@AlanMunn I always tend to forget this—in the humanities, the writing is the research much of the time. I remember a friend working on her PhD saying that “all she had to do was write her dissertation” and I thought she was being ironic. On the other hand, I'm finding non-fiction writing (like my LaTeX book) is so much easier than working on my fiction where a good day is getting two pages done.

Missing in circuitikz?

@LetMeBeYourLostDisciple @Rmano ^^^

@Schubladenzieher For me it is like the following: Anything I write which should be collaborated on, I have to write in Word (ouch). I'm not yet entirely sure about the dissertation (because up till now no one wanted to write it in TeX, afaik) but think I can write that in TeX as long as the title page looks exactly how it should.

@Schubladenzieher well, they don't have to work with TeX to give feedback on your work. Problematic is only if you're doing a collaborative paper, then you'll have to use the tools the rest of your team uses.

@Skillmon Depends on the supervisor, of course: a lot of people in my subject are simply expect to be a able to do that using Word comments/edits (track changes)

@JosephWright I wish everyone used Git and some sane text-based file format :( Collaborating would be so much easier this way.

@Skillmon I think that shows you are a programmer ;)

@Skillmon Also shows you are not really thinking about anything graphical :)

@JosephWright Most of my colleagues program quite a lot as well, but have no idea how to use version control it seems. You don't believe how often I get a zip archive called foo_yy-mm-dd.zip (or even worse, without the underscore but with spaces)

@JosephWright and I spent my entire Friday afternoon in front of LabView. Whoever had the idea that thinking about something graphically would be a good idea to program deserves a meatball, nailed on his knee.

@JosephWright but do you know what really kills it then: LabView has some built-in versioning (no idea how good it is, I don't want to use LabView) and still I got zip archives reading shaker_20-02-24.zip and shaker_19-12-04.zip and so on...

@CarLaTeX with github.com/circuitikz/circuitikz/issues/534 you can have them! (Well, if you do not need a rotaTHOR...) @LetMeBeYourLostDisciple

@Rmano :)

@AlanMunn you are now using vim, it seems, as you just described normal mode. :) (@Skillmon)

@PauloCereda he played himself :)

@Skillmon :)

> German scientists built a high-resolution microscope out of Lego bricks

ooh Germans

arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/…

@PauloCereda I wonder where they got a good Lego lens.

@Skillmon that's the only non-Lego part, according to the article. :)

@DavidCarlisle quack

@PauloCereda b

@DavidCarlisle oh no

@DavidCarlisle ooh it could be biscuits

@PauloCereda or bussy (is that an English word? I guess not, it means something like "small kiss")

@Skillmon ooh or bolo (cake in Portuguese)

This is getting better and better

@PauloCereda Or bomboloni: dolcidee.it/ricette/dolcine/bomboloni-alla-crema-4

@CarLaTeX ooh

@UlrikeFischer Users :(

@JosephWright tagpdf?

@JosephWright I have just one question: Who is McBool?

@Skillmon ooh a Scottish logician?

@Rmano where should I leave comments or ideas for the subcircuircuits? Is github.com/circuitikz/circuitikz/issues/534 fine?

@PauloCereda the next question which arises is: Why does tagpdf want to be inside McBool?

@Skillmon OH MY

@PauloCereda at least there is some macro named \g__tag_in_mc_bool, I guess that's what this should mean... :)

@Skillmon maybe the LaTeX team left Adobe and now partners with McDonald's? :)

@Skillmon uh-oh :)

@Skillmon @MarcelKrüger WAIT WHAT github.com/notomo/gesture.nvim

@PauloCereda somewhat contradicts my approach of not using the mouse as much as I can (yes, that includes all the graphical programs I use as well)

@Skillmon same :)

@PauloCereda mcpizza for all

@DavidCarlisle ooh

@JosephWright ;-). But what triggers this error? I'm trying to reproduce it, but can't.

@JosephWright Ah, I found it. It is only in lua, I forgot to declare the boolean there.

@UlrikeFischer ooh let's blame Marcel

@Skillmon yes, that would be fine. I am trying to see if I can find the link to the article describing how to set up versions like =[v1.2.2] (sure I had it, can't find it now)

@Rmano Do you mean latex-project.org/publications/…

@MarcelKrüger yes! Thanks!

@Rmano wouldn't that break context usage?

@Skillmon I am thinking to leave both mechanisms --- the rollback will be for LaTeX and the old "change the name to circuitikz-1.1.2" for context and also for LaTeX to keep old source file working.

@Rmano that one would be necessary for the new LaTeX rollback anyways (it works by substituting the file which is loaded with some differently named variant of it.

But I am a bit doubtful, I do not know if the effort is worth the result... there are no packages for now that depends on circuitikz, so the advantages will be small

@Rmano there is at least one package that depends on circuitikz (it's just not on CTAN)

@Skillmon I didn't know!

@Rmano well, I wrote it, and, afaik, am currently the only user. But it is distributed in some ways :)

@Rmano gitlass.de/jonathan/MRTbundle/src/branch/master/MRTcirc

@Skillmon yes, I was thinking about creating small "stubs" with the different package names that would \input the core of the version.

@Skillmon ;-)

@Rmano (I didn't check compatibility in a while, so that one is still officially at 1.2.2 of circuitikz, but it works with current versions, as far as I can tell)

Ok, I will study the thing. I have found by chance a scary problem this morning, and I am testing it around... (github.com/circuitikz/circuitikz/pull/562)

@Plergux hi sheep person!

@PauloCereda Hello duck person! :D

@Plergux do you know we used to have a resident German, Spanish-speaking penguin? :)

@PauloCereda oooh! trés bien! oh, wait wrong language XD

@Plergux it's close :)

@PauloCereda :p

@Plergux When I heard Catalan for the first time, I had the impression it was French spoken the wrong way. :)

@PauloCereda Heh heh heh... I think you probably get the same feeling about Dutch and German :p

@Plergux ooh mijn hovercraft zit vol palingen

@PauloCereda LOL

@Rmano adding keys to a subcircuit isn't as trivial as I thought, since TikZ will not allow groups inside the path as willingly as I wished... And I don't want to pull in something like expkv as a dependency for circuitikz... :)

@Skillmon I tried things but then I decided to leave that alone --- simple subcircuits are what is needed 90% of the times. Moreover, if you add any parameter that makes the geometry to change the "pseudo-anchor" trick will stop working, so I decided that well, though.

@Rmano couldn't subcircuits use TikZ pic-mechanism? That way they wouldn't need those pseudo-anchors at all, parametrizing would work, and the activation wouldn't be necessary as well.

twitter.com/manekinekko/status/1409954929956032517

@Skillmon I think the natural sciences in particular should switch to TeX. I don't see any reason to use WYSIWYG editors at all, except when it comes to simplicity. In the school sector, WYSIWYG editors are completely sufficient... but why they use such editors in the academic field is a mystery to me.

We have the opportunity to look at the dissertations of the other PhD students ... and i once compared those who wrote with WYSIWYG editors and those with TeX... after reading a few pages I didn't feel like reading any more :D

Well, I mean former PhD student of course… those who already have their PhD

@PauloCereda stability and calm

@DavidCarlisle exactly, see top left corner. :)

@PauloCereda yes

@DavidCarlisle <3

@Skillmon unless I am quite wrong, pics have no anchors... And circuitikz paths plays bad with them.

@PauloCereda Don't forget the TUGBoat reporting live from the scene ^^^

@samcarter_looks_forward_TUG'21 ooh

@Schubladenzieher To be honest, I don't understand why this is taught at schools in the first place. None of the things that worked in Word when I was in school is still working the same way. They keep changing the place where they hide stuff. The only things that should be graphically driven is things that are used to view/generate graphics, and things you don't use often. Everything that is in your daily/weekly toolbox is done faster with a good textual interface in my experience.

@Skillmon that's true, but I have to admit that the collaborative creation of documents is the strong point of Word. Send a document to a group and then incorporate/discuss/reject or merge the proposal of each person involved is something at which Word (LO is near, though it has annoying things) excels, and the interface is easy and intuitive.

The free format of LaTeX sources makes it almost impossible to do. Even plain diff is difficult to manage due to possible styles. Or at least I do not know any text-oriented editor able to manage that.

@Rmano my personal experience tells me otherwise. Merging two different documents is a painful experience, corrupting the document quite easily. Did I ever tell the story of the self-replicating undeletable image? Every time we tried to delete it (by marking it and pressing anything from Backspace to Delete, to trying to cut it with Ctrl+X) it appeared on some other page. Collaborating in LaTeX is as easy as using Git.

(and yes, Git is easy, as long as you stick to a minimal feature set of it it's a breeze)

@Skillmon tell that to the lawyers of the Uni...

@Rmano for those there are graphical Git interfaces.

@Skillmon Clearly you do not know my lawyers. I have a document with the paragraph numeration made manually

@Rmano People like that aren't capable of using Word either... (not that I claim I am, every time I try I'm frustrated, but lately I have found software I despise even more)

@Rmano add this: \AddToHook{para/end}{ And then the ducks arrived.}

@PauloCereda \end{document} And then the ducks arrived.

@StefanKottwitz quack :)

@Skillmon I had that once too, something was buried in a tabular and unremovable. At the end I had to unpack the docx, look through the xml and delete it manually.

@Skillmon I am using overleaf now to collaborate with not-so-LaTeX-proficient colleagues; the problem in using git (that I use under the hood, really) is that the free format of latex source is a problem. Hard indent lines at 80-char, or a phrase per line, or a paragraph per line? And if the other don't follow the rule the diffs becomes a mess.

@Rmano imho, not so much of a problem. Those are all unpleasant experiences but only a minor hindrance in usability. This is outweighed by the stability of clear text formats compared to Words arbitrary decisions to break everything by a huge margin.

@Skillmon To be COMPLETELY honest, I only learned the basics of typography with the help of TeX. If I continued to work with Word, I would probably still not know why a paragraph indentation is preferred xD

@Schubladenzieher I think you'd love the ugliness of my LaTeX templates :P (I had to mimic a Word template as precisely as possible)

(it has paragraph indentation though)

The thing that really bugs me about that Word template I mimicked is that the professor who originally designed that Word template knows typography (at least some of the lesser known terms), and still decided to create this horrendous looking mess (I once asked him why and he explained that his aim was to be as space efficient as possible)

@Skillmon I think that would give me goose bumps... and I don't mean that in a positive way :D

@Schubladenzieher gitlass.de/jonathan/MRTbundle/src/branch/master/Doc/… that's the documentation of that template (and yes, it is set in the style of the template itself)

@Skillmon I like the mrt_depp joke.

@StefanKottwitz :)

@StefanKottwitz I like it as well, I just hope my supervisor never finds it :P

@Skillmon The use of underlining is particularly innovative retro.

@AlanMunn when I wrote the very first version of that template getting that reliably working took me the longest (I had almost zero knowledge of TeX programming), iirc, I needed at least two weeks, just for that.

@Skillmon Clearly time well spent, as the result is spectacular. :)

@AlanMunn After the Corona Apocalypse, we will use underlining again.

Isn't it fascinating what a student gets done when he has to write his bachelor's thesis :)

@AlanMunn the best part of it was that when I finally had something that worked and came to this site because of incompatibilities with hyperref @UlrikeFischer rescued me: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/374490

So up till today, should this ever break, I can blame @UlrikeFischer :)

@Skillmon I could create a mail address mrt-madness

@UlrikeFischer not my fault!

@Skillmon mrt-madness-not-my-fault sound like a good address too.

@UlrikeFischer :)

@barbarabeeton twitter.com/yubo_app/status/1410723534112886789

@Skillmon Ah, yeah my dear university where i used to study for a few semesters before i changed study course <3

@Skillmon You did the template really well :)

@Schubladenzieher well, though the first one looked almost identical, I rewrote it almost entirely from scratch after a while (when I had a bit more LaTeX experience). Now it contains also some gimmicks like the MRTtable package (which I wanted to turn into something more general sometime and publish on CTAN), or MRTsfacc (that though being a crude hack in some ways, is filling a gap I know no other general solution for)

@Rmano I have a working, parameterizable subcircuit prototype (needs more work to make it more general, can never be part of circuitikz due to dependencies, sorry)

@PauloCereda -- They'll catch on soon enough. Just hope there are no alligators in that pond.

@Skillmon Maybe it could be the first public package depending on circuitikz, and so you'll force me to learn the rollback thing ;-P

@Rmano no, it would be a general TikZ package that allows to create parametrizable, reusable subimages with pseudo-anchors that is not ConTeXt compatible :)

@Skillmon -- Nice! Good explanation of why you can avoid taking responsibility most of the time. (I may send a few comments separately.)

@Skillmon that would be a great thing --- a kind of pics-on-steroids?

@Rmano pics on steroids with convoluted interface :)

@barbarabeeton you might, you can as well open Github issues (but via mail is fine of course)

@barbarabeeton though the code isn't mirrored, the issue tracker might still be used: github.com/Skillmon/MRTbundle/issues

@Skillmon -- Oh, no real issues, just my usual random quibbles

@barbarabeeton fine to me as well :)

@Rmano got a working draft of the code (currently still with a small expl3 dependency), see for yourself:

\documentclass[]{article}

\usepackage{circuitikz}
\input{tikzsubimage}% requires expkv-cs and \str_if_eq:nnTF from expl3

\tikzsubimagedef\divider
  [% key=value setup; the key 'anchor' is always defined
     sep=2
    ,sym1=R
    ,sym2=R
    ,label1=~
    ,label2=~
    ,gnd=tlground
  ]
  {% default (relative) position of pseudo-anchors
     in={0,0}
    ,out={\ekvcValue{sep}{#1}+.5,0}
    ,j={\ekvcValue{sep}{#1},0}
    ,gnd={\ekvcValue{sep}{#1},-\ekvcValue{sep}{#1}}
  }
  {% code to draw the subimage

@Skillmon I don't want to know how painful it was for you to stick to the Word style template :D

@Skillmon Just reading the name of my old university again brings back memories... I loved the students canteen :)