I wonder, in cases when there are a lot of options for a package, whether it makes to arrange them alphabetically.

@FaheemMitha where? In the manual or in the document using the package?

@Rmano I meant during usage. In the actual TeX file.

I don't know about documentation. I suppose one might group options by topic in documentation, for example. But for actual usage it might make sense to order them alphabetically. I use a template, so I would change it there.

@FaheemMitha I suppose it's a matter of taste. The biggest list I have (I hate too many package options; I think the correct interface is to have a \packageoption{} for anything that can be postponed) is this:

\usepackage[english, spanish, es-noshorthands, shorthands=off]{babel}

...and it's organized by function (and it's like that for a long-standing bug in Spanish babel)

@Rmano I'm not familiar with \packageoption{}. What is that used for?

@FaheemMitha no, sorry, I've been cryptic. I mean that any package should have a command to set option after the loading, I find that much more usable (and avoid the dreaded "option clash" when requiring a package). Like for example siunitx that has \sisetup{}.

@Rmano Ah, I see. So whether this exists is up to the package?

@FaheemMitha Yes. There are things that are only selectable at package load time (for example, in circuitikz, enabling the alternate syntax for units) but I think that a lot of things should be postponed if possible. My package is guilty of this too, there are things like voltage-direction and betterproportions that should not be package options, but settable after loading (and better if locally) with ctikzset.

@Rmano Postponed to when? And what is your package?

@FaheemMitha After loading the package. (I was referring to circuitikz, which I maintain now)

@Rmano I see. So later on in the file?

Yes. For example: suppose you use a package that do, internally, \RequirePackage[svgnames]{xcolor}. Now if in your file you use \usepackage[x11names]{xcolor} you will have an error Option clash for package xcolor. That would not happen if you could load xcolor without options and then use some kind of \xcolorsetup{x11colors} or something like that.

Said that, there are things that must be options, no doubt about it.

I try to "\RequirePackage" strictly with no options whenever I can, to avoid that... (and yes, I know that often you can solve it with \PassOtionsToPackage early on, but still. I love \sisetup and \hypersetup for that)

@JosephWright might be, but if expl3 should be a programming layer for (almost) all aspects, it has to include kerning support eventually.

@Skillmon Like I said, talk to Chris ;)

@Skillmon I don't think that you need to convince Joseph

@FaheemMitha be careful, for some packages, the loading order of options is important, e.g. for babel

@samcarter_says_quack Thanks, I'll try to keep it in mind.

@FaheemMitha grouping them semantically makes more sense to me, alphabetic seems completely arbitrary what advantage would that be over random order (which is what I actually use)

@samcarter_says_quack Leute, die nicht auf Englisch schreiben, verdienen kein Mitgefühl,

@DavidCarlisle I use the "oh drat, I forgot to add the <name> thingy, let me append it to the end" approach. :)

@PauloCereda \usepackage[duck]{breakfast}

@DavidCarlisle oh no

@DavidCarlisle Sounds good, except I'm not sure what semantic grouping would look like. You mean just similar things together?

@DavidCarlisle it's a keyval thingy, so it's \usepackage[exclude=duck]{breakfast}

@FaheemMitha grouping by things that make sense to be together by you. :)

@FaheemMitha yes

@DavidCarlisle Ok. If I can figure out what things belong together.

@FaheemMitha why introduce extra rules and constraints that make no difference?

@DavidCarlisle Extra rules and constraints as in alphabetical order?

@samcarter_says_quack youtube.com/watch?v=Ck57sOYq7YI I like how they avoid using specific names: Christmas eve is Toy day and Carnaval is Festivale. :)

@DavidCarlisle don't see secret G chat. :)

@Plergux twitter.com/amazing_nature0/status/1354446654498361344

@PauloCereda SQUEEEEEEEEEE!

@Plergux ooh

@FaheemMitha some classes use \ProcesOptions or \ProcessOptions* in the first case the order in the document is irrelevant so why give yourself a rule it has to be in a specific order. In the second case the order is relevant so you cannot add sone arbitrary constraint like putting them in alphabetic order without changing the resulting document.

@DavidCarlisle OK. I just thought it would make it easier to find whether a given option was present or not, if they were in alphabetical order. But I suppose that's not much of a reason.

@PauloCereda I think the Christmas thing is not to upset non Christian (Muslim, for instance) customers. The same as using "gosh" in TV series. But the Carnaval thing... why?

@JairoA.delRio My thoughts exactly. :)

Just curious, does anybody know how to hyphenate numbers in TeX as if they were letters? I'm doing it inserting discretionaries with a loop in Lua, but I feel there's a better, "only TeX", way

@JairoA.delRio for specific strings there plenty of macros around that allow breaking anywhere (I think xstring has one or xurl or answers on this site, if you mean any runs of digits in free text without having \zzz{123} that's a bit harder (you could do it with \patterns but that requires a new format oh unless you restrict to luatex..

@DavidCarlisle Yep, I'm on ConTeXt (LuaTeX and LuaMetaTeX). Where can I read about \patterns or a minimal usage example?

@PauloCereda I think \usepackage[duck]{breakfast} will provide the breakfast for a duck.

@JairoA.delRio texbook (or ex by topic I assume, for a free version)

@Skillmon ooh

@JairoA.delRio hmm I'm not sure even luatex likes patterns for digits. Anyone else know a trick to make \patterns{999} specify a level 9 hyphenation point between two 9's ?

@DavidCarlisle Nice, thanks. I've just seen TeX by Topic, but examples are somewhat lacking. Is it the same as \hyphenation?

@DavidCarlisle I felt compelled to answer a question using \caption{Blub}\label{tab:Blub} in the example, and it reminded me that tabularx is lacking an interface to exclude something from the trial run ...

@UlrikeFischer you don't think \ifx\@footnotetext\TX@trial@ftn is an interface?

@DavidCarlisle is in the documentation?

@UlrikeFischer the real documentation is tabularx.sty so much easier to read than tabularx.dtx with all those weird % \begin{macrocode} lines disturbing the reading flow.

@DavidCarlisle ooh

@DavidCarlisle isn't it bad to read real documentations?

@UlrikeFischer for that you can answer my (unasked) question on how to get \patterns{999} to work like \patterns{a9a}

@DavidCarlisle how can one test if it works?

@UlrikeFischer see if 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999 hyphenates

I tried giving it a self lccode and hjcode

@DavidCarlisle but after \patterns{a9a} aaaaaa... doesn't hyphenate, so is this really a working test?

@UlrikeFischer Hopefully I've sorted the PDF destination business

@UlrikeFischer er I'll try later

@Rmano clearly you learned nothing!

@PauloCereda ^^

@Skillmon I've raised \kern yet again with the rest of the team

@UlrikeFischer ooh

@DavidCarlisle I'm on my way ;-)

@PauloCereda :D

@JosephWright I get overfull/underfull messages with xelatex:

Underfull \vbox (badness 10000) detected at line 14
 []


Overfull \vbox (100.375pt too high) detected at line 14
 []

and I think up and down must be switched:

pdflatex:    [2 0 R /FitR 153.97 445.28 303.97 745.28]
xelatex      [3 0 R /FitR 153.97 845.28 303.97 545.28]

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{l3pdf}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\begin{document}
abc

\ExplSyntaxOn
x\pdf_destination:nnnn {test2}{150bp}{100bp}{200bp}\pdf_destination:nn {test1}{xyz}
\ExplSyntaxOff

%so that they are not optimized away ...
\hyperlink{test2}{some text}
\hyperlink{test1}{some text}
\end{document}

@AlanMunn That's a nice summing-up. You're British, right?

@UlrikeFischer Oh drat: we are getting there I hope!

@AlanMunn I tried google image search to find whether this is somewhere else on the net, but the result was a little ... disturbing 😂

@JosephWright you're allowed to blame @UlrikeFischer for the initiative :)

@StephanLehmke :-O :-O :-O

@FaheemMitha Yes, by birth, although I grew up in Canada, and am also Canadian.

@AlanMunn I see. So you still take an interest in the "home country"?

@StephanLehmke Wow you're right. That is strange.

@FaheemMitha Well I take an interest in losing my European citizenship, effectively.

@AlanMunn Oh. Right. So it still makes a difference to you if you're not living there?

Did you vote in the Brexit referendum?

@DavidCarlisle github.com/latex3/l3build/pull/144#issuecomment-769219066 see spoilers at the end :)

@FaheemMitha Yes, absolutely. But I've been out of the UK too long to qualify for voting in the referendum.

@AlanMunn I see.

@AlanMunn Brexit sounds like Windows OSes in the last decade

@PauloCereda lol

@AlanMunn ooh

/knock knock

- Who's there?
- Old lady.
- Old lady who?
- I didn't know you could yodel.

@Plergux ^^

@PauloCereda How do you restart yodelling? Ctrl-Alt-Yodel

@AlanMunn LOL

@AlanMunn oh is that about me?

@UlrikeFischer Fixed the overfull boxes, now looking at the shapes

@UlrikeFischer @JosephWright With the pdfbase equivalents I get different y coordinates. But they seem right as they coincide with those of the rectangle (re) produced from \rule. Is 200bp the depth, in your case?

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{pdfbase}
\usepackage{hyperref}

\begin{document}
abc

\ExplSyntaxOn
x\pbs_pdfdest:nnnn{test2}{fitr}{1}{\rule[-200bp]{150bp}{300bp}}%
 \pbs_pdfdest:nnnn{test1}{fitr}{1}{\rule[-200bp]{150bp}{300bp}}
\ExplSyntaxOff

\hyperlink{test2}{some text}
\hyperlink{test1}{some text}
\end{document}
%
%/D [2 0 R /FitR 153.97 356.239 303.97 656.239]
%/D [2 0 R /FitR 303.97 356.239 453.97 656.239]

@AlexG I've spotted that: I think it's a question of which way y runs: fixing it now

@AlexG yes we decided to go for \pdf_destination:nnnn{name}{width}{height}{depth} and not for a content.

@AlexG, @UlrikeFischer I think I've aligned everything now ...

@AlexG Hopefully we are picking off things in pdfbase so we get a single interface (with lots of credit to you, of course)

@AlexG, @UlrikeFischer Please try latest checkin

@JosephWright :), <3

@AlexG I hope you don't mind us ripping off taking inspiration from your code

@JosephWright No objections at all.

@AlexG I guess at some stage I'll also tackle patterns and whatnot in dvips for l3draw - lots of PostScript to write (inspired by the colorspace stuff I've managed to do)

@AlexG Cool: hopefully l3pdf will end up providing good interfaces all round (@UlrikeFischer is dealing mainly with interfaces, I just do backend stuff)

Somehow I get the feeling I'm now the PostScript expert on the team ... how did that happen?

@JosephWright They don't call it pstricks for nothing. :)

@JosephWright Yes I am eagerly waiting for it to be ready; Ulrike and I, we have had some communication already.

@AlexG Cool

@AlexG What features are you after?

@JosephWright At first, the l3pdf stuff, I would substitute them into my pkgs.

@JosephWright values of xelatex are ok and no warnings, now testing dvips ...hold your breath ;-)

@JosephWright you need to switch y there too. And curiously dvips has a small rounding difference to the xyz values:

<</D [4 0 R /FitR 153.959991 745.32 303.96 445.32]>>endobj
13 0 obj
<</D [4 0 R /XYZ 154.267334 644.959656 null]>>endobj

(but the second doesn't matter much).

@UlrikeFischer Really? That's not what I'm seeing .. I'll double check

@UlrikeFischer Ah, right, got it

@UlrikeFischer Fixed: merge?

@JosephWright I'm not sure. I had a test file with destination options and everything moved down by around 10 points. It still works in master. I need to check this.

@UlrikeFischer OK, cool

@JosephWright I found it. You boxed also the \pdf_destination:nn and this is not good. It changes the spacing all over the place. E.g. here for a section:

133.768 657.235 Td original
133.768 657.235 Td l3pdf no box
133.768 612.334 Td l3pdf boxed

And yes, if someone uses a FitR there it will change spacing too, but one can document it.

Gooed evening to everybody....

@StefanKottwitz @JosephWright Very kind moderators: I have seen this question tex.stackexchange.com/questions/580741/…. I have had a review suggested edits (I think of the same user): tex.stackexchange.com/users/233961/samantha-wilson and tex.stackexchange.com/users/233974/samantha-lea-wilson. I hope that this advice it is useful. Best regards.

@JosephWright simple: I kept my head down so you had to learn it.

@PauloCereda LOL!