TeX, LaTeX and Friends

12:02 AM

If you are writing an exercise where you need to show a text that includes accents e.g. ó, and the program where you show it does not support special characters, would you write: (1) Show "Avión is a word" or (2) Show "Avion is a word"?

For example we have the code: Show("Avion is a word") (we cannot include special characters). In the document we are writing, would you write "Avion" or "Avión"? Remark: I think it is not so bad to get out of good spelling to show the lack of special characters that the program supports

David Carlisle

@manooooh if you can not show non ascii letters what do you mean by would you write "Avion" or "Avión" ? surely you can not do the second?

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle well, suppose that the person who has to write the code reads "Avión". Then he puts the same text inside the language programming. It throws an error. What happened? We gave wrong information -- we should write Avion instead of Avión

We can do the second, but I think it is not suggested. I want to read your opinions

David Carlisle

@manooooh I do not understand your question. If only ascii input is supported then surely there is no chance to write Avión

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle in the language programming. I am using LaTeX to write a document (as you know LaTeX supports special characters), and the statement of an exercise asks to show a label that contains special characters, and I do not know what to do

David Carlisle

and what do you mean by Avión what encoding? older programs will not accept that as UTF-8 but almost all will accept it as latin-1

manooooh

12:11 AM

@DavidCarlisle it is a language programming that does not support special chars, not LaTeX

David Carlisle

@manooooh define special characters (in a string)

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle I do not know what do you mean. Sorry if this seems complicated, it is an easy question that I am trying to show to you

David Carlisle

@manooooh if the language really restricts strings to ascii (which seems unlikely) then there is no question to ask as only one of the words is valid input. If strings can be non ascii then most likely you can use Avión if it is in the supported encoding (which is likely latin-1 not utf-8.

@egreg up late:-)

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle ^^^^^^ look at the image (suppose that the correct English word is súm)

David Carlisle

@manooooh yes so type súm in latin-1 (not utf-8) and what happens?

manooooh

12:20 AM

@DavidCarlisle if we write show("The súm is" & A+B") it is not valid for the programming language

David Carlisle

@manooooh what does "not valid" mean? gives syntax error or wrong output? Assuming it is a syntax error then I return to my original comment if the only possibility is sum as súm is an error then asking whether to use sum or súm is meaningless.

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle not valid means that in the program e.g. LaTeX where you write the source code it does not support special characters

David Carlisle

@manooooh several programming languages restrict variable names to ascii, but I have never seen one that restricts strings

manooooh

So my question is: show the legend correctly in the document for lack of good spelling, or be respectful with good spelling and then adapt to the rules of the programming language syntax?

David Carlisle

@manooooh I still have no idea what you mean by that, sorry.

manooooh

12:25 AM

@DavidCarlisle you should start believing. Even if there is a library that includes other characters, I have never been forced to do so, so I'm used to not working with special characters

@DavidCarlisle ash sorry, I tangle

Let's do something related to LaTeX

David Carlisle

oh are you asking if in the documentation of the language use you should restrict to the legal characters?

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle nono, I am making a document filled by exercises related to writing programs in a programming language

David Carlisle

which programming language?

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle c++. But it does not matter

David Carlisle

@manooooh well c++ strings (even C ones) can contain "súm"

manooooh

12:31 AM

@DavidCarlisle teachers have taught me in such a way that I can not use special characters. That's why it does not matter what programming language I'm using

David Carlisle

@manooooh so you can't use them, so what answer can you have for your question of whether to use sum or súm if you have no choice. That is why I do not understand your question, but it's late and I'm going so bye:-)

manooooh

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{listings}

\begin{document}

Write a code that shows the legend ``Hello World!''.

\begin{lstlisting}
cout << "Hello World!";
\end{lstlisting}

\end{document}

In the above example, we need to suppose that the correct word is "Helló" but the programming language does not support special characters, so we must write cout << "Hello World!";. Now, in the description of the exercise, we could write "Helló" as it is valid for us (it is the correct word)

But I do not know if writing "Helló" in the description and then changing it to "Hello" in the solution of the exercise will confuse the reader or not

@DavidCarlisle wait! Now do you understand the question?

David Carlisle

@manooooh so it is (as I just asked) a question about documenting not using the language, well then you should use ascii examples as otherwise students will use Helló and especially as that is legal syntax but just a local convention to stick to ascii, using non ascii examples seems very confusing.

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle we actually use the language programming to show code. Given a statement, we have to show the solution. The exercise was to show a legend and we solved it by using the line cout<<"Hello World!";

@DavidCarlisle what do you mean by "non ascii examples"? I said it does not matter the programming language, the set of "Correct words" etc.

Faheem Mitha

5:07 AM

@JosephWright That used to be the motto of SuSE, once upon a time. At any rate, it would appear on the screen.

"Have a lot of fun", I mean.

manooooh

5:36 AM

@DavidCarlisle sorry if I said something wrong. I hate myself when I can't express as I thought, and it is not your fault. Sorry

Joseph Wright

5:56 AM

@FaheemMitha I know ;)

Faheem Mitha

8:03 AM

I wonder if SuSE still uses that phrase. I haven't used it in around 20 years.

David Carlisle

8:24 AM

@manooooh By non ascii I meant what you called "special characters" there is nothing "special" about é it is just not in the 127 character encoding known as ascii.

Paulo Cereda

9:58 AM

@DavidCarlisle That's why the Empire should've colonised us. :)

> Microsoft Bans Employees From Using Slack, Has AWS and Google Docs on a 'Discouraged' List

Paulo Cereda

10:15 AM

@manooooh if you want these glyphs available, you need to explicitly set them with literate in your listing environment, e.g,

   literate=*
        {ó}{{\'o}}1

cis

2:08 PM

Question: What is the english name of this point?

"Footpoint of altitude"? No....

David Carlisle

@cis no idea:-) random google search lead to this which names every kind of centre, bisector etc a triangle can have but manages to avoid naming that. "base" rather than "footpoint" if you have to have a name mathopenref.com/trianglealtitude.html

cis

2:26 PM

Puhh....

We say "Höhenfußpunkt" = "Footpoint of the height (altitude)"

I found

"The segment AB is perpendicular to the segment CD because the two angles it creates (indicated in orange and blue) are each 90 degrees. The segment AB can be called the perpendicular from A to the segment CD, using "perpendicular" as a noun. The point B is called the foot of the perpendicular from A to segment CD, or simply, the foot of A on CD.[1]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpendicular

Ulrike Fischer

2:41 PM

@DavidCarlisle For your eyes only: ctan-upload | announcement: In version 1.5
- the source of the [xskak] documentation has been added, so that it now can be included in texlive ...

David Carlisle

@cis foot of the perpendicular sounds Ok (not footpoint)

Sebastiano

3:20 PM

Hello everyone .... hurrah ... we arrived at 42 degrees in Sicily with strong westerly winds and the beaches are invaded by people. Impressive.

manooooh

3:34 PM

@PauloCereda thanks Paulo! I want the code made in listings be able to be copied&pasted into the programming language, so I think it is better to work without accents in listings since the PL does not support accents. My question is if the accents should be written in the description of the exercise

@DavidCarlisle oh, ok. However the teachers have never told us to explicity use accents, so there is no need to add it in the code. My question is about writing accents in the description of the exercise ("Make a program that outputs...")

@Sebastiano here it is getting hot and damp :(

David Carlisle

@manooooh I'd still be very surprised if there is any programming language that can not handle accented characters in strings. Unless the compiler explicitly checks for characters > 127 and throws an error then they will just pass through and land up in the output and any current font technology will render them. But as I said last night if you want the user to avoid such characters then clearly you should not ask them to output a string that has an accent.

manooooh

4:00 PM

@DavidCarlisle at least in my computer C++ v.5.11 (I think is that version) does not support literal accents (like á), surely it can but using the ASCII equivalent or using another method, like LaTeX does using \'a, but I have never tested it. Regarding the last sentence, thanks! I was not sure about respecting grammar or not in normal text when needing to forget about correct spelling

David Carlisle

@manooooh what do you mean by support? if you are using C char or C++std::string then it's just an array of bytes up to a null byte 0 so as long as you use utf-8 not utf-16 you are guaranteed not to have any 0 bytes, so it is a valid string, that was the point of the utf-8 design, that it was safe for such use.

@manooooh

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
    cout << "¡Héllö, World!";
    return 0;
}

works for me:

$ ./a
¡Héllö, World!

manooooh

4:40 PM

@DavidCarlisle ^^^^^^ the teachers also use this config, so I think it is not good idea to change it to include other characters

David Carlisle

@manooooh that's presumably your terminal window rather than the program, what happens if you just type the program listing? do you see the characters?

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle I do not know who (program/terminal) has this problem... I just went to Tools -> Compiler Options... -> Settings and look this option:

This could be the problem? However there is no option for C++ :-c

Nope, I tried with a C program and changing No to Yes and the same output is generated

@DavidCarlisle I do not know what you mean by "just type the program listing", do you mean in LaTeX?

David Carlisle

@manooooh I can't see how it's an issue with the compiler. Redirect the output to a file and look at the output in an editor. If your cmd window is not using utf-8 then clearly nothing will work. Odd though, it works for me and I'm English and we are usually last to get accents set up:-0

@manooooh no I mean open a cmd window and use the dos type command to just echo the source code to the terminal

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.17134.829]
(c) 2018 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Users\davidc>cd \tmp

C:\tmp>type zzz.cpp
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
    cout << "┬íH├®ll├Â, World!";
    return 0;
}

C:\tmp>

@manooooh like that^^^ as you see it's an issue with the cmd window settings it can not display the characters in the source file so the actions of the program are not relevant

@manooooh properties on the cmd window show it is using latin 1 (code page 850)

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle oh, I have never thought that! Nice investigation

So that means Windows has a deprecated character encoder?

David Carlisle

@manooooh yes if you right click at the top it will tell you the codepage it is using, if you write your program using the same codepage it will work

manooooh

4:53 PM

@DavidCarlisle ^^^^^^ do you mean this "codepage"?

David Carlisle

@manooooh bingo:-) so if you set your C++ code editor to use latin1 then the accents will work again.

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle I have no idea what are we talking, but I gave you the reason because you know a lot more than me :)

Hm, that seems reasonable...

0

A: dev cpp Save and open files with same encoding format

It seems that currently Dev-C++ does not support UTF-8 encoding, as seen in this ticket from 2016. The discussion there points to this link where someone said in 2013: Currently, it is not possible to read or write UTF-8 files using Dev-C++. Sorry about that. At the moment, there are no pla...

@DavidCarlisle ^^^^^^ is this a bad notice?!?!?

David Carlisle

@manooooh basically the hello world program is just echoing the input to the output without interpreting it at all, so it works as ling as the encoding you use to write the program is the same as the encoding of the terminal where you view the output.

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle that unfortunately seems deprecated, old, bad, not updated, right?

@DavidCarlisle do you have any idea how to do with Dev-C++?

David Carlisle

@manooooh I have no idea what dev-c++ is so no:-) but what do you want to do switch your terminal to utf-8 or switch your editor to latin 1 ?

manooooh

5:04 PM

@DavidCarlisle which option is less risky? :) I just want to get an utf8 output in my code editor program

However, as I said, teachers did not pay attention to this, so it is not good to contradict them...

I want to test if this works, then I will change it to the default config (unfortunately)

David Carlisle

@manooooh sorry I never use the windows console and i don't know the editor you are using I think I have helped all I could.

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle Ok, at least you could find what casues the problem, thanks!

cis

5:36 PM

@DavidCarlisle I heard "It's called 'foot of the altitude'"

Triangle

A triangle is a polygon with three edges and three vertices. It is one of the basic shapes in geometry. A triangle with vertices A, B, and C is denoted △ A B C {\displaystyle \triangle ABC} . In Euclidean geometry any three points, when non-collinear, determine a unique triangle and simultaneously, a unique plane (i.e. a two-dimensional Euclidean space). In other words, there is only one plane that contains that triangle, and every triangle is contained in some plane. If the entire geometry is only the Euclidean plane, there is only...

David Carlisle

@cis yes that sounds OK, english is harder than German as you need to use generic words like "foot" we can't just take a whole paragraph describing the thing, miss out the spaces, and call it a word:-)

yo'

5:54 PM

@DavidCarlisle we call it a "heel" :)

marmot

@DavidCarlisle In marmot language: Pfpht.

David Carlisle

@manooooh first rule of user support:

Jan 14 '15 at 21:56, by David Carlisle

@PauloCereda never believe what they tell you

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle "I hope ypu can help me. Nothing I try seams to work" well, I think you are right... :)

@marmot hello!

cis

As I said before: you have an almost non-self-explanatory conceptual budget *) as far as mathematical (geometric) terms are concerned. :)

*) Translate once "Begriffshaushalt"

Ulrike Fischer

6:14 PM

Petra naturally found the 2015 I hadn't changed into 2019 ;-(

David Carlisle

@UlrikeFischer within a decade, not bad. I have been further out than that.

Ulrike Fischer

@DavidCarlisle ;-). I had to update xskak in 2015 - it broke after an skak.sty update.

marmot

@UlrikeFischer Did they cancel chess tournaments when it was not working?

Ulrike Fischer

@marmot only for a few days ...

marmot

6:33 PM

@UlrikeFischer Would it be possible to hack the package in such a way that I get some extra moves?

Ulrike Fischer

@marmot what do you mean with extra moves?

marmot

Let's say you have black I have white. White moves, black moves, white moves twice, black moves, white moves three times, black moves ... and so on.

Ulrike Fischer

something like this was asked a few days ago: tex.stackexchange.com/q/494829/2388. Basically the underlying skak assumes a normal chess game, so you have to interrupt and start a "new" game and change the player to move to get this working.

Kurt

7:56 PM

@Sebastiano 42 degrees Celsius is hot. Is that ususal in Sicily at this time (Juni) or is that unusual high?

Sebastiano

8:15 PM

@Kurt Kurt, when it's too hot, I get anxiety and tachycardia. And I'm without air conditioning. Now we'll be around 25, 26 degrees. Patience for tiger mosquitoes but it is suffocating. :-( I hope that you are well and that the temperature in your areas is cool.

Kurt

8:42 PM

@Sebastiano Well, it seems the raining is over now so it is not so hot here in Germany. But that will change soon: hot weather with temperature until 42 Degrees Celsius is comming this week. The culprit is then that we get usually thunderstorms because hot and cold air comming together. That is clearly too hot for Germany, looking at the past years. Climate change is already clearly noticeable!

Joseph Wright

@Kurt Was saying that to a colleague earlier today; we are in Frankfurt, and it's hot

Kurt

@JosephWright Well, this is the day tomorrow in München (Munic):

bp2017

9:05 PM

Why \setbox doesn't work on a box created with \newbox and why \showbox doesn't work with such box either?

\newbox\myBox\hbox{bye}
\myBox % works
\setbox\myBox\hbox{bye bye}
\myBox % empty
%\showbox\myBox % error

Joseph Wright

@bp2017 \mybox is just a number ... you are not actually using the boxes

@bp2017 \showbox is basically an error (in the sense that's how TeX shows stuff)

Phelype Oleinik

@bp2017 Put both \myBox between parentheses to see that the first one actually doesn't work.

Joseph Wright

@PhelypeOleinik Well yes the \copy is missing

Phelype Oleinik

@JosephWright I think what @bp2017 thinks is that since bye is written to the PDF, the first \myBox worked. With the parentheses around \mybox he'll see "bye (<gibberish>)" instead of (bye).

egreg

@bp2017 \newbox\myBox\hbox{bye} allocates a new box register and prints bye (not assigning it to any register). If you type \myBox you get some character; if I compile the code with pdftex the character is the dotless i, living at slot 16 of the standard font. Look in the log file and the output of \showbox will be there.

\myBox=\box16
> \box16=
\hbox(6.94444+1.94444)x32.77782
.\tenrm b
.\kern-0.27779
.\tenrm y
.\kern-0.27779
.\tenrm e
.etc.

Harald Hanche-Olsen

9:42 PM

@bp2017 Use \box\myBox or \copy\myBox to use the box. The former empties the box after use; the latter doesn’t.

Jonas Stein

Hi, where does texstudio install the .cwl files to? I try to track down a bug of TexStudio on Gentoo Linux but can not find siunitx.cwl

github.com/texstudio-org/texstudio/blob/master/completion/…

I found autogenerated .cwl files in ~/

but there must be a global shared folder too.

bp2017

11:43 PM

@JosephWright, @PhelypeOleinik, @egreg, @HaraldHanche-Olsen, thank you, it took me some time to figure out.

% WORKING WITH PREDEFINED REGISTERS
\setbox0=\hbox{hello}
%\box0 % display once (empty after first display)
%\box0 % empty
\copy0 % not empty (can be displayed repeatedly)
\copy0 % not empty

% WORKING WITH USER-DEFINED REGISTERS
\newbox\myBox
\setbox\myBox\hbox{abc}
%\box\myBox % display once (empty after first display)
%\box\myBox % empty
\copy\myBox % not empty (can be displayed repeatedly)

Transcript for

$TeX - LaTeX$ TeX, LaTeX and Friends