I guess the paradigm would be fine if there were easy ways to work with it. For instance, why isn't there a \newcommandE that expands all parameters fully, no questions asked? (That's probably because the modern LaTeX ecosphere went way beyond what TeX was built for; I guess we abuse it quite hard.)
@cgnieder Because you wanted to, or you needed to in order to be productive? (I move that the latter would be bad.)
@Raphael Can't be done in TeX: not everything is expandable
@Raphael Fair point about TeX versus LaTeX (or indeed ConTeXt): Knuth's model was much more that you'd be doing typesetting with minimal programming to support human decisions
@JosephWright Try, it probably has never been tried. I can not think of any reason why e.g. a package abstraction with namespaces, proper scoping and a more "natural" parameter interface (cf xparse) could hurt. In a sense, I'm talking syntactic sugar here; I don't care how TeX works, I just don't want to have to know/bother.
@Raphael You still have to agree on some scheme for assigning names, so you ultimately are back with the TeX convention but with a different description
@Raphael Scoping I do understand but the TeX model works fine so where is the issue
@Raphael (sorry for stepping in mid-discussion): There's one problem with typesetting: you have 4 options I think: (1) Do it in Word/HTML/LibreOffice, it'll be quick, but very bad. (2) Hire a professional, it will be good if you choose a good one, but very expensive (however, that's the way how it was done 100 years ago). (3) Learn LaTeX, it will be painful, with all the problems you express, but it will be good, if you want it to be.
(4) Learn some other "professional" typesetting tool, it'll solve most of the issues you speak about, nevertheless it will be much more painful and likely won't produce as good result.
@PauloCereda Hi Paulo! Hmm, I was asking about how you are maintaining your library of songs on your mac and where do you download them from in the first place? :-)
The one thing we were not able to ascertain with our knowledge was: is it absolutely necessary for the lexer to be rewritten at runtime? Not for current TeX, but in principle.
@Raphael yep, I know, I just somehow want to say that there are tries and there are other projects, but the tries are complicated and the other projects usually make a bad job, mostly because they are not well thought out.
@kan: I let iTunes handle my music collection (actually just a part of it), but I hear there are other apps that can do the job. :) And I usually rip my CD's. :)
@Raphael He didn't care about us when writing his books, but the message is sent. :P
@JosephWright I guess I'd have to learn more in order to form an opinion. The idea that is should be necessary for symbols to change meaning feels very, very wrong to my CS-brainwashed mind.
@kan Oh, sometimes! There's an utility named youtube-dl which downloads videos from YouTube (command line). If you want some graphical aid, there's JDownloader, which has the option to convert the video to .mp3. :)
@Raphael well, you want to do crazy stuff: For instance you want to input code listings verbatim. And since there's clearly only one way to parse files in LaTeX (i.e. source code and input files are the same for the core), you can't do it in other way than by disabling the active features of the characters locally.
@Raphael Macro packages can issue their own messages but not intercept those from the engine (apart from for example altering the \hfuzz to suppress some overfull box warnings).
@tohecz True. Local changes are not what worries me as long as there is one syntactic element triggering verbatim mode. Trouble starts is a package, say babel, reconfigures the lexer for everybody.
@JosephWright I guess if you come from the experience of a Java or Scala compiler, the level of detail pdftex throws at you feels just unnecessary. Given that it's hard to get a meaningfull error message at the position of error, it certainly feels that way.
@Raphael LuaTeX offers what you'd think of of 'proper' programming, but at the engine level that doesn't separate markup out: needs to be done by the format (LaTeX, ConTeXt, ...)
@Raphael You're thinking of languages where if they work right it's probably likely you want to keep things 'tidy'. In the TeX case, the idea is to be informative.
@tohecz The most common errors (when writing documents, not packages) usually point you at the right place. At least the first error does, the rest is usually crap.
If not, e.g. if the error got "swallows" by an environment and reported add \end{...}, the full log does not give me more.
@Raphael I dunno. It's not a programming language, it's a text writing program. You shouldn't be making too many errors. (I mean, I'm maybe equally good in C++ and LaTeX, and I get significantly less errors in the latter)
sigh I guess the bigger issue is: assume I (or anybody) would come up with The Solution that allows typesetting as we like and gives "nice" programming and document-writing abstractions. Would anyone care? Probably not: it'd probably be completely incompatible with LaTeX (or any other flavor) and moving the whole ecosphere is ... impractical.
@tohecz But we do program and use programmed packages. Maybe we should not, but them's the facts. And these are usually the issues that trip me over. (1, 2) I don't know how many hours I lost because of issues with expansion.
@tohecz (That's probably because modern IDEs don't train you to get it right the first time. Errors are severly punished in LaTeX, so you learn to avoid them.)
Well, I guess in meantime I can work on my business plan for "You write Markdown and I get what you want using pandoc". :D
It's so, so painful to watch indie publishing enterprises struggle no end because they spend time on fixing links, indices, etc with Word, Illustrate or others. :/
One guy (RPG publisher) seriously told me something like "we have to feature-freeze now because redoing the PDF index is too time consuming to do twice".
@ppr Yea. That's the common sense reading in many western cultures. What about 1-5; do you mean 1,2,3,4,5 or 1,3,5? ;) Just saying that law is one domain you don't want to take chances.
@ppr well, if you decided to use § for paragraphs, then you should go for §§ 1 and 6. I would write out ` and ` rather than use ` a comma, to make the text clearer and more fluent.
@tohecz That's true, and today a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. How can any contender hope to reach the features of LaTeX before funds run out? (So, last remark.)
@ppr (Or write a macro so you can change it later.)
@PauloCereda It's only by chance that I saw that message. I saw you make the repository on GitHub and I immediately cried over it not using expl3 tools… it's turning out to be a great pain to use it, though. Oi.
@PauloCereda I got everything but color working :( something something \xglobal not doing its job for whatever reason. But that was a really great hummingbird!
@JosephWright lalalalala I'm not hearing you lalalalalala Now serious: I actually know that, I'll rename it ASAP. I'm just waiting for Frank and his new feature requests. :)
Btw, I can't help myself, this comment is simply ridiculous, given my previous one got 5 stars:
@tohecz I find more useful teach the user how to catch the fish, so maybe a question about "How I find the change made in the TeX?" would be more productive and relevant, no? — Braiam29 mins ago
Psmith, the TeX bot, in fixed font mode: Let's take a look at the last cricket results:
- Pakistan 341/10 v Sri Lanka 428/9 & 133/5 *
- Bengal 114/10 & 16/1 * v Maharashtra 455/10
- Punjab 270/10 v Karnataka 39/2 *
- Ireland Women v South Africa Women
- Ireland Women v Pakistan Women
Our cricket expert David might explain these results later on.
@PauloCereda apparently it's no longer news but having lost the ashes test series 5-0 we are now 3-0 down in a 5 match 1-day series against Australia, which isn't a great position to be in.... bbc.co.uk/sport/0/cricket/25798897
I'm looking for a way to create a leontief-gozintograph that looks similar to this one:
I searched at http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/ without success. Is there anyone who already have been creating something like this?
Attached is my Python script, I add it to ArcToolBox to run. If the LGA name has no space, it works fine, the report file created. The problem is: when the LGA name has a space, it run but no report file is created. If manually run the script with space in LGA name, no report created, but all the...
The new Knuth TeX has been released in early this month, and its version number is 3.14159265 now. See here.
What's new in this release?
I'm looking for a way to create a leontief-gozintograph that looks similar to this one:
I searched at http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/ without success. Is there anyone who already have been creating something like this?
