TeX, LaTeX and Friends

Alan Munn

4:02 AM

stackoverflow: 390,092 questions with no upvoted answers. And we're concerned about our ~200!

Joseph Wright

7:05 AM

We have a full house of TUG members

16

Q: Who would like to become a member of the TeX User Group, sponsored by Stack Exchange?

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 ...

Stefan Kottwitz

@JosephWright Great to see!

Rebecca Chernoff

7:21 AM

@StefanKottwitz since you've been leading the show for the most part, I'll just confirm...everything look ok to send over to TUG?

Joseph Wright

@RebeccaChernoff Do you ever sleep?

Rebecca Chernoff

lol yes

I'm a night owl. (:

Joseph Wright

@RebeccaChernoff All looks fine to me: I assume you'll get addresses from the 'takers'

Rebecca Chernoff

I wonder if I need emails or mailing addresses, should probably check. q:

Joseph Wright

@RebeccaChernoff TUG will need mail addresses to send TUGboat!

But perhaps if you give e-mail addresses then the TUG office will sort it out

Stefan Kottwitz

7:40 AM

@RebeccaChernoff yes, let's confirm it. The question is open for 7 days and had more than 400 views (good for meta), so it's been visible enough, and now we've got the full crew.

Rebecca Chernoff

@StefanKottwitz I am sending an email to those 8 asking for their addresses and contact info per the template TUG gave me. Perhaps you could edit the meta post to indicate we've got the number our institutional membership gives us?

I'll send it to TUG as soon as I get 8 responses...hopefully people will be good about replying. (:

Stefan Kottwitz

7:55 AM

@RebeccaChernoff Joseph edited the meta post.

Andrew Stacey

@RebeccaChernoff: Any chance of a post on the main blog announcing this when it's done? Sort of along the lines of when SE became an official supporter of MathJaX?

Martin Scharrer

8:34 AM

@hendrikvogt: The "accepted answer got removed" notification seems to work now. I lost a tick and the answer of mine is now listed as -15 in the reputation listing.

Andrew Stacey

@JosephWright: Quick question on LaTeX3: each of the core packages seems to pull in the others, so it seems that to get the LaTeX3 syntax I should only need to load one package. Which package is that? Is it expl3?

@MartinScharrer Ah, but would you notice that if you also got some votes on that question so that the total score was positive?

Raphink

Ah, today I discovered that editing an answer 10 times makes it a community wiki post automatically ;-)

Rebecca Chernoff

I see several people here who have an email to reply to. (:

Martin Scharrer

@AndrewStacey It would still be in the listing. Anyway, now you have a chance to see it directly.

Andrew Stacey

8:50 AM

@RebeccaChernoff Not in my inbox yet .... (assuming I'm one of those)

Rebecca Chernoff

seriously? I sent it 45 minutes ago.

Andrew Stacey

@RebeccaChernoff Seriously. I'm looking at my mailer right now and there's nothing new in it. Nothing in the spam trap either, unless you're masquerading as "Rosetta Marianna" these days (selling replica watches before anyone gets too imaginative).

Rebecca Chernoff

you have a problem with my watches? >_<

Raphink

@RebeccaChernoff done

Andrew Stacey

"These Watches have troubles, the biggest of which is \\ The fact there are many more Watches than Witches." Or something like that.

Joseph Wright

9:04 AM

@AndrewStacey Yes, just load expl3 (apart from l3names, you can't load any of the others without first loading expl3: this is a deliberate decision to avoid any odd errors)

Andrew Stacey

@JosephWright Good to know. Thanks.

Hendrik Vogt

@MartinScharrer Yep, it's been marked "status-completed" 6 hours ago:

40

Q: How do you want to be notified of unaccepted answers?

One feature-request we keep seeing is users want to be notified when someone un-accepts an answer, so a few questions that follow are how often should these notifications be seen, under what conditions, and how should they be presented? Using myself as a high activity user (~6,300 answers), we s...

discussion status-completed accepted-answer notifications

Martin Scharrer

@RebeccaChernoff: No Google Docs form this time? I just responded with my details. Thanks for the membership!

@HendrikVogt Hi Hendrik, so did you knew it already or did you just looked it up after I mentioned it :-)

BTW, one of my main tag on Meta.SX is status-completed. Apparently I'm a successful feature-requester

Andrew Stacey

*still has no email from SE, starts sobbing*

Martin Scharrer

9:21 AM

@AndrewStacey Maybe you are on the blacklist of TUG? ;-)

Did you made advertisement for MS Word in the past?

:-D

Raphink

:)

Hendrik Vogt

@MartinScharrer I knew that post very well, but didn't know that it was just completed. I only looked at that post again after you told me.

Paulo Cereda

I need to wake up earlier, everything happens when I'm not here. =P

Andrew Stacey

@MartinScharrer But the names haven't been set to TUG yet, so I must be on the SE blacklist. So rather than MSWord, it must've been some other product. No idea what: "X is to SE as MSWord is to TeX". (While we're on the subject of interesting numbers, the comment that I'm replying to has number 1999333.)

Paulo Cereda

@AndrewStacey X = experts-exchange...

Martin Scharrer

9:35 AM

@AndrewStacey Is that number per site? Yours is already 1999384.

@PauloCereda Indeed!

Let's see who gets 2000000.

Patrick

@MartinScharrer its not per site. See for example chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/1999380#1999380

Martin Scharrer

@Patrick Ok, makes actually sense

Paulo Cereda

OK, so far we have TUG memberships, one blog, and moderator cards. How about the T-shirts? :-)

Andrew Stacey

12:59 PM

@RebeccaChernoff: Got the email, shall reply anon.

Paulo Cereda

@egreg: Juve 1 vs. 1 Bologna. :-(

egreg

2:02 PM

@PauloCereda Not a very good match; Juve led 1:0 in the first half, but they were in 10 for the entire second half. A stupid foul by Vučinić. Then a defensive error and Bologna scored. But also for Milan it was a draw and Inter lost. :)

Starting to collect no rep votes.

Paulo Cereda

2:30 PM

@egreg I saw the game. Bologna scored on a lucky chance. Milan played without 8 of their starting players and managed to draw. Now, Inter... even Gasperini was fired.

egreg

3:24 PM

@JosephWright I had been writing the answer to the 35 column table. Ouch!

Joseph Wright

@egreg Yes, the answer I have in mind is 'do not do this'

Caramdir

4:41 PM

@egreg: Why did you delete your answer to tex.stackexchange.com/questions/29191/… ? I'd prefer having an answer to just closing the question.

Joseph Wright

5:03 PM

@Caramdir I agree, and as I'm a mod the answer is back :-)

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright mod power FTW. :-P

Paulo Cereda

6:45 PM

Next step:

egreg

7:14 PM

@JosephWright I saw the edit just after I answered and agreed that it was a trivial question.

Joseph Wright

@egreg There was some discussion in the mod chat room yesterday about closing versus deleting. I'm happiest with the 'close with an answer' approach that we seem to have. Apparently, on Programmers there is a feeling that closed questions should be deleted!

egreg

@JosephWright I agree with you, though certain questions can add noise; not this one in particular.

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright Programmers have some sort of GC ("garbage collection") syndrome.

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda It did sound quite intense, from the mod from Programmers

My impression from the mod chat room, in general, is that TeX.sx is working extremely well

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright I see. I'd like to join other SE sites, but IMHO TeX.sx is probably the only one I see as a truly friendly place.

Joseph Wright

7:22 PM

@PauloCereda It's not just about friendliness, there were also some concerns about numbers of questions, etc. Obviously, I'm not naming any other sites!

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright :-) On number of questions, we almost hit 10k.

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda Yes, I guess we should have some celebrations when we get to 10k

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright Any ideas? (we could have a question in the meta site).

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda Something on the blog: I make it about 12 days off, using the 'mod only' data on questions-per-day

It's amazing how views-per-day vary. Sunday is a lot less busy than any other day!

I could write a blog post about the 'behind the scenes' information that the mods can see: increasing hits-per-day, etc.

Paulo Cereda

This would be awesome!

"A day in the life of a TeX.sx mod"

2

As part of the celebrations, our ten thousandth question could be posted by @egreg. The title: 'What is this "TeX" thing I keep hearing about?'. :-)

6

Joseph Wright

7:32 PM

@PauloCereda A slightly different topic, but also well worth-while. I'll see if I can pull together a couple of draft posts at the weekend.

Of course, if @StefanKottwitz or @MartinScharrer want to write about 'A day in the life' then that would be great

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright Great!

@JosephWright Out of curiosity: the mod statistics are real-time?

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda I think so: they certainly run up to 'today', but I guess there may be some lag in filling in hits.

Oh, my mistake: they run to 'yesterday'

So that means that Saturday is the quite day

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright Ah cool!

egreg

7:54 PM

@PauloCereda I was actually asking that to myself. :) Do you know that my first glance at the TeXbook was in 1985, when you were a baby?

Joseph Wright

@egreg Next time we have a mod election, comments like "I've been using TeX since 1985" may come back to haunt you :-)

Paulo Cereda

@egreg :-P I was one year old. And I still had my soul, which I lost it several years later when I decided to give theoretical computer science a try.

egreg

8:14 PM

@PauloCereda You didn't choose math, that's your fault. :)

@JosephWright There are distinguished members on board that have known TeX before me, but I won't tell their names. :)

Joseph Wright

@egreg I can take a few guesses

However, they are not #1 for rep for the last quarter

Caramdir

@JosephWright Which significantly reduces the number of potential choices to 8035 (counting unregistered users).

@JosephWright Given that half of the Programmers front page is closed questions I can sympathize with that position. But as we don't have that problem here I don't think this should become policy on TeX.sx.

egreg

@JosephWright 637 to catch lockstep

Joseph Wright

@Caramdir Apparently they have about 2k closed out of 14k total, whereas we have something like 700 closed out of ~10k

Paulo Cereda

8:57 PM

Is there a way to add this "answer" as an update to the question and delete it?

0

A: How to get abbreviations of the bibliography into the list of shorthands?

(this intended as comment, not as answer, but I dont know how to produce a comment) @Audrey Thanks again! Unfortunately I always detect new troubles while trying to solve my problem. Now there's a problem concerning the sorting of the list of shorthands. I suppose I should really wait for the of...

Andrey Vihrov

@PauloCereda Yes. Flag it for moderator attention as "not an answer".

Paulo Cereda

@AndreyVihrov Oh OK. Thanks!

Martin Scharrer

@PauloCereda I merged the two accounts of the user together and left a comment.

Paulo Cereda

@MartinScharrer Danke, Martin!

Martin Scharrer

@PauloCereda Bitte, bitte.

Paulo Cereda

9:11 PM

@MartinScharrer :-)

lockstep

9:35 PM

@egreg Now back at 647. ( I know, every reputation point I earn is just delaying the inevitable.)

egreg

9:45 PM

@lockstep Don't despair.

Bruno Le Floch

10:29 PM

@egreg At least Joseph was a baby. That was five years before some of us were even born :).

egreg

@BrunoLeFloch Just envy for being so late in learning TeX. ;-)

Transcript for

$TeX - LaTeX$ TeX, LaTeX and Friends