quack

Boo!

@yo' ooh :)

@AlanMunn: twitter.com/AbbiGreenGiant/status/1243653090739466241

@Danu See? Hibernation (even quantum one) is over ;-)

@barbarabeeton twitter.com/petershankman/status/1243611688659750914

@Rmano Not sure what quantum hibernation would be, but I'll take it! :)

ooh a squirrel

@barbarabeeton an encoded message: the eagle has landed (a wooden eagle). :)

@PauloCereda -- Quiet here. Somehow, my access to the main site has just been terminated. Don't know what happened, but I may be cut off here too.

@barbarabeeton oh no! Not even trying to login again?!

@PauloCereda -- Oh, notice on site -- "currently in read only mode". So I'll just hang on.

@barbarabeeton Scheduled maintenance

@egreg -- Check the date.

@barbarabeeton twitter.com/StackStatus

twitter.com/StackStatus

@barbarabeeton They forgot to change the date in StackStatus

@egreg -- okay, thanks. The blog says March 8, and nothing more recent.

@PauloCereda /chirp/ (it's that the sound a squirrel makes?)

@PauloCereda Social distancing tool. :) (I've seen this before though.)

@Sverre you need \makeatletter

But when I copy everything from my .sty files into a .tex document in order to find what causes it, it compiles fine.

@Sverre but you shouldn't need \makeatletter in a .sty

@DavidCarlisle But I load sty files, which then shouldn't be necessary.

O hang on ... I see

@Sverre but basically you have \@makeatletter which is a single token a if @ is a letter but otherwise is \@ makeatletter and gives the error you show,

Of course, rookie mistake! Thanks, @DavidCarlisle!

I copied egreg's recent answer to my question straight into my sty file ... :-/

Which of course had \makeatletter

@Sverre you are the 1000001st person to make that error so don't feel too bad about to bad about it:-)

@Sverre major mistake copying @egreg's code :-)

Haha!

I'm also not the first to be unable to understand an error message thrown back at me by LaTeX ... I hope making error messages more human friendly is part of the latex3 process?

@Sverre In .sty files \makeatletter and \makeatother are implicit at the beginning and end respectively.

@Sverre Never (well, almost) use \makeatletter and \makeatother in a .sty or .cls file.

@egreg Yes, I did know that ... but I forgot when I copied your code (in spite of having done that very mistake ten times before).

@Sverre yes and no that one though doesn't come from latex really it's just a low level tex parse error. Actually the specific case of \@ we could define it to add a "have you forgotten makeatletter hint" but that is really just catching one minor case, if the command had been \maketitke@ it would have executed \maketitle again or if it and loop forever had it been \foo@bar you'd get an undefined command \foo, really you can not catch these things.

@DavidCarlisle Yes, I did actually have a "did you put \makeatletter in your style file" hint in mind.

@Sverre but the most common reason for getting that error is using the code in the preamble without using \makeatletter how many permutations can we hint about?

@Sverre \makeatletter is harmless, you must have had \makeatother

@DavidCarlisle Well in that case I guess any hint along the lines of "this could be due to using \makeatletter \makeatother incorrectly" would help a lot.

@Sverre still against it really as it only catches the case of commands that begin with @ and then what will you do about having the same error with \ExplSyntaxOn and try to catch commands with _ or :

@Sverre you have to assume something and when writing tex code you have to assume a correct catcode regime, otherwise you can't assume anything, even \def\foo{} might not work.

Hmm ... no idea. I will leave it to you wizards to figure it out. But the downside to being a wizard is that error messages that make sense to you, make no sense to ordinary folks. This being a case where a more informative message probably would have made me realize what I had done wrong. Exactly what that message should say ... not sure.

@DavidCarlisle -- It's really important to learn how to read error messages in a .log file. A hangup on an undefined control sequence always has a continuation line, so if that starts with @, it's a \makeatletter condition. L3 can't reasonably detect that, but a person can.

@barbarabeeton where is the " symbol on a us keyboard?

@UlrikeFischer -- On my laptop keyboard (a Macbook Pro, 2009 model) it's on the right in the middle row: ... L ;/: '/" where the / separates lowercase/uppercase. I'm pretty sure this is the same as what I had at the office, since I can still touch type without having to hunt, so letters, digits, specials are probably pretty standard. Function keys are not necessarily uniform.

@barbarabeeton thanks.

@UlrikeFischer where @ should be

@DavidCarlisle @ should be below the Q ;-)

@UlrikeFischer just cloned psnfss, won't ctan want a README (rather than 00rreadme these days?) or perhaps they don't enforce that. Changing the name is a bit of a pain as it's mentioned in the doc though

@DavidCarlisle not sure. Should I ask?

@UlrikeFischer otherwise looks OK to me.

@DavidCarlisle ok, I will write about both questions. On the other side, there are only 4 places with the readme, so probably not too problematic to change it.

@UlrikeFischer yes looks that way.

@DavidCarlisle should the date inside the readme be changed? Probably yes?

@UlrikeFischer and \date{PSNFSS version 9.2 \\ 2004-09-15} basically 9.3 and 2020-03-?? everywhere I guess

l3build?

@DavidCarlisle not sure if I want to write tagging commands for a (probably) one shot. It is probably easier to do it manually.

@UlrikeFischer yes agreed for the tagging. probably true for the rest too. although usually I like to have a shell script or l3build or something (as I don't trust myself to type the build commands directly:-)

@DavidCarlisle I renamed the readme, and adapted the version numbers. I will ask ctan about the zip.

@UlrikeFischer thanks I'll pull here and look, I'll get the other repo as well

@DavidCarlisle I had to correct a month setting ;-)