@Raphink If you and another person post several comments below a question or answer the system will think you need to have an discussion and automatically offer you a link to open a new chat room with the existing comments.
You can also open you own chat room and invite people. But I think they need to have a chat account, i.e. at least be in any chat room once.
@MartinScharrer I think it's a design problem. For people, figure naturally associates with figures and they expect a figure when using this environment. But for LaTeX, figure just means float. But figures need not always float!
You can see that this is not well-designed when you observe you have to use another semantically unrelated environment and even load a package to get genuine non-floating figures.
@egreg Great insight. It's very common to find in here articles and documents full of images with their respective captions, but with no reference to them in any part of the text. I had a hard time to convince my advisor to accept best float placement and "Figure n" in the text instead of "figure must be here!" and references like "figure below, figure above, figure in the previous page".
@AndreyVihrov Yes, many beginners have difficulties to understand the concept of figure. It should be be coded in a way that {figure}[h] automatically turns it into a non-float.
@NN Nag away! (Does N.N. stand for Nags iNcessantly?) I did notice it, but Tuesdays are busy days (I lecture on Wednesday mornings). The problem with passing through more than one point is twofold: 1) we're working with cubic beziers here, and once you've specified the end points then you don't have much freedom left, 2) we're working with cubic beziers here and getting them through a particular point involves solving cubic equations. (ctd)
I chickened out a bit with that answer by making the bezier particularly nice so that the equations weren't difficult to solve. Making it pass through several points might not be possible with the "special" bezier that I used. I guess that one extra point would be possible, so long as it wasn't opposite the one given ("opposite" taken with respect to the line between the start and end).
@AndrewStacey I see (from what I comprehend of these technicalities). Maybe your answer is the closest one can get in solving the problem with automation.
@NN Not convinced. I think that there's a fair bit of mathematics behind this one that needs to be solved first. Also, the problem may need to be made a bit clearer. For the original problem (of paths avoiding nodes) then as I said in a comment, there are huge programs like graphviz that solve this and reimplementing this in TeX seems ... difficult.
So that's why I chose to solve a slightly different problem: of a path going through a point. Generalising this could be tractable (one way would be to split the path in to multiple beziers between the points), but technically it is a different question. So I think that rather than putting on a bounty, you could ask a new question (linked to the old one) that asked:
given a list of points, find a path that goes through these points in as "smooth" a fashion as possible.
@CharlesStewart: Thanks for your edit on the TikZ/PGF meta question. It's hard to keep track of all the places where these packages have been mentioned.
I'm working on a prototype for an innovative form interface, where different parts of the form are shown on different sides of a cube. The cube rotates, and the user can fill it out as the cube spins. I have a working example.
To me, it seems like a pretty robust solution (before, our forms took...
I like this answer ux.stackexchange.com/questions/11229/… "To improve it, you could make it not be a rotating cube. [...] It's like trying to play guitar with handcuffs on."
That would be tricky. I don't remember exactly how many down-votes I've garnered on this site, but I think it's still in single figures so they'd have to be all on one post for me to be able to do that1
(Oops, "that!". Forgot that I had my keyboard in TeX-mode with 1 and ! swapped.)
@lockstep the tumbleweed badge seems hard to get for anyone at tex.sx because the traffic is low compared to other sx sites and because of the fact that many tex.sx users are careful to check out every new question
@NN I could write an answer saying "Use LibreOffice, TeX sucks"; but probably everybody would know it's a joke for getting that badge! Unfortunately the Tumbleweed badge is beyond my possibilities, as I have 0 questions until now. :)
@PauloCereda That reminds me of a local joke; the word we use in our dialect to denote a dumb guy is mona. Not precisely "dumb"; the definition might be: "He's so mona that at the world championship of mona people he classified second".
@PauloCereda I should mention that mona has another meaning, that I won't report here. Suffice it to say that only a male can be mona in the sense described above. ;-)
Wow! Two starred comments by me and three about me!
@egreg hehe don't worry. I once saw this word and asked my mom if she knew the meaning. Thankfully, she had no idea and spotted the possibility of being a slang. I checked the dialect and found two meanings. Needless to say, I only explained the "clean" one to her. =)
The initiative on meta
Do we want Stack Exchange to become an institutional member of the TUG?
got a great response. It quickly became the highest voted question on meta. This fact and the well thought out concept convinced Stack Exchange to join TUG:
Stack Exchange is institutional member ...
@Patrick Here is one of my (unfinished) books typeset with the latest version of the new impnattypo package in debug mode, with colored ties colored in magenta and turquoise when inserted for (respectively) single letters and short last lines. I had to adjust some words still to prevent homeoarchies.
@egreg Ok, we've simultaneously proposed similar solutions to the example continuation problem. Is there a reason to prefer yours? (Apart from the fact that if I were a betting man, I would.)
@AlanMunn I started with a more general approach, but in the end decided not to go too deep. Your solution has the "weakness" that it uses the built-in method for an attribution, which is something I wouldn't do.
The initiative on meta
Do we want Stack Exchange to become an institutional member of the TUG?
got a great response. It quickly became the highest voted question on meta. This fact and the well thought out concept convinced Stack Exchange to join TUG:
Stack Exchange is institutional member ...
