@UlrikeFischer, @DavidCarlisle I see the source of the weird 'no format updating' has been found ...

Hi.

Recently \begin{center}\rule{0.5\linewidth}{\linethickness}\end{center} stopped compiling due to the \linethickness. I have probably copy pasted that from somewhere. Is there a way to query the current line thickness?

@wilx \linethickness takes an argument (the width you want to set it to) so it could never have worked could it?

@wilx oh it somehow managed to fail to give an error before, but wasn't doing anything useful. The width you want is \@wholewidth

@DavidCarlisle Thank you.

@wilx I just did \tracingall on the construct you posted in an older latex, the trace is "interesting" but it did actually end up accidentally making a rule of length \@wholewidth but not by any code path that has ever been tested:-) (@JosephWright)

Haha.

@wilx the change in this week's latex release is that many commands (including \linethickness) are now robust, essentially every command that could ever conceivably be used in a \write is now robust so you shouldn't ever get the fragile command in moving arguments random expansion errors, so \linethickness now expands to \protect\the-old-definition and the \protect messes you up here.

Yup. It mentioned something about \protect before the fix.

@JosephWright yes also explains why that year when we had 5 PL releases we kept seeing Mac users with unpatched formats even though they said they had updated.

@DavidCarlisle Yes

@DavidCarlisle I can only imagine someone forgot how formats work: they don't go into the download at all ...

@JosephWright I just merged the set@currfile change back from master to the graphics-compat branch and took out the patch I had added there, now just seeing if it all works...but I think it will be best to release the PL first and then graohics later, even if I get it sorted out today.

@DavidCarlisle Sure

@JosephWright Thanks also for the last in this series: is that thanks for the update, or thanks that it is the last I wonder:-)

Morning quack

@PauloCereda a bit early for roast dinner

@DavidCarlisle oh no

@JosephWright I just noticed (again) that fmtutil-sys builds aleph, does anyone still maintain and/or use that still?

@DavidCarlisle brunch?

@DavidCarlisle I'd said there would be a full set: nowadays that's quite rare

@DavidCarlisle Probably not .. might be worth asking for it to be disabled

@HaraldHanche-Olsen oh no

@PauloCereda It's hard being a duck.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen oh

@Skillmon Hi mr. rabbit!

@yo' wohoo, since you joined, the alexa rank goes up!

@StefanKottwitz by the rule "tell me what the result should be and I'll find a corresponding ranking"? :)

@yo' It's out of curiosity, when I read that 4 million people use Overleaf

I just wondered, if it's actually people, users, or IP addresses or sessions or hits

@PauloCereda Hi, Mr. Duck! Must cook now. It'll be noodles with eggs.

@StefanKottwitz can you please verify that the downwards trend started when I left Overleaf?

@Skillmon ooh :)

@Skillmon they lost the best rabbit in the world <3

@StefanKottwitz existing user accounts

@Skillmon or the trend started when I removed the direct link from all code snippets to overleaf on latex.org, golatex.de and texwelt.de in response to the subscription enforcement

@Skillmon but as @yo' said, such statistics don't tell much. The alexa rank, specifically, just says that other sites on the Internet come up and strong over time and that's today's trend anyway.

@StefanKottwitz yeah, unless you make a comparison to another page, any ranking is mostly useless. Some of them raise as the internet grows bigger, some of them decrease as the internet grows bigges. Some are trying to be stable (like google pagerank, that actually compares the ranking to that of google and takes some sort of a log), but even that is not perfect.

@yo' yep

@yo' Overleaf should rank well since people actually continuously work on it, staying a long time on it.

@StefanKottwitz maybe. (I dunno, that's not part of what I really have to care about at Overleaf)

now I'm sorry, but the boss level of The Lost Vikings 2 is waiting :-)

@yo' oh, good luck!

@StefanKottwitz have been trying for a while.

@yo' alexa made a comparison of other sites on the overleaf statistics page

@StefanKottwitz well, one thing is that once you know overleaf, you have it bookmarked. the other sites get a lot of traffic simply from google search

@yo' have fun!

Eric's dead :(

@yo' I think alexa takes it from actual usage via a tool (a toolbar?) on user's computers, but that's a vague memory

@StefanKottwitz then it's highly biased towards amazon clients, right?

@yo' That's probably the case!

@StefanKottwitz ok, makes me less woried :-) (and less interested...)

@yo' Amazon clients are people who can spend money. Such as on an Overleaf pro account. Non-Amazon-online-clients (such as in areas with no Internet or too low income or with an aversion to Amazon or online payment) may perhaps use the free Overleaf service (which is great)

@StefanKottwitz well, one of the missions of Overleaf is to make LaTeX easy to access. So if we manage to get people in (even people not willing to spend money), that's fine

@yo' Just a thought, there may be a slight correlation between an online payable service and the reference Amazon

and then there are academic bodies who realize that online collaboration tools give you an advantage, and are willing to pay for this.

@yo' Yes, Overleaf made a great job in making LaTeX accessible!

@StefanKottwitz indeed!

@yo' How good is the rich editor (without coding) today? attractive for new users too?

@StefanKottwitz well, it's good for people who want to comment on other people's project without deep knowledge of LaTeX. I mostly think of professors on student projects.

Usable with templates? (letters, CVs, ...)

@StefanKottwitz well, for CVs not really (you definitely need a lot of case-to-case tweaks there). For nicely made letters with e.g. company's headers, that would work quite well I think

@yo' Cool! An online LyX-like interface could lure more people into LaTeX

@StefanKottwitz well, it is in the mind of the people here, but you probably realize how tough this is :-)

@yo' I used LyX in the cloud on my old Blackberry :-)

@Mico should I change the heading of tex.stackexchange.com/a/511970/117050 to "pdfLaTeX answer -- use the NFSS" to be more in line to your heading? :)

Does it make sense to use \expandafter\url\expandafter{something} if you don't have reason to believe that the something needs to be expanded? In my current use case I think it's very very unlikely by construction. How does one distinguish between defensive programming and paranoia?

(If the question is too vague, please ignore.)

@FaheemMitha with \url it wouldn't be good idea to store the argument in a macro anyway - it can't change the catcodes then.

@FaheemMitha well it could force the wrong output

@FaheemMitha for example \url{~mitha/zzz} \url defines ~ to be safe but if you pre-expand it it will expand to some code to avoid a linebreak/

@DavidCarlisle I forget what safe means.

@FaheemMitha not a technical definition I just meant its normal english definition of not doing anything bad in this case it means it typesets as ~ not as a non breaking space,

@DavidCarlisle Ok. I understand.

@StefanKottwitz That's a lot of cable for a blackberry. :)

@AlanMunn Multiple 10 gig fiber since it lacks a 100 gig interface

@StefanKottwitz lol

@AlanMunn On the Internet, nobody knows that the forum is hosted on a Blackberry.

@wilx The construct was actually from Pandoc, it seems: Horizontal-Line · Issue #5801 · jgm/pandoc

This is such a nooby question, but what in the hell am I doing wrong? Just wanna add a couple of random macros in such a way that I don't have to rewrite them every time!

@It'sNotALie. You need a TDS structure: tex/latex/<files here>

Thanks! Still have a lottt to learn about TeX...

I see I have to teach everyone Git ...

@JosephWright Well if you're offering... :)

@JosephWright I'll take that course.