@Skillmon Hmmh, not sure I agree.

@Skillmon Of course I have no clue about circuits, but I believe the anchors are in.

when I was looking at tex.stackexchange.com/a/437993 I was reminded of the discussion on do-it-for-me questions, for example the comment in tex.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1538/…

I must admit that I sometimes answer such questions myself, but it does send a mixed message to questioners, that you are not supposed to ask such questions but you will get a good quality answer nonetheless

@Marijn A long-standing issue:L the problem is we don't really have a consensus. Some people love the challenge of the drawings, so answer, whilst others might not like the questions but don't actively vote-to-close.

@JosephWright Problem is, that voting to close is only done after a grace period, in which the OP should rephrase, but the answer is posted before the end of that grace period.

@Skillmon Sure, but again that's a 'local convention': we could take a more active approach to the do-it-for-me questions

@Skillmon Like I say, reflects the fact some people are keen to answer these questions

I suspect @marmot is one of those people :)

@JosephWright the problem is that discussions on META lead to something like the one@Marijn posted, that just leads to the exact same behaviour. There is (at least at the moment) neither a strong consensus build nor enforced. I personally do sometimes answer such questions after commenting that it should be changed, but post before such changes are made.

@Skillmon Exactly: as a mod I can't take action here as there is no clear position. More widely across the network, the assumption would be to close very quickly and wait for edits to address the issues before re-opening. But that's never been the feeling here.

5:18 AM

I need my coffee

come to Europe, it is much less early in the morning :)

@JosephWright Do you have ideas about how to solve my linebreaking problems in travis tests? On my side I have been thinking to enlarge the max-line-value (but it must be quite large ...), or to patch luaotfload so that it inserts more line breaks (no idea if possible).

@Marijn exactly!

@Marijn ooh :)

@Marijn the first time I went to Europe, it drove me insane the fact that near 9 PM is still daylight!

then don't come to Europe now, this month we have daylight until at least 10:30pm

@Marijn holy cow

it is already dark in here by 7 PM

(shamelessly equating Europe with north-west Europe here, in the Mediterranean it is very different)

@PauloCereda Sunset here is at about 23:15 these days.

@TorbjørnT. OH MY

I am indeed a simpleton. :)

@yo' I'm confused, is that some kind of Czech gardening tool??

@PauloCereda Comes with living at 60 degrees north. In northern Norway they have midnight sun, so there is no sunset.

@TorbjørnT. Wow, the sun simply stays there?!

@PauloCereda Goes up and down, but doesn't go below the horizon. (Conversely, in mid-winter the sun never rises.)

@TorbjørnT. Ah I see!

@PauloCereda Sunset at 21 here, these days.

@egreg Wow

@egreg you will be very surprised when being here. :)

@PauloCereda Sunrise at 5:25, but nothing I'm a witness of. ;-)

@egreg :)

@Marijn google "aeropress"

@yo' I thought those could be coffee beans in the box... but it didn't look like any type of coffee maker I knew

@UlrikeFischer whenever we have thought of increasing the max-line setting to help make log files compatible it's always failed as the engines insert linebreaks in interesting places anyway... If you don't need to check those lines you should be able to arrange an\OMIT .. \TIMO block around them so they get removed. If you want to check a normalised version of the line hasn't changed then it's a bit harder

@TorbjørnT. Sunset at 23:36, sunrise at 03:05 where I live. And of course, if you go a bit further north, it doesn't set at all.

It's always a shock, when I travel to lower latitudes in summer, that it gets dark at night. It doesn't seem natural.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen :)

every year the major of Kongsberg sends a Christmas tree to the city of Gouda, which is close to where I live - but they put lights in it because it gets dark very early in December

just to show that different sunset times has its advantages, a free tree in this case :)

@DavidCarlisle OK I now load the font before the \START so that the luaoftload messages are not seen and added \newpage\END to avoid that the aux-file line is seen and now the test passed. But this is really an art to get meaningfull but working tests ;-) @JosephWright

@TorbjørnT. -- that's because you're in the eastern part of the time zone. what time is sunrise? at this time of year in norway, the sun rises at about 4 a.m., which is a big surprise when you're in a hotel room facing that direction and forgot to close the blinds before going to sleep.

@TorbjørnT. -- oops! i looked at your avatar and thought it was @yo'; you're looking very similar these days.

@marmot I tried to take your code and make some adjustments to get it to work with circuitikz (which is not that compatible with the circuit library), but now I get a very interesting error ! Package pgf Error: No shape named is known.

@Skillmon I see. My bad. I have no idea about all these circuits. So you want circuitikz?

@barbarabeeton @TorbjørnT. ... must be the suntan ... :)

And btw, @barbarabeeton I'm at 15E exactly, so I'm precisely on GMT+1 line, all countries west of us are in the western part of the zone, and countries west of 7.5E are in the wrong timezone :)

@yo' -- ah, yes. the location of time zones, like highways in rhode island, is political.

@barbarabeeton all highways in Rhode Island turn left?

and @marmot, what is your opinion on how-to-draw-this questions without any code?

@Marijn -- no, some of them have sections that are very curvy, both left and right, and are posted with great big arrows telling drivers to change directions. and at the same time, entrances and exits that are really too close together for comfort. lots of accidents when it snows or there's a heavy fog. but the real estate on which they were built was owned by very influential people ...

if they always turned left, everyone would be going around in circles.

yes but left-turning circles, which would be preferred to right-turning circles by the majority of RI voters I assume

@barbarabeeton But I've been told that UPS trucks never make left turns, and they still don't go around in circles. I guess the secret is that they are allowed to go straight.

@Marijn I take them to be crossword puzzles. Meaningless but fun to solve.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen -- interesting ... a few days ago, my husband came to pick me up after work, and the ups driver had just made his pickup. the ups truck was pointed right at our car, but the driveway was sufficiently unoccupied that he could make a very sharp u-turn to the left, which he did. maybe the rules are relaxed in rhode island?

or the UPS driver was just confused that your husband's pickup (of you) coincided with his own pickup - was any of you driving a pick-up truck?

@barbarabeeton I guess the reality is that how to get out of a residential area is left somewhat to the driver's discretion. But the routes are planned to avoid left turns, since they often lead to longer waits for other traffic. It could also be that route planning software has become more sophisticated since I heard this. Instead of banning left turns altogether, they could just program in a certain amount of waiting time for left turns and then leave the rest to the optimizer.

so it's left to the driver to decide what's right?

@Marijn you should always drive on the left

@DavidCarlisle Sweden did that for many years, but they saw the light and came to their senses.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen -- at certain busy or dangerous intersections, "jug handles" are provided so that left turns aren't necessary and cross-access can be managed by a traffic light. or course, there are very few left exits on superhighways, and fortunately those that exist are usually well marked. but not always. i once found myself on the way to new bedford instead of providence when the marking wasn't clear enough.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen -- someone once posted a very funny (proably -- i hope! -- staged) photo of an intersection on the day the rules changed.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen English speaking countries drive on the left, as @barbarabeeton will no doubt confirm

@DavidCarlisle -- you're implying that neither canada nor the u.s. has an english speaking population. i can withstand your adverse opinion. but i have friends in canada whom i'm sure would be incensed.

@barbarabeeton There's a certain spot in St. Louis where there is a left entry and you have to head for a right exit very soon thereafter, some five lanes over. What a lot of fun on days with heavy traffic. (It's on the way to where a sister-in-law lives, so I have done that quite a few times.)

@UlrikeFischer On the l3build business: normalisation of lines which loose paths is really problematic. Perhaps we could look at increasing the line length for the 'all LuaTeX' case: that might be workable. (Line breaking varies between engines in a way that makes really-long-lines a non-starter more generally.)

@UlrikeFischer An alternative approach would be for me to force each file onto a separate line (if I can: may be non-trivial)

@barbarabeeton The jokes surrounding the transition are legion. In reality, they did it super careful: For an hour or so around the transition, all driving was prohibited unless absolutely necessary. At some prescribed time, if you were on the road then, you had to park on the left shoulder. Then some minutes later, you would move your vehicle slowly to the right shoulder and stop again. After some further waiting, you could drive again, but the speed limit was extremely low for the first days.

@barbarabeeton Not a joke: A month or two after the transition, a Norwegian truck driver was stopped on the left side deep inside Sweden. He had not heard about it! He must have been living under a rock.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen -- under a rock, or under a bridge? isn't that where trolls are reputed to live? (when my car -- a saab since 1964 -- was still one with a two-cycle engine, i used to value bridges when it was raining hard. the poor thing didn't like to get wet, and the engine would often conk out. so hiding under bridges was a good workaround.)

@JosephWright Probably not easy. The luc/lua messages e.g. are from a texio.write(format("(compiling luc: %s)",lucname)) in the middle of the fontloader. Imho only Hans can change this ... And longer lines don't help much as the pathes are quite long. But currently I got around the problem by loading the fonts outside the START/END.

@JosephWright side question. Is there a way to get the real log-files from travis? Currently I have to guess a lot what happened there.

@zezollo welcome, good to see another monochrome human here:-)

Question to linux users Would you expect/like (with lualatex) \font\testb={file:firamono-regular.otf}\testb blblb to work?

@UlrikeFischer what is the alternative?

@UlrikeFischer probably especially since kpathsea recently changed to do case insensitive searches in other contexts

@Marijn using the proper name:-)

the proper name of the font, or the proper name of the command?

@Marijn FiraMono-Regular.ttf

@UlrikeFischer best would be if you could honour the texmf_casefold_search configuration option (but just always doing a case insensitive lookup probably works in practice)

so the proper filename? in that case I would not expect it to be case-insensitive in Linux - not that I would mind (and the possibilities of confusion with another file would be mostly theoretical) but I would not expect it

@Marijn as I said kpathsea search library changed in the 2018 release to be case insensitive by default, so on unix and macs now (as always on windows) if you \input{CHAPTER1} it will find chapter1.tex if there is no CHAPTER1.tex in the search path.

@DavidCarlisle ok, that's good news I guess (?) in that case it would imho also make sense to implement it in the example of @UlrikeFischer.

@UlrikeFischer Not that I know of: that's why I have a VM set up locally for manual testing

@UlrikeFischer it's possible to use an access token to allow travis to check things in, but that can be a bit over-weight, you don't really want to check in the logs (has to be said one of the nice things about gitlab's CI is that it makes a zip file of all "artifacts" available for download from its web interface

@Skillmon @Marijn Yes, I think in this case in particular posting an answer was a bad idea, because this is a case where it's clear that the OP could have posted a MWE. But there's very little we can do about it unless we started aggressively closing such questions, but I'm not in favour of that.

@PauloCereda Stay away from Iceland then too.

@UlrikeFischer or you can just cat the log files so they appear in the normal travis log, see after_failure here github.com/travis-ci/travis-ci/issues/7836

@DavidCarlisle Thanks :-) Didn't notice yet there are so few of us :-)

Odd I was just going to say there are far too many ducks here and @PauloCereda arrives...

@DavidCarlisle Quack <3

@Skillmon The error you got was because the anchors did not exist when needed.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\makeatletter
\newdimen\ContactLength
\ContactLength=30pt
\newlength{\ContactRadius}
\setlength{\ContactRadius}{1pt}
\newdimen\pgf@xd
\newdimen\pgf@yd
\pgfdeclareshape{SkillmonBox}{
  \inheritsavedanchors[from=rectangle] % this is nearly a rectangle
  \inheritanchorborder[from=rectangle]
  \inheritanchor[from=rectangle]{center}
  \inheritanchor[from=rectangle]{north}
  \inheritanchor[from=rectangle]{south}

@marmot ... in pancakes

@DavidCarlisle I also can't stop seeing ducks eat pancakes (with blueberry syrup).

@AlanMunn I will not do that, too. TeX.SX is such a nice spot, I don't want to ruin that (though sometimes I do post some not-so-kind comments...)

@AlanMunn Well, on the one hand I see your point, but on the other hand the answers are not really meant for the OP only. In fact I have joined this site since I have passively used it for some time, i.e. used some of the answers were very useful for my work. So I tried to also to contribute. And I must say that quite often the questions were not good but the answers were useful for me nevertheless.

@AlanMunn IMHO the real question is whether the quality of the answers will drastically improve if we enforce a different policy. I am not necessarily convinced of that. (Actually, in some cases I even feel that the MWEs posted are hurting the quality of the answer because one is more or less forced to produce a minimal damage solution rather than building something more or less clean from scratch. But of course I also think everyone should post MWEs.)

@marmot I understand that, and I have no problem with it, especially with one-off types of images that are sometimes requested. But this particular case I think that it would have been worth waiting until the OP responded with something before adding an answer.

@AlanMunn OK, I deleted it.

@marmot To me this isn't about improving the answers, but about not encouraging a behaviour that is IMO antithetical to the site, and in the long run might discourage people from answering at all. As I said earlier, I don't think we should be instantly voting to close such questions, but I think that some pointed commenting is worth trying. (And I certainly wouldn't vote down answers to such questions, as has happened to me on another site!)

@AlanMunn But why do you think it is not the main goal to improve the answers? Or do I misunderstand your statement?

@marmot I'm not saying that we don't want to improve answers, and I see your point that sometimes 'fixing' someone's MWE can be worse that an brand new way. But I think those good answers will come anyway. What I don't think the site should be is simply a "please give me teh codz", and answering questions of this sort encourages that.

@marmot And maybe because it's a linguistic tree in question, and not a random TikZ image, I'm inclined to push the person to use the site in a way that isn't just exploiting people's good will.

@AlanMunn On the one hand, I see your point, on the other hand I also do not see how answering those questions hurt us. (Apart from what I said above, another major motivation for me answering questions is that I really love LaTeX and want to help keeping it alive. I know more than enough who are claiming that it is too complicated, and I like to give them a starting point to convince them it's not.)

@marmot Of course. And there are definitely two sides to the argument. The way I think it hurts us is that we will get more and more questions like that. And those questions are not really very good (not searchable except by title, for example, and those titles are usually "How do I draw this?") so they help almost no-one except the OP unless someone randomly comes across them or the answerer links them as a duplicate to some other question.

@AlanMunn Again you have a point but I found that a google picture search with site:tex.stackexchange.com and some key words in is highly efficient. Then one finds the results of the answers, and vey often the right keywords can be found in the answer. But yes, it is true that too much spam may dilute the helpful posts. On the other hand, we have of course our votes as an additional means to filter out the good posts.

@marmot I guess I would just say perhaps wait a bit before posting answers like this, especially if there are people commenting.

@AlanMunn Well, sure, I can do that. It is always tricky to gauge if a question "deserves" an answer, and for me personally it is hard to decide this. And I also feel that after some period of answering questions the excitement "Hmmh, maybe i have an idea of how that works" will decrease. (I am actually wondering how @egreg and @DavidCarlisle are able to maintain their enthusiasm. ;-) The only point I want to make is that I do not see myself here teaching others a lesson... ;-)

@marmot Yes, I understand that too. And I think there's a lot of "please provide a MWE" comments that are not always necessary. And I generally don't comment on "just do it for me" questions anyway. But linguistic trees are not one off things: they're a skill that any syntactician really needs to use often, so the context of the request for a tree is different than the context for a request for something that is one off.

@marmot Maybe I'm just too close to it. :)

@AlanMunn I can understand this. That's why I am hardly ever looking at the physics site. It is way too cruel. ;-)

@marmot Yes, I've never contributed to the lingusitics site, and the English Language site was the one where people downvoted perfectly good answers if the question was deemed bad. (I.e. "You shouldn't have answered this so I'll down vote your answer.") At that point I just stopped contributing.

@AlanMunn In one of my first posts on physics posts I got a comment that gauge theory vacua do not have to be gauge invariant, with reference to some Haste-Nicht-Gesehen guy I never had heard of before. That did it for me. I really love this site because here people like @egreg and @DavidCarlisle, who know what they are doing, contribute.

@marmot Yes, this site is indeed really great.

@AlanMunn Here I agree without a "however" ;-)

@marmot :)

@DavidCarlisle vvvvv

@marmot I normally don't answer such questions as I don't find them interesting enough. But I don't mind if some else does it. I do find it problematic if bad questions with code snippets get too fast answers as this really can detoriate the quality, but a request with a picture is not a bad question, only lazy. But imho such pictures get quite fast lost in the sea of answers and I would suggest to add them also to e.g. www.texample.net/tikz/examples.

@DavidCarlisle that sounds good. I will have to try.

@DavidCarlisle that's certainly an argument pro case insensitive.

@UlrikeFischer Overall I agree but I am wondering if you really think that it makes sense to duplicate answers.

@marmot well normally if I search for examples for a picture I search first sites like texample.net and not tex.sx - easier to get an overview.

@UlrikeFischer I hardly ever look(ed) at this site. Maybe I should ;-)

@UlrikeFischer @PauloCereda talking to @Skillmon ? :-)

@DavidCarlisle @Skillmon is too colorful ;-)

@marmot texample.net consists mainly of examples that people sent in, from theses and own works, so a way to publish what otherwise would hardly be seen. (though it started with examples from the manual and own work from Kjell and others, and me) So it's not repeating tex.sx examples.

@marmot At one time I started to add some beautiful examples from tex.sx to get nicely browsable gallery, but I gave that up. Also because StackExchange violates CC licensing systematically, so I did not want to promote that and not copy it

@StefanKottwitz What do you mean by 'violates CC licensing'?

@AlanMunn Yes, let me explain a bit and I'm happy to get an opinion.

@AlanMunn Sites as texample.net publish the work of authors and give credit to the authors. Here, with Creative commons license with attribution, that means mentioning the author and providing a hyperlink to the source. That link means, not hiding it from search engines by adding the "nofollow" attribute so humans can click the link, but no credit via search engine (google)

@StefanKottwitz So this is how all external links are dealt with? I had no idea.

StackExchange itself explicitly requests "follow" links for attribution to StackExchange posts. That's fine. But at the same time, StackExchange forces "nofollow" by default to user posted content. So, somebody that posts an example from texample.net, isn't allowed to post a normal ("follow") link

So tex.sx users are forced to post links that are ignored by search engines, no matter what

it's only because of bad karma or reputation or google penalty, that this was loosened a bit, and some algorithm decides (based on data such as age and votes) that some links get "follow" links instead of "nofollow" by default, to appear more natural than a black-hole site

@StefanKottwitz Can you show me an example of such a link? (I'm had no idea of the difference).

@AlanMunn werner's comment here for example

@StefanKottwitz Can't you still ask users to re-license their contents? I mean, if you see a nice example on TeX.SE by me for instance, you ask me whether you can post it on TeXample.net using license XYZ, and I agree, it should be legal, no matter what XYZ is. Or is this not the case anymore?

@DavidCarlisle this should be the accepted answer :-)

@AlanMunn sure, I just look for other mentions of this first

@AlanMunn if you highlight and view selection in FF you see <a href="http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/plain/texbytopic/TeXbyTopic.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">TeX by Topic</a>

@yo' nope

this blog post: "Ask Ubuntu StackExchange is an Internet Black Hole"

or this: "Stackoverflow amongst nofollow web abuse sites"

@AlanMunn This means: StackExchange requires credit, but doesn't give credit. For being successful and leading.

@StefanKottwitz I can't get too concerned about it though to be honest. Mostly the guidelines tell people to not link to external sites and to copy the text and attribution inline and if answers don't have external links the issue doesn't arise

@DavidCarlisle I see.

@StefanKottwitz I didn't know about the licensing problem! Thanks for telling me. It is amazing what you are doing for the community. You are also running TeXWelt, aren't you?

@StefanKottwitz it seems an over-exaggeration to say that, you might also say that it means people only add links to posts to enhance the post not to inflate their google foo by having inbound links from a massively popular site like stackoverflow

@StefanKottwitz Thanks. This is a corner of internet detail that I was unfamiliar with.

@DavidCarlisle Links are always a spam and "seo" issue and can be dangerous to allow them freely. But why not allow hi-rep users (who can even edit or delete posts) to have normal links, or have a simple voting threshold, so trust the community if posts with links are valid

@AlanMunn I'm biased anyway, just to be clear about this :-) I maintain a forum that was quite active, just the google power now sends not so many searchers and askers any more to there, most arrive at tex.sx today.

@StefanKottwitz @AlanMunn @DavidCarlisle You should all switch to this site. Non-profit, not at all aggressive, and much better pictures! ;-)

@StefanKottwitz yes sure, I think it would be better without the nofollow but in the scheme of things I could worry about this rates somewhere below the bottom of the sacle.

@StefanKottwitz I understand. But I agree with you that there's very little reason not to let reputation or answer votes define whether links get the nofollow designation or not.

@DavidCarlisle But you don't run a competing website. :)

@AlanMunn well we could do, but we don't by choice.

@DavidCarlisle :)

@AlanMunn it used to be the case, moreover. Seems that they either made the rules stricter, removed the feature, or made the rules stricter to the extent that everything is nofollow now.

@AlanMunn Take a look at the source code of this (or use a "nofollow" plugin to see):

Every link to tug.org is "rel=nofollow". I didn't choose that.

@AlanMunn well not :) for once. at latex-project.org we don't distribute latex (which surprises people) we send everyone to ctan and we don't handle user questions, we send people to "other forums" but essentially to here.

64 upvotes, 100.000+ rep user, 6 years of age, but doesn't qualify to seriously link to tug.org

It's good that there's StackExchange since it's a good platform for TeX questions and a benefit for all, to be clear about that. That it has to earn money from the users (don't know how, by ads or so) is not contrasting that.

@StefanKottwitz Only a few sites make money: we are just advertising ;)

[Seriously: running the site costs the network basically nothing]

@JosephWright Someone has to pay the investors $70 million back over time :-) linK: "Stack Exchange Raises another $40 Million"

@StefanKottwitz Sure: that's all the job stuff on the main site, etc. (or at least I assume that's the plan!)

@JosephWright yeah, a forum such as latex.org or galleries as texample.net doesn't earn a cent on advertisement and so. It's only about surviving. If google doesn't lead some users there any more (because of big commercial players) then sites get silent, no user contributions any more there.

@StefanKottwitz I meant that for StackOverflow, almost all of the sites are really just 'small change' advertising, making SO itself more visible so it gains users who might be turned into revenue. Of course, what I don't know is if that works at all

@JosephWright for job stuff they did not create travel or gaming or cooking sites. somehow there's a plan beyond job stuff

@StefanKottwitz texexample.net is a different kind of site but having multiple q/a forums is not clearly a good thing it is good to have a central place. it used to be comp.text.tex and now essentially it's here. I don't think follow or nofollow links would or should change that.

@StefanKottwitz i assume it's almost all just advertising the concept of the forums so that they can sell the private "teams" versions to companies (and of course harvest a lot of useful user data) it doesn't mean they have any expectation of making money off the site directly.

@DavidCarlisle Yeah, let's have a central software company. And a central government. Hide all links to alternative stuff (nofollow). No one needs redundancy for cases. ;-)

@StefanKottwitz that isn't what I said, and you weaken your argument by such over-statement.

@DavidCarlisle Sorry, I was stretching it, to emphasize why I'm not happy about a single dominating central place, with the consequence to lose other places.

@StefanKottwitz a choice of software is a good thing, a choice of multiple places to ask a question (answered mostly by the same people) just dilutes the information and isn't clearly a good thing at all.

@DavidCarlisle Just a frank exchange of views. :-) thanks for that

@StefanKottwitz :-)

so uh...am i blind, or did elsevier not include a .cls file in their elsarticle class on ctan?

ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/elsarticle

@heather "To extract all files from *.dtx: latex elsarticle.ins"

ah.

i knew i was missing something.

thanks =)

@heather but you shouldn't have to do that. elsarticle is in both texlive and miktex already (as it says on the page that you link to)

@DavidCarlisle i'm using an online editor, so I have to upload package files that aren't automatically included - it includes a pretty broad variety of packages, but not elsarticle.

which, i should probably just switch to using a normal desktop editor.

@heather I always assumed overleaf/sharelatex /etc had a full texlive, never actually tried any of them:-)

i thought they did too...

hmm, i'm going to try using elsarticle again.

@UlrikeFischer what's that supposed to mean? I can't eat ducks because I'm pink?

@barbarabeeton @PauloCereda @egreg Just today I realized I'm nearing my 6 years in the typography job!