TeX, LaTeX and Friends

Faheem Mitha

5:39 AM

In LuaTeX, is there a command to write to the log file?

mickep

@FaheemMitha Maybe there is a better way, but one can do it with texio.write.

Faheem Mitha

6:21 AM

@mickep Ok. Is this documented in the manual? And is texio part of LuaTeX?

mickep

@FaheemMitha Yes, I read it in the luatex manual. You could use texio.write_nl if you want your comment on a new line.

Faheem Mitha

@mickep Ok. I'll take a look. Thank you.

Yes, I see it's documented on pg 209 of my copy of the LuaTeX manual.

David Carlisle

7:56 AM

@FaheemMitha you can also of course write from the tex side of luatex using same mechanisms as pdftex

@CarLaTeX I should have taken that pineapple pizza off the picture mode duck and put it on my Mandala, you'd have been sure to give me the bounty then:(

Ulrike Fischer

@DavidCarlisle you didn't get the bounty? that's shocking as your answer showed not only great art but also language and research skills ;-)

David Carlisle

@UlrikeFischer complain to @CarLaTeX

CarLaTeX

8:21 AM

@DavidCarlisle It was a very hard decision! @UlrikeFischer

mickep

8:33 AM

@CarLaTeX A pity, @DavidCarlisle was more in need of the reputation.

CarLaTeX

8:52 AM

@mickep the indecision was between Mark's answer and yours

mickep

@CarLaTeX Oh, almost like in the Olympic games 2026! :)

CarLaTeX

@mickep Don't talk to me about Olympic games 2026, we will have 7 years of "men at work" and crazy traffic from now on in Milan!

mickep

@CarLaTeX Oh, yes. I'm not too sad we did not get that.

CarLaTeX

@mickep Indeed!

Faheem Mitha

9:07 AM

@DavidCarlisle You mean like passing \typeout via tex.sprint, for example?

David Carlisle

9:19 AM

@FaheemMitha no I just meant use \typeout, you asked how to print to the log from luatex not specifically from Lua.

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle Yes, that is what I said. I meant from Lua.

David Carlisle

9:37 AM

@FaheemMitha texio.write(_nl) then:-)

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle Ok.

Faheem Mitha

10:06 AM

I'm trying to pass arguments which include a macro to Lua from TeX, but it's trying to expand it before sending. Should I just tell it not to try to expand it?

\formletter{config.yaml}{Hello, \name}

And here is the definition of \formletter, which passes to a Lua function.

\NewDocumentCommand{\formletter}{m m}
{
  % \directlua{formletter([[#1]], [[#2]])}
  \directlua{formletter([[#1]], [[#2]])}
}

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha \directlua performs expansion: you'll want \unexpanded

Faheem Mitha

\formletter{config.yaml}{Hello,  \noexpand \name}

did the trick, but I'm guessing that's not an optimal approach.

Actually, not a viable approach in general. For one thing, I won't know where the macros are.

@JosephWright What is \unexpanded? Searching.

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha An e-TeX primitive

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha texdoc etex

Faheem Mitha

@JosephWright @DavidCarlisle Ok.

The etex docs are a bit light on details.

David Carlisle

10:21 AM

@FaheemMitha the luatex and xetex ones are lighter (welcome to our world:-) (@JosephWright)

Harald Hanche-Olsen

10:50 AM

@FaheemMitha Perhaps something like \directlua{formletter([[#1]],[[\detokenize{#2}]])} is safer?

CarLaTeX

11:01 AM

2

@mickep trams today ^^^

Joseph Wright

@HaraldHanche-Olsen I'd use \luaescapestring as well myself ...

@CarLaTeX Oooh

CarLaTeX

@JosephWright Happy for getting the Winter Olympic games 2026 :)

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@JosephWright good point!

David Carlisle

@CarLaTeX if you will live in cold climates not England where it's too hot and sunny to ever host the winter Olympics.

CarLaTeX

@DavidCarlisle Indeed it hasn't seriously snowed in Milan since 1985, lol

Ulrike Fischer

11:20 AM

6

@CarLaTeX training has started ^^^

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle The Unbearable Lightness of TeX.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen I read dicussions of \unexpanded and \detokenize, and to my layman eyes they look very similar.

Can someone give me an "explain like I'm 5" summary of how they differ?

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha \unexpanded works during exactly one expansion, then it's gone (like \noexpand); \detokenize removes category codes entirely, leaving catcode-12 tokens

Faheem Mitha

@JosephWright Then indeed \detokenize would be the safer choice.

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha Here it's irrelevant: once you've passed the tokens to Lua, there are no catcodes

Faheem Mitha

Else one risks unexpected surprises in the future.

@JosephWright Oh?

I thought TeX would do its expansion thing before passing it on.

CarLaTeX

11:30 AM

@UlrikeFischer Yayyyy

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha Yes, but that is one expansion, so like a single \edef

Faheem Mitha

@JosephWright Hmm. Now I'm getting a "Tex capacity exceeded". Probably an infinite loop.

Never mind - cut and pasted the wrong thing.

So \unexpanded and \detokenize are both e-TeX primitives.

Which means they are not a part of original TeX.

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha Yes

@FaheemMitha e-TeX is really standard nowadays unless one is using Knuth's unaltered TeX

Faheem Mitha

@JosephWright Ok, just to be clear.

@JosephWright I understand. Thanks.

e-TeX does not appear to have a separate Wikipedia entry.

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha Possibly not

David Carlisle

11:59 AM

@JosephWright another engine to support, I see

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Huh

David Carlisle

@JosephWright jsbox on texhax

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Oh yes; not sure it has \pdfstrcmp

David Carlisle

@JosephWright or etex at all.

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Thought it did have that ...

> JSBox is a from-the-ground-up rewrite of TeX/e-TeX's engine

@DavidCarlisle He's messed with tracing and show: I don't think we have any chance of supporting it

Faheem Mitha

12:19 PM

Who rewrote TeX and why?

Sounds Javascripty.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha everyone will think it is related to javascript (but it isn't) I believe @barbarabeeton asked about a name change last year when he spoke about this at TUG (or was it the year before).

@JosephWright you thought luatex logging was bad:-)

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle Ok

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha it is rewritten to be fast as it is used in an e-book format on ios (only) that retypesets the book each time on demand, so there is no dvi or pdf back end it (as far as I understand the description) writes directly to the operating system graphics interface. (it is not free and I haven't got an iphone so I haven't seen it)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle It's also £7.99 ...

Ulrike Fischer

@DavidCarlisle the "no-pdf-backend" is nice - so nothing to worry for me ;-)

Joseph Wright

12:27 PM

@UlrikeFischer :)

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle I see. So it's for displaying text?

Or math, possibly.

@DavidCarlisle Nice there are people out there who don't have Iphones.

Sometimes it seems like everyone has one.

Apple seems to have quite a capable marketing dept.

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha I do ....

@FaheemMitha They stuck with a vaguely-sensible size after all the Android people went to massive phones ... sadly no longer

Faheem Mitha

@JosephWright I think they're kind of small, personally. And excessively over-priced. At least by local standards.

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha Oh, price is a problem

Faheem Mitha

By local standards, I mean here. As in, India.

Harald Hanche-Olsen

12:32 PM

@JosephWright I have a 6s. I was afraid at first it would be too big, but I quickly got used to it. I don´t think I’d want it much bigger, though.

@FaheemMitha They feel overpriced even in my corner of the world. But they can be relatively long-lived, and that helps. Mine is soon four years old, and I intend to hang onto it for a bit longer. (But the 6s is the last model without adequate water resistance. We’ll see.)

Faheem Mitha

@HaraldHanche-Olsen So they now have better water resistance?

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@FaheemMitha Yes, starting with the 7.

Faheem Mitha

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Interesting. For something that expensive, it should be bullet-proof.

Harald Hanche-Olsen

12:47 PM

@FaheemMitha Absolutely. The lack of water resistance in older models bordered on the scandalous. Doesn’t it rain in California?

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha well his description has it displaying diagrams and flowing text around it etc, so all the usual stuff (it passes the trip test it claims modulo differences in log output)

@FaheemMitha everything that you can display in pdftex

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle Reimplementing TeX seems like an enormous amount of work. Surprised there are people who are up for it.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha by modern standards it really is not that large a program and it is very simple code (a subset of pascal) and excessively well documented, so not impossible to do but not unreasonably if you just spent a few years doing that you may want to sell it rather than give it away.....

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle I gather the writer is indeed selling it.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha it is only available as embedded in an e-book he is selling (currently)

Faheem Mitha

12:53 PM

@DavidCarlisle Embedded in an e-book?

David Carlisle

1:20 PM

@FaheemMitha yes as I say he wanted it fast as each time you open the book it re-typesets the whole thing you can read his email on the texhax archives

@FaheemMitha tug.org/pipermail/texhax/2019-June/023707.html

Faheem Mitha

1:47 PM

@DavidCarlisle I've never heard of such a thing.

@DavidCarlisle Yes, I was looking at that thread. Though of course much of it is over my head.

I'm not familiar with the texhax ml.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha it dates back to the beginning of time, older than stackexchange or comp.text.tex.

@FaheemMitha that is presumably the intended reaction to announcements of new technology...

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@DavidCarlisle What, the texhax list still exists? It’s been years and years since I was subscribed. I thought the list had died some time in the 20th century …

David Carlisle

@HaraldHanche-Olsen yes mostly inhabited by dinosaurs from the past I suspect.

Faheem Mitha

2:03 PM

It seems \NewDocumentCommand doesn't like arguments with blank lines.

Is there anything I can do about that, or should I use something else?

I found tex.stackexchange.com/questions/209678/…

which suggests this is a \def thing. Apparently \newcommand doesn't have this issue.

But what do I use if I want to use the fancy LaTeX 3 interface thingys?

barbara beeton

@FaheemMitha -- Re JSBox, the reason the author rewrote TeX was so that it could natively process graphics along with text (including math). The demo at the 2014 TUG meeting was remarkably fast. (Earlier than you thought, @DavidCarlisle.) Info on the trip test in TUGboat 35:2.

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@DavidCarlisle I notice that someone is posting there under your name.

Joseph Wright

2:22 PM

@FaheemMitha You need to allow a \par by using +m rather than m: it's the same ideas as \newcommand vs \newcommand*, but the default is the other way around

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@FaheemMitha Search for \long in the xparse docs. (It’s at the bottom of p. 3 in the most recent version, I think.)

David Carlisle

@HaraldHanche-Olsen you don't even get badges

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@DavidCarlisle The horror!

Faheem Mitha

2:39 PM

@barbarabeeton Does it include any new technology?

@JosephWright I see. Why isn't this just the default? To make debugging easier?

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Ok. Thank you.

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha Knuth had it right that \def is more common than \long\def in document commands. In LaTeX2e, \newcommand was already long so the star had to be the short version. But for xparse we could start from what seemed best

Ulysses

@Raaja I just saw your mandala coffee image you posted. I love it. :D Did it taste as good as it looks?

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha what do you mean by new technology? it's completely new code.

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle New ideas. New algorithms.

barbara beeton

@FaheemMitha -- Not sure what you mean by "new technology". The basic translation is described (very briefly) in the abstract of the talk: tug.org/TUGboat/tb35-2/tb110abstracts.pdf (the paper wasn't presented for publication in the proceedings issue). Both talks were videoed; see the first two entries at zeeba.tv/conferences/text/tex/tug-2014 .

Faheem Mitha

2:47 PM

But I suppose that most non-trivial things in computer software involve doing new things.

David Carlisle

:50809090if it passes the trip test then the algorithms for layout must be the same but writing a tex back end that writes to the operating system graphics layer rather than writing to dvi or pdf is new code and new ideas etc.. But as it's not open source, who knows, you have seen the email same as me,

Faheem Mitha

@barbarabeeton I see the abstract. Thank you.

Has Doug McKenna contributed anything to TeX proper? It seems like he did a lot of work.

I wonder if anyone of it was sent upstream, so to speak.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha a new back end couldn't be contributed to pdftex better as a separate program

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle I was thinking better ways of doing existing things.

Then again, I suppose TeX maintainers aren't keen on invasive changes.

Is texdoc latex2e still a good/current reference?

barbara beeton

3:06 PM

@FaheemMitha -- Nothing has been sent to CTAN, for example. Doug McKenna is working on his own, and it's apparently slow going, as he has no outside funding, as far as I know. The texhax posting does say that the project may, sometime in the future, become open source, but I suspect that won't be soon.

Faheem Mitha

@barbarabeeton Seems like a lot of work.

I wonder what his motivation is.

Is this something you could build a business on?

barbara beeton

@FaheemMitha -- At TUG 2014, he said that his motivation was to be able to incorporate interactive graphics directly into his TeX source files.

cis

Hello!

`$\Large\boldsymbol{a,b,c}$` ---> This is getting Large....

But "LaTeX Font Warning: Command \Large invalid in math mode on input line 39."

What have I to do else?

Raaja

@Ulysses summer and mango goes always well together ;)

Faheem Mitha

@barbarabeeton Right. I was thinking more like - putting food on the table style motivations.

Unless he's very rich and doing it as a hobby.

Programming, like math, is either a lot of fun, or hair-raisingly difficult. Depending on ones point of view.

David Carlisle

3:13 PM

@cis put the size change outside the math

@FaheemMitha the email makes it fairly clear that is the intention, if you have some tex sources and want to publish to an ipad, then... that may be a big enough market, there must be a lot of math students with an ipad....

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle So it's OS X/Mac specific?

cis

@DavidCarlisle Ah ok, thx.

Ulysses

@Raaja So very true. :)

David Carlisle

3:43 PM

@FaheemMitha as I said, you know everything I know about it. It says in the email that it is ios specific so just iphones and ipads not desktop mac.

@cis as you had it it only works by accident because \boldsymbol is more or less \mbox{\boldmath$#1$} so goes to text mode (sees the Large) and then goes back in to math.

cis

@DavidCarlisle Ok, I used \Large\boldmath{a,b,c}

David Carlisle

@cis with $ so {\Large\boldmath$a,b,c$}

cis

@DavidCarlisle Ah yes, correct

Jonas Stein

4:01 PM

Hi, I want to run a command before compilation. As a test I wrote
$compiling_cmd="date >> /tmp/compiled.log";
in my local .latexmk but the file was not created. Do I miss something?

oh it seams that is not easy tex.stackexchange.com/questions/299822/…

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle We probably should ask him about \pdfstrmcmp at least, and probably warn him that as he's altered the logs, all bets are off

David Carlisle

@JosephWright yes on list or off...

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Off list I guess

David Carlisle

I'm a bit tied up trying to read some perl..

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Oh deep joy

David Carlisle

4:14 PM

@JosephWright what few comments there are seem to say I wrote it, a long time ago, but now it's supposed to be working still....

Phelype Oleinik

4:25 PM

@barbarabeeton Hello Barbara! If I take any of those videos, say, zeeba.tv/libterate-texc%e2%80%94top-part-jsbox, and click play it takes me to a Page-not-Found page...

David Carlisle

@PhelypeOleinik ah probably part of the river valley "discussions"

Phelype Oleinik

@DavidCarlisle What's that?

Faheem Mitha

I'm seeing an error: ! Illegal parameter number in definition of \reserved@a.
<to be read again>
1
l.146 }

Phelype Oleinik

@DavidCarlisle So the video was (removed)... ;-)

Faheem Mitha

I searched for this, and it seems to be typically when one tries to define a macro inside the definition of another macro.

I'm not trying to do anything so exotic, but I am trying to pass arbitrary TeX code as an argument of a TeX command to Lua.

I'm also wrapping it in \detokenize.

barbara beeton

4:36 PM

@PhelypeOleinik -- It appears that the videos for TUG 2011 and 2014 have been taken down. That's distinctly too bad; I'll ask that the links from the TUGboat proceedings issues be removed while trying to see if they can be found elsewhere.

Faheem Mitha

The error gives me no indication of where the error lies.

Faheem Mitha

4:49 PM

Apparently this line is the problem:

\renewcommand{\nextnuml}[1]{\refstepcounter{tabenum}\thetabenum.\label{\theletternum :#1}}

I tried doubling up the # to ##, but that just breaks other stuff.

Phelype Oleinik

@barbarabeeton Thanks! It would be nice if they were online again.

David Carlisle

5:22 PM

@FaheemMitha that line in itself wouldn't give an error, depends how you then use \nextnuml I suppose...

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle General question: is there any way to allow putting arbitrary TeX code in the argument of a TeX macro without all hell breaking loose? I kind of thought \detokenize would do that, but I guess not.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha it's too general, if you detokenize then it is no longer tex code at all, and define hell breaking loose. If you have an example that is making an error post a question with the example, hard to say anything otherwise.

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle Yes, that's what I thought about \detokenize.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha it is not putting the code in the argument that causes problems, it is what you do with the argument. \newcommand\foo[1]{} then you can put anything in the argument of \foo{...}

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle I see.

@DavidCarlisle \nextnuml is also used inside some Lua code.

David Carlisle

5:30 PM

@FaheemMitha you can't use a tex macro inside Lua code. But we can't debug riddles. Post an example.

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle Yes, I realise you don't have enough information.

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@DavidCarlisle lost your crystal ball?

David Carlisle

@HaraldHanche-Olsen apparently

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle The macro is used inside a call to tex.sprint.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Just grasping at straws. I hate trying to write MWEs. And they often aren't that M. But I think I've said that already, before.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha so that's fine, you are just writing some tex code that then get executed when control returns to tex. But it depends of course what you write and wher eyou write it

Faheem Mitha

5:33 PM

@DavidCarlisle Yes, I realise the devil is in the details.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha I don't see why you are avoiding that, you could have written an example in less time than it's taken to not describe the problem in chat, and debugging the example would likely be instantaneous.

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle Well, my code is now relatively complicated, and I'd have to strip it down. Because I'm not sure where the problem is.

I often try to reproduce errors in toy examples. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn't.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha the trick to making examples is to not try to write an example from scratch, start from a copy of your document and delete stuff.

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle Yes, that's what I meant by "strip it down".

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@FaheemMitha what I do when trying to do something new (to me): wite only MWEs first, then when I get it working, I embed it in working code. The other way around is just too painful.

Faheem Mitha

5:37 PM

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Yes, that's what I do too.

But my MWEs are currently working. It's the actual code that is breaking.

mickep

I do as David, just write it correct the first time.

3

David Carlisle

@mickep excellent plan

Faheem Mitha

@mickep That's a good tip. Thanks.

mickep

@DavidCarlisle Oh, you also do as David. Great!

Faheem Mitha

@mickep Did you have a different David in mind?

mickep

5:39 PM

@FaheemMitha I'm just teasing him a bit.

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@FaheemMitha then apparentky your MWE is too M.

Faheem Mitha

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Apparently.

But one problem with TeX is that different pieces interact in unpredictable ways.

Isolating pieces from each other is not so easy.

Also, error messages are generally completely useless. But you already know that.

Well, not completely. It gives you a general idea what is wrong.

But it's nothing like a normal traceback. Or even a core dump.

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@FaheemMitha you can try inserting some debug code: let your lua code write to the log what tex code it is generating, perhaps. you might be surprised.

Faheem Mitha

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Sure - I do that all the time. And yes, sometimes I'm surprised.

Thanks for the encouragement, folks.

David Carlisle

6:05 PM

@FaheemMitha you can have a full trace of every macro expansion from the original source line to the error, how much more trace do you want?

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle But would I understand any of it?

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha well it's a whole lot easier to read than a core dump. What else can you expect from a stack trace?

Ulrike Fischer

@DavidCarlisle my husband is sending me links to images of daddles the duck. Any idea why?

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle I have fond memories of core dumps. (No, not really.)

David Carlisle

@UlrikeFischer no idea:-)

Ulrike Fischer

6:35 PM

@JosephWright for the BDC-operator I need to create (unique) names. dvips uses R1,R2 etc, pdfbase rm@oc1 etc. Any suggestion what we should use?

barbara beeton

7:17 PM

My complaint on the main meta site (meta.stackexchange.com/a/329773) about the treatment of ads on tex.sx, in particular about the disappearance of our community ads and their replacement by team and commercial ads, has been answered with what looks like a solid fix. It did apparently require attention from one of the more exalted members of the tech staff. Only took a week. And, thankfully, was not as nasty to fix (by us) as the horrid \\ mess.

@FaheemMitha -- My favorite core dump was from the output of a utility sort, where the reported error was "key out of order". About 3 inches of fanfold greenbar. Never figured out how it happened; maybe someone with a particularly magnetic personality was walking past a tape drive at the wrong time. (Machine flipped a bit in the output phase of the sort. Never trust a computer.)

Enthusiastic Engineer

Hi LaTeX friends. I want to prepare a portfolio of my professional activities including my codes, projects, excel sheets, manuals, etc. Which LaTeX package is more suitable for this? Should I use an article template or something more interesting exists?

yo'

7:32 PM

@EnthusiasticEngineer you will probably manially tweak almost everything, so it doesn't really matter. My CV is for isnstance built over article, but everything is in minipages anyways.

Enthusiastic Engineer

@yo' Thank you. I also have used simple article theme for my CV and created everything I needed.

I wanted the portfo to be so eyecatching... I am a little worried about how it is presented in the eyes of the human resource person.

yo'

7:53 PM

@EnthusiasticEngineer not overdoing it is important :) But having the right stuff in the text is importanter. Certainly in Europe, dunno avout US

Enthusiastic Engineer

@yo' yes. the content is more important than the style and colors ^_^ But I am worried because having portfo for civil engineers is not something all people do. And this is my first time preparing such document for myself.

cis

8:51 PM

Here is my newest TikZ-bomb!

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/497425/tikz-how-to-get-decorations-on-each-grid-middlepoint

How can I create such a nice preview here?

David Carlisle

0

Q: TikZ: How to get decorations on each grid-middlepoint?

What is the right setting to get a decoration at every center of every box? \documentclass[margin=5mm, tikz]{standalone} \usepackage{tikz} \usetikzlibrary{decorations.markings} \begin{document} \begin{tikzpicture}[>=latex, scale=0.5] \draw (0,0) grid (8,8); \tikzset{mymarks/.style={ ->, de...

@cis ^^

cis

9:08 PM

@DavidCarlisle Ok, and how did you do that?

David Carlisle

@cis just post the link, but it has to be the only thing in the comment

cis

@DavidCarlisle Ah, I understand.

David Carlisle

@cis same true of some other well known sites. youtube, wikipedia etc, links get boxed as above with a preview of the page rather than just showing the url

cis

@DavidCarlisle Ah, very good.

Skillmon

9:32 PM

@FaheemMitha I like the error messages and don't think they are "completely useless".

David Carlisle

9:53 PM

@egreg I blame you for the textmerg bug

egreg

@DavidCarlisle ?

David Carlisle

2

Q: Preserve label spacing dimensions when using mailmerge

I am making a sheet of address labels. Here is my first iteration: \documentclass[letterpaper,12pt]{article} \usepackage[newdimens]{labels} \LabelCols=4 \LabelRows=6 \LeftPageMargin=20mm \RightPageMargin=20mm \TopPageMargin=13mm \BottomPageMargin=12.5mm \InterLabelColumn=8mm \InterLabelRow=5mm ...

spacing sticky-labels textmerg

@egreg missing %

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Never used textmerg in my life

David Carlisle

@egreg nor me, but we both seem to have write access to its git repository:-)

Ulrike Fischer

@DavidCarlisle god, more packages ;-). I wondered why footmisc is not there, but this one Frank seems to have heritated.

egreg

10:01 PM

@DavidCarlisle Oh, the RF legacy!

David Carlisle

@UlrikeFischer yes he took first pickings and we got the rest

marmot

@Skillmon Of course they are. Error messages only benefit those who make errors. From my own experience I can tell you it is much better not to make errors. ;-)

Skillmon

@marmot Having a bit of experience on Overleaf and here, I can assure you, it's not my fault!

@marmot who said error messages are for the users? They are for those supporting the users.

marmot

@Skillmon Well, using overleaf is clearly an error, and there should be a message, I agree. ;-)

Skillmon

@marmot it's the right tool for some and the wrong for others.

@marmot using Emacs is also an error, but I know a few people risking their tendon sheath trying.

marmot

10:14 PM

@Skillmon I think you did not read the ";-)" in my above messages. And yes, using emacs is also an error.

Skillmon

@marmot oh, I did, don't worry.

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