@FaheemMitha: I've been thinking about your journal question. In my opinion, it is too narrow since you concentrate on the specific journal, and thus Barbara's answer is perfectly reasonable. Would you mind if I edited it a little to make it a more general question?
Background: I think that Submitting a journal article as a single tex file is potentially a great question (it already has 10 upvotes), but I think it could do with a little polishing. I don't want to send it to CW inadvertently, and I want to check my edits with the original author, so I'm usin...
@FaheemMitha: Given how extensive my editing has been, I've copied it over to meta to work on it there. At the moment, you can't edit it but hopefully a moderator will stop by and make it "community wiki" so that you can.
@FaheemMitha: I agree about the links, I just hadn't gotten round to editing them in (as I also wanted to look up the cmdtrack details). I've just done that.
@FaheemMitha: Yes, you do. Which is one reason why I copied it over to meta.
(Note that I copied it, the original is still there)
(Oh, and you don't lose any that you've already gained from that question, just don't gain any more). There's a copy of the question on meta and it is clearly marked as a sandbox. My idea is to polish it on meta as I think it'll take a few edits to do that, then copy it back to the main site. After that, the meta copy can be deleted or closed or gotten rid of in some way.
@FaheemMitha For the moment. @AndrewStacey's idea is that the CW version on meta gets edited, the resulting text is then copied back to the main question, and then the meta version is removed (I guess by one of the moderators)
@FaheemMitha: Joseph (or someone) has now made the meta question community wiki which means that you can edit it as well. So the meta version is the "beta version" and if we can polish it so that you're happy with it, then we can "publish" it back to the main site.
On the new users page it is now also possible to sort after number of edits someone made. @lockstep is (of course) on #1 of all time. But what's funny is that with over 900 total edits he still didn't got the Copy Editors Badge which requires 500 edits (on post of other users).
Here seems something broken, otherwise he would have to really edited his own ~270 posts over 400 times!
And there are two other users over the 500 edit boundary.
Is there any way to get a handle on how many edits I've made on other people's posts? I have >80 edits, but no "Strunk and White" badge. I assume this is because I've made lots of edits to my own posts, which doesn't count...
@MartinScharrer Cumulative edits per post are counted as one, and edits of own posts are not counted. Also retagging \neq editing for the purpose of badge awards.
We counted "title" edits and "body" edits as distinct entities. This badge was awarded to users with 600 cumulative "title" or "body" edits.
Clearly this is not intuitive or right so I made some adjustments.
Strunk & White and Copy Editor now only count posts, provided:
The post is not ...
FWIW, there's currently no reliable way to check one's progress towards the editor badges. The queries on data.stackexchange.com are outdated and conflicting.
I've started doing something which I think is quite helpful, so I thought I'd suggest others do the same. When I use some code from an answer to a question on this site, I comment that in my source code. I'll write something like "from tex.sx 10682 Herbert's answer". So if I want to look up the question again, I can.
I've got to start using the "favourites" a bit more (only the link seems broken tex.stackexchange.com/users/86/andrew-stacey?tab=favourites just brings up my normal user page) as I keep thinking, "I know I've seen a question about that on tex-SX, now if only I could remember where ..."
Blast, no-one's going to get the link joke as the URL gets cut off. You'll have to hover over it to see.
@MartinTapankov: I see that you've accepted Hendrik's answer to your question on editing MWEs. (First, I agree that that's the best advice but ...) to my mind, this highlights the inanity of having meta on the same SE engine as the main site. What does accepting an answer here mean? Should I now feel bound by Hendrik's answer? Is this now in the TeX-SE canon? It's potentially confusing for someone coming to meta afresh and expecting to find out how things should be done.
@AndrewStacey: Well, this question is tagged "policy", so it should be kind of an indication what behaviour is expected (3/4 voiced similar opinions, were upvoted, and the fourth was also not in favour). As I explained, I don't fully agree with this, but if this is how people feel about it -- let it be that way.
@MartinTapankov: To be clear, this isn't about that particular question but about the general principle of what accepting an answer on meta actually means. Also, I don't expect you to do anything about it! I'm just voicing an unease that I have with this sort of question on meta: it looks like some policy has been decided, but actually 4 people have expressed an opinion with very little actual discussion.
@AndrewStacey: Indeed. No chance for a democratic process as it currently stands (I should probably say "thankfully"). But we always have the chat for classical flame wars, parallel mud-slinging and other immature forms of entertainment
I think I agree that these sorts of meta questions could easily be left unaccepted. That way, whichever answer gets upvoted the most does float to the top. That extra endorsement of accepting should be reserved for questions that are definitively answered (e.g. by one of the SO team coming along and saying "we will fix this bug in the next release")
On an unrelated note.. Since we had a lot of meta questions related to tagging, maybe moderators can mark those which have been completed with status-completed. It's hard to track otherwise which issues got resolved, which are in the process of being so, and which are only proposals (accepted answers don't work here).
@MartinTapankov That's a great suggestion. I was planning on updating the list of "top tags" still without wikis, I'll do that this afternoon... Once it's clear which are still empty, we can start opening some meta questions about them (if needed)
@FaheemMitha I think links to tex.sx are fairly stable. I just keep track of question number (in case stackexchange changes how links to questions work...)
Yeah, but if you compare to how long it would have taken to sketch them in MS paint, photoshop or similar, that is crazy! It depends on the quality you want too, I guess.
Well if you just want a rough sketch of something, it's much quicker (a matter of seconds) to draw something. And for a lot of people, that's enough... But I agree that I'd much rather do it right
@Seamus: I don't know if journals for example, care. Maybe this could be a meta-question for tex.sx. :-)
Do journals REALLY CARE about figures? Do users REALLY CARE about figures?
Ok, another frivolous question. How long does it take people here to draw a working TikZ figure from a standing start, and do you typically refer to the manual a lot?
@FaheemMitha I think your question about Tikz images is too vague: it depends on the complexity of the picture. I did this picture in a couple of hours, but it's super simple.
On the other hand, I had a picture that I spent days making because I needed different parts of it to appear at different slides on beamer. (lots of clipping)
@FaheemMitha Very much depends on the picture. Most of the time I use tikz for drawing relatively simple commutative diagrams, which is really fast. I can do simple illustrations pretty quickly now too. More complex things can take longer (in particular if I first have to figure out where the points should be). I use the manual a lot and know it well enough that I usually immediately find what I want). I think the picture that took me the longest time to get right is i.imgur.com/kab6b.png
@Caramdir Is there a simple interface for commutative diagrams in TikZ? I've used xypic in the past, which is super easy for simple ones, but a nightmare if you want to do something more complex... For the simple diagrams, I had the feeling that TikZ had a steeper learning curve...
Andrew has already produced a really beautiful snake (I think I never saw the diagram typeset nicer), so let me add a long exact sequence. For this I usually prefer curved arrow between the lines. These are easily produced using [out=...,in=...] giving the angles at which the lines starts and end...
@Seamus I typically use something like that (with the styling encapsulated in a commutative diagram style)
I've made two types of TikZ picture. But I had several slightly different versions of each in each case. Philosophy isn't a subject that lends itself to diagramming very often...
Anyone? I'm running tlmgr and (via TeXLive Utility on a Mac) and it seems to have hung while running fmutil-sys. Will I screw everything up if I force it to quit?
@AlanMunn: sorry, i've no idea what you are talking about.
Anyone care to comment on an abstract for the PGF manual?
Document: pgf Title: User s Guide to the PGF Package, Version Author: Till Tantau <tantau@cs.tu-berlin.de>
Abstract: This is a high quality manual for PGF and TikZ, including several tutorials and a detailed reference. The manual is divided into main three sections, the Frontend Layer, the Basic Layer and the System layer. The Frontend includes TikZ and corresponds to user level commands. The Basic and System Layers correspond to increasingly low level functionality.
A high-quality manual? That's rather subjective and boasting, if the author of the abstract is the same as the author of the manual. I'd also avoid discussing structure in the abstract -- this is better left for the introduction. Probably better to just list the good stuff about it in a couple of sentences.
"It discusses both frontend commands accessible by the user, low-level functionality" etc.
When you say "abstract", I imagine a paper (as in academic paper) being written -- and the author(s) of the abstract are the same as the authors of the paper itself.
This is a high quality manual for PGF and TikZ, including several tutorials and a detailed reference. It discusses both frontend commands accessible by the user and more low-level and powerful functionality that may not be needed by the average user.
This is a high quality manual for PGF and TikZ, including several tutorials and a detailed reference. It discusses both the more accessible frontend subsystems such as TikZ, and more low-level and powerful functionality that may not be needed by the average user.
@FaheemMitha @Caramdir: You asked for it: find . -name '*.tex' -type f -exec grep -c '\\begin{tikzpicture}' {} ';' | perl -lne '$a += $_; END {print $a}' result: 1375. Diagrams for lectures don't take long. What took a while was the diagrams at math.ntnu.no/~stacey/Research/Preprints/TheEnchantedForest but I wouldn't have wanted to try to draw them using any other package!
@FaheemMitha: Part of it is that drawing the diagrams helps with the maths. The link I gave is to a load of knot and link diagrams and if we hadn't had a good way of visualising them, we wouldn't be able to study them.
@FaheemMitha: I'm afraid I didn't do much research before choosing a VCS so don't know much about the different options. About as far as I got was deciding that I wanted a distributed one rather than a centralised one. So once I stumbled across BZR, I didn't look any further.
In other cases, especially if it is offensive in English or recognized as obscenity in other popular languages (e.g. similar words) then it should be highly discouraged.
Ahh, there are much more blush-inducing things on dA than a few innocuous naughty words
I've just been trying to figure out how \newcommand defines a command with an unknown number of arguments (meaning that the \newcommand command doesn't know when it is written how many arguments the command will have). I'm ... staggered to say the least!
@Caramdir Yes, but probably not if the user is called Adolf Schmidt (although for a lot of people this will evoke the wrong connotations -- it certainly does for me)
@AndrewStacey: hg is generally reckoned to be better, and based on my limited exposure to bzr, i'd agree with that. you're right to prefer distributed. centralized sucks.
@FaheemMitha: I probably don't use any of the fancy stuff that a VCS can do. Most of my "projects" are single-branched. I rarely branch anything and ensure that I'm always working on the latest version at all times.
@FaheemMitha I was just pointing out that this statement is usually the start of a flame war :) That DVCSes are more useful in many situations is I think generally accepted on the other hand.
@Caramdir: bzr vs hg? most people seem to agree hg is better. and bzr usage is pretty fringe. just look around. but needless to say I have zero interest in starting a flame war.
Plus I don't think there are enough people here for a war. a tug of war, maybe.
@FaheemMitha: There's a link to the style file at the top of the page I linked to. But you don't need to compile them to see what they look like! There are PDFs and SVGs (and PNGs).
@Mods: Could you make those [meta-tag:status-completed]? The tagging policy mentioned in those has been clarified, and tagging is underway. http://meta.tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1006/contradictory-tag-wiki-entries-floats-tables-figures http://meta.tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1056/tables-and-tabular-tags
@Caramdir @Andrew I hate to be a stick-in-the-mud, but I don't think this is a good idea for a competition; it's really too frivolous. I'm not a big fan of the whole competition idea anyway, but this kind thing I think has the potential to just clutter up the site.
@AlanMunn To the tables list, I didn't read it really, I've just checked the wiki, seen I made it and I'm used to make such lists, just put it there referring to the wiki :-)
@AlanMunn that gave a motivation to add more to it :-D
@AlanMunn let's hope it becomes a bit more useful than the topical TeX Catalogue section - otherwise it's not really necessary
@StefanKottwitz I like the additions to the question. I'm curious about lockstep having replaced dcolumn with siunitx. The latter is a much heftier package; while it might be good to mention, do you think dcolumn should not be mentioned?
@StefanKottwitz Actually I think a single answer for comm. wiki. stuff that we all add to is much better than the "one answer per package" type question. (As in, e.g. the "what are the good packages" question, which I find quite unusable.) For example, last time I checked, the answer for microtype got the biggest number of votes, but that's hardly essential, even though it produces nice output.
@StefanKottwitz So maybe we should add it in. I didn't want to seem like I was starting an editing war.
@JosephWright Joseph, I'm not aware of either of those packages, so perhaps you could add something about them. I'm happy to add back the dcolumn stuff.
@AlanMunn Votes can bring it "up" then, or accepting as answer
or the collapsed summary could be put into the question
sometimes a good answer exists, wich may be the foundation for a summary
there's nothing with rep, and if somebody makes work by editing/collecting, even a nice answer badge and the like would be fine if there come upvotes later on
Funny: \@onelevel@sanitize\mymacro doesn't work correctly when the macro has '->' in the parameter text. There seems to be no way to figure out if it is part of the parameter text or the separator of \meaning.
I'm just programming a Perl script parsing the output of \meaning.
We counted "title" edits and "body" edits as distinct entities. This badge was awarded to users with 600 cumulative "title" or "body" edits.
Clearly this is not intuitive or right so I made some adjustments.
Strunk & White and Copy Editor now only count posts, provided:
The post is not ...
