@PauloCereda No, it's Das Murmeltier ;-) The origin of the word marmot is in France, where we are also very popular musicians - youtube.com/watch?v=MbevBhYNlrM

@PauloCereda I'm wondering if ducks can also do that ;-)

@yo' -- i would think of paraphrasing this as each base B has an alphabet A such that C is true. "attains" requires an object, so "... C attains what?" doesn't work. "holds" has both an intransitive and a transitive sense. (sorry to be late to this party; hard to see the screen on laptop when it's closed with a dinner tray on top.)

! LaTeX Error: File `a4paper.sty' not found.

@alhelal MikTex?

@marmot OH MY THIS IS AWESOME

@marmot I think ducks and geese like parades: youtube.com/watch?v=11bMxNcsUZA :)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DON!

@CarLaTeX Yay!

@PauloCereda It'll be in the next DuckBoat :):):)

@CarLaTeX ooh :)

@alhelal why do you expect latex to find such a file, have you written a package of taht name?

@DavidCarlisle I use \usepackage{a4paper,left=0cm,top=0cm}{geometry} instead of \usepackage[a4paper,left=0cm,top=0cm]{geometry}. Thank you.

Happy Knuth Day to all of you!

@Semiclassical Texlive. Thank you. This is solved.

@UlrikeFischer you've mentioned miktexs ability to easily add extra texmf trees. Anyone know if that have been added to tlmgr yet? I have an extra tree on my Linux box that I'd like to switch on and off at will.

@daleif tug.org/texlive/doc/…

@daleif I'm glad that they added it not only for me;-)

@UlrikeFischer thanks, that was definitely not the term I was searching for

@UlrikeFischer You'll have install --texmfhome <whereever> in today's release of l3build ;)

Quack!

dinnertime

@DavidCarlisle oh no

@UlrikeFischer I'm going through the range related questions; this one seems to be fixed with XeLaTeX, but not with LuaLaTeX

@egreg I will look at it in the afternoon. Have to eat now (spaghetti carbonara with cream) and the train the children in chess.

@UlrikeFischer duck to king, duckmate. :)

@UlrikeFischer Cream? Oh, no!

@egreg hehe, sunday I managed to make that dish using only spaghetti, bacon, parmesan and egg yolks, quite pleased that I got it to work the "right way" (key: use warter from boiling the spaghetti)

@daleif Happy to see someone is following good advice :):):)

@CarLaTeX note the important second ingredient cooks.com/recipe/o50xs81u/spaghetti-carbonara.html

@DavidCarlisle ::sadface:: there is probably a reason why there no image for the dish.

@daleif no picture needed as everyone knows this classic Italian dish?

@DavidCarlisle classic? I've never seen a recipe for spaghetti carbonara with those ingredients. Did you read the comments?

@daleif no I didn't dare:-)

@DavidCarlisle That site should be crooks.com

@egreg it serves a useful function in validating the belief that whatever stupid thing you think of, someone has posted a web site describing it, and google will lead you to it.

@DavidCarlisle Fake recipe!

@daleif The only ingredients in the recipe that match the original are spaghetti and pepper. :-) Garlic in carbonara is a blasphemy, ham is ludicrous. You're right about the boiled water: it softens the egg sauce. Some people use milk cream for the same purpose, but it's wrong.

@egreg without it the egg yolks tend to scramble, the recipe mentioned to keep some of the warter, made all the difference.

@CarLaTeX Credo in tutto ciò che ho letto su internet

I must say that the [LaTeX] documentation is too long and horrible in comparison to mathematical programming languages like R. I can only interpret this ironically.

@daleif That's the idea

@PauloCereda Why aren't the ducks in your video yellow? I hope they are well!

@DavidCarlisle The earth is flat!

@CarLaTeX e la Gran Bretagna è nel suo centro

@CarLaTeX Do you think you should pass this advice along to @PauloCereda? You make writing a thesis seem so easy.

@DavidCarlisle Like the link to haggis pizza I found yesterday! (@CarLaTeX should not look at this message. Oops.)

@marmot oh

@AlanMunn ooh

@PauloCereda Although clearly @CarLaTeX hasn't encountered ABNT...

@AlanMunn I'm not the right person to give such advice, I have been procrastinating for years!

@AlanMunn Indeed my faculty gives very few rules :):):)

@CarLaTeX Somehow I fail to find tikzducks on your list of recommended packages.

@marmot I didn't add it in order to avoid attracting undeserved upvotes :):):)

@CarLaTeX Why undeserved?

@CarLaTeX where is this list anyhow?

@marmot because it's samcarter's :):):)

@CarLaTeX Oh, this one, perhaps.

@CarLaTeX For including chapters in a thesis is makes more sense to use \include than \input I think, since you can use \includeonly for selective compilation.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Yes, that one!

@CarLaTeX Well, you could have added "Nowadays, it is virtually impossible to write a proper thesis without Sam Carter's tikzducks package." ;-) ;-)

@marmot personally I found these useful for my thesis

@AlanMunn I prefer \input because \include can't be nested, isn't it?

@CarLaTeX do you nest chapters?

@DavidCarlisle What is this?

@DavidCarlisle No, but I \input tikz pictures in my chapters

@marmot it's a golfball from an IBM golfball typewriter

@CarLaTeX that is not a problem. You can use \input from an \included file.

@DavidCarlisle And it responds to LaTeX commands? Impressive!

@marmot You're too young, I used a typewriter with that thing

@DavidCarlisle I used a more traditional typewriter, but it had proportional characters.

@DavidCarlisle You need at least two of them, of course: One has the regular alphabet, the other has mathematical symbols. Maybe a third for Greek letters. Good typists could switch these balls amazingly fast.

@marmot In my case it responded to voice commands (since it came complete with a typist from the math department office)

@CarLaTeX That also works, you can \include a chapter and \input pictures within.

@AlanMunn indeed. :)

@HaraldHanche-Olsen yes I think the one used for my thesis had about 6 (not sure if they were all used) and the typist could type one handed apparently without stopping while switching the golfball with the other hand...

@DavidCarlisle love at first sight. :)

@DavidCarlisle I'm too small for typewriters, but I can use very small keyboards. (They do not sell keyboards for marmots yet, but I believe that for ducks it's even harder to find appropriate devices, so I probably shouldn't complain too much.)

@DavidCarlisle To type just one symbol: Pop off the current golfball, toss it up into the air. Insert new golf ball, insert character, remove new golfball, catch the first one as it is coming down, insert and continue typing.

Hi, what does "obsolete" mean on ctan? We distribute ctan.org/pkg/noweb on Gentoo. The package has some problems. Is it worth to fix them for our users, or should we simply remove it from Gentoo? Unfortunately we can not see how many users need a package.

@marmot ducks come in all colors as can be seen in the tikzducks video.

@JonasStein I think it's a dead project; the last alpha version for noweb 3 was released in 2009.

@PauloCereda nope this was a contractual arrangement using up the last of my grant:-)

noweb was needed for sweave, correct?

@DavidCarlisle oopsie

@JonasStein I don't know and I'm unsure why it is in the “obsolete” list.

do you have an idea how I could find out more? I do not want to delete a package which is still important to anyone, but I do not want to invest a weekend to fix a dead horse.

@JonasStein it should mean that the maintainer has asked the ctan team to flag it that way, although it's worth checking if that is the case, there is room for human error in the catalogue data

@marmot done

@DavidCarlisle OK, I didn't know it, added a note to my answer.

@CarLaTeX I upvoted your answer before you made this crucial change, but if you receive no more upvotes, you may blame Sam Carter ;-) ;-)

@egreg I'm not sure if this release addresses this question. @WillRobertson didn't mark the imho relevant issue as resolved: github.com/wspr/unicode-math/issues/423. It is not easy to decide which fontdimens should win in such mix.

@UlrikeFischer :-(

@marmot If someone won't appreciate, I'll delete it :)

@egreg It is not so bad. If the range option no longer misbehaves the trick to reset as last font the constants of the main font with a small range is quite ok.

I can now generate my adminicrap Word documents like meeting minutes from within TeXShop using pandoc. One step closer to never having to use Word again.

@AlanMunn Nice. Any tricks required?

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Not really, TeXShop allows you to save .md files, and for simple things, you write in markdown and then add a TeXShop engine (or use arara) to generate either PDF or docx (or both.) It can also do simple latex -> docx too, but for things like minutes it's much faster to use markdown as the source.

@AlanMunn Ah, so not being a TeXshop user, the equivalent for me would be just writing markdown and pushing it through pandoc? No TeX involved, really?

@AlanMunn apart from not running on Linux, I find Word to be a bit better than LibreOffice

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Yes, TeXShop is just the editor I generally use. But you can do it with arara and your favourite editor/previewer combination too. You can use TeX if you like, but for simple things it's not worth the extra markup overhead.

@StrongBad Yes, I agree. The opensource office equivalents really leave a lot to be desired. And I still use Excel, for which there is really no good substitute.

@AlanMunn Why would I even need arara, though?

@AlanMunn Well, if you're on macos, there is always Numbers.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen It depends on how simple it is to run pandoc on a document from within your editor. Of course you can just run from the command line too.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Numbers is a toy, not usable for serious work.

@AlanMunn I disagree on Excel, there is really no need to ever use it or a substitute.

@AlanMunn That's news to me. Though it was irritating how they removed a bunch of features when “upgrading” the package. I think most of them are back, though. And so long as it has what you need, it is vastly more pleasant to work with.

@StrongBad It's very useful for certain things, like creating stimulus files for experiments.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen I admit I haven't used it for a while. Also, I need to share files with students a lot, so Mac only options are really not practical.

@UlrikeFischer That might be done automatically by the package. Maybe disallowing \setmathfont in the document body (defining versions should be preferred).

@AlanMunn That is a good point. Numbers will import and export excel files, but too much seems to change when you do.

@egreg Yes, but what I mean is that is not an annoying bug but "only" a missing feature and as such has not a so high priority for me.

@StrongBad What do you use instead for e.g. quickly looking at experimental data, editing CSV files, ...

@AlanMunn Obviously don't have admin in strictly fixed templates (with tables)

@StrongBad Claiming expenses ...

@JosephWright matlab, r, python and more recently PsychoPy

@JosephWright No, luckily we don't. The same American distaste for government regulation tends to extend to the university world too, by and large.

Claiming expenses might be one of the few cases where a spreadsheet is appropriate as opposed to a CSV file or a database. But really, it should be on line

@StrongBad Yeah, not so convenient for a quick view ... (for real presentation I of course use pgfplots)

@StrongBad Budgets for grants too.

@AlanMunn Those for me are in online forms mainly

@StrongBad Still need to edit the CSV, for which a text editor is not so great

@AlanMunn My last university and my new government job are both fully online for travel and grant budgets.

@JosephWright I read the CSV into matlab/python, visualize/manipulate and then write it back out.

Guys, I reformatted my Mac. Two things: brew and brew cask. They are amazing.

I was able to setup my Mac entirely from the command line. No drag and drop, or unzip, or anything else.

@StrongBad Hmm, you are obviously better at this than me (I'd see Python as for 'serious' programming, and don't even have access to Matlab)

@PauloCereda I found them intensely annoying ...

@StrongBad Also, these are not tools that are easily usable by undergrads. Most of them can use Excel to some degree though.

@JosephWright Octave (open source matlab) and matlab will import a CSV file into a spreadsheet type view. You just cannot sum columns and things since everything is a variable.

@AlanMunn you do linguistics right? You should check out psychopy. We got undergrad psychology students to use it instead of things like eprime.

@StrongBad Hmm, that's one of the things one needs to be able to do (for example to enter mark sheets, or do your admin of a TeX user group ...)

@JosephWright The annoyance is good. :)

@StrongBad Yes, I've been using it for a few years. And since it reads Excel files, we use Excel to generate stimulus files.

I used to be at Nottingham in the office next to the main developer so got conned into using and it and really like it.

@JosephWright Oh, yes I forgot, grade sheets. Using Matlab for that seems like overkill. :)

@AlanMunn wow, apparently I was spoiled. We entered our grades directly into the LMS.

vim can open CSV files and sum them like a spreadsheet. :)

@StrongBad Generally more hassle than Excel, IMO. But to each their own.

@PauloCereda tidbits.com/article/17718?rss

oooooooh

@ScottSeidman Wait, I get it too. And if it persists you should add an issue at github and not to try to debug it yourself.

@ScottSeidman @UlrikeFischer github.com/MiKTeX/miktex/issues/49

@TorbjørnT. Yes just saw also miktex.org/alert/miktex-6582-out-of-sync

@UlrikeFischer That's where I got from also.

@UlrikeFischer Thx. I need to install tabto.sty without the Miktex tools to do so. Is there a place I need to copy it to (win10)

You can copy it to your document folder and then delete again tomorrow.

@UlrikeFischer thanks again.

@egreg do you understand this issue report? github.com/wspr/unicode-math/issues/431?

@UlrikeFischer Probably referring to the fact that the examples of \mathscr and \mathcal on page 15 of the manual for v0.8j looks quite like \mathit.

@UlrikeFischer I added a comment.

@PauloCereda but you can't save the file after editing so it's a bit useless

@barbarabeeton Another hard day on the recumbent?

@HaraldHanche-Olsen -- yup, but only three miles today (an hour and a half). there was a line waiting to get on. but i'm now doing a fair amount of walking with a cane. (good as a weapon too, as long as i can keep my balance.) so maybe i can get sprung from here, but not until the surgeon has cleared me, and there's no appointment available with him until jan 22. so i'm stuck for another week and a half at least. so i'll just keep giving the rehab crew a hard time.

@barbarabeeton You'll be running up and down the stairs by then!

@CarLaTeX -- my reaction, in addition to \include instead of \input was to make use of \frontmatter, \mainmatter and \backmatter. one of the really reasonably designed facilities of the basic book class. (i have a distinct dislike for how the toc doesn't handle starred chapters and sections, but i'm biased.)

@HaraldHanche-Olsen -- well, that'll be something new; i haven't run up and down stairs since i was in my 20s, and i'm not sure about that. but if you'd adjust that to "sweeping gracefully", i'll concur.

@barbarabeeton I'll add them

@DavidCarlisle -- an ibm executive typewriter with a "typit" attachment could produce an even sexier result.

@DavidCarlisle -- that's cheating.

@marmot -- too small? never read "archie and mehitabel"? look it up.

@barbarabeeton good use of limited resources if you ask me.

@StrongBad -- another use for a spreadsheet is figuring one's taxes. had bad experiences with the commercial tools -- when the difference between my figuring and the alleged output from the tool is $3000 and i can't find what caused the difference, i reject the tool. i don't like to be audited.

@barbarabeeton I always thought this was fiction. But the keyboard problem is not the worst, some authorities deny marmots a passport (because of the fingerprints, they say). ;-)

@barbarabeeton You must have a rather simple tax system if you can figure it out in a spreadsheet. That's impossible to do in germany ;-).

@UlrikeFischer -- no, not so simple, but i'm able to create a tailored spreadsheet with the exact choices of rates and dependencies that apply just to us. (it wouldn't be useful for anyone else.) last year it took about 8 hours to complete, but since i can tie back every line to the official forms, if anyone questions it, or we're audited, i can explain. (having been audited once before computers got involved, that doesn't frighten me as long as i know i've got receipts for all the numbers.)

@UlrikeFischer No

@egreg ;-) But I played a bit with range={cal} and the results are not quite consistent but I wanted to wait until github.com/wspr/unicode-math/issues/430 is resolved ...