@PauloCereda: It's a mixture of real stuff and fiction of course... entertainment..., but good actors of course. My fiancée and I were at the cinema, with a lot of students of CS, I suppose ... no teenagers :D Just nerds :D
@Johannes_B Yes, I can see that. As I've indicated above, the 'standard' position I've taken with the case changing code I'm messing about with is simply to use the current Unicode data as-is, and that says ß maps to SS when upper casing.
@ChristianHupfer He was also subjected to sustained harassment by the British govt. Forced to do hormonal treatment, among other things. Funny way to say thank you.
@FaheemMitha I think he had that anyway: it was clear what they were up to could lead to big issues but there was the problem that until you do the work you don't know the answer
@Johannes_B I wonder if we will have a brave person to name his son/daughter using a complex Unicode sequence. It would be a followup joke of Little Bobby Tables. :)
Since I'm a total newbie to LaTeX I was asking myself if there is a special website or downloadable program which creates a LaTeX document for me. Like in the beginning I would start the program (website) and I need to set the preferences like "What kind of document class I would like?" or "which...
I agree with Xavier on the first two points.
Another advantage of LuaTeX over XeTeX is that LuaTeX uses the PDF engine of pdfTeX, while XeTeX uses its own one. One consequence of this is, that all features of the PGF graphics package (on which TikZ builds) should be available also under LuaTeX, ...
Maybe this will be considered a bit of a nitpicking argument, but I constantly find myself asking: In a paragraph where the last word is bold or italicised, should I make the period at the end bold or italicised too.
For example, which of the following is preferrable?
Today I met a lot of in...
thesis list one university specific thesis template. I see @PaulGessler a few comments above, who also maintains a special class. We certainly cannot list all of them, who chooses which ones make the list? Or in other words, just mention that there are specialised classes and drop this specific mention?
@Johannes_B I didn't even realize one specific class was mentioned. Anyway, I don't feel the need to have mine added, because its user base is very small at the moment.
@FaheemMitha quite (If I had read that out of context I would probably have guessed it meant something to render pdf) and a consequence of that is that like graphics or color the amount to which features work the same way on different back ends depends on the lengths people go to make that so. I'm not aware of any pgf requirements that require pdftex rather than classic tex or etex, but there may be some I don't know pgf that well.
@JosephWright So I decided that since I use titlesec and tweak it badly, I'll opt for pure L2e for the sectioning commands. I somehow feel it'll be cleaner.
@FaheemMitha For questions that ask for an opinion of something my inclination is not to edit other people's opinions. You could always leave a comment asking the person who wrote that to give an example of something that doesn't work in xetex.
@FaheemMitha -- very simple, really, why the ams was interested. knuth was invited to present the gibbs lecture (a public lecture by an eminent scientist, not particularly a mathematician, whose work utilizes math) at the 1979 annual meeting. his subject was mathematics in the service of typography, and in the lecture he introduced tex and metafont.
the typesetting system in use by ams at the time was not ideal, and tex sounded like it was ready for use. the head of the ams board of trustees, dick palais, was instrumental in seeing that the opportunity was not missed. things turned out to be somewhat more complicated, but in the end, tex was installed and made into a production system.
This utter mess of zip-files containing strange templates. It is one thing to say i cannot provide an MWE, i have a template. But not being able to proper link a centralized place and instead uploading that piece of crappy template to a freaking dropbox. Realizing that one has downloaded that i'll written (and by now updated) template for the fourth time. ARGH
@DavidCarlisle Unlikely to get an answer though. Last seen Aug 16, 2013.
@barbarabeeton I see. That's interesting, thanks. I guess I was wondering why other users of mathematical typesetting systems, of which there must be many, were not also interested.
Was it because TeX was not production-ready at the time? Or simply that they didn't know about it? Or that they didn't take serious software work coming out of academia?
The solution of LOF+LOT+BIB in TOC with numbered chapter does not work in my case.
Admittedly I used a template of some other person - when I produce a Pdf with his code all above mentioned sections are numbered. However, when I produce the Pdf of my code, these sections remain unnumbered - whic...
@ChristianHupfer -- before the movie existed, there was a graphic novel by the same name -- "the imitation game" -- that i understand was based on several reliable biographies, which in turn had input from turing's mother and others who knew him. this novel is much more detailed than any movie can be, and it seems to me to more accurately tell the story. (the novel isn't mentioned in any of the movie reviews.)
@FaheemMitha -- not so many math typesetting systems, and those pretty expensive. math has always been "penalty copy", with a relatively small audience. ams was willing to take a chance; but other publishers like having the "guarantee" of a license under which, if something goes wrong, some established and well funded company will promise to fix it.
@FaheemMitha -- oh, okay. (yes, more users than systems.) the content and complexity of math notation in ams publications is far greater than that in those of acm or ieee. physicists are the next heaviest users of nasty notation, i think. and i believe there's not a really wide overlap in membership between ams and either acm or ieee, so i suspect it took a while for the word to get around.
@FaheemMitha in my (limited) experience, when too many people get involved too early, more time is spent deciding what to do than actually doing things. :-)
@PaulGessler but without support such efforts can flounder early. Though I guess Knuth was an unusually determined and capable individual. Who presumably had the spare time and energy needed. Presumably being a tenured professor helped.
@PauloCereda -- please observe the copyright. i'll send you the author's address off-line; i was expecting that this would be published in hard copy by now, but i haven't heard of that happening.
@yo' \newenvironment{yellowtab}{\begin{lrbox}{0}}{\end{lrbox}\colorbox{yellow}{\usebox{0}} then leave it for the user to put any kind of content in there
@PaulGessler It's sort of document and sort of fixable as the overhang is \tabcolsep so if you effectively change that you need to specify a different overhang. Except that means dropping back to \multicolumn{1}{>[\rowcolor... as that's the only form with the overhang arguments
U+0075 LATIN SMALL LETTER U
U+0073 LATIN SMALL LETTER S
U+0065 LATIN SMALL LETTER E
U+0062 LATIN SMALL LETTER B
U+200c ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER
U+200b ZERO WIDTH SPACE
U+006f LATIN SMALL LETTER O
U+0078 LATIN SMALL LETTER X
@yo' yes to google prettify, but I think you'd need an explicit comment to switch code blocks to l3 syntax, I can't see any automatic way that would be reliable enough
Do you think it would be worthwhile to provide hints as to what language to use for the syntax highlighting?
Sometimes I find the highlighting on SQL or VB.NET answers is more distracting than helpful; for example:
Converting MySQL select to PostgreSQL
Retrieving data from a VB.NET arraylist o...
@SeanAllred I worked on latex3 mostly before we did latex2e, so it's a while back now. But apart from answering questions here I haven't really used tex at all for ten years or so so I just got out of practice:-)
@yo' There are three kinds of leaders: \leaders, \cleaders and \xleaders; the first kind aligns the boxes with respect to an imaginary infinite grid as wide as the box to be repeated. It doesn't necessarily start from the left.
@FaheemMitha -- ams-tex didn't/doesn't support automatic numbering and cross-referencing, and mike spivak wasn't particularly impressed with the way that was done with latex. however, the preponderance of authors really needed those features. spivak extended ams-tex to lams-tex, but latex was there first, and the ams succumbed to the pressure to adopt it. the math facilities were reworked into what is now amsmath, and the document processing into ams classes and amsthm.
I have come across an ancient (1995) LaTeX file which was (surely) once compliant, but now does not compile at all. Is there any way to rescue it?
My actual question is much more precise. I want a copy of the follow paper on the arXiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/alg-geom/9401005
Downloading the pdf ...
@egreg -- i'm not aware of any reliable source for the basic lams-tex manual. however, the "wizard's manual" has been posted on ctan: mirrors.ctan.org/macros/lamstex/doc/… (but it's probably better to use the ctan search).
@egreg -- ah, spring! maybe it will come to providence sometime. (and when it does, i will have my annual debate with myself ... is this the year i succumb and again acquire a vespa?)
@egreg -- gotta get rid of the snow first -- the piles by the sides of the street are way taller than the top of my head, and more came down today. i know from past experience that a two-wheeled vehicle (human- or motor-powered) is not safe on snow, ice, or wet leaves!
@FaheemMitha -- some are not so little. but they are much more decorous to ride than your average motorcycle, especially if one tries to be a lady and wears skirts.
@egreg -- quite a few people do. but it was easier, and less dangerous, before all the interstate highways were built. (and you have to like hills. when i was in college, not all that many people had bicycles. i got up college hill by going into the providence county courthouse on the ground floor, asked the elevator operator to let me off at the fifth floor, walked out the back door, and was still only halfway up the hill. try that now ...)
@egreg -- no, i meant a pedal bike. some masochists i've seen recently (but before it started snowing) are riding single-speed bikes (there's a fancier name, but i've forgotten it) around providence. certainly something i could never manage!
@yo' -- maybe. they look like slightly heavy-duty road bikes, with straight handlebars. but they do have caliper brakes, not a coaster brake. neither "bmx" nor "fixie" is the term my husband used to refer to them though, i don't think.
@yo' I'm looking forward to hearing details as well. Certain soon-to-be-made decisions may allow me to make the trip. I initially thought I wouldn't be able to make it.
@yo' oh, you're right, I've just checked. It used to be that some airline did, I thought. But not anymore I guess. Or maybe I'm remembering wrong. My uncle used to fly to Germany/Switzerland for business often.
@yo' $25 one-way. But that train only goes to Union Station (downtown) or some northern suburbs, then you have to find another method to get to the airport.
@yo' yeah $25 is not too bad. The trains aren't bad, but I wouldn't call them "comfy". (Though I got spoiled by the train system when I was in Switzerland... :-) )
@yo' when my wife and I were in Paris on honeymoon in June, we never took the TGV or other lines. Only Métro and one trip on the RER to/from Versailles.
According to TeX by Topic \ifx tests macro equality in the following manner.
Equality of tokens is tested in a stronger sense than the above by
\ifx token1 token2
Character tokens are equal for \ifx if they have the same character
code and category code.
Control sequence tokens...
It says gives true and false. What does that mean. I tried testing it, and I just get a blank.
\ifx\somecommand\undefined returns true provided \undefined is really undefined and also \somecommand is undefined. On the contrary, \ifdefined\somecommand returns true if \somecommand is defined and doesn't rely on another token being undefined.
@FaheemMitha It depends on what you mean by “having booleans”. The syntax of TeX conditionals is “\IF<test><true text>\else<false text>\fi, where \IF` is one of the primitive conditionals. The <test> in the case of \ifx consists of two tokens. In case of \ifdefined the <test> is just one token.
This is amazing article to read about Walter Pitts: "When he was offered his Ph.D., he refused to sign the paperwork. He set fire to his dissertation along with all of his notes and his papers. Years of work—important work that everyone in the community was eagerly awaiting— he burnt it all, priceless information reduced to entropy and ash. Wiesner offered Lettvin increased support for the lab if he could recover any bits of the dissertation. But it was all gone."
@FaheemMitha primitive tex conditional are basically weird and have all kinds of traps for the unwary, that is why there are so many packages that try to give some syntax with more easily describable behaviour, ifthenelse, etoolbox, expl3, ....
@FaheemMitha thanks for the link. Reading these, I am glad I am not a genius so that I do not have to worry about doing something crazy like these guys did and end up dying too early.
@FaheemMitha \expandafter builds a token from \csname R@#1\endcsname before \ifx is executed. If the argument at call time is foo, this is the same as doing \ifx\R@foo\relax, which returns true if \R@foo is undefined.
I have come across an ancient (1995) LaTeX file which was (surely) once compliant, but now does not compile at all. Is there any way to rescue it?
My actual question is much more precise. I want a copy of the follow paper on the arXiv:
http://arxiv.org/abs/alg-geom/9401005
Downloading the pdf ...
According to TeX by Topic \ifx tests macro equality in the following manner.
Equality of tokens is tested in a stronger sense than the above by
\ifx token1 token2
Character tokens are equal for \ifx if they have the same character
code and category code.
Control sequence tokens...
