What do you recommend for writing two columns in more, let's say, friendly way? I'm using paracol with \switchcolumn* to maintain the paragraphs in sync, but it's just not a very good approach writing a paragraph of each column alternately.

@Miguel I gave up trying to align the opposing lines, and then I use standard \twocolumn

@yo' It's a translation, so it really needs the paragraphs to align. I would like something that would wait until the end of the paragraph in the opposite column and then start a new paragraph. \switchcolumn does this quite well, it's just not very friendly.

@Miguel it's not something I ever do but I think reledmac/reledpar packages have something for that as well?

@DavidCarlisle Thanks, David, I will look to it better. Until know didn't find anything, I'm trying the \stanza.

@DavidCarlisle It worked with reledmac and reledpar, thank you.

Quack!

@PauloCereda qua qua qua

@CarLaTeX ooh another duck

@PauloCereda quack

@CarLaTeX quack!

@PauloCereda Quacks tend to \infty :)

@CarLaTeX asymptotic analyis is an expertise of Knuth. :)

@PauloCereda Wow! Ducks are very clever in asymptotic analysis

@CarLaTeX yet we ducks are very naïve. :)

@CarLaTeX yet we ducks are very naïve. :)

@PauloCereda Of course! :):):)

s/naïve/tasty/

@DavidCarlisle you are mean

@DavidCarlisle oh no

@HaraldHanche-Olsen ooh we need a fixed point

@DavidCarlisle Do you know how to hide the numbers from the margins with this reledmac way?

@PauloCereda λ🍍.(λ🦆.🍍(🦆🦆))(λ🦆.🍍(🦆x))

@HaraldHanche-Olsen ooh well done! I love this so much!

@Miguel no I never used the package, just "know of its existence" :-)

@PauloCereda Oops, there'a a typo in there. Should have been …

@PauloCereda λ🍍.(λ🦆.🍍(🦆🦆))(λ🦆.🍍(🦆🦆))

@HaraldHanche-Olsen ah

@HaraldHanche-Olsen we star this one as well. :)

@PauloCereda Kleene star?

@DavidCarlisle :)

@HaraldHanche-Olsen oh no! I can't see to symbol from my smartphone

@CarLaTeX Apparently, my smart phone is smarter than yours.

@CarLaTeX I just got a new phone and so can compare two: on the older I see only the pineapple and on the newer (with android 7) I see both (but I have no idea what the calculus say and should better not try to find out if I want my work to get done today).

@UlrikeFischer it's a fixed point thingy from lambda calculus, do not worry. :)

@PauloCereda I didn't worry but I'm always so curious ;-) (and I did recognize lambda, the skak (chess) package uses the lambda package but I never really got what exactly it does apart from some boolean test).

@UlrikeFischer ooh :)

@UlrikeFischer my smartphone is like your old one!

@HaraldHanche-Olsen :'(

@UlrikeFischer it's a qualifier like "forall" but constructs functions rather than predicates, lambda x . (sin x + cos x) is the anonymous function that returns the sum of sin and cos.

@DavidCarlisle I have wondered idly, from time to time, whether TeX would have benefited from the ability to write anonymous macros? So that, say, \λ #1 #2\relax{\foo{#2:#1}} this that etc\relax would expand to \foo{that etc:this}. (Silly example, I know.) It might make programming TeX's mouth easier, or would it not?

@HaraldHanche-Olsen yes this is sort of what the expl3 expansion helpers are doing but there has to be one predefined for each possible argument type due to the fact that you can't define them on the fly with an inline lambda

@DavidCarlisle Hmm, seems like another reason to bump expl3 higher up on the list of stuff to learn.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen look who's arrived:-)

@DavidCarlisle ;)

@DavidCarlisle You have to upvote my answer for clever use of tabulary: tex.stackexchange.com/a/400331/4427

@egreg I think it would have been better if you hade make \scalebox{0.5}{\hline} convert the outer tabular into a tabulary.

@DavidCarlisle Even better now: I also used xpatch for fixing vertical alignment. ;-)

@egreg I think it's better to stick to packages by reputable authors

@egreg so not tabulary for a start:-)

@DavidCarlisle That's why I added a carefully and cleverly written package such as xpatch.

@egreg @DavidCarlisle I guess this could appear here soon too with newest texlive (I already wrote Will and Javier):

\documentclass[]{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\usepackage{fontspec}

\begin{document}
bla
\end{document}

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!
! LaTeX error: "kernel/command-already-defined"
!
! Control sequence \latinencoding already defined.
!
! See the LaTeX3 documentation for further information.
!
! For immediate help type H <return>.
!...............................................

l.121 \tl_new:N \latinencoding

Workaround: switch order of the packages.

Hi all, I've forgotten how is called the large capital letter which starts a paragraph like the one in tex.stackexchange.com/q/400285/1952. Could someone remind me? I'm sure there are packages to do it but I don't know how to start to search them?

@UlrikeFischer Not sure it's a good workaround, because apparently Will wants \latinencoding and \cyrillicencoding to be TU instead of what babel sets. Let me do some tests.

@Ignasi Lettrine, drop capital?

@UlrikeFischer I retract, they're set correctly.

@Ignasi As @PauloCereda says, or shorter: drop caps (in one word, or two)

Nosotros los patos somos muy inteligentes. :)

@PauloCereda tasty, too.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen you are mean/average

@UlrikeFischer But if one doesn't load fontspec, babel sets \cyrillicencoding anyway to TU (with XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX), resulting in no output.

@UlrikeFischer yes I think Will's fixed that already (was reported in the fontspec github)

@PauloCereda, @HaraldHanche-Olsen Thank you. Found it!

@Ignasi <3

@DavidCarlisle Ah yes. Sorry hadn't check github.

@DavidCarlisle I need to set up the tags for the new (ssh) place for LaTeX2e: did you make the branches at the point of each major release? Trying to track it back ...

@JosephWright yes hopefully the branch is in fact the last patched state of the release of its date, that is I branched just before starting to add code for a new release., but it may be simpler to forget the svn branches just to look at svn blame of changes.txt and see when # 2017/01/01 PL 2 Release got added and git tag those dates that way you will pick up PL releases as well?

@DavidCarlisle Ah, good plan

@DavidCarlisle I'll work back on it tonight: have a thesis to finish

@JosephWright all the older ones ### release dates I added after the fact by checking archived versions of latex releases and matching up the text in changes.txt so the svn dates for those will not be informative but the date in the file would still be useful to git tag if the svn history goes back that far eg

######################
# 2001/06/01 Release
######################

2001-08-26

means the last change for the nominal 2001/06/01 release was 2001-08-26

@DavidCarlisle I'll work out the 'recent' releases ... those in Git (So for the last 9 years or so)

@DavidCarlisle Have to get Frank to write his TUGboat!

@JosephWright yes I just picked a random line there I couldn't remember how far back the current svn/git history went:-)

@DavidCarlisle 2008-03-18

@DavidCarlisle Presumably the other SVN goes back further

@JosephWright yes (although I don't recall if all the original rcs logs got saved when we went to cvs, so might not go all the way back, I don't have it checked out on this machine:-)

------------------------------------------------------------------------
r1 | (no author) | 1993-08-06 13:47:03 +0200 (Fri, 06 Aug 1993) | 1 line

New repository initialized by cvs2svn.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

@DavidCarlisle ^^^

@DavidCarlisle I cloned it on comedy and then looked at the log there ;)

@JosephWright hmm I'd have thought it was earlier than that (if it was the rcs log) or later (if it was from the start of using cvs) but my memory may be failing

@DavidCarlisle There might be some oddities at the start: I didn't check in detail

@JosephWright I don't suppose you were using cvs in 1993?

@DavidCarlisle No: at school we were still on CP/M in 1993 ;)

(Or perhaps by then we had 16-bit PCs ...)

Should we resort to the Four Yorkshiremen sketch?

@DavidCarlisle ^^

@PauloCereda Evolution of the pineapple pizza: the pizza pineapple!

@CarLaTeX no, those are two different things. :)

Like a bee duck and a duck bee.

@PauloCereda LOL

@PauloCereda some useful coding for your Thesis in my last answer.

@DavidCarlisle ooh

@DavidCarlisle I hope the tags make sense ....

@DavidCarlisle What – you're not going to answer questions anymore?

@HaraldHanche-Olsen English isn't a context free language:-)

@JosephWright oh I'll pull and have a look:-)

@DavidCarlisle So I gather. Words mean what the speaker intend, neither more nor less.

@JosephWright doesn't time fly:-)

@HaraldHanche-Olsen We might need a semioticist here. :)

From github.com:latex3/latex2e
   d8c2ff65..8a19285e  master         -> origin/master
 * [new tag]           2009-09-24     -> 2009-09-24
 * [new tag]           2011-06-27     -> 2011-06-27
 * [new tag]           2014-05-01     -> 2014-05-01
 * [new tag]           2015-01-01     -> 2015-01-01
 * [new tag]           2015-01-01-PL1 -> 2015-01-01-PL1
 * [new tag]           2015-01-01-PL2 -> 2015-01-01-PL2
 * [new tag]           2015-10-01     -> 2015-10-01
 * [new tag]           2015-10-01-PL1 -> 2015-10-01-PL1

@DavidCarlisle I blame Joseph

@PauloCereda that is standard Team policy so goes without saying

@DavidCarlisle ah

Oh no I have detached my head, I hope it's not painful

$ git checkout 2016-03-31-PL1

Note: checking out '2016-03-31-PL1'.

You are in 'detached HEAD' state. You can look around, make experimental
changes and commit them, and you can discard any commits you make in this
state without impacting any branches by performing another checkout.

@DavidCarlisle I guess you know what Git means here ...

@JosephWright yes I was a bit worried I'd done the wrong thing for a while as the checkout took quite a while but I see it created an entire tree with trunk and three dated branches, then when I checked out master again it zapped them all again.

@DavidCarlisle Probably easier to use git log --oneline or (perhaps) a GUI to look at tags over time

@JosephWright if it had gone wrong I could have reverted to the standard team policy referenced above.

@DavidCarlisle Or git tag followed by git show <tag-name> ...

@JosephWright yes sure i just thought I'd try winding back my local checkout just to see how it worked:-) I did install that gitkraken thing, might try it a bit more one day.

@DavidCarlisle The fact I've had to allow for the SVN rearrangements makes it a little less slick than it could be: try the LaTeX3 one, where we've only ever had everything in SVN trunk ...

@DavidCarlisle It's quite good: can't do some of the more complex stuff (SourceTree can), but for that I'm happiest with the CLI anyway, so I'm picking a nicer looking GUI for reading the log mainly

@DavidCarlisle The original Git conversion (where I just did trunk) would have been 'cleaner' but then we'd loose all the pre-mid-2015 history (or at least leave it permanently in SVN only, cf. the non-public one)

@JosephWright eek Windows

@DavidCarlisle I'm hoping that 'easy' tagging will help track what we are up to: for L3 it's a lot easier than going back through the commit messages

@PauloCereda Current laptop is a Dell XPS ...

@PauloCereda GitKraken is available for Linux and Mac ;)

I may even buy the paid-for version ...

@JosephWright Mine is a Dell and it's Linux. :D

@JosephWright That looks like a Windows version. :)

@JosephWright what does that do extra (I vaguely recall seeing something)

@PauloCereda never mind, perhaps you'll be able to upgrade soon

@PauloCereda It is

@JosephWright boo

@DavidCarlisle Sort merges in the GUI and the like

@DavidCarlisle to OS2/Warp? :)

@PauloCereda mine's a Dell lattitude which is just like an XPS, I'm sure:-) running cygwin (although I understand there may be another operating system behind that)

@DavidCarlisle :) My older laptop is a Lattitude and my more recent is a Vostro. :)

@DavidCarlisle I looked up the full range of XPS systems after the UK-TUG meeting: they do a Ubuntu-specific one (so driver support for Linux), and if you have the cash one with 16Gb of RAM and a 1Tb HD

@PauloCereda ah I went the other way my previous two were both vostros (although I suspect they just build the machines and stick a random name on them as they go out the door(

@DavidCarlisle They've also upgraded the CPU since I bought mine ...

@DavidCarlisle Nothing beats my old laptop, to be honest. :) My desktop is an Inspiron.

this lattitude isn't bad though: SSD and an i7

@DavidCarlisle 15"?

@PauloCereda yes

@DavidCarlisle Cool, I don't like 13"...

@PauloCereda I had a 17in once but that was too bulky to carry around and I have an external screen at work (don't bother here) so 15in is big enough

@DavidCarlisle I only saw a 17" from Toshiba. :)

@JosephWright I always get a Ubuntu-based one (to ditch the OS later on) because the overall price decreases due to the lack of a license. :)

@PauloCereda I thought about it, but I have to have Windows for work, so would have needed a VM anyway. Then there's the fact I needed to replace my laptop at a weekend following a machine failure.

@JosephWright Oh I completely understand.

@PauloCereda If I'd got a 16Gb machine I might have gone for Linux

@JosephWright My desktop has 16GB. :)

@PauloCereda this is 16gb and 500gb ssd but it's the only machine I have, no desktop machine:-)

@DavidCarlisle ooh I want one

@PauloCereda and it has windows 10!

My Dell became Spanish recently. It lost a L in the logo, so it became "DEL"!

@PauloCereda To DELete it ;)

@PauloCereda A question of funds: current machine was £1050, a 16Gb would be at least £1399

@TeXnician ooh :)

@JosephWright WOW

@PauloCereda That's the Ubuntu version: the Windows one is a bit more ...

@JosephWright I tried to work out what mine would have cost but "dell latitude 5580" seems pretty meaningless, it could be any machine in a range of 800 to 1500 pounds by the look of it (as you may guess I didn't actually pay for this one)

@DavidCarlisle Oh, same here: mine's a 9360, but that covers a massive range of machines

@DavidCarlisle Like I said, since I got mine they've upgraded the CPU (mine's an i5, the new ones are i7)

@DavidCarlisle Tags look OK?

@JosephWright seems like it: I decapitated myself to look round a couple of the tagged releases and it all seemed to make sense

@DavidCarlisle I'm not really sure if I have the right commits ... tracking it through the history is tricky!

@JosephWright yes and also in at least one case I did all the svn tag stuff then Petra made me change something and I am pretty sure I didn't re-branch If the tags get within a day or so of the code at that point in time, I'm sure nothing will go wrong...

@DavidCarlisle Indeed: for future ones we should be OK as I'll tag each time there is a release

@JosephWright as I say to get in the ### comments in the change log I ended up downloading every archived latex release going back to the 1980s and compared change log files (seemed safer than relying on the svn log to determine what the releases were)

@egreg

@DavidCarlisle Even then can be tricky, I suspect, as we could have released before or after things like babel commits, etc.

@JosephWright yes although there I was just putting in comments in the change log so they are fairly accurate, as if I downloaded a 2001 release and the top comment in that change log was zzzz then I put a # 2001... comment in the line above zzzzz

@DavidCarlisle Sure

@JosephWright meanwhile I should get back to my utf8 branch....

@DavidCarlisle If we need to go back to a tag and need to be 'spot on', we might have to double-check and move them ...

@DavidCarlisle Looking forward to it!

@DavidCarlisle git checkout -b utf8?

@JosephWright utf8-and-filenames but currently it's not on the remote

@DavidCarlisle git push --set-upstream origin utf8-and-filenames

@JosephWright oh sure i know how to do it, I just want to get it being a bit more coherent first:-)

@JosephWright on a similar subject though If I'd like a .md file so when it does go to github I can highlight some design choices and changes (so temporary notes just for this branch) i could add them to the readme but will that complicate merges later or I could add a separate file or I could I suppose just open an issue and leave notes there or ...

@DavidCarlisle But I see that also you get inspiration from my comments tex.stackexchange.com/a/400365/4427

@egreg excuses excuses:-)

@DavidCarlisle Just add a separate .md I guess, or note them in the log, or use the GitHub wiki, or ...

@DavidCarlisle Can always remove the extra .md before a merge, and if we want it can 'disappear' from the history (by rebasing)