@StefanKottwitz OK, hier ist meine erste Antwort. I guess on TeX.SE this would not have been unanswered that long.

Word of the week: anatidaephobia.

@marmot -- but decoys used to be used (and in some places still are) to attract ducks, so that hunters could shoot them. i'm not familiar with decoys used as repellents. (stuffed owls have been used to scare off gulls and pigeons, but it's not clear that they are very effective. i don't think they'd have much effect on ducks either way.)

@marmot -- i didn't realize that @DavidCarlisle was a predatory bird ...

@barbarabeeton He especially likes to prey on egre t gs

@AlanMunn -- touché

@barbarabeeton That's how I got this knowledge:

Someone must have removed David in between. ;-)

@marmot Having posted that image you're making my anatidaephobia worse. That duck is definitely watching me.

@AlanMunn Well, at least this is a visible duck. I guess all the invisible ones must be much worse, aren't they?

@marmot This hibernation thing is starting to look better and better.

@AlanMunn The first few months are fine, but then it's becoming a bit boring.

@marmot :)

@StefanKottwitz Stefan, read my reply on that tweet about Venus and Mercure positions: twitter.com/CarLaTeXSE/status/976796506945675265?s=19 :):):)

@TeXnician ctan updated thanks

@JosephWright Ronnie O'Sullivan: Came in China, played 147 and goes home.

@barbarabeeton @DavidCarlisle @egreg You got mail, a few comments for the manual.

@daleif Seen it and agreed upon almost completely

@daleif thanks, just reading them. I'm travelling for a couple of days so time is quite tight for a ctan release at the weekend but I'll get in what I can and put everything else in issues for an update after the texlive2018 cycle is started

@DavidCarlisle Is CTAN deadling for TL18 this weekend? Then I'd better ship the memoir update quite soon

@daleif cutoff for tl is the 9th according to tug.org/texlive so stuff had to be uploaded to ctan in time to be pulled back and integrated into the texlive svn by then so the weekend is cutting it fine

@DavidCarlisle Thanks for the reminder

@egreg you have write access to the file ....

I've had a question on mathtools for a component I don't quite understand. In the definition for dcases we find the following preamble for the first column

$\m@th\displaystyle{##}$\hfil

The question is why Morten used this and not for example

$\m@th\displaystyle ## \hfil$

as the later would allow

to center the 0 in row 2

The dtx does not mention any difference

@marmot also you can get rid of ducks by mentioning unfinished theses. :)

@PauloCereda However mentioning unfinished theses is considered cruelty to animals!

@samcarter indeed!

@samcarter: how's Passau? :)

@PauloCereda Not there yet. I am only going tomorrow and Friday - but I am looking forward to it.

@samcarter oh cool. :)

@egreg any comments on my question above? My knowledge of table/array preambles are very limited

@daleif I guess it's done for uniformity with align

@egreg then the next question is of course why align uses the braces, it seems to work without it (at least for dcases, haven't tested if align works without the braces)

Quack

@PauloCereda Oh, does that mean you're done with your thesis?

@marmot Not yet. :) There still some road ahead.

@PauloCereda Is that the road paved with good intentions? Better be careful!

@HaraldHanche-Olsen -- i think it's gotta be the yellow brick road.

@PauloCereda I recommend starting with page 1

@DavidCarlisle Even better, the This page left intentionally blank page.

@AlanMunn This comment left intentionally blank.

@santimirandarp Yes.

@santimirandarp Yes, I was going to say that it's likely viewer dependent.

@AlanMunn I discovered today, to my surprise, that the PDF viewers I usually use fake the presence of hyperlinks where there is none. They look for text looking like an URL and, if you click on such text, it will send you off to the web browser. (Preview, Skim, and PDFPen Pro on the Mac.)

@HaraldHanche-Olsen I think that might be a Mac thing more generally.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Typical behavior of PDFKit based viewers (Preview, Skim and others).

@HaraldHanche-Olsen, @AlanMunn, @DavidCarlisle: you guys are mean

@AlanMunn My favorite in this direction is This page is unintentionally left unblank.

@mickep That should be @PauloCereda 's header.

@AlanMunn I have something far better:

@egreg I don't think PDFpen is based on PDFkit, though. But they might have been infected by this “annoyingly helpful” virus.

@PauloCereda You realize that without this chat your thesis would be too long and dull, right? ;)

@mickep ooh improvement

@PauloCereda \lhead{Are you still awake?}\chead{}\rhead{\thepage}

@AlanMunn One of my all time favourite quotes from Futurama is this Al Gore line: Finally, I get to save the Earth with deadly lasers instead of deadly slide shows.

@PauloCereda :)

@PauloCereda You just have to come up with a chapter in the thesis that fits the quote, then! ;)

@PauloCereda Because ... Why not? youtube.com/watch?v=ReiAGVoJFkc

@Johannes_B ooh

@percusse If you want add me on LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/manuel-kuehner-4b81a5b9) or ResearchGate (researchgate.net/profile/Manuel_Kuehner)

@Dr.ManuelKuehner Thanks! Done.

@Dr.ManuelKuehner Here is the haptics stuff just in case you are dying from boredom.

github.com/ilayn/boekje

@percusseThanks! :)

@PauloCereda music.tomh.eu/arr/151 you might know the song...

@Sebastiano the problem is that the question can not really be answered. Your document is fine, but you are showing that there should not be a problem, the roman numbers come out in latin script by default. So (as is often the case) the question is about some code that no one has seen that is making that not happen.

@santimirandarp One of the jobs of \begin{document} is to issue \normalsize.

You can do \AtBeginDocument{\large} if you prefer to have it in the preamble.

@santimirandarp the idea is that you (or more commonly the class file you use) defines the document default size by defining \normalsize so it is logically inconsistent to specify a document default size in your class file and then say in teh preamble you never want that size