\documentclass{article}
%\usepackage{siunitx}
\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{lp{6em}}
One & two three four five\\[1em]
Six & seven eight
\end{tabular}
\end{document}
@yo' It's a deliberate difference in approach between Frank's code and Leslie's: it's covered in the array manual in section 1.1 ('The behavior of the \\ command')
> In the basic tabular implementation of LATEX the \\ command ending the rows of the tabular or array has a somewhat inconsistent behavior if its optional argument is used. The result then depends on the type of rightmost column and as remarked in Leslie Lamport’s LATEX manual [3] may not always produce the expected extra space.
@AlexG (@UlrikeFischer) I've just released an update to expl3 to tighten up various things, including improved graphic inclusion. What I haven't done yet is cover SVG inclusion in dvisvgm, or other 'non-standard' graphics. That's next on my list - should just be a backend adjustment
@AlexG The key is I've fixed various backend bugs, as I've extended testing: I really hope I'm close to covering everything dvisvgm.def can do (other than SVG imagine inclusion, a I said)
@mickep Anything that changes spacing is basically a no-no for the LaTeX kernel - if it's at all conceivable users might rely on the behaviour, we have to keep it. Here, users might reasonably have 'adjusted' their tables on this basis
@JosephWright Yes, but two wrongs do not make a right... Don't you ever feel like "Ah, let's freeze what we have now, and let us go on and fix things."?
@JosephWright Oh, I did not mean to compare with context. I understand that the situations there is different. I was merely thinking that there must have happened a lot since latex first arrived that could be done differently, and that require people now to make "bad solutions" just because some old strange code is there (probably for a good reason by then). (Since you seem to agree, I stop here.)
@mickep It's more common that people use packages for stuff that now we'd like them not to: there, the team are proactively seeking to 'retire' packages, e.g. atbegshi
I wonder, is anyone aware of an environment using other characters than [a-zA-Z0-9] in their names? I'm thinking of some weird stuff like spaces, [_-@] etc.
@samcarter_waiting_for_siparty yeah. So far we found out that \newenvironment{a~b}{}{} is not a good idea, all other things work, including \newenvironment{a_b$c d}{}{}
@yo' In mathtools you have \newenvironment{MT_gathered_env}, and I bet there is a template somewhere that uses some oriental script in the environment name.
@yo' \edef~{\string~}\newenvironment{a~b}{}{} and now it works :)
@yo' My suggestion would be to take anything between a { and the next }. You can have all kinds of weird stuff like environments in macros with \begin{#1}, or \begin{\@envname}, and so on... If someone sticks something there that isn't a character, it's not your fault :)
@PhelypeOleinik But as soon somebody uses it (1251 hits on the main site) people show up very quickly and say that it shouldn't be used, and that there are replacements (amsmath, mathtools, ...). Isn't that more like caring for the users? To point them to good solutions.
@mickep Yes, but what I mean, and @PhelypeOleinik is getting at too, is that there are millions of existing LaTeX documents, and we can't break a large number of them - eqnarray is there is the docs from before the team took over, so it's part of standard LaTeX. The absolute best we could do is add a warning to it
@mickep No, I mean users. For example, we were shouted at (this was a weird case though) for including xparse in the kernel, which cannot possibly change a document in any way
@mickep We had the whole LaTeX3 idea to free us from this, but that has it's own issues (essentially: no users will ever pick it up), so we had a change of plan
@mickep Any change at all to the LaTeX kernel is emotional for some people: they'd rather it was truly frozen, and users made changes only using packages. But that doesn't exactly scale brilliantly
@mickep We (team) have to be very mindful of vocal users who might raise issues that then lead to concerns about the continued stability and usability of LaTeX - that's a central part of the offering, and we worry about it a lot
@mickep There are several 1000s LaTeX packages at present, and even with a significantly expanded kernel, we could only hope to cover the functionality of a small subset. It's likely such a move would not carry packages with it, so they'd all be 'killed'
@mickep The 2.09 -> 2e move was touch and go, and it was a lot less severe and with a much smaller corpus of existing documents to worry about
@mickep To a first approximation, we'd have no users - but I'd say that's also true for ConTeXt
@mickep If you need users to opt in, most won't, so wouldn't get any gain from the work - hence the change of focus. For example, the tagging project is all about allowing existing sources to produce tagged PDFs without having to edit, at least too much
@JosephWright Well, I think people would adapt packages after a while to a new version. And the current version is still there. (I understand that it is not a small step, but staying with old solutions of things forever sound like a worse option.)
@mickep They might adapt, it's true, and that was the plan for a long time, but at least to those of us on the LaTeX team, it really doesn't look viable
@JosephWright In context tagging is just working perfectly well. \setuptagging[state=start]. If someone writes a module they will probably work hard to break it as well.
@JosephWright So, looking 20 years ahead, you think that there will still be eqnarray and strange spacing in tabulars with \[1ex] depending on the type of cell (was it like that?)
(It is easy for me to say things like this since I'm neither a coder or have any responsability against users...)
@mickep Probably yes on eqnarray as it's in Lamport's book; @UlrikeFischer and I might manage to convince Frank about the array business, particularly if longer-term plans come off and we can move away from \halign internally
@mickep A lot of the current work is refactoring 'from the inside'. For example, we are likely to make all active chars \protected, which makes some changes a lot easier to do. This is stepwise but we are moving toward the right outcomes
@mickep One thing you might notice, if you look carefully, is that the way we describe things in LaTeX News is not always quite what happens in the code - we are slowly making things \protected, for example, but not exactly advertising it
@JosephWright I have not seen it. To me it sounds like protecting some stuff might have large consequences and not being backwards compatible, but I will not complain. :P
@JosephWright So, is it a too bad simplification to say that you (and some others?) try to push forward, but Frank (and some others?) are holding back?
@mickep yes it can :) There are two types of programs: the ones for which you look forward to and update because all the new toys and features to play with and the ones where the message "a new update is available" just results in a groan "Oh, no, don't break it again" (for the later case, I'm looking at you, firefox!)
@mickep Frank is working pretty hard on new ideas, it's just that they likely don't show up for end users: things like paragraph hooks are a big change and are needed for tagging (we can't just require LuaTeX/LMTX), a new marks mechanism, etc.
@JosephWright Good to hear. (Freezing would allow for moving on to luatex, but I'll stop the nagging. I'm just curious, since I see more or less only pros with moving on.)
@mickep There are a lot of specialist fonts only available in classical formats, so T1 or similar encodings; those don't work properly with LuaTeX ...
@mickep LuaTeX deliberately isn't 100% compatible with pdfTeX/TeX90, for example in line breaking, so it would alter lines in typeset material, and that's a real issue
@mickep So what happens if you want to re-set them as part of a collected edition or similar? OK, you could do some old-LaTeX -> PDF -> include as a PDF in new LaTeX, but most people would prefer to run all of their sources with one engine
@JosephWright No, old documents will continue to work as intended in the frozen version. Isn't it true that if one writes a book in LaTeX one keeps the installed version to be sure to have the intended output?
@mickep freezing wouldn't change anything. You still would have to consider how to communicate changes and get people or packages authors to use them and how to do more changes without breaking existing documents.
@mickep To be 100% sure, yes, but that's largely due to non-team packages (or fonts): the team code should work with any source for at least the past 25 years
@mickep No, that's rather the point for some use cases (collected editions of mathematics, for example)
@mickep You might want the main typeblock to stay the same, just alter the page numbers, headers, etc., as part of a collected volume
In the recent episode Data Brokers, John Oliver showed this picture:
which is of the Stack Exchange cookie screen. He said this:
Privacy should be the default setting here and there should be legal
fixes to this. Other countries have actually tried; the EU passed a law to
force sites to discl...
@samcarter_waiting_for_siparty He's right, but I wonder why he picked SO - it's a problem generally, and there are lots of media companies who I'd say are a lot more obvious
@JosephWright Well, but coding things for different engines is a down side, right? I remember the other day when you were going through the graphics file name parsing...
@mickep Most of the time it's not too bad: I do the backend stuff, which yes is a little more complex, but then even with LuaTeX-only you need to think about dvisvgm, dvips, etc.
@JosephWright I'm not sure pdftex is faster than lua(meta)tex. Perhaps for "hello world" but I have a feeling that lua(meta)tex scales well. But it is difficult to compare..
@samcarter_waiting_for_siparty In the German interrogative pronouns (wen/wem etc.) are there any forms that are the same but correspond to different cases/genders etc. I.e. same pronunciation but one is e.g. dative and the other accusative (or nominative)?
@mickep It's a much faster output format than PDF, and you can post-process it to get lots of end-user docs from a single TeX run - for high-throughput systems that's important
@mickep Well, trying some relatively simple document with some math and structure in pdfTeX I get around 400 pages/s. And that's with an unoptimized debugging build of pdfTeX...
I always have this problem with texstudio. Can I post question on it on main board? If I have a little larger file than normal, it hangs opening it. I have now a Latex file which is only 100,000 lines. After waiting 5 minutes, it crashes. I have very fast PC (one of the fastest) with 128 GB RAM. And using latest version of texstudio. Crash screen show below. Windows 10
So now I use notepad++ to open my large Latex files, since I am afraid to use TeXStudio, else it will crash and I could lose any unsaved work. I guess no one tested texstudio on Large latex files before releasing it.
@mickep I guess having a rather fast system helps, but based on many attempts to get people to switch to LuaLaTeX I get the impression that the speed difference hits a rather critical window: For many typical math papers pdfTeX is on many systems just fast enough to feel more or less instant. Even relatively small slowdowns make the compilation time much more noticeable.
@Nasser Notepad++ is a 'programmers editor', mean for very large files - TeXstudio is not. I can't imagine having a useful TeX source that long (siunitx v2 is too long at 18k lines)
Could someone please if they have texstudio, just try to open the file to see if they also get hang and crash? Make sure to save your work first. I just need to know if it is my system (it is new PC) or not. Please find the file in this folder (safe, my own page) 12000.org/tmp/large_latex_file it is called report.tex
@Nasser Opens fine in TeXworks here (I use the dev version, which fixes some large file issues) - which platform are you on? I'll download TeXstudio to test, but I want ot be sure I pick the right one ;)
@Nasser IMHO it's not exactly related to the size itself, but to all motions editor components do while rendering text (syntax highlighting, lint, intellisense, etc).
@MarcelKrüger In our department people are more like not moving because they dont know that luatex exists. But then again some of them probably (still) use eqnarray and stuff as well, so ...
I just did an experiment. I had about 20 files also open at the time in TexStudio. So I closed them all. Closed T.S. also. Opened T.S. again and opened same file. Now it opened instantly ! So I think it is because I had many other files loaded in the editor at the time?
@JosephWright One thing you did not answer was if there was any feedback on the ontarget-math. Maybe you missed the question, or that is just too sensitive stuff(?)...
@JosephWright I managed to make it hang again. Could you please if you have a minute try this on your system since you have the file? I simply opened it. It opens OK., Then I selected all text inside it (starting from after \being{document} to end of file) and clicked the DEL key to delete this selected large amount of text. Now it hangs. been like this for 10 minutes. This editor is not very robust. It takes this long to delete text? Why?
@mickep Ah, don't think I'm objecting :) The question is always how to manage change. For example, on the array example, I'd just say load the package and adjust the input. And as @UlrikeFischer says, we now have a marker for 'updated docs'
@samcarter_waiting_for_siparty This is really strange. Why it took almost 12 minutes for me? which version are you using? I am using 4.2.2 Do you have the "structure" left panel open at same time? This might have an effect. (view->Show->Side panel)
@AlanMunn Not sure I completely get the question. But do you refer to the case of the answer? E.g. “Wohin willst Du?” could be answered with dative or accusative.
@samcarter_waiting_for_siparty good. sorry I did not mention you need the structure panel open. I think this is also what caused the earlier crash when I had 20 other files open.
@Nasser might be. I usually don't have the structure open and never had a problem with many files. At one point, I opened several hundred files and texstudio was doing fine.
@mickep We spend a lot of time looking for ways to square that :) For example, rollback covers the worse problems, but we also test a lot to make change opt-in or dependent on clearly 'new' features (like \DocumentMetadata)
@egreg Maybe it could be done better. But this is the kind of thing that is done once (if you install, have a look at math-ini.mkxl). (Not sure what parameter you have in mind, exactly.)
@mickep -- Someone mentioned \eqnarray. I think the copyeditors at AMS wouldn't notice this being used unless one of its characteristic bugs (overprinting equation numbers) was present. So it may be present in lots of AMS journal article files, which are archival. Stability is urgent in a production environment.
@mickep -- Actually AMS stores with each article or book the version of software and any packages. It's frequent enough that something is resurrected for a "collected works" that this is essential. So it is possible to always use a version that works. But it does require an enormous archive. There's also an effort to support things like pandoc, which only recognizes $$, but none of the amsmath environments; very poor support.
@mickep -- Oh, I think spacing may not be great, but AMS now runs on "editorial lite". So some things that I learned are no longer observed. General degradation. Nit-picking is no longer valued.
@mickep Why should we inflict an error on people only because they choose to use a not so good command? There are lots of other bad stuff around in various packages. I don't want to spent my time defending such a change.
@UlrikeFischer Well, if we care for good typesetting (don't we?), removing macros that produce bad result could not be a bad thing. But I realise I'm alone here in that view.
@UlrikeFischer But when we see somebody drinking bad wine, we scream to them "Avoid bad wine!" :) (tug.org/pracjourn/2006-4/madsen/madsen.pdf, good points, so not complaining about that)
As long as it is there, it will probably be used. The publishers don't care apparently (so we find it in their published articles and books, and our eyes will cry every time...)
though, i don't understand how the solid is positioned, therefore the center of it. i have tried the line that passes (0,0,-3) & (0,0,3) but it doesn't work.
@UlrikeFischer Well, another option would be to fix it so that the output is actually "correct". But I understand from the discussion here that such a thing would probably be even worse. :)
One could even have a flag somewhere use-old-broken-eqnarray that loads the old behavior.
@mickep I know. What I meant is more like: there is so much bad code around, that eqnarray isn't nearly as bad (even though it's in the kernel, so people tend to use it much more)
@PhelypeOleinik That is of course sad, but a different problem. But since eqnarray is what comes by default, one could get a feeling that it is suggested to use it. At least new users could. And they do.
@mickep Yes, that's half of the problem: new documents using eqnarray. But we can't remove it from new documents without affecting the other half of the problem (if that was possible, it would probably have already been done)
@mickep and @PhelypeOleinik -- Two recent places that might be checked to see how they deal with \eqnarray: learn-latex and @StefanKottwitz's 2nd edition of a beginner's manual. (I don't have the book, or time to check learh-latex.) But I'd really like to know.
@barbarabeeton learnlatex.org doesn't mention eqnarray at all. I don't have a copy of Stefan's book, but I'd bet he either didn't mention, or wrote against eqnarray. The same is probably true for TLC3
@TeXnician Thanks. Yes, that's the idea. Are there any of the personal interrogative pronouns that have this behaviour? (i.e. some version of 'who' inflected for gender/case/number)?
@mickep People are creatures of habit. "I've always done it this way, why should I change now?"
@JosephWright it doesn't need to be something complicated. Simply make4ht file and then log checking. It would at least prevent that one break it completly.