@AlanMunn Excellent, thanks! :)

@PauloCereda The best reason for a bounty I've seen yet:

(meta.tex.stackexchange.com/questions/3238)

@egreg We use numerical citations, with relatively short bibliography entries

Hi, can anybody tell me how to keep latex from turning "--" into "—"? In the context of \texttt if that makes any difference. Both google and symbolhound have failed me...

I've found a workaround using "-\--", but I'm not sure that's the best thing I could do here as \- seems to be an invalid escape.

@l4mpi Why do you need to do this?

I'm describing command line arguments of a program, so the paragraph contains a line like "Using argument --x, ..." where "--x" should be in \ŧexttt font

@l4mpi Verbatim material, so \verb|some command --arg| would be appropriate

@JosephWright thanks, that's exactly what I needed :)

Hello everybody!

@Alenanno Ciao

@SeanAllred awww. <3 :)

From today's terminal:

			HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 2

proof by cumbersome notation:
	Best done with access to at least four alphabets and special
	symbols.

proof by exhaustion:
	An issue or two of a journal devoted to your proof is useful.

proof by omission:
	'The reader may easily supply the details'
	'The other 253 cases are analogous'
	'...'


paulo@alexandria ~$

@PauloCereda I like the most "proofs by intimidation".

@egreg :)

Wolfram CDF Player ~557mb for a player. Right.

@PauloCereda First time I saw the CDF plugin I felt moved to write some javascriot instead:-)

dpcarlisle.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/slinky-canvas.html

@DavidCarlisle Wow, you are epic. :)

I have noted that Tikz is very popular and I find myself wondering what people use it for. There are plenty of questions with showcases for cool tex stuff and whar people are using tex for. I am thinking there must be a similar page for tikz where people showoff what they have done in tikz. But where is it? I can't find it...

@jonalv texample.net

ah cool

Must... resist... getting... Pokemón... game...

@PauloCereda :-))

@Kurt True story. :)

@PauloCereda I only played tetris some time ago (Operating system DOS). There was a version for two people, getting the same bricks. Funny thing, nice fights with colleges ...

@Kurt found a similar dual player (sideways) Tetris on Ouya. Way too much fun.

@ForkrulAssail I heard that Ouya is very interesting. :) Too bad it's not available here. :(

@PauloCereda Isn't available here either, I have to use a mail forwarder (in Florida) otherwise I can't get any decent electronics in South Africa.

@ForkrulAssail Ouch. :( We could ask @David to get them all for us. :)

@PauloCereda, when this masters is handed in. I will spend all of December visiting all my old megadrive games (in ROM format) and become a couch glutton

@David: speaking of which, buy Pokémon X/Y for M. :)

@PauloCereda, sounds fair, hang around in a chat room, get an Android console, seems legit.

@ForkrulAssail ooh that sounds like an epic plan. :)

@PauloCereda too late for this year:-)

dcarlisle.demon.co.uk/matthew

@PauloCereda, also have StarCraft 2 in my pile of shame (stuff I can't touch till manuscript is done)

@DavidCarlisle Oh happy birthday M! What did you get him? :)

@ForkrulAssail Intresting. I can only run it on a pc. We had lists of scores and battles to find the best one. One student was not to be beaten ...

@ForkrulAssail :) I have Rayman Legends (Wii U) still in the box for 2 weeks now. I need to find time to play it. :)

@PauloCereda anagram of oelg, mostly (plus the nexus 7 except we got that in the summer as somehow we knew we were going to be stranded at Gatwick airport for 12 hours with nothing else to do:-)

@Kurt, it tested my randomization of swearword phrase structures :)

@PauloCereda, jip, know the feeling.

@DavidCarlisle Technic or Mindstorm?

@PauloCereda city (he's still only little, really:-)

@DavidCarlisle Bah, he'll carry the Carlisle tradition on TeXnical stuff on. :)

Hello my old friends

I have a quick question: How do I get my frontmatter page numbers (which are in roman) to be capitalized?

Meanwhile, @JosephWright keeps killing people in Red Dead Redemption. :)

@MarioS.E. use \Roman not \roman wherever you set \thepage for the frontmatter

@PauloCereda Not at the moment: grant proposal to finish and moving house next Friday

What have the \roman's ever done for us?

@JosephWright oh my!

@DavidCarlisle Thanks! It worked perfectly :)

That's it, I'll try to make WiiTeX ready. :)

@PauloCereda PS3 will get boxed up on Monday for the move, I think

@JosephWright :)

my professor wants this sort of citation style, is this right to get a regular nonbreaking space after the period?: (packet,~p.\@~55)

@Gnintendo the \@ is an overkill, ~ always makes an interword space

@tohecz Thanks, that's what I wasn't sure about

!!/texdef -t latex ~

\nobreakspace :
\long macro:->\leavevmode \nobreak \

@Gnintendo it is nonbreakable \<space>, which is the interword space

@JosephWright Can I ask you what is your grant about?\

@tohecz thanks again

@MarioS.E. getting money

@Gnintendo yw

It's done. Got me Pokémon Y.

@DavidCarlisle Hahahaha, well, I think we all need to get money. I was kind of asking what is he asking the money for

@tohecz This is a fake Psmith!

I just found out lipsum cannot be used with [spanish]{babel}

@MarioS.E. Modelling enzyme active sites with small molecules

@JosephWright Sounds complicated.

@JosephWright Are you a biochemist?

@egreg: Palmeiras will have a new 3rd uniform in the next game:

@MarioS.E. No; but kantlipsum can. ;-)

Palmeiras was the first team to represent the national team in a game against Uruguay. :)

I already pre-ordered it. :)

@egreg Hahahaha, yes, I just saw it. Prego!

@egreg Nevertheless, howcome we don't have a lispum package for spanish? It should be so easy having "Don Quijote"

Yay, carrot cake!

@DavidCarlisle Ohhhhh I just find out that when you are using [spanish]{babel} your roman page numbers are always capitalized, not matter how you set them.

@MarioS.E. Actually it's lipsum's fault: it uses \roman{lips@count} instead of \romannumeral\c@lips@count. Some languages modify the definition of \roman; use the option es-lcroman if you want to use lipsum.

@MarioS.E. The default is indeed es-ucroman. You can also do es-scroman to have \roman print reduced size uppercase letters.

@PauloCereda :)

Is there existing software or a site where you can feed it a BibTex file and it calculates the H-index average of the authors?

@ForkrulAssail Not that I know of, but certainly something I'd like to implement. :)

@PauloCereda, if you can wait till December, we can do a project like this?

@PauloCereda, I don't want to interrupt your Pokemon Y collecting.

@ForkrulAssail I'm actually stuck with work and research until December, so it sounds like a good period to start a project. :) If I can help somehow, count me in. :)

@ForkrulAssail Gotta catch'em all. :)

@egreg but I just ran the code with spanish and I still got the capital numbers

@egreg (and no lipsum, of course)

@PauloCereda, no API for Google Scholar exists, but I'm happy to use BeautifulSoap to scrape the data from wherever we can find it. Initially might be interesting to look at just average H-index, and later to incorporate that into some like github.com/rowanmanning/joblint but for bibliographies. Give new researchers and scholars alike a tool that could warn them about their bibliographies, quality of references, reference order etc.

And this exists: icir.org/christian/scholar.html

@ForkrulAssail Ah interesting. :) I think it would be a great deal, specially because most departments aim at impact factors.

@MarioS.E. This works (as I predicted)

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[spanish,es-lcroman]{babel}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\begin{document}
\lipsum
\end{document}

@JosephWright:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{tikz}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{adjustbox}

\definecolor{c784421}{RGB}{120,68,33}
\definecolor{c552200}{RGB}{85,34,0}
\definecolor{cffffff}{RGB}{255,255,255}

\newcommand{\biberlogo}{\adjustbox{height=1.6ex,keepaspectratio}{%
\begin{tikzpicture}[y=0.80pt,x=0.80pt,yscale=-1, inner sep=0pt, outer sep=0pt]
  \path[draw=black,fill=c784421,miter limit=4.00,line width=1.000pt]
    (352.3125,419.5000) .. controls (323.9458,421.2530) and (288.0758,434.1585) ..

:)

@PauloCereda, why don't we have a Click for Raw option in code mentions?

@ForkrulAssail I'm lost. :) What would it do?

little icon either left or right-most that downloads cited code as a raw file.

@ForkrulAssail Ah. :)

I'm sure I've seen it on some SX sites, allows user to single-click launch, instead of copy-pasting, would be nice for MWE launches (depending on the user of course, editor wars aside).

vimeo.com/71401892

@PauloCereda I forgot the best thing we got (currently playing:-)

amazon.co.uk/Wacky-Races-Complete-Collection-DVD/dp/B000H8RW3S

@DavidCarlisle ooh! :)

@PauloCereda Lucky draw. ;-)

@egreg Indeed. :)

@PauloCereda, nice find, played it?

@ForkrulAssail Not up to us

@JosephWright, wanted to mention that. I wasn't sure how SX run these and who gets to dev on them.

Hm, is that a question we want here? I mean only a screen shot?

Seems that he used a basic installation so that some packages are missing ...

@ForkrulAssail Nope, I'm broke. :) Too much people using my credit card. :)

Congratulations to Nils L. for an awesome gender neutral comment:

Is the following a case for tex.stackexchange.com/questions/27440/what-cant-tex-do ?

I read Tex. My eyes hurt.

@Christian Not really. Hyphenation patterns are based on lookup, and TeX can't be expected to know every word, especially if it's a name and not in a dictionary. You can specify its hyphenation points manually by using \hyphenation.

@Christian Add \hyphenation{werm-ter} in the document preamble. The standard patterns don't know how to hyphenate many words; this one doesn't seem English, so special treatment is needed.

@egreg If TeX doesn't know a word, what heuristic does it use to hyphenate it?

@AlanMunn No heuristic: it applies its rules matching it to the known patterns.

@AlanMunn "Doesn't know" in the sense that it hyphenates the word wrongly.

@egreg Yes, but I'm assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that hyphenation patterns are for each word. But maybe that's wrong.

@AlanMunn each substring of letters within a word with a numeric weighting of the desirability or otherwise of breaking between each pair of letters in the substring

@AlanMunn Read Appendix H. In hyphen.tex we find the pattern er3m4 which is essentially what is used, because of the high numbers: a hyphen can be inserted between er and m, while none is legal after the m. Odd means "yes" and even means "no". Every substring is matched against the patterns and the highest number between two letters wins.

@AlanMunn This works quite well for languages like Italian where we have rules regarding hyphenation. The size of hyph-it.tex is 3263 bytes, hyphen.tex is 27860

@egreg and it's fairly rubbish for languages like German that don't put spaces between words

@egreg Ok. So there's no sense in which it really "knows" a word; the word matches its patterns in some way.

@AlanMunn yes although before the hyphenation trie is used, the exceptional words that have been specified using \hyphenation are checked, they must be an exact match for the whole word

@DavidCarlisle Ok. So there's a combination of a potentially a list and the patterns (which was what I had in mind for the heuristics). I guess I'll go read Appendix H. :)

@AlanMunn It's a pretty good algorithm, (I have a copy of Liang's thesis somewhere:-) The main failing for some languages is that weighting just decides where in a word hyphens may appear you can not weight the different allowed positions, so if you have a compound word really you'd prefer breaking between the compounds but that is hard in Tex unless you specify breaks that only match compounds and don't allow breaking the root words, which isn't really feasible

@DavidCarlisle Right, and this is where in German, the problem gets compounded. (Sorry, I simply couldn't resist.)

@AlanMunn My solution is that they put spaces where there are supposed to be spaces, but this doesn't seem universally popular.

@DavidCarlisle That takes all the fun out of German. All that will be left is the Mittelfeld.

@DavidCarlisle So now having read Appendix H, do I understand correctly that the actual patterns are built off of manually generated hyphenation lists?

@AlanMunn Yes, in the case of English. Only in part for Italian.

@egreg Because you have sufficient rules to be able to generate some patterns that way.

@AlanMunn Yes or no, for English which is typically anarchic the system is you get a very big list from a dictionary and then feed it to patgen which tries to distill some rules out of the mess. For other languages it is possible to directly code the hyphenation patterns based on some linguistic rules

@AlanMunn Yes, that's the reason.

@DavidCarlisle And is patgen doing statistical learning to generate the patterns from the list?

@AlanMunn I can't remember what it does exactly but... tug.org/docs/liang

@egreg Sure, I already did that. It wasn't a TeX question, it was an English question and as a rule of thumb, TeX knows more about the (to me) weird English hyphenation rules than I do. So I thought I'd better ask the guys over at english.SX before just forcing TeX to follow my gut feeling which is known to be very wrong in these cases.

On more than one occasion I saw TeX put a hyphen in a place where I just though "ouch, that must be wrong" ... only to find out that in fact it was right.

@Christian If you followed the discussion above, you have discovered that actually TeX doesn't know the rules; but the patterns are pretty well made.

As I said, it's weird to me that in English, morphology and etymology trump phonological syllables.

@egreg It does seem odd, though, how it would arrive at Wer-mter, though.

@AlanMunn The patterns say that a hyphen between r and m is possible. ;-)

@egreg I just came home from work and was going to follow up the discussion after answering the part where you highlighted me. Sorry!

@Christian I guess it's just what you're used to. Purely syllabic hyphenation seems odd to me, (at least given clear morphology as an option). Admittedly, morphology isn't always clear.

@AlanMunn If a pattern such as er4mt was added, the hyphen would disappear. And erm3t would make it appear after m.

@AlanMunn and lefthyphenmin and righthyphenin being 2 and 3 mean that is the only break

@egreg I would have thought it would have had a way to encode that mt is an impossible initial sequence.

@AlanMunn Sure, that's why I was careful to say "weird to me".

@Christian Yes, I'm agreeing with you. :)

@AlanMunn Ok I see :)

@AlanMunn Evidently there was no rmt in the words analyzed for building the patterns.

@egreg And it wasn't a Bayesian learner.

@AlanMunn It does have a way, but the aim of the game in 1979 was to have a pattern list large enough to cover 80% of a given dictionary, and to be small enough to fit in memory

@AlanMunn English hyphenation has to take into account morphology in order to ease reading, I believe. Italian hasn't this problem.

@AlanMunn learning wouldn't fit with running a plain tex document in 1000 years and getting the same line breaks:-)

@DavidCarlisle And since that's pretty good most of the time, there's no pressure to improve it, I guess.

@AlanMunn There's the big list of hyphenation exceptions that's growing year after year.

@DavidCarlisle I just meant patgen itself. So if you used the 1000 year old patterns you'd be fine.

@DavidCarlisle "Fairly rubbish for languages like German that don't put spaces within words" you mean! ;)

@egreg So the need is there.

A compound word is just that: a word :p

@AlanMunn Ukenglish has a (much bigger) table as an option, and Barbara maintains an ever growing list of exceptions but even if you had a newer patgen, getting hold of a large hyphenation list (unless you are a commercial dictionary publisher) makes the whole exercise hard

@Christian possibly:-)

@DavidCarlisle Right, but I'm wondering whether the successes in statistical NLP might be applied to generating better patterns.

@Christian Except that 'word' is a pretty hard to define notion, linguistically.

@AlanMunn true

@Christian We could start with German separable prefixes. :)

I'm just so mad at the many German native speakers that lack the sprachgefühl not to separate compounds that I couldn't resist saying that even though I know that in English that's correct ... mostly ... as in "you pretty much have to look up everything in the dictionary and often you'll find that both forms are acceptable".

And actually in German it makes a real difference semantically. "Hotelpark" is a park and "Hotel Park" is a hotel. So yeah, getting your spaces straight does matter.

@Christian And sometimes in English, too. "black bird" vs. "blackbird", but we're very inconsistent with it.

@AlanMunn Yeah, that's my problem with English. In German there are clear rules (even though most people don't even seem to have an intuitive understanding of what those rules are). In English it's more like "oh look, we've been using this compound for such a long time and gotten so used to it, I guess we'll just use a hyphen between the constituents" and a hundred years later or so people will remove even the hyphen .... and it's all just arbitrary really.

@Christian That's a pretty accurate description of the state of affairs.

lol

Yeah, so I like me my German precision there and I really mourn how we're losing it because people don't understand their own language well enough to grasp the subtleties it allows.

@Christian which basically describes English in general, not just hyphenation rules, as basically we just steal words from other languages without knowing what they really mean or how they are formed or pronounced, hyphenation is a bit arbitrary:-)

@Christian Well that might be a bit of an overstatement. Just because they aren't reflecting something in writing doesn't mean they've lost the distinction.

@DavidCarlisle But if I gave you a bunch of nonsense words, I suspect you and I would agree on their hyphenation to a large degree.

@AlanMunn yes because we'd both secretly run tex and post the result of \showhyphens

@DavidCarlisle LOL.

@AlanMunn Well, in this case I believe they do because you actually also pronounce "Hotelpark" and "Hotel Park" differently, with the stress on "-tel" in the first case and on "Park" in the latter.

But even when saying these examples instead of writing them, I still get empty faces :/

@AlanMunn I forgot to add Mike Spivak's joke in “The Joy of TeX”: one of the characters in the book is doctor Treemunch who's unhappy because TeX hyphens his name as “Treem-unch”.

@Christian Right, but suppose you wrote them the same way, but used them in different contexts where they clearly meant one or the other, people would probably apply the right pronunciation. (We have a student in our lab working on this very problem in English.)

@egreg And unhappy he should be, since that's an awful hyphenation choice.

This is TeX, Version 3.1415926 (TeX Live 2013)
**\showhyphens{Treemunch}

Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) detected at line 0
[] \tenrm Treemu-nch

I remembered wrong. ;-) It's even worse!

@AlanMunn That's probably true. It's still sad and more importantly annoying to me ;) Because I actually find it hard to read texts containing these mistakes as I read them differently than they were meant to be read by the person who wrote them.

@egreg Indeed. That's abominable.

Compulsory quotation of a quotation:

If all problems of hyphenation have not been solved,
at least some progress has been made since that night,
when according to legend, an RCA Marketing Manager received
a phone call from a disturbed customer. His 301 had just hyphenated ``God.''
\author PAUL E. ^{JUSTUS}, {\sl There's More to Typesetting Than %
  Setting Type\/} (1972)
% in {\sl IEEE Transactions on Professional Commun. vol PC-15, pp. 13-15

Or, what's even worse, I find myself misreading things that are spelled correctly but ambiguous as to if they are actually one word or two because I'm too used to correcting these mistakes on the fly.

@Christian Surely though, the number of cases that are ambiguous in the context is quite small. (I'm not saying the errors don't slow you down, though.)

@egreg Maybe it was Jewish, and wrote G-d. :)

@AlanMunn It's surprisingly often that it is ambiguous, at least initially. It's quite common when names are involved. And by "initially" I mean that it gets clear when you read the rest of the sentence. German sentences aren't renowned for their brevity though so yeah, it can slow you down considerably.

:11643619

Underfull \hbox (badness 10000) in paragraph at lines 8--8
[] \OT1/cmr/m/n/10 Tree-m-unch

(UKenglish wins again:-)

@DavidCarlisle Only if it chooses the first and not the second hyphenation point.

@AlanMunn I was skimming over embarrassing details

@AlanMunn As you said yourself, Treem-unch is still better than Treemu-nch

@Christian That's interesting. Do you have an example in mind (or can you construct one?) I'm curious.

@Christian and germany wins

@DavidCarlisle That's fascinating. "Treemunch" is as Ungerman a word as it gets :)

@AlanMunn No, unfortunately I don't have an example right now. I might remember to come back to you when I encounter one again.

@Christian It looks german to me ( = looks like two words stuck together:-)

Too funny ;)

@DavidCarlisle The same with Italian. :P

At least you can't pronounce it without risking damage to your vocal tract but then I imagine many English speakers will say that about regular German words as well.

@Christian I reserve that problem for Dutch.

@AlanMunn Hehe, I'm with you there. Although you should try Swiss German. That sounds even more as if you've got something stuck in your throat than Arab does.

Wow, how many countries did I just insult in a single line?

@Christian :)

@Christian That's OK, you didn't include England in the line:-)

Anyway, I think I'm going to call it a day because I'm seeing my English deteriorate quite rapidly and too many stupid mistakes slipping through my proofreading ... or proof reading or whatever (too lazy to look it up ... also, it kinda proves my point, two of them really ;) would be quite embarrassing after the grammar nazi performance I gave earlier.