@AlanMunn a page with nothing written on it. Let's say you have inside \begin{document} a lipsum text but in the middle of it you create a \newpage and you write nothing on it and then add more lipsum text. Can a boolean variable track blank pages like that? Or the opposite, page with some text written on it?
@Levy I understand, but my point was that this notion of 'page with no text' means something more like 'page with no text in the main text area excluding the header/footer'
@Levy I'm (somewhat educatedly) guessing the answer is "No", but maybe someone else can either confirm or deny that guess.
@Levy you need to be a lot more specific about when the test is made, eg if you test within the page body there may be no text but then the output routine could add floats so the resulting page is non-empty, or you could test within the output routine that the page is empty but then it is too late to use that test to affect anything in the page body or... What is your actual use case?
@Levy also are you just interested in forced page breaks (\newpage, \clearpage` etc) or also need to test automatic page breaks (which are less likely to result in empty pages)
Well actually, I set a booleanvariable to true at the beginning of command, and at the end of if, it returns to false. But in the text produced by the command the last page is not affected by the boolean
@Levy posting to the site would be better but I followed the link this once, you have the separator on the page hook, but the end of your biblechapter env doesn't force a page break so the \bibletexttrue will go out of scope at that point.
@Levy you are also missing lots of % from ends of lines in that code
@Levy also don't do this!!! \ifnum\c@bibleverse=1\else do \ifnum\c@bibleverse=1 \else
@Levy if your biblechapter ends 1/4 the way down column 1, and then the rest of column 1 and column2 have some other text, do you want your tikz column separator or not?
@DavidCarlisle If it ends on the fist column there's no need for the separator, but if it ends at any point on the second column there must be a separator
Today, by chance, I have found out that among the available applications in my company's repository there are MiKTeX and TeXniccenter. Now I must find out which office uses them and ask to be moved there!
@FaheemMitha Various bits of software we use. In particular, I use a program called ChemDraw for figures. Those copy-paste into Word and stay editable, but only if you stick on one platform. So all-Windows or all-Mac (no ChemDraw for Linux anyway)
@FaheemMitha Also, quite a number of programs for instrument (machine) control are Windows-only, so if I want to open the data files I have to have a Windows machine
@FaheemMitha For papers I write on my own, I use LaTeX so it's not an issue, but those are a small minority; usually it's collaborative, and that means ChemDraw, and Windows
@FaheemMitha Ironically, the physicist I work with is really LaTeX-averse, so Word even there (where you see lots of LaTeX papers)
@FaheemMitha No. ChemDraw was first Mac-only (graphics and all that), so for many years chemistry was Mac-heavy. That dropped off around the time I took my PhD, but the Mac has made a comeback to some extent
@FaheemMitha There's some scripting in the 'Ultra' edition, I think, for database searches and the like, but our work license covers only the core drawing tools
@FaheemMitha Menus not that important: the tools floating on the left, plus some keyboard shortcuts, are the vital bit. (For example, 0 adds one bond where the cursor is ...)
@JosephWright That's what I meant. Pointy-clicky things.
Random musings - I've wondered how much you can deduce about an element from just knowing its atomic structure. E.g. mercury. Could one figure out it was silvery and liquid at room temperatures just from calculations?
@FaheemMitha Like I said, draw; doing simple rings and chains is OK without a visual aid, but getting more complicated structures right does take a lot of work. For example, structure 6 has a core part that I drew about 10 years ago and have stuck with: getting it right is hard.
@FaheemMitha Yes, more or less, at least if one uses a sufficiently high level of theory
@FaheemMitha Mercury is big and heavy. So the electrons at the outside of a mercury atom have to move fast (using a classical model). They approach the speed of light, so relatively gets important.
I've read that Fortran is still heavily used for scientific computing. For code already heavily invested in Fortran this makes sense to me.
But is there a reason to use Fortran over other modern languages for a new project? Are there language design decisions in Fortran that makes it much more s...
@FaheemMitha No, my Fortran writing days are behind me. Now mainly R or Python, although I don't do much of either (and I prefer Ruby, but software I use is written in Python.)
I would like to ask you for your opinion as to whether you should leave or delete this answer of mine if it is useful or not, as it is not welcome. Thank you for your reply.
ADDENDUM:
a) Here there is the .tex guide of zed.sty documentation indicated by great user David Carlisle: http://www.dmi.usherb.ca/~frappier/ift734/devoirs/zed.tex;
b) For Z specifications in LaTeX there is a question to find the comma: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3076840/z-specificati...
@DavidCarlisle Looked again at building the dev format .. rotex.tex problematic even if I force things by creating an updated pdfLaTeX format on my system ...
@UlrikeFischer in all the zzz.def files as well, that's why I keep putting off doing it, but ....
@UlrikeFischer really only know whether you need "cat" or "cat.eps" or "cat".eps or {cat.eps} in the driver-specific parts so it would be better in the end if the core normalized the filenames without quotes, But it requires lots of small changes in lots of places
ADDENDUM:
a) Here there is the .tex guide of zed.sty documentation indicated by great user David Carlisle: http://www.dmi.usherb.ca/~frappier/ift734/devoirs/zed.tex;
b) For Z specifications in LaTeX there is a question to find the comma: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3076840/z-specificati...
