@PauloCereda it looks predatory to me. Not good for the ducks ;)

@DavidCarlisle Ok. I accept your suggestion.

@marmot Yes. :)

@Raaja We ducks do not like predatory stuff, it's dangerous. :)

@ShreevatsaR how is it possible to see that 1970 is written without thousands separator but in 3,800 yes? I think it is a NY Times mistake @DavidCarlisle @barbarabeeton

@PauloCereda Exactly!!

@manooooh 1970 is a date (year); while in “3,800 years ago”, what we have is a number. Seems fine to me.

@ShreevatsaR hi mr. velociraptor!

@manooooh you never use a comma in dates

@ShreevatsaR @DavidCarlisle I think that it is not appropriate to assign characters to numbers, and less in a communication medium. In fact, if you make mistakes using these ornaments it is more noticeable than if there are not any

@manooooh number is a character, isn't it? :)

At work, I stumbled across an article that contains both "AK-47" and "LSD". Ouch.

sashat.me/2018/12/18/mashup-maps-reflections

@PauloCereda ^^ You could just as well live in Australia!

@manooooh but there is no mistake here so it's not a problem.

@samcarter ooh

@DavidCarlisle nice jacket ;-).

@UlrikeFischer ooh James Bond

@PauloCereda only the suitable mug missing ;-)

@UlrikeFischer ooh a secret

@UlrikeFischer well I wouldn't want to look stupid with a duck on my head:-)

@DavidCarlisle oi

@DavidCarlisle my duck is swimming nicely in a moat

@UlrikeFischer much better place for keeping dinner fresh than on a head

New palindrome for me:

@DavidCarlisle james bond ducks can shoot vimeo.com/284348495

@manooooh -- in an english-language environment, year designations never have commas. but if you were talking about 1,970 chocolate chip cookies, you usually would use a comma. and for very large numbers, say 23,000,000,000, it would be very hard to determine quickly the exact magnitude without some kind of separator. (in some places, a thin space is used instead, and there's also "exponential" notation, but that's not universally understood.)

@barbarabeeton Some programming languages also include separator support to increasy readability. :)

@Skillmon hi mr. rabbit!

@DavidCarlisle — Your CTAN uploading code is now on its way to CTAN using your CTAN uploading code!

@WillRobertson ooh

@UlrikeFischer No, I missed that! Interesting. I guess there isn't a Mac version either.

@UlrikeFischer Windows S-mode can take care of that. :)

@JosephWright @DavidCarlisle ^^

@WillRobertson it'll probably get caught in a loop and never get there:-)

@PauloCereda hello, Mr. Duck!

@PauloCereda what's your field of research?

@DavidCarlisle Thanks for writing the code in the first place. I never would have got it off the ground!

are oy in medicine at all?

@UlrikeFischer what language is that written in?

Oh, Rust

@WillRobertson luckily you have worked on it enough that if it doesn't work we can blame you:-)

Finally managed to add my TeXmas contribution :)

@Skillmon didn't hear about it! link?

@thymaro tex.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7971/117050

@Skillmon @thymaro that is a link, but clearly the best link is tex.meta.stackexchange.com/a/7955/1090

@thymaro Theory of computation :)

@DavidCarlisle after reading @thymaro 's first message again, I noticed that the question might have been to link to the TeXmas-fun, not to my contribution, in which case I wouldn't have linked to any of the answers but to the OP.

@Skillmon I wouldn't argue with a killer rabbit

@PauloCereda then you are clearly qualified to give a talk about that otolaryngology thing! go for it!

@DavidCarlisle Oh, don't underestimate my scrolling skills. I have seen your contribution. ;)

@Skillmon of course

@thymaro Yes, after all, NP stands for nasal passage.

@AlanMunn and NP complete?

@Skillmon When you're very congested.

@PauloCereda I always knew TeX was written by a cat! It's so sneaky. ;-)

@marmot it grew up to be a lion

@PauloCereda @samcarter we need a cat in tikzlings!

@CarLaTeX Die Katze

@PauloCereda That doesn't sound well in Italian, lol

@CarLaTeX Oopsie

@CarLaTeX Until the tikzlings cat is ready, you can use the cats from @cfr

@samcarter I know them, of course!

@DavidCarlisle It seems that you're in good company in your plans for LaTeX3: "[Knuth] figures it will take another 25 years to finish “The Art of Computer Programming,” although that time frame has been a constant since about 1980."

@JosephWright \RequirePackage[constants format = roman]{stuff} do you make that work or is the space removed by the usual requirepackage option \zap@space ?

@DavidCarlisle Oh, there's that too ...

@JosephWright I thought I'd better check first:-)

I am using siunitx and I am getting a line break between two units; basically 10 m kg has a line break between the m and the kg. Is that "allowed"?

@StrongBad Example?

\DeclareSIUnit{\HL}{HL} \SI{35}{\decibel\HL} gives me 35 dB [line break] HL

\documentclass{article}
\listfiles
\usepackage{siunitx}

\DeclareSIUnit{\HL}{HL}

\begin{document}

rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb
rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb
rhubarb rhubarb \SI{35}{\decibel\HL}

\end{document}

@StrongBad ^^^ Works OK. You can turn on breaks but you'd do so explicitly ...

@JosephWright crap, now I have to figure out what I am doing wrong.

Ha, I found it. Silly coauthor did not use \SI If you use the macros you get the right answer, if you don't use the package you get the wrong answer.

@StrongBad :)

@StrongBad There's a reason I spent a long time writing it ...

@JosephWright so how do you make sure all numbers use the macros?

@StrongBad You can't enforce that, other than in LuaTeX (where one can use a callback)

@AlanMunn did @barbarabeeton send you that link?

@DavidCarlisle No but I'm sure she knows it. :)

@StrongBad don't we all?

@thymaro most of the regulars in this room seem to know what they are doing (at least in regards to TeX).

@DavidCarlisle are package option lists always passed through an edef?

@StrongBad ask anyone in here. I'm looking forward to the answers.

@UlrikeFischer yes, and \zap@space it seemed a good idea at the time.

@egreg @barbarabeeton Please, in multline, would you do +\dotsb\\+ or +\\\dotsb+ ?

@boycott.se-yo' I'd do the first (I think)

@DavidCarlisle well as quite often people want to store options in a macro it is not so bad - as long as you don't try to pass non expandable stuff ;-).

@UlrikeFischer options were supposed to be things like 12pt or fleqn not some key with spaces = \somefragilemacro

@DavidCarlisle my package options are never more complicated ;-).

@UlrikeFischer well you're German, you probably wouldn't dream of putting spaces in a key name:-)

@DavidCarlisle thanks. Well, it probably does not matter in the end :-)

@DavidCarlisle at one of the christmas concerts we heard a story about "Schneeseekleerehfeedrehzehwehtee" - very german and completly impossible to traduce ;-).

@DavidCarlisle the tikz people seem to plan a tikz update and now realized that since months the graphdrawing library can not be used with the new luaotfload and that they can't compile the manual ;-(.

@UlrikeFischer translate.google.co.uk/…

@UlrikeFischer do they blame you?

@DavidCarlisle no, the message (in a german list) had not clue and blamed miktex in general.

@DavidCarlisle hm. It is leaving out all the difficult bits ;-).

@boycott.se-yo' -- according to the authority here, neither. it would be xxx\\ +\dotsb + -- the ams style is to put the plus (or =) at the start of the new line, and the dots go along with it. we'd probably just code it as \cdots, but other publishers may have other styles.

@barbarabeeton oh that's a solution!

Thanks @barbarabeeton

@DavidCarlisle Do you need to see the output of the following?

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}
\sbox0{$$}\scriptfont1=\scriptfont0

$x_{max}$ works\footnote{But $x_{max}$ doesn't} and what about $x_{max}$?

\end{document}

@egreg yes that's a feature

@DavidCarlisle Well, that's a bad answer.

@egreg not really, it could (as you know) be extended to cover other font sizes, and the kind of documents where this is needed are often very restricted and don't have footnotes or math in large sizes etc (nor greek etc in subscripts and anything else thatj doesn't work)

@egreg How come your Merlin hat has two stars less than mine?

@marmot Possibly it's the different orientation?

@egreg Maybe they cheated you? ;-)