if you use mac or linux or similar i can she you the delimiter thing with awk really easily

@tjt263 using it for english assignments is so obnoxious and pretentious but pretty fun. I used it for a presentation once and that was fun too, even though i had to learn how to use beamer; of course it was turned in like a week late, but whatever.

@texdr.aft haha just one week. you must be fast

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\saveimageresource {example-image.pdf} %ok
%\saveimageresource {"example-image.pdf"} %nok
%\saveimageresource {"example-image".pdf} %nok

xxx
\end{document}

@DavidCarlisle ^^^^

@tjt263 i try to write code but i'm not good at it.

i was worried it might seem pretentious, but i dunno. good is good

@UlrikeFischer hmm

awk is like sed right

@texdr.aft

well, both.. absolutely.. and not at all

it's used for similar things

and they both utilise regex i.e. regular expressions

which i think is also a donald knuth thing

or maybe dennis ritchie or ken thompson

dennis ritchie i believe

he introduced the unix world to regex with ed

have you every tried ed?

well sed is based on ed

@DavidCarlisle but \saveimageresource{Neuer Ordner/bild mit leerzeichen.pdf} works fine.

@yo' -- Good. (You can ask your friend a question for me. I once "failed" a canoe "certification" by being unable to swamp a canoe. The test was to swamp the thing, then shake it out and get back in. I could jump out and get back in without flipping it, and I could shake out a water-filled canoe, but I never did manage to fill one with water. Would your friend let me pass the test?)

i have used ed, but i don't.

i use vim

and only recently

Knuth didn't really have anything to do with regex, but he did invent LR parsing

i don't know what that is either

ed is almost impossible to use nowadays

whys that

@UlrikeFischer yes I had this working (but maybe that was part of the code I never merged over top Franks utf8 and space branch) not the primitive of course but in teh latex back end removing all "

i think i just use bash like people use ed

@tjt263 eek go away we all use emacs here (@PauloCereda)

you do?

@barbarabeeton sorry, I'm afraid I'm lost with vocabulary there (and I'm losing against time, I get up in 7.5 hours)

well i believe that sed and definitely awk are parsed using yacc which is an LR-based parser generator

is anyone else impressed this kid is still in highschool

whatever

i think i had one interest in highschool, and it wasn't computer science

oh also in metafont you can actually enter systems of equations and it will automatically define the variables by solving it

@yo' -- "swamp" = fill with water, but don't necessarily sink. "shake out" = while one is in the water, slosh the water-filled canoe back and forth to get as much water out of it as possible. Does that help? Anyhow, sleep well and travel safely.

i just have a lot of time

you have all the time. but you won't always. try to use it wisely, i wish i did

and a+b+2c=3 will define a b and c with "dependencies" on the other variables if they aren't defined yet

that seems appropriate

also that isn't an assignment statement

did knuth ever work with ritchie. i'm thinking no, but maybe he should have

assignments are with the algol := operator

oh

what is it then

it's an equation

metafont just has equations as a language construct

but you said it defines a and b and c right?

that sounds like assignment

3=5 evaluates to true and 3=x sets x to 3

it does assign values

yeah, the sounds like it is assignment

@barbarabeeton oh. Swamping is pretty useless IMHO, you don't need that on WW1 or WW2; can be useful as a measure you can well manipulate the boat for >WW2.

by definition

that's true :)

so, can you draw SVGs with metafont

sadly no

draw something like.. a figure 8

oh

wha's it even good for then

tex fonts

you can fake drawings by defining a font with just a few huge characters

that seems like a highly specific thing to be interested in for someone who doesn't really use latex

i don't use it because i have no need to

i'm only interested in it because i use it

i managed to get the entire computers and typesetting series and i'm reading it now so it's relevant

and even then i'm so bored and frustrated with it i'd never do it by choice!

"reading" as much as one can read TeX the program

try plain tex

i mean, I'm interested in this conversation on another level, but still

i think knuth's setup is a format built off of plain tex and metapost

so what can you do with metafont (or is it meta post) exactly. show me a cool thing that you can do. prog

write a little program to demo it

i mean

i don't know the language

sounds like you do

if you look at most (la)tex-produced output they'll use the computer modern typeface and you can see what it does there

i mean i write in other languages, and i don't fully understand them. i don't think anybody does really. you just know enough to do what you need to do, and if you don't you figure it out. it never really stops

not enough to actually use it though

i think you might surprise yourself if you actually have a task

that's how it usually works with programming

in the beginning anyway

you don't know what to do until you have to do.. something

i think that's why they call it hacking

it's like hacking through a jungle with a machete

i agree completely

for most languages

not metafont

"necessity is the mother of invention" is something i heard somewhere. it's kinda like that

but as a substitute for my inability

go to page 21 in this pdf: metafont.tutorial.free.fr/downloads/mftut.pdf

the following page shows the output of the program listing there

where'd @marmot go

the document says page 7 but it's logically page 21

@texdr.aft hey you might be interested to read about Pierre Bézier if you haven't already

i'm familiar with bezier curves but if there's something else about him then i will

like how you are interested in knuth and this stuff]

i think you might find it interesting is all

a while ago I was trying to begin to develop a program for music notation but one that's actually good

so i learned about bezier curves

for drawing slurs which i now realize is probably a special case of the problem metafont solved

you mean treble clefs and crotchets and quavers etc

or midi piano roll stuff

specifically i mean the curvy things here:

if you're familiar with notation then i don't mean to be patronizing

but anyway it turns out it's pretty difficult to automatically draw them and make them attractive

with no human intervention

i don't think thats true

lilypond has a whole essay about it

to draw this shape

(

for instance, imagine automatically producing this:

its an arc

it's not an arc

well some of them are

but it varies in thickness and extrema

I've never seen it like that

i think theres a simple solution maybe

using the highest points of everything as control points?

and then trying to avoid collisions

are you drawing a path around it and filling it in

i'd divide the problem into two parts

or are you drawing the centre line as an open path

one is determining the path

the other is making the thickness look natural

what do you mean by that?

wait nevermind

the latter

here you can see the variation in thickness i'm stressing

yeah, good, so the problem is what you might call the profile

the arrow is irrelevant and i didn't add it

exactly like that good example

the simple method doesn't work for many cases

do you have adobe illustrator

i don't

this one "bottoms out" which the program would have to be able to do

@DavidCarlisle oi

it's quite simple to make this shape -- as a human

well it's simple to make the shape as a computer too

it's simple to make it generally and make it look good as a human

but not as a computer

@yo' Yay!

@texdr.aft Related to an earlier conversation you were having (about the TeX program): you may also be interested in this, someone's relatively clean manual translation of tex.web into C++: github.com/nadder/rstex/blob/3a324aa/rstex.cpp.pre

@PauloCereda C-x C-s

@tjt263 look at the curvature of this one:

@DavidCarlisle :wq

@ShreevatsaR thanks

@PauloCereda ah, the secret escape code

@ShreevatsaR I stumbled across your repository of other tex implementations on github the other day

@texdr.aft this one is a tie, not a slur

@tjt263 if the "pathfinding" were entirely based on avoiding collisions with high points, then it wouldn't be such an extreme shape

i'm speaking of the ridiculous thing connecting the g in the pickup measure to something we can't see in this picture

here's what lilypond does

lsr.di.unimi.it/LSR/Image?id=1028

even better:

in lilypond each slur starts at a different distance from the initial note, but in sibelius they start from the same point (or close to it)

@texdr.aft Ah ok, let me know if you find more :-)

lilypond is more attractive than sibelius here

maybe making it more curved like sibelius does is the way to go, but the thickness is imbalanced

the lowest point isn't the visual midpoint of the slur at all, and the thickest part should generally be centered

lllypond's slurs are too anemic to make any comment about their thickness

@ShreevatsaR hi mr. velociraptor!

@PauloCereda hi, long time since I was here… you welcome me every time :)

@ShreevatsaR :)

@texdr.aft i'll show you something

the first slur in this image is an example of a good computer-generated slur

sadly it's occluded by the staff; ideally we'd take this into account too

@tjt263 oh?

someone on here asked about setting page layout according to some rule given in a 19th century manual or something, and someone responded "you mean where everything on the page depends on everything else on the page?" that's how i'd describe music notation when approached from an algorithmic/programming perspective

honestly i'd argue that "breaking systems of staves into lines" is slightly more complicated of a problem to formulate than breaking paragraphs into lines

(i definintely haven't solved anything, but it's just how it seems)

@texdr.aft It is much more complicated!

spacing should be determined at the system level, which means that, paradoxically, line breaks must be determined long before the actual spacing happens

i suppose that's how text justification works though

i'm trying to come up with an adequate way to describe the issue

Hi, I get a linebreak between \approx and 5 in \SI{\approx5}{\micro\metre} is this a bug?

this one is beautiful (not computer-engraved)

@JonasStein Ask @JosephWright

spacing actually happens on multiple levels, which i think is what makes it complicated

the spacing is disrupted by bars and key/time signatures, so these need to be taken into account

and then the actual space between the notes is determined, which is its own issue, and we need to allocate space for every interrupting element that can be moved (accidentals)

one that's done we can determine line breaks, but doing it like this requires respacing the lines that we've broken

i don't think at all that that's the best way but it's relatively simple

it's made much more difficult when we need to somehow make sure "bad" page breaks don't happen (fast runs across a page and there's no way to turn to the next one without an assistant)

oh and lyrics ruin everything. they are the reason that an automatic music engraving program needs to have a hyphenation algorithm implemented, and they also affect the spacing of everything.

@texdr.aft don't be foolish; hyphenation has nothing to do with breaking lyrics into syllables.

@JonasStein Example?

Ted Ross says that a music proofreader should have a dictionary with them to check hyphenation, so they were related at some point

oh yea what does bob ross have to say about it

(In his "The art of music engraving and processing" from 1971)

@texdr.aft yep; but he has to rely on his sense of syllables, as especially English is crazy considering hyphenation

fair enough

hehe. bob ross was the man

Czech has simpler rules, for instance, but it also has complications of its own; vowel-less syllables being only one of them.

@yo' do you know of any cases where hyphenation points don't correspond to lyric syllable division points?

i mean any cases where not a single one does

@texdr.aft imgur.com/a/XcRvk0M

@texdr.aft well, consider for instance that blessed is sometimes one syllable and sometimes two, and only some typesetters typeset the latter as blessèd. How could an automated system decide this?

that's a good point @yo'

but it can if the music is expressed unambiguously (and it must be)

and there are many such words: vegetables is 2 or 3, for instance

from the information, how to appropriately divide a word may be determined

and there's record: broken as re-cord as a verb and rec-ord as a noun.

that is definitely an undecidable case

without some analysis of the text

which is beyond the scope of most things

@texdr.aft even with it; there are sentences in which you need a very wide context to decide what is a verb and what is a noun. (I don't have examples atm)

of course

i feel like NLP in a music notation program is a little unnecessary

@texdr.aft see you you can assign profiles to the stroke and the curve

@tjt263 yes i was just about to respond

so that would be integrated into the "drawing slurs" system

or are you just demonstrating something

the latter? maybe both? i dunno

@yo' in cases where the program can't determine syllable boundaries (which is a necessary part of music engraving, while in typesetting one can get away without hyphenation if they'll accept lower-quality output) it should just say "! Syllable boundaries ambiguous in 'record'" or something similar

when entering lyrics, the user can mark division points with hyphens

@tjt263 some of the final curves would be acceptable as a part of a slur

@texdr.aft not that I would ever be willing to rely on such a system; I would much more prefer to have a text editor fu to do this: syllabilize the lyrics automatically, show me the result (still in the text editor) and let me do what I wish to do with it.

but i think it can be automated is the point

yeah they're identical though

@yo' fair enough

it's been scaled is all

@texdr.aft I can live with some loss of control in text typsetting (when it's automated, for instance). But I don't consider it acceptable in music typesetting

but you could also scale stroke weight as a ratio of the length

when preparing music using the very obscure method known as "autography" it is suggested to draw the start and end points and then connected

i think you want just a basic symmetrical taper

@yo' i think the user should be able to have total control over at least setting lyrics; they can choose whether they trust the program enough

@texdr.aft lyrics is only the very last thing. All over, music typsetting is either bad, or full of small touches and fine tuning.

@tjt263 not necessarily; sometimes slurs are asymmetric and still look good

@yo' that's what everyone says, but i'm still interested in the problem

yeah, because of the curve

the taper is symmetrical, the line is curved

so the taper ends up skewed

@texdr.aft well, for most bad (or not perfect) music I can tell you what's wrong with it :-) but it's hundreds and hundreds of little things.

same

@tjt263 i want to try something, if you're up for it

here's an image of music with only a few slurs

encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/…

nope

i wonder how using your curves to add a slur to this would look

oh and i remembered another complicating factor: vertical whitespace is very, very significant

@texdr.aft it will look ideal

i took a bunch of shots.

imgur.com/a/SoOVbD4

all that is at the end, is a plain bezier curve with a symmetrically tapered profile

you should be able to do it with tikz ,etc

right

also i think i answered a question i asked a long time ago: does metafont allow you to manipulate n-order bezier curves. the answer is kind of

you can also do things like this imgur.com/a/UelhYSm

i'm curious about what the ridiculously complicated slurs would look like

but not as complicated as the real examples

show me one

just one where it "changes direction"

okay hold on

high resolution

it's difficult dealing with rasters

actually i'm sure theres a latex package for music notation

there is

no good?

also here's a picture though idk if it's high enough resolution

i've already sent it but still

and no it's not very good

not really , i was looking at that one just now

but it'll have to do

it's impressive and amazing from a technical point of view but compared to other programs' output, it is lacking

but it's not quite as extreme

@texdr.aft

imgur.com/a/77Bo6uh

its a nice 3 point bezier curve. with a tapered profile. very simple to draw mathematically as a vector

actually i drew it with 5 points inthink

can probably be done with 3

it probably doesn't really matter

of course it does

i mean it doesn't matter yet

we're talking about form

i'm messing with metafont and there's another weird/cool feature

and end-of-line doesn't really end anything. a statement only ends with a semicolon

it makes sense, but i expected a syntax error and didn't get one

that's normal

yeah but i'm doing this in the command line

like metafont's repl

yeah.. i image you would be. sure

do you know C

ostensibly

but i only use python (because it's easier)

yeah, i can tell. well python is written in C, so it abstracts that kind of thing

i know

i mostly look at old, low-level code which is usually in c

i just don't really like the "modern" programming environment or whatever

sure, but i can see there is something that you don't know. i have to set the stage for context somehow. anyway, the semicolon isn't EOL. it's just for the compiler really, i think

i think EOL is \0

what do you mean by that

like a hundred twenty-line files spread across ten directories

that is the old way

TeX is a single file

it can be

it all can be

meanwhile the modern re-implementations spread it out

it's mostly for abstraction as well, and compartmentalisation. that's why you import modules. it's annoying sometimes but it pays off

oh i know. I just really like the idea of things being completely self-contained

thats what the header files are for (.h)

yeah, me too, but they never really are

nothing ever really is. it's all a bunch of things connected to other things. so we tend to look at things in layers

Going through the SAILDART archives, I came across the code for the pascal compiler they used (which was used to first compile tex) and it's a giant file of pdp-11 (i think) assembly code

it's cool

an apple is fully self contained to the average person, but not to a biologist, even less so to a chemist, and again to a physicist. programming is a lot like that

yeah, so that would be another layer. getting pretty atomic there

so i hope that was helpful, re: vector curves etc

yes for sure

vectors are quite elegant compared to bitmapped rasters

metafont is internally all vectors

good

it's actually kind of impressive

but then it converts everything to raster font files

if you export to svg or pdf or eps etc it will be quite nice

does pdf support graphics as postscript does

what do you mean

postscript can pretty much be used as a programming language to draw things

pdf is similar but i don't know if it can be used in the same way

obviously pdfs can contain graphics

well, it's compiled

mostly

post script isn't

you probably can't just type up a pdf. like you can postscript

you can open them in a text editor and see the commands

sometimes the entire file is compressed though

if you do strings 'file.ps' || cat 'file.ps' you'll probably be able to read the whole thing. with a pdf, you will get mostly garbled nonsense

right

most text in pdfs is compressed in some way (i forget exactly how)