@DavidCarlisle @egreg and others. tex.stackexchange.com/q/155874/37049

@AndrewZabavnikov Sorry, I really don't follow the question

@JosephWright What is the most misunderstood part?

@AndrewZabavnikov Well the entire thing! You are processing a document, then somehow you are worrying about the .aux file, then you imply you are writing some new document somehow, ...

@JosephWright Please, ask me questions. I'm not quite a person who explains his thoughts well :-(

@AndrewZabavnikov It may be other people get it more: I've not been following the chat discussion closely

@JosephWright chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/13375749#13375749

It's about making automatically-sized delimiters.

And making it work for example with MathJax.

Or latex2html.

@egreg: Buongiorno! How did you manage to cover accented letters in here?! tex.stackexchange.com/a/155850/3094 :)

@JosephWright: we need to have some sort of witch council. :)

@PauloCereda That's the LaTeX team: watch out or you'll get asked to join :-)

@JosephWright LOL

Nobody expects the LaTeX3 team!

We need to sell L3 T-shirts. :)

@PauloCereda Cool: find a printer ;-)

@JosephWright Beware, I have my sources. :)

@PauloCereda I'm sure

This will be the best T-shirt in our store:

@Joseph: will you get Minecraft for PS3? :)

You and David could play!

David is now a Minecraft expert. :)

@JosephWright I'm processing the document and somehow produce some information like for example that in final document \mymacro{abc}should be replaced with abc. That information is written somewhere for every entry of \mymacro and every corresponding argument. Then it's used by something (maybe not TeX, maybe even my custom replacement program) to produce final source that can be fed to something entirely incapable of handling macros like latex2html.

@PauloCereda That's not really complete; a dash would give “good”.

@egreg Oh. Still an awesome code. :)

@PauloCereda I wrote it in a hurry, after a very good dinner with friends. ;-)

@PauloCereda Do you like squids?

@egreg I never ate them. Are they good? :)

@PauloCereda Yes. They were prepared with their own ink. And served with polenta, of course.

Wow!

@egreg Own ink?!

@PauloCereda Squids expel a black liquid when they feel being under attack. That liquid can be used for cooking them. One can do black risotto with squids, for instance, which is a typical dish in Venice. Otherwise squids are cooked with a tomato sauce.

@egreg Oh my! When I'm in Italy, we will take a look at this dish. :)

One of the disadvantages of \def is given as follows, the author did not get notified when the redundancies exist.

Taken from the showexpl package.

I compiled the following and I got 4 blank pages. What is wrong?

\listfiles
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[a4paper,margin=25cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{tcolorbox}

\begin{document}
\begin{tcolorbox}
This is a test \textcolor{red}{\LaTeX}.
\end{tcolorbox}
\end{document}

@CodeMocker Isn't the margin way larger than the paper dimension itself?

@PauloCereda Genius! I did not notice that! :-)

Thanks

I usually type in mm, I don't know why I typed it in cm. :-)

@CodeMocker <3

Still, a nice experiment. :)

@CodeMocker that's why I use inches for page geometry (but only for that) :)

@tohecz But sometimes I write it in pt.

@CodeMocker you should put everything in a counter first and then cast it to a dimension :p

@tohecz I prefer to do it in PostScript level.

@codemocker Then you should write in bp.

@cgnieder Quick chemformula query: is there an easy way to handle mass spec fragments? I'm thinking of the case M - <something>, which fails to look right with \ch{M - <something>} even if I try escaping the -.

Hi @HarishKumar, how are you feeling today?

@JosephWright The dash should simply be a dash, right? \ch{M "-" H} should look like M-H

@cgnieder ooh a chemistry duel! Throw an hydrogen bomb!

@cgnieder No, it should be an equation, spacing as +

@cgnieder At present, my best idea is $\ch{M} - \ch{<something>}$

+ is detected correctly but - doesn't seem to be

@PauloCereda Physics

@JosephWright Oh. :(

@PauloCereda Here you go: youtube.com/watch?v=rmtK2BgmGCw

@cgnieder YES!

@StephanLehmke OK. Thanks for correcting.

@JosephWright yes, a - is detected either as a charge or a single bond. I could add something...

@cgnieder I'm updating my TeX distro like crazy waiting for this update. <3

@cgnieder Would be consistent with handling of +, which is a charge with no spaces but a mathematical operator with spaces

while true do tlmgr update --self --all

@cgnieder I guess no-one has asked about mass spec before?

@PauloCereda More or less what I have ;-)

@JosephWright omg!

@JosephWright LOL you probably have some sleep(n) in there. :)

@PauloCereda Actually a cron job, once per day

@tohecz Joseph might have some crontab script that runs once or twice a day. :)

@JosephWright Aha.

@JosephWright exactly :) I sent an update of chemmacros to CTAN yesterday so the next update is due when I find the bug...

@PauloCereda Exactly, and the same idea on Windows

@cgnieder Will work on it!

@JosephWright Cool!

@cgnieder The student I mentioned a few days ago is really enjoying using LaTeX in place of Word, but I have to sort the technical things for her :-)

:13392268 \documentclass{scrartcl}
\usepackage{chemformula}
\ExplSyntaxOn
\cs_new:Npn \chminus
  {
    \skip_horizontal:N \l__chemformula_plus_space_skip
    $-$
    \skip_horizontal:N \l__chemformula_plus_space_skip
  }
\ExplSyntaxOff
\begin{document}
\ch[math-space=0pt]{M ${}-{}$ H}\par
\ch{M + H}\par
\ch{M \chminus H}
\end{document}

@JosephWright Yay!

@JosephWright :)

@cgnieder Great

@Joseph: does she know what her advisor means to the LaTeX world? :)

ok, for the first time I forced someone to delete an answer for political reasons

@PauloCereda I'm not her boss: he's not so keen on the 'not Word' plan so I'm hoping it all works out!

@tohecz Huh?

@JosephWright Oh.

@JosephWright it was on Academia ... someone claimed that mentioning scouts in ones CV is bad because they are controversial, and he explained the controversy by mixing together scouts, Hitlerjugend and Soviet Pioneers...

@tohecz Ah, right

@tohecz Certainly not controversial in the UK

@JosephWright they are controversial only in the 5 countries that prohibit them now

@tohecz People don't want their cars washing?

@JosephWright what?

I want to be a scout.

@tohecz Bob-a-job week, where they come round to raise money and offer to wash your car

@JosephWright oh yeah, this. I've always found this ridiculous

but well, the list is quite self-explanatory I think: China, North Korea, Cuba, Laos, Myanmar :)

@tohecz Really alike to each other! ;-)

@tohecz Did he/she mention also sport teams? You know, sport is symbolized war.

@egreg oh yeah, well, no :p

I made a metaphor that "science is bad because nuclear weapons exist"

@JosephWright: is there any official key in which God Save The Queen has to be played?

@PauloCereda I would go for G major, seems that the original prints were at this pitch

@tohecz Oh cool. :)

@tohecz: I was curious because our national anthem has to be played in F (if to be sung) or in Bb if only orchestra.

@PauloCereda oh my! such complicated rules. No, I don't htink it's so strict in general

@tohecz :)

@PauloCereda from wiki: A version of "God Save the Queen" by Madness features the melody of the song played on kazoos. It was included on the compilation album The Business – the Definitive Singles Collection.

kazoos -- wtf? :D

our anthemn is in E major in the Law on Czech National Symbols, but in general, it's played in C major: it's quite difficult anyways, so we don't want it to be too high :)

@Paulo cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

@tohecz Cool!

@PauloCereda I like it. It's certainly very strange, but I like it :)

@tohecz :) I like ours too. :)

yep, one thing: ours is very difficult to sing at the scout camps, with no instruments :)

@egreg Thanks for your solution. However, is it possible to ignore the spaces at the beginning?

btw, a general question: is it bad in some way to put \centering directly into \begin{figure|table} ?

@PauloCereda What? Can't a singer choose the key that fits his/her voice the best?

@cgnieder he's just left, but obviously they can't ;)

@tohecz I wonder if they also must use 440Hz :p

@cgnieder who knows :p because almost non of the large orchestra use 440, they like to use a bit more

@cgnieder God Save the Queen is old enough to allow 415 Hz ;-)

@JosephWright quite certainly ;) but do you have to keep it in G major?

@tohecz No rules here, I'd guess

otoh, it was written in G major 4 centuries ago, which might be a good reason to never transpose it, since it's British ;p

@tohecz Didn't The Queen record it once? Which key have they used?

@cgnieder they did. I don't know. They recorded many fabulous stuff :D

@cgnieder Yup: used to finish their set with it

E.g. the famous Wembley '86 recording

@tohecz indeed :)

@JosephWright I didn't know that...

@tohecz Yes, it's surely possible. But you should remove it anyway before the test.

btw, a bit of English questions: We use, in a journal, the text "* corresponding author: [email protected]", and we put a star next to the corresponding author's name in the title. Now if there's only one author, it looks ridiculous.

@egreg that's a good advice, now tell me how to do that (I've never done this, since I don't care about what the authors do, and I can always correct it myself)

@tohecz Varies between journals

@tohecz Append \centering to \@floatboxreset

@JosephWright well, we like it as it is. We remove the small "a" for affilliations if there's only one. But if you remove the star, you're left with "corresponding author: [email protected]" with no link, which simply doesn't make sense

@egreg I use {float} and {caption} anyways, I suppose one of them has that option ;) It's more a question of concept, whether one should do it, and whether it has any drawbacks

@JosephWright So if I remove the star in the image above, I have a feeling I should change the text next to it, but I don't know how

@Jos maybe simply "correspondance: [email protected]"

@egreg the missing ping for fixed font messages is by no means a bug

@tohecz I'd just have the e-mail address

@JosephWright well, we (the Editors) insist on having "corresponding author: ..." for the case of multiple authors, and if I remove all text, it will look IMHO too inconsistent across the articles

@tohecz Authors will do evil anyway, no matter what we do for avoiding it.

@egreg yep, but they might use less of {center} if they see it's ok without that

@tohecz Possibly. Tell them in the user's manual that floats will be automatically centered. The 2% of them who read the manual will be happy.

@egreg oh yeah, manuals. I've already thought about putting a beer invitation in the manual :)

@tohecz Don't allocate a big budget for the beer. Keep it for my visit.

@PauloCereda How do you tell arara to only do some command if some file doesn't exist?

@egreg when do you come you said?

@egreg What I do for achemso

@cgnieder I'm not sure, but it cannot be used in official events. :)

@NicolaTalbot Ah, only via conditionals in v4. :(

Is there a way in the main site to see something different that "recently active questions"? I'd like a view with the questions in the order in which they were posted, for example, and not in the order of last modification. Was that something that changed in the last months? I don't remember it being like it is now.

@GonzaloMedina I guess tex.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=newest

@tohecz Next summer, but you'll surely be elsewhere. ;-)

@cgnieder Thanks. Do you know if there's a way to have that as the default page when I open a browser tab for the site?

@egreg depends ... June is almost all fine, July is almost all bad, August is all fine :)

@tohecz We'll see. June could be good for a long weekend in Prague.

@GonzaloMedina No idea :(

@egreg I'm in Porquerolle for one week, probably Sunday morning to Friday evening, depending on the flight-train connections

(btw, did I tell you how difficult is to get there from Prague?)

@GonzaloMedina put it in your favourites, it should then appear as a 1st suggestion when you type tex.s

@tohecz There's a bus connection from Prague to Mannheim, then a TGV to Marseille

@egreg there's a flight from Prague to Paris, then TGV to Marseille, you know. But then train to Toulon or Hyères, and then the ship

@tohecz That'll do. Thanks.

@tohecz Bus+TGV is 14 hours. From Marseille you're on your own, of course. But the place should be beautiful.

@GonzaloMedina of you can even make a shortcut in most browsers, than it could be simply tex.s<enter> for you ;)

@egreg I'm looking forward to it ... well, my supervisor organizes the meeting ;)

@egreg the problem is that I hate buses :(

@tohecz I too; but probably the plane+TGV solution takes about the same time, all things considered.

@egreg yep. the most stupid thing is that direct TGV from CDG to MAR are rare, so you have to go to Châtelet and Gare de Lyon

but the good point is that I could do what I did on my way to Amiens last summer: I took the morning flight and went to the church in Paris :)

@tohecz Which takes "loooooong", particularly for the connection at Châtelet, where one walks for kilometers.

@PauloCereda Oh, okay. I'll have to wait for v4.

@egreg no, it's fine since you can connect B->A or B->D, which is at the same place. You can even go the calmer way and connect B->D at Gare du Nord

@tohecz I was thinking to the connection from Métro to RER: that takes really long.

@egreg depending which one. If you need to go from RER to 14, it's best to change to 4 at Les Halles, move one station, and then only change to 14

@egreg another option: PRG->CDG, ORL->TLN, the airport in Toulon is 2 km from where the ship to Porquerolles leaves. But it's very expensive (EUR 600 return ticket if bought now)

@SeanAllred Will answer l3docstrip question shortly :-)

@JosephWright Thanks!

@JosephWright I added something to my development version. In the next release (after the one that Robin installed today) the - will behave like the +.

@cgnieder Cool

Do you think I should advise the OP to abandon this custom style?

It's probably going to be one of these .sty files that has been passed down over several generations.

@NicolaTalbot o.O he must have missed the “minimal” part of MWE

@NicolaTalbot difficult question. It would probably be better in the long run but the changes necessary to adapt a standard class to the required format may be difficult for a newbie. Hard to give advice without the actual sty file

@NicolaTalbot If you're willing to spend the time, is should be possible to invite him in a chat room if you own the room, then you can discuss it. It's always easier to convince people over the chat than over the comments ;)

@cgnieder, @tohecz I suppose it depends on how much his document code relies on the package. If removing the package makes everything go badly wrong, then it might be easier just to find a patch to fix this particular issue.

@NicolaTalbot I dunno, I just know that over comments, you can't solve this problem

@tohecz Yes, I think you may be right.

I've just had a thought. It could be that \listoftables has been redefined to use \chapter instead of \chapter* (with the numbering suppressed due to \frontmatter). It may be that the starred version has a different format.

@NicolaTalbot that's possible. You can always try to hack it, but it's all just blind shooting

@tohecz Yes, you're right. I've added to my answer, but I need to cook some dinner now.

Has anyone any experience with ctan.org/pkg/typeface ? Looks quite interesting

Might be interesting to some folk here, a job advert for an editor-typesetter working with Latex for an actuarial publisher in Connecticut:

ziprecruiter.com/job/Layout-and-Technical-Editor-Mathematics/…

@CharlesStewart in 2 years and in Europe, I'd grab it immediately :)

@cgnieder The M stands for monstrous. :)

@PauloCereda Oh my! I did it wrong all those years!

@cgnieder I've had some ideas in a similar area for LaTeX3: ideally users should have one interface for loading fonts irrespective of engine

@PauloCereda Ack.

@JosephWright I think so, too. With fontspec there is a common interface for LuaLaTeX and XeLaTeX but for pdfLaTeX the interface varies from package to package... a common LaTeX interface would be a good thing

@cgnieder Yes: devil is in the detail!

@cgnieder Certainly if you are aiming to have a proper design interface then something better than a load of font packages is needed

@JosephWright I can imagine that :)

Problem for me at present is I need the rest of the team to come to some decisions on for example templates/'LDB'

[Wonders] Is @DavidCarlisle about :-)

Will was handling fonts, but he seems to have been busy for a while now

@JosephWright I just got blown up by a creeper:(

@PauloCereda ^^

@DavidCarlisle I can believe that

@JosephWright no doubt. I can imagine that this is not an easy task, though

@cgnieder I think I can see how it might work, but as I say it really needs other stuff in place that wev'e not sorted

@JosephWright I guess this one is for you:-) tex.stackexchange.com/questions/155923/…

@DavidCarlisle Already commented

@DavidCarlisle Questions directly to one person are not really on-topic

@JosephWright I could edit it and remove your name by "anyone in the vast army of beamer maintainers"

@DavidCarlisle :-)

@DavidCarlisle Same problem, I'd say

@tohecz Good luck. Don't forget to remind us folk when you are ready to start looking for something.

@CharlesStewart wait, you have some connection to publishing industry?

Yes, I'm a copy-editor. I do mostly work for authors, but I've done some book and journal work for publishers.

I'm trying to swing a regular gig with MIT Press.

@DavidCarlisle Oh no!

@AlanMunn Hi Alan! :)

@tohecz I'm interested in tracking recruitment, because I want to keep informed on what publishers are looking for, though I want to stay freelance myself.

@CharlesStewart Useful to know: how do you pick these things up?

@CharlesStewart ah ok. I would prefer to get a job in LaTeX, if not in research and teaching

Guys, a stupid question. I might need to typeset some Bible versicles, but I'm in doubt how to deal with the superscripts. :(

@JosephWright That one was advertised on Linkedin. I see openings mentioned on mailing lists and Twitter. I don't think Latex jobs get advertised much: if you want to use Latex for your publishing workflow, you probably are well-enough connected to find your people yourself.

@CharlesStewart Ah right. With my UK-TUG 'hat' on I get the occasional message to pass on to members.

@PauloCereda er what?

@DavidCarlisle The numbers near the text. :)

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

@PauloCereda \textsuperscript?

@PauloCereda Nick the ConTeXt code to do proper text superscripts?

@DavidCarlisle Oh my, do they exist?!

@JosephWright Oh!

@PauloCereda Don't have to, of course

@PauloCereda Yes

$ latex \\show\\textsuperscript
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.5-1.40.14 (TeX Live 2013)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
LaTeX2e <2011/06/27>
Babel <3.9h> and hyphenation patterns for 54 languages loaded.
> \textsuperscript=macro:
->\protect \textsuperscript  .
<*> \show\textsuperscript

?

@PauloCereda or you can use xetex or something and use a font with superscript numerals in the unicode slots

@DavidCarlisle @JosephWright: I'll take a look, thanks. :)

@CharlesStewart I have actually one more project in mind: typesetting of a new hymnary book of our church, but I would first have to convince the cantor that he wants me for that

@JosephWright I really should join the TUG/ Dante

@CharlesStewart Yup

@tohecz Your cantor might be impressed by the argument about not needing to pay to upgrade software - no planned Office obsolescence, no Office 365 subscriptions, etc.

@tohecz Tell TeX in mentioned in the Blble. :) We probably can find some TeX occurrence in a Latin version. :)

Dura TeX, sed TeX.

Exodus 39:21

21 et capitium in superiori parte contra medium oramque per gyrum capitii \TeX tilem

I knew it. :)

Oopsie. :P

(removed)

\DeclareDocumentEnvironment{foo}{}{\itshape\ignorespaces}{}

...

\lipsum[1]

\begin{foo}
\lipsum[2]
\end{foo}

\lipsum[1]

Guys, any reason why I have a gap between the end of the environment and the beginning of the "normal" text?

I know the font shape is the culprit, but I don't know what to do. :(

@PauloCereda I can see no gap:

@PauloCereda have you tried putting \par in \endfoo ?

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum,xparse}
\DeclareDocumentEnvironment{foo}{}{\itshape\ignorespaces}{}
\begin{document}

\lipsum[1]

\begin{foo}
\lipsum[2]
\end{foo}

\lipsum[1]

\end{document}

@cgnieder oopsie MWE. :)

@tohecz Hm \par?

But @tohecz is right: there should be a \par at the end, just in case... (\lipsum adds one itself...)

@PauloCereda well, you finalize the paragraph in the \upshape font, not in \itshape

@tohecz Oh.

@cgnieder depends whether it always gonna end in a paragraph

@tohecz details... ;)

@cgnieder might be important. But then: using an environment for something not seperated by a paragraph end (at least semantically, if not syntactically) is a bit wrong usage of LaTeX IMHO

Still, in all honesty, I understand people doing \begin{bfseries} if it's for long part of the text

@cgnieder, @tohecz: I'm ashamed! The culprit was...

I won't even tell you guys. :)

@PauloCereda you have to! :D

@tohecz I didn't notice the whole thing was enclosed by a multicols environment, so... :)

@PauloCereda aka "always make a MWE" ;)

@tohecz Indeed!

btw, I'm happy, I managed to eat a good thick entrecote steak without feeling significant pain!

@tohecz I can also understand it... although its of course wrong semantically

@cgnieder yes, one should know why this happens and do \newnevironment{theses}{\bfseries}{\par}

Hi. I'm trying to use \url with {\bfseries \Filename}. the url doc has a warning at the top saying you can't use \ in an arg to \url, and in fact, if in enclose \Filename in \url, i just see \Filename verbatim back again.

I'm unclear what the workaround is.

@FaheemMitha what exactly do you want to achieve? \url is a fragile and weird command

@tohecz I want \Filename to split across lines. Currently it doesn't.

maybe you want \expandafter\url\expandafter{\Filename}

I mean, the values corresponding to \Filename, obviously.

@tohecz Dunno. What does that do?

Oh, right, it expands \Filename. Gotcha

@FaheemMitha well, try if it works, if it does, I'll explain, ok? ;)

@tohecz It is ok, I had a discussion about this exact form the other day.

Yeah, it expands the things in the order \Filename, \url, {, }

one sec.

Didn't think of it in this context. Must try to be smarter.

You can as well use \expandafter\expandafter\expandafter\url{\Filename}, but I prefer the former, especially since it's one \expandafter shorter

@tohecz Right.

btw, do you know the joke about the word "abbreviation"? I think it equally applies to \expandafter ;)

@FaheemMitha It will come. It took me a lot of practice to realize some of these concepts, and still there's a lot that I don't know of

@tohecz I don't think this works. { is not expandable so the first expansion does nothing and you're left with \expandafter\url{\Filename} which again does nothing

@tohecz That worked, thanks!

@FaheemMitha which one?

@cgnieder you're right, damn, something's wrong :D

\expandafter\expandafter\expandafter\url{\Filename}

@FaheemMitha that should not work! :D

@FaheemMitha Are you sure it wasn't \expandafter\url\expandafter{\Filename}?

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{url}

\begin{document}

\def\F{Ahoj}

% gives \F
\url{\F}

% gives Ahoj
\expandafter\url\expandafter{\F}

% gives \F
\expandafter\expandafter\expandafter\url{\F}

\end{document}

@tohecz: I'm using \nextnuml{\RowID} & \Date & {\bfseries\expandafter\url\expandafter{\Filename}} & \From & \To & \Email & \Subject \\

This is in the context of datatool.

Sorry for the confusion. I was trying to simultaneously have a conversation and was distracted.

@FaheemMitha yes, so it's \xp\url\xp{\F} and not \xp\xp\xp\url{\F} ;)

no worries

@tohecz Correct.

@cgnieder was saying the other form would not work, right?

@FaheemMitha yes, and I didn't believe him :)

@tohecz I hope you are feeling better. wrt the mumps thing, that is.

@FaheemMitha yes, I am, thanks for caring. It's quite significantly better, so I think it needn't even be the virotic form of parotitis, but simply an inflammation of the gland caused by the inflammation of the ear

@tohecz That's good to hear. When I was young, I had mumps for what seemed like months but was probably just weeks. It was really boring. I used to read comic books, I think. I didn't have the internet or a computer.

@FaheemMitha yep, being ill is no fun now, with all the technology /sarcasm

Actually, the intenet didn't exist at the time. And user computers were in their infancy. We've come a long way.

@tohecz You mean "so fun"?

@FaheemMitha I mean "no fun", and I add the /sarcasm comment at the end ;)

@tohecz Ok.

Does the xp\url\xp{\F} pattern come up a lot? what other patterns do?

well, at home I could imagine lots of things to do when ill, but since I'm at a hotel, I'm happy that I have the computer

@FaheemMitha well, quite, you often need to enclose the thing you expand in braces

other than that, it's mostly just the 2^n-1 rule

@tohecz I'm not familar with that. You mean those crazy sequences of \expandafters?

if you have a specific command in which you need \xp\mycmd\xp{\something} a lot, then you can define it seperated, you save one \xp each time by that

@FaheemMitha yep, 2^n-1 \xp in a row cause the first following thing to wait until the next n ones are expanded

@tohecz And that comes up a lot? Ok. I'll try to recognize it next time.

@FaheemMitha sometimes it does

for example, \expandafter\expandafter\expandafter\let\mymacro\csname #1\endcsname

@tohecz csname is if there are some special characters, right?

@FaheemMitha csname is used when you need to construct a macro name from something

@tohecz Ok, but i think the point is that you can't control what the name might be?

@FaheemMitha yes, somehow

so it could have funny characters

@FaheemMitha yes

for example spaces

@tohecz Sorry to interrupt again: this expands \mymacro twice and then lets this expansion to \csname ... :)

@cgnieder damn, I'm sure I had this working

so it's \expandafter\expandafter\expandafter\let\expandafter\mymacro\csname #1\endcsname ?

@tohecz I hate those \expandafter chains... they're always hard to follow

@cgnieder yep, and if you ask \tracingall, it only says {\expandafter} many times and then trhrows either "too many }'s" or "undefined control sequence"

@tohecz this seems to let the first expansion of \mymacro to the first expansion of \csname

\expandafter\let\expandafter\mymacro\csname #1\endcsname I'd think

@cgnieder oh yeah, so in this case the wanted thing should really be just \xp\let\xp\mymacro\csname#1\endcsame,

@tohecz sometimes I type in (literally) what I think must be the result of an expansion and then the result of the next expansion and so on just to make myself clear what's happening... (try following expl3's \expargs:Nno \foo:nn {bar} {\baz} for example... a pain)

@cgnieder well, I don't need it much, gladly. And I'm not the "everything expandable" person, so I prefer to use \edef\mytemp{\noexpand...}, it's so much simpler to retain control there

@tohecz especially in combination with \unexpanded{...} :)

@cgnieder usually, I don't even need that since \noexpand can do most ;)

Oh my. I'm being yelled at because I can't fix a problem without a MWE.

What do people recommend?

@NicolaTalbot I can't re commen d anything, but I will commen t

@PauloCereda Better a draw than…

@NicolaTalbot What does he mean by »the errors seem to disappear«? Do they or don't they?

@cgnieder No idea! Surely either an error message is shown or it isn't.

@NicolaTalbot commented

@tohecz Thanks. (I think you've misspelt \tracingmacros.)

@NicolaTalbot thanks, you're right, that's an important typo!

@tohecz :-)

@NicolaTalbot You mean "without a MWE", right?

@FaheemMitha I was just going to point that out ;) another important typo :D

@FaheemMitha Oops. It's obviously contagious!

Thanks. :-)

Most of the people coming through here seem surprisingly well-mannered. Not sure why that is the case. I guess there is the occasional exception.

@tohecz With etoolbox it's simpler: \letcs\mymacro{#1}

@egreg yeah, I know, it was an (obviously wrong) example

@tohecz And with LaTeX3 it's even better: \cs_set_eq:Nc \mymacro { #1 }

You don't have to remember different names, just use the appropriate signature.

@FaheemMitha I dunno, it simply happens sometimes. Like that it happens you have to very similar institututions, just one is a very friendly and positive, and the other one is competitive and unfriendly.

@egreg That's something I learned to appreciate very fast

Still, TeX is something that attracts positive people, in a sense. Like for instance SageMath does

@tohecz People come here from all over the world though. There isn't any filtering. Well, except for the common TeX factor. :-)

@FaheemMitha but the "preset" environment influences us. I have lower downvote factor here than on any other site where I'm active, simply because it's more wrong to downvote here than there

@tohecz Yes, that might be a factor too.

@egreg agreed!

@egreg yeah, I would never think how significant can the input type be

@FaheemMitha that's what I meant by the metaphor with the two institutes

@tohecz yes, I see.

I don't see what is stopping a bunch of rowdy types coming in and trashing the place, though.

TeX hooligans, as it were.