I searched for "knuth80" (DEK's 80th birthday celebrations in Sweden) and found some nice slides from Yannis Haralambous talking about “TeX as a path” --
Ugh. I was in the middle of editing my post when the next post came in, auto-committing my edit⁉ And now I can't, anymore. The edited text was supposed to read as follows: ed is the standard editor
@JosephWright have you downloaded the installer? (I tend to recommend downloading the zip and unpacking it). Then either run install-tl-windows or install-tl-advanced.
@JosephWright there are still instances where the simple installer fails with perl errors. And last I tested the .exe it did not leave the alt installer behind, it unpacked itself in a "hidden" place. So I recommend the zip for more options for the user.
@Vrouvrou unzip it of course. Then go into the folder created by unzipping the zip, and run either install-tl-windows.exe or install-tl-advanced.bat. It is not rocket science.
@daleif because I use cygwin for more or less everything so it is far more natural to use cygwin tex as well with the same notional file paths, and when I shell escape I get a cygwin path with my usual environment rather than some windows based path. I use cygwin X windows, bash perl, make, emacs, tex, ....
@egreg On the offset business, what I'm trying to get at is that a new format would I think have the origin as (nominally) (0pt, 0pt) (so remove the one inch margin). Any subsequent 'final adjustment' should as you say not be picked up by packages.
@JosephWright Yes, but the (0,0) origin should not be obtained by using \hoffset and \voffset; all engines now have something about the origin, don't they?
@egreg yes thanks I guessed I could use the accent commands, so I should ignore the current "transliterated" output and experiment with adding teh supplied translations via babel's addtoextras or whatever it's called
%D We get rid of the funny \TEX\ offset defaults of one inch by setting them to zero.
\voffset\zeropoint \let\voffset\relax \newdimen\voffset % prevent messing up
\hoffset\zeropoint \let\hoffset\relax \newdimen\hoffset % prevent messing up
@egreg I keep hearing that you should never touch \hoffset and \voffset. But the pdfTeX manual says the opposite: “For standard purposes, this parameter [\pdfhorigin] should always be kept at 1 true inch. If you want to shift text on the page, use TEX’s own \hoffset primitive.”
@HaraldHanche-Olsen Based around the idea that you start with a one-inch margin. If you start from the ground up with the origin in the corner, it doesn't apply.
@JosephWright Somehow, I still find that confusing. Granted, in LaTeX it's probably best to just use the geometry package and let it do its thing, but I still don't know why fiddling with the offset/origin parameters is bad. And you seem to tell me it isn't bad? (Except I think I read somewhere recently that TikZ may get confused by it.)
@HaraldHanche-Olsen Whether it's bad or not depends on what assumptions are built in to everything. Current LaTeX was written when we didn't have PDF-based values for paper size, origin, etc., so the ideal that \hoffset and \voffset are 1in is widely 'baked in'
@egreg Oy. That didn't work out too well. (I just copied atbegshi-example1.texand added the vmargin package.) But if I am doing plain TeX, and handle all the page layout on my own, there really shouldn't be any surprises, I assume.
@egreg I don't generally do TikZ in plain TeX. All my plain TeX documents are very simple. The moment I feel like doing something complicated, I switch to LaTeX.
@AlanMunn I love this statement! Similarly, I have a passion for using Milá/milý (Dear) in mails, which is usually replaced by Ahoj (Hello) followed by the recipient's name. So I wouldn't say formal, but rather old-fashioned :)
@AlanMunn yeah, but in Czech, it quite disappears, and also, the word gets slightly negative taste to it. Similar to when you call your children by their proper name instead of the familiar form (if this makes sense in English, damn the languages know to be different!)
@yo' In English most names don't have familiar forms, so the "I'm angry at you" form is usually to say the full name (First Last) (and sometimes middle). I don't recall my parents using that form much but it's pretty common.
@AlanMunn yeah, it's funny; in Czech it's strange to use names with non-existent or unnatural familiar forms. My good friends named their son by one such name, and the familiar form they use sounds ... humiliating at best, and stupid at worst (IMHO)
@AlanMunn Erik is not quite a domestic name (about 1/1000 in Czechia), and the familiar form is following a typical pattern, but the result does not turn well
It's basically infantile, yeah, it's Eriček (č as in Cz-ech), it's almost twice as long as the original name and sounds proper only as long as the boy wears nappies 24/7. So I wonder if they're gonna use it forever.
@JosephWright Spanish and Portuguese have diminutive suffixes (kind of like –y/–ie in English Bobby, Lizzie etc.) that can be attached to almost anything. So when attached to a name, it's used with very close friends. In Spanish it's –ito/–ita and in Portuguese its –inho/–inha.
@AlanMunn funny, again Alan is not quite common here (1/4000) and it does not have a common familiar form. However, the name Alena is common (1/50) and of course has many familiar forms then :)
@AlanMunn I guess what I'm not seeing is the 'standardisation': it's quite possible to have a 'pet' name in English, but that is dependent on the people (for example, my sister sometimes calls me Zeppy, from Guiseppe, which is therefore the 'same' as my name)
@AlanMunn yeah, Czech has this thing too, and these familiar forms sound infantile to the highest degree. I'm happy even my family has never really called me this way