@Skillmon perhaps you need the !important for the side bar too.

@UlrikeFischer I tried but it doesn't look good (both metaphorical and literal speaking).

I'm laughing way too hard after this funny pun.

@Milo complaining works a bit then:-)

@Skillmon I'm using here (on my laptop) a sidebar width of 20%, that is ok.

@Skillmon which version of FF do you have?

@DavidCarlisle 61.0.2-1 on Arch Linux

@UlrikeFischer the code actually injects (after removing the div prefix and reducing to 10 % to see a difference, 10 % is too narrow though).

@Skillmon hm that reddit post seems to imply you need to tweak the settings from 61 on, I have 63, i suppose I could try

@DavidCarlisle I did not tweak any settings for it to work.

@DavidCarlisle how do you already have 63?

@Skillmon I use firefox nightly so it updates most days

@DavidCarlisle ah, that explains it. Why though?

@Skillmon why not? :-) When I was editing the MathMl spec I had bleeding edge versions of all browsers (chrome canary, some weird pre-edge edge, opera dev, ...) i dropped most of them but I keep nightly as my main browser.

@Skillmon ah, the MDN page says: This documentation has not been updated for Firefox Quantum. Support for the userChrome.css file and any of its elements described below are not guaranteed in future versions of Firefox. Using it may lead to hard-to-diagnose bugs or crashes. Use at your own risk!

that's userChrome, but I wonder if userContents is going the same way...

Anybody knows how to change the font colour of the text body and links?

I'm not going to lie its rather weird latex hasn't agreed on a standard way to make comments.

multiline comments. I mean there are packages, and commands you can define but nothing built in.

mathjax seems to have adopted \comment{}

@William personally I have never needed more than % or sometimes \iffalse a syntax such as \comment{} is obviously more restrictive.

why more restrictive

\comment{can hold anything right?}

@William well you can't comment out any text with a mis-matched { ifor example.

@William no

just escape it no?

@William `\comment{can't hold % and } and { and...}

\}

works in mathjax

@William so it isn't a comment at all

@William but this is what David means with restrictive. % works much easier.

\comment{testing
maetih
\}}

this works fine

% is one line though

@William but that is not a comment. an important feature of comments are that you can comment out unfinished syntactically incorrect stuff, a command that does nothing is not a comment at all it is just a function with no result.

@William that is not a comment, it is a command that does not use its argument.

ahh that's fair

I would argue they have done /**/ like pretty much every language out there

honestly I was trying to add annotations to my latex code

@William no not like every language, at all

and settled on a \comment to o hold it

every c based language

most have something html even does <!-- -->

@William quite. It is hard to imagine a languge that is less like C

@William line based comments are not really a restriction, any reaonable editor should be able to comment or uncomment a region of a file in a few keystrokes

mathematic's is the coolest because it let's you do (* any (* testing *) *)

yes but I am trying to store the evaluatable equation form in the latex code

extract it using JavaScript

and display it with MathJax

on right click

mathml has an annotations feature built it

which I may say is much better

@William well i did edit that spec for 20 years so of course it's better:-)

the mathematica spec are you serious?

@William no mathml

oh mathml

yeah sorry

laptop died had to plug it in went black

mathml question

Have you used mathematica because I am trying to establish if mathml form is similar enough to BoxData in mathematica?

I want to create a web editor for mathml that lets you convert back to a code tree

Mathematica is the only thing I have found that works like this

Do you think that a mathematiac editor is possible with mathml?

@William not since last century, mathematica had reasonable mathml input and output (they were on the original math working group)

@UlrikeFischer (really meant @William) -- easier = more reliably

You are correct mathml seems to work much better then latex in mathematica for a bunch of reasons

probably being mathml can hold much more data other then presentation(but I am guessing)

@barbarabeeton I think you mean the other Will

I am just starting with latex

I doubt I can be of much help

@William tex is just hard to parse with anything other than tex, (have a look at the file xii.tex on ctan, or possibly in your local tex installation) mathml has xml syntax so you cn parse it easily even if the application don't understand the mathematics

I output the same equation from Mathematica with latex and get this

\frac{a}{b (23 d)}

@William -- no, my comment was in response to how to format comments.

@William same as what?

here is the mathml

to long sorry

anyways the mathml exported and reimported in mathematica constructs the correct equation

the latex that mathematica exported doesn't import correctly

maybe that is mathematica being lazy

Anybody knows how to change the font of the sidebar? I changed the font of .question-hyperlink to 18px DejaVu Serif but sadly this also affects the sidebar that now uses a way too big font.

what is the sidebar I probably can do it

right or left?

what is the content?

@William \frac{a}{b (23 d)} is syntactically legal latex, but without seeing your input or knowing what you want it to mean I can't say if it is the correct latex for your expression

@Skillmon

@William right. The one that's width is changed with #sidebar { max-width:30% !important }

@DavidCarlisle equation a/(b*(d*23)

okay looking now

@William yes so the multiplication has been dropped which is fine if you are using latex as a print form, but you can't in general parse the result to put them back b(...) might be b times ... or a function b applied to ... or anything else

@William I mean the box that show Hot stuff on meta

"Hot Network Questions"

@William No, the orange box width "Blog", "Featured on Meta" and "Hot Meta Posts"

why don't you just do

#sidebar .related a, #sidebar .linked a{font-size:15px !improtant;}

#sidebar .relate a.question-hyperlink{font-size:15px !important;}

@Skillmon

@DavidCarlisle is there way to write the latex in that example such that it might import correctly back in

@William because my CSS knowledge is limited to what I've grasped from looking at it the past 30 min or so :)

@William didn't work :(

what are you using userscripts?

did you do the first or second one

the 2nd one has a typo

#sidebar .related a.question-hyperlink{font-size:15px !important;}

there was a d missing

@William second. Now it works :)

@William Thank you very much

David is there maybe a more specific way to write that in latex maybe?

@William well you could define an \invisibletimes command in latex (that does nothing) and modify mathematica's latex output to write b \invisibletimes(d\invisibletimes 23)

interesting thank you

I do not understand why latex did

\rule{w}{h}

instead of

\rule{w,h}

@William mathml has invisibletimes and invisible functionapply operators specifically for that issue

the 2nd is well more familiar

the 1st seems like currying in othe rlanguages

@William more familiar to C programmers but there were not many of them in 1979

how is the \sum function defined in latex?

its output is quite interesting to me

@William you are making weird comparisons, firstly you are comparing tex syntax to programming languages, but the syntax of tex is not optimised for programming it is optimised for writing text, and secondly you are comparing it with "common" languages that were developed some decades later.

function calling f(1,2,3) is math

predates latex

@William \DeclareMathSymbol{\sum}{\mathop}{largesymbols}{"50}

has to be more isn't there?

\sum _{x=0}^{10} x^2

@William but in lisp (which had more influence on latex design) it would be (f 1 2 3)

@William but actual text tends to include commas which makes it uneasy to parse.

@William no, that is literally the complete definition copied from the source.

how does _ know to display below the symbol then

@William that is the behaviour of a \mathop

@DavidCarlisle too slow :(

@Skillmon actual text includes commas making it uneasy to parse

can you elaborate

seems to me text could also have { or \

@William you might have natural language text that contains 1,2,3 but far less likely to have {1}{2}{3} as i said above tex syntax is optimsed for writing text, so natural language strings mean themselves and markup uses "weird" symbols like \ and {} to keep it separate from text.

@William imagine using a TeX macro that takes two portions of text as its argument. \foo{This is text, and it looks good}{this is more} is somewhat easy to parse (which is the first and which the second argument). Compare this to \foo{This is text, and it looks good, this is more}

@Skillmon fair point realized text isn't quoted in latex

@William you look in any pre 1980s document and say how many \ or {} there are.

@DavidCarlisle look at contemporary texts. I don't think this has increased much.

@Skillmon yes but now there are tex documents and programming language texts and other things that cloud the issue.

@DavidCarlisle but other types of text also increased in number, I don't think the share did rise significantly.

@DavidCarlisle considering you worked on MathML is there a well a more compact version of MathML that isn't well basically an XML dump

that contains evaluation syntax

@William no

one thing I do like about latex compared to html is that you don't have to repeat the tags

\html{} in latex

<html></html>

kinda an abstract view

but html is probably better for well error proness

is there a way to create essentially tags in latex?

@William \begin{environment}...\end{environment}?

\html{lang=en}{some random text}

@William there was a plan to do one and we actually did a survey to see what we wanted but the result of the survey was that we didn't do it. Basically the xml syntax had the benefit that no-one liked it everyone wanted a "linear" syntax, but latex uses wanted tex, mathematica uses wanted mathematica, Word uses wanted word linear input form and so it went.

:( well thank you for your work on mathml

I can see the division

Okay back to my question

\fun{property=value}{some random text}

does this have a syntax in latex

@William and anyway I like XML as I think I mentioned yesterday we maintain all our manuals with thousands of pages and hundreds of thousands of math expressions all in xml

@DavidCarlisle Now the site administrator have changed the colour of the code. One of the suggestions of the very good @egreg has been accepted.

@William yes of course if you wish, see for example \includegraphics[width=2in,clip,scale=3]{file.jpg} you can define all sorts of syntaxes

@DavidCarlisle xml, the compromise of creating something which is as readable to humans as it is to machines by making it illegible to both.

@Sebastiano so they have @egreg has power over them:-)

@Skillmon only because you use vim, everything looks lovely in emacs

@DavidCarlisle I vote @egreg forever :-). Have you look?

@Sebastiano vote down, i hope :-)

@DavidCarlisle @egreg should then make them revert to pre-unified design.

@DavidCarlisle ahahahaha

@William there are several packages like kvoptions, pgfkeys, l3keys, ...

yeah off to try and define my own

@William CSS?

@DavidCarlisle the color have been changed.

@Skillmon I'm confused by the question

@Skillmon I don't think it's unreasonable that they force a simplified, unified design across the network if they can not maintain all the site customisations going forward, it means some things have to go but so be it, but I don't think it's reasonable to have a layout with impossibly narrow main text with stupid wide sidebars and garish colours that make it painful to read.

@Skillmon oh you want the old colors don't you

@William "yeah off to try and define my own". I asked "What do you define, a CSS?"

do you mean "what do you define in CSS"?

@DavidCarlisle and horrible font choices.

because CSS stands for Cascade Style Sheets

I think

@William I just wanted to ask what you're going to define for yourself.

@Skillmon oh parameters like

\fun{property=value}{some random text}

@William pleasse use the reply feature there are several interrelated threads and it makes it very hard for anyone else reading to follow if you do not.

could latex be used simple for text reorder and processing

@William it's turing complete it could be used for anything but perl might be better at some things

@William technically yes, it can be used to do almost everything, at least theoretically speaking. But awk or perl or ... might be better.

@Skillmon we want comic sans!

okay running tex

@DavidCarlisle are you a cthulu madman?

@Skillmon no a typist:

is there a latex console?

@William what would that even mean? latex files are text files.

This example shows how to do {\bf boldface}, {\em italics}, {\color{red}different} {\color{blue}colors}, and mathematical expressions such as $y^3\alpha_x \to \beta$.

@William you can use latex as such. Just type in latex in your console. But you don't want to use it like this I guess

so I ran tex

and passed it

> This example shows how to do {\bf boldface}, {\em italics}, {\color{red}different} {\color{blue}colors}, and mathematical expressions such as $y^3\alpha_x \to \beta$.

but it doesn't really work

@William \bf has been deprecated since 1993, where did you see any tutorial mentiong that?

math.vanderbilt.edu/schectex/wincd/intro_to_tex.htm

@DavidCarlisle mine looks like this, atm:

@William what does not work mean?

@DavidCarlisle so a console like bash

Well it has the output on the right

I guess I can make my own badly written console

but it is a little silly to do

@William the command line program doesn't return stuff immediately, it's just as if you'd write a tex file and let that one be processed.

@William well normally you use a file but if you just type pdflatex command with no file then it will put you at the interactive * prompt and you can type tex to it

@William please use the reply feature

@DavidCarlisle I have entered pdflatex mode how do I enter a command?

@DavidCarlisle it seems to want a file

@William what exactly did you run in your terminal?

@Skillmon what does he mean by the reply feature I thought I am using it

@Skillmon just pdflatex

@William look up the chat almost everyone's comments except yours have a small arrow at the start of the text which links to the comment that is being replied to

@William then you'll get a prompt with two stars. There type \relax

@William ^^^^^^^

@DavidCarlisle learned something new

@William yeh!

@Skillmon now it says Please type another transcript file name:

@William apart from the menu on the left you can use the arrow that pops up on the right

@William take a look:

@William tex does not say that, you must be using some IDE that needs a file.

@Skillmon ! I can't write on file `texput.log'.

@William run tex in a directory where you have write permission

going to bed now. Good night everybody!

@William if you mouse-over a message you want to reply there is a flag, a star and an arrow on the far right. If you hit that arrow you'll reply to that message, too.

@DavidCarlisle Okay I'm back what is something I can run on TeX?

@DavidCarlisle after running \relax that will result in text only output

@William you said you wanted something like an interactive bash shell, in bash you type bash commands, to the tex * prompt you type tex, exactly as if you had a file, it's not that useful, but it is there

@DavidCarlisle thank you off to dinner

@DavidCarlisle that is close but I was hoping it would give immediate output

@William it will give you a pdf file when you type \end{document} (or \bye if you used pdftex rather than pdflatex)