TeX, LaTeX and Friends

8:43 AM

@JosephWright ooh a duck

Do I really need to prepare a talk about sillypage? Can't we just agree it would be a very silly talk and then there's no need of it, so we could go have some tea or walk outside, or socialise, or etc.? :)

Paulo Cereda

9:09 AM

@samcarter oh no twitter.com/shouldhaveaduck/status/1543078411056254976

BAYMAX

9:58 AM

Hello chat!

Can you please help how to write the matrix in Latex

gusbrs

12:10 PM

@PauloCereda Just found out that gnome-boxes brings along something called tracker. Oh, my! My old hardware could not handle that kind of stuff. Feels like I have my computer back now. :)

Paulo Cereda

@gusbrs sorry :)

gusbrs

@PauloCereda Oh, no problem at all, just sharing. I suppose you know the beast well, since it appears to be part of gnome. It seems ubuntu is also enabling it, so it will eventually reach me. Hopefully as slow as my computer got with it. :)

Paulo Cereda

@gusbrs IIRC tracker is the file lookup database thingy used by Gnome, so it's not as scary as the name implies. :) I never paid too much attention to it (and I rarely search things in my computer), but I think it doesn't hurt performance (that much lol). :)

gusbrs

12:25 PM

@PauloCereda The name is unfortunate, but it doesn't seem to be an information leak or something of the sort, its an indexer of files and metadata, as far as I understood. But it is a HUGE CPU hog. For me, it was kind of the whole time >25%, sometimes long streaks of much higher. Lots of fan, etc. I suppose that, if one uses the features it enables on the desktop... (for me, not even then). But, as a dependency of a virtualization app? No, no, no.

Paulo Cereda

@gusbrs I will take a closer look if it could be masked. Maybe the flatpak version of gnome-boxes could be used instead?

(or snap, if you are on Ubuntu)

gusbrs

@PauloCereda I think it can be disabled. But, really, I just uninstalled it. It was wrong that it came in as a dependency in the first place.

@PauloCereda I suppose my desktop doesn't even use all that indexed information.

Paulo Cereda

@gusbrs That works too. :)

gusbrs

@PauloCereda :)

samcarter

@PauloCereda oh no :)

gusbrs

12:29 PM

@PauloCereda Though you may wish to disable it. ;-)

Paulo Cereda

@gusbrs it's one of those proactive thingies of modern desktops. "What if he wants to search something from his 3876 virtual machines?" I can barely run one. :)

gusbrs

@PauloCereda hahaha "Please, help me!" :-D

Paulo Cereda

@gusbrs :D

gusbrs

@PauloCereda "Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope!"

Paulo Cereda

@gusbrs ooh

gusbrs

12:33 PM

@PauloCereda Turning geeks on since the 1970s: youtu.be/GTs6FYgT_MU :)

Paulo Cereda

@gusbrs hahaha

@gusbrs watch the new Obi-Wan series and your head will explode. :)

gusbrs

@PauloCereda It's literally the script of the latest Kenobi series. (I was already writing this when your latest comment came).

Paulo Cereda

@gusbrs oh :) I enjoyed that series, specially the finale. :)

gusbrs

@PauloCereda My head didn't, but my patience did. I stopped at the first episode, no second for me. :)

Paulo Cereda

@gusbrs oh no :)

@gusbrs Weird Al can save you: youtube.com/watch?v=hEcjgJSqSRU

gusbrs

12:38 PM

@PauloCereda hahaha, better than the series with a much smaller budget. :)

Paulo Cereda

@gusbrs Weird Al is a true American hero :)

gusbrs

@PauloCereda :)

Paulo Cereda

@gusbrs and I just tweeted earlier today, Kanan and Billaba are the best Jedi ever. :)

gusbrs

@PauloCereda stirring the fuss for click bait are you now? :-)

Paulo Cereda

@gusbrs we ducks are good at making chaos. :)

gusbrs

12:42 PM

@PauloCereda That's one reason I like ducks. :)

Paulo Cereda

@gusbrs ooh

gusbrs

@PauloCereda And the Weird Al video is good at that too. (I hadn't seen it, lots of fun :)

Paulo Cereda

@gusbrs definitely!

gusbrs

@PauloCereda An alien doing the Pulp Fiction Travolta dance while Palpatine plays the piano to the sound of American Pie is great stuff.

Paulo Cereda

@gusbrs lol

Paulo Cereda

4:00 PM

@samcarter OH NO twitter.com/hyxpk/status/1543263239093465088

David Carlisle

4:17 PM

@PauloCereda I need to stay on github so codepilot can inject code in the style of xii into more projects

5

Ulrike Fischer

@JosephWright @DavidCarlisle we broke biblatex:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{biblatex}
\begin{document}
aaa

\end{document}

! Package biblatex Error: Patching \MakeUppercase failed.

David Carlisle

@UlrikeFischer oops

@UlrikeFischer looks like ~~they~~ @JosephWright should be able to fix things at the biblatex side, \blx@hook@uc....

Ulrike Fischer

@DavidCarlisle I was just wondering what this hook should do and if we have a suitable hook they can simply use instead.

Rmano

5:36 PM

out-of-boredom release of circuitikz on CTAN. Now I will have 23 bug reports in the next 24 hours (after one month of complete silence).

samcarter

@PauloCereda :P they know which are the important topics in life which have to be covered in their comics

David Carlisle

@Rmano just blame them all on PL4

Rmano

@DavidCarlisle good plan

moewe

6:08 PM

@UlrikeFischer I take it that is the issue you wanted to tell me about?

Ulrike Fischer

@moewe yes. We changed in PL4 the definition of MakeUppercase etc to handle some issues with commands like \label, but this breaks your patches. What are trying to add with your hooks? I mean, what problem does the hook solve?

moewe

@UlrikeFischer Obviously I have no idea. But if I traced the things that are happening back correctly we end up at \blx@hook@uc and \blx@hook@lc which locally switch the definition of the \bibstring commands to explicitly enforce uppercase or lowercase.

Ulrike Fischer

@moewe yes, but is there an example so that one can test what happens if the patch is not there anymore? I mean is it used in the expl3-case changer? (which under the hood is now used by \MakeUppercase too?

moewe

:61500965 \documentclass[ngerman]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\usepackage[style=authoryear]{biblatex}

\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\renewbibmacro{cite}{%
  \bibstring{bibliography}%
  \setunit{\addspace}%
  \MakeUppercase{\bibstring{bibliography}}%
  \setunit{\addspace}%
  \MakeLowercase{\bibstring{bibliography}}}

\begin{document}
\cite{sigfridsson}
\end{document}

Ulrike Fischer

@moewe ok, clearly different ;-(. @JosephWright

moewe

6:23 PM

@UlrikeFischer Realistically speaking I don't think this biblatex feature is particularly useful. The case switching does not work if \MakeUppercase/\MakeLowercase are called 'outside' of biblatex, because then \blx@init kicks in.

Ulrike Fischer

@moewe What do you mean with "outside" biblatex? In the document when \bibstring is undefined anyway? But in any case: tomorrow PL4 will hit the first users and then they will get errors as the biblatex patches fails. A short time work-around is to suppress the error message with \def\blx@err@patch#1{}, but I think it should be fixed somehow rather fast.

Joseph Wright

@UlrikeFischer Well yes, \bibstring is non-expandable

@UlrikeFischer Great :(

@moewe I see the outcome, what I don't get is why \bibstring is \protected: as it needs to expand to a string ... but I guess there's a good reason

moewe

:61501037 That's what I meant with outside:

    \documentclass[ngerman]{article}
    \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
    \usepackage{babel}
    \usepackage{csquotes}

    \usepackage[backend=biber, style=authoryear]{biblatex}

    \AtEveryCitekey{\bibstring{bibliography}}

    \addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

    \begin{document}
    \autocite{sigfridsson}

    \MakeUppercase{\autocite{sigfridsson}}

    \MakeLowercase{\autocite{sigfridsson}}

    \printbibliography
    \end{document}

Ulrike Fischer

@JosephWright you should know by now that I always find this stuff just after you sent something to ctan ;-)

Joseph Wright

@UlrikeFischer Oh yes

moewe

6:32 PM

The Uppercase case doesn't work, but you get the idea.

@JosephWright I don't know why \bibstring is protected, either, but looking at the code it does a little bit more than juts expanding to a string.

There is the wrapper argument and some unit/punctuation housekeeping.

Ulrike Fischer

@moewe uppercase on a complete cite is naturally rather hopeless. But something simple like a \bibstring should be manageable.

moewe

@UlrikeFischer Well, nevermind that. Is there any hook in the new definitions of \MakeUppercase and \MakeLowercase we could use to get our patch back?

David Carlisle

@moewe it is just:

\cs_new_protected_nopar:cpn{MakeUppercase~}{\text_uppercase:n}
\cs_set_nopar:Npx\MakeUppercase#1{\use:c{MakeUppercase~}{#1}}

moewe

@DavidCarlisle So I'm guesssing that is a no?

David Carlisle

ie a \protected def around \text_uppercase:n

Ulrike Fischer

6:48 PM

@moewe well the question is if there is something in the expl3 command that you can use.

David Carlisle

@moewe well, the l3 code has some customisation possibilities so you may be able to use those, but I lost the thread a bit as to what the biblatex hook is doing. I particular text_uppercase:n has a list of commands to avoid so \AddToNoCaseChangeList{\autocite} would protect the argument of \autocite just as \cite and \ref are.

moewe

@DavidCarlisle Basically the hook redefines the command \bibstring to print lowercase inside \MakeLowercase and uppercase inside \MakeUppercase. It does that by \letting \bibstring to an internal definition that forces upper/lower case.

github.com/plk/biblatex/blob/… in case you need to see the code to understand what's going on.

Ulrike Fischer

@JosephWright can one detect if one is in a lowercasing or uppercasing context?

samcarter

7:09 PM

@all Inspired by @Marei's talk at the recent Dante meeting, I'd like to learn some expl3 during the summer (e.g. two weeks in August). My plan is to tackle one small programming puzzle each day, for example
- print the first n Fibonacci numbers
- sort this list of students by the number of characters in their names

(nothing really tex specific, really just small puzzles which I hope won't take me too much time even if I'm a beginner at expl3)

In case anybody is interested to join, please let me know and I'd put the problems somewhere publicly accessible.

Joseph Wright

@moewe There is a mechanism: I’m not at my computer at the moment, will post an example as sun as I can

@UlrikeFischer No, as we can’t set anything in an expansion context. The system itself knows by paying an argument

moewe

@JosephWright @UlrikeFischer We'll push out github.com/plk/biblatex/pull/1233 as soon as possible to CTAN to hopefully keep the major disruptions for users at a minimum.

Ulrike Fischer

@JosephWright couldn't one have something similar to texorpdfstring?

moewe

As I say, I don't think the actual feature the patch implements gets used a lot, but I can't be sure so it would be great if we could get the patch back on track somehow.

David Carlisle

7:27 PM

@moewe in anycase sorry about the breakage, normally you'd get warnning in advance via latex-dev, but the June release broke \label in uppercased sections so this PL4 update didn't get much advance warning. (The main change, to use \text_uppercase:n happened already in the June release, just that by chance the patch still matched, but the further PL4 re-arrangement makes it no longer match)

Joseph Wright

8:45 PM

@UlrikeFischer Yes, I guess so - it would need to allow for upper/lower/title/title-first I suppose

@UlrikeFischer Would be an additional list to look for: need a name

David Carlisle

@JosephWright a list or a command like \NoCaseChange you use inline \UpperLowerTitle == \text_upper_lower_title:nnn which expands to#1 #2 or#3, depending?

David Carlisle

9:17 PM

@samcarter I would start with some basic l3 code, such as

\ExplSyntaxOn
\cs_set:Npn\;#1#2{#2#1e}\cs_set:Npn\.#1#2{#2#1#1}~\cs_set:Npn
\>#1{#1P}\cs_set:Npn\<#1#2{#2t#1}\cs_set:Npn~\!#1#2#3{#3#2#1}
\cs_new:Npn~\x#1{#1{\!cod\;mu\<cnl\.sa}{a\<ir\;lc}\!ai{\>{#1{
\!ra{\;v\;ryp}}{}}\;ni\.{p}a\;l{}\>{~}\.z}#1{\<osp}}\x~\use:c

moewe

9:30 PM

@UlrikeFischer @JosephWright Opened github.com/plk/biblatex/issues/1234 to track reenabling the patches. If there is any development on the LaTeX side a heads-up would be appreciated (ideas on how to proceed are also very welcome).

Ulrike Fischer

9:43 PM

@moewe you could open an issue in latex3

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$TeX - LaTeX$ TeX, LaTeX and Friends