@Hazinga -- answer posted. but i don't much care about rep; i'll never catch up with either @egreg or @DavidCarlisle (or a lot of other folks). i'm just happy that the suggestion produced the desired output. i spend lots of time debugging (mostly other people's) problems, and hope to help them learn to analyze logs so that they can, in time, solve such problems themselves.

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL‌​LLLLLL

@PauloCereda are you practising?

@UlrikeFischer Yes. :)

@PauloCereda Beware of the Swiss

@PauloCereda the opponents ^^^

@egreg ooh

@UlrikeFischer ooh

@PauloCereda It is time to check the number of ooh for a palindrome. Where is @DavidCarlisle when one needs him?

@UlrikeFischer listening to a tuba concert. :)

Oh wait, it's a trombone

@PauloCereda Alphorn

@PauloCereda youtube.com/watch?v=ljSTN1wFSm4

@UlrikeFischer, @egreg: David has money involved in the game. :)

@PauloCereda He surely bet on Switzerland.

@egreg oh no

@egreg I remembered David when I wrote an example in my manual:

@egreg ^^ by the way, arara uses natural indices, so 2 means the #2 in the list, which is... :)

@PauloCereda The right person?

@egreg of course. :)

@PauloCereda Care to answer this one? Seems like begging for arara

@percusse I will sir. :)

@percusse by the way, expect an email in a couple of minutes. :)

@PauloCereda clarinet, but actually I'm pushing my dad past some ducks

@DavidCarlisle oh

@DavidCarlisle Quack

@JosephWright @PauloCereda of course I only took pictures of the interesting birds, not the ducks

@DavidCarlisle oh

Biber gives me a strange new kind of error and I can't read anything out of it.

Prozess gestartet: biber.exe "ExposeeD"

The following parameter was passed in the call to DateTime::Format::Builder::Parser::create_single_parser but was not listed in the validation options: params at
C:\Users\thymi\AppData\Local\Temp\par-7468796d69\cache-9d6b46fefde4bd584f892f8159e8daefd64788a3\ee447f6b.pm line 164. DateTime::Format::Builder::Parser::create_single_parser(undef, "regex", qr(^ (-?\d{4}) - (\d\d) - (\d\d)\x{a} )...ux, "params", ARRAY(0x498bcb0), "length", ARRAY(0x498bc68)) called at

can anyone point in the right direction as to what I could try?

I have two parencite commands in my document, the bib file contains around 150 entries. The bibliography is not included in the document. Also, texstudio tells me:

Citation 'United.2016.MarinePlastic' on page 4 undefined

Empty bibliography

LaTeX Warning: There were undefined references.


Package biblatex Warning: Please (re)run Biber on the file:
(biblatex)                ExposeeD
(biblatex)                and rerun LaTeX afterwards.

What should I try? It doesn't make any sense to me...

or should I attempt to shape this into a site question?

@DavidCarlisle, @egreg Looks like there are no objections on the e-type changes?

@JosephWright I see no function with :e except \exp_not:e

@JosephWright At least in the documentation.

@egreg I mean altering e.g. \str_if_eq_x:nnTF

@egreg No: I thought I should ship the basic idea first ...

Quack?

aaaargh... what took me so long to try this!? I made an MWE, breaking down every element of my document and then had an idea: I just did biber --version in cmd on windows and it gives me the same . fucking . shit . message as seen above! I'munna go download biber again, as the problem is clearly with it and not any part of my document.

@thymaro I'm not expert with Windows, so I didn't chime in, but the problem seemed just that. Did you try removing the C:\Users\thymi\AppData\Local\Temp\par-7468796d69 folder first?

@egreg nope

anyways, much ado about nothing. my biber seemed to be corrupted in some way. I downloaded the latest biber-MSWIN64.zip from the project website, extracted it to C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.9\miktex\bin\x64\biber.exe (replacing the existing EXE file), now it works again.

@PauloCereda Goal!

although... hmm... biber --version now yields biber version: 2.10 (just like on linux the other day, if anyone cares to remember). The project website does have the explanations on biber 2.11 and states it works with biblatex 3.11, but the download section doesn't actually contain the 2.11 files, just the 2.10 files.

I'll go and contact the devs.

@AlanMunn ooh

@thymaro Why do you install biber manually on windows? With the package manager of miktex I get 2.11.

@UlrikeFischer true... I could just reinstall biber with mpm

but nevertheless, SF should have 2.11, not still 2.10

Goal! Mexico 1:0 Germany

@PauloCereda You are mean.

@AlanMunn <3

@barbarabeeton Dear me, I see this from more and more from my own students. I wonder if there is something in the wild that is promoting the idea of \\\\ for new paragraph. Perhaps we should make it call an error :)

@WillRobertson -- do we have any idea where the "quadruple backslash" is being recommended? (i use a double backslash in a number of "unconventional" situations, so wouldn't want that marked as an error, but surely four in a row, even separated by a space or line end, is sufficiently questionable to warrant at least a warning.) if we can find the source of the recommendation, we should complain vociferously.

@WillRobertson Eeek

Hi @WillRobertson

@barbarabeeton I promised harsh punishments to my students if they use \\ for ending a paragraph.

@egreg Forced to eat pineapple pizza?

@JosephWright Hello :) Sorry to jump in and run! Grant rejoinders due

@AlanMunn Some of us like pineapple on pizza!

@WillRobertson Yes. :) But it annoys the Italians here to no end.

@barbarabeeton I haven't seen anything actually suggesting it; it's possible that it arises naturally from a number of factors (a) students hate indent without parskip, because MS Word, (b) they're used to hitting "return return" for a new paragraph in emails and Word, (c) they stumble across the fact that they can write:

foo bar baz\\
\\
what seems to be a new par

@WillRobertson Yes, I think this is exactly right. (I was just about to say the same).

The first one is the most baffling to me, though. (The general loathing for indent.) I tell them to pick up ANY BOOK, and they're still skeptical.

Anyway, gotta run. Nice to chat briefly!

@egreg Are you the author of xcite (ctan.org/pkg/xcite)?

@egreg If yes, is there a good reason to choose xcite over xr (ctan.org/pkg/xr) that you mention on the xcite ctan page?

@PauloCereda Happy belated birthday :)

@Dr.ManuelKuehner from memory they serve related but entirely distinct purposes

@DaiBowen Thanks for the response. I was hoping for a clear A or B answer :).

@WillRobertson Some people also like `\\` at the end of the paragraph, both are similarly weird, I would say.

@AlanMunn That could be the start, if I could find a pizzeria that has it in the menu.

@Dr.ManuelKuehner xr is for \ref, \xcite is for \cite

@egreg I see. Then I should use xr. Sorry for the noise, missed that.

@Dr.ManuelKuehner Consider also xr-hyper if you use hyperref. Actually there is, more or less, a plan to merge the three.

@egreg Ah, ok. Then I have a look at xr-hyper

@PauloCereda am I going to get my £20?

@PauloCereda Ouch!

@DavidCarlisle How much did you bet on Tunisia?

@egreg it's a sweepstake, everyone puts in a pound and pulls out a ticket at random so £32 pounds went in, winner gets £20, second gets £12 it's a zero-sum game:-) I pulled out Brazil....

@barbarabeeton One of my former instructors always told his students to use it (and didn't change that even after complaints)…

@TeXnician -- that is dreadful. i really don't know how to combat that sort of "instruction".

@barbarabeeton That's the whole point. A student can't change an instructor/teacher/prof so everybody will continue with what "visually works". Maybe we should get the authors of TeX editors to issue a warning if a user types four backslashes ;)

@TeXnician -- i think maybe will's suggestion -- issue an error from latex in that situation -- might be more likely to happen. (after all, even notepad can be used as an editor for tex, and that's not likely to change.)

@barbarabeeton Yeah, that might be a good idea. Hence we just need the kernel team to approve it, so maybe it's included in a few years :)

Good evening to everyone and I send you my most sincere greetings to everyone.

@CarLaTeX @TeXnician Hi, with affect.

@Sebastiano Ciao!

@TeXnician \def\\{\\}

@DavidCarlisle -- and you get to answer the first question "why isn't latex producing any output? and why is my computer stalled?"