TeX, LaTeX and Friends

barbara beeton

00:08

@Canageek -- granted my experience is on a linux box, and on my employer's net connection, but when i go to a ctan mirror i always go to the one in salt lake city, utah. sometimes it's busy, but (barring disasters like unscheduled outages) it's always up to date, and once connected, it's reliable. if you're in western canada, it's certainly closer to you than halifax. Ii'm in rhode island, which is closer to halifax than it is to utah.)

Canageek

@barbarabeeton Good idea. I've tried to manually tell it to use Seattle, since that is really close to me (I can see the pacific from the top of this building. Halifax is a LONG way away), but cant' get the CLI option right

0

Q: What is the correct command line to tell install-tl to use the mirror I tell it?

I'm updating TeX on my systems, and have been having issues with very slow install speeds (Estimated finishing times of over 19 hours at times for a 1.9 GB install). I think this might be since testing indicates that CTAN selects mirrors based on what country I'm in, and the nearest Canadian mirr...

I tried tlpkg\tlperl\bin\perl.exe install-tl -gui perltk -repository http://ctan.math.washington.edu/tex-archive/ without luck

Now it is giving a reasonable time, which is 2 hours with myself being 30 minutes in.

(Package 0631/2928 34:48/02:03:04)

So I'm going to head home and hope this finishes installing on its own overnight

@barbarabeeton (This is also on my boss's net connection. That is how I can get such good download speeds)

Once I figure out how to manually pick a mirror, I swear, I should write a little batch file or bash script that automatically picks a specific 50 KB file and downloads it from every CTAN mirror and goes with whatever one get the fastest download time.

manooooh

00:47

@CarLaTeX hi...

@CarLaTeX I know we should have spoken more often, it's been my fault, I apologize... Even though the promise is debt, you know? :)))

@CarLaTeX (if I have time, I'll download the video, add subtitles in Italian, and send it to you. I don't think YouTube accepts a translation of that video, so I'd choose to make it more homemade)

CarLaTeX

06:00

@manooooh They are not a reliable tourist guide, they took Santa Maria delle Grazie al Naviglio: goo.gl/images/acmhVC for San Cristoforo al Naviglio: chiesasancristoforo.it/mainmobile.asp (I live near here), argh!

manooooh

06:31

@CarLaTeX lol! Thanks for the warning, I never thought I'd be wary of tourist programs

@CarLaTeX after all I made you wait a week to disappoint you with an unreliable trip :(. I don't know how to reward you... (? haha

CarLaTeX

07:22

@manooooh Don't worry, I'm accostumed to deal with people who think you can put pineapple on pizza, lol!

manooooh

@CarLaTeX hahaha

@CarLaTeX how are the holidays?

CarLaTeX

@manooooh Fine, thanks, the sun shines and yesterday I visited the beautiful town of Ravenna

manooooh

@CarLaTeX that's fantastic!! Did you take photos?

CarLaTeX

@manooooh Of course, let me try to upload something

manooooh

@CarLaTeX yayyy I wait you

Muhammed Hashim

07:31

Hello all

manooooh

@MuhammedHashim hii

Muhammed Hashim

I am newbie with latex

and all I do is coping some templates

CarLaTeX

3

@manooooh ^^^ mosaics UNESCO Eritage

manooooh

@CarLaTeX what year is it from approx?

CarLaTeX

@manooooh V Century: turismo.ra.it/ita/Scopri-il-territorio/Arte-e-cultura/…

4

@manooooh There are also duck mosaics ^^^

manooooh

07:40

@CarLaTeX it's a beauty

CarLaTeX

@manooooh Yes, really

manooooh

@CarLaTeX mai gosh! In the tour you must have been the only one who had a real passion for ducklings <3

CarLaTeX

@manooooh lol

manooooh

@CarLaTeX have you gone with a guide?

CarLaTeX

@manooooh No, I went to the tourist office to have some reliable documentation

manooooh

07:44

@CarLaTeX cool

CarLaTeX

@manooooh bye, I'm going to the beach now! <3

manooooh

@CarLaTeX my grandparents would be super happy to see their Italy :)

@CarLaTeX LOL okay, best of luck little girl

CarLaTeX

@manooooh Surely!

@manooooh "little girl", lol! Ciao!

Joseph Wright

09:14

@DavidCarlisle, @egreg Looks like Google have fixed Firefox support for Hangouts :)

David Carlisle

10:45

@JosephWright hangouts seems to be "meet" now

@JosephWright It's very bossy:-) "You will be able to join the meeting when someone lets you in"

@egreg @JosephWright are you in the meeting?

ah works now

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Cool

Krishna

12:36

@DavidCarlisle is it a good idea to use passivetex for going from XML to PDF? Just curious, that's all...

David Carlisle

12:50

@Krishna no, basically same issues as this (third highest voted unanswered question on the site:-)

43

Q: Using XMLTeX to typeset OpenDocument Text

I know that XMLTeX has already been used to typeset TEI documents, but has anyone publicly worked on a set of environment files and stylesheets to typeset OpenDocument Text? I have been looking for such things lately, but I could not find anything. The rationale is that I want a comprehensive so...

xml open-office

Phelype Oleinik

"Actually do the fix described above in the code, not just document it."

@DavidCarlisle Best changelog line ever :D

David Carlisle

@PhelypeOleinik :-)

@UlrikeFischer some progress (mail gone to ctan)

Ulrike Fischer

@DavidCarlisle Saw it. I have no time today or only in the evening but will try to get something ready this week (I need to convert the scripts which pulls files from context too, it wouldn't do if the official package has a mix of old and new fontloader files).

David Carlisle

13:06

@UlrikeFischer Hopefully ctan will accept that (and not require mail from both existing maintainers) we'll see. Don't feel you have to rush out a release but hopefully when you are ready let me know and I can test it here with 1.09 and the latex test suite.....

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Sounds good to me

Krishna

13:44

@DavidCarlisle Thank you for pointing to me to the xmltex question. The recommendation boils down to XSLT, ConteXt, or pandoc

Among these, pandoc is the easiest to use :)

The XSLT from Writer2LateX seems well documented too

David Carlisle

$ pandoc
bash: pandoc: command not found

@Krishna ^^^ can't help with that, sorry:-)

Krishna

huh?

pandoc is a haskell package by John G MacFarlane at Berkeley

binaries are available for a large variety of platforms.......or you could compile it from source

@DavidCarlisle sorry about this. I did not understand your statement/question.

David Carlisle

14:02

@Krishna I just mean I haven't used (and don't currently have) pandoc.

Krishna

Ok....

It is good for small documents in my experience

David Carlisle

@Krishna conversely we have a few lines of xslt here:

$ cat */*.xsl | wc -l
223380

Krishna

As they claim, a nice swiss army knife........ The code is very modular

ok....

From what I read, XSLT seems to be the way to go for a long-term automation

pandoc is good enough for one-off documents

David Carlisle

@Krishna nag has been working on the same 15000 page document since 1974, so fairly long term:-)

Krishna

14:20

Hmm...It was in high school that I first heard of two competing numerical routines....NAG and IMSL.... It looks like IMSL is mostly a shadow of its former self

But, Nag doesn't have much penetration in many countries eg. in India, the IITs do not use them extensively.

barbara beeton

15:02

@CarLaTeX -- i've occasionally found mosaics transferred to needlepoint patterns. they work very well, and are excellent funding projects for old churches and museums. i look for them whenever i'm in a place that has such delights on display. they're also relatively easy to carry around, the main problem being the airline restriction against carrying pointed scissors.

David Carlisle

15:16

@UlrikeFischer it's all yours:-)

owjburnham

15:27

I've a question for which I have been trying to produce an MWE for a few days but when I try to trim my document down the bug is so fragile that I'm struggling to reproduce it -- the removal of various (seemingly) unrelated packages or commands makes it vanish.

So rather than posting a "here's my MWE and error; how do I make it have no error?" question, I was thinking of posting something along the lines "here's an interesting error with [package], what might be the underlying cause?" Not least because it's a bit strange, and some in the Tex.SX community might find it interesting. Is there a way of phrasing that kind of question without being uselessly vague?

(Sorry if this would perhaps have been better on meta)

David Carlisle

@owjburnham not really. Well you may get lucky and it's a "known error" but if you need someone to debug it an example is likely to be needed, don't worry too much about removing packages, if you can take them out fine but if they need to be in then that's OK, just reduce the document by removing everything after the error and changing every (say) 5 line paragraph by a\\a\\a\\a\\a and every (say) 3cm high image by \rule{2cm}{3cm}

@owjburnham having said that, let's see if you get lucky, what is the error (the full error message from the log file) ?

Skillmon

15:44

Is there a l3 equivalent to \input?

Joseph Wright

@Skillmon \file_input:n

owjburnham

@DavidCarlisle I'll go back to my (relatively) minimal version and dig it out.

The gist is, I think, that auto-pst-pdf and Tikz are playing nicely together (not a new problem, I know). The result is that on the second run through auto-pst-pdf / chemscheme is replacing my eps-generated figures with whole pages from my thesis.

I mention chemscheme directly on the offchance that @JosephWright has seen this before. But failing that I'll write up the problem properly and post my (semi-)minimal example and my log on the main site.

Skillmon

16:38

@JosephWright thank you very much, I was looking in the wrong module, it seems.

owjburnham

17:00

In the interests of getting a log file with all the relevant information, does anybody know if messages from PDFCROP are outputted to anywhere during compile?

Or rather, I don't get that in the log. I just get pdftex interacting with that pdf (NewMWE-pics.pdf) that PDFCROP had produced.

CarLaTeX

@barbarabeeton Oooh interesting!

owjburnham

17:25

sigh I have found now, I think, the pdfcrop log. I was momentarily too tired for commonsense googling -- but sorry all for spamming the chat with a silly question ;-)

I think I'll be able to get what I need now to frame diagnose the problem or put it in a form that's diagnosable by someone else.

David Carlisle

18:14

@UlrikeFischer ctan.org/pkg/luaotfload?lang=en

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle :)

David Carlisle

@JosephWright now we have someone to blame

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Robin ;)

marmot

@barbarabeeton Even in the checked luggage?

barbara beeton

@marmot -- oh, lots of things are allowed in checked luggage, including all sorts of sharp-pointed objects (like sewing scissors). but if one wants to stitch while in flight, it's a definite disadvantage not to have any way of cutting thread. biting through it is really hard on the teeth, and is messy for the embroidery.

marmot

18:29

@barbarabeeton I have very sharp teeth. ;-)

henry

@DavidCarlisle Haha :-) Will post an MWE as soon as I am able to, currently in hotel and busy. :/

barbara beeton

@marmot -- have you ever tried biting through needlepoint yarn? (long gone are the days when i boarded a plane near annapolis, and a stewardess escorted a newly-minted ensign down the aisle, she brandishing his ceremonial sword like a scepter.)

marmot

@barbarabeeton No. I was just shocked when I was in the US for the second time and saw a big sign at the check-in counter saying that guns need to be unloaded on the plane. (Later I realized that these were the instructions for guns in the checked luggage, and one could not bring any gun in the cabin, but from what I saw at the counter this was not obvious.)

barbara beeton

@marmot -- it's not clear to me that the people who make those signs were ever taught to write intelligible and unambiguous instructions.

marmot

@barbarabeeton No, not really. There are many things I do not understand, like pre-check. Is it really less checking (which would be odd since it is rather easy to get) or do they just like to torture those who do not want to pay the fee for the pre-check interview.

Ulrike Fischer

18:41

@DavidCarlisle If I break down under the pressure you will have to create a Fischer Package Support Group ...

barbara beeton

@marmot -- well, for me it's worthwhile -- the line is usually shorter, and i don't have to take off my shoes or turn on my laptop. on the other hand, i do still have to unpack my cpap machine. go figure.

marmot

@barbarabeeton I also use it. My question is, however, if this really means that the checks are less careful, which would be a bit scary, or it is just money making.

barbara beeton

@marmot -- oh, i suspect you're correct about money making. on the other hand, at the other end, coming back into the states, it probably cuts down on the number of passport control agents, since now anyone with "global entry" (which goes along with tsa-pre) can simply check in at a kiosk. (occasionally i do get pulled out of the inspection line for a pat-down, usually because i forget to take off my watch -- self-winding, non-electronic, that i refer to as my half-a-pound of stainless steel.)

@CarLaTeX -- have you seen this: npr.org/2018/09/10/646445359/…

CarLaTeX

19:36

@barbarabeeton Yes, Como is not far from Milan. @UlrikeFischer ^^^

Ulrike Fischer

@CarLaTeX we heard about it at the day we returned to germany.

CarLaTeX

@UlrikeFischer You should come to Italy more often :):):)

marmot

19:55

@CarLaTeX And it has a nice lake and nice hills to walk in, but is generally a bit too warm for marmots. ;-)

marmot

22:18

@DavidCarlisle Just saw what happened here. Getting downvoted when one spends ones time on reading and answering a question is very frustrating. If the OP would just have spent a tiny fraction of her/his energy in making the question clearer (rather than writing loooong comments), things might have been much easier and harmonic.

Faheem Mitha

23:08

@marmot For someone who wants free help, he certainly isn't being very polite.

But sometimes people are mysteriously entitled.

One wonders what planet they live on.

marmot

@FaheemMitha Yes. A few users are really weird. Luckily, these are just a few cases.

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$TeX - LaTeX$ TeX, LaTeX and Friends