TeX, LaTeX and Friends

@samcarter are you sure that's not just a @marmot in disguise?

@samcarter clearly for chemists and SI units, it should be @JosephWright's new avatar.

8:44 AM

@DavidCarlisle Pretty sure, a genetic analysis also discovered features from the sloth.

Ulrike Fischer

@samcarter that doesn't sound like Joseph ;-)

ooh

@DavidCarlisle Joseph is a real duck

I met him in Rio. :)

@UlrikeFischer is also not tall enough :)

@PauloCereda What is the ohh-counter doing?

9:00 AM

@samcarter resting. :)

@PauloCereda ooh :(

@samcarter oh no

user49915

2:31 PM

To moderators: whenever you find time, feel free to take a look at tex.stackexchange.com/questions/237285/… and tex.stackexchange.com/questions/286485/… and merge them.

2:42 PM

@user49915 did you flag them? (you can't expect the mods to read every message here, although they might:)

user49915

@DavidCarlisle Yes, I've flagged them both.

3:34 PM

@DavidPurton Now that your fantastic package is included in most tex installations, maybe it would be good to update your answer tex.stackexchange.com/a/454195/36296 so that people can learn about the package?

Christian

Is is good practice to mark my own question as a duplicate, if after digging into the code of the involved packages it turns out that the offending function is mentioned in another question and a solution is porovided there?

3:54 PM

@Christian I think it is a good idea. It will help users with the same problem to find your question and follow the link to the answer from there.

cis

4:10 PM

/cat

:(

@PauloCereda Has songidx.yaml something to do with MusiXTeX?

5:54 PM

@cis No, it's from a package named songs.

cis

@PauloCereda Ah, I understand.

@cis :)

6:44 PM

@PauloCereda Cwac!

@cfr Cwac! <3

@cfr miss you!

@DavidCarlisle I have a weird issue with project somewhat similar to the one you diagnosed a while ago as needing morewrites. I was wondering if you had any advice for troubleshooting it. I'm externalising TikZ pictures and externalisation fails if I include too many refsections (Biblatex). If I tell pdfTeX to carry on, the picture is typeset without problem. If I remove a refsection, externalisation succeeds. But it seems also to depend on not having too many refsections in a group ...

@cfr I know nothing:-) but needing lots of writes means you are writing lots of files concurrently rather than having lots of files written in sequence (which only requires one write stream) I would have thought that any writes by tikz externalize would be in sequence?

... so it doesn't seem to be just the number of refsections, but something more complicated. It doesn't matter which refsection I remove within the group, provided I remove one. I'm already loading morewrites, though I'm not sure if I'm loading it at the right time. This only happens when I get to hundreds of pages and many refsections. Some packets of course materials compile fine, so the number of sections has to be quite high.

@DavidCarlisle Yes, I think so. It is the externalisation compilation which fails, when it should be throwing more stuff away. It fails even if I put the refsection in an externalisation conditional, so it shouldn't even read it on the externalisation run.

@cfr what's the error?

@cfr I am of course the natural person to ask about this as I've never used tikz externalize or biblatex:-)

6:55 PM

@DavidCarlisle Externalisation failed. See such-and-such log for details. Such-and-such log says: externalisation failed. See such-and-such log for details.

@cfr oh so not a low level \write allocation error

@DavidCarlisle Yes, but you know everything.

@DavidCarlisle Nothing that informative.

@cfr Wrth gwrs

@DavidCarlisle I didn't know you'd never used Biblatex. I thought you might know what difference the refsection made.

@cfr well it's possible I'd know that without having used it. Of course like tikz Ive used it in examples that people post to the site but not in my own documents (which mostly were written before biblatex existed)

6:58 PM

@DavidCarlisle Is there someone better to ask? An MWE isn't really an option.

@cfr you could send me a non-minimal zip if you want. No promises but if I have a minute or two i could look what it's doing...

@DavidCarlisle Thanks, I think I might have to do that.

@DavidCarlisle Before I do that, when should morewrites be loaded? Should it be very early?

I wonder if I'm just loading it too late ....

@cfr before whatever is opening write streams allocates them with \newwrite as the package needs to subvert this calls