Interesting article that popped up on the LaTeX subreddit today: chalkdustmagazine.com/blog/is-there-a-perfect-maths-font I don't agree with everything in it, but it's nonetheless nice reading.

@yo' just 10 days back then but it litterally changed by life :-)

@FrankMittelbach :)

Has anyone "taken the plunge" with biber vs bibtex? It won't run my "standard" bib file that's been growing cruft for the last 10 years. (For my PhD and related research I use one relatively large bib file for everything.) And it's not "instant" like bibtex :) But I decided at TUG that 2015 was the year to actually use the bleeding edge (LuaLaTeX, etc.) for the majority of my work. So success stories would be nice to hear...

@WillRobertson Indeed

@WillRobertson The bigger issue is not BibTeX versus Biber but vanilla BibTeX versus biblatex

Morning @DavidCarlisle

@WillRobertson What's the problem? You need to correct/adapt some entries if you want to use biber (use real utf8, change date fields, remove some tricks etc) but normally it is rather straightforward.

@JosephWright morning. Any idea what I was doing here before I went away?:-)

@UlrikeFischer You don't have to use UTF-8 for accents: will still work with LICR

@DavidCarlisle Answering questions?

@DavidCarlisle We need to get the LuaTeX finilised

@JosephWright I know. But you will better kerning if you use utf8 - and less problems with some characters which biber translates to "glyph + combining accent", see e.g. github.com/plk/biber/issues/65. biber has to translate everything to unicode anyway to do the sorting. So it is a good idea to avoid to many commands.

@UlrikeFischer Nothing major -- like you say, just some tidying up where bibtex is less strict and/or verbose

@UlrikeFischer Oh certainly, I only meant you don't have to (also, if you need to use the database with BibTeX as well then it may be safer)

@JosephWright If I needed also an ascii-version for bibtex I would use biber --tool --output-encoding=ascii file.bib to get an suitable ascii file_bibertool.bib.

@N3buchadnezzar well, this would give Missing \item

@N3buchadnezzar you mean like what description does?

Well, the question is: why do you need a custom label in enumerate...

but labelfont=\bfseries should do I think

Because I am writing a problemset and reffering to the items given in the book.

@N3buchadnezzar ah ok. Well, this should do:

\begin{enumerate}[label=\normalfont\arabic*, font=\bfseries]

Would \setenumerate{ labelfont=\bfseries } work globally?

Heh, that worked thanks!

@JosephWright yes, what did you think to the idea of merging ltluatex.sty back into .tex? or did you get too diverted into l3build stuff to think about that?

@N3buchadnezzar yep, that would work globally I think.

the point is whether the default label of enumerate should be bold as well or not.

Dont care :p

@N3buchadnezzar ah ok, then, shouldn't you use itemize?

Yay, my new machine is on its way today!

I might get cardiff today!

:)

@PauloCereda I've had, including all our family computers, 7 machines altogether. You seem to get much more!

@yo' Oh let me count. Hold on. Update: 10 machines. :)

@PauloCereda can't you name all your flock?

@yo' Some of them got new names: alexandria, satyagraha, oxford, cambridge, trento, interlagos, padova, hamunaptra, herakompolis, and the new cardiff (I used to have thebes, tallahassee and other cities, but I can't remember right now). :)

@PauloCereda oh my goodness!

@yo': ^^ story of my life. :)

@PauloCereda no, it's not. None of your servers is called caffeine.

@yo' LOLOLOL

But my router is potato. :)

@PauloCereda you drink vodka?!

@yo' No? :)

@PauloCereda btw, I think cauliflower would have made more sense for a router name ;)

@yo' ooh I like it!

@PauloCereda or, if you wish something a bit shorter for a router name, broccoli :)

@yo': My old lab had used famous painters names, and I used to name my machines after famous writers. But then I decided to stick with places rather than people. :) (satyagraha is an exception)

@yo' OMG YES

@PauloCereda my dad's IT dept. leader was reading JRRT, so they have bilbo, gandalf, ...

@yo' Oh cool! :)

@Joseph's scheme is elements of the periodic table. :)

@PauloCereda oh!

@PauloCereda I wonder if helium makes high-pitch noises...

@yo' LOL

There was a kids show in Brazil about dogs running a TV station and there was this bloke named Jaca Paladium:

@JosephWright: ^^

:)

Jaca is jackfruit in Portuguese. :)

@Johannes_B Well, SmokeDetector has sometimes false positives :)

@yo' We've used that as well. I named my old terminal Undomiel. Nowadays I name mine from the Alien series. I have a netbook called newt. And my office PC is called nostromo. I keep forgetting what the wayland communication network is called, I want to use that as the ID for my wireless network at home.

@daleif Awesome!

Do you like games, @daleif?

@cfr: Ciça in a wooden box. ^^ :)

@PauloCereda ready to cover with soil?

@DavidCarlisle oh that's so mean. Poor Ciça. :)

She almost died though, she had to undergo a surgery to remove her reproductive system.

@PauloCereda cats have 9 lives though, so don't worry.

@DavidCarlisle :)

@PauloCereda Depends on what it is.

@egreg hmm see my comments on bf below that maketitle answer:)

@PauloCereda -- i think she deserves to be cuddled in a nice cozy (but lightweight) blanket. (a pretty creature.)

@barbarabeeton awwww <3

@DavidCarlisle I wouldn't use \bf in an answer anyway.

@egreg so I see, not even in one of my answers:-)

@DavidCarlisle :)

@egreg I'll change it to \normalfont\bfseries so the comments make some sense

@PauloCereda Indeed

@DavidCarlisle I'd favour having the one file, yes, as we are really not wanting to add a new package more roll up an existing one into the kernel (for the future) with the generic version as a fall-back for older LaTeXs + plain

@JosephWright OK I'll have a go at that tonight..

I see French is broken...

@DavidCarlisle Odd path: /usr/local/texlive/2015/texmf-dist/tex/generic/e-french/french.cfg

@JosephWright tlmgr just removed frenchle and added e-french I assume there is a config file conflict...

@DavidCarlisle Checking myself now

@DavidCarlisle Cool

@DavidCarlisle I think there shouldn't be a .cfg file with the name of a babel language in the tree

@JosephWright I just send a mail to texlive list

@JosephWright There has been an update just for that.

@egreg ?

@JosephWright tug.org/svn/…

% \changes{v3.1h}{2015/08/19}{french.cfg from e-french conflicts with
%    frenchb. Do NOT load it (no need for .cfg files with frenchb
%    anyway).}

Meine Wiener Schnitzel sind Schwartz :(

@yo' -- i think that's what comes from cooking them for too long without paying attention.

@barbarabeeton but my kitchen multitasking is getting better and better, this time I managed to prepare mashed potatos at the same time, tea for my granda, and come to her room twice to tell her the dinner is almost ready. Morevoer, I realized only today how painfully small my parents' kitchen is.

@yo' -- if you learn to cook over a camp stove, you'll appreciate any work space with a flat surface!

@barbarabeeton I cook at a camp, but not on a stove, rather in an "army kitchen"

@yo' -- that's different from a primus stove in front of a tent. (but i've never cooked for a large number of people while camping.) sometime i should send you my "guaranteed no-fail" recipe for pilaf.

@barbarabeeton "seasoned broth"? at a camp? ... We use bouillon (cubes) even for soups...

@yo' At first glance i thought this would be a trash can.

@yo' On a second look: Awesome, i wanna test it out and make pea soup for all of us :-)

@Johannes_B well, if you heat it up well, everything can be turned into trash in it :)

@Johannes_B you can make a lot of soup. Each of the pots has 25 litres of effective volume

Toronto 2016: No fancy banket, get the Gulaschkanone running.

@yo' How much servings is that? Rougly?

There are only some impossible things. For instance, if the recipe says "cook for 20 minutes on mild heat", you have to change it to "cook it for 12 minutes, and add water in it every minute".

@yo' -- nope ... instead of bouillon cubes, get the powdered kind. mix it right into the dry ingredients. (dry ingredients: equal parts rice and medium bulgur, with a medium handful of thin egg noodles crumbled up per cup of rice + bulgur. about 2 tablespoons of powdered chicken bouillon.) into the bottom of your pot, put enough oil or butter (butter tastes better, but is messier to pack into a campsite) to just cover, heat it up. (cont'd)

@Johannes_B you can serve roughly 60 people, depending on what you do. A portion of soup as entrée is roughly 1/3 litre. For a soup as a main dish (like your pea soup for dinner, for instance, served with bread), a portion is roughly 1/2 litre.

You can boil potatos for 50 people easily in one pot, similarly with pasta or rice. With rice, better be careful and use parboiled in boiling bags.

@Johannes_B speaking of goulash and sauces in general, goulash for 40 is a bit above one half of the pot.

(cont's) throw in the dry ingredients and stir until they're nicely coated and turning golden, then pour in about twice as much water, cover, and cook until done. stir again to fluff it all up and serve. you can experiment with proportions, but i've never known this to fail, and it's more interesting than rice-only pilaf. (you can add some finely chopped onion, cooking it a bit before throwing in everything else, if you're really feeling experimental.)

@barbarabeeton ok, I'll triple the amount of water and it may work in our conditions :)

but heck, I'm a "fancy cook" only at home. Outside, I prefer to keep it simple ;)

@yo' Are there any leftovers when you are in charge of cooking? If so, what happens with them?

@yo' -- no, the bulgur doesn't require as much water as the rice, and you don't want it soggy. try 2.5 times for a start.

@Johannes_B (I'll get there)

@Johannes_B -- my husband's mother always used to suggest that leftovers would be fried up for breakfast. (doesn't work so well with soup.)

@barbarabeeton No, not with soup. But i guess fried pilaf is great.

@barbarabeeton well, the machine brings 2--3 litres of cold water into boiling each minute, or evaporates a similar amount. So when you cook something for 10 minutes, you have to add about 10 extra litres of water.

@yo' How is heating? Electrical? Wood?

@yo' -- even if it's cooked covered? (that's a bit too fast for good pilaf.)

For lefrovers, it depends. Small amounts are kept in the kitchen; the older boys often eat them later that evening. Larger amounts are stored overnight and eaten at last the next noon. We put everything in/by a cold creek in the forest, so the things stay fresh quite well.

@barbarabeeton if you cover it, the lid jumps away. If you cover it with added weight, you get a lot of hot steam everywhere and a sort-of steam engine feeling. You can also close it and pressurize it; one boy has an experience with this, he got steam-burnt on the whole chest and stomach from opening it; of 15 litres of soup, only 3-4 were left in the pot.

Of course, you can, to some extent, regulate the heat, but it's very difficult. You use wood (@Joh), but the regulation is slow. Also, you regulate all 3 pots at once, which makes it difficult. Sometimes we remove one pot for maybe 2-3 minutes to regulate the heat; the stuff inside rarely stops boiling.

@yo' Is this a binary cooker?

@Johannes_B it's wood-fed

@egreg oh it's maintained directly in texlive not elsewhere and imported via ctan?

@yo' Wood is that effective?

@Johannes_B yes, of course. We can melt glass in a teepee fireplace. We regularly melt cans of all sorts.

@yo' Use less wood?

@Johannes_B yes, you you've got the soup in the other pot that needs to boil a lot just now because you put there too little water earlier, etc.

Imagine you have only one knob on your 4x cooker, and all 4 cookers are as large as the largest one. (Well, no, one of them is even larger.)

@yo' Does it go up to 11?

@yo' The pots are sinking in as part of the whole cooker? Or are there really different plates on which you place a pot (like a cooker at home)?

@JosephWright you mean the intensity scale? It starts at 11 ;)

@Johannes_B (looking up a good photo)

heck, no good photos here

@Johannes_B All 3 pots are in this photo, two in front, and one on the left behind:

309lisaci.wz.cz/2014/07/kronika_2014.html#foto633

@DavidCarlisle Maybe Javier

@yo' Ah, now i see. There really is full force all the time.

@yo' On a different matter: Are you a cowboy? :-p

@Johannes_B yep. They are made of alluminium, so the whole large surface conducts the heat inside.

@yo' You can melt glass in an aluminium pot?

@Johannes_B I think that in this place, my role was a city major ;) But my standard role in that camp was a pastor

@Johannes_B no, we melt glass in the teepee fireplace

@yo' What kind of glass is that?

@Johannes_B this was some glass bottle. Someone threw it in just for fun. It seriously changed shape.

@yo' A pastor is friendlier than the average cowboy, right? by the way, how popular are Terence Hill/Bud Spencer movies in czech?

@Johannes_B people really like them here I think.

@yo' Glass gets real soft quite quickly before melting. Well, it is a liquid anyway, but frozen :-)

@Johannes_B ah, well, sorry for misleading you then

@yo' I was just wondering :-)

I am actually interested in that kind of stuff.

@egreg just noticed your comment about \newcolumntype , sorry wouldn't have answered, but as it's you I'll let my answer stand:-)

@Johannes_B cool

@SeanAllred Interesting guidelines for patches to Git itself: github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/SubmittingPatches (see the entire mailing list business!)

Does anyone know how to add page numbers to automatically-inserted citations using RefTeX in Emacs/AUCTeX? I think it's supposed to prompt for optional arguments but it doesn't. (Yes, I am trying out switching to emacs from vim...)

Never mind, found it on this site: it prompts for it after C-u C-x [

Did people notice that Frank's added all of the team talk links from TUG0215 to latex-project.org/papers?

@AndrewCashner Andrew!

@yo' Tom!

@AndrewCashner sorry that I haven't responded yet. I wanted to write you about my lilypond preprocessor, but I didn't get to do it... :-(

@yo' @AndrewCashner both! :)

@PauloCereda <3

@yo' <3

@yo' No problem at all. I've been quite busy myself getting set up for my new job.

@AndrewCashner I hope you do well!

^^ @Werner splendid.

@yo' thanks. classes start next week. writing syllabi and writing a new LATeX syllabus class file at same time

That is a really strange question/answer/dupe-team. And a bit of time travel.

@AndrewCashner yay!

@DavidCarlisle :)

@yo' are you in FR for classes now?

@yo' Have to get to work. Take care.

@DavidCarlisle The updated LaTeX3 git mirror has found more of your excellent contributions :-)

@DavidCarlisle github.com/latex3/latex3/commits?author=davidcarlisle

@JosephWright Initial revision :-)

@DavidCarlisle Yes, just reading that

Variants of this language have been in use within the \LaTeX3 project
since around 1990 but the syntax specification to be outlined here
should \emph{not} be considered final. This is an experimental
language, and the syntax and command names may (and probably will)
change as more experience is gained with using the language in
practice.

:-)

Most of it still seems to apply

@JosephWright Of course:-)

@JosephWright do we need to sign up for that new commit list are are we on it already?

@DavidCarlisle I think I recognise the text from expl3.dtx (presumably got moved at some stage)

@DavidCarlisle You'll need to sign up: I don't control the list

@JosephWright OK

@DavidCarlisle One Git commit seems to have gone astray: I'm still working on getting it 100% right

@DavidCarlisle I think it's more sensible to have a list than the hand-edited list we have for the SVN even without the 'two faces' business

@JosephWright yes seems good idea, people can then watch activity even if they don't have a github account and without bothering us to be manually added

@DavidCarlisle Indeed

@PauloCereda Aw... ;).

stackoverflow.com/10m

@JosephWright not necessarily blaming you but I couldn't clone the git view and working backwards I see I can't ssh to comedy or do an svn update:

$ svn update
Updating '.':
svn: E210002: Unable to connect to a repository at URL 'svn+ssh://[email protected]/serv/latex-project/svn/latex2e-public'
svn: E210002: To better debug SSH connection problems, remove the -q option from 'ssh' in the [tunnels] section of your Subversion configuration file.
svn: E210002: Network connection closed unexpectedly

@DavidCarlisle OK here

palladium:latex2e-public joseph$ svn up
Updating '.':
At revision 780.
palladium:latex2e-public joseph$

palladium:experimental joseph$ ssh comedy.dante.de
Linux comedy 3.2.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.2.65-1+deb7u2 x86_64

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
You have new mail.
Last login: Thu Aug 20 22:09:35 2015 from host81-157-7-244.range81-157.btcentralplus.com

@JosephWright hmm will restart my network connection and ssh agent and try again...

@DavidCarlisle I don't have any special access to comedy

@AndrewCashner no, now I'm in Prague.

@JosephWright non-special access is better than no access:-) rebooted but same, I'll experiment with the debug logging with ssh access it's clearly changed there rather than svn or git.

@DavidCarlisle Odd

@DavidCarlisle Very odd

@yo' Yes

@yo' shh, that's a secret

@DavidCarlisle Indeed

@DavidCarlisle ah sorry :)

@DavidCarlisle Probably should not mention the actual port, rather defeats the point

@JosephWright yes thought about that (a bit late:)

@DavidCarlisle Just tried SSH to my work then from there to comedy: working (as far as a password prompt: don't have the right key on my work machine)

@JosephWright it does not. If someone makes a blind scan on port 22 to random linux machines, they didn't read this post. If someone wants to hack you, this is just security by obscurity to them

@yo' I mean more that the people in charge of the server don't make this info public so we probably shouldn't

@JosephWright I'll try connecting from work.

@JosephWright yes, I understand this. In that case you may want to remove the message completely, it's still in the message history

@yo' Good point: zapped

@JosephWright kk. Now I have to go finish cleaning up the schnitzel mess

@JosephWright odd If I ssh to work I can ssh from there to dante but going direct times out. I suspect they are blacklisting me (or my ISP or something) I need to check with Rainer I guess,

@DavidCarlisle :-(

(removed)

@DavidCarlisle quite likely this is the case. from home, I'm blacklisted to my French univeristy, I have to go through my Czech uni.

@yo' yes but I have been accessing that machine for some decades and I wasn't blacklisted before today:-)

@DavidCarlisle My update to the mirror has already been picked up: github.com/h-kitagawa/latex3/tree/h-kitagawa_test :-) (I did tip off the people with forks)

@DavidCarlisle Which ISP are you on?

@JosephWright well demon but that's vodaphone really now

@DavidCarlisle Ah, we used to be Demon but switched a while ago (they clearly wanted to get out of the domestic business)

@JosephWright I don't know why I pay them so much really it's just a BT line (and a 2Mbit connection) I have a fixed IP address but I don't really need it, but had that account (and email etc since ~1996 so it's in a lot of places:-)

@DavidCarlisle Indeed

@DavidCarlisle I do miss the fixed IP

@DavidCarlisle In my case, we've had morningstar2.co.uk for a long time so I've used it as an alias for other non-work addresses basically for ever

@JosephWright yes if I could go back in time I'd have got a non-ISP DNS name. I suppose I should do that even now..

@JosephWright The traffic is just a bit scary :-)

@Johannes_B Indeed

@Johannes_B I spotted this only because I was looking up something about Git

@JosephWright :-D Really? I should really work on my git skills.

@Johannes_B For our 'live' Git <=> SVN mirror

@JosephWright I forked @Martin's standalone repo on bitbucket, but git pull says that the repo cannot be found. :-(

@JosephWright There is really a lot going on right now, sadly i can't follow everything.

@Johannes_B are you sure you pull from the right place?

@yo' Marking the url and paste it in the terminal. Works like it with github.

So, no, i am not sure.

@Johannes_B ssh://[email protected]/martin_scharrer/standalone?

@Johannes_B less .git/config from your clone?

@Johannes_B there can be a special address, like the one posted by @Joseph

@yo' Hang on, that's a Mercurial address :-)

@Johannes_B Are you sure you shouldn't be using hg?

@Johannes_B You want to try being me

Would this work?

@JosephWright My normal workflow used to work just fine with the bitbucket repos. A friend told me he can acces the repo (cloning i guess). bitbucket.org/JohannesBottcher/standalone

@JosephWright :-)

Or maybe this: bohyunkim.net/blog/archives/2518

@JosephWright @yo' By the way, the only reason for forking was the search for the mysterious math option. I couldn't find it in the doc.

@yo' No matter if pasting directly or adding the url as remote, i get:

remote: Not Found
fatal: repository 'https://bitbucket.org/JohannesBottcher/standalone/' not found

@Johannes_B you don't need to fork, you should be able to pull a repo you don't own, you just can't push

@yo' That's still a fork, just not on BitBucket

shouldn't it be ssh://bitbucket.org/JohannesBottcher/standalone.git ?

$ git clone bitbucket.org/martin_scharrer/standalone
Nach »standalone« wird geklont
remote: Not Found
fatal: repository 'https://bitbucket.org/martin_scharrer/standalone/' not found

@JosephWright yes, right. Well, git doesn't quite know the notion of fork :)

I'm not on linux, but wouldn't git clone https://[email protected]/martin_scharrer/standalone.git work?

@yo' Only if it's a git repo

I am trying to figure out with all my consciousness if i am going insane.

@yo' The URL says its Mercurial

@JosephWright ah

It seems you can't pull by git from an hg repo, at least I didn't find any trace of this on teh webz

but @Paulo may be more experienced :)

@yo' Not without using one of the conversion programs, and that's really meant for a one-way change

@JosephWright @yo' I can do the following:

$ git clone bitbucket.org/JohannesBottcher/tikzposter
Nach »tikzposter« wird geklont
remote: Counting objects: 382, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (371/371), done.
remote: Total 382 (delta 248), reused 0 (delta 0)
Objekte werden empfangen: 100% (382/382), 1.75 MiB | 412.00 KiB/s, done.
Unterschiede werden aufgelöst: 100% (248/248), done.
Verbundenheit wird überprüft … Fertig.
[26426][boettchj.Pearl: testgittmp]$

@Johannes_B Yes, it's a Git repo: [email protected]:JohannesBottcher/tikzposter.git

But i can't access either the orig repo, nor my fork. Is there some kind of thing you can setup to save your repo from cloning?

@Johannes_B I don't understand

Now i am confused

@Johannes_B Martin is using Mercurial: it's not the same as Git

@Johannes_B You'd have the same if you tried to copy a Subversion repo using Git: won't work

@JosephWright Ah, now i do understand all this talk about mercurial :-)

@Johannes_B hg clone ssh://[email protected]/JohannesBottcher/standalone

@JosephWright Since i don't have any real interest in forking the repo, but am looking for the doc-source to find the math option. Can you check? It seems to be just missing iin the doc. Or i am getting blind.

@Johannes_B Give me a minute

@JosephWright odd, after timing out several times over last hour or so it cleared (perhaps someone's looking at the logs:-) and ssh login worked so I tried git clone:works.

@DavidCarlisle Phew

@DavidCarlisle did you add the line I suggested to get the SVN info too?

Now, as a starter i couldn't figure out that the repo is Mercurial. How did you guys see it?

@JosephWright not yet, was working down your mail and got stuck at the start, will do that now:-)

@Johannes_B It says hg in the URL :-)

@Johannes_B A Git remote would also be a 'bare' repo, so should by convention have a name ending .git

@Johannes_B Don't see a math option

@Johannes_B Notice I looked at the SSH URLs

@JosephWright The ssh busines is still a complete mystery for my :-(

@Johannes_B Overall the best way to work: once you have your public key on the server (and a private key on your system) all the communication is transparent

@JosephWright So simply missing from the doc i guess. A user reported that mails to @Martin's keep bouncing. How to reach him?

@Johannes_B Log an issue on BitBucket, I guess

@JosephWright A friend of mine has quite some knowledge about this stuff. I should give him a ping and invite him for a nice beer to go through the basics with me.

@JosephWright See, i am going insane. Didn't even came up with something as simple as that.

@Johannes_B It's not too hard, but does take a bit of getting used to

@JosephWright I guess i need vacation. I don't see an issue button. What is going on? I am, i looked at my onwn fork. sorry

@Johannes_B bitbucket.org/martin_scharrer/standalone/…

@Johannes_B Left-hand side, it's an icon

@DavidCarlisle Why does \emergencystretch change line breaking even when it is 0pt?

@AlanMunn it doesn't

@AlanMunn Example?

@DavidCarlisle Yes

@DavidCarlisle Anywhere in the same section will work (you can do it from the command line but a direct edit of the config file seems easiest)

@JosephWright bitbucket.org/martin_scharrer/standalone/issues/15/…

@JosephWright oops edited the question by mistake:-) as above, seems to have worked and git pull fetched something

@DavidCarlisle :-)

@DavidCarlisle Good

@DavidCarlisle Should show up with git log (or similar, e.g. in a GUI)

@AlanMunn \emergencystretch is 0pt by default.

Author: Joseph Wright <[email protected]>
Date:   Thu Aug 20 18:50:54 2015 +0100

    New location for the GitHub mirror

Notes:
    r5876 trunk

@JosephWright ^^

@egreg @UlrikeFischer Yes I know. My super minimal document isn't showing the effect. So it must be something to do with biblatex. Hang on. :)

@DavidCarlisle Phew

@AlanMunn are you sure \emergencystretch was non zero before you set it to zero?

@DavidCarlisle Unless biblatex sets it in its \parencite command, which may be what's happening.

@JosephWright we are about to blame you for @AlanMunn's \emergencystretch confusion.

@DavidCarlisle Probably

@JosephWright Not your fault I think. Here's a MWE:

\documentclass[draft]{article}
\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}

@article{fama-french:1997,
	Author = {Fama, Eugene F. and French, Kenneth R. },
	Journal = {Journal of Financial Economics},
	Pages = {153 - 193},
	Title = {Industry costs of equity},
	Volume = 43,
	Year = 1997}

@article{fama-french:1992,
	Author = {Fama,  Eugene F. and French, Kenneth},
	Journal = {The Journal of Finance},
	Pages = {427-465},
	Title = {The Cross-Section of Expected Stock Returns},
	Volume = 47,
	Year = 1992}

@article{fama-french:2002,

As you can see, \emergencystretch is 0pt at the beginning. So if you compile this document is gives awful overfull boxes. Now uncomment the \pretocmd line, and suddenly the overfull boxes disappear, but \emergencystretch still seems to be 0pt

@AlanMunn I don't have a usable biber to test the doc, but \the\emergencystretch\emergencystretch looks like it typesets the value of emergencystretch then assigns emergencystretch whatever length follows?

@DavidCarlisle eek, yes that must be what is happening. Sorry for the noise. :)

@AlanMunn I'm surprised you didn't get Missing number, treated as zero.

@yo' Yes, that's why I was fooled.

@DavidCarlisle \emergencystretch is global, so it doesn't really help to add it to the \parencite command anyway I guess.

@AlanMunn well, the value at \par is what counts ;)

@AlanMunn Not really global; the value which is current when \par is found is used for the whole paragraph, just like \leftskip or \linepenalty.

well, gotta go. G'night

@egreg But it doesn't go back to 0pt in the next paragraph though, right, once set to some non-zero value?

@AlanMunn No. \hangindent, \hangafter, \parshape, \looseness are reset, other parameters aren't.

@egreg Ok, that's what I thought. So if you're having lots of overfull boxes, what's the downside of setting it to some + value in a document?

@AlanMunn That you can get worse paragraphs in general.

@egreg So better to use \sloppypar then for most uses.

@AlanMunn sloppypar sets \emergencystretch 3em

@UlrikeFischer Yes, I know, but it sets it locally, right?

@AlanMunn yes, but you get set a (smaller) emergencystretch locally too. 3em is a lot.

@UlrikeFischer Ok.

@AlanMunn The code you added, besides printing the value of \emergencystretch, executes \emergencystretch\spacefactor\@m, which curiously is a legal assignment: it assigns \emergencystretch the value 1000000sp that's the same as 15.25879.

@egreg I did wonder what length it was picking up but decided I didn't dare look:-)

@egreg No wonder it appeared to work. I got (un)lucky.

@egreg Why did the assignment work?

@AlanMunn \emergencystretch is followed by \blx@citecmdinit, which starts with \blx@leavevmode@cite; this expands to \ifhmode \ifnum \spacefactor=\blx@sf@par \else \spacefactor \@m \fi \else \leavevmode \fi; the \ifhmode test returns true, while the \ifnum test returns false, so we remain with \emergencystretch\spacefactor\@m; in your case \spacefactor is 1000 and \@m is defined by \mathchardef\@m=1000.

So, for quite obscure reasons, we get the same as \emergencystretch=1000000sp

@AlanMunn Read chapter 24 in the TeXbook for learning how this happens. ;-)

@egreg TeX is bizarre in many ways. In this case we have an implicit multiplication and an implicit =, right?

@AlanMunn The = is always optional in an assignment to a <dimen> parameter.

@egreg Right, but the two lengths get multiplied first, right?

@AlanMunn In horizontal mode, \spacefactor can be used as an integer, while a <mathchardef token> is coerced to a length in sp in this case.

@DavidCarlisle Your picture skills are required:

@AlanMunn So the 1000sp is first multiplied by the current space factor.

Behold, cardiff is up and running!

@AlanMunn It's not really different from \emergencystretch=1000\dimen0, after \dimen0=1000sp.

@PauloCereda Umpteenth installation of TeX Live?

@egreg Ok.

@AlanMunn Very bad luck!

@egreg Yep, here we go again. :)

@PauloCereda I'm disappointed: I'd assumed the locale would be Welsh

@DavidCarlisle Iechyd da!