Yay, I'm out of votes.

@PauloCereda As usual …

@Speravir I'm slower these days. :)

@PauloCereda :-)

Is swearing allowed here?

Beacuse I have some NASTY things to say about powerpoint and justification

@PauloCereda What a pity, that you cannot upvote this:

@josephwright I got it working, and copied all my IR spectra into it. Now if only I could get it to use the full page, instead of leaving that annoying right margin. But thanks! This is more then good enough.

@percusse Thank you very much!

@Canageek May i ask how you prepared those plots? Using the standalonepackage, you can set the margins quite easily.

@PauloCereda But what makes a paper/presentation look more academic or more mathematical/physical. That's the thing a am wondering about.

I always struggle with having the \section name or \subsection name happen to show up at the bottom of a page, then the actual section content starts at the new page. This happens when there is an image as the first item in a section. THis is very annoying. What is recommended way to tell Latex not to do this?

I know I can add a \clearpage before each subsection and before each section, but I really do not want to do this.

These images are all included using \includegraphics. I do not use \begin{figure}....\end{figure}

@Nasser Well, the simplest way would be to swap the first paragraph with the first image.

@Nasser Floating environments were made to prevent such behaviour.

@Johannes_B sometimes I only have images in a section and no text! Are you saying if I use \begin{figure}....\end{figure} then Latex will do the right thing? and have the \section{} start at the same page as the content? This is a long document with full of images and text. I always spend more time fixing things by hand afterwords.

@Nasser If there are mostly figures LaTeX will get into trouble. There will just not be enough text to fill the gaps in a good way.

If there are many figures, you should think , if you need them all in the text, or if an appendix would be better.

@Johannes_B here is an example

You see, a subsubsection heading is on page page and the image on the next page

I like the figure to show up right there. I need them in the text. So they show up where they belong

I do alot of diagrams using Visio, then include them in my documents.

I wish InDesign would support Latex, I would switch. I much prefer to fit these things visually. the problem indesign does not support math in any useful way.

@Nasser I guess there are some penalties you can tune, but i am far from experienced in that field.

I usually have just normal text with a few figures.

@Johannes_B no problem. thanks. I'll add a extra text line and see how it works out.

@Speravir Terribly sorry, I had a busy day and could not add a proper entry. :( The answer is in my "to upvote" queue now.

Hi! I'm on my way to São Paulo! I'm already in the bus, playing with my smartphone which doesn't very smart at all. :) Cheerio!

Smart Phone!

Y u no smart!?

@Jubobs why did you delete your \lstdefinelanguage question?

@Nasser It won't do that if you give it any alternative, presumably it had none.

@DavidCarlisle Yes, I tried these things: Added an extra text line after \subsubsection, then the image. did NOT help. Then made all the images as figures, but that send each image to different location (even though I said HERE). So I really do not know what to do. I was thinking of asking a question on this.

I can use inDesign and have complete control where to put everything. The problem is that inDesign does not do Latex. So I am stuck.

May be I will go back to MS word and equation editor :)

@Nasser Latex has a very high penalty for breaking after the section head, so if it breals there it presumably had no option, for example if you have \flushbottom and not enough stretch before the heading, it can not take the heading to the next page as that would leave the page short and infinitely bad, and if the next thing after the heading is a large non floating object like a figure or minipage that doesn't fit then breaking after th eheading is the least bad option it has available

@DavidCarlisle How about this: Would you recommend if I do \begin{samepage} \subsection{...} image \end{samepage} ? thanks.

@Nasser no that just makes it worse, latex has no viable options, and samepage just makes some options infinitely bad without making anything else less bad.

@Nasser not sure what you mean by "I said HERE" if you mean float package H then the float will definitely not move (and bad breaks are quite common) if you mean h that is a request to take the float to the end of the document. If you use H without loading float package than that s a syntax error that causes the float to be unplaceable

@DavidCarlisle let me look at the code. I use SW GUI and it had an option called "here"

@DavidCarlisle This is what SW added:

\begin{figure}[ptbh]%
\centering
\includegraphics[
natheight=3.615600in,
natwidth=6.503900in,
height=3.643in,
width=6.5321in
]%
{aircraft_items/NASA_SGT_super_guppy.png}%
\end{figure}

@Nasser latex does not read your mind, it reads your instructions, you have told it you want well packed pages with no large gaps, and that it may move the figures to achieve that. So that's what it did.

This is the GUI that does that

may be I need to just check "HERE" only and not the others. Will play with them.

yes so you included h which is fine but it can only use h if there is room on the page to put it there which there is not in this case

I think, for me, there is a conflict. I like the math of Latex, but I also want to have complete control of how I layout the page. Doing this visually is easier. But there is no current tool now that does BOTH well. InDesign does the layout well, but terrible in math, and Latex is good in math, but hard to get it to put things exactly where I want them.

@Nasser No that make h which is never the right thing to do. The figure does not fit in situe and if you say [h] that is the only place it is allowed, yiou are stopping it be placed anywhere else so it can not be placed anywhere so it and all following figures will get dumped end if document

@Nasser latex is also a lot cheaper:-0

@DavidCarlisle Ok, will change the options and keep "h" only.

@Nasser No as I say that is never the right thing to do

@Nasser "h only" means not top not page not bottom, just "here" but it doesn't fit "here" as that point is too far down the page so you make it impossible to set the figure at all.

@DavidCarlisle Ok. But this is getting too hard for me. I think I need to go study Latex more and read again on figure placement...

@Nasser Or just don't worry so much. Traditionally you would have submitted your figures as separate files to the human typesetter who would have fitted them in where convenient and you would have had to write your caption and text in such a way that it made sense wherever the figure appeared. If you did the same with latex you wouldn't have so many problems. If instead of using the caption you refer to "figure below" or such phrases, and the figure isn't there you get frustrated.

@DavidCarlisle I know that. But I want to have the images exactly where I want them. I like to layout the page that way. That is why I liked inDesign, but again, it does not do Math. I do not like to have images away from where I want them. But I understand what you are saying.

@Nasser well don't use figure environment, the only reason to wrap an image in figure is to allow latex to move it.

@DavidCarlisle but that is what I had before!! just \includegraphics. But the problem as I showed above chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/13831854#13831854 is that \subsection name can sometime end up at bottom of page and the content starts at the next page ! That what caused me to ask here in first place, so I am going in circles :)

@Nasser They are floats. So they float. :)

@Nasser The buzzword for your problem is widows and orphans. One has no trailing text one doesn't have preceeding text (one remaining line at the top of the page)

then you can search on the site for the penalties related to them

@Nasser well of course, if you have large unmoveable objects then you have to accept worse page breaks: the reason latex moves floats is to get better page breaks.

@Nasser the question is what alternative setting do you want. the image does not fit under the heading so you need to break after the heading, or increase the size of the current page (\enlagethispage) or move the heading over to the next page

@Nasser by default, overshooting the page and leaving a page short are infinitely bad, so latex chooses to break after the heading as that is just very very bad.

:)

@percusse thanks. Will try to search on this. @DavidCarlisle ok, But Latex should not really put a heading on bottom of a page only to start its content on next page? Should not there be a rule against this (build-n)? any way, I do not like to do micromanage things like this all the time. For me, I expect Latex to just do the right thing. But May be I am asking too much

@Nasser InDesign also doesn't do that. Tweaks are always needed.

@Nasser As @DavidCarlisle says, TeX uses an idea of 'badness' to determine what to do. The problem comes when you have two things which are both 'bad': leaving a big gap or splitting after a heading. The standard settings prefer the latter but neither is 'good' so this is a fall-back.

@Nasser There is a rule against it, it is almost infinitely bad thing to do but there is also a rule against putting the image below the heading if it will overshoot the bottom of the page. You can't just ban everything you need to give it an option that it can do

@percusse with inDesign, one can see where things are and resize using the GUI :)

@Nasser Try kerning properly from the GUI :)

I think it will take 100 more years before we have a tool that does layout and math all well together. This is a very hard problem.

@percusse If I wrote Latex, I will have it resize the images automatically to make things fit just right !

Add more A.I. to latex, that is the key

@Nasser Microsoft did that. It will drive you crazy.

In 100 years there won't be pages. So just hang in there

yes, but Microsoft did A.I. bad. I mean do it the right way.

@Nasser ah that way! Yes, that will work right out of the box.

what do others thing of FrameMaker 12 support for math? here is a screen shot I posted here chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/41?m=13803364#13803364 not too good

it generated GIF files for all the math. Very bad.

It's like putting all the ingredients on top of each other and calling it cooking.

@Nasser Not with the memory constraints of the machine you had available in 1985, you wouldn't.

@Nasser automatic resizing figures is evil It is almost always better to move the image rather than rescale

@DavidCarlisle it can be an option?

default can be as is now. otherwise., latex will do auto-resize to make things fit the page very well with no bad breaks.

This is all theory ofcourse. Very hard to get all this right in practice I know...

@Nasser NEVER! EVER! DO! AUTOMATICALLY! SUCH! A! RAPE! (and yes, I am shouting, and I do have my Graphics Editor hat on)

@Nasser tex's page breaking is not at all like its line breaking (which is least cost over a paragraph) it tries to break as soon as it has a chance, so as to free the page memory. This meant you could typeset 100 page documents with tex in 1982 when wordprocessors of the day would struggle with a few dozen.

Ok, so I guess @tohecz does not like the idea :)

@Nasser a page with an automatically resized figure is bad by definition.

@Nasser Well, I typeset a lot of documents, I'm sure that this wouldn't ease my work. Some "correction suggestions" in the log would be fine, their automatic application not so quite

@Nasser if it is a photograph which is arbitrarily scaled anyway then resizing might be an option, but for any kind of plot or line drawing or anything with text, arbitrary scaling should not be considered as a serious option,.

@DavidCarlisle I really do not see why it is a bad idea. myself I run Latex, I then find the image too large, then go scale it down, and try again. If Latex will do all that for me, it will save me time. @DavidCarlisle I am only taking about images ! as in \includegraphics{myimage.png} I do not mean other things. only images.

@Nasser other images, like externally generated figure exported as PDF that should not be scaled since the font size matches?

may be \includegraphics[auto_fit_as_needed]{myimage.png}

@Nasser scary: starting with a bitmap rather than a scalable format and applying arbitrary scaling sounds like a recipe for disaster. But as I say above it depends what the image is of, if it is a picture, perhaps, but if it is a line drawing or text, then definitely not.

@Nasser "I am only taking about images" If it is a photo of your cat, OK, if it is a matlab plot then no.

Have to go, time to leave for school. thanks everyone for the valuable advices ! bye

@Jake Haha... Indeed. A thriller

I still don't understand why we need post or pre keys. It works properly on regular paths. Installing 0pt on the lengths shouldn't fiddle with arrow heads.

@percusse We don't need post or pre keys, but if we do use them (which is always the case for the axis lines), for some reason they must be expanded.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{decorations.pathmorphing}
\begin{document}

\tikz \draw [->, decorate, decoration={random steps, post length=0pt}] (0,0) -- (1,0);

\def\postlength{0pt}
\tikz \draw [->, decorate, decoration={random steps, post length=\postlength}] (0,0) -- (1,0);

\tikz \draw [->, decorate, decoration={random steps, post length/.expand once=\postlength}] (0,0) -- (1,0);
\end{document}

@Jake Oh wait, I remember this.

@Jake From the manual

 If you do not need/wish a pre-decoration, set this key to 0pt (exactly this string, not just to something that evaluates to the same things such as 0cm).

@percusse Aaaah!

Wow

Why I wonder.

@percusse Yeah, that's a really unexpected behaviour.

@Jake Probably it's not a dimen and it's easy to just take an if statement.

@percusse Yeah. There's \ifx\tikz@lib@pre\tikz@lib@dec@zpttext in tikzlibrarydecorations.code.tex, and \def\tikz@lib@dec@zpttext{0pt}.

@Jake May I delete my answer while you make a sensible story out of it? :P

I think this is archaic TikZ coding.

in fact looks like beamer code heheh

@percusse Oh god, can't we just put my comments at the bottom of your answer?

@Jake As you wish. It's your surgery. I can do the suturing.

*goes and looks up "suturing" in the dictionary*

stitching meat ":P

@percusse Ah, that I understand =)

@Jake It's from Latin “sutura”, which comes from “suere”, that is, “to sew”. Easy, no?

@egreg Do you disagree with that assessment?

@DavidCarlisle Everybody should do as I say. ;-)

@PauloCereda How was the trip by bus?

@egreg hi! :) It was good, but the traffic here is literally a living hell. :) Now I am safe inside the lab. :)

Hi! Anybody using Windows and Adobe Reader? I can't write the PDF when the document is open in the reader...

@PauloCereda I have a request for you :) s/placekitten.com/placeduck.com/

@topskip on Windows, you can't, that's right. On linux, AR hard-links the file so it's fine. On windows, such thing doesn't exist

@egreg voted:-)

@topskip that's because it's rubbish. Most other pdf viewers don't have that problem.

@DavidCarlisle but sometimes people are forced to use rubbish

@topskip well they need to use ^W to free the file before running pdftex:-)

@DavidCarlisle I don't think there is a general way to expandably test for substrings.

@DavidCarlisle It would be nice to circumvent this if it's easily done. But probable there is no easy way.

@egreg true, depends whether the real question was about expandafter, and in@ was just an example, or whether the question was really about in@

@topskip no way at all as far as I know. You used to be able to use control leftarrow to re-open the previous file at same page and zoom level so the edit/preview cycle wasn't so bad, but they stopped that around AR4 or so so now you have to re-open the file at the start which is a pain, or use a different viewer

@DavidCarlisle It looks as if "pdftools" are using DDE commands to open / close a PDF file in Acrobat Reader

@topskip That's what WinEdt does

@JosephWright While the solution is not the proper solution, it seems to work reasonable well

@topskip Not sure what other solution there is: files are PDF locked by Reader when opened on Windows

@JosephWright the proper solution would of course be to patch acrobat/reader

:)

@topskip I'm not sure it would be: on Windows I think this is the 'correct' behaviour

As in: that's what programs are supposed to do, according to the dev guides

@JosephWright ok, I don't know enough about that

@topskip I'm not up on this either but have seen it mentioned before as not being some weird idea of Adobe's

You gotta love when a manual reads at some point: "Note that this practice usually only serves to confuse the reader of a program." :)

@topskip If I remember correctly this has been introduced as part of a security patch in AcroRead 7 or 8. Others don't have that problem because they can't handle Javascript so they are OK but Acrobat shut every hole. Why I have no idea. Don't take it as I enjoy or approve this. I think it is nonsense too.

@Alex I'm not a TikZpert, but try looking for minimal distance I think

@Alex What effect are you looking for? The distance is measured between node edges I think, if you supply the on grid option it is measured between node centers.

I will add the grid option and play with it when I have time. Just wasnt sure if I had the syntax wrong earlier.

@Alex The following example demonstrates the difference, and I added an option for placing the fifth node using the calc library.

\documentclass[border=1cm]{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{positioning,calc}
\begin{document}

\begin{tikzpicture}[every node/.style=draw]
\draw (-1,1) grid (8,-8);

\node (1) {1};
\node [right=2cm of 1] (2) {2};
\node [right=2cm of 2] (3) {3};
\node [right=2cm of 3] (4) {4};
\node [below right=1cm and 1cm of 2] {5};

\begin{scope}[yshift=-3cm,on grid]
\node (1) {1};
\node [right=2cm of 1] (2) {2};
\node [right=2cm of 2] (3) {3};
\node [right=2cm of 3] (4) {4};
\node [below right=1cm and 1cm of 2] {5};

In an hour, hopefully I'll be at home! Yay!

How can I type Unicode in this keyboard? hmmn

@PauloCereda You just did I can see the word

Power off. :)

@PauloCereda Think deeply. Maybe it works.

@Christoph I was thinking to Paulo's keyboard. Maybe if he thinks hard to an “ã”, the keyboard gets convinced to type it.

@egreg :)

@egreg Some sort of Peter Pan keyboard, it works on happy thoughts. :)

I'm back home, yay!

@PauloCereda Have a nice dinner

@egreg Thanks! :) I had some tasty rice, beans, a good steak and some fries. :)

Oho, two moderators logged in … @JosephWright or @StefanKottwitz are you able to remind people to be carefully with closing and especially with the closing reasons? The case for me today is Fail in MiKTeX install : "The operation failed for some reason.". While I think the question must be closed, in my eyes the reason is clearly wrong. The OP complained about this. I added a comment on this topic, too, what I’d loved to add as short CW answer.