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Henri Menke
Henri Menke
3:39 AM
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!
 
 
2 hours later…
CarLaTeX
CarLaTeX
5:40 AM
@DavidCarlisle teh
 
 
2 hours later…
Enthusiastic Engineer
Enthusiastic Engineer
7:23 AM
I can not really understand people's answers in this page!
Have they ever tried LaTeX???
 
CarLaTeX
CarLaTeX
7:36 AM
@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
solisoc
7:48 AM
hey folks, I need to use a non-integer font size as default. is \def\normalsize... the best way to do this?
 
Faheem Mitha
Faheem Mitha
8:27 AM
@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
Enthusiastic Engineer
8:44 AM
@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
CarLaTeX
@EnthusiasticEngineer Yes, to write in LaTeX you need some minimal computer skills not any people have
 
Enthusiastic Engineer
Enthusiastic Engineer
@CarLaTeX Skills and Interest!
 
Faheem Mitha
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
Enthusiastic Engineer
@FaheemMitha Exactly
 
Faheem Mitha
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
CarLaTeX
8:49 AM
@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
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
CarLaTeX
@EnthusiasticEngineer Good, I would like to try, too, as soon as I have time to do it :)
 
Enthusiastic Engineer
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
CarLaTeX
@EnthusiasticEngineer I have some vision problems, and I like dark themes, I set them in any editor I use
 
Enthusiastic Engineer
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
CarLaTeX
8:57 AM
@EnthusiasticEngineer Good to know :)
 
Enthusiastic Engineer
Enthusiastic Engineer
^__^
 
Ulrike Fischer
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
Henri Menke
9:19 AM
@UlrikeFischer But why is it non-deterministic?
@UlrikeFischer There are no random numbers being used before page 106.
 
Ulrike Fischer
Ulrike Fischer
9:35 AM
@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
wilx
9:55 AM
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
Paulo Cereda
10:10 AM
@wilx When I prepare stuff for me to read on my iPad, I try to use as much space as I possibly can. :)
 
wilx
wilx
@PauloCereda Do you size the page to exact size of the screen of the iPad?
 
Paulo Cereda
Paulo Cereda
@wilx I actually never did that, but I tend to use A5 instead of A4. :)
 
Enthusiastic Engineer
Enthusiastic Engineer
10:27 AM
@wilx why should be worried about it when PDF files normally fit to screen of any desired size?
 
wilx
wilx
@EnthusiasticEngineer So that the font size is reasonable for the screen size?
 
Paulo Cereda
Paulo Cereda
HEAR, HEAR: TAOCP volume 4, fascicle 5 is out!
 
Enthusiastic Engineer
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
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
Paulo Cereda
10:49 AM
@DavidCarlisle ooh picture
 
David Carlisle
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
Enthusiastic Engineer
@DavidCarlisle do you want to kill me again? :((
 
David Carlisle
David Carlisle
@EnthusiasticEngineer did I kill you already? (Hard to remember these details:-)
 
Enthusiastic Engineer
Enthusiastic Engineer
@DavidCarlisle :)) yes, and now I am a dead who never uses \bf instead of \textbf with extra brackets!
 
David Carlisle
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
cis
11:32 AM
I almost dropped the idea with paged text files.

I'm trying it now in just pgfplotstable.
 
 
1 hour later…
wilx
wilx
12:48 PM
@DavidCarlisle OK.
 
Martin Sleziak
Martin Sleziak
1:14 PM
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
Joseph Wright
209
Q: Compile a LaTeX document into a PNG image that's as short as possible

MalabarbaI 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...

graphics formatting conversion scaling
 
Martin Sleziak
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
solisoc
1:39 PM
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
cis
1:54 PM
I think this is something with let, edef, exandafter a.s.o. :(
0
Q: pgfplotstable: How to handle correctly with pgfplotsinvokeforeach by pgfplotstablecreatecol

cisI 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
AndréC
2:37 PM
My first palindrome:
user image
2
 
1010011010
1010011010
3:13 PM
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
David Carlisle
4:02 PM
@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
Ulrike Fischer
4:28 PM
@DavidCarlisle I'm considering to remove pdfencoding=auto and pdfdoc from hyperref ... Doing everything in unicode seems so much easier.
 
1010011010
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
David Carlisle
@1010011010 the document markup shouldn't need to change
@UlrikeFischer yes
 
1010011010
1010011010
\def\'{\text{\XeTeXGlyph1158\relax}} ?
 
David Carlisle
David Carlisle
4:43 PM
@1010011010 no that is defining the acute accent command, \' not ' something like {\catcode`\'\active \xdef'{\text{\XeTeXGlyph1158\relax}}}
 
1010011010
1010011010
Ah fair enough
 
Pablo González L
Pablo González L
Hello, some of the users of TeXLive (Updated) in windows can check the output of tlmgr check all
 
David Carlisle
David Carlisle
4:59 PM
@1010011010 gdef not xdef
 
1010011010
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
David Carlisle
@1010011010 no gdef should work (xdef less so)
 
1010011010
1010011010
I copied your first try without the braces that was the culprit
 
David Carlisle
David Carlisle
@1010011010 ah yes copying untested code off random internet sites has its drawbacks
 
1010011010
1010011010
@DavidCarlisle It even has a name: spaghetti code
 
Martin Sleziak
Martin Sleziak
5:05 PM
@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
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
David Carlisle
5:21 PM
@PabloGonzálezL blame @UlrikeFischer it's not safe if she is waving sharp blades about
 
Pablo González L
Pablo González L
@DavidCarlisle jeje, a consultation, will you divide it completely?
 
David Carlisle
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
Pablo González L
5:37 PM
Great, the listingsutf8 package is on your list?
 
David Carlisle
David Carlisle
@PabloGonzálezL possibly, do you use it?
 
Pablo González L
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
Pablo González L
5:51 PM
@DavidCarlisle Thanks to the current division, I no longer charge oberdiek in one of my configurations in travis :)
 
Ulrike Fischer
Ulrike Fischer
@DavidCarlisle you are fast ;-)
 
Pablo González L
Pablo González L
@UlrikeFischer Really fast, I'll wait for the update and remove oberdiek...every second counts in travis!!!!
 
David Carlisle
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
Pablo González L
6:08 PM
@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
Ulrike Fischer
@DavidCarlisle you mean the bundle? Which packages are still needed in hyperref?
 
David Carlisle
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
Ulrike Fischer
@DavidCarlisle yes.
 
David Carlisle
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
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
David Carlisle
6:17 PM
@UlrikeFischer why anyone ever deviates from the one true keyval is beyond me.
 
Ulrike Fischer
Ulrike Fischer
@DavidCarlisle ;-)
 
David Carlisle
David Carlisle
I wanted to give an update miktex answer but i see you had commented already.
 
 
2 hours later…
Ulrike Fischer
Ulrike Fischer
8:12 PM
@JosephWright did you see the hyperref discussion about how "text-purify" should handle ligatures?
 
Joseph Wright
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
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
Joseph Wright
8:35 PM
@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
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
Joseph Wright
@UlrikeFischer A small subset, but done using a hash table lookup so should not be too bad in performance terms
 
Ulrike Fischer
Ulrike Fischer
@JosephWright From the math that I would expect in this place the most problematic are probably limits and sub/superscripts.
 
David Carlisle
David Carlisle
8:50 PM
@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
Joseph Wright
@DavidCarlisle Yes: and those tools all skip operators!
@DavidCarlisle Try \sin for example :)
@UlrikeFischer Needs a spec
 
Ulrike Fischer
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
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
Ulrike Fischer
9:06 PM
@DavidCarlisle that sounds like a plan.
 
David Carlisle
David Carlisle
@UlrikeFischer we don't actually generate legal asciimath, but if looking for a spec, asciimath.org
 
barbara beeton
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
Ulrike Fischer
@DavidCarlisle @JosephWright ^^^
 
David Carlisle
David Carlisle
@barbarabeeton I'm at my Mum's because it's her Birthday. Happy birthday to Gordon:-)
 
 
2 hours later…
David Carlisle
David Carlisle
11:00 PM
@PabloGonzálezL I was distracted ^^^ :-)
 
Joseph Wright
Joseph Wright
11:27 PM
@UlrikeFischer I'm minded to go with Chris's idea: $\lim_{x \to\infty}$ is 'it'
 
Ulrike Fischer
Ulrike Fischer
@JosephWright you mean the verbatim tex code?
 
Joseph Wright
Joseph Wright
@UlrikeFischer Yes
@UlrikeFischer Nice and easy to do :)
 
Ulrike Fischer
Ulrike Fischer
@JosephWright what about simple stuff like x=y or 1+2=3?
 
yo'
yo'
@JosephWright I'm with Chris on this one!
 
Joseph Wright
Joseph Wright
11:56 PM
@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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