@DavidCarlisle @barbarabeeton @marmot and why not @CarLaTeX: here we began to encourage neck pains in the street

in short, prepare for another Vietnam war...

@manooooh Good idea :)

@CarLaTeX yeah

Morning all

Everyone should look at the TUGboat survey (see starred message)

@user1732 @CarLaTeX ^^ ouch...

@yo' It was a reply to a previous message, click on the arrow

@CarLaTeX I know...

Everyone done the survey?

@JosephWright Yes

@CarLaTeX :)

@JosephWright after the usual round of errors due to typos (stengine) and wrong settings (pdfext={""}, don't ask me why this was in the build.lua) pdf testing seems to work fine ...

@UlrikeFischer Cool

@UlrikeFischer Great

@UlrikeFischer There's an update for today: I'm still working on PDF normalisation (or rather getting the binary data out). Release some time this afternoon :)

@JosephWright and the tpf file looks quite useful even outside tests as you don't have to scroll over all the useless binary data ...

@UlrikeFischer Exactly: that's one reason for normalising that out. It also makes diff happy when there is a change.

@UlrikeFischer l3build updated on CTAN

@JosephWright something completly different: do you know if there is somewhere luacode for utf8 to utf16BE conversion?

@UlrikeFischer I don't know of a specific set up, but the conversion is well-documented so it should not be too hard: where do you need UTF16?

@JosephWright The /Alt and /ActualText values should be encoded either in pdfdocencoding or utf16be. With pdftex I managed a more or less sensible output with \StringEncodingConvert (from stringenc) and \pdfescapehex. But stringenc doesn't work with luatex and I can't find something suitable in the luatex manual.

@UlrikeFischer Ah

@UlrikeFischer Must be something in ConTeXt, then

@UlrikeFischer We need some of Bruno's string-conversion stuff in expl3 core, then, longer term

@JosephWright context has something in l-unicode.lua. But it is in bits and pieces and lots of renames (local X= y) and so quite some work to get everything together.

@UlrikeFischer Ah

@UlrikeFischer We must have the algorithm in the string conversion code for pdfTeX

@JosephWright when you mentioned Bruno I remembered l3str-convert. But it doesn't work ;-(. ` \str_set_convert:Nnnn \l_tmpa_tl {öäü} {utf8} {utf16be}` gives (with luatex) the error Invalid UTF-8 string: missing continuation byte (x3).

@JosephWright Rereading the docu, the correct syntax is \str_set_convert:Nnnn \l_tmpa_tl {öäü} {} {utf16be} and this seems to give something more sensible. Now I have to check how to get the hex from it.

@JosephWright ` \str_set_convert:Nnnn \l_tmpa_tl {öäü} {} {utf16be/hex}` looks perfect ;-). Bruno is so good ;-)

@PauloCereda a balanced menu:

@DavidCarlisle A DUCK!

@DavidCarlisle Where's that?

@JosephWright countryfile live at Blenheim

@DavidCarlisle Oooh

@DavidCarlisle Sounds fun

@UlrikeFischer I've updated l3build on CTAN, and probably will switch to some macro stuff for a few days unless anything specific comes up with PDF testing

@JosephWright I just went today, M+J are there all four days (young Farmers helping out on some of the stands)

@DavidCarlisle Goodness

@DavidCarlisle Sounds like a fun day out

@JosephWright warm:-)

@JosephWright one for replacing the TUG videos one in the featured list? tex.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7769/…

@JosephWright I see, thanks :)

@DavidCarlisle We haf vays and meanz to make you quack! ^^^^

@UlrikeFischer Why ifnt fe duck 3D?

@marmot it's keeping a low profile.

@UlrikeFischer But on a TeX site, shouldn't it hide behind some integrals, say? I'm not sure the camouflage you propose works on this site. ;-)

@marmot I love your profile pic. Its cool you've got it tikzified. I'd love to have a tikzified profile pic too

@crypto Then you need to ask @samcarter ;-)

Can I drop a request here or must I wait until he appears online?

@crypto I was just going on her nerves long enough this was probably the easier way out. But I don't thin this will work again. ;-)

@marmot That's not good news :(. I was just figuring out what to request

@crypto But you can always ask a question on the main site... ;-)

Isn't that strictly meant for questions? I though personal requests must be made over here while the site is strictly dedicated for academic purpose

@crypto I am not an expert on this but nobody grilled me for this question. Actually, most of my most upvoted questions have the tag fun.