Just popping in to thank everyone for being helpful over the past few months. Coming back to SE was a tough decision, but ultimately it's the best place to talk about TeX and friends. Thanks again!
@FaheemMitha well, there were some decisions in the past that made at least a big share of users sad or even mad. For quite some time it didn't feel like the powers that be do really care for their community. There were a few incidents which made a portion of users leave and search for alternatives.
@FaheemMitha that's why I said "no :)" whether I could elaborate on that. The other message was meant more seriously and as an attempt to explain why some might think it's a tough decision.
@FaheemMitha yes, rabbits try to be friendly and peaceful beings :) Even though this is against our nature. Still, there was some unrest in the TeX-subcommunity a while ago, and some longstanding users left. And our community's looks turned ugly.
@FaheemMitha well, that was the result of stackexchange's effort to make the site more accessible with a responsive design, something I have yet to notice the benefits of, the uglyfication I noticed immediately.
@FaheemMitha yes, with the "looks turned ugly". And that even though the community (and not only the TeX-subcommunity) made it very clear that the design decisions made were sub-optimal, to say the least.
@PauloCereda linguistic/colour fact of the day: in Icelandic a "carrot" is called "yellow-root", because of its distinctive colour. Later when different coloured varieties appeared in the country such as white and purple ones they are simply called "purple yellow-root" and "white yellow-root" because the meaning of "yellow" in "yellow-root" has merged into the concept of the vegetable and holds no objection to other colour terms. :p
@PauloCereda probably :p they might carry some human knowledge since the Icelandic rabbit population is all feral. :p
@Skillmon heh heh heh... you might also notice this phenomena in a more modern setting if you've ever bought Red Bull energy drinks. Now they have blue Red Bull and nobody bats an eyelid :p
Quick question folks: In matchtabular environment, (say)the left column has 2 row, and the right has 3 rows. However, the empty left row is also numbered. how do i fix this?
\newenvironment{matchtabular}{% \setcounter{matchleft}{0}% \setcounter{matchright}{0}% \tabularx{\textwidth}{% >{\leavevmode\hbox to 1.5em{\stepcounter{matchleft}\arabic{matchleft}.}}X% >{\leavevmode\hbox to 1.5em{\stepcounter{matchright}\alph{matchright})}}X% }% }{\endtabularx}
@GermanShepherd you could use \multicolumn{1}{c}{} to get an unnumbered cell (but the use case sounds a bit odd)
@GermanShepherd \leavevmode\hbox to 1.5em{ isn't latex and (I assume) makes underfull hbox warnings all the time, why not the latex \makebox[1.5em][l]{ ?
@Skillmon yeah, I don't really drink them either. Mostly because my stomach gets upset. :p I'm down to one cup of (strong) coffee, and one glass of Sprite Zero per day and otherwise only water. Any more irritating liquid and I won't sleep because of heart burn :|
@GermanShepherd yes but why have a tabular alignment if there is no relation between the columns, and if there is a relation, why is one cell empty. Shouldn't it be two minipages with an enumerate in each?
@GermanShepherd probably not "modern yellow" but boundaries of colour terminology changes through time, so probably at the time of naming the term "yellow" (or "gelb" in this instance) also covered what we call "orange" today. :) #doctoralthesis
@DavidCarlisle I'm afraid "preparing_for_xmas_without_roasted_duck" exceeds the character limit. Would this be a good enough reason to open a feature request for more characters?
Ah it goes down to change in the definition of \AtEndPreamble in etoolbox to use \AddToHook. Goodness. /runs away screaming
@UlrikeFischer Yeah, e.g. when a package uses \AtEndPreamble and the way how these hooks are ordered changed between tl19 and tl20 :) (well, I have now someone to blame, so I'm happy :) )
What do you hate Microsoft most for and why is it for making people believe that spaces and other whatnots in filenames are a good idea?!
@Plergux -- Ginger allegedly settles one's stomach. I recommend ginger beer, which I drink because I like it much better than ginger ale. (Actually, I just like it! Float dark rum on top of it, and you've got Bermuda's national drink, the "dark and stormy". My current favorite is Gosling's, and it comes in diet, which amazingly tastes the same as fully-sugared.)
@barbarabeeton Thank you for this advice :D I shall try it :D (I have also found that after eating a fatty meal some water with apple vinegar works wonders :D).
@Plergux -- I suppose you also know this trick with apple cider vinegar: When making chicken soup, starting with the carcass of a roast chicken, add in a few spoonsful of vinegar about halfway through the simmering. It will leach calcium out of the bones, which is good for your bones, and you can't taste the vinegar when it's finished.
@Plergux -- If you want to taste the vinegar, serve up a nice, simple salad of thinly sliced cucumbers. If you put matzo balls in the soup, you wouldn't want to taste the vinegar there.
@yo' no, the dates in the 2.09 sources an interesting mix of unsortable strings, 2-digit years, 4-digit years, months as numbers month as three letter names months as full words, ...
@DavidCarlisle I have no idea what exactly causes this. I tried removing everything in the nWE and still get an error. I started a MWE, tried to add everything, and get no error
I'll investigate further, as this is Overleaf-originated class
@DavidCarlisle when I was with them, it was one of the first things I tried often during support. Sometimes projects had a corrupted cache on Overleaf.
@Plergux -- Tea sounds good. Probably not surprisingly, I have a recommendation for that too. Long jing, also called "dragon well". A lovely green tea, delicately aromatic. I was introduced to it many years ago by a Chinese graduate student for whom I'd helped find a bug in a program; he gave me a box as a thank you present. (It's become easier to find more recently.)
@JosephWright well, easiest to copy-paste it from the project or download the project ZIP. But as I said above, this MWE is also giving issues: overleaf.com/1765415634rsvqkksrppzr
@JosephWright no etoolbox is fine. \AtEndPreamble was not allowed in older formats, so it is okay if it errors there.
@yo' the bug is with the class. As I wrote at the start: it is not a good idea to load a package with \AtBeginDocument, at least not if the package doesn't expect this.
@UlrikeFischer yeah, I know. But it surprised me that this became an issue only now and I didn't understand why.
Anyway, we will correct the class file. Other than that, as we're definitely not upgrading the latex core in Overleaf because of a very minor possible bug that might not be a bug at all, I'm for closing this now. You can blame me for causing so much noise :-)
@barbarabeeton I'm not too keen on tea. And the words "delicately aromatic" make me think I might not appreciate it. :p (I'm the kind of person who can't tell the difference between Euroshopper instant coffee and super fancy new ground spiffy coffee machine stuff :p)
@PauloCereda Yes, "high tea" is posh. But "tea" is fish and chips. :p
@DavidCarlisle well, one is a mark on a timeline and the other a physical object. we shall hope all concerned will be able to discern which is which in the circumstances. :p
@Plergux The real answer to your TIPA question is that no linguist these days should really be bothering with pdfLaTeX and 8bit font encodings, but instead should use LuaTeX or XeTeX with a good font. I understand that in the context of your thesis draft this isn't necessarily what you want to hear, however.
@AlanMunn (and @Plergux) -- But even using Xe(La)TeX, isn't there a problem that italic forms for the IPA characters may not be available? Do you know of a font that does provide them?
@Rmano -- Ah, yes. Gotta be good vodka; my vote is (or at least used to be) Moskovskaja. Used not to be available in the US; had to sneak it in from Canada, (Or get someone to bring it in from Russia.)
@barbarabeeton I am not really an expert on liquors --- but yes, I concord that I drink so little of them that they have to be very good. I mostly like grappa (when really good) and Negroni ;-)
@barbarabeeton Yes, this is a problem in that any font designed as an IPA font will not support italics, since it is an abomination w.r.t. IPA. :) So the SIL fonts don't provide slant or italics, for example. But many more generic unicode fonts do (as in the Libertine case) although they may not cover the more obscure IPA symbols.
@AlanMunn -- Thanks. Shouldn't it be possible to adapt the tipa input notation to use Libertine instead? (I know that it's considered an abomination, but if one wants one's dissertation to be accepted ... it's terribly hard to move the people in charge of those rules. I know I shouldn't characterize them as blockheads, but often they act that way.)
@Plergux actually commonly not. If you get invited round to a neighbours for tea, you might be expecting a meal but get a cup of tea and a biscuit and go home hungry (it's not normally considered polite to assert superior linguistic understanding of the phrase and demand food with menaces:-)
@AlanMunn Well, considering I've only been using TeX (in any form) for a little over two months now I will excuse myself by being ignorant. :p However, I shall keep it in mind (for now my advisor is none the wiser so I'll stick to it for a little longer :p)
@barbarabeeton Well I think that fontspec implements TIPA commands and maps them to the appropriate characters, so it might be possible, I'd have to check.
@Plergux If you're a new user, then even more reason to switch, in fact. You don't have decades of TIPA code rumbling around inside your head. :)
@Plergux You've run into the problem of the persistence of the interwebs. Old information stays around far too long. The same reason that people are still using qtree or covington.
@DavidCarlisle All right, I must admit all my UK cultural knowledge is aqcuired via the Young Ones :p (and anyway, one might go out to dinner and expect a meal and go home hungry :,| )
@AlanMunn -- But @Plergux in her question points out that it's not as immediately noticeable as italic, an observation with which I agree (I will not comment re attractiveness of appearance; that's subjective).
@DavidCarlisle -- Not much more; TeX hasn't been around much more.
@barbarabeeton heh heh heh... It might be because I am so used to italic. In fact I didn't even know there was such a thing as "slanted text" until I started using LaTeX :p
@Plergux -- I'm not sure that slanted was generally available much before TeX. I can't think of any slanted metal type. But Knuth adopted it so that it would make "real math" (always italic) easily recognizable in theorems (traditionally italic; Knuth ==> slanted), which I think makes good sense. (But I know a lot of people, including a lot of math editorial people, who just won't stand for it, and hang the intelligibility.
@DavidCarlisle -- Oh, fiddlesticks. I'm not ashamed of the fact that I was employed by AMS for 56.5 years. It's irrelevant that I started there when I was 3.
@Plergux although many later systems (and fonts) have that, but call it italic, eg if you use a sans serif font and hit the I button thing in a word processor it's most likely a slanted rather than true italic font (whatever the font is actually called) but especially if it's just the upright font transformed
@AlanMunn -- Slanted IPA is relatively easy. Italic requires real redesign, and that requires both a good stock of relevant knowledge and real talent. Neither is in readily available supply.
@barbarabeeton Well, I don't think people very often think about the practicality of things. Many of these style things are so much just embedded habit.
@Plergux It really depends on what they are. The fontenc package shouldn't be loaded, instead load fontspec and then set a main font. I think that your tipa commands won't work out of the box, and you'd need to replace them with the actual characters in your source. This will make the source more readable at the expense of a little more cumbersome input method.
@Plergux -- Consider youself encouraged. If you mastered LaTeX so well in a matter of months, a bit of (very messy) editing shouldn't be too dangerous. Since you've presumably used tipa vocabulary consistently, consider global search-and-replace techniques. On a copy of the file at least for the first experiments.
@PolineSandra I get no error from that document (and you haven't shown what command you ran or what error you got)
@PolineSandra unrelated but size commands do not take an argument, use \small abc not \small{abc} also \rm hasn't been defined by default in latex since 1993, best not to use it in new documents.
@Plergux -- Good! (If I were doing this, I'd also make the replacements one at a time, and back up the successful result before going on to the next. Takes longer, but worth it.)
@PolineSandra presumably you have a package that needs to be updated, but as you have not shown your log or said what versions of the packages you are using hard to guess. I assume you could also simplify your example a lot (which would help debugging) remove every package not required to show the error, do you really have to load amsmath for example?
@PolineSandra If you have a minimal example it is worth comparing package versions but pointless comparing versions of amsmath or stmaryrd if you get the same error without those packages
@AlanMunn -- You might want to do a diff after each replacement step to check. (I've been brought to grief by failing to do that. One does learn from bad experience.)
@AlanMunn although in my day job where edits often apply to a couple of thousand documents at a time, doing them one at a time can be a bit tiresome. Can anything really go wrong if you apply a multi-line regex replace over thousands of files then commit the result?
@DavidCarlisle Oh, I'm happy to use global regex replacement too, but it does require quite a bit of testing. And version control obviously helps too. :)
@DavidCarlisle Reminds my of my first phonetics professor, who when we learned the full IPA would say things like "The next sound comes from Kannada, a language spoken by 30 million people in India. You have probably never heard of it." :)
@AlanMunn heh heh heh... anything is better than bloody Piraha :p
@barbarabeeton Yes. I will probably do it in small bits. Fortunately for this my main document is basically just links to around sixty smaller documents, so I could add them one by one and see what happens. :p
@Plergux -- If you're using \include, you can make a new main document, and bring in the updated components one by one. (\includeonly is one of the very good features of LaTeX.)
@Plergux -- Never used that. But since I started with plain TeX, I early subscribed to the concept of a good, solid, consistent front end. What's important though is that everything works together. Onward!
Hello! Some question at TeX LaTeX Stack Exchange caused me to "study" expl3-token-listen variables. A question came to my mind: Why do you have \tl_use:N in expl3 and not just \use:V ? I mean \exp_args:NV \use:n {<token list varable>} seems to work as well...
@UlrichDiez V is newer but also slower as it has to do different things for different types (typically \the prefix for registers) for a token list of course you don't really need anything at all.
