TeX, LaTeX and Friends

Lyndon White

08:00

Is it just me, or is scrlayer-notecolumn hideously fragile and worse than just using plain \marginpar or any other work-arounds it was supposed to solve?

It is labelled as experimental, but I had it recommended to me a few times on the site, and saw in other questions it looked like people were doing cool stuff with it.
But it seems like I have to fight it every step of the way.

I guess it does have some advantage over \marginpar in that it won't just allow content to flow over the page. my my goodness the level of finicky it is to do anything advanced with it...

ahh it feels good to get that off my chest

Joseph Wright

@LyndonWhite I suspect most of us stick to \marginpar :)

Lyndon White

08:15

What I really want is a margin paragraph that is willing to float upwards to avoid going off the page bottom.

But I think nothing in latex will ever float upwards?

David Carlisle

@LyndonWhite it's a bit tricky to float up if they try to stay with the main text paragraph, easier if you just let marginpars filll from the top.

@LyndonWhite the hard part actually is not so much coding it up as coming up with a spec of what you want to do (in all cases:-)

@LyndonWhite er \begin{figure}[t] floats upwards....

@JosephWright ~~most people use \usepackage{a4wide} and have no margins.~~ No I couldn't have said that.

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle :)

Lyndon White

thinking about really what I want:
each margin paragraph given a unhappyness rating (i.e. a loss function).
Which is distance from where it is declared, with an additional factor for how far up, and then an additional factor for each time it is broken across a page.
Then optimize to minimize the unhappyness of all the margin paragraphs.

But that is NP-hard

because of having a constant loss factor for an optional occurrence -- breaking over a page.
Which I'm pretty sure lets you convert it into Mixed Integer Programming.

Sebastiano

Hola' to everybody and good morning

@egreg Hi Prof. I would like to ask you a question about compiling a .te file. Specifically, I would like to buy a € 1000 laptop with a 7th generation Intel processor with at least 4GB of RAM and 8GB of motherboard RAM. Is compiling a .tex file, with png or pdf or graphics in TikZ, faster or slower?

egreg

08:32

@Sebastiano Sorry, but I'm no hardware expert. But the more RAM you have, the better.

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@Sebastiano As @egreg says. When buying computers, I have never bothered to pay for the fastest CPU, which invariably costs a bunch of extra money for a very marginal improvement – especially as seen over the lifetime of the computer: After just a year, that superfast CPU will be just a run of the mill CPU anyhow. But I always max out the RAM. Disk too, as far as I can afford to.

David Carlisle

@LyndonWhite NP hard doesn't actually matter. A a sane document doesn't have more than say 10 marginpars on a page, and you want to keep them in order, so the numbers can't get that big.

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@Sebastiano Oh, and having a fast disk may be more meaningful than a big one. So go for SSD if available and you can afford it. It will have a big impact on how fast the computer feels in practice. (I only need a big disk because of my photography hobby.)

Lyndon White

Fair.
They don't really have to stay in order, e.g. it is preferable to reorder marginnotes than to have one split across page boundries.
But I can't see anytime that reordering would get you something that just pushing the notes up or down to avoid breaking would not get you.

Paulo Cereda

08:50

@DavidCarlisle ooh. :)

Lyndon White

09:01

@DavidCarlisle ah I see some discussion of this kinda thing at tex.stackexchange.com/questions/225795/…

Martin Thoma

Hi :-)

Paulo Cereda

Aloha!

Martin Thoma

I have a question for which I'm not sure how to phrase it: When I add `\printglossaries` to my document, it changes something so that the sections look different. Before, if I have multiple sections below each other (nothing in between) they are close together. After adding `\printglossaries` there is a lot of space.

Any idea where I have to look for the problem?

David Carlisle

09:16

@LyndonWhite if you penalise how far a margin note is from its target paragraph then potentially you could reduce the penalty if you kept all the marginnotes in position except moved the last one up to the top where there was space, rather than shift all the notes up to make space for the one at the bottom (depends on your cost function)

egreg

@PauloCereda Aloha! Romanza from Mozart's n. 20 playing just now. ;-)

David Carlisle

@MartinThoma if you made a test file and posted it as a question on the main site someone could easily answer just by tracing the code, otherwise you rely on someone here having seen that before

Martin Thoma

I'm currently trying to make a minimal example. The document is quite big and that takes quite a while, but I think I found it: It was not related to the glossary (I'm not sure if that was anther problem or what happened there). A big minipage after the sections seems to cause that behaviour.

Paulo Cereda

@egreg ooh that's great! :)

David Carlisle

@MartinThoma space around sections is (typically) stretch so it will stretch or shrink depending what else is around so the space changing is just business as usual, probably.

Ohh it's a birthday

Martin Thoma

09:23

@DavidCarlisle After removing \usepackage{parskip} the problem seems to be gone.

David Carlisle

09:46

@egreg \ensuremath :-)

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Twice!

David Carlisle

@egreg even better

egreg

@DavidCarlisle In Rome they would say “quanno ce vo' ce vo'” (I don't think you can Google translate it).

Paulo Cereda

@egreg On the same lines, Carla mentioned that I used Arrivederci Roma as soundtrack. Oopsie. :)

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Perhaps, “when it takes, it takes”.

David Carlisle

09:55

@egreg I shouldn't make google work on its birthday (Non dovrei fare il lavoro di google per il suo compleanno)

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Use Bing. :D

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda Conheço todos esses idiomas sem ajuda automática

Lyndon White

@DavidCarlisle good point. Do you still think it is not problematically NP-hard?

David Carlisle

@LyndonWhite presumably not in reply to my portuguese? :-) Oh it probably is, but as I say that isn't necessarily an issue as the numbers are not that big. See Frank's alice code on optimising figure placement across a whole document, that must be harder, it slows things down but not impossibly so

Paulo Cereda

@LyndonWhite asymptotically NP hard, but as David mentioned, numbers are kept at a doable range. :)

@DavidCarlisle ooh :D

Lyndon White

10:03

@DavidCarlisle which code? (nothing is coming up from google on that)

This one? latex-project.org/publications/…

David Carlisle

10:30

@LyndonWhite yep sorry (I was going to give a link but got called from my desk, that's the thing about day jobs:-)

@PauloCereda you wait: there will be a biologist using A0 paper with 1000 marginal notes and 10000 footnotes,

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle ooh or a linguist telling us the eskimos have 40 words for snow.

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda oddly enough over the years I have had more "feature" reports about footnotes from biologists than anyone else:-)

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle uh-oh. :) Do we have any biologists in the house? :)

Paulo Cereda

11:47

High Sierra anyone?

egreg

12:02

@DavidCarlisle By the way, in another answer I removed \ensuremath from a definition.

David Carlisle

@egreg trying to atone for earlier sins?

egreg

@DavidCarlisle No, the removal was earlier.

David Carlisle

@egreg that's worse then: you are falling in to sin:-)

Joseph Wright

13:31

@DavidCarlisle Re. your comment on tex.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7420/…: I'm not sure what you mean about LuaTeX. Yes, the code is today different from that in TeX90 but it's been created by modification not by reimplementation from output only.

Paulo Cereda

2. Unusually short abstracts, intentionally abridged in a rare display of academic humour. (12/46)

Tweeted by AcademiaObscura on September 27, 2017 at 11:30 AM in reply to AcademiaObscura

@AlanMunn, @JosephWright ^^ :)

The fact of the first author being JK (an internet slang for joking) makes everything more amusing.

David Carlisle

@JosephWright originally created by modification, true but to a different language and then parts of it extensively hand re-coded since then (other parts less so) but I chose the wording (hopefully) to be true without going into details it is a different, and separately maintained code base in its present form.

Paulo Cereda

I should blame TeX and friends for making me extremely paranoid on kerning, alignment and whatnot. I am beginning to think that's one strong reason my thesis is taking so long... :) — Paulo Cereda 16 secs ago

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@PauloCereda I have seen a PhD thesis in algebra with that very same abstract.

Paulo Cereda

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Really? That's amusing!

David Carlisle

13:43

@HaraldHanche-Olsen that abstract would be longer than @PauloCereda's entire thesis!

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle oi

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@PauloCereda Knowledge is a dangerous thing. I recall getting so confused by “its” vs “it’s” I had to relearn the difference. With the result that, every time I see the wrong one now, I nearly jump out of my skin.

@DavidCarlisle Well, I have no doubt the thesis is full of clever TeX macros. Whether anything is actually typeset, is a different question. Lorem ipsum to the rescue …

Paulo Cereda

@HaraldHanche-Olsen uh-oh. I suffer with kerning syndrome.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen or kantlipsum. :)

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@PauloCereda Wait, wait … is that a thing? Hang on while I texdocit … ooh, @egreg to the rescue! Who would have thought?

Paulo Cereda

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Surely not Kant. :)

Harald Hanche-Olsen

13:53

@DavidCarlisle At least, an empty thesis contains no errors.

Paulo Cereda

@HaraldHanche-Olsen ^^ I wrote a paper on generation of chant melodies (unpublished still) and decided to be fancy about drop capitals. :)

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@PauloCereda Combine it with kantlipsum, and you've got a Kant chant!

Paulo Cereda

@HaraldHanche-Olsen ooh I like this

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@PauloCereda (Faint echo of Dr. Seuss there.)

egreg

14:08

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Nice package, isn't it? I was recently in a bookshop and saw a copy of Kant's “Critique of judgment”: it's written exactly like kantlipsum. :-)

David Carlisle

@egreg as are many of your answers here!

egreg

Philosophy (and it must not be supposed that this is
true) is a representation of the never-ending regress in the series of
empirical conditions; however, the Antinomies have nothing to do with,
in the study of philosophy, the discipline of practical reason.
Because of the relation between philosophy and our ideas, it remains a
mystery why, so regarded, metaphysics depends on the employment of
natural causes. The pure employment of the Antinomies, in particular,
is a body of demonstrated science, and all of it must be known a

Alan Munn

@PauloCereda @JosephWright I'm not sure if I've posted this before: realclearscience.com/blog/2015/12/…

2

@DavidCarlisle I Kant even.

@PauloCereda You're just listening to the wrong people. Some of us are not obsessed with this. We use TeX for its other useful properties.

Paulo Cereda

14:26

@AlanMunn :)

@AlanMunn I was exagerating, but I became aware of more things since I started using TeX. :)

@AlanMunn Fantastic

mickep

14:54

@AlanMunn That was a funny one, thanks for sharing! :)

samcarter

@PauloCereda Pushed the first try for random ducks to github, see page 11 github.com/samcarter8/tikzducks/blob/master/documentation.pdf

Paulo Cereda

@samcarter ooooh

@samcarter: I WUB YOU

samcarter

@PauloCereda <3

@PauloCereda Next step is to do something with the colours.

Paulo Cereda

@samcarter <3

@samcarter rainbow duck

Installing High Sierra now, let's see. :)

samcarter

Paulo Cereda

15:08

@samcarter close enough. :)

samcarter

@PauloCereda google never disappoints in such things :)

Paulo Cereda

@samcarter nope. :)

@samcarter: I will use the random ducks in my info boxes for arara 4.0

samcarter

@PauloCereda Yeah! I'm really looking forward to 4.0 - the possibility to use conditionals is so great!

Paulo Cereda

15:28

@samcarter me too. :)

@DavidCarlisle: do you know this project from Apache? commons.apache.org/proper/commons-jelly/index.html

yo'

@samcarter @PauloCereda It seems to me that arara is becoming a new Emacs: nice and sexy operating system :)

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda we used to have a jelly based website running at w3c for the mathml test suite

Paulo Cereda

@yo' ooh :) That would be arTeXmis, my next project. :)

David Carlisle

I guess it still is

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle interesting

David Carlisle

15:34

@PauloCereda I always found it frustrating, just like vi suffers from not being emacs, jelly suffers from not being xslt

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle you are mean :)

David Carlisle

Jun 29 at 16:15, by Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle you are not mean :)

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle oh

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda somehow the air of surprise seems faked

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle oh no

samcarter

15:43

@yo' just easier to exit :)

4

Paulo Cereda

@samcarter ooh

samcarter

@Skillmon Please see image above :) Your package is really fantastic! Thank you for putting it on ctan!

Paulo Cereda

16:10

High Sierra still installing.

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@PauloCereda Exciting! Like watching paint dry, except you don't know if it's gonna blow up in your face.

Paulo Cereda

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Very accurate. :)

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@samcarter Are there safety glasses for tikzducks? @PauloCereda could use a pair.

CarLaTeX

@samcarter @Skillmon Which is the name of your package?

samcarter

16:26

@CarLaTeX ctan.org/pkg/ducksay

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Unfortunately not, only normal ones and sunglasses.

Paulo Cereda

@HaraldHanche-Olsen ooh safety goggles

Paulo Cereda

16:59

@egreg, @AlanMunn, @JosephWright, @HaraldHanche-Olsen ˆˆ :)

CarLaTeX

@samcarter Thank you, it's great!

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@PauloCereda Ooh, on a six year old iMac even!

Joseph Wright

@PauloCereda Oooh

Paulo Cereda

17:16

@HaraldHanche-Olsen my iMac. :)

egreg

17:29

@PauloCereda Striking differences, I guess

Paulo Cereda

@egreg Nothing noticed so far.

egreg

17:45

@PauloCereda Much more responsive, surely

Harald Hanche-Olsen

18:23

@egreg Probably less responsive initially, while Spotlight does its indexing.

David Carlisle

18:36

@egreg do you know anything about space tokens?

David Carlisle

18:54

@JosephWright @egreg's hiding so which bit of the TeXBook tells me that the first of these is like the second, not the third....

X\vbox{\halign{ #\hfil\cr1\cr2\cr}}X
X\vbox{\halign{#\hfil\cr1\cr2\cr}}X
X\vbox{\halign{\space#\hfil\cr1\cr2\cr}}X


\bye

tex.web makes it explicit @ Spaces are eliminated from the beginning of a template.

Skillmon

19:21

@samcarter Thanks. I'm not so sure about that (the code might be really bad). But I just had to put it together seeing that one ASCII-duck when it was posted here :)

Werner

Do I need to use a tikz library in order to set text within an ellipse shape?

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle :)

Skillmon

@samcarter But I'm glad someone is already enjoying it :)

@Werner You need \usetikzlibrary{shapes}

Werner

Here's an example:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{tikz}

\begin{document}

\begin{tikzpicture}
\draw (2,2)
node[shape = ellipse, line width = 3pt, draw=blue]
{Something};
\end{tikzpicture}

\end{document}

The output is a rectangle.

@Skillmon ...looking into it.

Skillmon

@Werner you can leave the rest as is. Just that library and it works. Unknown shapes are replaced by rectangle, that's why your output is a rectangle.

Werner

19:34

@Skillmon: Well wouldn't you know it! shapes adds shapes to tikz.

Skillmon

@Werner :)

@Werner Sometimes they make things really cryptic :)

Werner

@Skillmon :)

Thanks.

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Engaged with a cricket match

egreg

20:11

Goal

David Carlisle

20:59

@egreg I don't think you have the rules of cricket quite right

egreg

21:16

@DavidCarlisle Not sure if it's in the TeXbook, but the behavior is consistent with spaces being ignored after &

@DavidCarlisle Don't they score goals in cricket? Then I've been deceived.

David Carlisle

@egreg funnily enough when I looked in tex.web for \halign details, first thing I found was ...

default case that applies if no matching label is found. Thus, we shall use
constructions like
$$\vbox{\halign{\ignorespaces#\hfil\cr

@egreg looked like "somebody" had forgotten this feature:-)

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Very possible; maybe ignoring space at the beginning was added on second thought.

David Carlisle

@egreg I started on this search of course as you had omitted % from ends of lines (even though tex ignores the space, think of that lost byte of tex memory:-)

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Did I? Oh, well…

David Carlisle

@egreg the xetex macron under accent code:-)

egreg

21:22

@DavidCarlisle Anyway I'm looking in errorlog.tex and have found no entry for it

David Carlisle

Oh no it's start of the template not start of the inserted cell text.

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Yes, spaces are ignored only after &, but not after the u-part.

@DavidCarlisle Spaces are ignored also during the scan for \omit in the first cell of a row.

ppr

21:45

Hi, is there some users of reftex for citation right now?

I forgot a shortcut and I don't find anything in the manual

In reftex, you can use C-c ] to insert a \cite command. There is another shortcut which add something before C-c ] to use when you want to cite but also to add a page or else (\cite[45][key]).

Do someone know this one?

David Carlisle

@ppr I don't have it installed but C-h b will show you all the key bindings in the current mode

ppr

@DavidCarlisle I've got it: C-u! C-u C-c c which prompt for optional argument

David Carlisle

@ppr oh that's the generic prefix keybinding across emacs

ppr

@DavidCarlisle ok I didn't know. It prompt for all kind of optional argument?

David Carlisle

22:01

@ppr yes eg C-f = move forward one character C-u 20 C-f = move 20 characters

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