@JosephWright string case speedun: x.com/lemire/status/1819881136333488481

BTW: nowadays, what is the best way of getting text letter spaced? microtype? It has to work with pdflatex, xelatex and lualatex.

@daleif don't you want something other than 0pt for that last argument?

@PauloCereda :)

@JosephWright we should get Unicode to re-arrange unicode so lowercase was always a fixed offset:-)

@DavidCarlisle :)

@DavidCarlisle It probably should yes. Normally it is only working on single strings each typeset on their own line. But here I'm getting two strings from a prop and have to letter space both. I'm looking into instead being able to get multiple strings from the prop and just concat them with spaces and use the letter spacing on that. Though, keep getting errors that the seq I've created is not a seq. Sigh

@daleif well I wouldn't use soul but as you already suggested microtype.

@daleif 0pt is actuvely removing the spave but if you want to keep that you could use \foobar{FOO}\mbox{}~\mbox{}\foobar{BAR} or \foobar{FOO}\mbox{ }\foobar{BAR} or ...

@UlrikeFischer does it work with all engines these days?

@UlrikeFischer the doc for soul is a bit confusing now, texdoc soul just gives the old soulutf8 doc and you need texdoc soul-ori to actually find out what \sodef does

Hmm, one should not run \clist_clear:N on a seq variable.

@DavidCarlisle yes, the question is if we can merge that and if yes how? If I remember correctly we tried to perserve most of the look of the old documentation. Putting both together is not quite trivial ...

@UlrikeFischer not sure we want to spend any time on it but we could add a READ SOUL-ORI DOC now line to the soul.pdf we sort of say that in the abstract but it's easy to miss

@DavidCarlisle -- Would have been a good idea, but NBL.

@UlrikeFischer I made some experiments...

@DavidCarlisle in secret or something that I should check?

@DavidCarlisle ah just saw the commit. I will look

This one might be obvious, but if I have a table column which is dates, eg. 2nd July 2024, for example, is there a good way to format this so that the days and month and year line up?

@FaheemMitha use two columns (or three)

@DavidCarlisle OK.

@FaheemMitha but it may look more readable simply to right align so the years are aligned

I tried to add a blank space in front using \phantom, but it didn't work. But maybe it does not work with blank spaces.

@FaheemMitha ?

@FaheemMitha why would you want to pad at the front explicitly? Just use a right aligned column.

@DavidCarlisle if I have text like "foo bar" and I want " foo bar", shouldn't \phantom work?

@DavidCarlisle I'll try that.

@FaheemMitha phantom would work but it doesn't really make sense to use it, you could just use ~ to get a space and as I say why align things by hand by adding spaces if you are already in a table with aligned columns?

@DavidCarlisle It didn't work for me when I tried it. I could try a test example, but I'll try to align it first.

@DavidCarlisle OK, aligning work, but I need to break the headers manually if it is long. Which it is in this case. (Assuming I am using r, which I am.)

TeXLive says I should

Add /usr/local/texlive/2024/texmf-dist/doc/man to MANPATH.
Add /usr/local/texlive/2024/texmf-dist/doc/info to INFOPATH.

But on my system both MANPATH and INFOPATH are blank. I forget what the correct thing is to do here. Also, does TeXLive actually have stuff in man and info? I don't think I've ever seen it, if so. Mostly I just use texdoc.

@FaheemMitha I never bother to do this, if you don't use man or info then it makes no difference and most man pages in texlive are very sketchy compared to the doc shown by texinfo

@DavidCarlisle I have used info before, but not so much recently. I use man quite regularly.

Well, relatively regularly.

Are the info docs different from what texdoc would show?

@FaheemMitha yes but do you use man for tex that's the question, set the variables to the suggested values, ending in a : then the standard search path will still be used, see man 5 manpath

@FaheemMitha yes they show info files (if there are any) (although it seems to also show man pages these days)

@DavidCarlisle I don't know if I would. I would at least look at them, assuming there are any. And I will look at man 5 manpath. Thank you.

@FaheemMitha Karl likes man pages, he asked @JosephWright and I include one for l3sys-query I suspect part of the reason is that it simplifies inclusion of texlive into linux distribs some of which have packaging requirements that all programs have to have a man page

@DavidCarlisle Yes, Debian likes man pages for programs/executables.

@FaheemMitha yes, exactly

And lintian complains if they aren't there, if I recall correctly.

is there an equivalent of \settowidth in expl3? Was looking under dim_

@daleif \box_set:... and \box_wd:....

@DavidCarlisle ahh, outside the box ...

It's \hbox_set:

@daleif details...:-)