScumCoderDisclaimer: I've barely started to learn LaTeX so bear with me. Problem: I use a lot of matrices like this Which I absolutely hate to code manually. Obvious solution would be a nested for loop, something like this: \begin{equation} A = \begin{bmatrix} \pgfplotsforeachungrouped \m in {1,...,3...

I think pgfplots is an overkill there
 
5:05 PM
For those of you who actually know how publishers work:
0
Q: How often do publishers change/tweak articles to achieve visually appealing results?

StrongBadWhen reading this question it seems the theoretical answer is that LaTeX is not perfect and manual/human intervention is required. In the TeX Book Knuth says: But the problem of page make-up is considerably more difficult than the problem of line breaking that we considered in the previous ...

I am curious about how often they tweak the desired layout and/or the author's material to get good results
 
now thats a good question
 
@egreg Thank you. Now all that I need to find is how the user, who could compile code with \newgeometry until recently, all of a sudden ends up with a 2002 version of the package. The unexpected "update", I presume.
 
@percusse I suspect it's a dup of this, to which @egreg has given an l3 answer
4
Q: Use array-meaningful ampersand to change column in foreach loop

iago-litoI wish to loop over this code: \begin{tabular}{l*{8}c} first column & column a & column b & column c & column d & column e & column f & column g \end{tabular} But the following does not compile: \begin{tabular}{l*{8}c} first column \foreach \i in {a,b,c...

 
5:30 PM
@percusse Done
 
5:42 PM
@egreg @DavidCarlisle Thanks to both of you.
@StrongBad In this age, it is all due to bad academician habits. The worse they write the more copy editors have to tweak
@yo' should know better
 
5:59 PM
@DavidCarlisle FAQ sweep going OK: there are a lot of out-of-date answers
 
6:17 PM
@CarLaTeX -- reported to tug webmaster already, by claudio beccari. karl will probably get to it reasonably quickly.
@JosephWright -- i think i had better take a look at some of these. i don't trust myself to do actual updates, so to whom should i send the updated text?
 
@barbarabeeton speedy Italians!
 
@UlrikeFischer -- you might want to change "preset" to "present", to avoid somebody trying to "reset". (delightful creatures indeed!)
 
@JosephWright yes what's the plan, standardise the markup then divy out updating the texts?
 
@barbarabeeton Give me a little while to establish an approach :)
@DavidCarlisle Exactly
@DavidCarlisle I'm hoping to sort out the formatting today
 
@JosephWright is jekyll running? I thought you could have just gh-flavoured markup without jekyll if you didn't want the templating stuff running over it?
 
6:30 PM
@DavidCarlisle Yes: GitHub pages runs automatically, as far as I can tell
@DavidCarlisle We will want footers and similar at some stage
 
@JosephWright yes I just checked some other pages i have, i mis-remembered
@JosephWright yes
 
@DavidCarlisle I'm working out how much tidy up to do: quite a lot of the pages with issues probably need updating anyway
 
@barbarabeeton Thanks! Claudio liked prof. van Duck's first article very much, he asked me to write an Italian version of it for ArsTeXnica :):):)
 
user image
4
and got another palindrome.
 
@barbarabeeton yay
@CarLaTeX Wacky Italians <3
 
6:36 PM
@PauloCereda :):):)
 
@CarLaTeX -- that's a real nice invitation. do take him up on it!
 
@barbarabeeton Surely!
 
@barbarabeeton Ups ;-)
 
@CarLaTeX hai bisogno di aiuto con la traduzione?
 
@DavidCarlisle Sono sicura di poter far affidamento su di te per quello!
 
6:49 PM
@CarLaTeX Potete crederci? Ho solo un distintivo in bronzo per !
 
@DavidCarlisle Non ci posso credere, con la tua padronanaza delle lingue, meriti molto di più!
 
@CarLaTeX It's true, I do!
 
@UlrikeFischer -- hey, your english is soo much better than my german ... i figure that was just a finger glitch. (on another topic, i like the "cracked crystal ball" image. i actually do have a sphere of rutilated quartz. that's the perfect crystal ball for me -- very pretty, but totally unreliable regarding clarity of answers.)
 
@DavidCarlisle :):):)
 
@DavidCarlisle Sono italiano di Manchester.
 
6:53 PM
@CarLaTeX having mastered Italian and Portuguese, now I only have to work on that strange language spoken by @barbarabeeton
 
@DavidCarlisle LOL
 
@DavidCarlisle xii-bnb.tex?
 
@DavidCarlisle An American friend of mine married a lady from Manchester and she complained that her mother-in-law didn't understand her!
 
7:08 PM
@DavidCarlisle, @barbarabeeton First step in revising the FAQ I think is to remove the various entirely out-of-date answers ...
 
@JosephWright depends a bit how much you worry about incoming links from various tutorials and the visual faq etc. If it wasn't for that and you just deleted out of date stuff then a large chunk would go...
 
@DavidCarlisle Take a look over e.g. tex-faq.github.io/#current-tex-related-projects: there are a lot of really old things there
 
@JosephWright yes, I would say more than half of the answers I have looked at over last couple of days have been out if date to the extent that they are basically just wrong.
 
@DavidCarlisle Exactly
 
@JosephWright -- a lot of answers are out of date for sure, but are the topics still relevant? if the topics are still solid, possibly better to mark them as "under construction" and solicit assistance in updating.
 
7:14 PM
@DavidCarlisle I think we do need to look over all of them, if we want them to be useful
@barbarabeeton I'm thinking of answers such as tex-faq.github.io/FAQ-omegaleph.html: it's hard to see that this should be in an FAQ, link stability or not
 
@JosephWright yes, I wonder if you should put a visible "text last revised 2010" banner on them all (or whatever date makes sense) and then we can gradually update
@JosephWright could be replaced by a one liner that said omega was the first unicode extension, and work fed in to xetex and (especially) luatex. I'd keep the link though, if stuff needs to be dropped I think we could consider dropping it from the site navigation but leaving a page with minimal information and a pointer to the rest of the faq
 
@DavidCarlisle I was wondering whether that can be automated, but of course the files are all new so it wouldn't work
 
@JosephWright well I would pick a date when work on the tex sources stopped and just put that on all of them.,
 
@DavidCarlisle Sure: there was a reason I'm thinking we should have a branch for changes, and merge them properly ...
 
@JosephWright -- while that answer is not going to be of much current use, i know from current experience that it's pretty hard to locate good historical information. (writing a paper with karl berry and dave walden on how tex fits in with the history of desktop publishing; will appear in the ieee annals in two parts.) would suggest that for some topics, move them from the current organization into a section "topics of only historical interest".
 
7:19 PM
@DavidCarlisle All doable
@barbarabeeton That would be reasonable
 
@barbarabeeton that fits with what I just commented as well as "move to a historic section" can just be a matter of changing the site navigation without changing the page url
@JosephWright if we edit via a fork how would a staging branch work? A contributor fork from the staging branch and Pr to update that, then "you" (or some team admin) moves to master if it doesn't break stuff?
 
@barbarabeeton, @DavidCarlisle Sure, we can keep them 'out of the way': I'm mindful that 430+ questions is too many for 'FAQ', really
 
@JosephWright and it would get more if you added any more current faq about unicode or opentype or tikz etc
 
@DavidCarlisle Something like that: I was mainly think about the need to have clear versions. We could though simply put the updated date in each page as we do them ...
 
@DavidCarlisle -- that sounds like a good compromise. i'm willing to look at historical stuff. the answers were good at one time, so maybe putting a date showing period of relevance?
@JosephWright -- but since the information is curated, it would be more reliable than much of the latex wikibook. hence valuable, if not necessarily super-"frequent".
 
7:24 PM
@JosephWright yes that's what I meant date them all now with some old date (2000 is a round number:-) but then updat ethe date individually (or automatically via jekyll?) as they are edited for text (as opposed to markup) changes
 
@barbarabeeton Sure: that's the plan :)
 
@barbarabeeton I think that argument is sadly spurious. Since the information is (or was) curated, it is wildly out of date and misleading or wrong in large part
 
@barbarabeeton I'm thinking a small number of 'well known' people can add most stuff
@barbarabeeton Of course
 
@JosephWright -- how about a section "infrequent, but nonetheless useful"?
 
Infrequently Frequently Asked Questions
 
7:27 PM
@barbarabeeton "questions old people used to ask in their youth" ?
 
@DavidCarlisle I'll try github.com/gjtorikian/jekyll-last-modified-at: give me a few minutes
 
@JosephWright my understaning was you couldn't use jekyll plugins other than the preconfigured github setup unless you run it locally
 
iFAQ sounds like another apple blowtware hahaha
 
@DavidCarlisle Could well be
 
@DavidCarlisle -- not necessarily. i'm thinking that quite a few questions about tikz are about itsy-bitsy problems that don't come up often, but are real head-scratchers when they do, and aren't necessarily easy to find in the manual. hardly obsolete.
 
7:30 PM
@barbarabeeton oh you meant new stuff, I thought you meant a section to move some of the existing stuff, OK I see.
 
7:43 PM
@DavidCarlisle, @barbarabeeton Date line added
@barbarabeeton, @DavidCarlisle I suspect I've done as much 'cleanup' of the sources as I feel like doing today. Might be worth starting on the 'real' issues: working through, identifying stale content, etc. There's also some work to do on layout: I suspect we need a header/footer ...
@DavidCarlisle, @barbarabeeton Oh yes, one 'editorial' thing: should I clean up single versus double quotes? It seems to lean toward the latter, but not consistently ...
 
@JosephWright also I think I miss the breadcrumbs or some other indication of where you are, but to start on real issues do you want me to fork or get write access and edit directly or ... or experiment on a staging branch or... (meanwhile we have a patch level 5 to release....)
 
@DavidCarlisle It's all doable: probably we want to sort breadcrumbs by adding some variables and then modifying the Jekyll
@DavidCarlisle I'm not fussed by any particular workflow ... you should have write access so that's probably easiest. It's not like we want/need formal PR/review/merge cycles ...
@DavidCarlisle What is needed is some idea of who is doing what ... probably just a heads-up is what's needed at the moment
@DavidCarlisle, @barbarabeeton I guess I should sort a bit of header information for 'Historical questions and answers'
 
@JosephWright yes but was holding off suggesting any text changes in case you wanted global edits to the markdown which will get less consistent once edited by hand, but but then I could experiment with updating some that are definitely in my sphere like that mathml one...
 
8:01 PM
@DavidCarlisle One reason for going for Markdown is that it's pretty easy to be consistent: not a lot of power to do different stuff
 
@DavidCarlisle -- well, i'm talking about both, but obviously not being clear about which is which. (having spent the night before last in the charlotte airport when thunderstorms disrupted our connection. my head still isn't on straight.)
 
@JosephWright sure but currently alll idioms coming from the tex are exactly the same, so if you decided to change it you could easily do a regexp replace rather than re-run teh convertor, but once hand edits are allowed there will be differences, and if you allow wysiwyg editing in the github web interface then all kinds of invisible stuff gets added
 
@JosephWright -- can you identify a couple of each (single vs. double quotes)? there might be reasons that some should stay single; the u.s. convention is usually double, but there are exceptions. not sure, actually, why robin would have gone with double. had a discussion once with sebastian on the subject; i think he went with double for tex live documentation, but i think he was thereby "recognizing" the u.s. origin of tex.
@DavidCarlisle -- ugh! please disallow wysiwyg editing!
 
@DavidCarlisle OK ...
@DavidCarlisle Do we want to go for a proper review cycle then? I can act as editor, with nothing going into master unless I've OK'd it ...
 
@barbarabeeton you can't have a globally accessible website on a site that offers an in browser editor, and disallow that people use it.
 
8:13 PM
@DavidCarlisle But we can restrict push access to the main repo
@barbarabeeton From what I could see, it's more-or-less random, possibly reflecting the original (pre-RF) editing
 
@JosephWright not necessarily just musing. Although maybe you/we should start with a page of editing guidelines eg on whether or how to add a new page, any markdown idioms to use
 
@DavidCarlisle -- sigh. (which is why i often bring a file down as source, and strip out all the "framework" manually, to get something i can edit reliably.)
 
@DavidCarlisle Did you see the CONTRIBUTING.md file? That was where I thought I'd collect anything up. I'm still unsure about the stuff that was \meta: the angle brackets are nice, but they don't work in code blocks, ...
 
@barbarabeeton that's what I do on my village website (which is google pages rather than gh but same thing) I let people edit, but I pull the source in to emacs and have some emacs lisp functions that sanitise it and re-commit:-)
@JosephWright no, I'll look
 
@JosephWright -- okay. if that's the reason, then going for consistency is best. if it remains "uk", then you should decide. (taking care to handle quotes within quotes by alternating the pairs to retain clarity.)
 
8:17 PM
@barbarabeeton Like I say, the balance is toward US-style double quotes
 
@JosephWright -- i volunteer to start with updating the pages dealing with ams stuff. also tug, if such exist.
 
@JosephWright running the w3c link checker over it at moment, it's found a few things, I'll let it get to the end and gather up the results
 
@barbarabeeton Cool
@DavidCarlisle Good plan
 
@JosephWright sorry to interrupt but do you know if it is possible to set texmfhome in a travis build to one of the folders of the repository? I thought that `env:
- TEXMFHOME=${TRAVIS_BUILD_DIR}/texmf` in the .yml should work but it doesn't (it sets the variable but the files are not found) ;-(.
 
@UlrikeFischer No, I've never tried that
@DavidCarlisle A lot of the links are likely dead
 
8:25 PM
@JosephWright do I have write access? I tried to push "Please note " rather than "Please not " in contributing.md, just as a test but it failed authentication
 
@DavidCarlisle Give me a second
@DavidCarlisle Try now
 
@JosephWright e pushed thanks:-)
 
@barbarabeeton Do you have a GitHub account?
 
@JosephWright hmm back to forks and/or staging accounts. I don't think I want to edit live in master as the choices are to edit in the browser and see the preview or edit in emacs in my local checkout but then push to the site unseen, or some combination of the two involving cutting and pasting, to preview. Perhaps it would be better if i forked, edited on my branch and then did a PR. Not so important in this pre-release stage but i don't really trust my typing on a live site
 
@JosephWright -- i allegedly do, but haven't tried it recently. (id is bbeeton15; whether or not the password in my "clues" list really works is an open question, but i can probably get that changed if i say i've forgotten it.)
 
8:38 PM
@DavidCarlisle Fair enough
 
@barbarabeeton hey that is my new password manager. I randomly bash things on the keyboard and they next time I need to log in say I forgot the password.
 
@DavidCarlisle -- not only would i not trust my typing on a live site, but the update procedure in such a situation would probably invoke a lot of bloatware.
@StrongBad -- yeah, but the last time i did that the site told me that the temporary password would expire in 15 minutes, but the message didn't reach me for more than half an hour. not really very effective. good thing it wasn't an emergency.
 
@barbarabeeton not sure what you mean, by editing on a live site here I just mean checking out the faq site editing it in emacs and pushing it back. As unlike the tex version I have no local preview so I can't see it until it's pushed back live, If you fork you can push it to a temporary test site then move it to teh live site when its good.
@JosephWright @barbarabeeton although having just tried it, it's not so bad, if you edit the markdown locally to have a spurious foo.md edit open in github as you can drop in the whole file and "preview" which is probably good enough here.
 
@DavidCarlisle -- ah. the ams web pages have a "live" edit, and it uses something like dreamweaver. but i prefer to edit clean xhtml code in emacs, send it through the w3c validator, fix if necessary, and then post. the garbage that's on ams pages (both bad/corrupted-by-the-system code and faulty links) is major discouraging. those of us who do validate are in the infinitesimal minority.
 
@barbarabeeton as I was moaning discussing with Joseph earlier today in this chat, markdown seems not to have any effective validation other than "post to the site and see if it looks OK"
 
8:49 PM
@DavidCarlisle Like I said, Markdown doesn't really do 'not valid', just 'no right': you could set up Jekyll ...
 
@JosephWright no (as with latex-project.org) I think having to have a local jekyll misses the point. If I had to build it all locally I'd rather the input was tex or xml the gain in using gh-pages (or google sites or any of these free servers) is the fact taht you can realistically ask peopel to contribute without having to set anything up locally
 
@DavidCarlisle Sure
@DavidCarlisle We could have stuck with HTML, but again that's an issue
@DavidCarlisle I think if we stick to a small group of trusted people at the commit side, PRs from others are OK being reviewed
 
@JosephWright I think markdown will be fine, just grousing from an xml geek:-)
@JosephWright so.. if we are going to start on the questions, editing in the main repo, do we need some way of avoiding edit conflicts, or just trust git to flag such things
 
@DavidCarlisle Ho ho
@DavidCarlisle Well Git will flag it up, but might be better to agree on some pattern ... I was thinking of picking headings and saying 'I'll deal with XXX'
 
@DavidCarlisle @JosephWright a LOT of people would be able to work on the content. Only a few people are able to work on LaTeX development. Do you really choose to spent your time on practical documentation?
 
9:00 PM
@StefanKottwitz Not exactly
@StefanKottwitz I'm trying to deal with the fact that the FAQ have drifted somewhat: I'm happy to take suggestions from other people
@StefanKottwitz Remember it's got a long UK-based history
 
@JosephWright well I'll start with the mathml one (and that may be all today)
 
@StefanKottwitz Remember that most of it was done by one person
@StefanKottwitz Documentation is pretty important
 
@JosephWright I just vote for motivating people to add work on it (multiply) instead of doing it yourself (add and substract)
 
@StefanKottwitz Sure: at present the plan is to get enough editing done that the usefulness is obvious to others
@StefanKottwitz Need to sort out the DNS, etc., so the new set up is the 'live' FAQ
 
@JosephWright I need a plan b for link checking as if I give it the top level index it stops after a bit with Maximum number of documents (150) reached! I think I'll grep for absoluter URL locally and then link check a single test document with all the links
 
9:09 PM
Is there any updated comparison of LaTeX vs MS Word/LibreOffice Word?
 
@JosephWright I just made a thought on motivation (promoting) instead of pure doing. SE did never make TeX content themselves but caused 205.000 TeX answers to appear over time. ;-)
 
@StefanKottwitz A lot of the answers come from a small set of people ...
@G.Bay No real change ...
@DavidCarlisle Cool
 
@JosephWright If you compare word 2016 ... the space between words is a lot better then before
 
@JosephWright A lot of the answers are from non-developers but experienced users who are glad to have this kind of way to contribute to the big vision.
 
9:27 PM
Good evening to all users into chat and the moderators.
-1
Q: Change the part of the appendix with letters of the alphabet

SebastianoIn relation to my previous question in this link Change part with arabic number, I ask how to obtain, using the Legrand orange book source and his structure.tex file, an appendix (in italian language) that has the letters of the alphabet. See this figure: I only managed to get the chapters, ...

Why when I ask a question I have always negative vote?
I would like to understand where I'm wrong and what I wrote about inaccurate. Almost absolutely I consider a question without having read it badly.
 
@Sebastiano every time you get such a vote you come here and ask and we always say the same. You have again asked a question with no usable example.
 
@G.Bay Word is still a word processor, not a typesetting system: the two tasks are different
 
true
 
@StefanKottwitz Sure, but not many non-devs will provide Git commits: suggestions for edits are welcome, and getting things up to date would be very sensible
 
@JosephWright yes, git is already a minimum qualification
 
9:33 PM
@DavidCarlisle It is impossible. In the previous question there is full code. I wonder if anyone reads my questions correctly. Mine is not a complaint but I always want to improve and understand. If I write it here, surely someone could tell me a reason or an explanation of it. We're all to help each other and do the pundits.
 
@Sebastiano well I certainly didn't I have been working on something else, but i had a look when you asked, but you still just provide two disconnected fragments of code and expect anyone trying to reproduce your image to re-do your edits.
 
9:53 PM
@DavidCarlisle Thank you very much. But it takes a lot to add a comment rather than immediately use a negative vote even justified? The complete code is on my previous question.
 
@Sebastiano well as i said last time, I don't negative vote (and the question while not that good probably doesn't deserve a negative vote but people are free to vote and to be honest while the site is very tolerant of new users, you are not a new user and if you have been asked to provide a MWE in your previous questions and then you post a question without one, you shouldn't be surprised if some people get annoyed
@JosephWright '' doesn't work to make a double quote does it, it still gets rendered as two single quotes it seems
 
 
1 hour later…
11:06 PM
@JosephWright I'll sort out ^^ evenings this week:-)
 

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