TeX, LaTeX and Friends

Henri Menke

03:39

Anybody has an idea why compiling the PGF manual does not converge randomly? Pass: travis-ci.com/hmenke/pgf/jobs/263688500 Fail: travis-ci.com/pgf-tikz/pgf/jobs/264275185 And I'm building literally the same commit both times!

CarLaTeX

05:40

@DavidCarlisle teh

Enthusiastic Engineer

07:23

I can not really understand people's answers in this page!

Have they ever tried LaTeX???

quora.com/…

CarLaTeX

07:36

@EnthusiasticEngineer Once I sent a .zip file to a collegue of mine and she replied to me: "I'll open it later, I have to ask for help to unzip it". That's why people use Word :)

solisoc

07:48

hey folks, I need to use a non-integer font size as default. is \def\normalsize... the best way to do this?

Faheem Mitha

08:27

@EnthusiasticEngineer One should not pay too much opinion to random stuff on the Internet.

Mind you, some of the answers do have a point. E.g.

> And in the real world, nobody cares, that your documents are beautiful. The content will make the difference.

Though clearly "nobody" isn't quite correct. And I'm happy that Knuth did care.

And anyway, it's not like one has a choice. It's either TeX, or something much, much worse.

Enthusiastic Engineer

08:44

@CarLaTeX Exactly, It was a period I used to work in an engineering firm, the direct boss of mine who was an engineer and head of engineering design unit could not open Excel! You are right, people's skills is so much important...

@FaheemMitha Yes but some of the answers there have much confidence behind them that make me surprised! We have lots of perfectly maintained and currently developing ones, we have LaTeX 3 being developed by the lovely experts, there are many many TeX users; and answers there firmly insist: LaTeX is Dead!!!!!

CarLaTeX

@EnthusiasticEngineer Yes, to write in LaTeX you need some minimal computer skills not any people have

Enthusiastic Engineer

@CarLaTeX Skills and Interest!

Faheem Mitha

@EnthusiasticEngineer I expect most of the people writing those answers don't know much of anything about TeX. They may not even use it.

Enthusiastic Engineer

@FaheemMitha Exactly

Faheem Mitha

Though they're right that TeX does have substantial overhead. The expedient and ugly choices are easier, at least for small documents.

CarLaTeX

08:49

@EnthusiasticEngineer Yes, if you don't want to learn you will never learn. My mother learnt to use Whatapp at 80 years old, and she has only an elementary school licence, but she is curious and wants to learn new things

Enthusiastic Engineer

@FaheemMitha Exactly the same as the other aspects of life; most of the people are interested in pop music and less are into classical and opera! LaTeX has its unique place in unique people's heart! :))

@CarLaTeX good to hear that... yes some people want to learn and many do not.

And about my linux learning: I am also little by little getting used to my Linux OS! First it was hard, now I am very confident about it... learnt some codes, etc... In long term I hope I be able to shift to it!

CarLaTeX

@EnthusiasticEngineer Good, I would like to try, too, as soon as I have time to do it :)

Enthusiastic Engineer

@CarLaTeX first I was afraid to do so, but now I am getting more used to it... it is like my eyes are getting comfort with darkness! :))

CarLaTeX

@EnthusiasticEngineer I have some vision problems, and I like dark themes, I set them in any editor I use

Enthusiastic Engineer

@CarLaTeX it has good features... and if you are busy, it does not take you much time to install any distro you like. about one hour...

CarLaTeX

08:57

@EnthusiasticEngineer Good to know :)

Enthusiastic Engineer

^__^

Ulrike Fischer

@HenriMenke the problem seems to be somewhere in the first 106 pages. From the licence text on there a page more.

Henri Menke

09:19

@UlrikeFischer But why is it non-deterministic?

@UlrikeFischer There are no random numbers being used before page 106.

Ulrike Fischer

09:35

@HenriMenke I don't know I'm on my smartphone currently and could only look for clues to restrict the problem a bit. I can look more later.

wilx

09:55

Would you guys know or say that there are or should be different page layouts for documents that are primarily target as electronic only/never printed? Like, narrower margins, different page size, etc? Is there any such norm in the wild?

I always have a feeling I should use narrower margins than the defaults, for example.

Paulo Cereda

10:10

@wilx When I prepare stuff for me to read on my iPad, I try to use as much space as I possibly can. :)

wilx

@PauloCereda Do you size the page to exact size of the screen of the iPad?

Paulo Cereda

@wilx I actually never did that, but I tend to use A5 instead of A4. :)

Enthusiastic Engineer

10:27

@wilx why should be worried about it when PDF files normally fit to screen of any desired size?

wilx

@EnthusiasticEngineer So that the font size is reasonable for the screen size?

Paulo Cereda

HEAR, HEAR: TAOCP volume 4, fascicle 5 is out!

Enthusiastic Engineer

@wilx I am not aware of the technical side, but I have heard that (and this is what I experience while reading papers and books in PDF format) when a text is converted to PDF, everything is dynamic from the margins, text size, etc. So, when you fit it to screens with different sizes, everything changes with this regard...

That is how we can display perfect PDF presentations in our laptop and on a big screen...

cis

This is a short excerpt from an extensive work that still lacks various queries, design tools, etc.

That has its reason why I use pgfplotstable. You just have to believe me.

I'm not the best TeXer ever, but I know what I'm doing!

Paulo Cereda

10:49

@DavidCarlisle ooh picture

David Carlisle

@EnthusiasticEngineer ?

@PauloCereda an important environment

Oct 4 '16 at 22:18, by David Carlisle

@Canageek 1st rule of tex support: never believe users when they describe what happened.

Enthusiastic Engineer

@DavidCarlisle do you want to kill me again? :((

David Carlisle

@EnthusiasticEngineer did I kill you already? (Hard to remember these details:-)

Enthusiastic Engineer

@DavidCarlisle :)) yes, and now I am a dead who never uses \bf instead of \textbf with extra brackets!

David Carlisle

@wilx margins (as a place to put your thumb while holding a book) don't really have a place but reduce the margins by reducing the page widths, not by making the text block wider (as a general rule)

@cis there may (possibly) be a reason to use the pgfplotstable typesetting command, but there can be no reason to write out data to a text file to read back using pgfplotstable file reading, as that just defines a macro that you could define directly in tex but does it orders of magnitude more slowly.

cis

11:32

I almost dropped the idea with paged text files.

I'm trying it now in just pgfplotstable.

wilx

12:48

@DavidCarlisle OK.

Martin Sleziak

13:14

On Mathematics Meta, somebody has asked this question: Why the bracket(s) disappear? Basically, it seems that their after converting formulas to images. (Although the question is about specific website.)

I have suggested using Ghostscript as a possible way to do that. Is that a reasonable solution?

Is there some post on TeX - LaTeX to which I could direct this user?

(The OP asked about converting "equations written in MathJax" - but I suppose as far as we're talking only about stuff used in math mode, there aren't big differences between the basic usage of MathJax and LaTeX.)

Joseph Wright

209

Q: Compile a LaTeX document into a PNG image that's as short as possible

I need to convert my LaTeX documents into PNG. The problem is, I also need the resulting image to be as short as possible (height-wise). I've tried latex followed by dvipng, but the result is always the size of a page. For instance, take a .tex file containing: \documentclass{article} \begin{d...

Martin Sleziak

Thanks! I was about to write that I linked to the same post.

in MathJax, 4 mins ago, by Martin Sleziak

Possibly answer to this question might contain some suggestions: Compile a LaTeX document into a PNG image that's as short as possible

I have encouraged the user who asked the question to come to this room if they have questions - I hope that's ok.

solisoc

13:39

ugh, I can't get smallcaps working with a otf font in context, and I also can't find any relevant information despite scouring the context wiki & mailing list... i know the font has the smallcaps feature, but either i am not enabling it correctly or enabling it does nothing

yet it feels too trivial to ask a question about

cis

13:54

I think this is something with let, edef, exandafter a.s.o. :(

0

Q: pgfplotstable: How to handle correctly with pgfplotsinvokeforeach by pgfplotstablecreatecol

I get only the last value (that is '0') expanded in the following pgfplotsinvokeforeach-loop. What have I to do? BTW: I would like to keep create col/set list. I hope it is possible. \documentclass[a4paper, landscape]{article} \usepackage{pgfplotstable} \pgfplotsset{compat=1.16} \begin{docu...

pgfplotstable foreach

AndréC

14:37

My first palindrome:

2

1010011010

15:13

Hi all, I have a font which has \prime already a "superscript", in the sense that the regular definition of active $'$ in latex leads to an optical effect of a double superscript

What are my options? is this the point where I redefine prime from the latex kernel? it feels dirty

David Carlisle

16:02

@1010011010 almost every non math font has that problem:-) but you should almost never have \prime in any document, all you need to is make ' a normal mathcode so it acts as a normal character then x' will make x' not x^\prime

@AndréC not bad, shame about the comma though:-)

@MartinSleziak the original tex expression is in error, so most tex emulations on web pages will just do some arbitrary thing.

@cis it's still vastly more complicated than needed.

Ulrike Fischer

16:28

@DavidCarlisle I'm considering to remove pdfencoding=auto and pdfdoc from hyperref ... Doing everything in unicode seems so much easier.

1010011010

@DavidCarlisle With the asterisk that one does not want to break existing primes in the document of course, but yes much of the definition can be copied and ..simplified in view of the "multiprime" functionality not being required

David Carlisle

@1010011010 the document markup shouldn't need to change

@UlrikeFischer yes

1010011010

\def\'{\text{\XeTeXGlyph1158\relax}} ?

David Carlisle

16:43

@1010011010 no that is defining the acute accent command, \' not ' something like {\catcode`\'\active \xdef'{\text{\XeTeXGlyph1158\relax}}}

1010011010

Ah fair enough

Pablo González L

Hello, some of the users of TeXLive (Updated) in windows can check the output of tlmgr check all

David Carlisle

16:59

@1010011010 gdef not xdef

1010011010

@DavidCarlisle This appears to lead to "doesn't match its definition" errors... (?)

Both xdef and gdef

Never mind

All it needed was an extra pair of braces

David Carlisle

@1010011010 no gdef should work (xdef less so)

1010011010

I copied your first try without the braces that was the culprit

David Carlisle

@1010011010 ah yes copying untested code off random internet sites has its drawbacks

1010011010

@DavidCarlisle It even has a name: spaghetti code

Martin Sleziak

17:05

@DavidCarlisle Only later we noticed that there is unpaired \left..\right. But eventually we figured it out.

In any case, thanks for response!

Pablo González L

@DavidCarlisle I think oberdiek bundle should now be called oberdiek b ... after so many cuts to become a little smaller :-). That sword will need to be sharpened again

David Carlisle

17:21

@PabloGonzálezL blame @UlrikeFischer it's not safe if she is waving sharp blades about

Pablo González L

@DavidCarlisle jeje, a consultation, will you divide it completely?

David Carlisle

@PabloGonzálezL no probably stop after this next batch, should be around 50 left, of less used packages, and I'll just pull them out if they need updating

Pablo González L

17:37

Great, the listingsutf8 package is on your list?

David Carlisle

@PabloGonzálezL possibly, do you use it?

Pablo González L

@DavidCarlisle Yes, in conjunction with tcolorbox

And I would bet that many users (who don't read the listingsutf8 documentation) load it without knowing what its purpose is :)

Pablo González L

17:51

@DavidCarlisle Thanks to the current division, I no longer charge oberdiek in one of my configurations in travis :)

Ulrike Fischer

@DavidCarlisle you are fast ;-)

Pablo González L

@UlrikeFischer Really fast, I'll wait for the update and remove oberdiek...every second counts in travis!!!!

David Carlisle

@PabloGonzálezL it's still needed if you use hyperref, I wondered about pulling out all the hyperref dependencies but it would be better to fix hyperref not to use them.

Pablo González L

18:08

@DavidCarlisle Mmmm....mmmm....as an idea, if some packages are only working with hyperref, maybe it's better to take them out (for now), then, when hyperref is set, you just declare them as inactive and they won't need updating anymore (apart from hyperref no other package uses hypcolor for example).

Ulrike Fischer

@DavidCarlisle you mean the bundle? Which packages are still needed in hyperref?

David Carlisle

@UlrikeFischer vvv

$ pdflatex hy1 | grep /oberdiek
(/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/tex/generic/oberdiek/ltxcmds.sty)
(/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/tex/generic/oberdiek/kvsetkeys.sty
(/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/tex/generic/oberdiek/etexcmds.sty
(/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/tex/generic/oberdiek/kvdefinekeys.sty)
(/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/tex/generic/oberdiek/pdfescape.sty)
(/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/tex/latex/oberdiek/hycolor.sty
(/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/tex/latex/oberdiek/xcolor-patch.sty

@UlrikeFischer ltxcmds and etexcmds seem completely pointless in hyperref, it only works in latex anyway so why \ltx@ifundefined rather than \@ifundefined....

Ulrike Fischer

@DavidCarlisle yes.

David Carlisle

@UlrikeFischer I'm not keen on highlighting kvdefinekeys either, it's a tweak to keyval but given where we are now things should converge on keyval or l3keys (or pgfkeys if living in a pgf world)

@UlrikeFischer I have a version of hyperref more or less done that writes out those two.

Ulrike Fischer

@DavidCarlisle I'm not too keen about pgfkeys - I'm not getting along with its system to define and set keys with one command - so l3keys ;-)

@DavidCarlisle I will try to find what this xcolor-patch is doing.

David Carlisle

18:17

@UlrikeFischer why anyone ever deviates from the one true keyval is beyond me.

Ulrike Fischer

@DavidCarlisle ;-)

David Carlisle

I wanted to give an update miktex answer but i see you had commented already.

Ulrike Fischer

20:12

@JosephWright did you see the hyperref discussion about how "text-purify" should handle ligatures?

Joseph Wright

@UlrikeFischer Yes :)

@UlrikeFischer They are a bit 'interesting' as they are already ASCII text

@UlrikeFischer They fit really with the accents question: I could arrange that \text_expand:n simply turns them into Unicode: perhaps we need \text_unicodify:n

Ulrike Fischer

@JosephWright well the main question is how configurable this should/can be. What to do if some people want -- -> -- and other -- -> endash? And what if both is wanted in one document?

Joseph Wright

20:35

@UlrikeFischer I've just tested \text_purify:n + \str_set_convert:Nnnn against \Hy@pdfstringdef using l3benchmark:

hyperref 4.33e-4 seconds (1.58e3 ops)
expl3    0.001 seconds (3.2e3 ops)

@UlrikeFischer We can add mechanisms ... if we want to

@UlrikeFischer Now, just need some idea of a spec for math mode

Ulrike Fischer

@JosephWright I wished l3benchmark would use the same unit for all numbers ;-(. How much of the various replacements, redefinitions etc of pdfstringdef is in \text_purify?

Joseph Wright

@UlrikeFischer A small subset, but done using a hash table lookup so should not be too bad in performance terms

Ulrike Fischer

@JosephWright From the math that I would expect in this place the most problematic are probably limits and sub/superscripts.

David Carlisle

20:50

@JosephWright a similar issue is @Sebastiano's question about math as unicode strings, as he wants to go further, using superscript characters etc

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Yes: and those tools all skip operators!

@DavidCarlisle Try \sin for example :)

@UlrikeFischer Needs a spec

Ulrike Fischer

@JosephWright at first it needs an idea how to write this in the bookmarks ;-). I don't think e.g. \lim_{x\to\infty} has a sensible translation.

David Carlisle

@UlrikeFischer at times at work we have to generate matlab documentation, and in the GUI there the document is basically html but the built in table of contents system is similar to pdf bookmarks, and restricted to plain text. Have various heuristics (including re-writing the section headings to avoid issues) but the automatic conversion if necessary falls back on essentially an asciimath linearisation, so tex-like but without \ , so lim_{x → ∞} in that case

Ulrike Fischer

21:06

@DavidCarlisle that sounds like a plan.

David Carlisle

@UlrikeFischer we don't actually generate legal asciimath, but if looking for a spec, asciimath.org

barbara beeton

@UlrikeFischer -- There are some really strict limitations on what Unicode can (or will be "allowed to") do; I had this discussion with the UTC. We're headed out to dinner (it's Gordon's birthday), but I'll address this mess when I get back.

Ulrike Fischer

@DavidCarlisle @JosephWright ^^^

David Carlisle

@barbarabeeton I'm at my Mum's because it's her Birthday. Happy birthday to Gordon:-)

David Carlisle

23:00

@PabloGonzálezL I was distracted ^^^ :-)

Joseph Wright

23:27

@UlrikeFischer I'm minded to go with Chris's idea: $\lim_{x \to\infty}$ is 'it'

Ulrike Fischer

@JosephWright you mean the verbatim tex code?

Joseph Wright

@UlrikeFischer Yes

@UlrikeFischer Nice and easy to do :)

Ulrike Fischer

@JosephWright what about simple stuff like x=y or 1+2=3?

yo'

@JosephWright I'm with Chris on this one!

Joseph Wright

23:56

@UlrikeFischer Yes, I see that: something like 'Properties of $x$' seems like something we could handle

@yo' I see that argument too: one might make 'linearisation' of math mode optional, with big caveats about the outcomes

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$TeX - LaTeX$ TeX, LaTeX and Friends