TeX, LaTeX and Friends - 2011-03-03

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5:37 AM

@Caramdir sure, but my point was that if there are n Martins, that doesn't help tell you (as far as I can see) which one it is you are replying to.

3 hours later…

8:21 AM

@FaheemMitha: I think that your question on tikzexternal should be posted to the main site. It might need a little working to get it into a suitable form of a direct question, but the situation you describe - a journal wanting a single file - is very common and so if there are any problems with it then it would be useful to know what to be aware of. So maybe the question should be: "The journal I'm submitting to asks for a single file. I have a few non-standard packages. How do I do that?".

@AndrewStacey: Ok. Should I ask and then answer, or wait for someone to answer?

btw, do the moderators here have the power to link this account to accounts on other SE sites, eg stackoverflow?

it is handy to have all accounts associated. my so account currently isn't, cos i created it with my google openid. now i'm using myopenid instead.

@FaheemMitha I don't think so - you need to add the various OpenId's to your account(s)

i've already flagged a post for moderation on SO, so maybe i should wait and see if anything happens then

@JosephWright i've already added myopenid to the SO account

but it hasn't magically associated me with the others, afaik

SE doesn't seem to have a way to keep a draft without publishing it. hmm.

@FaheemMitha: When posting a question that you already know the answer to, it's generally felt good etiquette to wait before posting the answer yourself. People are more likely to post their own answers to a question that has no answer, and there's always the chance that one of those people will spot something you didn't. You can say in the question "I know one way to do this but wondered if there was another way or if there were any traps that I might have missed.".

4

@AndrewStacey: ok

@AndrewStacey one issue with the tikzexternal question is that there is more than one issue within it

one is pgf/tikz specific. ie. how do i submit to a journal who doesn't want to know about pgf/tikz without rewriting my tikz figure handling code? the answer to that was kindly provided by christian with tikzexternal.sty, though he seems to have overlooked the catcode issue. he even mentions in the comments that people might want to include the code directly

the second question is. if you have nonstandard sty or package files, and the journal wants just one tex file uploaded, what issues might you run into if you try to directly include code in a latex file that was meant to be included via \usepackage?

I don't know whether the second question is general interest enough to be worth talking about.

The second is what you had in mind, I assume.

tex.stackexchange.com/questions/2044/… talks about running texhash. i was fiddling with the Debian package of PGF, and that just runs mktexlsr after installation.

Is this the same thing, perhaps?

8:59 AM

@FaheemMitha: I was thinking more along the lines of the second question in that the answer to the first could just be "use tikzexternal" (and I think, though I couldn't find it right now, that there are answers along those lines already on the site). The catcode issue is something that shouldn't be specific to tikzexternal, but it could be worth mentioning the tikzexternal example as an example. (ctd)

(ctd) Often with questions like this, it is possible to make a general question (such as: how do I include a style file in my document to make it one file) out of a specific situation without any difficulty: almost any answer to the specific question is almost certainly going to apply to the general. But then it's good to include the specific situation as background/motivation just in case there is something about the specific situation that is a bit different.

That way, you get the best of all possible worlds.

@AndrewStacey ok. thanks for the pointers/suggestions.

9:22 AM

@FaheemMitha: By the way, I don't know about the distinctions (if there are any) between texhash and mktexlsr (... and others?). Again, it would make a good question (if it hasn't already been asked) as different packages/documentation probably refer to different ones.

@FaheemMitha: On the general point of when to ask a question, there've been times when there's been something I want to know that I could figure out myself given an hour to work on it, but I still ask here. My reasoning being: someone else might just happen to know, in which case I've saved an hour and it only took them 2minutes to type in the answer; there might be something that I've overlooked; and (ctd)

(ctd) even if it does take someone (possibly me) an hour to figure it out, then the solution is visible for all to see and anyone else who comes across that problem saves an hour.

This is a philosophy towards knowledge-sharing that I've had for a while, and the SE platform fits superbly with it. Before SE came along, I was posting these things on my webpage whenever I came across them (I have a section called "How Did I Do That?" and a subsection called "Hints, Hacks, and HowTos" for keeping these notes in), but now I can share them with the world ... okay, the TeX-world .. via this place.

(Gosh, I'm wordy when I get going ... I'll shut up now, but you should post these questions on the main site. They just get lost here and they're good questions.)

1 hour later…

Martin Tapankov

10:33 AM

Do we need both wrap and wrapfigure? Maybe those can be merged into e.g. {wrapping}? (cc our Chief Retagging Officer @lockstep)

10:44 AM

Joseph Wright has been automatically appointed as owner of this room.

10:58 AM

@MartinTapankov wrapfigure is an environment from the wrapfig package, so maybe merge wrapfig and wrapfigure, and merge wrap into wrapping: a general purpose wrapping tag?

I'm excited by Rstudio. Although I do like running everything inside emacs...

My copy of Chicago Manual of Style 16th ed. has arrived! Now, to find myself a cheap copy of Bringhurst...

Martin Tapankov

11:28 AM

@Seamus Uhh yeah, though the idea is to have a tag for the concept only instead of a separate tag for the package as well. The low usage doesn't warrant having a specialized tag for wrapfig/wrapfigure, IMO.

@AndrewStacey: Thanks for the encouragement. Certainly the SE model does seem to be working well, especially for small, high powered, tech sites like this one

Hmm, i've never thought of TeX as high powered, but by some yardsticks I guess it is...

Some of the bigger sites are a little more anonymous though.

@MartinTapankov Yes I suppose you are right: the package doesn't warrant its own tag.

11:46 AM

@AndrewStacey: texhash and mktexlsr are the same command. on my machine texhash is a soft link to mktexlsr

Not worth posting as a question imo

12:19 PM

@FaheemMitha: Good thing I didn't try to steal your question and post it myself!

@AndrewStacey: heh

1 hour later…

1:29 PM

@AndrewStacey

@AndrewStacey done. tex.stackexchange.com/questions/12554/…

1

Q: submitting a journal article as a single tex file

When submitting a paper formatted with LaTeX (or similar) to a journal, the journal may instruct that only one .tex file be uploaded. See for example BioMed Central TeX template files, Section 2.3, which says. 2.3 Make sure that you only a single .tex document for the entire manuscript, as you w...

latex-general external-images publishing write18

1:41 PM

I flagged this for formatting help. I hope this is an appropiate use of flagging.

Martin Tapankov

@FaheemMitha: Usually this is not necessary -- often people would notice that the formatting could be improved, and will do that for you. Take a look at tex.stackexchange.com/editing-help for some extra pointers how to format your posts.

@MartinTapankov ok. so desist from flagging in such cases?

oh, i see, SE uses markdown? was not aware

Martin Tapankov

@FaheemMitha: Yeah, if the reason for flagging is formatting help. High-rep users can do that as well -- this is not a moderator-only privilege.

@MartinTapankov ok.

2:22 PM

What do we think to @FaheemMitha suggestion of an "academic" tag? Does academic publishing differ enough that the "publishing" tag is not specific enough?

Martin Tapankov

That could work, but the tag should be something like academic-publishing, and be strictly about questions that deal with submission of TeX manuscripts to academic journals and conferences (which have somewhat arbitrary rules how stuff should look like, what packages you should and should not use, etc.)

But I'm somewhat against the idea.

I guess this "submitting as one document" thing is more or less unique to academic publishing?

Martin Tapankov

@Seamus: Indeed. The only issue I have is misusing it for questions that could be generalized, and the author only happens to have the problem in their magnum opus/article/textbook

2:37 PM

I'm not sure potential for misuse is a reason to avoid a tag: people could horribly misuse the various figures/graphics/floats tags but that's not a reason not to have them...

Maybe journal-publishing to distinguish it from thesis-publishing which is less specific (more open to misuse)

@Sean: I'm not sure how unusual this one document thing is. I don't have a lot of experience with journals.

However, journal typesetting people seem scarily clueless in my limited experience.

And want everything as simple as possible.

From what I've seen, the "one document" thing is a persistent and fairly general problem for submissions to journals...

I also got the impression, from things that David Kastrup has said in the past, that people are not willing to pay money for expert typesetting knowhow and consulting.

But I've no experience with this.

@Seamus: I see.

Martin Tapankov

@Seamus Hmm, that's actually a good idea, although conferences also have some crappy requirements sometimes, and the "journal" bit doesn't quite encompass those as well.

With the result you get people managing a LaTeX submission process whose knowledge of TeX and related things, is, um, sketchy.

2:44 PM

@MartinTapankov Well if it's for published conference proceedings, that's close enough to a journal. I think that's a safer option than going for the more general academic-publishing tag that, like you say, is more open to misuse...

See comments in this interview, for example. tug.org/interviews/kastrup.html

@FaheemMitha What surprises me is that it's fine to spend money on professional typesetting software, but it's not ok to get LaTeX for free and pay someone who know about it...

@Seamus: Yes, it's nutty. So you agree with my general point?

My experience has been somewhat limited. I was asked to resubmit something as a word document once, so I sent them a .txt file...

DK's description of emacs as a 'traveling junkyard of editing solutions' is quite amusing. He has a good turn of phrase.

2:47 PM

My only other contribution is under review, so so far they've only seen a PDF.

Seam: Heh. How did they react?

Relevant quote from above interview: "for the last few years I tried working on TeX-related tasks, self-employed, but this will have to change soon since it does not pay the bills — partly because of the expectation of people that free software should be written for free,..."

I think they copied it into word and then sent me a word document with "track changes" suggested edits. Then for publication, they got it professionally typeset. (The final product looks suspiciously like LaTeX output)...

@Seamus: I see.

Ah, you're English too? Lots of English people here. Or maybe Irish. I dunno.

I am English/Irish.

@Seamus: You're both? :-)

2:59 PM

Yup

In another place he calls emacs "probably the world's greatest editor prototyping platform". LOL.

@FaheemMitha I added journal-publishing tag to your question

@Seamus: Thanks. Appreciate it.

Interesting blog you've got there.

I've just noticed we already have a journal tag. Should we merge that with journal-publishing?

@Seamus: oh, i didn't see that one.

3:12 PM

@Seamus: One of those {journal} questions should now be {journal-publishing}; I'm not sure about the other one. But maybe that's again something for discussion on meta.

3:46 PM

Interview with Joseph Wright, if anyone is interested. tug.org/interviews/wright.html

4:36 PM

@HendrikVogt meta.tex.stackexchange.com/q/1079/215

Martin Tapankov

4:51 PM

Rename conflicts into package-conflicts?

Given the number of potential tag questions on meta/on chat, maybe we should have a tag-chat chat room?

Martin Tapankov

5:38 PM

It's "Write Your Own Meta Question" Day on TeX-SE.

4 hours later…

10:00 PM

If anyone wants to offer formatting tips on this one, be my guest...

0

A: How to install a current version of TikZ?

This answer is for users of PGF and Debian or Ubuntu, or other Debian derived Linux distributions. The most recent version of PGF available in Debian and Ubuntu is 2.0, from 2008. The TeX distribution used by Debian and Ubuntu is Tex Live, currently Tex Live 2009. It turns out that making a PGF ...

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