Keeping the unanswered list down is a constant challenge
How does this idea sound: we agree a regular (once a month) slot to discuss unanswered questions here on chat? Something like "First Wednesday in the month, 1900-2100 GMT is the 'unanswered question' session on chat"
7
We could then try to get a few awkward questions dealt with without too much waiting for comment feedback
I've been having a hack at the unanswered list: the odd vote or comment on some of the questions I've tackled would be great, as it will help get them off the list!
I'm looking through the source of polyglossia now and just can't get what is the advantage of writing code in plain TeX files and then using a script to merge everything in one .dtx by including each of the source files inside \begin{macrocode} … \end{macrocode}. This completely defeats the purpose of .dtx!
@JosephWright: I had now the following idea: The source code on CTAN is pulled using rsync once a day by an automatic script running on some server (like my small virtual one), which then commits it into a VC repository hosted by some open source host (sourceforge, bitbucket, github, etc.). This would affectively archive the source code, allow the check-out of old versions and costs us almost nothing. The repository would be of course only read-only and not be used to publish new stuff on CTAN.
Is it off topic to ask how to proceed when you defined a certain relation, e.g. of A and B, and you want to make or combine some existing symbols to create their relation symbol?
@PauloCereda yeah. I got way more rep than I expected from a simple question about footnotes. The answer was just the ol' \footnotemark\footnotetext trick, but it got me like 60 rep...
OK. Must stop editing my answer to the extended draft mode question...
@PauloCereda heh. Yeah. I did once suggest a don't do this tag. But I was {status-declined}. I think it's probably right that it shouldn't be a tag. But sometimes...
@N.N. I guess the argument is that tags are supposed to help categorise the questions. Arguably best-practices is a useful category. But how would forbidden-practices help someone find the information they need?
@MartinScharrer This doesn't work: \pretocmd{\input}{\texttt{#1}}{}{} I guess this is something to do with input rather than etoolbox not being able to do it.
@MartinScharrer Ah right. I see. So that's why patching it doesn't work. So I need to patch \@iinput I think... Hmm. This looks harder than I thought...
@Seamus The argument was removed in one of the newer versions. Use \currfilename (from the sibling package currfile) instead as mentioned in the manual.
Here is a first very sketchy proof of principle. It uses KOMA script's scrpage2 package, but I'm sure fancyhdr and the like will do just as well. the inside head has the first linenumber of the page and the inside foot has the last linenumber and marginpars for section linenumbers.
Also now work...
Joseph Wright suggested in chat that we arrange to meet regularly in chat to discuss unanswered questions. He said:
How does this idea sound: we agree a regular (once a month) slot to
discuss unanswered questions here on chat? Something like "First
Wednesday in the month, 1900-2100 GMT is...
@MartinScharrer everything but graphics and paragraph hooks works. (And floats are suboptimal. But it's good enough for me! It's a really good idea by the way: I think I will use this code myself! I may even package it up and send it to CTAN what do you think?
I'll put something on github this afternoon and then we'll see whether there are any improvements suggested before posting to CTAN. I'll wait until Monday at least for weekday tex.sx-ers to have a look...
@Seamus Apropos Github. I'm planning to move away from Subversion. I read a little bit about Hg and saw Bitbucket. Do you have any experience with that too and can compare it to Git and Github?
Yeah. I'm a curmudgeonly Brit who insists on spelling words in British English.
(I did put in macro aliases in colourchange.sty for the American spellings)
I do write "program" rather than "programme" for computer programs, though. I think that's engrained enough that it's become a distinct word that can have a distinct spelling...
\usepackage[british-english]{babel} (or whatever it should be) should define a load of aliases for common US spelling macros: \let\itemise\itemize, \let\textcolour\textcolor...
@Seamus While I'm also from the UK, after some thinking my feeling is 'pick one or the other'. As LaTeX was originally written by an American, I'm afraid that means 'color' 'center' (and of course 'math mode' from TeX itself)
@PauloCereda That's one of the drawbacks to colourchange: most pairs of colours mean that the transition is really quite ugly at some point. The simple blue to red change is probably my favourite. I think there's a defaultstyle option that makes it use that transition. (Or possibly blue to a slightly darker red...)
@JosephWright I have to admit that a lot of the time it's unconscious: when I uploaded colourchange to CTAN it just didn't register that this would be weird to most users.
I use emacs so its macro completion means I never really actually type all of itemize so I don't notice it a lot of the time...
@Seamus I've never really got on with the completion system in TeXworks, but as I like the editor I stick with it (I prefer the Ctrl-Space shortcut in WinEdt to the Tab in TeXworks, for a start)
@PauloCereda I think white to any colour or any colour to white would work. Although maybe the structural elements would look weird with white. No that wouldn't work since some of the structure elements are mixed with black... Well, you could try it out...
@Seamus I'm using the Berkeley theme and blue to red looks pretty cool. I tried with green and it looks good in the middle, I'll probably try to set a darker green with \definecolor.
@JosephWright emacs doesn't have tab completion per se, but it has an "insert macro" command which then allows tab completion. Tab is used for alignment in emacs. I'm sure you could redefine ctrl spc to be the completion command in TeXworks...
@Seamus: I usually write US English for some reason, my co-supervisor now made me change my thesis to UK English because we are in Ireland. I lot of s/ize/ise/g etc. :-(
@JosephWright: I actually agree in principle. The US shouldn't have that much influence in Europe. However, I personally prefer US spelling over UK. It comes more naturally to me.
I think US English got influenced quite a bit from German settlers, that would explain that.
I'm not sure what to think about who "should" use which spelling. i guess it's a matter of taste. I appreciate that a journal has to be consistent, but as long as all articles are in US english, I don't see what the problem is.
Brazil and Portugal recently signed an ortographical reform. It still gaves me headaches to see why I should write a word that way instead of this way. Common words I used my whole life. =(
@MartinScharrer It's more complex than that: some US spellings were common in the UK in the past, but were dropped more recently in the UK
@Seamus Well indeed: I find the German 'spelling reforms' bizarre, as to me spelling is a matter of current practice and cannot be changed by any 'official body'.
On the s/z business, there is actually more to it than US versus UK, as the OED has always favoured 'z' for some cases!
There's a balance between preserving the rich heritage of a language and refusing to allow the language to evolve. I think the English laissez-faire attitude is better than the bizarrely stringent French system (I don't know about the German one)
@JosephWright I never bothered learning the new spelling. The only two things I recall is that you can now write 'dass' instead of 'daß' and that triple identical letters are OK now.
@PauloCereda The Eszett is quite interesting from a typography POV, as it is actually the long-s and short-s ligature. This used to be used in English, for example, when we used a long-s.
There was an article in the latest TUGboat about the long-s - it's complicated!
@PauloCereda You do have to look carefully. Find a good-quality font with a long-s, and compare the shape with the first part of the Eszett. They should be the same, more or less.
@MartinScharrer From a computing POV, that implies the same glyph for two different underlying letter combinations (you get the same with some old English letters. I forget which ones - yogh and wynn?)
@JosephWright: Other thing: We sometimes have migrated questions from unregistered users which never bother creating an account here as well. Does it make sense to CW these questions after a while?
I just voted the following question as "too localized". Somehow I thought the desciption "This question is unlikely to ever help any future visitors" quite fitting. Please let me know if you think this reasoning doesn't hold water.
My microscopic equation is 2.8 points too wide for some reason, which is quite a lot. I am reluctant to ignore the warning because if I get more of them I'll start missing important things.
Code is:
Applying Snell's law (Equation \eqref{eq:snell}) twice gives us:
\begin{align}
\theta_2 &am...
@AlanMunn You can still edit it to blank it out completely, or to say "deleted as duplicate" or some stuff like that. The system might require you to enter some minimum of characters, but this is easily circumvented by inserting an HTML comment that will be invisible.
@JosephWright I mainly target the package sources, so basically the macros folder only. Maybe even only macros/latex/contrib and there only the source files. This is already a couple of hundred MB but small compared to the whole CTAN.
@AlanMunn: I remember back in dark times when I was required to make presentations using Keynote. Now think of typesetting math into Keynote. I used a handy LaTeX to image app to import those images.
@PauloCereda LaTeXit! It's still a fantastic app. I use it for making trees for posters and for the times when I'm using Powerpoint with unenlightened co-authors.
@JosephWright w.r.t times: How many people are up at 6:00 - 8:00 other than you? :-) I suspect that a late evening GMT time would actually catch people on both continents better.
@JosephWright True. Sorry for being so NA-centric. I wonder how many people would be opposed to a weekend day. This would likely give more flexibility on timing.
@AlanMunn I'd personally favour the weekend, but some people have real lives I guess!
2
How about 0900-1100, 1400-1600 and 2100-2300 (GMT) as slots? That should cover most of the day, with a slight emphasise toward times that are comfortable in Europe as we seem to have a significant number of active members here.
4
Then we just have to pick a convenient day of the week: at the weekend, Sunday might be best as people tend to have things to do on Saturday (or is that just me)
A place to note down how this would work.
Date/time
First Sunday of each month
Cycle of three time slots:
0900-1100 GMT
1400-1600 GMT
2100-2300 GMT
Approach
The moderator-adjustable banner would be set ~48 h before to state that a 'unanswered question session' was scheduled on chat.
At ...
@JosephWright On a second thought, it's probably better to leave the banner as text, since we have lots of ads and stuff going on in the front page. We are environment-friendly, so we won't pollute it. =)
@AlanMunn Have a nice trip. Last saturday it was only 400 km, but with three 2000+ meter mountain passes. The highest one has 27 hairpin turns going up and 33 going down; it's a famous mountain for the "Giro d'Italia" if you know it. There's a monument to Fausto Coppi at the top. But with a motorbike it's way easier. :)
@egreg I once rode my bicycle from Basel to Milan, then to Venice and from there to Florence. The part from Bologna to Florence was much tougher than crossing the Alps.
A place to note down how this would work.
Date/time
First Sunday of each month
Cycle of three time slots:
0900-1100 GMT
1400-1600 GMT
2100-2300 GMT
Approach
The moderator-adjustable banner would be set ~48 h before to state that a 'unanswered question session' was scheduled on chat.
At ...
