oh nein

@DavidCarlisle you know a package is good because Germans use it ^^

@samcarter will also be pleased with my last checkin correcting @UlrikeFischer's PR: git commit -a -m "color mix too subtle for colorbl doc, use primary colors"

Hello

@user91500 hello

I have a samll question. In my tex file using tikz and pgfplots packages, ylabel appears on the right of y axis by default. How can i move that to left? Could anyone help me please?

@user91500 search for ylabel style in the manual; the first hit for pgfplots y label positioning gives you tens oh hits, like tex.stackexchange.com/questions/122747/…

@user91500 I just searched for ylabel in texdoc pgfplots and the first three examples all had the label on the left

Sun Jun 19 06:24:20 UTC 2022
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@JosephWright HTML starting to be used a bit ^

Oooh

@JosephWright I was actually there for PL3

@UlrikeFischer dante meeting still going?

@DavidCarlisle no, I'm back in Bonn since around an hour.

@UlrikeFischer I found some testfiles for colortbl I didn't know I had: ct1, ct3 and ct4 reported by well known trouble makers, and ct2 failing in luatex and xetex as cedilla doesn't really work very well in latin modern :(

@DavidCarlisle where are you hiding such interesting files?

@UlrikeFischer ct2 was meniod as a test in th colortbl doc. Comes to something if I read my own doc... I did a filesystem search and found them in dpctex/tests so I moved them to colortbl and made into lvt tests (just testing for no-error currently)

@UlrikeFischer but having imported \rownum I don't like it much, I don't think it makes sense to be tied to \rowcolors:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{colortbl}
\setlength\parskip{15pt}
\begin{document}

\begin{tabular}{ll}
\the\rownum  & a \\
\the\rownum  & b
\end{tabular}

\begin{tabular}{ll}
\the\rownum  & a \\
\the\rownum  & b
\end{tabular}

\hrule
\rowcolors{1}{}{}

\begin{tabular}{ll}
\the\rownum  & a \\
\the\rownum  & b
\end{tabular}


\begin{tabular}{ll}
\the\rownum  & a \\
\the\rownum  & b
\end{tabular}


\hrule
\rowcolors{1}{yellow}{}

\begin{tabular}{ll}
\the\rownum  & a \\
\the\rownum  & b
\end{tabular}

I need to move the seting to zero and the increment so it always happens

@DavidCarlisle looks quite odd. But making it available for every tabular would probably require various changes in latex and other packages?

@DavidCarlisle ah that trouble maker. He was mentioned a few time at Dante too as the one pushing package developers around ...

@UlrikeFischer initially I think just if colortbl is loaded, I think I just need to do it at point \rowcolor is set up (which happens in every tabular once package loaded) although as lvjr commented it could be done in array or even in the format, but small steps....

@DavidCarlisle Here is an answer from Heiko where he restarts the numbering inside a tabular to change the coloring: tex.stackexchange.com/a/170654/2388

twitter.com/patrickgundlach/status/… <- seems nice. I guess it was presented at Dante.

@UlrikeFischer yes I was worrying about such uses. If rownum is just for \rowcolors then it's just the parity that matters but if you really want it to enumerate the rows, what you want is to keep the numbering but essentially swap the rowcolors so odd->even and even->odd

@DavidCarlisle I'm not sure that it was a good idea from xcolor to expose this counter to the user.

@UlrikeFischer having a row counter would be useful but not if it's so closely tied to zebra stripes. we'd have to keep at least \rownum though even if I pull the \therownum interface.

@DavidCarlisle yes. But can't you for the coloring itself use an internal counter (to free the rownum) and add some command to reset the coloring to another stripe if wanted?

@UlrikeFischer I could, it depends how many people are resetting the counter mid table just to affect the colors, and whether they would be upset to have that break if a nicer interface was available

@DavidCarlisle yes that is the question.

@UlrikeFischer Best would be if I make any breaking changes via pull requests from you, that way if anyone complains I have somwhere to divert the complaint.

@DavidCarlisle You could sent me the new file per mail ...

Question about terminology. If I have a bunch of TeX macros in a TeX file, and they take the same arguments, or at least the same arguments. And if I then use TeX macros, like say \newcommand{\SOMEARG}{someargval} to avoid duplicating the arguments across the macros, would one call that parametrizing the arguments?

@FaheemMitha I don't really understand what you're doing.

@AlanMunn Attempt at illustration: gist.github.com/277f71107715d0e680c9da4c836ae5e9

Here the macros \foo, \bar and \baz, which I don't actually define, share common arguments.

@FaheemMitha Maybe this is a just a toy example, but really what you're doing is defining constants that then get reused. I don't think I would call this parameterizing the arguments. (But I'm not sure what I would use that term for, either.)

@AlanMunn OK. How would you describe it, then? And yes, it's a toy example, but that's basically what I'm doing in my actual code.

@FaheemMitha Defining constants for reuse? :) I guess it depends a lot on what the context of the need for the name is (code documentation? user documentation? something else?)

@AlanMunn Changelog entry.

For my reference. Probably nobody else will ever see it. But I like to use sensible terminology when possible.

@FaheemMitha In that case, sensible is almost by definition what make sense to you.

@AlanMunn That sounds a bit tautological.

@FaheemMitha With my linguist hat on, meanings of words are defined by their use, i.e., by the speakers of the language as they actualy use them. So in your case, you are talking to yourself, and therefore you get to define things the way you want.

@AlanMunn Unfortunately I don't have my own private language. I use other peoples.

In this case, that would be the language used by those people called the British. And sundry other peoples.

@FaheemMitha Now of course you also interact with a wider range of speakers, so it's in your interest not to have competing "private" and "public" definitions if that confuses you, but that's really up to you to decide.

@AlanMunn Surely there must be some kind of term for this, so I don't have to make something up.

@FaheemMitha Well I've suggested the term constant, which seems to be how you're using these macros, and is pretty standard.

@AlanMunn OK.

Maybe others will chime in with suggestions.

@AlanMunn Based on previous experience, that doesn't seem likely. But perhaps.

@FaheemMitha i would also call them constants. In C you would define them with #define.

@Rmano "the constants" -> "them constants"?

@FaheemMitha yes,sorry

So something like: "use macros to define constants for use in the macro arguments"?

That seems kind of clumsy.

@FaheemMitha "define constants to be used later". Wherever you need them. The fact that you use it in macro arguments is accidental, nothing stops you using them in other contexts.

But I think you are overthinking it. You can call them whatever you like, provided you explain it.

@Rmano Yes, sometimes I overthink things. One downside of doing things alone.

@Rmano macros for example

@DavidCarlisle yes, that's an option

@FaheemMitha just "use macros", the "define constants for use in the macro arguments"? part is just explaining what macros do so you probably don't need it

@DavidCarlisle Well, it's a particular use of macros in this specific case. I might not need this explanation in this case, because it's pretty obvious. But I try to err on the side of overexplaining, because I sometimes look back at something I wrote six months ago and wonder what the heck I was thinking,

That's when log entries, or comments, or any kind of documentation, really, come in handy.

@FaheemMitha a "macro" is a name for a fragment of text used elsewhere in a program. Isn't that exactly what you are asking a name for?

Mostly it works, because I quite often mentally congratulate the writer of those past log entries (or comments), which I mostly don't remember writing.

@DavidCarlisle Isn't a macro a bit more than that in general? Like you can expand and execute and all that fun stuff.

@FaheemMitha "expanding a macro" is "replacing the name by its replacement text" You presumably intend that to happen when you use these names

@DavidCarlisle Well, yes. It's just a particularly simple example of that. I just wanted to express that I'm using macros here, because TeX doesn't have variables, and I don't want to write the same macro argument value a bunch of times.