TeX, LaTeX and Friends

David Carlisle

09:37

@PauloCereda I'm having problems understanding this comment, it might be in Portuguese, could you translate?

@DavidCarlisle then I guess you do not use emacs much, due to how few problems vim causes. — physkets 31 mins ago

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle :)

Paulo Cereda

11:19

@DavidCarlisle It says, "I love emacs, it's so great it even makes toast!" :)

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda oh OK thanks for the translation. That seems reasonable in the context.

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle and there's toast! :)

egreg

14:21

@JosephWright We have some problems, as you certainly have already realized. :(

Joseph Wright

@egreg Something specific?

egreg

@JosephWright XePersian related

Joseph Wright

@egreg OK

egreg

@JosephWright Two rude answers in a day, plus an offensive comment.

@JosephWright I see you have already managed it.

@JosephWright Besides being rude, no help whatsoever was offered. The other two answers of the specific guy's incarnation are instead to the point.

Guilherme Z. Santos

@egreg Hello, I'm new here, currently in Germany and there's not much to do at work so I started participating in the community (it's addictive) but I feel you, there are some people that wants solutions for free by the wave of a magic wond...

Joseph Wright

14:28

@egreg Keep the flags coming :-)

egreg

@GuilhermeZ.Santos Well, we have TeX with which some magic can be done. ;-)

@GuilhermeZ.Santos Welcome to the chat! Do you know cricket?

Guilherme Z. Santos

@egreg Yeah, quite magical, yesterday I started the TeXbook (awesome book)...

@egreg It's a game right? But I never played it...

David Carlisle

Jun 21 '12 at 22:32, by David Carlisle

@tohecz you don't need to follow all news but you need to follow football, cricket, english grammar and national culinary dishes, in order to have the faintest hope of following conversation here which only rarely touches TeX

@GuilhermeZ.Santos ^^^

@GuilhermeZ.Santos skip to appendix D :-)

Guilherme Z. Santos

@DavidCarlisle I'm in bad Sheets then. I do not like to watch sports (makes me feel incompetent), of english grammar I believe I know how to write and speak properly but never paid much attention to grammar itself.

David Carlisle

@GuilhermeZ.Santos don't worry: I'm English so haven't any notion of English grammar other than "that sounds right"

Guilherme Z. Santos

14:36

@DavidCarlisle Although cooking I love... My mother's family is Italian and I'm Brazilian, I was pretty much born in the kitchen! :-)

David Carlisle

@GuilhermeZ.Santos @egreg and @PauloCereda are our usual resident Italian and Brazilian but don't start Paulo discussing food, he has a thesis to finish and is always looking for distractions....

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Speaking of which, did you read the draft L3 news?

Ulrike Fischer

@DavidCarlisle Most importantly not dishes with ducks ...

egreg

@GuilhermeZ.Santos What region in Italy is your mother's family from? Paulo's mother was born in a village near Bologna, where I often pass during my tours; there's good ice cream in the place.

David Carlisle

@JosephWright I skimmed over the checkin message, just checked it out and typeset will look again...

Joseph Wright

14:43

@DavidCarlisle Thanks

David Carlisle

@JosephWright looks like we need to invent a columns worth of future predictions:-)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Yes: I was kind-of expecting Frank to do that

Guilherme Z. Santos

@egreg I'm not sure of an specific location. I've been told that the Zanotelli family is tipically from the north region of Italy though.

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle 'Joseph will keep on about xor' probably doesn't work (anymore)

@DavidCarlisle Realistically, that needs us to agree on the issues currently raised on the team list

David Carlisle

@JosephWright yes, unless Frank wants to fill that space with a trip report about his trip to vienna (with Alice)

Joseph Wright

14:45

@DavidCarlisle Would be interesting, certainly

@DavidCarlisle That sort-of fits into the same ideas as raised on the team list, of course (as it's not xor)

Guilherme Z. Santos

@DavidCarlisle I will be tempted to discuss stuff with Paulo... He and Lauro César (abntex2 creator) are great friends of mine, even though they don't know me at all. They've both helped me a lot regarding TeX.

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle I was wondering what to talk about at UK-UTG: currently 'xparse revisited' and possibly a 'keyval survey' are in my mind

David Carlisle

@JosephWright luatex 1? (is Hans going to release that)

egreg

@GuilhermeZ.Santos Quite probably from Trentino.

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Erm, not sure what you or I might say about that!

David Carlisle

14:55

@JosephWright I could talk about positioning algorithms for floats of negative height

egreg

@GuilhermeZ.Santos mappadeicognomi.it/index.php?sur=zanotelli&s=Genera

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle :)

@DavidCarlisle Don't worry, Jonathan has lots to say!

Guilherme Z. Santos

@egreg Thank you so much for this link!!!!

David Carlisle

@JosephWright I might find myself unavoidably involved with a clashing meeting

Guilherme Z. Santos

@DavidCarlisle I skipped to the Appendix D... I'm not sure I'm ready for TeXarcana!

@DavidCarlisle The first two paragraphs almost made me laugh out loud in the company though.

David Carlisle

14:59

@egreg a red target for your next motorbike trip: mappadeicognomi.it/index.php?sur=carlisle&s=Genera

egreg

@GuilhermeZ.Santos The name has to do with "Giovanni", because in the Trentino or Veneto dialects it becomes "Zani", so "Zanotelli" may have originally meant "son of the little Giovanni"

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Mainly for the committee, I think: just avoid joining!

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Quite certainly some American soldier/officer in Vicenza.

Guilherme Z. Santos

@egreg My Name was almost Giovanni! My mom always tells me that she laid the choice to my dad between Guilherme and Giovanni... Now I wish my name was Giovanni. :(

egreg

15:31

@GuilhermeZ.Santos Not João? That's more common in Brazil

Johannes_B

Anybody aware of Y&Y TeX and alternatives?

Joseph Wright

@Johannes_B Going to be tricky based on vague specs!

wilx

@Johannes_B TeX Live?

How is that distro unique?

Johannes_B

@JosephWright I don't even know what Y&Y is. Never heard of it.

egreg

@Johannes_B code.google.com/archive/p/yytex

Johannes_B

15:48

@egreg Thanks for the link. I am not very wisr, though. Have to take a look at this later.

@JosephWright Oh, ok. :-)

Joseph Wright

@Johannes_B Sorry, thinking of something else!

Guilherme Z. Santos

16:14

@egreg João is truly common in Brasil, but I think my mom was not aiming for simplicity! :-P

egreg

@GuilhermeZ.Santos :)

samcarter

@Johannes_B Maybe related to tug.org/yandy ?

Johannes_B

@samcarter Yes, it is the same. :-) Thanks

David Carlisle

@Johannes_B was a nice system, one of the first to use scalable system fonts

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle I got round to looking at tex.stackexchange.com/questions/328825/…

@DavidCarlisle It's an issue in (x)dvipdfmx, I think, with gscale. If you use the approach from the expl3 TeX drivers, which use the same approach as pdfTeX, all is well:

\ifx\XeTeXversion\undefined\else
\def\Gscale@start{%
  \special{x:gsave}%
  \special{pdf:literal \Gscale@x\space 0 0 \Gscale@y\space 0 0 cm }}
\fi
\makea

David Carlisle

16:31

@JosephWright i wondered about trying to change the pdf but got distracted

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Same here: just came to mind so I had a quick hack

@DavidCarlisle Probably doesn't actually need changing, but it's nice to know where the issue is ('Not our fault')

David Carlisle

@JosephWright yes allocation of blame is always important

2

@JosephWright but in view of your "etex" policy question I was wondering if it would make sense to look again at graphicx \Gscale@div which isn't that accurate (which has caused problems with tabulary in the past and see if I can use etex arithmetic to get a bit better (without going to loading full expl3 arithmetic)

Johannes_B

@DavidCarlisle So, Lua and XeLaTeX seem to be modern alternatives?

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Certainly makes sense to me

@DavidCarlisle As I've said on the team list, I'm quite happy to make the first 'payload' in latex.ltx a check for e-TeX, but we probably have to tell people :-)

David Carlisle

@Johannes_B yes but there was also a nice previewer you could select characters and it would tell you what font it was, and have on screen rulers for measuring between points etc

Joseph Wright

16:41

@DavidCarlisle Will the round/truncate business be an issue? (I guess no, and it can be handled even so)

@DavidCarlisle We can fix it, though, I suppose: using the PDF-based special also works and avoids the problem

Johannes_B

@DavidCarlisle The OP mentioned stuff like that. Seems he is going to be disappointed.

Paulo Cereda

17:11

I sense a potential distraction for not writing my thesis!

@Guilherme: hello, hi, aloha, olá! Welcome to the chat and TeX.sx! Quack!

Guilherme Z. Santos

@PauloCereda Hello!! Distraction alert... Which thesis are you writing? Doctor, Ph.D.?

Paulo Cereda

@GuilhermeZ.Santos PhD, trying to, actually. :)

David Carlisle

@JosephWright that can be worked around but what I think I read somewhere is that it uses higher precision internally so you should be able to get more accuracy from an etex expression than from the equivalent chain of classic assignments, we'll see.

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Yes, division is higher-precision internally: it's in the manual

> The arithmetic performed by "-TEX’s expressions does not do much that
could not be done by TEX’s arithmetic operations \advance, \multiply, and
\divide, although there are some notable differences: Each factor is checked to
be in the allowed range, numbers must be less than 231 in absolute value, dimen-
sions or glue components must be less than 214 pt , mu , fil , etc. respectively.
The arithmetic operations are performed individually, except for ‘scaling’ opera-
tions (a multiplication immediately followed by a division) which are performed

David Carlisle

@JosephWright manual, I keep forgetting about those (I was going to look at the sources:-)

Guilherme Z. Santos

17:20

@PauloCereda Nice! I have a ABNT MS Word template if you need it, ok?

Just kidding guys, please don't kill me!

Joseph Wright

@GuilhermeZ.Santos I spend much of my working life using Word and similar tools, don't worry

Paulo Cereda

@GuilhermeZ.Santos You probably know about my declared hate towards ABNT and all the things they stand for. :)

@GuilhermeZ.Santos However, I have a nice setup for using TeX and ABNT. :)

Guilherme Z. Santos

@JosephWright I feel that I'll have to as well, but so far I was able to avoid it... Even have taken the trouble to translate some Word company docs to TeX. :-P

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright You will love my PPT presentation in our user meeting. :)

Guilherme Z. Santos

@PauloCereda Actually, I don't really hate ABNT, Lauro César probably does, he did all the work for me! =D

@PauloCereda You don't use abntex2?

Paulo Cereda

17:26

@GuilhermeZ.Santos Documentwise, I have no huge problems with ABNT in itself, my real anger is towards the madness regarding partitioning of a standard, which is heavily done by universities. Lauro is a hero of modern times.

@GuilhermeZ.Santos Only abnt2cite, IIRC. :)

@Guilherme: I have a really pragmatic view of ABNT, actually. :) That's why I can use it on TeX and friends without any problems. :)

Guilherme Z. Santos

@PauloCereda, yeah I think if back then I had the TeXperties I have now, I would format my own doc as well... I'm actually making a template for my university (UFSC) I'll present to them when I return in February...

Paulo Cereda

@GuilhermeZ.Santos How nice! :)

@Guilherme: It's a learning adventure for us all. :) I found out several things when writing my own thesis, and I've been using TeX since 2007!

Guilherme Z. Santos

@PauloCereda, yeah I can even imagine. It never ceases to suprise me, the things that people do with TeX are quite impressive and somewhat unimaginable provided that TeX is "just" a typesetting system.

Paulo Cereda

@GuilhermeZ.Santos Yep! :) So you are in Germany at the moment?

Must dash, time to get the shaky bus back home! Cheerio!

Guilherme Z. Santos

17:54

@PauloCereda, yes I'm in Germany doing my internship so that afterwards I can call myself and engineer! Great country but the language is... rather complicated, not to say something else ;-P

egreg

18:15

@GuilhermeZ.Santos I've heard children speaking German, so it must not be that difficult. ;-)

Guilherme Z. Santos

18:37

@egreg, smart kids man, damn smart! ;-D

David Carlisle

@egreg Ich finde Deutsch nicht schwieriger als andere Sprachen

Guilherme Z. Santos

@DavidCarlisle sehr Gut, aber Ich denke Deustch ist nicth so einfach...

David Carlisle

Dec 13 '13 at 9:34, by David Carlisle

@PauloCereda I am a master of all languages.

@GuilhermeZ.Santos ^^^ you may see that the good thing about this chat room is that you can drop out for two or three years and find the same conversation and pick up where you left off. (my linguistic ability is in amazing correlation with that of google translate:-)

Guilherme Z. Santos

@DavidCarlisle yeah I'm noticing it, almost as good as TeX cross referecing! And good that your cleared the air about the languages, I was about to ask how many you speak. :-P

David Carlisle

19:06

@JosephWright actually apart from one small tweak to avoid underflow error, the graphics package division does better then I remember, still probably worth using etex division though:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{expl3}

\makeatletter
\def\Gscale@div#1#2#3{%
  \setlength\dimen@{#3}%
  \ifdim\dimen@=\z@
    \PackageError{graphics}{Division by 0}\@eha
    \dimen@#2%
  \fi
  \edef\@tempd{\the\dimen@}%
  \setlength\dimen@{#2}%
  \count@65536\relax
  \ifdim\dimen@<\z@
    \dimen@-\dimen@
    \count@-\count@
  \fi
  \ifdim\dimen@>\z@
    \loop
      \ifdim\dimen@<8192\p@
        \dimen@\tw@\dimen@
        \divide\count@\tw@
    \repeat
    \dimen@ii\@tempd\relax
    \divide\dimen@ii\count@

egreg

19:42

@GuilhermeZ.Santos Actually @DavidCarlisle only speaks his own version of English.

Guilherme Z. Santos

@egreg hahahaa, what's that supposed to mean?

egreg

@GuilhermeZ.Santos He always says that he makes up the grammar as he goes along. ;-)

Guilherme Z. Santos

@egreg ohhh, I get it, completely. @DavidCarlisle, for me english is a very... I don't know how to put it, emotional language maybe. If you speak something and it doesn't sound right, it most likely isn't.

Joseph Wright

20:25

@DavidCarlisle Looks good: what's graphics+?

David Carlisle

@JosephWright its divb defined at the top of the file it just has one line changed \ifdim\ifnum\count@<\tw@\maxdimen\else\dimen@\fi<8192\p@ to stop it underflowing \count@ in the loop that does the rescaling before the division.

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Ah

@DavidCarlisle eTeX version shorter :-)

David Carlisle

@JosephWright yes but my loops work in tex2 (and y&YTex:-)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle :)

Alenanno

There's nothing more frustrating than code that should work but doesn't as expected. >_> I don't know what to fix!

barbara beeton

20:38

@GuilhermeZ.Santos -- he speaks (allegedly) british. we have a disagreement whether british is actually english, although i suppose it has historical precedent. he claims that i do not speak english, being a child of the colonies.

David Carlisle

Nov 17 '14 at 21:40, by David Carlisle

@Iplodman If there are no interesting questions to answer on site, we pass the time by being rude to each other (or at least, egreg is rude to me, I'm never rude of course)

Guilherme Z. Santos

@barbarabeeton, Indeed, tough question there. Since I speak USA english I feel much inclined to agree with you, although as you said, there is the historical thing.

David Carlisle

@GuilhermeZ.Santos ^^^ I am immune to their insults.

barbara beeton

@DavidCarlisle -- as we are immune to yours. a case of amicable disagreement.

egreg

20:55

@GuilhermeZ.Santos Everybody knows Shakespeare was from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Guilherme Z. Santos

@egreg, I don't see your point there, perhaps I'm not smart enough. :(

David Carlisle

@GuilhermeZ.Santos he's just trying to claim all english is american (his grasp of english history is about as good as his grasp of tex)

Guilherme Z. Santos

@DavidCarlisle, I've read some Shakespeare poetry, coulnd't understand sh**. All nonsense! :-P

David Carlisle

@GuilhermeZ.Santos just pass it through google translate english->german->portuguese->english and you'll find it is improved greatly.

Guilherme Z. Santos

Never rude huh... hahaha

David Carlisle

21:04

@GuilhermeZ.Santos oops.

barbara beeton

@egreg -- a former mother-in-law (whose family was irish) claimed that her italian instructor always claimed that shakespeare (syllable-ized as shak-e-spe-a-re) was italian ...

Guilherme Z. Santos

Ok, it's late here, I'll get going now, thank's for the chat everyone. But I'll definitely be back... I sure have found something to do at work! :-D

egreg

@barbarabeeton From Sicily, probably: it's the Crollalanza hoax

Paulo Cereda

23:06

Home sweet home!

sky-light

always

David Carlisle

23:23

@sky-light there are dozens of lscape examples on site eg tex.stackexchange.com/questions/196465/… or tex.stackexchange.com/questions/44221/…

sky-light

@DavidCarlisle I posted a question, do you suggest I delete it ?

David Carlisle

@sky-light sorry, it closed, but as I say it's one of many :-)

Paulo Cereda

@David: What did I miss today? :)

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda 627 instances of passing argument from incompatible pointer type

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Suppress -Wall next time. :)

David Carlisle

23:33

@PauloCereda -Wall isn't enough we like warnings:

-Wall -Wextra -Wno-unused-parameter  -Wmissing-prototypes -Wstrict-prototypes -Wwrite-strings  -Wunused -Werror=declaration-after-statement -Werror=vla

amongst other flags:-)

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle You sir are a legend.

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda or in this case, I do what I'm told:-)

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Fortran?

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda C calling fortran in the case for c library I generate >1000 functions that get past those flags with no warnings, for a new project I'm not quite there yet (code doesn't work at all yet but at least the bits that are generated should be warning free:-) but it's C so some random insertion of *(&*->foo) should clean things up.

sky-light

I used Fortran Power Station during my MSc

Paulo Cereda

23:40

@DavidCarlisle Oh cool!

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$TeX - LaTeX$ TeX, LaTeX and Friends