TeX, LaTeX and Friends

Caramdir

4:18 AM

@AlanMunn Possibly after a rep recalc: tex.stackexchange.com/reputation

Alan Munn

4:37 AM

@Caramdir Thanks, I did that and gained some more rep to boot.

Andrew Stacey

8:02 AM

@PauloCereda *Yuk*. Looking at the specifications, there's only one possible correct answer ...

Faheem Mitha

8:22 AM

The journal PLoS One does not use numbered sections, it seems. In that case, how can one use \ref to reference a section?

I'm asking here because maybe it is impossible, so may not be worth asking as a question.

Paulo Cereda

11:18 AM

@AndrewStacey Indeed! That's what I thought. Besides, most of these esoteric codes are reduced to the very same form by the compiler.

Seamus

11:36 AM

Currently having my mind blown by TeX quines

Andrew Stacey

@Seamus Never heard the term quine before, but from that post it sounds a lot like something I once read about in Godel, Escher, Bach. I remember having some fun constructing perl programs that would print themselves. I ended up with a wrapper script that could take (almost) any perl script and modify it so that when run, it printed a copy of itself, as well as executing the original code.

Seamus

Yeah I think the wiki page mentions that the idea was Hofstadter's originally.

Paulo Cereda

Hm I never heard of quine before. My dictionary gave me some weird definitions until I found the real definition. Phew. =P

Andrew Stacey

12:30 PM

Bother. Just tried to leave a comment on TH's blog (the quine source for anyone not up to speed) about Knuth's "little joke". What sprang to my mind when I read it was the sound of the words "aka Macros". If you say "a-ka" instead of "A K A" it's got quite a nice ring to it!

Seamus

12:57 PM

@PauloCereda "to quine" is also used as a verb to mean "to deny the existence of something everyone agrees exists" by (I think) Dan Dennett.

Paulo Cereda

@Seamus Thanks! I was scared for a moment.

Paulo Cereda

1:25 PM

Anyone with Mac OS X Lion?

Andrew Stacey

1:57 PM

(Back to the "toggling variable" SO question.) I got voted down for my answer! Can anyone think of a suitable reply to the comment? I have a few alternatives in mind, but I'll throw it open first. Here's the answer:

-1

A: Is there a better way of writing v = (v == 0 ? 1 : 0);

The wording of this part of the specification: If it's 0, I want to set it to 1, else set it to 0. implies that the most accurate solution is: v = dirac_delta(0,v)

Seamus

@AndrewStacey downvoting based on his not understanding the answer seems a bit off. Although the point about JS not implementing a delta function function may or may not be accurate. I don't know.

Andrew Stacey

@Seamus I'd be amazed if any language (except, perhaps, Haskell) had a dirac delta function implemented. I figured that the "code golf" tag allowed me to ignore the "javascript" tag since it wasn't explicit in the question.

Paulo Cereda

2:13 PM

@AndrewStacey: gasp, if I knew Dirac delta function before! IMHO most of the programmers rely on code itself (i.e. how ) instead of analyzing the problem itself ( i.e., why ). I once submitted a paper to a conference on automata. One reviewer gave me a bad rating because "why one should use automata when the very same idea can be easily implemented with a high level programming language?". facepalm =(

Seamus

@AndrewStacey I wonder if, say, Python's math library has one? Probably not because it's a basic if/then where the condition is whether the argument is equal to the relevant value...

Paulo Cereda

I'd be killed there if I add an answer using a Moore machine.

Seamus

@PauloCereda "Here's a solution in brainfuck"

Paulo Cereda

@Seamus o.O - Fantastic!

=P

@Seamus It looks like sympy has a DiracDelta function.

(@AndrewStacey: could this be the subject for your next blog post? =) )

Seamus

3:48 PM

I don't get this question. Don't absolute paths work fine anyway?

3

Q: \input and absolute paths

Sometimes it is convenient to use an absolute path to include a preamble. To do so, I use the following "hack": \documentclass[a4paper, 12pt]{article} \newcommand{\folder}{/path/to/folder} \input{\folder/preamble} \begin{document} \end{document} Now my question is, whether there is a more ele...

input

Seamus

5:08 PM

My answer to that question got downvoted with no explanation. That always bugs me.

Martin Scharrer

@Seamus: I think it might have to do with your initial "I don't really understand the question" :-)

I basically wants to specify some absolute base directory but it a way that is compatible with the mentioned file inlineing tools.

Alan Munn

5:32 PM

@MartinScharrer Do you know much about fmtutil? Especially what to do if you accidentally ran fmtutil and not fmtutil-sys?

Martin Scharrer

@AlanMunn No, I don't know it.

Alan Munn

@MartinScharrer Too bad. I have a feeling that the person with the memory problem on MacOS has screwed up his system partially by doing fmtutil and not fmtutil-sys, but I'm not sure how to explain how to fix that.

Paulo Cereda

5:47 PM

@AlanMunn Could that mistake screw up the whole system? o.O

Alan Munn

6:00 PM

@PauloCereda Maybe not, but it's never a good idea to have local things overriding things that should be system things unless you really know what you're doing. Looking further into his actual log file, I've found the problem: it seems to be a bug in the latest version of pgf-plots.

Paulo Cereda

@AlanMunn I see. TBH, I never went that deep into my Mac system.

Caramdir

I continue being astonished how bad the STIX Fonts Project is at estimating release dates.

Alan Munn

6:17 PM

@PauloCereda No, I don't either, generally, which makes it harder to help people who do.

@Caramdir This is pretty much a standing joke on c.t.t.

Paulo Cereda

6:29 PM

@AlanMunn I'd love to see the underlying Darwin OS running rm -rf /

Alan Munn

6:44 PM

@PauloCereda Try it, and report back to us the result. :-) (Need to use sudo, though.)

Paulo Cereda

@AlanMunn I'd love to, but the last reinstall took me a whole day. Probably when I get the new Lion DVD thingy, I'll screw up my system just for fun (as I do with my Linux systems on every two weeks). =P

Alan Munn

7:48 PM

To any pgf/tikz experts out there, can you help this poor soul. tex.stackexchange.com/q/24753/2693. His problem is NOT with memory, AFAICT but with a failure of the externalization system command. I know very little about this, and his sample document compiles fine for me on essentially the same setup. Our log files are almost identical except for where the system call fails. If you use a Mac, even better, since he seems a bit lost in general.

Andrew Stacey

8:06 PM

@AlanMunn Looks like memory to me. On my machine, then disabling shell escape causes it to hit the memory ceiling. The failure in the log for his files is also a memory hit. That figure is really, really big and it's trying to create a TikZ path, which internally is represented as a long string of macros, so I can actually believe that it is hitting some sort of cap.

Alan Munn

@AndrewStacey But then the issue has to do with disabling shell escape. But on my machine, which has less physical memory than his, it works.

Andrew Stacey

If I run it with the shell escape then on the single picture, I get in the log file: 2509907 words of memory out of 3000000 so it's pretty close. Then add in the rest of the file and you can see where it gets used up. On his system, then the cap seems to be at 2000000 so it's hitting the ceiling even when the file is, effectively, split in two.

@AlanMunn It's not about physical memory, but about how much TeX has been configured to use. If you look at the end of a TeX log file then you'll see what the limits are for your system. Maybe you've gotten something with a bit better than he has.

Incidentally, I did see something in his logs that suggests he's running an old binary. Maybe upgrading that would help.

Alan Munn

@AndrewStacey about the memory, yes, you are exactly right. When I change the memory it fails in the same way. Ok. So now the problem is undoing the mess he made by running fmtutil instead of fmtutil-sys. Thanks a lot. w.r.t. the binary really? It's a fresh TL 2011 installation.

Paulo Cereda

Meanwhile, I'm screaming like an idiot while trying to make my speech recognition software get my phrase.

And by software, I mean my own code. =P

Paulo Cereda

8:31 PM

@AndrewStacey: Just bought the Red Dwarf DVD set. I can't wait!

Andrew Stacey

9:01 PM

@AlanMunn It was the error message from etexcmds in the onelargefigure.log that made me think that. But looking closer, I see that you're right: it's TL2011.

@PauloCereda Enjoy! And don't forget to watch Backwards backwards after you've seen it forwards.

Paulo Cereda

@AndrewStacey o.O - For real?!

Alan Munn

@AndrewStacey Anyway, thanks a lot for chatting about this; it made me rethink what I had done earlier to answer the question (which was change my own memory allocation). Hopefully the expanded answer will clear up the problem for him.

Andrew Stacey

9:18 PM

@AlanMunn No worries! Sometimes one needs a sounding board to bounce things off!

@PauloCereda For real. That'll make a whole lot more sense once you've seen the episode.

Caramdir

10:29 PM

The sample images that come with Windows seem to have bugs...

0

A: How to force pdftex and xetex to produce the same measurement for the imported image?

tl;dr version: The metadata in the Koala file is inconclusive, as the Exif header exists, but doesn't specify the resolution. To solve the problem use some tool to either add the resolution to the Exif data or remove the Exif data completely. First some technicalities on how metadata of (moder...

Alan Munn

@Caramdir How do you get the question displayed in chat like this?

Caramdir

@AlanMunn Just post the URL (and nothing else)

Alan Munn

10:50 PM

@Caramdir I thought that's what I was doing. I just click on the link button and select the text. Is the problem that I need to remove the suffix on the url that corresponds to my user number on the site? Or do you mean that the link has to be a separate chat line all by itself?

Caramdir

11:15 PM

@AlanMunn It has to be on a separate line.

Alan Munn

@Caramdir Ah ok. Thanks.

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$TeX - LaTeX$ TeX, LaTeX and Friends