hmmm. while the experience of latex on windows is very nice, thanks largely probably to the work of many marvelous people, the "yeah it's preinstalled packaged" position of linux makes it a charm

@FélixGagnon-Grenier although the common advice here is to avoid the linux packaged distribution and install the upstream texlive from tug, pros and cons either way.

quack

pesky ducks making a noise again

@DavidCarlisle oh

@DavidCarlisle regarding harfbuzz as default: I just tested tex.stackexchange.com/q/370799/2388 with Renderer=Harfbuzz and it breaks.

@UlrikeFischer not surprised, If you start using any lowish level keys to fiddle with the font then probably things will break if you change the underlying renderer (that wouldn't have worked in xetex before either) However I wonder if at the fontspec level it could be the default if you don't use any option or only use high level keys to specify bold font etc, perhaps that ends up being more confusing... I don't know (my question was a question, not a suggestion:-)

@DavidCarlisle ooh a question

@PauloCereda I can ask questions that don't require finding an "ask a question" button.

@DavidCarlisle ooh

@DavidCarlisle it is a good question. But this is not so much a lowish key, more functions/handlers specific to the context fontloader and there are around 70 hits using them. The fontloader works well for languages with only the occasional dot over a letter so I would be wary to change this. Also I don't know if this would affect text fonts used inside math (\mathrm, or mathastext stuff).

But one should discuss with Will if it were manageable to use harfbuzz as default if scripts like devanagari or arabic are used.

The wheels on the buzz go round and round

@UlrikeFischer ooh Will

@UlrikeFischer roughly I was thinking that if a particular option works now in luatex and xetex then it could (perhaps) be expected to work with renderer=HarfBuzz as well (although even if it does, that doesn't necessarily mean it should be the default, as it would be a bit odd if adding one key to fiddle some feature had a side effect of completely changing the rendering mode...) You are probably right that keeping the default for Latin scripts may work best

@DavidCarlisle if something works with xetex it should work with renderer=Harfbuzz. But fonts.handlers.otf.addfeature is normally used to repair or add something that doesn't work with xetex. But I'm not sure yet what the best is. One should also consider speed - I didn't see much difference yet, but didn't test much.

@UlrikeFischer एक विकल्प सुरक्षित है

@DavidCarlisle ;-). Does l3doc need a special makeindex style? When I run Phelype's example it breaks because a faulty \verb.

@UlrikeFischer not in general (as far as I know) source2e does so that I is IJK not I II III

@DavidCarlisle does this compile for you if you simply call makeindex?

\documentclass{l3doc}
\begin{document}
abc\cs{def}
\PrintIndex
\end{document}

! Extra }, or forgotten \endgroup.

@UlrikeFischer Did you pass -s gind.ist?

@UlrikeFischer oh yes not special makeindex style for l3doc, just the usual doc one

@DavidCarlisle I'm less fluent in doc-usage as I'm in burmese ;-)

@UlrikeFischer nobody reads the doc anyway

@DavidCarlisle ooh

@UlrikeFischer The arara directives were part of the example ;-) Thanks for looking into it!

@PhelypeOleinik oh, I ignored them ;-). But you found a nice bug.

@PhelypeOleinik ooh

@UlrikeFischer main bug was having arara directives in the example rather than an elisp local variables block.

@DavidCarlisle oh

@PauloCereda You have to admit that arara's lisp interpreter is not great.

@DavidCarlisle @TeXnician and I are working on it. :)

@PauloCereda useful test example (delete-file "/usr/bin/vi")

@DavidCarlisle oh no

@PauloCereda you are safe, as long as your lisp interpreter doesn't work

@DavidCarlisle ooh

@DavidCarlisle alo, permission error :)

@PauloCereda you mean you don't run everything as root?, so untrusting of you.

@DavidCarlisle quack :)

I have a fontfile (TTF). Where does it go in order to be usable with xelatex/lualatex?

@UlrikeFischer ^^^^?

@AlexG You can open the font viewer (both Windows and Linux have one) and install the font

@AlexG depends on your OS.

@CarLaTeX Thanks for the nice words on twitter!

@PhelypeOleinik , @UlrikeFischer Thank you! I have Gentoo linux. I prefer to install it in my $HOME, just for testing purposes. There is a ~/.fonts directory, And I have vanilla TL installed as normal user, also in my $HOME.

@UlrikeFischer miktex admin mode. again.

@AlexG just for testing the current directory will work

@DavidCarlisle what else?

@UlrikeFischer can we forward every bug report and tex.sx question to a miktex support list?

@DavidCarlisle Great! And what about fontspec? Anything to configure there?

@AlexG In Ubuntu it is ~/.local/share/fonts, but I think it's the same thing. But for testing, as David said, the current folder should work

@AlexG no. if you reference the font by its filename then putting it in your local user texlive fonts tree will work (or the current directory) if you want to refer to it via its internal font name in xetex then it needs to be in a directory controlled by fontconfig, and you need to have re-run fc-cache, or be in the current directory)

@AlexG I don't know much about the system directories. You can put them also in texmflocal/fonts/truetype. With luatex it should work fine, with xelatex you perhaps will have to use the file names.

@DavidCarlisle @UlrikeFischer The file Lohit-Devanagari.ttf is now in the working directory. What now? Apologies for my ignorance...

\newfontfamily\devafam{Lohit-Devanagari.ttf} \devafam chars .... What are you trying to check?

@PhelypeOleinik the new location is under .local/share. Dotted folders in the home directory are being deprecated.

At least, for more modern distributions. :)

@PauloCereda Oh...

@PauloCereda I still use 16.04, so...

@PhelypeOleinik I think .fonts might still work, but it will be deprecated... :)

@PhelypeOleinik LTS?

@PauloCereda Yes. There's 18.04 already (since, well, 2018 :-), but I didn't like the appearance. Mostly because in 16.04 (Unity) if you start typing a file name in a folder, the selection jumps to the file, and in 18.04 it opens a search window which looks in all subfolders, and I find this annoying :-)

@PauloCereda I think I'll drop Ubuntu eventually and use some other distribution

@PhelypeOleinik ooh :)

@PhelypeOleinik ooh Fedora a new distro :)

@UlrikeFischer Thank you! Following your template, I have now \newfontfamily\devafam[Script=Devanagari]{Lohit-Devanagari.ttf} and it works!

@PauloCereda Might be. I don't really have any knowledge about that, so I can be influenced :-)

@PhelypeOleinik I better not influence your decision then. :)

@PauloCereda What I'm not liking about Ubuntu is that they are changing too much from one release to the other

@PhelypeOleinik just in case you decide to try Fedora: github.com/cereda/fedora-postinstall

@PauloCereda I'll take a non-influenced look at Fedora :-)

@PhelypeOleinik I think they are now set with Gnome 3.

@PauloCereda Thanks!

@PhelypeOleinik I recommend the one from microsoft

@PauloCereda Until they aren't anymore? ;-)

@DavidCarlisle I have a laptop with that one already. I don't want to repeat myself ;-)

@PhelypeOleinik LOL I don't like/trust Canonical and the Shuttythingy-bloke.

@DavidCarlisle ooh

@PauloCereda Shuttywho?

@PhelypeOleinik Let me google the bloke's name...

@PhelypeOleinik Mark Richard Shuttleworth

CEO of Canonical

@PauloCereda Ooh

@PauloCereda But he's an astronaut :D

@PhelypeOleinik ooh :D

@PauloCereda Time to make some pizza lunch. See ya o/

@PhelypeOleinik YES! :) See ya, buddy!

@PhelypeOleinik oh, good that you reminds me, I have to do the dough ;-)

@PhelypeOleinik you can use ubuntu with whatever DE you want. You don't need to install kubuntu to use KDE or lubuntu to use LXDE.

@UlrikeFischer ooh secret pizza

@StrongBad Speaking of managers, I saw this earlier today: github.com/PapyElGringo/material-shell

@PauloCereda for modern ducks:

@UlrikeFischer OOH

@UlrikeFischer DiscoDucks(TM)

btw, this should be a poststamp series.

@PauloCereda I have never liked gnome and it seems like gnome 3 is still problematic even after all these years.

@yo' You're really great!

@UlrikeFischer: I just ordered a 30x30 poster of those ducks.

@PauloCereda did you found the pdf?

yes, last year's extravaganza. :)

@PauloCereda ;-).

@CarLaTeX well, not me personally in this particular case, but thanks :)

@yo' "You" meaning "all of you". I always receive a great help every time I ask :):):)

@CarLaTeX :) :)

I have a template file which I need to put different values in occasionally. It's a feedback form for my short term rental. Having that information in my form means that I have to keep committing changes which aren't part of the template. Would it be reasonable to put the specific information in a config file (I was thinking YAML, which is about as flexible as it gets, though in this case it's overkill), and just have the template reference the config file. Does that sound reasonable?

This isn't really a TeX-specific question, just that in this case the template file happens to be TeX.

@FaheemMitha Use TeXplate (and ask @PauloCereda to release it with the manual ;)).

@TeXnician Release it with the manual?

Well, currently it is (a) unreleased and (b) lacking a manual…

@TeXnician Ok?

@FaheemMitha Something that should have been presented at UK-TUG. But really, it's Paulo's project (and a TeX-centric templating system).

@TeXnician Oh. Do you have a link?

@FaheemMitha That's the point where the fact that it is unreleased comes into play. So unfortunately, no…

@TeXnician Oh. Not even on GitHub?

Well, it's one of the projects of the Island of TeX (gitlab.com/islandoftex). But currently, it is not public, as far as I can tell.

@FaheemMitha why yaml not tex?

@DavidCarlisle Well, YAML is designed for storing config information. Though in this case, it's overkill. What would an TeX approach look like?

@TeXnician The Island of TeX? How exotic.

@FaheemMitha Define macros in a file you \input.

@TeXnician Oh, right. Yes, I think I had considered that earlier. Is that a robust solution?

@FaheemMitha it's the most natural solution for tex surely, if you have the information in yanly or xml or anything that isn't tex you have to parse it and convert it into the tex to input anyway, so just storing it in tex seems vastly simpler unless you need it in a non-tex form for other reasons

@FaheemMitha Yes, even if the macros aren't robust :D

@DavidCarlisle Well, I would use Lua to read it in. But I guess that would be overkill too.

What kind of suffix would one give a file like that?

@FaheemMitha .tex

@FaheemMitha I would probably give it a .tex extension so it would open in the editor I like for tex files.

@DavidCarlisle Oh. So I shouldn't use .dat?

@FaheemMitha then it will open in the editor you use to edit .dat files.

@StrongBad That sounds like a very Windowsy thing to say. I can open it in whatever editor I choose.

@FaheemMitha of course you can, but even in linux there are default programs associated with different file types

@StrongBad Yes, there are.

@FaheemMitha use whatever extension you want but .tex seems a reasonable one for tex files.

@DavidCarlisle and very trustworthy

@DavidCarlisle ok

@UlrikeFischer yes that graph proves that

put the image is a png, so I am not sure if I should trust it.

@TeXnician oh no

@FaheemMitha I am working on the manual, so hopefully we will have a public release in the upcoming weeks...

@StrongBad but if I tell you the png was derived from a tex source, and you trust me and tex sources, then that png must be trustworthy

@UlrikeFischer another bite of dragon

@DavidCarlisle ;-) What are the plans with it?

@UlrikeFischer this time I started with just using iftex instead of ifluatex, but I'm going to make it work with xetex (it doesn't even check if \filemoddate exists, it just skips as \pdffilemoddate not defined, but I am wondering about \ifx\ExplSyntaxOn... skip the whole lot of testing and just define everything in terms of the ones set up... (@JosephWright)

@DavidCarlisle sounds like a plan ...

@UlrikeFischer do I need to do something with github.com/ho-tex/pdftexcmds/issues/2

@DavidCarlisle well yes. Basically it is the problem we discussed a few days ago (~ here chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/52611978#52611978): \pdfescapestring doesn't work with luatex outside ascii). Imho this should be repaired. The main question is how at best.

@UlrikeFischer hmm I want to push this out this weekend, I suspect I'm going to have to punt on that this time not sure we have a plan that is firm enough, I'll have another look..

@DavidCarlisle imho @MarcelKrüger's code here tex.stackexchange.com/a/471315/2388 is okay for luatex: it expands pdf@escapestring so that it at least gives some output for non-ascii (and it gives the same as \str_set_convert). But I'm not sure what is with xetex.

Why is the chicken soup best for treating cold? Because it's full of ATB.

@UlrikeFischer but for the hyperref use as pdf names wouldn't you need it to be hex quoted utf-16 rather than utf-8 as marcel commented under the answer?

@DavidCarlisle I don't think that \pdfescapestring is used for anything really meaningful. I mean with lualatex it outputs nothing at all currently for non-ascii. Getting a valid non empty pdf string instead can only improve the situation.

@UlrikeFischer yes but that's what I mean, the definition there just passes the utf8 straight through (apart from quoting lua syntax like " and \\ ) but that's not valid in the pdf contexts you need as far as I understand oh I see the name is interpreted as the "wrong" but valid set of bytes... its too late tonight but I think leaving this this time and slipping in an expl3 version later might work better.

@UlrikeFischer although not using byte so giving badly encoded bytes is I suppose better than dropping them (at least it gives destinations that work internally)

@DavidCarlisle yes that is what I mean. Basically you want simply unique keys here. But it wouldn't be bad to make a comprehensive list of all these escape/convert commands. It is easy to get lost. I'm never know for sure where are the differences.

@UlrikeFischer in that application yes but if you use that to get pdf strings to put in a bookmark or other visible text, it would be scrambled

@DavidCarlisle yes, but it isn't used there. bookmarks go through \pdfstringdef and it has very longish conversion code to handle the markup and then the conversion to unicode (or pdfdocencoding) (e.g. HyPsd@ConvertToUnicode). \pdfescapestring is used only for the simple cases of keys.

@UlrikeFischer sure, but pdftexcmds documents the function as escaping to produce a valid pdf string, so producing a valid pdfstring that is not at all the same text as the input is a bit of a cheat even if it works here

@DavidCarlisle but it gives the same result as with pdflatex. When I do

\edef\test{\pdf@escapestring{abc()\detokenize{äöüß}}}\show\test

I get with pdflatex and with lualatex + Marcels code

abc()\303\244\303\266\303\274\303\237

@UlrikeFischer hmm matching pdftex makes sense I suppose, I'll do some more tests tomorrow, just matching pdftex and documenting that is probably thing to do.

pdf@escapestring isn't defined at all for xetex, i suppose I should fix that too...

@DavidCarlisle, @UlrikeFischer Er, \str_set_convert:Nnnn ...

@JosephWright yes, it gives the same. But it is not expandable.

@UlrikeFischer Sure

@UlrikeFischer

This is LuaTeX, Version 1.10.0 (TeX Live 2019)
 restricted system commands enabled.
(./pd2.tex
LaTeX2e <2019-10-01> patch level 3

luaotfload | main : initialization completed in 1.356 seconds
(/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2019/10/25 v1.4k Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size10.clo))
(./pdftexcmds.sty
(/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/tex/generic/oberdiek/infwarerr.sty)
(/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/tex/generic/iftex/iftex.sty)

@DavidCarlisle ;-).

@UlrikeFischer I just pushed that if you want to give it a try

@DavidCarlisle it is too late now and tomorrow I will be out all day, so I can look only in the evening or on sunday.

@UlrikeFischer it'll be fine it was broken before, and it's not really right now but I think it'll be Ok, I'll do some more tests tomorrow but I'll probably push this out at some point this weekend.