TeX, LaTeX and Friends

8:30 AM

@DavidCarlisle Hi, David, can I ask you for a clarification for calligraphic fonts of mt2pro?

@daleif Good morning to you and good work.

@Sebastiano you can ask, but I don't have the font

@DavidCarlisle Don't worry for the font.

@DavidCarlisle When I want to insert any mathematical character in bold I use the command \boldsymbol. This command does not work if I use the \boldsymbol{\left(} command but it works correctly with \boldsymbol{\Bigl(}.

@DavidCarlisle For curly fonts, which are the calligraphic characters of mt2pro I wanted to get bold. \boldsymbol is ineffective or the command does not work at all, but if I insert the package \usepackage{bm} instead it tells me the .log file that I have declared many fonts. What can I do?

@Sebastiano yes of course, that is nothing to do with \boldsymbol, you would see the same with {\left(} you can't have \left without a matching \right in the same group. But almost always it's better to use \bm than \boldsymbol and actually you can use \bm{\left(} (I thought you were going to ask about \mathcal ?

@StefanKottwitz Good morning to you and happy day.

Stefan Kottwitz

@Sebastiano Good morning!

8:40 AM

@DavidCarlisle I want to get the calligraphic character in bold, but with \usepackage{bm} it doesn't work. :-(

@Sebastiano try reducing \bmmax (default is 4) to a lower value with \renewcommand or try loading less fonts

@Sebastiano do you want the whole expression bold or just a subterm? (bold brackets in a subterm seems a bit strange)

@DavidCarlisle I didn't know that. My source file is very long and I wouldn't know which package to delete. It seems to me that I need all of them. Right now I'm at school and my students are doing in absolute silence the math test on exponential inequalities and logarithmic calculations. With absolute sincerity they are polite and fantastic. Could you send me a few lines of code please, so I can try it at home if that's okay?

@Sebastiano I just asked if you were making the whole expression bold or just a part of it. If the whole expression is bold then \boldsymbol and \bm are wrong thing to use, you should use \boldmath

@DavidCarlisle Yes is true that bold large brackets are a bit strange. But for me is good. Ah ok. Should I make \boldmath{\mathcal A} for bold curly script?

@Sebastiano no \boldmath goes outside the math \boldmath .... $x$ and $y$ with give bold math italic x and y

8:58 AM

@DavidCarlisle David must be \boldmath$\mathcal A$ inline mode and for an equation, \[\boldmath{$\mathcal A$}\]? Is it correct?

@Sebastiano No!!! as I said just now. \boldmath has to be outside the math it is a core latex command see the latex book or any tutorial. \boldmath \[\mathcal{A}\] will make a bold A if your fonts have a bold A.

@DavidCarlisle David didn't remember the boldmath command and its use. I hope I didn't make you angry. I send you my warmest greetings and inform you that a user who votes negatively on the answers and questions that I write even if they are discreet I have identified him. Thank you very much.

Jasper Loy

9:17 AM

Given the fact that MiKTeX is now also cross-platform, working on Windows, Linux, and macOS, is there still any advantage in using TeX Live? Hmm...

Hello @PauloCereda have you finished your thesis finally?

hi all, I have a quick question about the bxpapersize package .....well, errrr....what exactly does this package do?

@JasperLoy rather I wonder why miktex was ported to the non windows versions. The only reason I thought it existed was to be more like a "native windows" application.

3

The README.md says "As is well known, in LaTeX processing layout paper size specified by document class options is not automatically applied to output paper size. "

It wasn't well-known to me at all!

@Krishna it's also not true if you load graphicx, or hyperref, or geometry packages.

Should I be concerned with this package for accurate printing of a Ph.D thesis on a4paper

9:23 AM

@Krishna no

@DavidCarlisle Should I ask in the main site? Seems some historic context here?

As in, if graphicx, hyperref or geometry is not loaded, the documentclass a4paper option won't be applied to the output?

That's the first time in my life I have ever heard of something so bizzarre.... I thought the base classes revert to US letter size unless invoked with the a4paper or other similar modifier options

@Krishna had a quick look at the source and it's mostly extra support for using \mag magnification which is basically only used in japanese setup.

@Krishna define "applied"

@DavidCarlisle Well. the layout on the screen (PDF) must fit exactly as expected on the output paper. I thought the PDF standard defines this precisely. It's confusing when you have such packages claiming things like "As is well known......."

@Krishna The readme also says "It should be noted that there are many packages that try to synchronize paper sizes, ...".

@Krishna classically tex has no notion of external paper size so in pure latex if you go [a4paper] then the text block is set to the right width for A4 and the left and top margins also, but tex has no notion of physical paper size, in 1982 it would print on whatever size paper you had in your printer and that's all there was too it.

@Krishna Once you have loaded a package that has driver-specific knowledge so it knows that it is pdftex or latex+dvips or xetex+xdvipdfmx or whatever you can (and it does) also insert a \special or set \pdfpageheight or \pageheight or whatever is needed for that platform to set the specified physical media to match, that means on-screen previewers can size their windows accordingly

9:39 AM

@DavidCarlisle thank you for the excellent information

Do you think we can rightfully term the bxpapersize package as extraneous/superfluous?

@Krishna as i say (after a full 30 seconds inspection of the code) it looks like it is extra features mostly of use for japanese (ptex) tex.

@DavidCarlisle cool. Thank you for your help. Much appreciate these pointers.

@Krishna well unlike geometry it doesn't change other page values, and if you don't want to load graphicx or hyperref it is an alternative.

@UlrikeFischer and @DavidCarlisle are you both saying that for e.g. if I have a simple letter using the base letter class without any geometry, graphics or hyperref packages, the printed output won't be as expected?

That's a rather profound statement, no?

@Krishna the printed output will depend on your printer driver. The pdf-size can be unexpected - that depends on the default of your tex system. My default is A4 and so this shows different values:

\documentclass{letter}
\begin{document}
paperwidth: \the\paperwidth

pdfpagewidth: \the\pdfpagewidth
\end{document}

@DavidCarlisle Hans made just an interesting claim about how font design sizes and t-shirt-sizes are connected: "so given that when picking up a conference t-shirts at bachotex you have to get one size smaller than you expect, one can also assume that the gyre collection designsize is somewhat oversized"

9:50 AM

@UlrikeFischer That's unbelievable.

paperwidth: 614.295pt
pdfpagewidth: 597.50787pt

@Krishna But @DavidCarlisle just tried to explain this to you. Don't say you don't believe him.

@UlrikeFischer "the printed output will depend on your printer driver." Can you please explain this a bit more?

Well...unbelievable as an idomatic expression. I believed and understood what he said..... But seeing it in typeset output reinforced it

So, it's a good practice to load at least one of these packages bxpapersize, hyperref, graphicx, geometry in all documents

@Krishna If you have an a4 paper pdf and sent it to a printer which uses letter formats, the printer driver will have to decide if to scale the pdf, or to refuse to print it, or to cut out some margins.

@UlrikeFischer Understood

@Krishna Or to use a KOMA-class or memoir, which set the size too. Normally today I don't worry about, someone always takes care of it.

9:55 AM

@UlrikeFischer journals frown upon Koma-class or memoir

It's okay for a thesis

@Krishna the printed output will be as I expect, I can't speak for other people's expectations. (In my case it will be the same as if I add geometry)

@Krishna journal classes normally take care about this too.

@UlrikeFischer yes, seems like elsarticle does.... But asme does not .... took a quick look at my old submissions

ok...Thanks to you both for explaining about this......so many new things to learn every day

10:33 AM

@DavidCarlisle Thank you very much forever. I hope you're not angry with me.

@UlrikeFischer Hi, and good morning.

Good morning everybody to all users.

@KhaledHosny hi, don't see you here so often these days:-)

Ooh, hi @KhaledHosny

@DavidCarlisle was in the hate phase of my love-hate relationship with TeX.

Hi all

@KhaledHosny Happens to all of us ;)

@KhaledHosny hello!

@Sebastiano good morning to you too.

10:47 AM

@KhaledHosny aren't we all!

@JosephWright dungeon again I see:-)

@DavidCarlisle Oh yes :)

Any idea if it will ever be possible to use FFI with LuaTeX without --shell-escape?

@JosephWright and pizza?

@UlrikeFischer That's the plan

@KhaledHosny I was hoping to smuggle harfbuzz in that way:-)

11:00 AM

@DavidCarlisle me too, but if it will require --shell-escape then that is a big hindrance.

yes, Hans and Luigi have a paper where they say this: which does't sound too good.... First some words on the checks. As it is now,
ffi is enabled if and only if --shell-escape is
true and --shell-restricted is false (the cnf
files are also considered) because ffi is inherently
insecure (as we will discuss in greater detail later).

@KhaledHosny now if there was anyone around who understood harbuzz and tex, perhaps a version of luatex that had harfbuzz permanently linked rather than loaded via ffi could be made......

@DavidCarlisle may be we can have some safe libraries like there are safe executables allowed even without --shell-escape? Just thinking out loud…

@DavidCarlisle I wouldn’t mind doing that, but w would be effectively forking LuaTeX, not something I’d want to be responsible for.

@KhaledHosny that occurred to me as well, but not knowing the details of the ffi interface I didn't want to suggest it (actually I failed to get FFI to work with my normal cygwin setup so I gave up looking) but that was some months ago, the luatex sources have changed a lot since, so I should try again....

@KhaledHosny yes that is the issue, but if it could be arranged that it was a gentle extension that could just pull in the luatex sources and change the build scripts to add a harfbuzz library it might be something to consider....

@DavidCarlisle Alternatively, if someone can convince Hans and co to bundle a HarfBuzz Library with LuaTeX, that is otherwise unused and does not get in the way with their fonts adventure, we can then build on top of that. Not volunteering to be the one convincing them, though.

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright can I nominate someone? :)