Recently \begin{center}\rule{0.5\linewidth}{\linethickness}\end{center} stopped compiling due to the \linethickness. I have probably copy pasted that from somewhere. Is there a way to query the current line thickness?
@wilx I just did \tracingall on the construct you posted in an older latex, the trace is "interesting" but it did actually end up accidentally making a rule of length \@wholewidth but not by any code path that has ever been tested:-) (@JosephWright)
@wilx the change in this week's latex release is that many commands (including \linethickness) are now robust, essentially every command that could ever conceivably be used in a \write is now robust so you shouldn't ever get the fragile command in moving arguments random expansion errors, so \linethickness now expands to \protect\the-old-definition and the \protect messes you up here.
@wilx \protect is designed to stop random unexpected expansions happening at the wrong time, but \rule{0.5\linewidth}{\linethickness} only worked because of random unexpected expansions happening at the wrong time....
@JosephWright yes also explains why that year when we had 5 PL releases we kept seeing Mac users with unpatched formats even though they said they had updated.
@JosephWright I just merged the set@currfile change back from master to the graphics-compat branch and took out the patch I had added there, now just seeing if it all works...but I think it will be best to release the PL first and then graohics later, even if I get it sorted out today.
@Skillmon or the trend started when I removed the direct link from all code snippets to overleaf on latex.org, golatex.de and texwelt.de in response to the subscription enforcement
@Skillmon but as @yo' said, such statistics don't tell much. The alexa rank, specifically, just says that other sites on the Internet come up and strong over time and that's today's trend anyway.
@StefanKottwitz yeah, unless you make a comparison to another page, any ranking is mostly useless. Some of them raise as the internet grows bigger, some of them decrease as the internet grows bigges. Some are trying to be stable (like google pagerank, that actually compares the ranking to that of google and takes some sort of a log), but even that is not perfect.
@yo' Amazon clients are people who can spend money. Such as on an Overleaf pro account. Non-Amazon-online-clients (such as in areas with no Internet or too low income or with an aversion to Amazon or online payment) may perhaps use the free Overleaf service (which is great)
@StefanKottwitz well, one of the missions of Overleaf is to make LaTeX easy to access. So if we manage to get people in (even people not willing to spend money), that's fine
@StefanKottwitz well, it's good for people who want to comment on other people's project without deep knowledge of LaTeX. I mostly think of professors on student projects.
@StefanKottwitz well, for CVs not really (you definitely need a lot of case-to-case tweaks there). For nicely made letters with e.g. company's headers, that would work quite well I think
Does it make sense to use \expandafter\url\expandafter{something} if you don't have reason to believe that the something needs to be expanded? In my current use case I think it's very very unlikely by construction. How does one distinguish between defensive programming and paranoia?
@FaheemMitha not a technical definition I just meant its normal english definition of not doing anything bad in this case it means it typesets as ~ not as a non breaking space,
This is such a nooby question, but what in the hell am I doing wrong? Just wanna add a couple of random macros in such a way that I don't have to rewrite them every time!