@HaraldHanche-Olsen -- I remember one (right-handed) professor who wrote on the blackboard with chalk in his right hand, and used an eraser in his left hand to wipe it immediately. (And there was another professor who ate chalk, or at least got it smeared all over his face by the time the hour was up. He was really a mess the day his wife was delivering a baby.)
@egreg -- aren't the commas pointing the wrong way in that example?
@barbarabeeton Heard of a physics prof at Hopkins who did the erase with the left hand thing, so you had to clarify issues on the spot. So when he said, "It's obvious that...", a student interrupts with, "excuse me, professor, but is that obvious?" The professor, taken aback, looks at the student, then at the blackboard. He stands in concentration for 45 seconds. Then, turning to the students, replies, "Yes, it's obvious," and continues without blinking an eye.
@StevenB.Segletes Yes, sometimes one has to insist a little bit. ;-)
@StevenB.Segletes Physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek gave a conference talk, and at the end someone asked a question "It is not obvious to me that ...", and Wilczek replied "Well, it might not be obvious to you." ;-)
@StevenB.Segletes I always thought of it as as synonym of "I really don't want to, and perhaps even do not know to, explain this." The Greek thought that if body is twice as heavy it will fall with twice the velocity, and it was obvious to them. It was obviously correct until Galileo dared to make an experiment. ;-)
@DavidCarlisle In the meantime, I figured out how to do it (for a given token list, replacing an arbitrary number of matched catcode=12 left/right braces with their catcode 1 and 2 equivalents) using some parsing and looping with the listofitems package. But if there is a simple approach, I would still love to know that, too.
@StevenB.Segletes if you are adding tokens that you know you'll replace then it might be easier to use something normal like \zbegin....\zend rather than catcode 12 {...} but no difference really. On \scantokens it doesn't expand its argument, so that isn't an issue but the question is if you have full control over the tokens, it will make {} back to normal but if your tokens were defined by say \edef\tmp{\abc\string_xyz} to get a catcode 12 _ then ...
One legendary professor here (long since dead) would hold two pieces of chalk in his right hand: One in the normal position, and one between the ring finger and the pinky. The latter was his differentiation chalk: With a quick flick of the wrist, he could turn f into f'.
@barbarabeeton (I seem to have forgotten the back pointer on my previous message.)
@barbarabeeton And there was this poor TA who obsessed over whether or not his fly was closed. So he would check it frequently, while turned towards the blackboard. But at the end of the lecture, there would be chalk dust all over his crotch.
@StevenB.Segletes I suspect that story is told in every university. I certainly heard it in Oslo when I studied there. In that version, the professor left the classroom, then came back ten minutes later with his hair in disarray and said “yes, it is obvious”.
@barbarabeeton You're welcome! It's really amazing! My mental image of a pipe organ was much more like the 19th century one. I was susprised when they emphasized "the largest pipe organ in Chicago". I'll definitely remember your advice when I get the chance to visit one :-)
@UlrikeFischer sure but wasn't that the same issue in the old question? (oh except it's tex4ht rather than standalone where the change is needed I suppose)
@Skillmon Seriously now: searching for fontcharwd in the sources brings up only one (two actually) occurrences in l3names, where it's renamed to \tex_fontcharwd:D, so I guess "no".
@DavidCarlisle I have two failures in the noxetex folder: embedfile-test3 and that has to do with line endings, I need to remember what I did last time to force git not to change to windows line endings. The other is in pdfrender-test3. There your tpf contains a /Producer setting I don't have: /Producer(pdfTeX-1.40.20)
@UlrikeFischer must admit I was a bit unsure why I was getting diffs in the tpf tests, will look tonight, probably can't do much now. Thanks for checking, still only 2 differences means things are getting better
@HaraldHanche-Olsen put it in a box and \showbox ?
@DavidCarlisle the line ending is something I should change. I'm not quite sure about the producer setting. It could have to do something with the newer expl3 files. Can you sent me the log?
@PhelypeOleinik question was more whether there is something at the code level, the renamed primitive was clear :) But thanks for looking (I should grep through the sources myself, I guess)
@DavidCarlisle I initially did the \zbegin...\zend approach and it worked well...unless groups were nested... \zbegin...\zbegin...\zend..zend then, not so good. The approach I ended up with was a recursion that seeks the innermost cat12 faux-group, replace it with a real group, rinse and repeat.
@AlanMunn One can use arabxetex with xelatex. I'll try to add an alternative. In same time i think that the solution given work for arabtex (arabi in fact) she just need to give it a try.
ConTeXt does not directly output XHTML, it outputs XML. However the current browsers (at least Opera, Firefox and Chromium) are able to display XML correctly. The XML can be styled using CSS.
When you want real XHTML, you have to transform the XML to XHTML using external tools. ConTeXt standalon...
@FaheemMitha no idea, I have only seen a couple of examples, but quality of generated html usually depends greatly on quality of the tex input so again hard to compare as you can not use the same input for the two systems, in the way you can compare tex4ht/latexml/lwarp etc
@EmilioPisanty That could be the house style. Equation 21D shows that they can do multiline equations without excessive vertical spacing. Perhaps the problem with 12 and 13 did arise because both lines were numbered? (But why? It does not make a lot of sense to give separate numbers to the two equalities in equations of the form A=B=C.)
@EmilioPisanty Well, you couldn't have known that it would cause this vertical spacing issue (if that is what caused it). But you always refer to the parts together, as in (12A) and (12B), so I still think it makes little sense. Even so, they should have been able to deal with it more gracefully.
@egreg But (19) is aligned. Except it almost looks like eqalign? They didn't manage it in (10), but there they would have to use aligned
The inconsistency in alignment between (21D) and (22B) is something to behold.
(Apologies to readers who can't get behind the paywall … you're not missing much, except the science is hopefully good! Not that I am qualified to judge.)
@EmilioPisanty Maybe you need to give up physics and turn to mathematics instead. For the time being, at least, the typesetting is noticeably better.
@EmilioPisanty I couldn't get it to work. Maybe because of all the tracking protection in my default browser setup. Instead of investigating, I just turned on the VPN to get inside my work network.
@EmilioPisanty My worst experience was when the journal took a LaTeX generated figure of mine, scanned it while tilting and rotating it, and included the scan in the publication. You should consider yourself lucky. (These were just some proceedings but still...)
@marmot There was a journal in linguistics that would cut and paste stuff as images instead of actually typesetting them.
The nice part of this story though is that the entire editorial board and the editor resigned over Elsevier's position on open access and started a new open access journal which is now one of the major journals in the field, while the other one is publishing crap, since nobody will review for it.
@JosephWright I'm mostly interested to check if the pdf is still the same. I could e.g. add a batch file to do latex+dvips +ps2pdf -dCompressStreams=false -dCompressPages=false, but I don't know if the system could use it as "engine".
