TeX, LaTeX and Friends

yo'

05:19

wow, if you use \usepackage{background} and have a multi-page verbatim, tikz throws an error about $ having the wrong catcode

Ulrike Fischer

06:44

@yo' multi-page verbatim or listings are sometimes problematic. Do you have an example?

Joseph Wright

08:40

@egreg True, but I probably need to think a bit more about this: one needs \text so it respects deliberate italic, so I likely need to apply text mode settings even if math mode is active :(

egreg

08:54

@JosephWright Shouldn't units appear upright anyway?

Joseph Wright

@egreg 'Yes and no' ;)

@egreg The point is that I've likely missed an edge case here: in v2, it's possible to detect and apply italic selectively

@PauloCereda bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-nottinghamshire-58400193

4

David Carlisle

09:10

@JosephWright Nottingham ducks better read than UEA ones?

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Seems so

@DavidCarlisle We have rabbits

samcarter

@JosephWright Are these the ducks missing from York University? (duckoftheday.co.uk seems to have gone missing :( )

Paulo Cereda

09:54

@JosephWright ooh

yo'

10:10

@UlrikeFischer I do, but in a user project. I'll make one when back at the desk

Paulo Cereda

A 24-year-old woman from Illinois was arrested on Sunday while trying to enter Hawaii with a fake covid-19 vaccination record card. How did authorities know it was fake? For starters, the counterfeit card said the woman had received the “Maderna” vaccine rather than the Moderna vaccine.

7

Caught by typo. :)

Alan Munn

12:34

BibDesk users: there used to be a share via email function I thought, but now all I find is Airdrop, Notes and Messages. Has something changed?

raf

I like to decrease the space between words globally in my wholee document. Should I use \spaceskip? or anything else is better?

what is the default value of \spaceskip?

Joseph Wright

@AlanMunn Which version?

Alan Munn

@JosephWright 1.8.3

Joseph Wright

@AlanMunn Downloading

Alan Munn

@JosephWright I'm running MacOS 10.14, which is a bit old, so I wonder if that's an issue.

Joseph Wright

12:41

@AlanMunn I don't have Airdrop, but I do have Notes and Messages; no email

@AlanMunn I wonder if it's a question of how you are set up for email?

Alan Munn

@JosephWright Possible. My default mail app is Postbox, but that hasn't changed in quite a few years. I'm also using eMclient because of our damn Exchange server but it's not set to be the default mailer.

Joseph Wright

@AlanMunn Hmm, I'm using Thunderbird, but the point is neither of us is using Mac Mail

Alan Munn

@JosephWright True, but I'm certain it worked with Postbox, which is pure Mac (which is why it doesn't work with Exchange so well)

Joseph Wright

@AlanMunn Nothing in the change log: I guess report?

Alan Munn

@JosephWright Yes, I guess so. It was a super useful function.

@JosephWright Thanks for investigating.

David Carlisle

13:05

@raf by default it is 0pt, so the space specified by the font is used. If you set spaceskip it overrides the font (so for example in computer modern with bold being bx the space after a bold word is a bit bigger than a space after medium weight, if you set spaceskip and don't change it on font changes then all words get the same space. So an alternative would be to adjust the font parameters on loading the font (params 2 3 and 4 for classic tfm fonts)

samcarter

@AlanMunn I skipped 10.14, so no idea how this worked there, but are you maybe looking for system preferences->extensions->share menu to configure which apps appear in this list

How would you call an option for notes with lines? I'm undecided between "ruled" or "lined"

Faheem Mitha

In this example:

0

A: How to change a table column type in the middle of table?

Use nested table. Note, in the both table the corresponding columns width had to be the same: \documentclass{article} \usepackage{siunitx} \begin{document} \begin{center} \begin{tabular}{| >{\raggedright}p{1in} | S[table-format=3.2] |} \textbf{Part 1} & \multicolumn{1}{p{0.5in}|}{} \\ N...

yo'

samcarter

@yo' :D

Faheem Mitha

I'm trying to understand why the two multicolumns of width 1 column are necessary.

Without them things don't like up properly, so clearly they are necessary. But why?

David Carlisle

13:13

@yo' english is harder, as you have to type "the"

3

yo'

@samcarter books.google.com/ngrams/…

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha it's forcing the width of the second column

Faheem Mitha

The nested table has the same structure as the enclosing table. Granted, that doesn't mean it will line up correctly.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha but 100 is wider than 1 so with just the S column they would not line up

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle The p{0.5in} part? To match the earlier p{0.5in} multicolumn?

samcarter

13:17

@yo' Thanks! So either the top dog with a strongly declining trend or the aspiring alternative with a slow but steady growth :) Shall I wait another 100 years with the update to see which one will win?

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha yes they are both just a way of making an empty cell half an inch wide so the columns have a known width

Faheem Mitha

Also, the second column is already stated to have the format S[table-format=3.2].

yo'

@samcarter well, mostly it depends whether you feel older or younger than The Beatles :) I would consider the last couple years as some ngram noise

Faheem Mitha

Why then is a {p{0.5in}|} added below?

@DavidCarlisle Oh. So that things line up?

I suppose a S column has no fixed length, then?

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha huh? as I just said that same appears in both tables so you get thesame width

Faheem Mitha

13:19

Does the p{0.5in} override the default S width, then?

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha no it's a c column, so as wide as the data

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle Oh. OK.

@DavidCarlisle The inner table and the outer table?

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha that's the function of multicolumn

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle It is? Where is it documented?

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha yes although inner/outer not that relevant you could do the same if you wanted two adjacent tables to have same width

@FaheemMitha ? wherever \multicolumn is documented, that's all it does.

Faheem Mitha

13:20

@DavidCarlisle Oh.

samcarter

@yo' :) I guess I'll go with lined- that's what I already have in the code :) Thanks for the conversation!

yo'

@samcarter no worries. I love ngram exactly for these things :)

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle Just wondering where the official documentation for multicolumn is.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha lamport's latex book

Faheem Mitha

I usually end up reading some random web page.

@DavidCarlisle Oh. That's it?

David Carlisle

13:21

@FaheemMitha if you ask for the official documentation of the latex format, then yes.

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle How about unofficial documentation?

samcarter

@yo' Seeing such trends is really interesting - I'd love to know what happened to cause the jumps :)

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha google latex multicolumn

samcarter

@DavidCarlisle You should support your upcoming dinner and suggest duckduckgo :)

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle I did. I see it's mentioned in texdoc latex2e.

BTW, why doesn't latex2e have clickable links?

yo'

13:24

@samcarter the one in 1933 is interesting; the rest is just fashion, and also simplification of English I'd say

Stefan Kottwitz

I use a non-official page. :-) latex2e.org/_005cmulticolumn.html

Joseph Wright

@FaheemMitha We wrote it in ~1993 ;)

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha it does (assuming texdoc is showing you the pdf version of latexref.xyz)

Faheem Mitha

Ok, "8.23.1 \multicolumn" in latex2e.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha latex2e.pdf has pdf bookmarks and section references are links

@FaheemMitha the page number 89 is a link in the table of contents

Faheem Mitha

13:28

@DavidCarlisle That doesn't seem to be the case here. Let me check what version it is bringing up. For example, the pages in the index are not clickable, as would normally be the case.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha they are here (texlive 2021)

Faheem Mitha

The first result is /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/doc/latex/latex2e-help-texinfo/latex2e.pdf

That looks correct.

David Carlisle

check the current version which has links in the index latexref.xyz/dev/latex2e.pdf (not that I'm particularly recomending that document which has no connection to the latex project)

Skillmon

14:09

@JosephWright the documentation of product-units misses the choice power in the current documentation of siunitx.

Joseph Wright

@Skillmon Thanks: fixed

Faheem Mitha

15:53

I somehow always thought latex2e was published by the LaTeX Project. In any case, for people who have used it, how is it? @StefanKottwitz?

Alan Munn

@samcarter Hi thanks! That really helped. It looks like neither of the mail clients I actually use appear in that menu, so I'm stuck. Only Mail.app works. So maybe my memory of it working is much older than I think, and it only worked when I used Apple mail.

Joseph Wright

@AlanMunn Hmm, same here: I have lots of stuff listed ...

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha latex2e (the software) is of course from us but the document you are referring to, in its title and cover page makes it explicitly clear that it is not from the latex project

Alan Munn

@JosephWright Yes it's a weird set.

David Carlisle

16:10

@FaheemMitha section 1 says: LaTeX is maintained by a group of volunteers (latex-project.org). The official documentation written by the LaTeX project is available from their web site. The present document is completely unofficial and has not been written or reviewed by the LaTeX maintainers. Do not send bug reports or anything else about this document to them. Instead, please send all comments to [email protected].

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle Yes, I read it. Don't worry, I will not send any bug reports to the LaTeX team.

@DavidCarlisle Yes, I didn't say it was. I said I thought it was.

In any case, I was asking for comments on quality.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha only ever skimmed over it, seems basically sound

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle OK

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha of course it's a bit old, nothing about anything added to latex this century

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle I thought it was being maintained. But the sources do not appear to be public, and the document says they are using Subversion. So not GitHub or GitLab, I suppose.

Actually, I have the Kopka and Daly book. Though an old edition. Maybe I should pull it out.

David Carlisle

16:24

@FaheemMitha there is a link to the repo in the document, being maintained means making sure what is there is true (also maintaining the translations) it doesn't mean it gets a new chapter if utf-8 or xparse or expl3 or support for luatex and xetex are incorporated into the format.

@FaheemMitha I don't think there are new editions

samcarter

@AlanMunn You're welcome! I wouldn't be surprised if mac makes it extra hard for 3rd party programs to get into this list ... there are open feature requests for thunderbird from 11 years ago

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle I see I have the third edition. There's a fourth edition. And weirdly, someone has put it online - math.ucdavis.edu/~tracy/courses/math129/Guide_To_LaTeX.pdf

@DavidCarlisle Understood.

Alan Munn

@samcarter Yes, exactly.

samcarter

@AlanMunn What are you trying to sent? The local pdf file? Or some bibliography information?

Faheem Mitha

Based on a quick read of Kopka and Daly, and latex2e on the topic of \multicolumn, the latter is definitely superior. Much better example usage, for one. The K&D examples are way too complex and contain way too much material.

David Carlisle

16:32

@FaheemMitha it's rather odd to call the document "latex2e" as if it was the software.

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle Sorry, that's just what it is called. Would you prefer latex2e.pdf, or something else?

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha no, it is not called that

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle The name of the file is.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha if you want to reference it by author as in K&D it would be "Berry et al" and if you want to give its title it's "LaTeX2e: An unofficial reference manual"

Faheem Mitha

Or latex2e.html, depending on the format.

@DavidCarlisle The latter is a mouthful. And "Berry et al" is OK for a BibTeX cite, but sounds weird in conversation.

I feel the possibility of confusion is rather low, but I suppose opinions may vary.

David Carlisle

16:37

@FaheemMitha "unoffical reference manual" perhaps

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle Fine, I'm going to go with URM.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha without you having mentioned texdoc latex2e (and then me trying that and seeing what document it found) I would never have guessed which document you were refering to.

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle That one has been around for a while. I thought you'd even referenced it yourself from time to time, though I could be wrong.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha sure I know the document but I would never have guessed that you were refering to that document had you not said you had used texdoc latex2e and I tried that command to see what document its search heuristics returned for that query

Faheem Mitha

So from the description in URM, the rules for adding vertical bars is (VBAR IN TABULAR) OR (VBAR IN MULTICOLUMN). I'm assuming that behavior is quite old. It seems this command it itself quite old. Probably from Lamport.

@DavidCarlisle OK.

David Carlisle

16:41

@FaheemMitha tabular and multicolumn predate latex2.09 so mid 1980s

samcarter

@FaheemMitha I did not follow your complete discussion, but whatever the problem is, the solution is to not use vertical bars.

Faheem Mitha

@samcarter It wasn't a problem. I was just commenting.

David Carlisle

@samcarter reference manuals are supposed to specify how to shoot yourself in the foot

3

Faheem Mitha

I don't use vertical bars often. I find them kind of unaesthetic. Just my personal preference. I do use horizontal rules, though.

Lots of vertical bars just makes things look cluttery. Also reminds me of prison.

David Carlisle

@samcarter better to have red and yellow backgrounds

samcarter

16:43

@DavidCarlisle In this case one should apply your usual advice concerning reading documentation to them :)

Faheem Mitha

@samcarter Was just trying to understand how \multicolumn works. Since I realised I don't. And since I might need to use it.

samcarter

@DavidCarlisle obviously :) Such colours make all types of bars completely superfluous

Faheem Mitha

Learning how things work can be painful, sometimes, but beats the alternative.

David Carlisle

@samcarter except purple ones

samcarter

@DavidCarlisle a bit more green would be good :)

Faheem Mitha

16:51

@DavidCarlisle The URM uses siunitx, so it's not that ancient.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha as I said I only skimmed over it:-)

Faheem Mitha

The third example in that section has a typo (present in the svn checkout so presumably not fixed), so I guess it's typo reporting time.

I wonder why they are not using DVCS.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha not always a benefit. texlive is also svn, although there is a github git mirror. we use svn at work (mostly) although some gitlab instances as well.

Faheem Mitha

@DavidCarlisle Personally a big fan of DVCS. Though corporations sometimes don't like it for security and loss of control reasons.

David Carlisle

@FaheemMitha if you have an svn repository with a 30 year commit history converting it to git and having everyone clone the entire repository will probably require a lot more disk space even given git's funky compression. For situations where there is unequivocally one master repository svn isn't a bad choice

barbara beeton

17:02

@yo' -- This is somewhat peculiar. I find "lined notebook" unfamiliar, but it's definitely "lined paper" and not "ruled paper". (So when acquiring notebooks, I've often gone for "quadrille".)

Faheem Mitha

17:14

@DavidCarlisle That's the use case for partial checkouts, whether truncating history or directories. But no DVCS I'm aware of has proper support for those. In that respect SVN still has an advantage.

Marcel Krüger

17:55

@FaheemMitha I think that's not very surprising since partial checkout are pretty much incompatible with the concept behind DVCSs. Once you no longer have the full history it's no longer really distributed, so you get a classical VCS hacked into a DVCS's infrastructure.

Faheem Mitha

@MarcelKrüger Agreed. The concept is a poor fit for DVCS's.

Ulrike Fischer

@MarcelKrüger Could one uncompress pdfs with luatex? (without too much effort)

daleif

Tonight another blow to the italiens: pizza with parma ham, rucket and cherry tomatoes (very nice)

Ulrike Fischer

@daleif I think they would eat that too.

Marcel Krüger

@UlrikeFischer In the sense of wanting to look into/extract a specific part of a compressed PDF file or trying to create a new PDF file which is equal except that it's no longer compressed?

David Carlisle

18:03

@UlrikeFischer especially if you provided extra pinapple topping

Ulrike Fischer

@MarcelKrüger mainly looking into it, pdftk is a bit of a pain as it breaks with pdf 2.0. Also it would be nice if we could produce "views" on our own.

Marcel Krüger

@UlrikeFischer LuaTeX's pdfe library should work great for that. It just doesn't directly to write PDF files, but reading works great.

Faheem Mitha

19:35

I have basically the same question as this one, but in my case I just want to use multicolumns which are one col width. The idea is to switch from siunitx's S columns to something like p{}, so that inserted text will wrap. Does anyone know of similar questions?

10

Q: How to automatically calculate the width of a multicolumn in a table based on the combined widths of the columns that are merged

Let's assume that I have a table containing two l type columns that both contain rather short amounts of text. In one of the following rows I want to use a \multicolumn that merges both columns. I want it to automatically be as wide as both above mentioned columns together. I can either achieve...

In any case, this would presumably involve telling the p{} how wide it needs to be, based on how wide the corresponding S column is. If not the same as this question, it's certainly very similar

Oh, and I'm using longtable, which might make a difference. If I can't find a corresponding question, I might ask one.

Alan Munn

20:56

@samcarter I was trying to send both. When Mail.app was being used, it would put the bibtex record in the text of the email and the PDF as an attachment automatically.

samcarter

21:14

@AlanMunn Oh, this sounds difficult to replicate otherwise. If you'd only wanted to sent the pdf, an automator script might have been a workaround.

David Carlisle

23:35

@FaheemMitha just measure the width of the longest entry that will be set by your S specification -123.45 if you are setting to 2dp or whatever then use that as the p width.

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$TeX - LaTeX$ TeX, LaTeX and Friends