@PabloGonzálezL It annoys me a lot when my students tell me of such nit-picky requirements from their other professors. My motto is "teaching is not a power trip."
@AlanMunn I had a million problems when I presented my thesis because of the styles and yes ...at that time the department only had word templates...they were my first steps trying to make a TeX document look as ugly as a Word document :)
@MarcelKrüger ! Undefined control sequence. \__intopdf_pdfstream_file:nn ...ex_pdfextension:D objstreamattr{#1}file{#2} l.16 {The source of this document}{here}
@DavidCarlisle -- I've just done a rather cursory online search of places one might expect to see a warning about one-letter control sequences, and didn't find it anywhere. lshort doesn't have it. Michael Doob's "Gentle Introduction" doesn't mention it, although there's a quite complete list of single-character \css for accents. learnlatex doesn't even mention \newcommand, much less the single-letter kind (you might think of adding something along those lines). Any more suggestions?
@DavidCarlisle -- You can talk to me. (But I guess I'm in the same category as @Ulrike.)
@barbarabeeton I think it would be wrong to suggest anything special about one letter commands, it's just an observation of the mathematically true fact that a larger proportion of one letter commands are predefined than five letter ones. The rule (certainly at the level of lshort or learnlatex is "use newcommand and don't renewcommand commands if you know not what they do" we don't mention definitions at all in learnlatex which is by design although I don't know maybe we should
@JosephWright ^^^ we could mention \newcommand (\NewDocumentCommand??) in more-06, perhaps?
@JosephWright more-06 or lesson-xx and shuffle the rest along....? (more-06 is currently a bit light although we might want to drop the "with packages" from the lesson-06 title if we say too much about definitions
@DavidCarlisle lesson 6 could be "extending with packages and commands", it could then show a simple \newcommand, for example an abbreviation or perhaps a semantic markup. The more lesson could then extend a bit.
@Rmano believe me, getting the right look was annoyingly difficult (and I'm still not 100% satisfied with it). The problem when you try to mimick some (horrible) MS Word template.
@Rmano @Skillmonlikestopanswers.xyz my heart almost stopped when I read that one of the requirements of thesis writing was the mandatory use of sans serif. Being my thesis full of math stuff, I was in panic. I was considering helvet at some point. Thankfully, I noticed that a serif thesis would be acceptable, although it's not their preferable style...
@PauloCereda Well, even if your base text font is a sans serif you can get somewhat decent looking results with the right maths font, however if the requirement is that also the maths are in the same font, then I'd argue that this will look horrible (looking at my own master's thesis). I'll see how my PhD thesis will look like (hopefully).
@Skillmonlikestopanswers.xyz It's likely partly the personal preference of people: the classic case with that is WWII in the UK and railings - they were removed 'to make planes' but really because some government official didn't like railings outside houses
@JosephWright interesting. I sigh every time I had to read ABNT stuff, as they don't say serif vs. sans serif, it's just Times vs. Arial, which enrages me so much. I was hoping someone would ask me, when looking at Lucida, "oh that's a fancy Times you have there".
Now it's Calibri, I guess. Not sure how the mix with Cambria is, actually.
@JosephWright you know why the year in films is typeset in roman? The movie production was slow back then and they were simply playing the same movies over and over. Since some order from government required the movie productions to stamp their movies with the production year, they decided to use roman, so only a few nerds people would be able to say which year was, and no one would notice it was an old movie. :)
My favourite bit: Alternatively, you could have become a grave-digger. But beware, it may have been a riskier profession than it sounds. This husband and wife both dug graves for a living, but they got divorced because an evil demon ruined their marriage.
We plan a documentation hackathon at Overleaf. One of the proposed projects is to clear LaTeX sins from the Overleaf help. I hope this will be picked up, it's a debt to the comunity :-) So if someone knew about something that's wrong in our help, please let me know, as we might not be aware of everything.
@samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz great, thanks! Considering inputenc, we have had some discussion about that one, and we§re still inclined to keep it for compatibility with people's local installations. But this may change in the future of course
your dtx structure is rather weird, you sue \jobname but it only works if the file is called things.dtx as you include that package by name, the error is because you need the driver code earlier (or the package code guarded by % \iffalse so that when you do pdflatex things.dtx it only sees the <driver> section, as it is you are processing the <package> section before the documentclass has been loaded — David Carlisle2 hours ago
@samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz not really gonna happen I think. The "Blank Project" has a single file with a couple of lines, and we don't wanna go smaller than that; it could cause issues and unexpected behaviour...
@JosephWright see link in next comment (to be fair I didn't check how faithfully your template was followed I was just amused when he gave the source:-)
@yo' (I know I'm not the typical user) I'm using Overleaf to test things with different texlive versions (did I say the new option to switch between versions is great?) So whenever I come to overleaf and create a blank project (because I later might want to link to it) I first have to select or delete everything before I can paste my document.
(and I'm a bit uncomfortable that instead of a dummy text the \author field actually contains my user name and I'm afraid I'll forget to remove it and accidentality share a link that contains my user name)
@Anush it's good enough to make a random multiple choice quizz picking 3 questions from a sample of 5 or 6, I wouldn't use it to encrypt my bank details:-)
% This file defines the pseudorandom numbers.
%
% Version 1.414213 29/9/2007
% Pseudo-random number generation.
%
% See:
% \book@{pressetal1992,
% author = {William H. Press and Brian P. Flannery and Saul A.
% Teukolsky and William T. Vetterling},
% title = {Numerical Recipies in C},
% edition = {Second},
% publisher = {Cambridge University Press}
% }
%
% See also, the documentation for the lcg package by Erich Janka:
% (ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/lcg/lcg.pdf)
@samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz Well, for single-file projects, I'm afraid the Ctrl+A step can't be avoided. For multi-file projects, you can upload them as a ZIP file.
@Anush well, it's not terrible per se, it has its merits since LCGs tend to be simple to implement and very fast. It surely has good applications, so it depends on your usage...
@Anush Basically, we use the pdfTeX primitive, which comes from MetaFont, which means it's Knuth's approach more-or-less: there are some issues which are dealt with by only using some of the available range 'behind the scenes'
@JosephWright Yes, but he experimentally added a JavaScript interpreter to LuaMetaTeX. (IIRC the comment was something like: We added it because people asked for it and we want to show them that Lua is better even if you have the choice.)
@Anush that isn't likely to be easy to do. The bottleneck is encoding the algorithms at all just using tex macro expansion, writing it in expl3 rather than <insert language here> isn't the issue.
@Skillmonlikestopanswers.xyz well yes this^^ as you know (given your recent PRs:-) getting reasonable speed out of this requires the core code to be specifically written to exploit tex's quirks.
@Skillmonlikestopanswers.xyz and @JosephWright -- There are published standards for the use of fonts in expressing technical letter symbols, if you care to follow them. This one may interest you: Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (SI). The last sentence on page 34 is a nice example.
@barbarabeeton interesting that the preface says "the metric system of measurement as the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce" Not the impression one gets viewing from outside the country:-)
@Anush The reason is that beamer does lots of fancy things to get the slide animations to work and this makes it not compatible with what enumitem does.
@Anush Well it would be up to the beamer people to add that kind of functionality to its lists, not up to the enumitem author to support beamer IMO. (I've purposefully left "beamer people" unspecified.) :)
As shown by the following MCE, \textlangle and \textrangle are correctly displayed with pdflatex + kpfonts but not with lualatex + kpfonts-otf.
The latter case is not so unexpected since Daniel Flipo, the maintainer of kpfonts-otf, told me these characters are currently missing (he's working on i...
So after yesterday's discussions in here, I took what was left of my soul and managed to compile my first documents with LuaLaTeX and unicode-math; no errors!
@DavidCarlisle -- Indeed, it looks like a distinct bit of wishful thinking. (I certainly still think in terms of inches/feet/miles ... although "furlongs per fortnight" is sorely tempting.)
@DavidCarlisle -- Of course. Like I remember the measurement system that was Knuth's first publication in Mad Magazine. (One of my former department managers used the expression all the time. He was also a fisherman, and "fathoms" also was representative of his vocabulary.)
@UlrikeFischer @JosephWright if this looks half reasonable I'll move to a branch at learnlatex for a PR but lesson and more (@barbarabeeton may want to addd a semicolon or two)
It's hard to think of any sensible definitions at that point, no maths or images or ..
@DavidCarlisle If we are covering it, I think we need to say something like '#1 represents the first argument (braced text); we can use more than one of these, but usually for simple user additions, a single argument is enough'?
@UlrikeFischer @JosephWright I added some text, I could put it in a branch at learnlatex but it won't render there unless I immediately merge? Then you could adjust text as needed
@UlrikeFischer something like this, without the english bits?
\documentclass[ngerman]{article} % Notice that the option name is 'ngerman'
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\begin{document}
% instead of H"ohe
\tableofcontents
\section{Über Äpfel und Birnen}
\subsection{"Apfel}
Something about German apples
\subsection{Birnen}
and pairs with some babel shorthands
\end{document}
@UlrikeFischer not everywhere but at least once, the existing text before the example says `For example, in German, it provides some shorthands for creating 'soft' hyphens, and also a way to quickly type umlauts without needing a German keyboard.`
@DavidCarlisle -- I'll accept colons instead of semicolons. But the method of specifying options to \NewDocumentCommand is so different from that for \newcommand that a little more explanation would be helpful, like saying that they are specified within the first set of braces following the name of the new command. Don't expect a newbie to be familiar with xparse.
@barbarabeeton I don't think so, I mean mentioning that it exist so that they have seen it once is fine, but it is not the purpose of the course to train how to write new commands.
@UlrikeFischer -- When I read the new text I had to go look up the documentation of xparse to make sure I understood how the arguments were specified. It's quite specific that the number of arguments and value of optional argument for \newcommand are packed in [ ] square brackets. (I've read the xparse documentation, but don't use it every day.)
@barbarabeeton you are looking at this from the view point of an experienced tex user, not from a beginner. You want the details of the syntax, they should simply learn "there two commands to define new commands", and see a simple example. They don't need the syntax now, only a first impression.
@UlrikeFischer -- It's true that as an experienced TeX user, I want to know the syntax. But I think that a newbie will look at this and say, "Oh, this can be useful! How can I add it to my document?" And that information isn't there. It's not an example that can be experimented with. There's enough information given with \newcommand to be able to actually use it.
@barbarabeeton there was a working example. But if someone is already at "I want to use this in my document"-level then they can imho start to look up documentation.
@UlrikeFischer @barbarabeeton I did wonder about saying more (or less) it's a a bit hard to know where to balance it really, especially at this point in the course when there are so few examples you can give without forward references. Could probably add a sentence saying that newdocumentcommand takes the command name, an argument consisting of a list of argument specifications, and then the body of the definition