@UlrikeFischer You got three upvotes and a tick, so I guess the answer is good enough.

@marmot -- Very nice! Even rotated 180 degrees!

@barbarabeeton Yes, and it contains a scenic highway twice. ;-) The main problem is that the number of silver badges is not a square.

@marmot -- Yes, the old north-south highway; Camino Real, is it not?

@barbarabeeton Yes. (I also know that it does no longer exist everywhere but south of San Clemente it is a nice road for cyclists directly at the ocean.)

@marmot -- It is (or was) certainly much nicer than the interstates. As for no longer existing, that's rather like US 1 on the east coast, which has disappeared bit by bit over the last couple of decades. (The road is mostly still there, just not identified as a numbered highway.)

@barbarabeeton My bike navigation system says I am riding on the "old HW 1" when I am on that street. This leads through a nice state park with tons of surfers, many of which transport their surf board with their bike, to Camp Pendleton, for which you ironically need a drivers license to cycle through. ;-)

@marmot -- Oh, and not just rotated, but pivoted vertically about its horizontal axis. Super nice! (i think we can forgive the non-square silver badge quantity.)

@barbarabeeton Yes, if the 1's were written appropriately as |'s and there was no comma, then this would have \mathbbm{Z}_2\times\Z2 symmetry (the two reflections generate the 180 degree rotation, I think).

@marmot -- No surfers on the eastern US 1. (The most interesting surfboard conveyance I've seen on this coast was a top-down Karmann Ghia convertible. Surfboard, tied down in the back seat, extended noticeably beyond the rear bumper.)

@barbarabeeton I've been at the East Coast only a few times and never saw surfers. (This year I will be in Corpus Cristi, maybe it is different there.)

@marmot -- One of the papers I found when emptying my office was an "ambigram" rotation with the word "metafont" written by Scott Kim. Really pretty. If i can get hold of a scanner, maybe I'll try to post a picture here. (Will probably take a while.)

@barbarabeeton That would be great. Then one could redraw it with TikZ and produce an animation. ;-)

@marmot -- There are several Rhode Island beaches that have reasonable waves for surfing. No really big ones, but some good reliable rollers.

@barbarabeeton Yes, there are also the very realistic movies with the great white shark, which, if I remember correctly, also feeds on surfers. And those play on the East Coast, don't they?

@egreg Whenever I see your avatar entering at these times, I wonder if you are suffering from "senile Bettflucht", which Google translates to "fuga letto senile". ;-)

@marmot -- Yes, allegedly they do. Actually, several great whites have been spotted off the New England coast this spring. What I find more exciting, though, is the fact that five new right whale calves have been spotted so far this spring, migrating from the calving grounds in the Caribbean. There were none at all last year ...

@barbarabeeton Hope they do not get eaten by the sharks.... ;-)

@marmot -- I think they're somewhat bigger than the sharks, but yes, that would be really terrible. Their greatest danger, unfortunately, is getting tangled in fishing gear or being "run over" by ships' propellors, since they don't know how to stay out of the shipping lanes.

@barbarabeeton Unsurprisingly mankind is the greatest threat....

@manooooh thank you! Finally I flew an airplane myself (atleast in Latex;))

@marmot ahh nice ;). What do you mean by starburst node shapes?

@Raaja ^^^^ from the pgfmanual .... ;-)

@marmot It should have been better \bfseries instead of \bf, and also font=\bfseries instead of putting the command in the node text. (@HenriMenke)

@marmot I will look into that. It is a new information for me ;)

@marmot regarding your answer for the cover page question here tex.stackexchange.com/questions/475597/…

I think this part is different from the OP's representative figure:

just a minor remark. Nevertheless, the answer was really good!

@barbarabeeton Ooh a quarter staff.

@Raaja Yes, you are right. (I actually noticed that after submitting the thing, and thought "So what" ;-)

@marmot LOL just for the sake of completeness ;)

@Raaja OK, I added a version of this type. Thanks!

??

@Student404Mus \href{}{}?

@marmot Top! update, thanks for considering it.

Would a modulus operation via copying the value to a count, using \divide, then subtracting the result multiplied by the previous divisor from the original value by faster than using pgf/tikz's provided arithmetic operations \pgfmathparse{int(ceil(mod(\mycount,4)))}

@vlg you can use the l3benchmark package to test this.

Using an iterative function for 1 to ... a million? and 4 as divisor and compare compile times is the only thing coming to mind to compare them

thank you very much

@vlg almost certainly it will be faster as it would take more code to parse the pgf expression before you start the calculation than the three or four primitive assignments required to do it by hand. Whether that matters in practice depends of course on what you are doing and how often.

@JouleV That works for me but do you know how to cite a book for example without bibtex file?

@Student404Mus if you are not using bibtex you can still use \cite and simply write the bibliography by hand you just need a \begin{thebibliography}{99}... list which is the usual output from bibtex.

2 times in the last year i've updated packages, both result in errors and not being able to use it >_<

i see

@vlg update every day, and report any issues to the package maintainer the following day, when they can remember what they changed.

Last time I got the helpful advice of 'reinstall everything'

@vlg I always use texlive....

I never liked it. I use Sublime, but will give the default texworks a try, too. To clarify, the advice was to reinstall miktex, no the editor.

Concerning tex.stackexchange.com/questions/475585ℕ-goes-as-n-into-the-text-layer : It occurred to me that a file produced by {xe|lua}latex might be hypothetically malformed. So, l take back my vote to close the question until gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/issues/724 is resolved. Perhaps, the folks that voted for closing the question could also consider this argument and do the same.

@vlg David's advice is true here too: update miktex regularly and complain directly. If you wait to long, the danger that the changes are so drastic that something breaks is much larger.

@vlg texlive is a texsystem like miktex, not an editor.

@ulrike oh, I'm mistaken then, well, I'll report and see if a hop-over to texlive wouldn't be better, maybe without uninstalling the whole shabang of packages

@vlg if you switch to texlive you will have to install all packages again, but there is no need to deinstall miktex (I have both). Simply change the path variable to use texlive.

@vlg I always use emacs as the editor

@DavidCarlisle You're god, you could use sand to typeset documents.

I'm too much of a brainlet to use emacs or vim.

@vlg tablets of stone are I understand the preferred format for such beings, but I am no expert on them.

@user0 preflight doesn't see any problem in your example, also if a pdfviewer exchanges an unicode symbol ℕ by N this is clearly due to some try to be clever and improve copy&paste.

Texlive assumes I'm German because my OS as initially in German because secondhand, I hate this language so much when it come to working with it T_T

@UlrikeFischer Sorry, I'm not acquantied with preflight and cannot judge myself on how strict it is. As for clever copy-n-paste, it might (or might not) be simply our interpretation. (E.g., you could have N there coincidentally, similarly, e.g., to 1 at the end of some latex-produced documents.) In short, you give very good arguments, but in my opinion they do not completely rule out other hypothetical possibilies until an expert poppler developer takes a look.

@user0 there is no N in the pdf - I looked (and I know how to look at this).

@UlrikeFischer I also looked at the PDF earlier and found no N there (except as part of other words). In any case, thank you, I got your opinion, and you don't need to vote for reopen :-).

@UlrikeFischer You know, some poppler folks might be reading here, so ...

You know, some bug reports for poppler were closed because the folks said the PDF files provided there were malformed.

Still don't know the exact restriction on \immediate\write18..., but if it can/could execute the compilation/build of another .tex, one that externalizes graphics, so that they could be inserted after the build of the 2. .tex- does the first build halt until whatever the \write18 does is complete, or do they run simultaneously?

@vlg well as externalization e.g. with tikz works, the answer should be obvious.

@vlg it just calls the shell, so it will block the calling process unless use nohup ... & or some such construct (but I'd always do such things outside tex not use --shell-escape)

So, the first extra-terrestrial ultra-marathoner was claimed dead :-(

@user0 -- i am still packing up the office accumulation. I've come across some other potential Unicode additions that I had filed away. As soon as I unpack, I'll be getting in touch with my contacts.

@barbarabeeton I see. I wish you lot of strength for this task. Btw., are you partially abandoning smallletter-writing?

Oh boy...

@manooooh This was either a prank or someone just learned how to internet

@manooooh Could you provide us with the original URL?

@manooooh I can top that: math.stackexchange.com/questions/3118953/…. I wonder how long it takes till they remove it.

@manooooh Wow. Less than a minute until I got -12 and the question was removed. So, I could not beat the guy who was at -18. (sigh.)

@manooooh Maybe that is this guy again

math.stackexchange.com/questions/3106996

@user0 Check the end of the description on her profile.

@PhelypeOleinik yeah probably. It was good hahaha

@user0 "Page Not Found" sorry for the delay :(

@user0 loool

@JouleV hahaha yes probably!

Amusing story: I was wondering why my bibliography was being printed on a new page every time, despite using the article option of memoir. I tried a lot of hacks to later find out I was using \include to refer to the main content instead of \input...

How does one get l3benchmark to work? I'm getting undefined control sequences all over the place, the documentation is so extremely sparse, and the few usages in the SE have things not even mentioned in the doc.

@vlg Joseph has an example here

Nowhere is it explained what \ExplSyntaxOn is or does. I don't understand how it's supposed to work.

@vlg there are literally thousands of examples of that command on site, that is nothing to do with l3benchmark, it is expl3 command to allow access to commands with _ and : in their name. (same as \makeatletter does for @)

This could be better communicated. How is one supposed to know that the expl3 package/bundle contains documentation for a command that allows usage of commands in another package?

@vlg `interface3.pdf, page 7

@manooooh What I don't like about Math SE is the massive downvoting culture there.

What I like about TeX SE is the massive upvoting culture here.

I have alway wondered if ConTeXt should be pronounced as Contact!

@Jasper Ooh, just yesterday I found this in context.mkiv (line 27): % Welcome to context, pronounced as kontekst (rather dutch) and not as conτεχt. :)

@Jasper It's written ConTeXt but it's pronounced Throatwobbler Mangrove. :)

@JosephWright ^^ :)

@vlg expl3 is an interface for writing package commands, it doesn't define any user-level commands itself so all it does is enable the definition and use of commands in other packages.

I kinda get it, I'll read more documentation. The problem is - 'hey, i wanna benchmark' - 'use this' - and then you hit 3 brickwalls, because l3benchmark.pdf isn't helpful, 'expl3' has 0 occurrences. The l3experimental bundle then isn't a standalone package. Only if you've already read the latter, can you use the former.

So, uhm... How do you set the standard language of \lstinline? Doing \lstset{language=MyLanguage} has no effect, so I need to explicitly write \lstinline[language=MyLanguage]|var x = y + 1;| to see a change... :(

Guess I can be happy with \def\inline{\lstinline[language=MyLanguage]}.

@Jasper yeah... I agree with you, in fact that contradicts what I once read from @samcarter in a comment: it is enough to have -1 to improve the answer or any other action. Nor does it seem right to me to always vote positively; You have to have criteria and bias. I suppose that when someone google a question, the one that most matches your search comes up, not the number of votes (you would have to design an algorithm to detect positive and negative votes from a single website)

@NaCl \newcommand is better; I'd do \newcommand\inline[1][]{\lstinline[language=MyLanguage,#1]} so you can pass one-time options.

@NaCl doesn't lstset work?

@NaCl I love you username (I'm an inorg chem grad student)

@egreg I had a hilarious conversation on Mastodon recently. Someone messaged about TeX being the only moderately complex software project without bugs, and I said I knew someone who had found one. They said they did as well, and then we realized we where both talking about you

@Canageek we should read his/her name with a grain of salt. :D /ba dum tss

So, my girlfriend and I where having a discussion. I said chemistry twitter is having fun making each other's disciplines (inorganic, pchem, etc) which is a regular thing we do (mostly in fun). She doesn't get it, and says that linguists don't do that, except for if you are in semantics, then everyone hates you. I wanted to check with TeX.SX's resident semantasist if that was true

@Canageek ooh we need to summon @AlanMunn :)

@Canageek I'm actually not a semanticist, I'm a syntactician, although I do mainly syntax/semantics interface stuff, so I know a lot of semantics too. I don't think everyone hates semanticists. A lot of students hate semantics, though. :) But probably as many hate syntax. Mainly because both are quite formal and not necessarily what people were expecting.

@Canageek As for poking fun at other fields, I would agree with your gf that it's not terribly common.

@AlanMunn I'e never figured out the boundaries between areas of linguistics, though Mara has explained it to me a couple of times. All I remember is that she is a pragmatist. Which means a very different thing in linguistics then I'm used to.

@AlanMunn I think it might come from ye olden days when there was a serious inorganic/organic split. I had one prof who couldn't go three lectures without insulting organic chemists for having terrible lab skills, and polymer class where he couldn't go more then a few lectures without implying that inorganic chem was useless in the real world.

So us young 'uns kinda mimic this in a fun fashion, without the malice behind it, more of a gentle ribbing. Kinda like the emacs vi wars, that are basically over expect for a few half-hearted jests for old times sake.

@Canageek It's really quite easy: there's an input/output system (sound/sign; auditory/visual system) and a conceptual system (meaning). Syntax is mediates between the two (roughly). And pragmatics is the study of meanings that are part of the implied meaning rather than the directly asserted meaning.

@AlanMunn And semantics?

@Canageek I think also the field of linguistics is a lot smaller than most of the natural science fields, so people tend to know lots of people.

@Canageek That's the meaning part. It may or may not include pragmatics, depending on your point of view.

@AlanMunn ooh Peirce's?

@Canageek I realize I didn't really connect the description with the fields. The input/output side is phonetics/phonology, the meaning side is semantics/pramatics and syntax/morphology is in the middle. Of course there are other related areas that study aspects of language use (sociolinguistics), history (historical linguistics), processing (psycho/neurolinguistics) and acquisition (language acquisition).

@PauloCereda I actually don't know much about Peirce, I'm afraid.

@AlanMunn oh it's the Semiotics bloke. I read some of his stuff, and to this day I am yet to understand. :)

@PauloCereda Yes, I know who he is, just not much of his stuff.

@AlanMunn oh sorry. :)

@vlg expl3 is a programming language with a formal API; as such, knowing that l3benchmark is a module of this language is the same conceptually as knowing about numpy as part of Python, for example

zdf.de/politik/frontal-21/satire-toll-quietscheente-100.html ducks for europe... was that your idea? ;-)

@JonasStein Duck mania spreading all over the world :)

Btw, have everyone seen the latest Last Week Tonight? It's on a very popular (populist?) topic :-)

Can I put my own question on hold? I need some time to consider a (rather extensive example) I've just learnt and I want to avoid folks telling me that.

@user0 why?

@yo' So that folks do not critisize it without need.

@user0 you can delete it then undelete it when you are ready

@DavidCarlisle Will the comments and the answers so far get restored, too?

@user0 then as David says. Yes, everything is preserved.

@yo' It turned out I cannot delete questions that already have answers.

@user0 oh, well, yes, that's probably true

@user0 They certainly do if you delete an answer, I have never actually tried deleting a question (for obvious reasons) but I assume it is the same

@DavidCarlisle did you see Luigi's mail?

@UlrikeFischer yes just now, still trying to digest what it means

@DavidCarlisle ;-) I just wanted to ask you what it means ;-)

@UlrikeFischer do you need a translation from Italian-ish?

@CarLaTeX If she had needed Italian-German translation I could have provided that, this is more translation from internal Lua-C-API terminology to Human.

@DavidCarlisle I can't help, then :)

@CarLaTeX because you are a duck?

@DavidCarlisle :P

@Sigur Thank you very much for to have edit my question :-(.

@user0 -- The last box is packed, and I'm home again! After going out for an early supper, I think I'll ignore the boxes for the rest of the day. And yes, I am returning to full UC/lc mode. The reason for the "mostly lowercase" is described in my profile -- I was sometimes in the position of speaking officially for my employer, and any such pronouncement would be fully cased, while my own comments and opinions would be lowercase only so that they could be easily distinguished. No more!

@user0 I don't wanna speak for @Barbara , but I'd guess that there's a lot of emotions connected to moving out of job after that many years.

@yo' I guess, so, too, and they are all mixed.

@user0 well, certainly the cases are mixed. (No pun intended.)

@Canageek :-) Not bugs in ‘TeX the program’, actually.

@CarLaTeX Updated my answer on the funky table by including your remark :) thanks for the tip.