TeX, LaTeX and Friends

CarLaTeX

7:34 AM

@DavidCarlisle Buon Natale ai linguisti e a tutti!

Rmano

9:08 AM

Happy Christmas/Buon Natale to everybody!

samcarter

11:08 AM

Happy Xmas to all of you!

@UlrikeFischer Please tell the Bär that he rocks the Christmas look with his Santa hat!

3

tush

2:12 PM

I want my document to be typed as flush left. So inserting \flushleft right after \begin{document} indeed has an effect. But I also have text inside a minipage and nothing is changed inside it. How can I fix it?

Ulrike Fischer

@tush flushleft is an environment, use \raggedright if you want to use a command. Apart from this: such questions are much easier to answer if you show a minimal example.

tush

@UlrikeFischer What I have in mind is the following:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\setlength\textwidth{10cm}

\begin{document}
\flushleft
\lipsum[1]

\begin{minipage}[t][][c]{0.8\textwidth}%
\lipsum[2-3]
\end{minipage}
\end{document}

And as I said, the text inside the minipage is not `flushleft`

Ulrike Fischer

5

A: How do I make text raggedright inside all miniboxes?

You can use the \@minipagerestore hook: \documentclass{article} \usepackage{lipsum} \makeatletter \let\@minipagerestore=\raggedright \makeatother \begin{document} \lipsum[4] \noindent \begin{minipage}[t]{0.4\linewidth} \lipsum[3] \end{minipage} \end{document} Another option is to patch \...

tush

@UlrikeFischer Indeed. Wonderful. Thanks a lot!

barbara beeton

4:29 PM

Fröhliche Weinachten an alle.

4

Ulrike Fischer

7:05 PM

@barbarabeeton practicing for TUG? As @DavidCarlisle could confirm this should be FröhlicheWeihnachtenanalle.

barbara beeton

@UlrikeFischer -- No, actually this was how my family greeted each other when I was a kid. My maternal grandparents came to the U.S. from Germany, and all their children (8 who lived to adulthood) except one lived in the same city, and gathered together for holidays. (But I probably should start practicing. My grasp of spoken Germany is, at best, rusty. Frank Mittelbach claims my German accent is execrable.)

Ulrich Diez

8:43 PM

@barbarabeeton I suppose with a device like this, the likelihood is quite small that while you are working towards a deadline, it will crash in a way where all work is lost ;-)

(I just remembered s.th. that happened about 25 years ago:
A friend had two days left until his paper was due. He had everything on computer but for whatsoever reason he had no backups. He intended to copy his postscript files to floppy disks and take the floppies to the copy store for printing. But that didn't work. The computer could no longer read from the hard disk in question. Nice timing. So I was woken up in the middle of the night and asked for advice.
After about two hours of fiddling around I found out what the problem was: The hard disk had a 4-pin Molex socket for connecting to …

barbara beeton

9:40 PM

@UlrichDiez -- Indeed. Direct-to-paper did have its benefits. But if you made a mistake, it was a real pain to erase; white-out wasn't permitted. My masters thesis was typed on red-framed bond paper using an IBM Executive with carbon ribbon, and diagrams added in india ink with a crow-quill pen. To erase, very careful scraping with the corner of a razor blade was employed. Thank goodness copies could be made by photocopier; no carbon paper!

cfr

10:34 PM

@PauloCereda To thank you for the card & wish you Nadolig llawen:

% !TEX TS-program = pdflatex
% !TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode
% arara: pdflatex
\pdfminorversion=7
\documentclass[10pt.a4paper,british]{article}
\usepackage{cfr-lm}
\usepackage{geometry}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{verse}
\begin{document}
\poemtitle{Account of a Visit from Drake Nicholas}
\begin{verse}
  'Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro' Duck House,\\
  Not a creature was stirring, not even a grouse;\\
  The stockings were hung 'mongst the tree roots with care,\\
  In hopes that Drake Nicholas soon would be there;\\

[Not very good & not a picture - sorry!] <3

Ulrich Diez

10:52 PM

@barbarabeeton Sounds really painful. When I did my military service, I was ordered to spend three weeks in the office because of broken hand bones. The antiquated office equipment reflected the fact that these were tasks that were not important in either a strategic or tactical sense: The mechanical typewriter (Olympia SM3) and desk lamp were from 1958, and the furniture was from 1973. ;-)

I was to type material output lists from morning till night. I was allowed to use carbon paper because everything was needed three times. But I was told not to produce whatsoever typo, as one was not allowed to use whiteout: According to the equipment plan the office was not entitled to have that. ;-) Besides that, the paper was of the lovely grey coloring of recycling paper.

barbara beeton

11:02 PM

@UlrichDiez -- One of the secretaries in the office was such a fast and accurate typist that if she made a single typo on a full-page letter, it was quicker for her to tear up that copy and start over, than to make a correction. (It may actually have been her typewriter that I "borrowed" to type my thesis. The typewriter on my desk, although it had a marvelous "international" keyboard (lots of accents on dead keys) was monospace, with an inked ribbon.)

cfr

@UlrichDiez How do you type with broken hand bones?!

Nasser

I just spend 2 hrs to find where a latex bug was coming from. It turned out when I use

\usepackage[fit]{truncate}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\fancyhead[R]{\truncate{.5\headwidth}{\leftmark}}

And also use math on chapter header and also use listing pacakge to typeset this mathematica code `{{x0 -> 1/6, y0 -> 1/2}}` it gives syntax error. So it ia combination of these things. Instead of asking about it and making MWE and worry about it, I simply removed `fancyhdr` package and the problem went away. Another example of where the less packages one uses, the better it is and the less bugs they will …

Ulrich Diez

@cfr Most of the time single/left-handed. ;-) Besides, only metacarpals of my right hand were broken, the fingers sticked out of the plaster cast.

cfr

@Nasser It's better if you don't need the packages. It is not (necessarily) better if you have to roll your own instead ;).

@UlrichDiez Ah, OK. You didn't have to type with your nose. ;)

Ulrich Diez

11:19 PM

@barbarabeeton Since she could memorize a text so easily that it was faster for her to type the page again - why was she a secretary and not a professor?

@cfr Typing with my nose? That might still have been possible somehow. ;-) But I could not do that with my toes...

Nasser

11:44 PM

@cfr I have one core latex file which I put all packages needed and in include that as first thing in every latex file. over the years this core latex file now has so many packages I lost control of what is there and what I need or do not need any more. If I remove something, I am afraid it will break some file somewhere. I have over 100,000 latex file or so in my tree. Here is copy of it. my_core.txt...

but what is the solution? If I do not have a common file, then I have to duplicate many things each time in each latex file. And if I need to make changes, I have to find and edit 100's of files. So that is why I use a common latex file and add any package used there. But it is a big mess now.

one day I need to clean this up and remove as many packages as possible. But this will break things somewhere I am sure.

barbara beeton

@UlrichDiez -- She was typing from shorthand notes, not memory. She probably could have taught at a secretarial school. (Do those still exist?)

Nasser

if I have one dollar each time I find a conflict between latex packages, I would be a millionaire by now.

2

Kadir Şahbaz

@Nasser Absolutely.

barbara beeton

@Nasser -- “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey

cfr

@Nasser I have this, too, but I've been trying to move away from it. I think it is useful to split things up so you have different packages and classes for different purposes. In cases where I'm writing the macros to use at document level, I can change what's under the hood without breaking things. But I don't add (and never have added) everything. I don't load verse in any of my standard classes/packages, because I only use it in certain documents and there's no pattern to which ones.

I think it is more helpful to think in terms of modularity than in terms of a dump of everything you might want to use.

Version control is also helpful. If I really need to typeset an ancient document again, I could retrieve the corresponding versions of any custom classes/packages. Then I'd just need a corresponding version of TeX Live to typeset it!

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