TeX, LaTeX and Friends

cfr

00:00

How do you use the comparison stuff in biblatex? tex.stackexchange.com/questions/213987/… doesn't seem like it should be as difficult as I am finding it. (Though since nobody else has answered, perhaps it is.)

cfr

00:15

Is this on topic?

David Carlisle

@cfr yes I thnk so but it's a strange day first foiltex then eepic, I think we are in 1990 again

Pragabhava

00:28

Hello guys. I have a quick question. Is there a simple way to remove all margin note spacing and giving it to text width in memoir class?

cfr

01:26

@DavidCarlisle I thought it might be off-topic because it is about the export function of Xfig rather than eepic itself. At least, I think so: isn't the issue that Xfig is putting the wrong thing in the eepic code?

Werner

07:20

There must be a duplicate of this question around:

0

Q: How to write text vertically right/ left to the margin to the whole document?

I want to write text vertically right/ left to the margin to the whole document. A sample figure is shown below. Is there any way to do this? Please suggest.

I recall @GonzaloMedina doing something like this...

Found it:

8

A: Rotated, running text in right margin?

The background package lets you place any kind of material (in particular, text) in any given position of somo or all of the pages of your document, and gives you complete and easy control over the attributes of the material to be displayed; here's a simple example: \documentclass{book} \usepack...

Johannes_B

07:37

0

Q: Modifying "Cover page" and "Title page" of thesis

I am using thesis template from (: https://www.sharelatex.com/templates/thesis/easy-thesis/ ) to write. Currently I am experiencing some issues/problems, where, I need to change some parts (Frontpages) in this template in order to follow my institution's thesis format. This template have three...

templates thesis

Werner

A waste of punctuation:

-1

A: Problem in footnote with arabtex package

???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ????

David Carlisle

08:24

@cfr yes it's on the edge but I think it's a "friend" ie tex related software like an editor question which we allow so long as the question is about its tex functions not a general use question

Paulo Cereda

09:09

New avatar. :)

David Carlisle

09:21

@PauloCereda new isn't always better

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Oh. :(

David Carlisle

09:36

@PauloCereda is that the image to go on the forthcoming blog post?

Paulo Cereda

09:47

@DavidCarlisle It's in my TODO list. :)

Paulo Cereda

10:23

Time to upvote some blokes. :)

Christian Hupfer

11:26

@PauloCereda: Ducky the rednosed reindeer? :-P

Good maen

Paulo Cereda

@ChristianHupfer <3

@ChristianHupfer Hello!

Christian Hupfer

@PauloCereda: Hello Duckdeer ;-)

Paulo Cereda

Does anybody here have a... er... /whispering a jailbroken iDevice?

Christian Hupfer

11:44

@PauloCereda: I have never heard of any iDevice ;;; Speaking aloud and proud of it :D

tohecz

12:25

What's this @Paulo?!

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz A layer that allows installation of 3rd party apps.

tohecz

@PauloCereda I mean the avvy :) How old are you again? 5 or 6? :D

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz I wub you. :)

tohecz

@PauloCereda I take it as "five".

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz :)

tohecz

12:35

How're you btw?

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz In a hurry, as always, but fine. :) And you?

tohecz

@PauloCereda I just said goodbye to my sister and her husband, it was a nice week :) Sort-of holidays, which means that my Xmas will be probably quite busy :-/

Paulo Cereda

12:53

@tohecz Oh.

Johannes_B

15:15

Deep down this is opinion based. What do you guys think?

3

Q: PhD dissertation: templates vs scratch

I am still getting my feet wet with LaTeX (starting to read 'LaTeX for complete novices'). I have decided to use LaTeX for writing my dissertation. As I begin I was wondering if it would be better to start from scratch (and follow a book like 'Using LaTeX to write a dissertation') or to use a tem...

templates best-practices

Joseph Wright

@Johannes_B I think it probably is, yes

Johannes_B

@JosephWright There are a few other question dealing with nearly the same topic. Duplicate?

Johannes_B

16:01

@JosephWright FYI: several tag edits in the last few days adding tag linguistics -> tex.stackexchange.com/users/42880/jason-zentz It's a bit annoying.

Joseph Wright

@Johannes_B Are the edits correct?

Johannes_B

@JosephWright Today, it is adding linguistics to questions marked with gb4e (which is a package for linguistics), so yes, one can say they are correct. But if we retag all to add a tag, we could simply make a synonym.

23 hours ago, by percusse

Can we please not accept all linguistic tag edits? Most of them are forest stuff. OTherwise we have to mark all contextual tikz questions too and we'll get a lot of papiros

egreg

@Johannes_B I have rejected one, some days ago. But someone else approved it.

Johannes_B

@egreg I skipped them all. But someone will always approve it.

@egreg Nov 29: 21 edits.

egreg

@Johannes_B Blind reviews.

Johannes_B

16:16

@egreg Just saw that he edited the tag wiki for linguisticsm, if he goes on like that .... i can't even imagine

tex.stackexchange.com/tags/linguistics/info

egreg

@Johannes_B This is the edit I was referring to: it has really nothing to do with linguistics specifically

tex.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/57142

Johannes_B

@egreg I guess if you ask he refers to » LFG phrase structure rules... «

Whatever that is.

Gregory

It's finals time and I should know this by now. Is the best practice for creating underlined blank space for fill-in-the-blank questions \underline{~~~~~}?

egreg

@Johannes_B The application is for linguistics, but it's just "add a delimiter in front of a tabular"

@Gregory Certainly not! ;-)

Gregory

Please educate me, egreg!

egreg

16:23

@Gregory tex.stackexchange.com/search?q=fill+in+the+blanks

Johannes_B

@egreg If my car is broken i can't tag it {work} because i wanted to get there using the car. So rejecting the edit was the right thing.

egreg

7

Q: Breakable fill-in blanks

What is a good way to create blank space (preferably, underlined -- it is to be filled in by hand when document is printed) that takes up all the remaining space on a line. The blank space may appear at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of the line; it may also occupy the whole line. I ...

line-breaking plain-tex text-decorations

Joseph Wright

16:40

@DavidCarlisle New feature requests already for l3build: I wonder if @PauloCereda will get the same effect for arara

Gregory

@egreg Your \filltoend macro is great. The post you linked indicated that you had also provided an elegant solution for blanks of a fixed width, which I'm not finding. I have quite a few cases where filling an entire line would be visually awkward.

David Carlisle

@JosephWright or Simon for doxygen..

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Erm, maybe

@DavidCarlisle Wait until I sort out your talk!

David Carlisle

@JosephWright no one uses latex, so that'll be OK

egreg

@Gregory Angel linked twice the same answer; let me see if I can find it.

@Gregory Maybe this one

9

A: How do I make a long underscore in Plain TeX?

Use a negative height and a slightly bigger depth: \vrule height -3pt depth 3.4pt width 7cm Adjust to suit. The same idea can be used for “raised rules” (with a negative depth). No rule will appear if depth + height is negative. If you want a “low rule” that fills up a given space, leaders...

David Carlisle

16:49

@JosephWright should this answer be just left: it's too long to be a comment but... tex.stackexchange.com/questions/214965/…

Gregory

@egreg Thanks. I'll try that in a few minutes.

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Converted

David Carlisle

@JosephWright thanks

Paulo Cereda

17:10

@JosephWright So far, nothing new. :) But once the new version is released, I expect a lot of feedback. :)

Johannes_B

@PauloCereda There is a whole field teaching infants basic signs before they can speak so that the infants can communicate and express their wishes. Quite interesting, i'll try that out one day.

Paulo Cereda

@Johannes_B Oh my!

Johannes_B

@PauloCereda I already know car and banana and Nudel (pasta) and some more.

Joseph Wright

@Johannes_B Makaton?

Paulo Cereda

@Johannes_B Quick, to the bananamobile! :)

Where's @ChristianHupfer when we talk about bananas? :)

Johannes_B

17:20

@JosephWright Didn't hear of it till now, i'll take a look.

@ChristianHupfer QUACK

Gregory

18:09

@greg My first macro, mostly your code. It's behaving in some ways I don't understand. Specifically, it seems to cause lines not to break and it does not create a space between the end of the blank and a word that follows it. gist.github.com/pyrogerg/dcb94d7baaf293d40d16

Johannes_B

18:19

@JosephWright Please compare tex.stackexchange.com/questions/214736/… and latex-community.org/forum/…

@JosephWright I checked the IP and it leads to Stop forum spam I'll keep those posts under attention.

egreg

@Gregory Of course: \blank{} or \blank\ (with a space after \)

Johannes_B

0

Q: Text disappeared after update to 2.8.6

I have a very big problem. My text just disappeared after the update. Not everything but a very big part of my work! Can someone help me? Help I'm going crazy! Textstudio 2.8.6 (windows-Installer) When I open the chapter5, where the most content disapeared (after the update), the text whic...

updating

I see modifications on the main site, but checking teh question the last modification i can see is by Joseph

Gregory

@egreg. Perfect.

egreg

18:40

@Gregory tex.stackexchange.com/questions/31091/…

Joseph Wright

@Johannes_B Convert-to-edit

Paulo Cereda

@Johannes_B I'm very tempted to post Dude calm the duck down.

Paulo Cereda

19:09

@DavidCarlisle: Davis.

David Carlisle

19:39

@PauloCereda ?

Paulo Cereda

19:58

Thanks Davis: how can I find it out. because now its showing just a blank sheet without nothing... — Greg 53 mins ago

tohecz

I see some crappy SE heads behaviour here:

-1

A: The new, probably-shouldn't-be-called-"People Helped" stat. - Input needed

The only thing that would make sense to me is showing a statistic on the anonymous votes on one's posts. Reasons: This statistic is never shown and could be really interesting and significant. Registered users can vote on the Qs and As, so their opinion on the post is reflected in reputation. N...

(damn, I wanted to link the Q, not the A)

Paulo Cereda

@tohecz Then I upvoted your answer. <3

tohecz

@PauloCereda :)

tohecz

20:37

btw, should I make this one CW? tex.stackexchange.com/questions/215029/defining-to-align/…

Christian Hupfer

20:48

@PauloCereda, @Johannes_B: You guys definitely have tooooooooooooo much spare time

percusse

21:03

@tohecz Don't fight the windmills.

tohecz

@percusse this is more bouncing against a wall

percusse

@tohecz After understanding that this community thing was a hoax, I stopped caring. Maybe you should too.

They have a pyramid model in mind not a community drive.

tohecz

@percusse well, I wonder what is the future of SE with this approach. They'll soon gain themselves (ourselves) an extinction of new users and SE will die.

percusse

@tohecz I don't think it will die but will be something like Reddit or whatever those huge traffic places are. comp.text.tex is still alive though very very unpleasant in terms of content and behavior.

But they still have the big shots too

Including ours ;)

Joseph Wright

@percusse I'm not sure what you mean about c.t.t.: 'unpleasant'?

percusse

21:10

@JosephWright Many discussions go either unresolved or awry and lots of spam too.

Joseph Wright

@tohecz You have to remember the Powers really do think this sort of thing is a good idea: it's not deliberately badly worked out

@percusse Very little spam here (via Eternal September)

@percusse Usenet is meant for things that never get resolved!

You want to be on the LaTeX team list!

percusse

@JosephWright I do less sophisticated way; google groups

Joseph Wright

@percusse Ah well you know who to blame then

percusse

@JosephWright :) OK. But probably you are not reading loads of threads there. Some of them are really nasty and flaming rage.

tohecz

@JosephWright Well, frankly, it is a bad idea.

Joseph Wright

21:12

@percusse I read all of c.t.t.: have done since I started using LaTeX

percusse

@JosephWright Then I'm sampling only the bad ones probably.

Joseph Wright

@percusse Usenet traditionally has a different 'feel' to forums or the like

@tohecz I guess it seems to make sense from an SO point-of-view

percusse

@JosephWright I was active on Physics Forums for quite some time. I know a bit about the neverending thread feel but still not a big fan of it.

egreg

+1 for the disclaimer. i'd also warn against being anywhere near an active volcano or a plate boundary. — barbara beeton 1 min ago

Joseph Wright

@percusse, @tohecz I'd bear in mind that we don't do a bad job of helping people here, I hope

percusse

21:16

@JosephWright Of course but being optimistic and witnessing a drastic change of attitude are different things. At least via my personal and subjective gauges

Joseph Wright

On another topic: vimeo.com/113430065

6

percusse

@JosephWright Ambitious title ! :P

Joseph Wright

@percusse There is an issue that over time we get more questions that have been covered before, simply for statistic reasons, so we get more (likely) dupes, etc.

@percusse Poke @DavidCarlisle

tohecz

@egreg yep I know

btw, @JosephWright would you please purge the comments here? I think that only the first 4 of them are meaningful there: tex.stackexchange.com/a/215031/11002

Joseph Wright

@tohecz I did the lot

tohecz

21:23

@JosephWright thanks. much nicer now :)

percusse

@JosephWright On another topic; I've kind of collected a few macros that converts the beamer syntax to pgfkeys syntax. But I don't know if this is the way to go. For example, picking up the \setbeamercolor{alert block}{fg=, bg=,} you can say \beamerset{alert block/fg/.color=} etc. Hypothetically speaking is this front end worth developing or it is better to bite the bullet and redefine those \defbeamertemplate*** stuff.

Paulo Cereda

@percusse A Don Quixote reference? :)

percusse

@PauloCereda :)

tohecz

@JosephWright seems like I'll soon need an unfixflt2e

egreg

@PauloCereda That's why I provided the code, notwithstanding the risk for poor kittens.

tohecz

21:35

@egreg well, I think we speak about two different Don Quixote cases here: the $$$ and the people helped stat.

David Carlisle

@percusse sadly the talk not as exciting as the title:-)

Joseph Wright

@tohecz Will depend on what your requirements are

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda how is your cat?

tohecz

@JosephWright well, I need 2col Fig2 on top of a page where 1col Fig1 is on top too (but below it)

Joseph Wright

@tohecz Erm

tohecz

21:37

@DavidCarlisle ah ok, then I'm fine

David Carlisle

@tohecz no you are not, I misread

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle I want them on the same page, in the wrong order:

David Carlisle

@tohecz you can number them in the wrong order but they will be output in the order you put them in the source

tohecz

[----------]
[   FIG2   ]
[----------]

[----] text
[ F1 ] text
[----] text
       text
text   text
text   text

David Carlisle

\@tohecz

\stepcounter{figure}\begin{figure*}..\end{figure*}\addtocounter{figure}{-2}\beg‌in{figure}..\end{figure}\stepcounter{figure}

tohecz

21:40

@DavidCarlisle no!!! That's so messy

Joseph Wright

@tohecz We are clear there has to be an 'undo' mechanism

@tohecz But the order is wrong anyway, so ...

egreg

@tohecz I know. But I too won't fight the windmills.

David Carlisle

@tohecz It is accurate markup for the intended weird numbering, much safer than just relying on a bug that * figures can float past an arbitrary number of non-* ones, and hoping that it only passes 1.

tohecz

@JosephWright well, don't blame me, I can only process what I get as input. Since the authors are very "tough", which makes my job a hell sometimes :(

Joseph Wright

@tohecz I can only speak from my experience: we don't get a say in such things

tohecz

21:43

@DavidCarlisle well, I check manually for float placement anyways. I'll be actually happy when xor allows me to specify the order completely manually (let's say w.r.t. to the last \clearpage)

David Carlisle

@tohecz but you are right actually that the 2-colfloat fix is probably the one most problematic in terms of backward compatibility. It is hard to believe too many people will object to making \( robust, or the marks in a two column document match the sections in the correct columns, but having floats come in a different order, even if the old order was bad, is tricky

tohecz

@egreg I'm really worried, since your answer got accepted, which may mean that the OP uses it. Pauvres pussy cats!

Joseph Wright

21:58

@tohecz Indeed

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle I made sure he's fine. :)

Joseph Wright

22:20

@DavidCarlisle I'm not sure what you are driving at with your comment on tex.stackexchange.com/questions/215048/mapping-to. You could save $, make it active then do a macro-based look ahead.

tohecz

@JosephWright well, someone should comment in the sense that: it's backward compatibility, will be denied in L3

Joseph Wright

@tohecz Well yes but what to do about $$ is I guess to be talked about ($ is LaTeX syntax, but I think to be handled using an active char)

tohecz

@JosephWright yep. Bearing in mind {tabular}{>$l<$}

Joseph Wright

@tohecz If you start with a full set of active chars defined that's no issue

egreg

@JosephWright This can be done now that there is \protected\def

Joseph Wright

22:24

@egreg Yes

@egreg I have thought about this, you know ;-)

tohecz

@JosephWright well, {tabular}{>{a: $}l<{$; see?}} should work, too. Maybe I don't understand your comment?

Joseph Wright

@tohecz I don't see how that can work: math mode not balanced

egreg

@JosephWright But maybe >{$}l<{$} would be tricky, because these $ are “backwards” in array.

tohecz

@JosephWright sorry, made a mistake, better now?

Joseph Wright

@egreg At present

tohecz

22:26

@egreg in which sense "backwards"?

Joseph Wright

@egreg The entire 'using math mode for things that are not' needs addressing in various places (e.g. \textsuperscript, cf. ConTeXt's approach)

egreg

@tohecz The former closes math mode, the latter opens it.

David Carlisle

@JosephWright you could, but the basic principle that you can't hide the thing macros expand to remains. you can do lots of things which I didn't mention there:-)

tohecz

@egreg I lose you now?

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{array}
\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{>{A}l<{B}} C\end{tabular}
\end{document}

output: ACB

ah I get it now! Sorry, you speak about array env not array pkg

David Carlisle

@tohecz look at >{$}l<{$}`

tohecz

22:30

@DavidCarlisle well, it's the other way around in array than in tabular environments, that's what confused me

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda no thanks to @egreg's attempts to destroy the species

tohecz

we'll need \startmath, \stopmath, \starttext and \stoptext for there, maybe?

David Carlisle

@tohecz not to mention also relying on $$ doing nothing in inner horizontal mode, not starting display math

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle like \begin{tabular}{>$l<$} x^2 \\ $Hello world!$ \end{tabular} ? :D

David Carlisle

@tohecz yes now try it with array and the >$l<$ then makes it not math mode

Joseph Wright

22:32

@DavidCarlisle As you know, I'm imagining no 'real' display math other than for measurement, as in breqn

tohecz

@JosephWright that's crazy :D

Joseph Wright

@tohecz No

tohecz

@JosephWright better now with the smiley? :)

David Carlisle

@JosephWright ah well I was answering in the real world not your imagined one:-)

Joseph Wright

@tohecz :-)

@tohecz I knew what you meant even without

@DavidCarlisle Well of course

tohecz

22:34

@JosephWright I thought so :D

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle In any case, as @egreg says, things today with \protected are very different from in the 1980s

David Carlisle

@JosephWright with amsmath there isn't much real display math anyway is there?

@JosephWright too modern for me

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Possibly not: I guess Michael Downes' ideas feature there too

David Carlisle

@JosephWright then can we get rid of \halign after getting rid of display math

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Again, I suspect there may be something in that, although I've not thought so hard about it

tohecz

22:40

@DavidCarlisle isn't \halign like the most used \?align primitive? :)

Joseph Wright

@tohecz Yes

David Carlisle

22:55

@tohecz yes, which is why latex tabular alignments are all rubbish, really.

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle and what do you suggest: two-pass design?

David Carlisle

@tohecz best would be to just extend the engine but that's probably not going to happen (unless you count writing an alignment engine in lua) failing that these days you could almost certainly do a better job by just saving every cell of the table in a box, doing "some calculations" then laying out the boxes in the right place.

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle that can be a lot of boxes :D

David Carlisle

@tohecz most people have more than 640k of memory these days.

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle and tex has ... 64k box registers? Should be enough, after all :D

David Carlisle

23:01

@tohecz you don't need to use more than 1 register (although a few more would make it easier)

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle ok, interesting.

egreg

@PauloCereda Make sure Fubá's not reading some of today's questions.

David Carlisle

@tohecz basically if you have measured everything you can calculate the alignment and the boxes can just be \hbox{\hbox{cell 1,1}\hbox{cell 1,2}\hbox{cell 2,1}\hbox{2,2}} getting the cells is then just "list manipulation"

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle yeah I know, but that's crazy. You could as well assume that the table is not larger than 100x100 fields, and use 10k registers :D

David Carlisle

@tohecz people were setting longtables with more fields than that in the 1990's...

tohecz

23:12

@DavidCarlisle but longtable is a special case. I think that it's completely fine that it takes several runs to stabilize

David Carlisle

@tohecz it's all vapourware anyway, been planning to sketch an actual implementation since about 1995...

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle well, IMHO it works well. The ability of people to ignore the documentation doesn't change it.

egreg

\settabs4\columns
\+A& B& C& D\cr
\+D& E& F& G\cr

@DavidCarlisle Or simply \def\row#1#2{\hbox{\hbox to 3cm{#1\hfil}\hbox to 8cm{#2}}

tohecz

well, I should go home probably

David Carlisle

@tohecz but halign doesn't help in lots of ways, automatic column widths is hard (neither tabularx or tabulary do anything like as well as a simple html table at that, colouring tables is really hard (colortbl works hard to make it work, but after the 1000's time it's hard to justify really why vertical rules vanish in interesting ways, or stretch glue in a cell makes the coloured band shrink) multirow (egreg's favourite) isn't supported by the primitive and that shows.... i could go on..

tohecz

23:18

@DavidCarlisle I think I get it :)

David Carlisle

@egreg quite:-) (and no cats die)

@tohecz what timezone are you in?

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle CET +0100

so yes, I'm at work at 00:20 at night

David Carlisle

@tohecz go home:-)

tohecz

@DavidCarlisle I will :D

egreg

23:40

Count the errors in the following code:

\def\ds(#1,#2){\innerds{#1}{#2}}
\def\innerds#1#2{\ensuremath{||#1 - #2||_1}\xspace}

And the answer even got accepted. :(

David Carlisle

@egreg I saw and decided to look away

egreg

23:59

@DavidCarlisle Who's to be blamed for \ensuremath? /throwing stone

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