TeX, LaTeX and Friends

Speravir

00:03

@egreg Regarding your comments to Problem using locally installed font. Is it worth to add something to Manual font installation? If yes, what and in which passage of the answer?

Alex

Is there a shorter version of $\sqcup$? Roughly half the original height but the same width.

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright: tell me xor helps me here: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/160811/… :)

Speravir

@PauloCereda Some hours ago counting the minutes until the site went back I remembered I had bookmarked this picture:

Paulo Cereda

@Speravir LOL

Speravir

00:19

Am I blind or is @Nicola Talbot’s “LaTeX for Complete Novices” not mentioned in What is the best book to start learning LaTeX??

Paulo Cereda

@Speravir Oh my, it's not! We need to fix that ASAP!

Speravir

@PauloCereda My intention.

Paulo Cereda

@Speravir Do it. :)

Speravir

@PauloCereda No start you. Your wording is much better and nicer! :-) I can add a link later. For all teX distributions the command is BTW texdoc dickimaw-novices.

egreg

@Speravir It's preferable, whenever possible, doing the installation in TEXMFLOCAL

Paulo Cereda

00:23

@Speravir Oh I'll add an entry later on. :) Or if anyone is faster... :)

Speravir

@PauloCereda Really: I love how you write these answers: Make a todo, when you cannot do it today. Aah online dickimaw-books.com/latex/novices/index.html (also as HTML resource).

Paulo Cereda

@Speravir you are too kind. :) I'll see what I can do tomorrow. :)

Speravir

@PauloCereda My answer would be as dry as always.;-)

@egreg I see, I already wrote "In TeX Live you somewhere have already a directory texmf-local for a system-wide local installation (system variable TEXMFLOCAL), but you can also create a user specific path (TEXMFHOME)." Here or in a kind of footnote I probably should add, why TEXMFLOCAL is much more favoured than TEXMFHOME using your comment tex.stackexchange.com/questions/160766/#comment367610_160766?

egreg

00:57

@Speravir That's the place.

Speravir

@egreg OK.

@TorbjørnT. I do not know, whether you already have voted for duplicate: Preview of “hyperlinks” in PDF‌. But if not, please add the link you gave in your comment.

Vochmelka

01:11

Hi there, do you guys know if there's anything like subappendix?

I devote one of my appendices to source codes and I think it could be useful to distinguish between them somehow.

Torbjørn T.

@Speravir Sorry, was otherwise occupied. Too late now.

@Vochmelka Can't you just add a (sub)section?

Vochmelka

@TorbjørnT. yep, that works, now I have to find out how to prevent ToC from showing sections of an appendix.

Speravir

@TorbjørnT. OK.

@Vochmelka NO I don’t: google.com/search?q=latex+subappendix

Vochmelka

@Speravir I tried to google. I'm not that stupid.

Speravir

@Vochmelka I do not answer this.

@Vochmelka “Within the subappendices environment, an appendix is introduced by a \section command in chaptered documents, otherwise it is introduced by a \subsection command. Effectively, this provides for appendices at the end of a main document division, as an integral part of the division. The subappendices environment supports only the title and titletoc options.”

Vochmelka

01:27

@Speravir yep, I know.

Speravir

@Vochmelka I told you I do not have an answer …

Vochmelka

@Speravir :))

anyway, using \section*{} in appendix doesn't work, better said it hides section from ToC (that's good), but it deforms its name, i.e. instead of wanted A.1 Name of section it just shows Name of section.

Speravir

@Vochmelka Yes, that’s what the star effects: an unnumbered section not added to TOC …

Nasser

01:43

This is not a tex question, but since many here write math papers I'd ask. When I write my HW's, I normally write everything as 3rd person, but sometimes it is hard to get some things expressed that way compare to the first person. Here is an example: Support I want to say :

We will start from Eq (2) and show it can be written as Eq (1)

to write the above as third person (which I would prefer):

Starting from Eq (2) it can be shown it can be written as Eq (1)

Which looks really awkward to me. How would you write something like the above in third person and it still sounds good?

Derek 朕會功夫

04:01

hi

Anyone know why isn't this working:

\text{Mass of }C_{169} _{723}H_{270} _{464}N_{45} _{688}O_{52} _{243}S_{912}=33007.492\frac{g}{mol}

Alan Munn

@Derek朕會功夫 What do you want it to look like?

(i.e., do you want the 723 to be a subscript relative to the 169?)

@Derek朕會功夫 Perhaps you should check out the mhchem package, which is designed for this sort of thing.

Derek 朕會功夫

04:49

@AlanMunn Thanks for the response. This is actually auto- generated by a program I made and later I realized 723 should be with 169 (which means something like C_{169 723}). I fixed this bug and everything's working now.

Alan Munn

@Derek朕會功夫 Ok. Glad you got it working. You still might want to check out mhchem given that this looks like chemistry...

Derek 朕會功夫

06:02

@AlanMunn I looked in mhchem and it looks very helpful. I will sure try it later, thanks,

Johannes_B

06:20

@Derek朕會功夫 If you are looking for chemistry stuff, you should definitely check out @cgnieder's chemmacros

Derek 朕會功夫

@Johannes_B I'm actually MathJax to display LaTeX contents. I don't think it supports adding chemmacros, however it does support mhchem.

Johannes_B

07:25

@Derek朕會功夫 Ah ok, i was just reading the very last few lines.

Paulo Cereda

07:56

@egreg: ooh babel-italian got updated!

Paulo Cereda

08:27

You gotta love seeing a readme.txt where a name who needs no introduction appears:

  remreset.sty       by David Carlisle

From Springer's LNCS. :)

Paulo Cereda

08:42

@Joseph: where have you been yesterday? :)

Any news from David?

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda Laptop is playing up

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright Ouch.

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda Reinstalled OS but took hours (started at around 1700, got to '17 minutes' to go at about 1800, went to bed at around 2215 with it saying '9 minutes')

Suspect a hardware issue

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright I was gonna mention that.

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda Need to pin it down before going to shop: not yet got a clear piece of evidence (just 'slow' doesn't cut it)

Paulo Cereda

08:45

@JosephWright Any diagnostics tool you can run on the HDD sanity?

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda I tried one, but no obvious issues: I'd agree HD looks likely

Christoph

Good morning

Paulo Cereda

@Christoph Bonjour!

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda Installation did finish so I'm going to get things working. I'm away next weekend so really want the laptop in some usable state even if I then have to take it in later

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright Mavericks?

Joseph Wright

08:48

@PauloCereda Yes

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright Ouch. I'd go with HDD.

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda Like I said, my guess too but I need something concrete to show the shop

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright Out of curiosity, shop = Apple store?

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda Yes

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright Last week, the very first Apple store in Latam was opened in RJ. :)

@Joseph: would you consider moving to a solid state drive? :)

Joseph Wright

08:58

@PauloCereda Next time I buy a laptop that is likely: my mum has just got a new machine for other reasons, and has gone for a SDD. (Well, she's gone for a very light machine, but it has an SDD to allow that!)

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright At least here, SDD's are insanely expensive. I'd go for one, but right now I really need space (500GB isn't enough for me anymore). :)

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda Mum's got 128 Gb: I might want 256 to allow for Parallels, etc., but not more than that

Joseph Wright

09:41

@egreg On an expl3 'load file to tl' function, what do you think about \file_get:nnN? My alternative was \tl_set_from_file:Nnn, but that seems less popular with the team!

egreg

@JosephWright I'd stay with \tl_set, after all that's what the function does. Are there other \file_ functions, or are they planned?

Joseph Wright

@egreg There are already \file_... functions :-)

E.g. \file_input:n

egreg

@JosephWright So they see this nearer to \file_input:n than to \tl_set:Nn? I don't, but…

Joseph Wright

@egreg Neither do I: I will make the argument!

@egreg Checking our data type analysis, I suppose closer to \ior_get:NN or similar

egreg

09:56

@JosephWright Possibly. But \ior_get:NN is for getting a single line from a file (usually within a loop), so the distance is great anyway.

Joseph Wright

@egreg Yes, I see that

@egreg I'll see where I can get with the argument: will do my best

Paulo Cereda

10:16

Go curling!

Wait.

:)

Is there any kind of winter cricket?

Snow cricket or similar...

Christoph

10:39

Is there a way in latex to create a child process and send something to that child's stdin/read from that child's stdout? I'm hesitating to ask this as a real question because it seems to be very localized.

Joseph Wright

@Christoph Sounds like \write18 to me

Christoph

@JosephWright thanks! I found some questions regarding this but I'll have to do some tests to see if I can actually start a child in the background and communicate with it

Paulo Cereda

@Joseph: Can xor help me? :)

tohecz

10:58

@Christoph It's not so locallized. However, you can't really communicate with it. For that, you need to start a new process for every piece of communication sent basically. You could rely on file modifications, but that's very unstable.

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda no

Paulo Cereda

11:19

@DavidCarlisle Yay! :)

@DavidCarlisle: I was worried.

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda busy at work or ill or both, but still here:-)

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Oh my, get well soon. :)

tohecz

@PauloCereda "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" :)

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz :)

I saw some pictures from Sochi. Vladimir Putin looks like a villain from a 007 movie. :)

Vochmelka

11:37

Hey guys, should I unaccept an answer when another user suggested more elegant solution?

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz: is this correct, Tom? c'est la vie, ma chéri

cgnieder

@Vochmelka this is up to you but if the other answer is better in your eyes un-accepting in favour of the new one is completely fine IMHO

David Carlisle

@Vochmelka yes, unless the answer you are going to unaccept, is one of mine:-)

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle LOL

tohecz

@PauloCereda chérie, if you speak to a women

Paulo Cereda

11:50

@tohecz ooh thanks. :)

tohecz

@PauloCereda but I had to check whether you really add e in this case

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz Thank you. :)

tohecz

@PauloCereda you're most welcome :)

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz How do I saw thank you in Czech?

Let me guess, no vowels? :P

egreg

@PauloCereda Děkuje, I believe. Very abundant in vowels

Paulo Cereda

11:58

@egreg Oh my! :)

How am I supposed to type that e with that thingy on top?

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda for your question, I believe you want to put each song into a (real) database and then call up @topskip or @StephanLehmke to bash it with respective software tools to find an optimum layout.....

@PauloCereda Just speak perfect Czech to your voice recognition system

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Do they offer a good discount? :)

@DavidCarlisle Oh my!

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda offer them a free duck puppet and they'll do whatever you need

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle LOL good plan.

@David: the funny thing about my question is that the optimum layout algorithm is not trivial at all. :) I have a solution using FSM going O(n) but there are a lot of constraints, and not to mention that all my text blocks behave nicely. :)

egreg

@PauloCereda On my keyboard it's easy: "Alt-v e"

Paulo Cereda

12:03

@egreg I'm not in my Mac right now. :) Do you know the Unicode?

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda yes well that's the trouble: packing problems are hard anyway (irrespective of interfacing the answer to TeX) you can measure the height of each song and then (say) choose the largest song that fits each time but that's not a very good strategy really.

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Agreed. :) I think I could write some Prolog code and see what comes out of it. Probably No. :)

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda U+011B

Paulo Cereda

ě

WOOHOO

@DavidCarlisle Thank you! :)

tohecz

@PauloCereda Děkuji (1p sg), or Díky or Dík

Paulo Cereda

12:09

@tohecz ooh!

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda I just cut and pasted egreg's word into people.w3.org/rishida/tools/conversion

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle ooh great link! Added to favourites. :)

@David: now seriously, if you want to expand a little your comment about my question and add it as an answer, I'd gladly accept it. :)

tohecz

@egreg there're two options: either you re-post it yourself (a bit frowned upon, but might be fine), or a mod has to deal with it

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda nah, I might see if I can implement something a bit better, or perhaps it really would be best to just do a pre-pass that typesets each song into a box and writes out the heights, then uses some external software to pack thiose height values into page sized buckets, then do a second pass to typeset the re-ordered list...

Christoph

@tohecz I was hoping to somehow create a background process that waits for requests on stdin and then outputs data for a table on stdout. If I can't do that, there's a lot of ways to work around this idea, though.

tohecz

12:15

@Christoph you can't really write to stdin of the process you've created

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Thank you. :)

Christoph

@tohecz It might work with a named pipe!

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda You could wait for @JosephWright to finish xor...

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Sigh

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Good plan! :) I can ping him every day! :)

Joseph Wright

12:17

@DavidCarlisle First, Unicode case changing

(with quite a bit of input from Bruno)

David Carlisle

@JosephWright Then @PauloCereda can have his songs all in lower case.

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle LOL

tohecz

@Christoph well, that's your shell that might be capable of it, but not LaTeX

Christoph

@tohecz true

Paulo Cereda

12:48

Math friends, a silly question: is there a "formal" way to say, "pick a random element from a set"?

egreg

@PauloCereda Let $x\in X$

Christoph

@PauloCereda I had exactly the same in my chat box

(the same as egreg)

Paulo Cereda

@egreg Ah, thanks. :) I was afraid I had to do some trickery. :)

@Christoph Danke! :)

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda well it depends what you mean by random, egreg being a mathematician, just ignored it and answered ""pick an element from a set" a statistician would have asked which of the 1001 definitions of random you meant.

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Random according to a distribution? :)

Christoph

12:55

@tohecz regarding having a child process acting as a server: I can instead call a child process (A) and "immediately" get its output. I can let A query a server (B) that I wouldn't want to start for every call to (A).

tohecz

13:20

@Christoph you can't really get the output of the process. The \write18 execution ends when the process ends, and that's it. AFAIK you need to write a seperate file and read it afterwards

Christoph

@tohecz Here's a question with an answer from egreg that might be very useful in this case

36

Q: What are \immediate & \write18 and how does one use them?

What are \immediate and \write18 and how does one use them? I'd like some examples spanning from basic to advanced scenarios.

shell-escape

tohecz

well, in the cases I do need, I've managed :)

egreg

Hey! I saw a chicken!

tohecz

@egreg xport?

egreg

@tohecz Yes. Last visit almost two years ago.

Paulo Cereda

13:45

@egreg bwwaaaaaaaaaaaakkkkk! :)

Worst impersonation of a chicken noise ever.

That's another advantage of ducks: it's just quack! :)

tohecz

@PauloCereda hens make "quock" in Czech, as opposed to ducks' "quack" :)

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz Quock?! Oh my! :)

tohecz

the verbs are kvokat or kvákat, respectively

and the sound is written as kokokokokokodá! (where're @egreg's expl3 tricks when you need them)

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz OMG we need one of these epic Czech chickens. :)

tohecz

@PauloCereda lol:D

Well, the dog makes haf, the cat makes mňau, pig chro, sheep béééé, goat mééééé, cow bůůůůůů etc ;)

Christoph

14:03

There shall be no more unepic non-czech animal sounds!

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz What does the fox say in Czech? :) dum dum dum

:)

Man, that could be the follow up of that song. :)

tohecz

@PauloCereda I'm not sure we have a sound for fox.

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz No one does, apparently. :)

►

tohecz

@PauloCereda I'm at work ;)

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz don't play it. :)

tohecz

14:10

@PauloCereda well, the computer has fortunately no speakers :)

Christoph

The song is so persistent that I can hear it without speakers

egreg

@tohecz Italian dogs make “bau”.

Paulo Cereda

14:39

@egreg Brazilian dogs go "au". :)

egreg

@PauloCereda I think they can understand each other; not the case with Bohemian dogs, I guess.

Paulo Cereda

@egreg :)

Claudio Fiandrino

16:08

Does anybody knows where I can find the overlay-aware definition of TikZ commands? Say, \draw<something>? I had a look on both TikZ and Beamer code without success.

Thanks :)

tohecz

@ClaudioFiandrino and have you checked the code or the manuals?

Johannes_B

@ClaudioFiandrino This may sound strange, but usually use trial and error :-)

Paulo Cereda

17:42

<lame physics joke> If we consider the multiverse theory, your presentation is already done somewhere. :) </lame physics joke> — Paulo Cereda 15 secs ago

@percusse: ^^ sir <3

Claudio Fiandrino

18:45

@tohecz yes, on both manuals. On the pgfmanual it is stated that Beamer extensively uses the PGF layer, but it is not what I'm looking for.

@Johannes_B sorry, but I think I'm not understanding your statement. I'm looking for the code that makes the usual \draw, \node etc..., overlay-aware, meaning that the syntax \draw<2> draws the path on the second slide.

Paulo Cereda

19:25

Guys, hints on a font that goes with eulervm. :)

cgnieder

@PauloCereda the manual states that Palatino, Aldus, Melior, Sabon1 or Minion blend well with Euler

Paulo Cereda

@cgnieder Danke, I tried Palatino. :)

cgnieder

@PauloCereda best quote:

> Do not use the Euler math fonts in conjunction with the default Computer
Modern text fonts – this is ugly!

:)

Paulo Cereda

@cgnieder LOL

1

Q: MSc thesis presentation

I have completed my MSc Thesis and now I want to create a presentation slide. Can you please suggest me a good Physics template which i can use to create the slides

presentations

2

Personally, I prefer a sober approach. :)

Johannes_B

20:47

@ClaudioFiandrino Oh, i am sorry, i misread your post. I thought you were looking for the documentation of those features. Sorry for the noise.

@PauloCereda Have those question become more frequent in the last few days?

percusse

21:12

@ClaudioFiandrino I think that uses the overlayed definition of TikZ. Search for @overlay or something like that. I once checked it but it's too entangled.

Yes, in tikz.code.tex the macro \def\tikz@path@overlay if I'm not mistaken

I got to there while searching for ifnextchar<

Paulo Cereda

21:28

@Johannes_B End of semester? :)

Stefan Kottwitz

@PauloCereda Oh, I got to pay the next semester.

@PauloCereda By the way this weekend I made a humble companion to texdoc.net

Paulo Cereda

@StefanKottwitz Awesome! :)

Stefan Kottwitz

It's for much more, but for the moment I imported a part of the TeX FAQ to experiment with the interface, such as quick search and tagging

@PauloCereda An interesting part for a first look: texdoc.org/display/FAQ

Paulo Cereda

@StefanKottwitz WOW!

Stefan Kottwitz

@PauloCereda I love the quicksearch with preview results as I type

Paulo Cereda

21:42

@StefanKottwitz :) I owe you texdoc.net 2.0.

Stefan Kottwitz

@PauloCereda Join texdoc.org for collaboratively developing texdoc.net :-)

Paulo Cereda

@StefanKottwitz ooh how do I join?

Abhimanyu Arora

ciao ragazzis

how is it oing over there?

*going

Stefan Kottwitz

@PauloCereda You got mail

Paulo Cereda

@StefanKottwitz You too. :)

Speravir

21:49

Oh, when I see you @StefanKottwitz are you admins able to add a link to these boxes automatically appearing in duplicate questions?

Stefan Kottwitz

@Speravir They are automatically created when the question is being closed

Speravir

@StefanKottwitz So no change possible it seems?

Stefan Kottwitz

@Speravir I look for a dupe for testing :-)

@Speravir At the first look it seems that I cannot edit that box

Speravir

@StefanKottwitz OK, i give you the one why I ask: [Preview of “hyperlinks” in PDF [duplicate]](tex.stackexchange.com/questions/160755/…) The already added link is added by me, but see my comment below or Torbjorn's. In rare cases it would be better, when one could give more than link to. Oops while I am writing I read your update. But you could remove the duplicate state and then readd it. (just kidding)

Paulo Cereda

@StefanKottwitz, @cgnieder: check my profile photo.

Stefan Kottwitz

21:57

@PauloCereda Nice photo!

Paulo Cereda

@StefanKottwitz Cricketeer duck. :)

cgnieder

@PauloCereda which profile?

Hi @StefanKottwitz :)

Paulo Cereda

@cgnieder the texdoc.org thingy.

cgnieder

@PauloCereda Ah. I like it :)

@PauloCereda @StefanKottwitz has been busy again :) ... Now I should add some FAQ entries regarding chemistry and LaTeX. Good thing I already have my blog article series to start from :)

percusse

22:43

@Jake Believe me I'm happy for you :) Congrats with your new position.

Speravir

@egreg ~~Silly me~~ Obviously I was too tired to realize, that I already had added a remark.

@PauloCereda @tohecz Speaking of sounds of animals in different languages: PICTURES BY JAMES CHAPMAN (go into the archive). Some example follow.

PICTURES BY JAMES CHAPMAN • How to sound like a Cockerel in 5 languages

PICTURES BY JAMES CHAPMAN • WORLDWIDE WOOFS

PICTURES BY JAMES CHAPMAN • CAT SOUNDS

Last but not least: PICTURES BY JAMES CHAPMAN • How to sound like a duck in 7 languages

3

Jake

23:04

@percusse Thanks! I'm glad I made that decision

Speravir

@PauloCereda @tohecz Emm, on topic fox sounds: PICTURES BY JAMES CHAPMAN • WHAT DOES THE FOX SAY?

Paulo Cereda

@Speravir: wow!

Speravir

@PauloCereda But the ducks are not “wow”? ;-) (Would BTW be “Quak” in German.)

Paulo Cereda

@Speravir ;)

Peter Grill

23:44

@Jake So sorry to hear the bad news (tex.stackexchange.com/questions/160928/…) :-). I am sure you'll eventually get used to Word. I think the trick is to NOT look to closely at the actual output.

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