@JosephWright @WillRobertson I hope you travelled well. I'm for the last time at this Zaza bar place, and it's as cool as ever, had to give them 5 stars at google reviews :) (I'm drinking my weissenbier served with lime juice and salt, and it's so good :D )
@DavidCarlisle @JosephWright seeing Javiers problems with arabic and luaotfload it would be perhaps a good idea if the latex team would ask the maintainer "officially" about the future of the package. And I will try to enlarge my test pool by stealing as much as possible from fontspec, unicode-math and the latex testfiles ...
@UlrikeFischer We can, I suppose: it's a tricky one (most of the time it seems to work fine, so it's easy to forget that there is a lot of work to keep in line with ConTeXt/LuaTeX development)
questions regarding maple -- which i know isn't appropriate for this site, so what i really need to know is, is there a suitable .so or .sx site where they can be asked. (1) can maple be made to generate vector, as opposed to bitmap, graphics? (2) can fonts be embedded in a graphics file created by maple? (thanks.)
@barbarabeeton, hello. I remember from a long time ago to use some command like plotsetup('postscript', plotoutput=fileName, plotoptions=cat("quality=100,portrait,noborder,width=",w,",height=",h));
to export the plots
This could help: https://www.maplesoft.com/support/help/maple/view.aspx?path=worksheet%2Fplotinterface%2Fexportplot
More precisely, what I did was: plotsetup(ps,plo toptions=`portrait,width=4in,height=3in,bottommargin=0,leftmargin=0in, colour=cmyk`,plotoutput=`bicmat_logo_gray.eps`);
@barbarabeeton Absolutely, maple can generate vector graphics. Among the export options for a graph are both EPS and PDF. I can't imagine that they export to PDF without embedding needed fonts in this day and age, but I don't know for sure.
@barbarabeeton PDF export exports to a whole (US letter size) page, and so needs to be cropped. The EPS export doesn't, but it too tends to include too much white space around the picture.
@Sigur and @HaraldHanche-Olsen -- thanks, guys. that's very useful. now we need to figure out how to tell our author how to get the desired output instead of the bitmaps he's sent in. not having anyone here who knows or uses maple is a bit of a disadvantage. (we can deal with whitespace. it's the actual images that are the problem.)
@barbarabeeton, I used Maple with command lines, not clicking with mouse. So, I just inserted that line before plot commands. Then, instead of view the graph on a box, it was saved to the file.
@barbarabeeton If there are not a lot of these images, it is easily done by mouse: Generate the graph, right click on it (two finger click if using a Mac trackpad), and pick Export → PDF (or Encapsulated Postscript) from the menu. This may be easier to explain than the command line, which can be confusing at best.
@FaheemMitha -- don't know how popular it is, but some ams authors use it to prepare their figures, so we get questions. i've never used it, nor mathematica, nor any of the other options. (the last time i seriously prepared figures, a tech pen and india ink were the requisite tools. and maybe a leroy set for annotations.)
@FaheemMitha -- a leroy set was a collection of (physical) templates, or stencils, that one used with a tech pen to add lettering to diagrams or graphs. used mostly by engineers or architects, although here is a nice picture and description that says they were also used for the lettering in old comic books.
@FaheemMitha Many universities have a site license. Mine does. But I don't know exactly how widespread it is. The company seems to be doing well, though. They're also into online testing and assessment.
@DavidCarlisle -- well, i would have phrased it as "was designed to not work in the subsidiary environments", but that's not what i think is wanted. i'm sure michael would have had a good rationale.
@barbarabeeton the implementation would need to be different, the current ones set their content as full width paragraphs in the outer list (so textwidth currently) the inline ones don't have a natural width until you have seen the whole environment so you would have to throw the text away on the measuring pass and then set the text to the calculated width on the second pass.
@DavidCarlisle -- that's true, but the point of the subsidiary environments was that they were intended to handle something that was a logical unit, and thus shouldn't be broken. period. (i do remember having that discussion with michael. that was before there was a lot of experience with counterexamples and exceptions. i can't say whether he would change his mind now.)
@barbarabeeton presumably if you made it work the gathered would still be a single unbreakable box but with essentially three rows, the first math the text and the second math
@DavidCarlisle -- well, yes, that's a reasonable argument. what about emulating it with a \clap of a minipage of \textwidth? (oh, i see you just suggested something similar.)
@barbarabeeton but not textwidth it would have to be the width of the gathered (which you don't know until you have typeset the following part of the environment)
@egreg could be, but I tried also with tl17 and had the differences too. And if you get the kerns than it can't be my experimental fontloader. I think I have to ask @WillRobertson if the test is still valid.
@PhelypeOleinik -- i'm pretty sure (but haven't checked the archive of the relevant mailing list) that this was to match the iso standard for the date format, which specifies a hyphen rather than a slash.
@manooooh presumably the font designer preferred it that way, you can always use a different font.
@PhelypeOleinik ISO 8601 date format rather than some latex-specific format that Frank invented:-)
@PhelypeOleinik which makes it easier to match dates in auto-generated log files from svn or git or gnu changelog etc which all use iso format dates. the latex code now uses either so you can use \usepackage{array}[2018-01-01] or \usepackage{array}[2018/01/01] with the same behaviour.
Waiting for my pizza in Foz do Iguaçu. The waterfalls were beautiful and I enjoyed about an hour of walking along the jungle (even saw some monkeys and stuff). Tomorrow I plan the water dam and some more...