Somewhat ironically, my calendar reminded me to renew my UK passport yesterday.

@DavidCarlisle and @egreg thanks you two :)

@DavidCarlisle @UlrikeFischer Hello! Currently, I'm working on ja/lesson-13 for learnlatex. In the example in the lesson, there is a line \addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}, but if I didn't miss anything, such a bib file is not provided anywhere on the site. Is this intentional?

@wtsnjp biblatex-examples.bib is in texlive.

@DavidCarlisle oh

@UlrikeFischer Oops, I should try kpsewhich first... How about mentioning that fact (maybe as a comment in the source) so that to prevent some people (like me) will start a journey to find the file?

For those who are interested: There's a new introduction to ConTeXt available (original in Spanish here) which tries to bridge one of the biggest problems of ConTeXt, introductory material.

@TeXnician ooh me gusta ConTeXt

@TeXnician I was just about to post the same!

@JosephWright Attentive readers of the mailing list :D

@TeXnician Yup

@TeXnician A first look quite good: I like quite a bit of ConTeXt, although as you might guess, there are things that I feel work better in LaTeX

@JosephWright For example, the LaTeX kernel. :)

@JosephWright Yes, I had a look at the Spanish version when it was first posted a few month ago. I think the ConTeXt vs LaTeX section is a bit “interesting”. But those aspects which ConTeXt is superior to LaTeX like grid layout are omitted…

@TeXnician I'd not seen that section - which one?

@JosephWright 1.5.2

@PauloCereda I was thinking NFSS, the use of environments for things that are 'environment-like' and (for me) a better approach to optional/mandatory arguments (I'm not a great fan of ConTeXt's use of open-ended optional non-typeset arguments)

@TeXnician Tar

@JosephWright Oh, with NFSS I agree. But I don't think environments have many advantages over the start/stop mechanism, that's probably a matter of habits. What are “open-ended optional non-typeset arguments for you”?

@TeXnician I meant for example \placefigure: to me, it's an environment containing figure, which I'd favour having as some hybrid between LaTeX and ConTeXt syntaxes

@TeXnician \setup<thing> where one then has [] or [][] or [][][] (and I think ConTeXt doesn't do bracket matching, which is a shame)

@TeXnician Oh, there's the keyval thing too: spaces are not stripped at the =, which I think is a bit odd

@JosephWright Well, I have no problem with \startplacefigure[key=val] … \stopplacefigure, it feels quite ConTeXty as well. It's even one of the better ones as it allows proper keyval syntax and does not split everything into bazillions of optional arguments :D

@JosephWright Oh, yes, with that I totally agree.

@JosephWright Ah, didn't notice that one. Probably I'm not writing too many spaces there. After all, I'm German :D

@TeXnician That is better, essentially an environment, but the 'main' command is I think just \placefigure (I follow ConTeXt but oddly I'm not a user)

@JosephWright Yes, it is. But really, it's great that ConTeXt provides alternatives. It's like itemization. The proper MkIV way is \startitem … \stopitem. But nobody wants to write that when there's \item. On the other hand, for XML processing (which ConTeXt does an awesome job at) the ability to use start/stop syntax is very handy. So being able to make the decision based on the use case is a plus for me.

@TeXnician Ah, the \item one: that's a challenge I agree (I think we are going to try to avoid a syntax change in LaTeX, for things like PDF tagging. But it is easiest to require an 'end of thing' marker)

@JosephWright do you know famous Italians use ConTeXt? :)

@egreg @CarLaTeX ^^

@JosephWright Well, you could go the ConTeXt way and provide both ;)

@TeXnician It's well known on the LaTeX team that I'm quite a fan of a lot of ConTeXt ;)

@JosephWright It would be a shame if one couldn't see advantages in both systems ;)

@TeXnician Er, not really: you then require source changes to get tagging, and that's not realistic when you look at something like arXiv

@JosephWright ConTeXt is able to do tagging also for \item iirc. But yes, the arXiv is probably a real challenge for all LaTeX changes.

@TeXnician Yup

@TeXnician We have ideas

@TeXnician It's cool to see it translated to English. I asked Joaquín to provide template files to me in order to extend a Lua(TeX) section. Hopefully within some months he'll include some sections on Lua: things as interfaces (definecommand, implement) or metatable trickery are just too good to be omitted.

@DavidCarlisle a description of the picture environment "limited functionality, but great artists can overcome this". Obviously some knowledgable wrote this ;-) (found on topanswers.xyz/tex?q=1587)

@JairoA.delRio That would be awesome :)

@TeXnician Yeah. However, Castilian Spanish is a bit... odd? I'm amazed by the way Spaniards translate some English terms. Here in South America we tend to keep programming terms in their original language.

@TeXnician I'd say I'm learning both ConTeXt and my own mother tongue by reading the introduction.

@UlrikeFischer limited functionality? What are they talking about?

@DavidCarlisle they are naturally no limitations for great artists.

A must-see for all ducks in this pond: twitter.com/indigogeek/status/1320531623004172289

(it's older but still good)

Just learned the hard way that Overleaf's PDF viewer doesn't display hyperref link borders.

Also learned the editor really doesn't like unicode characters.

@LaTeXereXeTaL ? why should it have problems? i think I did run chinese and arabic examples there.

@UlrikeFischer The borders are there but only show up if I download the PDF to my Mac. The Overleaf viewer apparently doesn't show them. I sent a message to Overleaf support about it.

I don't know about the Unicode characters.

Something kept my uploaded file from being read properly. I had to create a new empty file, copy/paste the old contents into the new file, comment out the lines with unicode characters, and only then could I process the document.

@LaTeXereXeTaL that is quite possible, I was asking about the unicode.

@UlrikeFischer The first is how they appear in TeXShop and the second is how they appear on Overleaf. Same file.

It may be a font issue?

@LaTeXereXeTaL quite probably.

@UlrikeFischer I'll experiment more today. I'm looking forward to seeing color palettes in hyperref.

@PauloCereda Lol

@LaTeXereXeTaL if you need a monospace code font with good coverage of unicode math then your font choices are limited:-) You can set the code font used in overleaf in the left sidebar menu

... but only Monaco or Lucida, neither of which can show ∇·𝐵

@MarcelKrüger luatexja seems to have dropped the unicode library, so next time we should be able to remove it too.

@DavidCarlisle I hadn't thought of that. I'm used to using monospace fonts for coding and letting LaTeX do all the work.

@LaTeXereXeTaL I don't think it's language per se, but definitely people's cognitive models interfere with learning scientific concepts. There's quite a bit of research on this. I worked briefly with a group that was working on such things.

@LaTeXereXeTaL On phenomenon that they studied, which amazed me was the fact that an identical question will have vastly different performances by students when seemingly minor changes are made. For example, a genetics question about inheritance of traits would be answer at 75% accuracy when the organism was an animal (e.g. a tiger) but the same question would have 25% accuracy when the organism was a plant (e.g. corn).

@LaTeXereXeTaL Technical terms are always a problem because they generally overlap with everyday meanings but obviously are not defined like their everyday meanings.

@LaTeXereXeTaL then use \cdot not · :-)

Does linux packaged texlive include tlmgr?

@samcarter_prepared_for_xmas yes (debian at least) but not fully functional it will do some things others it witters about user mode and others it won't do, tells you to use the system package manager (I forget the details)

@DavidCarlisle Thanks! (I just encountered a user who claims to not have tlmgr installed with texlive and was wondering if this might be the reason)

@AlanMunn Agreed, and in my professional experience the people who complain the most about it with students in upper level courses simply refuse to address such things in the foundational courses. The physics community sometimes sucks.

@DavidCarlisle I was experimenting to see if Unicode was "all that".

@LaTeXereXeTaL the ACE editor that Overleaf (@yo') is using can display the characters with no prolem, here it is at learnlatex.org:

@LaTeXereXeTaL just that Overleaf only offers two fonts and neither of them can display ∇·𝐵 so it's an application/font issue not one of Unicode really

@DavidCarlisle could depend on system fonts I believe. Do you have an example of what fails to display?

btw, we might be changing the editor in not-too-distant future.

@yo' \[∇·𝐵\]

@yo' to the microsoft one (monaco)?

@DavidCarlisle Monaco is a font, not an editor?...

it's nothing too public at the moment, so I'm afraid I can't share too many details :-/ (not that I really know the details)

@yo' microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor

@yo' that seems to be a major contender for ace alternative these days

@DavidCarlisle ah, no, not that one I think. (Not sure we wanna have much to do with MS products)

@LaTeXereXeTaL Maybe so, but it's complicated. I teach a 3 course sequence that grad students take with the first course cross-listed with undergrads and there's still a serious amnesia effect in the second course.

@yo' You're spending too much time in front of a computer if a font is the first thing that comes to mind for this name :)

@samcarter_prepared_for_xmas this is "professional": Monaco is one of our font options, and it's one we recommend switching to if the user faces issues with cursor positioning.

@yo' it began life somewhere in visual studio code editor but got open sourced and is community driven these days as far as i know. I looked at it a while back for something but I'd got ace working and I didn't feel motivated to try to set up a new editor:-)

@DavidCarlisle could be an Ace issue, but I'm not sure. (Oh, probably not)

@DavidCarlisle we're not 100% satisfied with Ace. Or rather we are, but it has its issues, and we got users :-)

@UlrikeFischer You've given me fun things to review :)

@JosephWright you mean the destinations?

@JosephWright ah, just saw your comments.