Why is SO migrting that stuff to us?

@Johannes_B Because it is marginally more on topic than on SO? :)

The AMA style reference is not even accessible without subscription.

Geebus.

GEMA is no more! I can finally troll send links to German people! <3

@PauloCereda They'll be able to see new yodel videos!

@egreg YES

@DavidCarlisle: ^^ did you enjoy my comment? :)

@PauloCereda no

@DavidCarlisle oh

@PauloCereda ambiguous reference, did you mean IEEE 754-2008 or IEEE 754-1985, enquiring humans need to know these duck details.

@DavidCarlisle oh my

@DavidCarlisle, last week I was in your territory! Did not get the Chance to go to London, unfortunately.

@DavidCarlisle But Manchester was quite nice! =D

@GuilhermeZ.Santos not been to Manchester for ages (but lived there for ~30 years:-)

@DavidCarlisle Humans from NAG do

@DavidCarlisle ManUtd

@JosephWright yes because normal humans don't care about the details of arithmetic standards as they are too busy obsessing over the details of the SI standards

@DavidCarlisle nature.com/nature/journal/v538/n7626/full/538459e.html

@PauloCereda I managed to live there all that time without ever going to Man Utd (or Man City:-)

@DavidCarlisle ooh :)

@DavidCarlisle I respect such man!

@DavidCarlisle Too bad, it's very nice there, except for the traffic jam, jeez what a mess that traffic!

@JosephWright They need to measure them furlongs. :)

@GuilhermeZ.Santos They drive in the wrong side, that's why. :)

@PauloCereda what is your blood pressure in stones per square furlong?

@DavidCarlisle o.O

@PauloCereda Most likely... ahaha

@GuilhermeZ.Santos although I don't think the traffic is as heavy as compared to SP. :)

@PauloCereda Considering that they have good traffic structure and 4 lanes roads jammed, I'd say it may be as heavy but not as jammed. If you know what I mean...

@JosephWright I don't know the contents of the article, but I'm pretty sure that 140/90 mm Hg is not really too much different from 18.6/12 kPa

@GuilhermeZ.Santos I believe that anybody who regularly goes to SP is an expert in traffic jams.

@GuilhermeZ.Santos Oh I see. :)

@egreg and shaky buses. :)

@PauloCereda I use quality trains, with free wine, as you know. :P

@egreg Would you care to bring such facilities to Brazil?

@egreg In the past, they used to give me free water, but now they don't even say "good trip!" to anyone. :)

@PauloCereda When did this free water happened? o.O

@GuilhermeZ.Santos Don't mention trains, it's one of my huge rants about this country. We should use trains to go everywhere, but the government thought roads would be better in a country of continental proportions. :)

@egreg s/free/pre-paid/

Maximum I got was good morning.

@GuilhermeZ.Santos It was during long trips, like from SP to the countryside. They had a secret box of water in the back of the bus, but then one day I discovered it. :)

@DavidCarlisle Less than 7€ per trip is quite a bargain.

@PauloCereda Ohh yeah, I complain about that pretty much every time someone mentions high cost tolls and poor Quality roads, I say, "Blame it on the lack of Trains"...

@GuilhermeZ.Santos We should be connected by trains. :(

@GuilhermeZ.Santos A high speed train could do SP-Rio in a couple of hours.

@PauloCereda Ah yep, I thought you're talking about city bus. This Long travel buses still have water, and some even coffe. But I wouldn't dare drinking the coffe... ahaha

@GuilhermeZ.Santos With much less impact than airplanes

@GuilhermeZ.Santos Oh but you are in a more privileged area of the country. :)

@egreg You know there is/was (don't know anymore) a plan for building that Train line. But it's a dumb one, Brazil Needs Train rails to Transport cargo, not People! The current System relies solely on trucks, that's awful, it destroys the roads, increase chances of accidents and etc.

@GuilhermeZ.Santos A good train line can do both cargo and passengers

@egreg It should be a Train line covering Brazil North to south, then it would truly make things better...

@GuilhermeZ.Santos I'd favour a passenger line as well. My dad once took me to travel a small distance by train just to "make me experience what a train looks like before they deactivate the service". It was awesome.

@egreg Of course, but Rio-SP is much more of a People Train line then a cargo one. You know?

@PauloCereda I favor that too, but if there was one to build, I'd want it to be focused on cargo. On the likelyhood of that Happening...

@PauloCereda which Train line was that?

@GuilhermeZ.Santos It was a local line from Itirapina to Rio Claro.

@Guilherme, @egreg: even my city had a station! estacoesferroviarias.com.br/a/analandia.html

@PauloCereda Analândia! Is that supposed to be like Ana's land or something?

@GuilhermeZ.Santos Exactly! The patron saint is Saint Anne (Santa Ana). It was originally Anápolis and later became Analândia. We just changed the suffix from Greek to Saxon. :)

@egreg Given a scaling, yes, but my guess is there is no advantage to SI units here at all: the entire business is 'self-contained' (the actual units are entirely arbitrary for practical purposes)

@PauloCereda A station but no railroad!

@JosephWright We could use cubits for practical purposes instead of meters or feet.

@egreg Certainly :)

@egreg My point is that for some measurements one never needs to convert to anything else, so the advantages of SI don't show that strongly. There's then a barrier to change which is hard to overcome.

@egreg Not anymore. :(

@barbarabeeton mico's answer is better:-)

@DavidCarlisle -- you're right. i've given it an upvote. (could use an image though.)

@barbarabeeton any thoughts on genfrac? if it's going in I'd rather put in svn sooner rather than later (not to ctan until 2017/01/01 release, but that's getting closer)

@DavidCarlisle -- have handed it around for comments; no response. i shall nag.

@barbarabeeton given that the current code doesn't work at all, the proposed new code can't be any worse, it seems to me:-)

@DavidCarlisle -- oh, i agree with that, but if the local support guys who have to deal with questions don't buy in, i'll get grief for "not checking". i value calm in my old age.

@barbarabeeton tell them if they prefer (and given the season) I could write all new amsmath extensions in the style of xii if that would help answer support calls.

@DavidCarlisle -- oh, no! i'm actually the one who answers most (external) support calls, but that doesn't stop the others complaining.

@David: don't be mean to barbara!

@barbara: did you enjoy my Duck Potter? :)

@PauloCereda -- not sure of the reference ... if you meant the slippery landing, that has now been circulated to folks at the local zoo for their amusement. (but really, swans landing on unfrozen water can be even funnier. think barefoot water skiing.)

@barbarabeeton Oh I meant cfr's seasonal contest. :) I added a Potter-like duck!

@PauloCereda she might appreciate some christmas carols while she works

@DavidCarlisle ooh

@JosephWright: I am beginning to think ResearchGate knows I like Fawlty Towers...

@DavidCarlisle -- i can sing "xii" in latin. so there. ("promo die festali, amator mi misit ...")

Although I never had a Waldorf salad. :D

@PauloCereda -- well, i hadn't seen it, so i will have to go look.

@DavidCarlisle -- oops! typo! "primo die festali ..."

@barbarabeeton That would deserve the name xii.tex!

@egreg -- if you would like the words, i can send them to you. (a performance of this carmina is a highlight of the annual latin carol celebration at brown. even the no-smoking signs are in latin. but a feature i miss from earlier years in a different venue is the grex tubarum. the organum pneumaticum is now the source of all accompaniment.)

@barbarabeeton :)

@egreg: I am hearing a talk by an Italian priest. :)

@PauloCereda Sucks to be you.

@PauloCereda Can you understand him?

@Canageek er... why?

@egreg Yes! I can! :)

@PauloCereda, I think we're blessed with a latin language that can understand well enough plenty of other latin language but cannot be understood by the others in the same level... Do you agree with that? I've been noticing this more and more nowadays and want to know if it's just me who thinks that way.

@PauloCereda Errr, I'm a highly left-wing LGBT supporter and scientist from Canada. You can probably guess my opinions on the Catholic church from that.

On another note: For the people complaining about \left and \right I give you this equation.

They don't even have brackets after the sin!

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}

\begin{picture}(100,100)

\put(50,75){\oval(15,10)}
\put(47,50){\framebox(6,20){}}
\put(47,60){\vector(-1,2){10}}
\put(40,74){\line(2,1){10}}
\put(40,74){\line(-2,-1){10}}
\put(50,79){\vector(-1,2){5}}
\put(30,69){\vector(-1,2){5}}
\put(47,75){\circle*{2}}
\put(53,75){\circle*{2}}
\put(54,60){\framebox(10,10){}}
\thicklines
\put(53,55){\vector(2,0){15}}
\end{picture}
\end{document}

is this a good answer to the current tikz-pgf question on site?

@DavidCarlisle maybe a horn and some legs and you are good to go, I'd say... hahaha

@GuilhermeZ.Santos I can understand some written Portuguese. Spoken Portuguese, either Lusitan or Brazilian, is a completely different thing.

@egreg Nice! But I was talking about the spoken language more than the written one

@GuilhermeZ.Santos I'm under the impression that Italian is more understandable. The main reason is that almost everybody learnt it as a second language or had teachers at school in the same condition. We don't drop vowels, for instance.

@egreg Could be. But what about spanish? Is it more understandable than portuguese as well?

@GuilhermeZ.Santos Much more. They don't drop vowels as well.

@egreg ¬¬

@egreg Really? The Portuguese speakers across the hall can read papers written in Italian for me.

Drat

What is the command for "not italic"?

@Canageek \textup (command form) or \upshape (declaration)

@Canageek Not at all unexpected, barring a few false friends.

@egreg Thanks. Thought it was \textrm and was wondering why it didn't work

@Canageek \textrm is the command form for \rmfamily, you need a change in shape.

@egreg My linguist SO says it is pretty much only historical/political reasons those three are counted as sperate languages instead of dialects.

@egreg Ahhhh.

So \textit is a shape. What about \texttt? or textsc in those languages that support it?

@Canageek \ttfamily, \scshape. (And that's all I know about it.)

@Canageek \scshape which is a bit unfortunate in a way as it logically should be orthogonal to the others but it would have been too expensive to have an extra axis in NFSS, especially as there are not many sc fonts so most of the space would be empty and have to be filled with font substitutions.

@DavidCarlisle So if it was done today, when the amount of memory that would take is a rounding error it would be different?

@DavidCarlisle (Rounding error is about what, 100MB this days?)

@Canageek ask Will what he plans to do tomorrow for fontspec:-) Not clear actually you could set it up differently but that means it is easy to specify more independent properties so ask for a bold italic small caps font but making it easy to ask for something that doesn't exist in most cases isn't a clear win....

@DavidCarlisle If it makes it easy to get to non-italic greek letters, I'll be happy

@Canageek but it would be useful to have a proper font case axis, lowercase/normal/smallcaps/allcaps

@Canageek that's already easy in fontspec as greek is typically just like latin part of the font encoding so you get upright/bold/italic alpha just by using U+03b1 instead of "a"

@DavidCarlisle So why do I have to install Chemgreek to use them?

@DavidCarlisle I mean, I can't just do \textup{\alpha} right now, can I?

@Canageek \textup{\alpha} wouldn't work as \text... are text commands and \alpha` is a math one. but fontspec is luatex/xetex and I guess you are using pdftex/

@DavidCarlisle Yeah. I think the fact greek letter commands are math mode is one of the big weaknesses of LaTeX.

@DavidCarlisle Since I almost always need them as nice, upright characters in LaTeX.

@Canageek not really a weakness of latex (if you use \usepackage[greek]{babel} for example you can just type greek out of math mode. the original tex font collection by knuth simply didn't have any greek so it's not really latex's fault that teh default setup doesn't define commands for it

@DavidCarlisle When I finished my undergrad thesis, I found I had not one, not two, but THREE separate ways of having text-mode upright Greek letters. >.>

@DavidCarlisle Yeah, but that assumes you have a Greek keyboard. Which I don't.

@Canageek not really

@DavidCarlisle How would you type it then?

@DavidCarlisle I've done the 'copy and past the glyph each time' method and it is much sloewr then typing \upbeta or \chembeta

@Canageek sure but that's same as any commands: you can define whatever shortcuts you like. Also reasonable editors will transliterate for you. in emacs for example you have the option of typing tex-like input and it inserting unicode characters.

@Canageek If you just view latin as normal, Greek as 20 something characters annoyingly not on the keyboard, and everything else as unused, it makes sense to name them and call it done, but if you look at a modern opentype font with 80000 characters in it, it isn't clear giving them all individual named commands really helps, even if you have the space to do so.

@DavidCarlisle Yeah, but if you rely on user commands every document will have diffrent commands for it.

@Canageek does it matter that people do \newcommand\Reals{\mathbb{R}} ?

@DavidCarlisle Actually, I was just about to say, the ideal would be to just have every unicode codepoint be a command, so your tex document can be in any base language and have access to every other one. So if I'm on a very stange keyboard I can type latin, greek, etc characters.

@Canageek ever heard of lualatex/xetex?

@Canageek Δεν χρειάζεστε ένα ελληνικό πληκτρολόγιο για να πληκτρολογήσετε ελληνικά

@Canageek you don't need commands for that, you can access U+3b1 (alpha) as ^^^^03b1 or \Uchar"03B1

@DavidCarlisle But then you need to know the unicode

@DavidCarlisle \alpha works great since you just need to know the letter name, and can type is easily. Chemists use greek letters in our formulas, so we all know them, but don't use them italic and use them in text-mode.

@Canageek but how is naming tens of thousands of character sby name going to be easier than naming them by number?

@Canageek for my undergraduate work I used:

@yo' Yes. It is evil as it isn't backwards compatible and thus ACS, RSC, Nature, Science, Wiley, etc won't adopt it. So I'm not learning it, as I'd have to keep multiple ways of doing everything in my head.

@DavidCarlisle Far easier. I already know the names of all the symbols I'm going to need. Also names are easier to remeber then symbols.

@Canageek that's what I meant above. It's OK for you to say you only care about Greek, so just add twenty something names, but that isn't a system that scales to a Unicode based tex which by design is supposed to treat arabic greek and mandarin and .... all on an equal footing

@DavidCarlisle \alpha is proportionality constant. Done. \aleph is a order of infinity.

@Canageek I never did like chemistry. Stick to maths and physics

@DavidCarlisle Well, my first step is just delay on Mandrin and Japanese, since there are apparently signs that both will change character systems within a few generations. That should make life easier. ;)

@DavidCarlisle TeX's main use is scientific publishing though, which is always done in English.

@Canageek That would be my preferred option as well, back out the changes that made luatex/xetex/tex3, and go back to a 7bit tex2 with none of those funny accents that complicate things.

@Canageek are you sure (about either of those statements)

@DavidCarlisle I'm sure you've done usage surveys, is TeX not majority scientific/math use?

@DavidCarlisle As to the second, yes. English is the Linga Franca of science, the same way German was for chemistry up until ~WWII, except moreso. If it isn't published in English, then it might as well not exist (and is probably either plagiarized or made up anyway, or they'd be able to get into a better journal)

@Canageek hard to know, especially as that's the easiest use and we tend to see problems. But certainly since we are talking about unicode the big push for xe(la)tex is from people in the humanities typesetting indic languages etc, there is very large user base of japanese users using ptex and its variants, similarly luatex gets a lot of use for arabic. Even in chemistry are there no Russian language Journals anymore?

@DavidCarlisle All the Russian journals I've come across have a translation deal where the same article is published in parallel in English. Same with Awente Chemie, the big German language journal.

@DavidCarlisle The only journals I know of still publishing mono-lignually in something other then English are really sketchy Chinese pay-to-publish journals.

@Canageek well yes but if the untranslated version needs to be typeset then the typesetting system needs to be able to cope with Cyrillic;-)

@DavidCarlisle I'm not saying it shouldn't have full unicode support. Just that it should have a standardized interface for scientists. I mean, if I'm writing a chemistry paper in Russian, I'm still going to need to use \delta to indicate the handedness of a chiral molecule.

@Canageek Don't tell to the Spaniards and the Portuguese that they're speaking the same language. ;-)

@DavidCarlisle Just if you support Greek then providing that list to them isd easier.

@Canageek But Italian is different.

@Canageek why \delta and not \handedness_of_a_chiral_molecule ?

@egreg Not enough that the people from Brazil here can't read Italian papers

@DavidCarlisle Delta is also the name of the chirality. Delta and Lamba chirality are indicated with uppercase, non-italic greek letters. Also used for the handedness of helixes.

@Canageek I can read Spanish and French quite well, also some Portuguese, probably Catalan. It doesn't mean they're the same language.

@DavidCarlisle Chemists are lazy, and that would make it a lot harder to read hte latex code.

@egreg from what Mara tells me, the definition of a language is somewhat fuzzy, but generally if you can make yourself understood by a speaker of A while speaking B, then A and B are dialects. Once they become unable to do that, then they are separate languages.

@Canageek That's the key: speaking versus reading. You can more easily make a sense out of written text than speech.

@egreg So English actually has a number of dialects, they are just really close together right now (though moving apart). I've asked, but she doesn't know of anyone working on predictive math for when Indian English and Canadian Enlgish will be as far apart as Spanish and Portagese.

@egreg Weird. But you could write things down and be understood?

@egreg I'll have to ask her about that, but it makes sense. Apparently up until recently written text has changed a lot more slowly then spoken, since it was done by less people, and they were more snooty about it.

@DavidCarlisle When writing equations do most people write \lambda or \wavelength_of_light ?

@DavidCarlisle :)

@Canageek Better understood, yes.

@DavidCarlisle But I wouldn't think it would be that hard to get a list of symbols in use from IUPAC, IUCr,, whomever runs the bio journals and get the two symbols math and physics use that aren't well supported (aleph and that one cryllic one)

@DavidCarlisle and make a standard scientific, can write these without having to look up anything, package for scientific publishing. Or better yet, core LaTeX.

@Canageek and why would I need all of that to typeset ... a letter to my bank?

@yo' You don't use chemical shorthand as your banking?

@Canageek I have personally never written any chemistry, not in the time after I learned LaTeX

@DavidCarlisle Bio should be pretty easily actually. They use a few Greek letters that I've seen, but since they are modern they mostly just use acronyms for everything. And Physics already have most of the symbols they need at their command. So really just math and chemistry need a bunch. And Crystallography might need a few. Don't know about geology, do they use LaTeX?

@yo' That is why I'm saying 'make a list of symbols used in scientific publishing' not 'make a list of chemistry symbols'

@yo' Easy to do statistically: just ask the journals for a list of the 1000 most common symbols in their papers in the last 5 years.

Sorry, I had to post it again as I don't feel like you understood the message.

@yo' You posted that already

Vast majority of my documents have nothing to do with science

@yo' If my hypothesis that the majority of LaTeX users are in science or math is correct, then this would be 'what the majority of LaTeX users' need.

@yo' But what percentage of LaTeX documents is that?

@yo' I don't break out LaTeX for my grocery list. Plain text works fine for that.

@yo' I bet this could be uncovered, since pdftex puts a string in the PDF. Wait for the next big email leak, then sift through it for TeX generated PDFs, then compare those to the number of scientific publications.

@Canageek look at dozens of answers here, the core just provides character based commands but people (or subject communities) are encouraged to give more semantically named definitions. as i say above it's better to use \newcommand\reals{\mathbb{R}}...\reals than use \mathbb{R} drectly.

@Canageek vast majority of my documents have never made it to email. Sorry, another pointless and endless discussion we hold. I better go. Bye.

@yo' What is the point of writing a document if you aren't going to send it to someone?

@Canageek PRINT IT?!

@yo' I'm getting really sick of your unsupported claims.

@yo' Who the eff prints anything anymore?

This isn't 1994

@Canageek if by print you include sending the pdf or generated html or anything else that doesn't involve sending tex source, then lots of people.

@Canageek Sorry, but it's your unsupported claims here, not mine. You seem to assume some large percentage of LaTeX documents are scientific, or even needing some your idea of "universal scientific package". I don't assume anything.

@DavidCarlisle I said, send by email. @yo' said that "vast majority of my documents have never made it to email. "

@Canageek Go, test them properly, and return, please.

@Canageek people send pdf, but anyway I suspect that it is highly unlikely that the majority of unicode based latex documents are scientific documents in english as that community is pretty well covered by tex2. All the pressure to develop tex beyond the original cm font set is from communities outside that original user base.

@yo' There are about 125,000 math papers published a year, almost all of those will be in LaTeX. On the physics preprint server there were 86,000 documents published there alone in 2015. So that would be about 200,000 documents in LaTeX that get finished and published a year since sciences in LaTeX. Sadly I can't find any download numbers for LaTeX itself, but you could work out a rough % from that from the number of CTAN requests after a new version.

Since new features only matter to those who upgrade, you can safely disregard those who don't upgrade latex

Since they'll never know they even exist

In terms of industry you can disregard government and business as they all use doc or docx, and legal (wordperfect).

@DavidCarlisle Now that is a more convincing argument. It is hard to get chemists into it as you have to use mhchem or chemacros, both of which are a bit clunky. But physics and math (the original communities) are both covered by default. Which is part of the reason I want to push for chemistry to get the same first-class citizen status that physics and math have.

@Canageek they are not really covered by default, and that's a good thing, as the attempts for universal coverage that I'm aware of failed miserably, namely physics and nath

(@egreg would disagree and argue that these two packages are the most beautiful ones on CTAN!)

@yo' Quite certainly.

@Canageek yes but the good math support isn't in the core it is in amsmath.sty which (if we ignore the fact that the current maintainer is me) is developed by the American math society. So if the chemistry societies or main chemistry publishers want to standardise a chemistry package, nothing is stopping them

@egreg :) anyway, I'm off, I get up early tomorrow and I face a long day and a long weekend.

@DavidCarlisle Aside from the fact that as far as I can tell if the ACS says one thing, the RSC is required by law to say the other.

@Canageek well all the more reason for latex project not to put itself in the crossfire

@DavidCarlisle Yeah, but both rely on @JosephWright to do all their LaTeX for them.

@DavidCarlisle Really? I don't think I've needed it when typing out any of the formulas from my physics classes. Except possibly when I did nuclear and did a bunch of matrixes.

@Canageek yes any serious math document should load amsmath. The core latex math support isn't publication

@DavidCarlisle Doesn't core latex get all greek characters, integrals sums, etc, and even crazy stuff like a full set of the fancy characters for imaginary/real/integer number sets?

@Canageek yes but there are no usable macros for aligning equations or arrows or ...

@Canageek and a very reduced set of characters without the ams fonts no blackboard bold or multiple integrals or ...

@DavidCarlisle Interesting. So I should be finding ways to make chemmacros more applicable. That or writing my own version of markdown.