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3:00 AM
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2 hours later…
5:17 AM
@AlanMunn :)
 
 
3 hours later…
7:52 AM
@egreg a comment that I'm sure you would agree with:
@DavidCarlisle You're a real gentleman. :-) — frougon 2 mins ago
 
8:26 AM
and a scholar
 
 
1 hour later…
9:53 AM
@DavidCarlisle Almost
 
 
1 hour later…
11:08 AM
^^^ from texwelt.de, I think this counts
 
 
4 hours later…
2:56 PM
@marmot I hope you're not mad at me for the extra demand. If so, I'll apologize to you.
 
@Sebastiano No, not at all, but I do not understand it. Could you try to reformulate it? (I am just about to go to the farmers market.)
 
3:25 PM
@marmot I should also go there and buy chelated iron to reduce the chlorine in the drinking water used to water the flowers in my little garden :-). I'm afraid that if I edit my question again someone will get angry with me. Do you want me to explain it to you here in chat? Greetings.
 
 
1 hour later…
4:50 PM
@Sebastiano as long as your edit doesn't change the subject of the question but only makes it clear what you initially meant, edit the question. If you need to change the subject, ask a follow-up question.
 
 
2 hours later…
yo'
6:48 PM
@PauloCereda Of course you should, but it's easier said than done.
 
7:26 PM
@yo' do you have any license in mind? I thought one of the Creative Commons...
 
@Skillmon I should write EDIT FOLLOW-UP below my initial request or another "ask-question"?
 
@Sebastiano if it renders already given answers invalid which would otherwise be valid, you should ask a new question and link to the old one. A follow-up is always a new question, which should link to the old one.
 
yo'
7:44 PM
@PauloCereda GTalk
 
@Skillmon In my humble opinion, the changes I made to my question did not conflict with the answers already given. Am I also interested in your opinion? Have you seen my second edit?
 
@Sebastiano I don't even know which question we're talking about :)
 
@Skillmon The question is: why are koalas so much cuter than ducks? ;-)
2
 
@marmot because they are stoned their entire life eating eucalyptus?
 
@Skillmon No, because they are koalas. ;-)
 
8:06 PM
@marmot but they stand no chance against the cuteness of squirrels. And the king of them all: youtu.be/TnOdAT6H94s?t=100
 
@Skillmon I beg to disagree: twitter.com/i/status/1129445116106555392
 
@marmot agreed to disagree.
 
@Skillmon This will clearly win a lot of Academy Awards (just sad that there is no music, but clearly the actress, the director and the playwriter will win Oscars).
 
@marmot did you just link to the same page again?
 
@Skillmon Yes, one cannot see this movie often enough. It is a real hit.
 
8:12 PM
Hello friends!
 
@marmot oh, that is a movie, I just saw a picture (scripts were blocked)
 
I just watched a YouTube video:
Please watch it, it's not so long
It seems that we have a competitor...
 
@manooooh this was already posted here some two weeks ago.
 
@Skillmon thanks for pointing it out. I will try to find the discussion
 
@manooooh there was not much of a discussion, if I remember correctly.
 
8:16 PM
6
Q: Draw a line with an isolated and accumulation point in \mathbb{R}

SebastianoI would like to draw a line where 0 is an fixed accumulation point in \mathbb{R} where the points thicken near it and leave a small trace where you can see the shift to the left of the points. Point 1 instead is an isolated point always fixed. My graph is simply made with Mathcha. I was wonderi...

@Skillmon This is my question. :-)
@manooooh and all users hi, guys :-)
 
@Skillmon uhm, strange. WordTeX is, I think, our direct competitor
We need to do something
It seems that in comments of the video it has a lot of support
 
@CarLaTeX Hi; let's make a change: you come here to Sicily with 40 degrees and in the evening 22 degrees and I come to Milan that's cooler? :-)
 
We need to find things that make WordTeX lose, so we can comment it to advice people "Don't use WordTeX but (La)TeX!"
 
@Sebastiano Not so cool, 30° C and without the sea
 
@Sebastiano hello and good afternoon to you
 
8:19 PM
@manooooh Fun story: I'm in charge of making a thesis template (still) and it has to have a Word version as well. I tried to use this WordTeX thing. It works (in the limitations of Word) as is. As soon as you try to change the appearance of the document hell breaks loose (or I am just too stupid to MS Word).
@manooooh I wouldn't bother :-)
 
@manooooh You realize this is satire, right?
 
@manooooh I don't think so
 
@AlanMunn I don't think so. It has a lot of upvotes, the people really like WordTeX
 
@manooooh Don't trust people. People like MS Word.
 
@manooooh Well cat videos also have lots of upvotes.
2
 
8:22 PM
@Skillmon are you sure? We have a long discussion about Word and LaTeX. Something related to Word is not good for our passion, LaTeX
 
@manooooh Take a look at the other videos by this guy. Especially the Powerpoint one (which I posted here a while ago). This is pure comedy.
 
@AlanMunn WordTeX can be poweful. We need to show that LaTeX is better. This guy made a very similar template in Word of LaTeX
 
@manooooh I'm sorry, but no. This is comedy, pure and simple.
 
@AlanMunn why do you say that it is comedy?
 
@manooooh Have you actually watched the video? Have you read the comments? Have you looked at the other video?
 
8:26 PM
@AlanMunn what do you expect? A technical discussion?
The comments are funny, what else can you expect?
 
@manooooh I give up.
 
The comments are funny does not mean that WordTeX is a satire
 
@manooooh why?
 
@DavidCarlisle don't you hate MS Word?
 
@manooooh why should I hate it? I have used it to read a few documents that I have been sent in that format, but never written anything in it, but why should I mind if other people use it for writing documents, and I have met people on the team responsible for the math editing in Word, they did a pretty good job to be honest, given the constraint of working in that user interface. Also if you use math typesetting in luatex or xetex you mostly have the word math team to thank.
 
8:37 PM
@DavidCarlisle if you are a lover of (La)TeX, you should worry about competition
 
@manooooh why?
 
@DavidCarlisle because you love (La)TeX?
 
@manooooh that does not follow at all. I quite like tex, but I use it for very few documents personally,and why should I mind if several orders of magnitude more people use Word, the fact that one youtube video shows a one word template for scientific document hardly affects the balance of users, Word has vastly more users than TeX, that is hardly news.
 
Suppose that for general purposes, people start to use MS Word. Then LaTeX will die for most of people; there would be few people supporting LaTeX. I don't think that you want LaTeX to be die. Me neither
 
@manooooh it's only a typesetting system not a religion. In the end something better will come along and people will stop using it .
 
8:42 PM
@DavidCarlisle And the video doesn't actually show that anyway.
 
@AlanMunn well it shows people with blindfolds comparing documents, that seems pretty convincing to me.
 
@AlanMunn it showed math formulas, graphics, figures, text typestting... It has scientific purposes
 
@DavidCarlisle True, nothing better than a double blind study, for sure. The gold standard.
Changing topics. Shakespeare explains the lambda calculus.
18
Q: Why is it important for functions to be anonymous in lambda calculus?

Rohan PrabhuI was watching the lecture by Jim Weirich, titled 'Adventures in Functional Programming'. In this lecture, he introduces the concept of Y-combinators, which essentially finds the fixed point for higher order functions. One of the motivations, as he mentions it, is to be able to express recursive...

It's a great answer. I'm always trying to convince my students that names are fundamentally meaningless. I suspect though that this way will not end up convincing them more easily.
 
@AlanMunn I knew he must have done something useful, other than set torture tests for ever 16year old to take before they leave school.
 
@DavidCarlisle There's also his famous lesson on disjunction from Hamlet.
 
8:48 PM
@AlanMunn that is the question
 
9:02 PM
@AlanMunn This cannot be right. "Why are marmots called marmots? Because we look like marmots." ;-)
 
9:30 PM
I just learned that the windows calculator does this:
 
@UlrikeFischer NOW I know why people use Windows. Doesn't matter if the system crashes every once in a while, but you have nice turtles. ;-)
 
@UlrikeFischer -- That's one determined turtle! Go, turtle! (It's not entirely clear, though, whether it's a swimming turtle or a walking tortoise. A swimmer might go even faster for a short distance.)
 
we have also elephants:
 
@touhami Do you think you could help out this person? tex.stackexchange.com/q/494419/2693 I tried to help her, but arabtex is really out of my area of knowledge.
 
^^ If you have 30 minutes to spare it's interesting to see.
 
9:56 PM
@AlanMunn citing the author (from the comments section on youtube): "Yes, I actually use this for assignments." (source: youtube.com/…). So one could argue that it is not pure commedy
@DavidCarlisle that gent bestow'd upon the native english speaketh'rs many new w'rds not then in popular usage
 
@Skillmon Maybe, but from the abstract of the paper: "It is both stupidly impractical and surprisingly useful, offering an editing experience that is initially more enjoyable than LATEX and Word but is asymptotically more complicated than either. "
 
@AlanMunn that guy is just brilliant!
 
@Skillmon Yes, it's very, very clever.
 
10:22 PM
@AlanMunn will see.
 
@touhami Thanks. I think she's under a bit of time pressure, and it's unfortunately not a question that lots of people can probably answer.
 
10:46 PM
@PhelypeOleinik -- Thanks for the link. It's quite an amazing instrument! (But it doesn't have 64ft pipes. I first encountered those in Salt Lake City, at a Mormon center. You don't hear them, really, but you certainly feel the vibrations!) A long time ago I was a page-turner a couple of times for an organist, sitting on a corner of the bench; definitely exciting, and had to be careful to keep my feet out of the way. Any time you get a chance to explore the inside of a pipe chamber, take it!
 
11:03 PM
I am trying to use "¿" symbol in a listings code, but I get the error "Invalid UTF-8 byte sequence" from package inputenc (it has utf8 as parameter)
If I follow @DavidCarlisle answer:
20
A: Package inputenc Error: Invalid UTF-8 byte 147

David CarlisleYou have byte 147 in your file without declaring an input encoding, previously this would silently fall through and make whatever character happened to be in that position in the font encoding. From this year latex assumes UTF-8 if no encoding is specified and so this fails, you can add \UseRa...

then I get no errors but "¿" is translated as "£"
 
@manooooh listings doesnt support utf-8 by default , see listingsutf8
 
@DavidCarlisle ok. I was going to read that documentation but then I realised about literate
 
@manooooh the OP in that question did not have a UTF-8 file, so it broke when latex switched to utf-8 default, that answer told him how to go back to the old default. You have a utf 8 file so nothing in that answer is relevant
 
I am trying: literate={¿}{{\¿}}1, but can't achieve
@DavidCarlisle ok...
How can I write "¿" in the LaTeX world?
 
@manooooh ¿
or the classic tex ligature `?
 
11:11 PM
@DavidCarlisle the errors don't dissapear if I use literate=*{¿}{{¿}}1 or literate={¿}{{¿}}1
 
@manooooh are you using listingsutf8 ?
 
P.S. I am importing the code from a file, using \lstinputlisting
nono. I want a simpler solution (in other documents I have used `literate` and it worked, for example `literate=
*{“}{\odblq}{1}
{”}{\cdblq}{1}` worked)
I want "¿" to be written the same as e.g. \'a is á
I tried \¿ but it didn't work
 
well you could try using \textquestiondown but listings really doesn't work with utf-8 as far as I can se why is not using a package that documents itself as a fix to listings to work with utf-8 more complicated?
@manooooh no, why would it work? That isn't a command at all.
 
@DavidCarlisle \textquestiondown worked, THANKS!
@DavidCarlisle I just gave you an example. I didn't know how to typeset ¿ if utf8 is not loaded, so I tried \¿
with no results, as expected. But using \textquestiondown worked
@DavidCarlisle well... the original package is listings
 
@manooooh utf8 is loaded, but it's a genral fact that latex command names have to be ascii letters, to plain tex ¿ is three non-ascii letters
@manooooh yes and it fairly clearly documents that it doesn't really work with extended character sets. listingsutf8 is a wrapper around it that tries to fix the main failings
 
11:20 PM
@DavidCarlisle yes. But \'a works, so in the same way I tried with \¿ so see if worked but it didn't
@DavidCarlisle however, if \usepackage{listingsutf8} is loaded and \usepackage{listings} deleted, and commented literate={¿}{\textquestiondown}1 then I get the same errors
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something
 
@manooooh \' is a command with a single character name ' that generates an accent. \¿ is nothing like that at all It is like which is also a syntax error
 
@DavidCarlisle ok, thanks!
 
@DavidCarlisle normally literate works better than listingsutf8. listingsutf8 can only be used if the chars can be mapped to a 8bit encoding.
 
@UlrikeFischer what do I know about these funny characters:-)
@UlrikeFischer I really should fix listings to work with utf8 (I gave some code to the minted maintainer ages ago which I think he included in his fancyverb extension that backs minted:-)
 
@DavidCarlisle Do you see a system that is going to supersede LaTeX at the horizon? (I guess it will be tough given that some fair amount of people are familiar enough with LaTeX such that they may not easily switch.)
 
11:30 PM
@marmot I am amazed with people who believe that LaTeX will be deprecated (idk if David thinks this), and new systems will emerge
 
@manooooh Why?
 
@marmot because LaTeX is a powerful system
 
@marmot it's politics not technology though. If for example one of the open source office suites gets math that is "good enough" then if journals start accepting it then things could very rapidly change, who knows what microsoft will do, not many would have predicted a decade ago that they would open source .net or put a full linux kernel in default windows builds...
.. but still I would expect that latex is still the dominant technical typesetting system in ten years time. 50 years, less clear.
 
(for what has been created, not so for the insertion of dynamic images, let's say)
 
@manooooh Yes, landlines are working, too, but nowadays most people use cell phones.
 
11:32 PM
@manooooh That is a general statement about every computing system that has ever existed. They all get superseded in the end.
 
@DavidCarlisle @marmot actually, I do not see that in a short term LaTeX will be replaced by anything better
So let's spread LaTeX word in any scope, including the video on YouTube! :P
 
@DavidCarlisle Yes, but will be there something that emulates LaTeX but does no longer have the restrictions on maximal dimensions, computational speed and accuracy and so on? I mean without calling some directlua or whatsoever?
 
@manooooh certainly not in ten years or so (it would take publishers that long to switch even if they started now, but in the end...)
 
@manooooh I believe that whatever the arXiv will decide will have a major impact on all of us. At this point they do not even support lualatex, so for many this is not an option.
 
@marmot possibly who knows, perhaps the next generation thinks typing instructions into a text file is just too arcane to contemplate. Personally I use latex a lot less because I use pdf less and paper hardly at all, so typesetting is of interest but not actually a practical concern
 
11:35 PM
@marmot What can LuaLaTeX provide that can not provide the current configuration of arXiv?
 
@manooooh Lua
 
@DavidCarlisle so, what can Lua provide that can not provide the current configuration of arXiv?
I have never write in Lua to write documents so I don't know its potential
 
@manooooh a programming language with (what is now considered) normal syntax (like javascript if you want to think of it that way) it also has metapost
 
@manooooh Ironically most of tikz-feynman relies on graph drawing algorithms that require lualatex. That is, one physicist had nothing better to do than to write a package that relies on stuff that very likely will not be supported on a forum run by another physicist.
 
@marmot uhm, but tikz-feyman is, I think, not used all the time as normal tikz...
 
11:39 PM
@manooooh plus of course unicode opentype fonts
 
@DavidCarlisle thanks. I am learning. What can normal syntax provide that can not provide the current configuration of arXiv?
 
@manooooh Yes, sure. But this shows what the challenge is, I think. Come up with something that is harmless enough that arXiv will use it and at the same time powerful.
 
@manooooh the question doesn't make sense, sorry.
 
@DavidCarlisle is it really necessary? With that feature, will many more documents be published? Is it really an impediment not to implement that feature?
 
@manooooh nothing is necessary when I was using latex a lot no one used tikz, and almost all documents used the standard computer modern fonts. but times move on and people's expectation changes
 
11:43 PM
@DavidCarlisle that's why I don't know what normal syntax is
 
@DavidCarlisle Oh, are you indicating your plane is not state of the art? ;-)
 
@manooooh syntax has nothing to do with it
@marmot artistic integrity is sometimes more important than using bleeding edge technoligy
 
@DavidCarlisle do you think it is possible? I always thought that it could be difficult if keyword detection has to work too.
 
@DavidCarlisle how do you know that the actual people's expectation is to use lualatex, or tikz-feyman or any new feature?
 
@manooooh Count the number of posts asking about these things?
 
11:47 PM
@manooooh luatex provides callbacks so that most of the core algorithms in tex can be over-written, so for example if you do npt like tex's default line breaking algorithm you (or at least someone) can write a line breaking algorithm in lua and plug it in. In theory you could write a new algorithm in C or web and make a new version of pdftex but that would be much harder to distribute. so then users write documents as normal but with better line breaking, no syntax change in document
 
@marmot of course, this site is designed to ask those things. But I think we need to wath the global scope. To say a number, I would say that people exchanging knowledge about lualatex, or even talking about lualatex is approx 5K (I'm being generous, it could be 1K). We are 7B people in the world
 
@manooooh well for a start if you are writing in a non latin character set pdftex is not really usable. So that's something like half the worlds population
 
@DavidCarlisle so you want to kill latin people
 
@manooooh Yes, sure, but we are concerned here about LaTeX users. And a rather reasonable assumption might be that their wishes/expectations correlate with the posts (and perhaps even votes) on this site.
 
@manooooh "global scope" is definitely the wrong card for you to have played if you want to argue for pdftex over luatex and xetex:-)
 
11:50 PM
@DavidCarlisle I am very happy with pdflatex
@marmot you are right
 
@manooooh you are using the latin alphabet
 
@DavidCarlisle let's add \usepackage[english]{babel}, \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} and \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} magical lines!
 
@manooooh \usepackage{tikzlings} is missing.
 
@marmot duck.png is also missing :(
 
@manooooh they are not magic and they do not work for people using non latin alphabet (look I wrote the utf8 support in inputenc, I know what it does and what its limitations are:-)
 
11:53 PM
@DavidCarlisle Pssshht. he may stop using it. ;-)
 
@DavidCarlisle lol you are right
However, I could write all my document with those 3 magical lines and they are beatiful documents (they have TeX - LaTeX site inside :))
 
@marmot as for \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} that isn't majic it is saying that you are using a particular restricted font encoding only useful for languages developed in western europe. It doesn't even cover eastern europe, never mind Greek, or Cyrillic, or Arabic, or Chinese or ...
 
@DavidCarlisle ... and marmot language, I know. ;-)
 
@manooooh you are agreeing exactly with what I wrote above, pdftex only works for people using a latin alphabet
 
If you allow me to change the subject, I would like to know if it is possible to copy a code that is separated into 2 (or more) lines as a single one. This image corresponds to a fragment of code made in listings:
 
11:59 PM
@UlrikeFischer I never looked in detail, but you basically "just" need to detect the inputenc start character at the lowest level of listings scanning and make it grab the right number of bytes and pass through as a unit from then on... how hard can it be:-)
 

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