TeX, LaTeX and Friends

7:24 AM

Hi,
I just posted my sumission to the Show Off Your Skillz in TeX & Friends Contest. I followed all the instructions, and I deleted my post after posting it, but I can still see it below the question.

What should I do now?

Andrey Vihrov

@szantaii You can see your own deleted posts, it's by design.

You should notice that it is highlighted red and says "deleted by owner".

So… everything is fine :-)

szantaii

Okay, I checked it from another browser that I'm not logged in from, and I can't see it.

Andrey Vihrov

You can even edit the post without undeleting it, if you need to.

szantaii

@AndreyVihrov Thanks for the quick answer. Sry for the stupid question.

Ok, it's good to know that. Thanks again.

Martin Scharrer

7:56 AM

I think we should introduce a crazy-idea tag or something! :-)

egreg

8:07 AM

@MartinScharrer The \left recognizing macro is a candidate.

Martin Scharrer

@egreg Thanks. The current watermark question gave me the idea.

egreg

@MartinScharrer I can't see how to implement the "text protection" in an efficient way; the random shapes shouldn't be a problem. But the question deserves that tag. :)

Paulo Cereda

10:00 AM

Morning! I am late today. :)

Martin Scharrer

10:39 AM

Today I keep posting answer which only use my own packages ... tsts

Paulo Cereda

@MartinScharrer awesome packages FTW! :)

Martin Scharrer

@egreg I just had the following idea: Compile it as normal, convert every page into PNGs and then use a technique like pdfpages to create a PDF out of them.

-> LaTeX typesetting quality, but you can't copy any text. :-)

Then you also can add a watermark using an external graphics tool for every PNG / page.

egreg

11:37 AM

@MartinScharrer This wouldn't defeat OCR

Paulo Cereda

@egreg We could add a red background with black text on it. :P

wh1t3

12:13 PM

@MartinScharrer: also, that would lose scalability

Andrey Vihrov

You'll have to design something that humans can't read in order to defeat computer recognition

3

Paulo Cereda

If I'm not mistaken, a similar approach is used by the djvu format.

Martin Scharrer

12:59 PM

@covi You can't use \url or any other verbatim macro within another macro like \footnote. See Getting those %#!^& signs in the footnote! which should help you.

egreg

@MartinScharrer What's the delay before an answer can be accepted?

Martin Scharrer

1:27 PM

@egreg 15min after posting the question

wh1t3

3:33 PM

Why does pdflatex print a warning (LaTeX Font Warning: Command \Large invalid in math mode on input line) when \Large is used in math mode? The text is typeset with a larger face...

Brent.Longborough

@egreg : Thanks for your hyphenation answer. Did you really mean "don't do it", or were you just joking? (I bet Bringhurst would say "don't", if He could even imagine such an invention)

egreg

@BrentLongborough I really meant don't do it. :) Some typographic traditions use this device, but it doesn't add to clarity: it seems they're assuming that the reader can't read properly.

Brent.Longborough

@egreg OK, fair enough, I won't. {¦-{(

egreg

@BrentLongborough Russians want that a + at the end of line is repeated at the beginning; but the problem is when there's a minus!

Brent.Longborough

@egreg Yes, it seemed to me like a reasonable way to provide an additional "eyehook" when moving from one line to the next, but IANATE (I Am Not A Typography Expert), and I bow to the wisdom of The Community.

Paulo Cereda

4:15 PM

Long time ago, I saw my dad using the typewriter. When the word had to be hyphenated, the hyphen was like a little underline in the last letter. I do also remember to see another hyphen in front of the other part of the word, in the next line.

egreg

@wh1t3 While the text is effectively printed at a larger size, it's not recommended (and indeed an error is raised) to use \Large or similar commands in math mode; it's better to use them outside, protected by braces: {\Large$<math mode material>$}.

@PauloCereda Typists used underlining the last letter or the hyphen, depending if the hyphen would go beyond the right margin. But I don't exclude that some national tradition recommended only the underline.

Paulo Cereda

@egreg Ah, how nice! I had no idea. :)

egreg

@PauloCereda I myself typed my "tesi di laurea" with an electric typewriter that had different width characters. :) But symbols were handwritten in the spaces I left. The president of the final exam committee asked me only one question: "Who typed the thesis?", because he appreciated the result, so different from usual typewritten text.

Oh: no double spacing, of course. :)

Paulo Cereda

4:38 PM

@egreg Ah, the typing quality is strong in your blood after all. :) I never saw an electric typewriter, my dad still has his mechanical one. I thought the letters were all monospaced when using typewriters. :) Speaking of monospaced fonts, my dad had a bad time when he migrated to computers. Thankfully, his first editor was WordStar, so he adapted to the screen. But then Word came. :)

It took a while until my dad learned to type softer when using a keyboard. He broke a couple of them. :)

Martin Scharrer

I just got an email from Kjell Magne Fauske from texample.net that he doesn't maintain the site anymore.

egreg

4:56 PM

@PauloCereda With mechanical typewriters it was impossible to use non monospaced characters. IBM machines were the first to use proportionally spaced characters, I believe. The one I used was a Olivetti; the characters had a nice design, I think, but the main surprise was the "different look".

Brent.Longborough

5:26 PM

@MartinScharrer Do we know {if anyone, who} has taken it over?

Joseph Wright

5:45 PM

@BrentLongborough I'll get on to him asap - I've had a few interactions with him

@BrentLongborough I'll find out

Unless of course @MartinScharrer knows

@MartinScharrer Did he say anything else?

Joseph Wright

6:07 PM

For the first time in ages, I've hit the rep cap - 23 days now :-)

egreg

@JosephWright A whopping +402, wow!

Joseph Wright

@egreg Well 200 of that was a bonus from @MartinScharrer

lockstep

@JosephWright That is, for Epic?

Joseph Wright

@lockstep No, 23 days 'hit the rep cap by upvotes alone'

days represented 454
rep cap was reached via rep from upvotes *only* on 23 days
earned at least 200 reputation on 28 days

lockstep

@JosephWright I'm at 21/39.

Joseph Wright

6:16 PM

@lockstep So about the same on votes along, but a bit of difference on total rep. Seems about right

lockstep

@JosephWright I never had 400+ rep on a single day, though.

egreg

:2460477 days represented 233
rep cap was reached via rep from upvotes *only* on 112 days
earned at least 200 reputation on 132 days

Alan Munn

@lockstep I'm only at 11/17. No matter how many linguistic tree questions I answer, they're just not that popular. :-)

lockstep

@AlanMunn What about your biblatex badge?

Alan Munn

@lockstep You and Audrey continue to thwart its progress. :-)

egreg

6:20 PM

days represented 233
rep cap was reached via rep from upvotes *only* on 112 days
earned at least 200 reputation on 132 days

This should mean -18 (or -17)

lockstep

@AlanMunn Should I ask a question about biblatex? A simple one that is missing at tex.sx IMO? :-)

Alan Munn

There should be an Obscurity badge: answered n questions with accepted answer with < 5 votes.

lockstep

@AlanMunn There's "Tenacious" and "Unsung Hero". But they are about zero-score accepted answers. :-(

Torbjørn T.

@JosephWright Just ignore and delete that flag I just made.

(I need to learn how to read posts properly ..)

Alan Munn

@lockstep No, it's really fine. I'm sure a biblatex question will show up one of these days when you are asleep. I messed around with Canageek's biblatex-chicago question but Audrey beat me to it. (I hadn't quite figured out a solution anyway.)

lockstep

6:25 PM

@AlanMunn I just noticed that I already answered the question I had in mind. :-(

Alan Munn

@lockstep I've had that happen to me too. I asked a question on c.t.t that I had answered myself for someone else a year or so before.

lockstep

@TorbjørnT I flagged the answer as "invalid flag". That way, your flag weight shouldn't be affected.

Torbjørn T.

@lockstep Thanks.

lockstep

@TorbjørnT (I was close to flag as "not an answer" myself.)

egreg

@AlanMunn I have many with 1 upvote and one with zero.

lockstep

6:35 PM

@egreg IMO, zero-score accepted answers are a flaw in the stackoverflow design. Accepting an answer should automatically upvote it, too. (And the "Tenacious" and "Unsung Hero" badges should be about score-one accepted answers.)

Paulo Cereda

We had an Internet network failure! Must... be... connected... in TeX.sx...

On a less dramatic note: is it ok to write a blog post about rubber?

Alan Munn

@egreg I would assume that the scores are normally distributed, and you have almost 4 times as many answers as me, so that's not very surprising. I wonder if there's a way to find this out on dataexplorer.

@lockstep Yes, I've never seen the sense in zero score accepts either.

Canageek

7:04 PM

Alright, what are the best resources for how to make a table? I've got about a zillion things on it, no idea which ones are current, and they are all involve different packages. I thought I had this working until I tried to put text in it.

egreg

7:14 PM

@Canageek Read the manual for booktabs, it's very illuminating

Alan Munn

7:25 PM

@Canageek And apart from booktabs you shouldn't need much else: maybe dcolumn or siunitx for nice formatting of numbers and longtable or supertabular if you have a table that will take up more than a page.

12

Q: Footnotes in tables?

I would like to have footnotes in tables, but the \footnote command does not work inside a table environment. Googling one finds that this is a frequently asked question, at least in the UK. That link contains a list of solutions to the problem, but since the author of the FAQ does not believe ...

Is this really the only question we have about footnotes in tables? The answers aren't really very good.

Paulo Cereda

8:22 PM

Friends, I was thinking of updating a very old answer of mine. It would be a relevant update, but I'm not fond of bumping old threads. What do you guys think?

egreg

@PauloCereda Go forth.

Joseph Wright

What do we feel is the best resolution for

0

Q: cleveref package produces "??"

I've used the second answer in Multiple references to the same footnote with hyperref support - is there a better solution?, yet, like @Jake in the comments, it produces some ?? in my document. Anyone has a clue? Edit 1: I've compiled twice. The code is exactly the one of the second answer (show...

cross-referencing cleveref

Paulo Cereda

@egreg Thanks. I'll do it ASAP. :)

@JosephWright Too localized, perhaps?

lockstep

@PauloCereda Indeed.

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda Okay

Paulo Cereda

8:29 PM

Today is probably listings day. I've never seem so many listings questions. :)

Joseph Wright

8:47 PM

Right, I'm a bit confused. What do you want me to do about

0

A: Bibliography is not printed using Kile on Ubuntu

I had the same problem. Uninstalled and installed "texlive-publishers" as suggested above, and now the whole thing stopped to work! Most of my packages and fonts were removed and weren't re-installed. I had to spend 2 hours to see what is missing (texlive-extra packages, texlive recommended fonts...

On the texample.net issue, I've heard back from Kjell and will be exploring what needs to be done. I may well be looking for volunteers to assist!

egreg

9:18 PM

@JosephWright Suppose I want a control sequence stand for \space or \par, depending on package options; should I say \cs_set_eq:NN \kgl_star: \space or should it be a token list? I guess it's a function. And what's the name of \space and \par?

Background: as part of personal lectures on LaTeX3 I'm rewriting lipsum but using different paragraphs.

Joseph Wright

@egreg I'd probably go with something like \cs_new:Npn \mypkg_flexispace: { \c_space_tl }. I would not usually \cs_set_eq:NN, but particularly in this case as \par has a variable meaning.

The names we use (at present) are \c_space_tl for an explicit space token, and \par for a 'user-level' paragraph token.

The later is hard-wired into TeX, and therefore must be defined (see the LaTeX3 format-mode code comments). At an implementation level, what \par means can vary - see xgalley for the current LaTeX3 plan on this.

The entire 'is it a token list or is a function with no arguments' area is pretty grey. 'Use your judgement'!

egreg

@JosephWright Yes, of course. I'd use \cs_set because the options interchange the meanings of two functions. Why \cs_new:Npn and not \cs_new:Nn?

Joseph Wright

@egreg There has been quite a bit of internal discussion about \cs_set:Npn versus \cs_set:Nn. The problem with the later is that it takes a long time (do a time comparison with a decent size loop), and we need the :Npn version in any case. Frank M. and I feel overall that the code is clearer with :Npn, Will is more minded to use :Nn where applicable.

I suspect Morten H. would also favour :Nn, but he's busy these days. Not sure about Bruno's position.

My aim to to have a clear 'rule' in as many cases as possible. I can't give a good one for :Nn, so tend to avoid it.

The reason I've decided (after a bit of uncertainty) to favour :Npn is that it's quite easy to 'loose' what is going on with the implicit :Nn approach. With :Npn, you know how many arguments the function actually takes. (Internal code does not always absorb everything, after all.)

Martin Scharrer

9:43 PM

@JosephWright No, just that he will announce it officially on the website soon. There is a post asking for volunteers for maintainer-ship. But it is from 2010 already!

Joseph Wright

@MartinScharrer I'd rather assumed he'd got the help he needed (see the comment he added to the blog post).

I'm waiting for detail on what is needed (look after the examples, worry about the back-end, take over the entire site, ...)

egreg

10:31 PM

@JosephWright Another question: for \unskip is there only \tex_unskip:D?

Canageek

11:14 PM

@egreg @AlanMunn Ok, I'm using booktables now, I'll read the manual again. I just entered a line of text into it and all of a sudden the first column runs off the page, instead of wrapping downwards.

egreg

@Canageek If a column should contain paragraphs, it must be specified as p{<length>}

Canageek

@egreg paragraphs? I want it to say "Previously performed by Bryan FooBarBaz"

@egreg OHHHh, I see, thank you

egreg

@Canageek tabular doesn't break lines by itself, unless it's allowed to by a p{<length>} specification. Columns defined via l, r or c will not be broken.

Canageek

@egreg So I have to manually test what works for each column? wimpers

@egreg I decided it was easier to use short forms and add a legend.

Is there a proper way to add a legend to a table?

egreg

11:35 PM

@Canageek If the table hasn't p columns, you can say \bottomrule\addlinespace at the end and \multicolumn{n}{l}{First legend entry} (where n stands for the number of columns in the table) and repeat similarly for other legend entries.

Canageek

@egreg I already remade it, and it looks nicer this way. I just put in PP for previously performed and * for the entry that needs additional explanation. I'm now trying to figure out how to attach this information to the table.

2

Q: How to "glue" the caption to the table (stay on the same page as the table)

Normally, my captions stay with the table (cannot remember my exact example - couldn't replicate it - but I am now using the booktabs package anyway so let us take this one just in case this one is easy to solve...) Can you see any reason here why the caption may not be "glued" to the table? I w...

tables captions page-breaking

There we go.

egreg

@Canageek As Martin answers there, if the tabular and the caption are in the same table environment, there's no way that they can be separated.

A legend may well find its place in the caption, actually.

Canageek

4

Q: Tabular: title above and caption below?

I have a table that I would like to put the Title above and a caption below. Intuitively (though I know how troublesome intuition can be in something like LaTeX), I should be able to do as below: \begin {table}[H] \caption {Table Title} \label{tab:title} \begin{center} \begin{tabular}{ >{\ce...

tables captions

Opps, wrong question.

1st and 3rd answer show that all I had to do was add the text inside the environment and it works perfectly. Well, with a couple of line breaks and a flushleft

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