Not quite a stack exchange question, but anyone have real-world examples of things like \overset, \underset or extensible arrows?

@DonHosek -- It's well after midnight so I'm not going to try to check. However, there may be examples in the testmath document that's part of the amsmath package. If so, they were definitely drawn from material that was published.

@DavidCarlisle Sure. The question is how to do that automatically.

It might not really be necessary for practical purposes, but it still seems like a good way to do things.

@FaheemMitha you could use \pdfsavepos at each end of the cell, but nothing set up. If the inserted text is a heading usually you want to linebreak by hand in which case you can use a nested tabular and don't need to specify a width, so this doesn't come up often.

@DavidCarlisle It's a heading of sorts. A subheading. But does one set up a nested tabular for just one row?

There is a discussion about spreadsheet functionality at tex.stackexchange.com/q/169676/3406

While one could certainly use LuaTeX for this, I wonder how robust it would be at things like parsing, as opposed to an apparently pure TeX solution like spreadtab. And it would presumably be entirely DIY, since it seems nothing like this currently exists in TeX Live.

@DavidCarlisle Would \pdfsavepos work for LuaTeX?

@FaheemMitha well it's called \savepos there but yes

@FaheemMitha almost always do that for headings (some packages give you a \thead command for that: \multicolumn{1}{c}{\begin{tabular}{@{}c@{}} this\\heading\end{tabular}}

@DavidCarlisle I see.

@DavidCarlisle OK

@barbarabeeton The ad post got an answer: meta.stackexchange.com/a/369359/237989

@DavidCarlisle Just to be clear, that would be one heading per column in my case. Embedded in the table. Not at the beginning.

@FaheemMitha yes that's the normal thing

@DavidCarlisle OK

@FaheemMitha same construct used in an answer (not from me) today here, rotated but basically same thing

@DavidCarlisle Yes, I see. So a standard technique, then.

If I just use \multicolumn, I don't understand the breaking behavior. I have an example where it is breaking for some columns, and not for one. I was planning to post it. I suppose here, because it's probably not worth asking as a question.

@FaheemMitha multicolumn does nothing at all about line breaking, it's just the same as tabular, if you use a c column it won't break unless you nest a something that does, and if you use a p column then it's a parbox and will (try to) break to that width

@DavidCarlisle The one that didn't break was a p column. I'll post the code here. It's quite short.

Or maybe use Overleaf. Since that seems to be an option these days. But I don't have an account yet.

@FaheemMitha that's a shame :)

@yo' What's a shame?

@FaheemMitha that you don't have an account yet

(sorry, I'm just trying to be funny)

@yo' Ah, well, hopefully I can create one. And probably will, unless I have to pay, in which case I won't. And then it won't be a shame any more. :-)

@FaheemMitha the free account is pretty fine

@yo' Good to know. So how it working there? Good pay? Interesting work? Nice co-workers?

@FaheemMitha line breaking in narrow columns is tricky you may need to give tex some help

@DavidCarlisle Noted.

@FaheemMitha the team is very nice and the work is cool. And I hope you don't expect me to share my financial terms with my employer ;)

@yo' even the ones from Brazil?

@yo' I'm not sure what your last sentence meant. I just wondered if the pay was good.

@DavidCarlisle in partucular on lunchtime

@FaheemMitha you can't really ask people about their employer in public (well you can ask, but you shouldn't expect an answer)

@FaheemMitha yeah, and I'm telling you that I won't answer.

@DavidCarlisle <Shrug.> I don't see why not.

Obviously, they can ignore the question.

@FaheemMitha which I consider disrespectful (to ignore the question). OTOH, I expect others to respect my right not to answer.

@yo' It's not disrespectful to ignore questions. People do it all the time.

Well, at least in my opinion. I realise cultural norms differ.

At any rate, I hope you are doing well, wherever you are.

Oh, duck lanes: mymodernmet.com/duck-lanes-share-the-space

I'm not sure if Overleaf is suitable for sharing, but in any case, here is a link to my example file - overleaf.com/read/gtnxgsvqcgng

This is probably too trivial for the site.

@FaheemMitha underline doesn't break (and why have multicolumn there, your first column is already p so allowing line breaking

@DavidCarlisle That's true. I could omit that one from the multicolumns. Oh, I see. I didn't think of underline.

I just learned of the existence of the lua-ul package. Nice work by @MarcelKrüger.

And it breaks too.

@samcarter -- Thanks. I've flagged the ad, asking for moderator to delete it, Sad, very sad. The usefulness of the ads is becoming marginal for anything that isn't "permanent".

ooh FMi's has a spam assassin

@barbarabeeton @UlrikeFischer @samcarter twitter.com/shouldhaveaduck/status/1433450583457873922

@DavidCarlisle chaos is good twitter.com/nerds_feed/status/1433408351438872576

@PauloCereda -- One of the ducks looks sick, poor thing.

Microsoft Office is a word processor and LaTeX is a typesetting system. But, what can they be commonly called? Documentation systems? Or any specific name is used?

@DavidCarlisle What is the rationale here for stripping inter-column space?

Can LaTex be categorized as a productivity software (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_software)?

And if you have a bunch of \multicolumn{1}'s on the same row, you can have a separate embedded table for each of them?

@raf Perhaps better as unproductivity software. You spend so much time trying to get things exactly right, you don't get your actual work done.

:')

@raf software thingy

We ducks are very good at technical term thingies

@raf But why do you ask?

@raf Good question. I don't know of a common name off-hand. Might be a suitable terminology question for English Language and Usage SE.

Sometimes they don't like those, but they are on-topic, as far as I know.

@raf Sounds reasonable, but it wouldn't hurt to ask on ELU.

Bear in mind you aren't actually required to lump TeX and LibreOffice together.

You could have them on separate lines as Word Processing and Typesetting.

And MS Office would belong with LibreOffice in Word Processing, for example.

@raf Oh, you're Indian.

I wonder if one could use Desktop Publishing as a suitable umbrella term. But I can't say I'm fond of the term.

@PauloCereda oh :)

@barbarabeeton flagged it as well

@raf -- I'd go with "document processing systems". "Documentation" has a more limiting meaning. (I once had the title "Documentalist" on my business card, and it was meant to mean that I wrote documentation for both systems and end users.) LaTeX can be used to prepare letters, novels, journal articles, any kind of printed material. (So can LibreOffice,of course.)

@PauloCereda If LaTeX would have been written by a French person, it might have been called LeTeX.

@mickep ooh :)

@mickep A Klingon would say L'TeX!!

@StefanKottwitz Oh, that is advanced mode.

@mickep Klingons don't use \sloppy.

@mickep At one of the recent tex conferences, there have been talks by people from le-tex.de/de/index.html

@samcarter Germans! Interesting!

(Nice web page!)

@FaheemMitha you already have \tabcolsep padding from the outer table

@DavidCarlisle Can you run hyperref tests? I just wanted to try if I had broken something but l3build doesn't run any tests, it only unpacks the file.

@UlrikeFischer -- temp settings disable checks while testing ctan build hmm that's commented out though...

@DavidCarlisle no it isn't that. It is the checkinit_hook function, if I remove it it works again. And this is new, in texlive 2020 it worked. I'm just opening an issue for l3build.

@UlrikeFischer ah OK bit distracted was just looking but seems you are ahead of me:-)

@DavidCarlisle ;-). I think we don't need that init hook no longer anyway. dvipdfmx should now be new enough everywhere.

@UlrikeFischer OK