TeX, LaTeX and Friends - 2014-11-13 (page 1 of 2)

Harish Kumar

00:00

@PauloCereda: I am hiding and I won't tell you where. ;-) We will catch some bigwigs -- Paulo Cereda, Mark Wibrow, Christian Feuersänger, percusse....... Aim and we will shoot :-)

@PauloCereda On a serious note, I don't think I did enough to deserve that honour. I am a humble user of the site and you know, still a learner. I am thankful to @egreg and you for the suggestion. I feel that it is not time yet for me now.

egreg

@PauloCereda See? The plan is going on as expected.

Harish Kumar

@DavidCarlisle I have re-directed the hook at @PauloCereda ;-)

@egreg Certainly. You guessed right :-)

egreg

@HarishKumar You're too shy.

Harish Kumar

@egreg :)

tohecz

Hello @Harish, how do you do? :)

Harish Kumar

00:12

@tohecz Hi Tom, I am doing great. How about you?

tohecz

I'm fine. Finished an article, so I can finally move on and open a new Pandora's box of research :) And I'm of to the UK for the first time on Friday, so I'm pretty excited about it :)

Harish Kumar

@tohecz Woww, That is great. How long trip it will be.? So you can meet Joseph, David.... Lucky guy. :)

tohecz

Unfortunately it's only for 4 nights in London, and it seems that neither of them will be there :-/

Harish Kumar

@tohecz :(. So you are on a tour. A conference?

tohecz

@HarishKumar nono, just a family trip :)

Adam Liter

01:44

No rush, @PauloCereda! And sorry again for taking so long to follow up with you.

GTK

06:44

in 2012, there was a fantastic new package added to CTAN: pullquote. It came through this question: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/53073/…

I remember being on this chat room at the time, and when the "determine the shape of the insert by the shape of the image" feature was added it was a real wow moment.

then, again in this chat room, someone used it to create an animated gif of a bird in flight, with text flowing around the bird

from a classic series of flight drawings

It was so, so great.

but never got added to the accepted answer, not even as a comment.

i remember showing that around to coworkers, but now have completely lost it

it apparently made an impression on others too, since I was asked about it today by a coworker who was having a discussion regarding TeX with others.

Paulo Cereda

07:50

@HarishKumar Oh no! :) I was expecting to interview you. :)

Let's ask Mark Wibrow then. :)

Johannes_B

@joseph Flag and good morning.

3

Q: How to reduce the gap at the begining of chapter 1?

\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{mnnit} \usepackage{graphicx,times,epsfig,amsmath} \usepackage[Sonny]{myfancy} \usepackage{fancyhdr} \setcounter{secnumdepth}{5} \usepackage{float} \usepackage{subfig} \usepackage{xspace} \usepackage{algorithmwh} \usepackage{graphicx} \usepackage{pifont} \usepackage{hy...

1

Q: Reduce the vertical spacing just before the chapter start

Please help me out to reduce the vertical space at chapter start. The link for the .tex, .cls file along with the problem snapshot - https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0Bx6lCO-PLMCQRm9BcmNqLV9CeGM&usp=shar‌ing

sectioning header-footer chapters

Joseph Wright

@Johannes_B One is a dupe, the other is a poor question but I'm not sure what's needed from me

Johannes_B

@JosephWright Aren't both asking the very same question?

Joseph Wright

@Johannes_B Probably, but this is a new user who clearly needs a bit of guidance. I'll leave a comment on the open question.

tohecz

@Johannes_B they are, basically. The problem is that since he uses a home-brewed class, it's not clear whether the answers to the canonical question apply

Paulo Cereda

08:01

@JosephWright: could you pink Mark Wibrow asking for an interview? :)

tohecz

I'll try to comment in that manner, but later, now I'm running off the battery and running of to work

@PauloCereda <span style="color:pink;>MARK!!!!!</span>

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz LOL

tohecz

@PauloCereda :)

I'm off, the battery is dying

Joseph Wright

@tohecz Bye

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz See ya, Tom!

Joseph Wright

08:04

@MarkWibrow Would you be interested in taking part in an interview session?

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright Thank you!

Johannes_B

@JosephWright @tohecz Thats why i didn't flag officially

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle: your drawing skills are awesome. :)

Harish Kumar

@PauloCereda Paulo, :):):)

David Carlisle

08:27

@PauloCereda I can't understand why Frank asked you to draw the L3 logo:(

Johannes_B

Just for the record, not my downvote tex.stackexchange.com/questions/211952/…

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle :)

David Carlisle

@JosephWright why not just \show % (the active space isn't dropped)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Hadn't thought of that: feel free to edit

Johannes_B

08:45

@DavidCarlisle Plans on making a change? :-)

@Johannes_B, yes I knew it was redundant. Nevertheless, I usually keep those sentences there in order to remind me of that (or just in case the behaviour of frontmatter or mainmatter changed in the future). — Vicent 1 min ago

Joseph Wright

09:20

0

Q: Problem with pause in beamer

When I use pause, a duplicate of the frame is produced. Any know how to fix this? Here is my minimal example: \documentclass{beamer} \begin{document} \begin{frame}[shrink=15] \begin{equation} P(Z=1)=\pi = \frac{exp(\alpha + \beta x)}{1+exp(\alpha + \beta x)} \end{equation} \pause \begin{equat...

beamer errors pause

Anyone understand this?

Paulo Cereda

09:41

@JosephWright I think the OP doesn't understand what \pause does after all.

Enthusiastic Student

Hi. I can run my latex file by pressing the green icon provided in texmaker. Is there any introduction or a pdf file which help me learn how to run latex files through the terminal on linux ubuntu?

David Carlisle

@Johannes_B @Johannes_B text mode because of the \cancel and _ I assume? :-)

Johannes_B

@DavidCarlisle The whole newcommand is/was messed up ;-)

David Carlisle

@EnthusiasticStudent it's much much easier. Rather than having to read some editor doc to find out which button to press, to run latex you type latex

Johannes_B

@david the initial post was showing \chapter{\met\} and a runaway argument errer.

@EnthusiasticStudent But don't forget the argument, i.e. the file you want to process. -> latex nameOfYourFile.

David Carlisle

09:51

@Johannes_B oh that's just to make it easy, real pros just type latex than type their document to the * prompt.

Joseph Wright

@EnthusiasticStudent If you want a PDF rather than DVI, pdflatex in place of latex

@DavidCarlisle Nah, real pros do tex -ini then type everything in by hand ;-)

Johannes_B

@DavidCarlisle Real pros type tex instead of latex ;-)

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright Nah, real pros carve their own PDF's. :P

Johannes_B

@JosephWright That is the real deal.

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda you mean like the 2014 edition of grfguide that includes a hand written pdf file in a filecontents ?

Paulo Cereda

09:54

@DavidCarlisle ooh. :)

Enthusiastic Student

Thank you all... WOW! I ran my first latex file on linux via terminal! Congratulations to myself! :))

Paulo Cereda

Pizza-flavoured crackers, yay!

Enthusiastic Student

10:10

I did not know that I can edit a tex file through vim and terminal

Christoph

good morning

I have a tex document that begins with `\documentclass{article}` and tex says:

`! LaTeX Error: File `article.cls' not found.`

Enthusiastic Student

Have you installed all the packages completely?

Paulo Cereda

@Christoph How are compiling this document? Command line or any editor?

Christoph

I'm using kile to compile it, and I haven't touched the packages since I last used tex on this system (successfully)

I'll now try the command line

Paulo Cereda

@Christoph Good call. I suspect some path confusion from Kile.

Christoph

10:14

same error on the command line

David Carlisle

@Christoph what does echo $TEXINPUTS say?

Paulo Cereda

@Christoph Could you run which tex?

David Carlisle

@EnthusiasticStudent vim :(

Christoph

that says nothing. The only environment variable available for tab-completion is $TEXMFCACHE
`which latex` outputs `/usr/bin/latex` <---that doesn't seem correct, does it?

why do I suck a chat formatting!?

Enthusiastic Student

@DavidCarlisle what's wrong with it? I edited my tex file, but I don't know how to come out of the editor environment!

David Carlisle

10:17

@Christoph because you naively expect the chat formatting to be intuitive:-)

tohecz

:18591461 chat formatting is switched of for multiline messages, with the exception of
"fixed font" (but as you can see, even then the message doesn't get the "ping")

Paulo Cereda

@Christoph Do you have TeX Live installed? If so, we need to add it to the path.

Christoph

that explains a lot

David Carlisle

@EnthusiasticStudent No one knows how to get out of vi it has been the number one FFFAQ in unix for last 40 years

tohecz

@EnthusiasticStudent <esc>:wq<enter>

Enthusiastic Student

10:19

@DavidCarlisle :(

Christoph

@EnthusiasticStudent what happens when you press escape, then :q, then enter?

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle That means you still have an open vim session for the last 40 years?

tohecz

@PauloCereda ROFL!

Enthusiastic Student

@Christoph E37: No write since last change (add ! to override)

David Carlisle

Apr 12 '13 at 16:40, by David Carlisle

Paulo Cereda

10:20

@tohecz That was mean. :)

tohecz

@EnthusiasticStudent do what I suggeted: <esc>:wq<enter>

it means: write and quit

Paulo Cereda

@EnthusiasticStudent Either you save with :w, save and quit with :wq or you quit without saving with :q!.

Enthusiastic Student

this aooears with a red background

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle I wub you sir.

Christoph

@EnthusiasticStudent then you have made changes to the open file. You can exit without saving the changes with :q!, or use :wq to write before quitting

tohecz

10:21

or <esc>:q!<enter> which means quit and ignore

Enthusiastic Student

Ah! :wq worked!

David Carlisle

@EnthusiasticStudent or you could simplify your life and just use emacs

Enthusiastic Student

@tohecz I am really having fun with linux! :))

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle just note the emphasis. :P

tohecz

@EnthusiasticStudent but Vim is so useful when you have to work over ssh!

David Carlisle

10:22

@tohecz as shown by the image of an ssh session above?

Paulo Cereda

@EnthusiasticStudent Congrats!

booooo Ubuntu booooooo

Enthusiastic Student

@tohecz I searched the net for editing the tex file through terminal, and I found VIM!

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle maybe?

@EnthusiasticStudent that's the correct thing to find of course:)

Enthusiastic Student

@tohecz Instaling vim package does not harm my texlive, does it?

tohecz

@EnthusiasticStudent no, certainly not

Enthusiastic Student

10:24

@tohecz Is vim just an editor? Something like notepad I think...

tohecz

@EnthusiasticStudent yep, exactly

David Carlisle

@EnthusiasticStudent seriously the point is tex files are plain text so you can use any editor you have to edit them. The editor choice is independednt of tex. vi(m) and emacs users have been having a friendly war since the 1980's (which @PauloCereda and I have been honouring in this room for some time) but it really doesn't mater use whatever editor you are familar with

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle <3

@EnthusiasticStudent: do you use Ubuntu?

Enthusiastic Student

@PauloCereda yes! I am using ubuntu for 2 days! :D

tohecz

but it can do more; never type <esc>:!sudo dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/sda<enter> into vim :D (seriously, it will destroy your computer)

Paulo Cereda

10:26

@EnthusiasticStudent Then do this:

apt-get install sl

After it's finished, type:

sl

Enthusiastic Student

@PauloCereda what is it?

Paulo Cereda

in your terminal. Have fun. :)

@EnthusiasticStudent A locomotive.

Enthusiastic Student

locomotive?

:D

:))))

Paulo Cereda

@David: See? ^^ I have no credibility. :)

Enthusiastic Student

@PauloCereda I love you! :D locomotive!

Faheem Mitha

10:30

@EnthusiasticStudent Wow, you really are Enthusiastic.

omeinusch

Hi there. I want to force LaTeX/Bibtex to use in my cititations a special string and not the autogenerated format author+year; but only for some sources! How can I achieve that?

Because I want to cite some RFC's and it looks confusing not to have the RFC-number there but the author and the year of the RFC.

Paulo Cereda

@omeinusch Probably write a custom .bst file in order to handle specific entries the way you want?

user4550

hi

Paulo Cereda

@user4550 Aloha!

user4550

this is solely about programming?

omeinusch

10:43

@Paulo maybe I can use the string I use for\cite?

David Carlisle

@user4550 what is "this"? in your question? this site is (mostly) about the tex typesetting system

Paulo Cereda

@omeinusch I'm not sure how it would work.

@DavidCarlisle Also cricket.

user4550

Im talking about this chatroom.

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda we knew that

@user4550 when it's not talking about cricket or vi or German language it's supposed to be about the TeX typesetting system

Christoph

to all who tried to help: restarting my PC did the trick

David Carlisle

10:49

@user4550 did you have a question about TeX?

user4550

I fit none of them, I'm afraid.

David Carlisle

@user4550 how did you end up here:-) There are other sites in stackexchange for programming in general, notably stackoverflow

Faheem Mitha

Wow, this room seems to be going further off-topic.

Paulo Cereda

@user4550 We also like aviary affairs. :)

user4550

it was the most active chat room...

just that.

Faheem Mitha

10:51

Hi David.

Christoph

@user4550 tell us about your actual problem, or what you want to talk about in general, and we can tell you if you're in the right place

Paulo Cereda

@user4550 We do our best. :)

David Carlisle

@user4550 It's hard to keep @PauloCereda quiet. We try.

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Hey!

Enthusiastic Student

@FaheemMitha Yes :)

Faheem Mitha

10:52

Hi Paulo.

Paulo Cereda

@FaheemMitha Hello Faheem!

Faheem Mitha

I see you guys are still keeping things hopping in here.

Paulo Cereda

@FaheemMitha We all do (you too). :)

Enthusiastic Student

@DavidCarlisle What are the advantages of emacs over vim?

Faheem Mitha

@PauloCereda I don't really hop. Not much, anyway. My home room is U&L, but it isn't nearly as busy as here.

@EnthusiasticStudent Easier startup.

Enthusiastic Student

10:56

@FaheemMitha Could you please tell me more about it?

Faheem Mitha

@EnthusiasticStudent There are ten zillion words on the net about emacs. Do you really need mine? Note that a new Emacs Stack Exchange just opened recently.

Just try it and see what you think.

Enthusiastic Student

@FaheemMitha Is it just an editor too? like notepad? Isn't installing it harm my texlive?

Faheem Mitha

@EnthusiasticStudent It is an editor, yes. Opinions vary about whether it is "just" an editor. And no, it won't "harm" your texlive. What a strange question. Why should it?

You should probably take this to the emacs stackexchange. I imagine the people there would be willing to tell what you want to know.

Enthusiastic Student

@FaheemMitha thanks :)

Faheem Mitha

Emacs Chat Room

David Carlisle

11:05

@EnthusiasticStudent it's best not to ask that question of someone who's used emacs almost every day since 1987 and who only ever uses esc:q to get out of vim if some construct like crontab has put me in vim by mistake.

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Rember visudo? :)

David Carlisle

@EnthusiasticStudent don't you have emacs and vim by default with any linux install?

Enthusiastic Student

@DavidCarlisle I installed them today.

David Carlisle

@EnthusiasticStudent I'm surprised you didn't get at least vi by default, they must have given you some editor in the initial operating system, surely?

Enthusiastic Student

@DavidCarlisle Is vi different from vim?

David Carlisle

11:10

@EnthusiasticStudent vim is a later improved vi but these days as far as I can see many distributions set things up so that the command vi is just an alias to vim

Enthusiastic Student

@DavidCarlisle dirst I did not have emacs, so I installed it by that sudo apt-get install...

Also, when I wanted to open my tex file by vim

It asked me to install it

I am not sure it was installed automatically

@DavidCarlisle I am having this in my log file: This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.15 (TeX Live 2014/Debian) (preloaded format=pdflatex 2014.11.12)

Does it mean that the tex is compiling correctly by my texlive?

David Carlisle

@EnthusiasticStudent yes (and that you are using the texlive that is shipped by debian/ubuntu rather than the vanilla texlive that you can get from TUG)

Enthusiastic Student

@DavidCarlisle Is there any difference between debian and vanilla texlive?

Joseph Wright

@EnthusiasticStudent Debian version gets updated less often than the 'vanilla' one

David Carlisle

@EnthusiasticStudent there is this question tex.stackexchange.com/questions/18939/… but it's not so true I think now, the debian texlive is almost up to date but always lags a bit behind the original of course as is true of anything in the debian repository, needs someone to check and repackage it

Joseph Wright

11:23

@DavidCarlisle Well they have the 'frozen' version I think, but certainly Norbert has done a lot of work

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright Although Norbert is in charge of the Debian package. :)

Enthusiastic Student

@DavidCarlisle Do I need to re-install it? Or this version I have suffices?

David Carlisle

@EnthusiasticStudent if you need bleeding edge versions of everything (as you may see in answers here) then you might want the vanilla version, the difficulty then is the debian package manager will think things that depend on tex will need debian texlive unless you reconfigure things or (simpler) just install both. on cygwin (linux-like setup for windows) I have both cygwin's tex and texlive's tex distribution for cygwin

Enthusiastic Student

@DavidCarlisle this answer is also valuable I think: tex.stackexchange.com/a/125065/52417

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda Also TL stuff so he has two hats

@DavidCarlisle Speaking of Cygwin, does everything build properly for you there for a LaTeX release?

tohecz

11:35

@DavidCarlisle Somebody should finally make a virtual TL package for all the distros, the current stage is a bit painful.

Joseph Wright

@tohecz They all have their own requirements

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright :)

David Carlisle

@JosephWright I think so, (I'll do a full run again in a bit) although I think xetex is broken anyway (I really must make a test case and ping xetex (or texlive) list) since I switched to cygwin64 I haven't found any incantation that lets xetex find windows installed fonts.

Joseph Wright

11:54

@DavidCarlisle Oops

David Carlisle

@JosephWright doing texlua build.lua install first in experimental/trunk/l3build is that the right incantation?

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Yes

@DavidCarlisle I'll probably update CTAN today

@DavidCarlisle This is going to make a good talk at UK-TUG 2014

David Carlisle

@JosephWright ok that done, now in 2e does build ctan do the tests or do I need to do that first (I could read the notes but ....)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle ctan always runs check

@DavidCarlisle We decided that building for release should require a full test suite pass (not just us: this is a general feature)

David Carlisle

@JosephWright ok build ctan running....

Paulo Cereda

11:57

@JosephWright 100% agreed.

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda The old make.bat file didn't do that: it assumed that the person doing a release would make check then make ctan

tohecz

@JosephWright maybe virtual is not the right word. I just meant a package that would make it look like TL is installed by a standard way, so that the system runs smoothly with a vanilla TL

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright Will you record them?

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda Yes

egreg

@JosephWright Redefining the behavior when typing exit at an error prompt requires changing the code for TeX and recompiling it. It could be done.

Joseph Wright

12:10

@egreg I was thinking more there will be a setting to choose what editor is opened at that point, so it could be set as a no-op (I doubt vim is hard-coded)

egreg

@JosephWright The EDITOR environment variable is used, which several systems set to vim by default. The value I set is nano, of course.

tohecz

@JosephWright yep, something like export EDITOR='nano' in .profile

Joseph Wright

@egreg Good plan

egreg

@JosephWright Hmm, it should use EDITOR, but I tried it and got stuck in vim :(

Joseph Wright

@egreg let.rug.nl/alfa/tex/info/web2c/Editor-invocation.html says it shoudl be TEXEDIT, but that's wrong too (and the --with-editor thing is not recognised)

egreg

12:16

@JosephWright There's a default value.

Joseph Wright

@egreg Tried setting it, no joy

@egreg Ah, no, got it working!

(Windows) set TEXEDIT=notepad %s

Paulo Cereda

@egreg Good. :)

tohecz

@JosephWright I'm going to flag that message for mentioning notepad :D

@PauloCereda :)

Christian Hupfer

12:44

Good maen

Paulo Cereda

@ChristianHupfer ahoy!

Christian Hupfer

@PauloCereda: Ah, the Black Forest Cookie duck ;-)

Paulo Cereda

@ChristianHupfer My biscuits were all eaten. :(

Christian Hupfer

@PauloCereda: I guess, I know who ate them ;-)

tohecz

13:05

@ChristianHupfer cookies?! :D

Christian Hupfer

For the moderators

0

Q: force an application to use a proxy locally (many transparent proxy programs doesn't work)

Tox I have seen this question on "http://computers.findincity.net/view/6353992952120480581071562/force-an-application-to-use-a-proxy-locally-many-transparent-proxy-programs-doesnt-work" at there you have finally answer "I've solved the problem using a PPTP connection. the server I'm connecting t...

windows

egreg

@PauloCereda Escaping from vi wasn't easy, but I somehow got free again.

Paulo Cereda

@egreg Yay, welcome back! :)

egreg

@PauloCereda I hired a monkey for typing something on the keyboard.

Paulo Cereda

@egreg :)

egreg

13:17

@JosephWright This should be zapped ASAP: tex.stackexchange.com/a/211998/4427

Joseph Wright

@egreg Done

egreg

@JosephWright Had it been just spam I wouldn't have bothered you.

Enthusiastic Student

@DavidCarlisle Should I remove my debian texlive completely or can I simply install my texlive vanilla without uninstalling it?

Joseph Wright

@EnthusiasticStudent You can use both, or if you don't need the 'burning edge' just stick to the Debian one. As David says, the need for a vanilla install is not so strong now as it was in the past.

Enthusiastic Student

@JosephWright What do you mean by burning edge? You mean some packages are outdated? Cannot I just update those packages?

Joseph Wright

13:26

@EnthusiasticStudent You can install package updates in a 'stand alone' sense, of course

David Carlisle

@JosephWright vvv

Typesetting e
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.15 (TeX Live 2014) (preloaded format=pdflatex)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
LaTeX2e <2014/05/01>
Babel <3.9l> and hyphenation patterns for 79 languages loaded.
(../../build/doc/../../build/doc/e.tex
 ! Compilation failed

====================
Tests failed, zip stage skipped!
====================

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Oops

@DavidCarlisle Which one was that for?

David Carlisle

@JosephWright just come back from a meeting and that's the end of the log, what's easiest way to see what failed

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle If the tests failed there should be a load of .diff files in build/test

David Carlisle

@JosephWright don't know yet:-) it's the final terminal output from build ctan

@JosephWright no diff files

Joseph Wright

13:32

@DavidCarlisle Probably the typesetting failed then: perhaps I need to add some more messages

David Carlisle

@JosephWright it's scrolled off the xterm buffer, I can't see any errors, should I run it again under script or something to trap the entire log?

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle First plan of attach I think is to work out which part of the bundle is an issue. e.tex is tools, I think, so I'd try texlua build.lua ctan in there.

David Carlisle

@JosephWright Ok will in a bit I just tried running build.lua doc at the top level and it's not stopping but messages about missing source2e.ist would that have been enough to flag as fail in the end?

Enthusiastic Student

@JosephWright If I have both of them on my system, should I do any further job for using texlive? I mean some extra codes? or the usage will be automatic?

Johannes_B

13:51

@JosephWright @cgnieder @stefankottwitz latex-community.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=25331#p86230

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Yes: that shouldn't be missing, though, so is an issue

David Carlisle

@JosephWright I get

$ find . -name \*ist
./base/source2e.ist
./build/local/gglo.ist
./build/local/gind.ist
./build/test/gglo.ist
./build/test/gind.ist
./distrib/unpacked/gglo.ist
./distrib/unpacked/gind.ist
./unpacked/gglo.ist
./unpacked/gind.ist

should it be in build?

@EnthusiasticStudent as long as tl is in front of the debian one in your path, that will be used (which tex will show which tex that is)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle With the latest updates, it should extract into ./build/doc/ when TeX runs over source2e, which is deliberately at the top of the list of files to typeset

@DavidCarlisle I'm not at my PC with LaTeX on it at the moment, so can't double-check the situation

David Carlisle

14:07

@JosephWright I need to do some other stuff as well, will look later

Faheem Mitha

14:32

So, I've been learning a bit about autotools. Has anyone here ever used them in a TeX context?

Or Cmake, for that matter.

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha Only for building GUIs, not for TeX files themselves

Faheem Mitha

@JosephWright Oh? Got any references/links?

autotools doesn't seem to have any TeX support, afaict. Though I suppose they could be used for building TeX itself.

@AdamLiter excuse the nosyness, but I see you wrote on your web site "I grew up in occupied Dakota territory". Does that mean you are Native American?

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Yay!

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha For example TeXworks has some CMake-based stuff for building it (code.google.com/p/texworks/source/browse/trunk)

Faheem Mitha

@JosephWright Thanks. Looking now.

It seems TeX Live doesn't use either autotools or cmake.

Joseph Wright

14:49

@FaheemMitha No

@FaheemMitha The build system has been put together over many years and is complicated

Faheem Mitha

@JosephWright Right

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha Remember that almost no-one needs to be able to actually build TeX Live

Faheem Mitha

@JosephWright I see. Do you know why these chose not to use one of the well-known systems?

@JosephWright You could say the same for many other packages, in the sense that mostly people run binary packages. I've build TeX Live when backporting it.

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha Certainly true

@FaheemMitha I think you are geting things the wrong way around: Cmake etc. are quite new ideas

Faheem Mitha

@JosephWright They are? autotools goes back to the late 90s.

autoconf was first, i guess.

cmake is probably newer

Joseph Wright

14:56

@FaheemMitha So quite recent, then

Faheem Mitha

@JosephWright The late 90s is recent?

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha Yes, on a TeX timescale

Faheem Mitha

@JosephWright Oh. Is TeX Live so old, then?

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha @DavidCarlisle might know when Karl first started work on web2c

Faheem Mitha

@JosephWright Because He Was There?

Joseph Wright

15:05

@FaheemMitha See e.g. tug.org/texinfohtml/web2c.html: it says ~1987

egreg

@FaheemMitha Karl Berry writes that his first entry in the ChangeLog of Web2C was in 1990: tug.org/tetex/html/kpathsea/kpath_2.html#SEC2 But it already existed.

Faheem Mitha

Wouldn't it have saved everyone a lot of trouble if Knuth has written TeX in C to start with?

And come to think of it, why not just do that instead of creating a conversion program?

Which must have been pretty hard by itself.

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha What's wrong with Pascal?

David Carlisle

@JosephWright 1980's I think

@FaheemMitha at least he switched from SAIL to Pascal It would have been surprising to see a project from a major american university to use an experimental programming language from a commercial telephone company wouldn't it?

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha Well Knuth isn't about to alter the sources, so you've have a real difficult time keeping everything in sync (or you would when there were more changes to TeX)

@DavidCarlisle I'm not sure a 'universal' C was even available to people when Knuth started on TeX, was it?

David Carlisle

15:15

@FaheemMitha The first K&R C book was 1978 C existed before then but wasn't so well known, much of tex82 derives from tex79 (which was in SAIL) it wasn't really clear at that time that C was going to be a major language.

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha LuaTeX has been converted to native C code, so it's doable but they've deliberately dropped 100% TeX82 compliance so ...

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha there was a c(ommon)tex (that I used a bit) around the time that web2c took off, that was a "hand port" of Tex to C but it never passed the trip test, whereas web2c tex did, so it won.

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright Exactly. Wirth has a special place in my bookshelf. :)

egreg

@FaheemMitha You can look at the source of ctangle: tug.org/svn/texlive/trunk/Build/source/texk/web2c/cwebdir/…

Paulo Cereda

@FaheemMitha You know Pascal predates C, right? :)

@DavidCarlisle: any contact with Algol? Oh boy, how I love that language. :)

Faheem Mitha

15:26

Wow, that's a lot of responses.

@JosephWright I don't know anything about Pascal. My point was simply that it isn't so widely used as C, otherwise why would people bother with a port?

@DavidCarlisle He was using something called SAIL?

@JosephWright Good point.

@DavidCarlisle Hmm, I guess it is easy to forget how old TeX really is.

@DavidCarlisle I see. Who wrote ctex?

@PauloCereda I do.

If Karry Berry had worked for Microsoft, he'd be a multi-millionaire now.

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha You are looking at it from 2014, not when the work was actually done

Faheem Mitha

@JosephWright True.

I only go back to the late 1990s computer-wise. Before that I didn't really know anything.

So, in my world, C dominates.

Paulo Cereda

@FaheemMitha Personally, this why is Z written in X instead of Y theme leads nowhere. If it's Turing-complete, you can achieve what you want regardless of language.

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha Pascal was big mid-1990s in Delphi

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright Object Pascal. :) It's still big with Embarcadero.

Faheem Mitha

15:35

@JosephWright Oh. But not any longer, I presume. At least, I don't hear anything about it. Like, at all.

It's all C and C++. Occasionally Fortran.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha the first versions of tex and metafont were written in SAIL yes

SAIL (programming language)

SAIL, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language, was developed by Dan Swinehart and Bob Sproull of the Stanford AI Lab in 1970. It was originally a large ALGOL 60-like language for the PDP-10 and DECSYSTEM-20. SAIL's main feature is a symbolic data system based upon an associative store (based on the LEAP system of Jerry Feldman and Paul Rovner). Items may be stored as unordered sets or as associations (triples). Other features include processes, events and interrupts, contexts, backtracking and record garbage collection. It also has block-structured macros, a coroutining facility and some...

@FaheemMitha rather more than occasional Fortran use around here

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle I see. Curious choice. Because he was at Stanford?

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha well he was there but why is it a curious choice? As I say C was hardly known at the time

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle Well, presumably not standard even at the time.

Wouldn't one normally stick to reasonably mainstream (and portable) languages?

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha how many standard programing languages do you think there were in the 1970's....

Faheem Mitha

15:39

@DavidCarlisle No idea. I was alive, but not paying attention...

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha portability was a major concern, a major reason why tex uses almost exclusively integer arithemtic, because prior to IEEE double spec there was no reliable common standard for floating point models and every machine was different

Faheem Mitha

I remember seeing a picture of the Macintosh Lisa in a magazine once (possibly TIME), and thinking it looked quite cool. I think the Macs were the first big thing in PCs.

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle PL/I.

:)

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle I see.

I think that was 1984 or so. But it was many years before I actually used a computer.

Huh, the original LISA cost US$9,995. That's a lot of money.

1 MB RAM. Wow.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha 1MB was a lot of RAM even by 1993 when latex2e design was finalised, much of the design of 2e was (and still is) constrained so it would work with emtex on a machine with 640K

Paulo Cereda

15:45

@DavidCarlisle Do you remember a book named Programming Pearls? :)

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda I remember the name

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle I have one copy. :) A real jewel. :)

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle Oh. Well, I'm happy I have a machine with more than 1 MB of RAM. Or I wouldn't be able to watch How To Train Your Dragon 2, as I am doing right now.

tohecz

@PauloCereda I wonder if any TeX pearls that @egreg collects are there :)

egreg

@DavidCarlisle You're learning how to write answers. tex.stackexchange.com/a/212022/4427

Faheem Mitha

15:46

@DavidCarlisle Are memory constraints good?

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha COBOL?

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright ooh that hurts. :)

David Carlisle

@egreg :-)

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz Possibly from @David himself. :)

@egreg Teh points. He wants teh points.

:)

egreg

@PauloCereda Yes, he desperately needs them. But he'll never catch up with me. :P

Paulo Cereda

15:48

@egreg Oh no! :)

Faheem Mitha

@JosephWright Yuck.

David Carlisle

@egreg perhaps not, but I may beat you to a longtable badge (not by answering that question though:-)

Faheem Mitha

@egreg He might if you retire.

From tex.sx, that is.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha Not sure I understand the question. Exceeding them is bad.

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha More seriously, I think that or FORTRAN would be 'common' at the time, with Pascal also not looking that bad a choice

Faheem Mitha

15:51

@DavidCarlisle Is it better to live in a world with memory constraints, or in one without?

Or putting it another way, would TeX be "better" if Knuth was writing it now?

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha Well Knuth would still worry about these things

Paulo Cereda

@FaheemMitha Have you ever read TAOCP?

egreg

@DavidCarlisle By the way, I just need five answers in conditionals to get another gold badge. :) (Eight and nine for numbering and cross-referencing)

Faheem Mitha

@JosephWright What things?

@PauloCereda No. I've heard of it, though.

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha There's a balance: as David says, LaTeX2e is very efficient in memory use but that does mean some of the code is hard to read or rather tricky to look after

Paulo Cereda

15:54

@FaheemMitha Knuth's philosophy in a nutshell, as Joseph mentioned. :)

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha Efficiency of alogorithms, memory, etc.

Faheem Mitha

@JosephWright Ah.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha it would be different. possibly.

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Scheme. :P

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle So I imagine. Actually, I remember once asking you why Knuth didn't use Lisp. Which he presumably knew.

I think you said that it was for efficiency considerations.

David Carlisle

15:58

@FaheemMitha there are general efficiency considerations then there are deparate measures. If \zz takes one argument and it is passed a single token, "good style" is \zz{\x} but \zz\x works as well and saves two bytes. Frank and I spent some weeks going through the latex format sources removing all such extra braces (and extra spaces and other things) and we saved a few hundred bytes. this was the difference between latex2e working in DOS and not working.

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle Not sure I follow. This was when?

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle That's why I want you to sign my copy of TLC someday. :)

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha when we made latex2e so 1993 or so

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