I don't mind putting this on the main site, but unsure if it fits there, so I'll ask here first. There are a lot of new features for package/class writers (hooks, sockets, templates, ...). Is there a base class that class writers can use, since presumably the standard classes will not be re-written to provide these interfaces (or will they)?

I always was under the impression that the last "e" in "LaTeX2e" stands for "Euler's e" but someone noted that it "just stands for a very small number". Which is it?

@Lupino latinification of epsilon, så small number.

@daleif so "someone" was right. thanks. Now, i find it funny that they went from "2.09" to "2 something small". That's why i thought of Euler, since it is larger than 2.09

@Lupino It was Addison-Wesley's idea - suggest a small change from 2.09 on the way to 3

you never stop learning :D

@JosephWright and as we all know L3 comes out any moment now

@Skillmon texdev.net/2024/11/11/the-mythical-latex3

Meanwhile, pdfa.org/event/pdf-days-europe-2025

Good morning everyone, I'm writing a paper using Overleaf. The issue I am experiencing with "@inproceedings" in the bibliography is that this entry forces the title to be in lower-case letters. Why?

@CroCo Maybe the bib style you use enforces that.

@JosephWright that doesn't count!

@mickep I don't know. I am using a template provided by Springer.

@CroCo If they provide the template use their template. Most likely they'll not use your results 1:1 anyway but will give it to a typesetter who'll retouch it

@Skillmon Springer maybe even don't use TeX in the end...

@mickep Almost certainly they don't

@Lupino Actually it stands for a very large number, because it's used to mean the first uncountable ordinal, that is, the supremum of all countable ordinals.

@egreg Unusual notation for that. ;)

The problem I face with templates from IEEE and Springer is that they tend to be quite unreliable.

Certain templates are considerably outdated. Given the substantial funding available, might it be possible for them to employ some Tex experts?

@CroCo What makes you think there is funding available?

@CroCo In my subject area, there's been a drift away from 'templates' back toward accepting more classical manuscripts, as this makes it a lot easier for authors to shift between journals - so I'm not sure improving 'templates' is a good idea

(I keep suggesting this to the ACS)

@JosephWright Certainly, there exists substantial funding. This funding is derived from various sources, including journal and conference fees, as well as publication and other online access fees obtained from academic institutions.

@JosephWright What is ACS?

@CroCo There's money going in, what I mean is we've no idea of the overall finances - once you allow for existing commitments, there is likely not much left - that's before profit margins for the commercial side

@CroCo American Chemical Society

I have a feeling that the TeX knowledge might not be the best at the big publishers.

@mickep Indeed - all of the typesetting is I think contracted out, so the publishers don't need to know much about this at all

@mickep been a while since I took a look at anything Springer published (I lost my access to their SpringerLink platform when I left university), so I don't know, but chances are you're right.

@JosephWright just keep in mind how much access to a single paper costs, now keep in mind that the author doesn't get a penny of that amount.

@JosephWright I know a very good template which would fit that: \documentclass{article} \begin{document}\author{Your Name Here}\title{Your Title Here}\maketitle Your Contents Here\end{document}

@Skillmon I know the costs, I meant that all of this is already built into the business model - it's not cash just sitting in an account without being assigned to something

@JosephWright obviously, yes.

@Skillmon Well yes, I've suggested as I say to the ACS we do more or less that, but radio-silence

@Skillmon I'm thinking that publishers I broadly trust set fees that might seem at first look to be high - the money does fund useful stuff even if we are suspicious of the profil margin at some publishers

@mickep as we learned a while ago, Duden has outsourced their typesetting and they will use TeX.

@Skillmon Yes, but that is more special. Springer also uses TeX for some books at least.

@mickep Quite - books are different

@JosephWright well, the guys who proofread do it for free (peer review, obviously there'll be more proofreading down the line), the guys who author it do it for free (researches, not paid by the publisher), then they have their typesetters, editors who do the real proofreading and server maintenance. I always think their fees are too high.

@Skillmon The word "scam" comes to my mind...

Upon submitting my manuscript, the publisher contacted all authors to verify their work prior to conducting their own review process. They explicitly mentioned the bib files as they do have their own style. I don't know what the hell that is supposed to mean.

Indeed, I have identified an error in their own review. They substituted a "D" with a "G" in one of the references I utilized.

@mickep \varepsilon_0 would be too complicated.

@egreg I can see that.

@egreg Oh \mbox {\m@th \if b\expandafter \@car \f@series \@nil \boldmath \fi \LaTeX \kern .15em2$_{\textstyle \varepsilon_{0} }$}

@Skillmon Researchers don't do it for free, though - it's part of our paid employment - I do see what you mean but it's not like I write chemistry articles with no remuneration

@JosephWright do you get paid by the publisher?

@Skillmon No, like I said, it's part of my paid employment - that's not the same as being paid by a publisher

@Skillmon I can only observe that there are various learned societies doing publishing and not obviously making significant amounts from it, but still charging >£1k per article. There are others who do seem to make significant amounts, but they also seem to charge more.

@JosephWright still the publisher doesn't pay any money for the contents of the article, that's completely funded by others. Yes, the authors get money, but there is no cost for the publishers there. Same for the peer-reviews.

A big concern is money or not, how do we ensure that electronic articles remain available - paying 'for ever' doesn't really work but I'm not sure there's an obvious better approach

@Skillmon This is all true, but that's worked for >300 years ...

@JosephWright well, the societies do funding and other stuff the researchers benefit from requiring that money, but what does Springer do except for having a well known name and set of generally well received journals with that money? Do they fund research programs?

@Skillmon No, and I do see the concern about profit margins at some commercial publishers - but I'm not keen on authors being paid, probably because in my area they are not all academics - industrial research needs to be published too

Imho, research funded by public money should be publicly available free of charge (or at least for a reasonable price), not kept behind paywalls by some publishers.

@Skillmon It is, though, in the same way it was in the days of dead trees - visit a university library or your national library ....

I guess again I worry a lot about industry - with a free-to-read model, exactly where do they pay for the research they consume?

I'm thinking big industry: BASF etc.

@JosephWright I don't advocate for authors being paid by the publishers.

@Skillmon I was pinged (due to @car) :D

@CarLaTeX lol

@CarLaTeX :)

@Skillmon I didn't think you were, but I know some people do

@JosephWright then I misunderstood your "I'm not keen ..." to be directly in response to my ranting :)

@DavidCarlisle Oh, secret modified fonts.

@egreg faster than you by mere seconds twice in a row?! Must be my lucky day :)

@mickep I thought you'd like that question, fixing subscript position by moving the base off-axis seems a novel approach.

@DavidCarlisle Indeed, looked very nice!

@Lupino a small step to latex3 (which is older than 2e by some years)

@cfr No, each room has a PC that you can use (although most people I think bring their laptop). I just thought the sign wording was funny. I teach with chalk anyway, so no need for a computer in my classes.

@AlanMunn Don't you need the PC at all? For e.g. lecture capture or attendance monitoring? (I do a mix of teaching styles, but when I am at the board still need the PC for attendance monitoring and to point the camera for lecture capture)

@JosephWright No. I don't care about attendance (and neither does the university) and lectures aren't recorded.

@AlanMunn Ah

@AlanMunn You don't have the pressure we do then :)

@AlanMunn Ah, you mean lectures are not recorded by you - we are always reminded that students may be making ad hoc recordings of anything

@JosephWright I guess not, thankfully. We do have to report date of last attendance for students who fail the class, but for that I just use the last problem set they turned in or exam they took. This is mainly used to stop people registering for classes to get federal student loans but not actually attending.

@JosephWright I see. That makes sense.

@AlanMunn Yes, although in my area we have labs - we've always tracked attendance there, and if you are not doing the labs, something is likely up

@JosephWright I guess that's true, although recording without consent is a serious violation of our student academic code, so if people get caught doing it it can have serious consequences.

(I had to sign into labs as an undergrad - tutorials were also logged)

@AlanMunn Yeah, I'm aware of the complexity - this comes up when staff leave (the uni owns copyright on teaching materials, but doesn't have performance rights to recordings)

@JosephWright Interesting. We own the copyright to teaching materials typically unless they were developed with specific extra funding from the university. But I've always been very resistant to developing online courses anyway. (Apart from the fact that I'm not sure how effective they are).

@AlanMunn There have been some 'interesting' discussions at my work about exactly what the university owns - basically is it purely if you are directed to make something, or does it cover stuff you decide to do - not totally clear

@JosephWright Yes I can see that. I assume in chemistry there are substantial intellectual property issues outside of written material.

@AlanMunn Indeed there are

@AlanMunn For research, it's pretty clear though

@JosephWright But if you develop something new, and it makes money, do you get a share?

@AlanMunn Yes - staff are normally named on the patents, which are owned by the university - pretty standard

@JosephWright Ok. Since our research will never result in a patent, this is not something I know much about. :)

@AlanMunn yes, we have that too (well in most rooms). but we have lots of (non-class)rooms which have electronic locks. but we have not had anything you could use chalk on for years.

@cfr I would hate that. I can't stand white boards, apart from the fact they are much worse for the environment.

@cfr Maths stick to chalk at UEA, so there are a few rooms that have backboards, but most of ours are whiteboards (if they have something usable at all)

@JosephWright it isn't because of immigration? that's when they started getting serious about attendance in most classes. before the gov required that, it depended on dept. but it is used for welfare stuff, too.

@cfr Luckily we share a building with the mathematicians, who would riot if they changed our classrooms to whiteboards.

@AlanMunn I suspect I would be unable to use chalk now. whiteboards I quite like, but lots of it is glassboards now and those are horrible.

@cfr Immigration does come up too, with the idea that if you monitor everyone then you don't pick out Tier 4 students - but in my School, we have precisely one Tier 4 student at the moment, and of course those students know they need to record their presence - so it's entirely different

@cfr We are definitely worried about student welfare - arguments that you don't have to track every event have not been well received

@JosephWright ah. we have rather more students who need monitoring.

@cfr My take is that we can't help but pick out Tier 4 students, so should accept that and track them independently of anything else

@JosephWright they don't track lecture attendance mostly, but my classes are mixed method anyway.

@cfr We have to record all in person events

@JosephWright I'm not sure I agree there. yes, they are picked out, but they are not picked out publicly.

@JosephWright good grief.

@JosephWright I also don't record my classes. which is to say, I stop them recording my classes.

@cfr I can see that, but it's a decision made by the UK Government - and they don't actually require we track attendance either, only engagement in the course

@cfr We have automatic recording, but currently release to students is opt-in - we will likely move to opt-out but I believe the feeling is that our contract at the moment doesn't allow the university to require that lectures are released

@JosephWright true. but there are actually uk students we have to track attendance for on widening access pathways for finance reasons.

@JosephWright we have automatic recording with automatic release (which my dept has unwisely made automatic instant release). but we can opt-out.

@cfr Ah, right - similar, probably the same tools

@JosephWright I have had students demand I check we are not being recorded before they will say anything else. I have also had someone from IT interrupt my class to ask if it is being recorded.

@cfr Wow!

@cfr I guess you talk about stuff that students might worry about - we get that in say law or psychology - in chemistry, there's not a lot we could say that would be confidential

@JosephWright I unplug the microphone if they say something like that, just in case.

@cfr This is some Black Mirror vibes.

@JosephWright this. especially I sometimes have medics in my classes. if you are a GP, you are not going to want to say what went on before Shipman if Big Brother is recording you for posterity ....

@AlanMunn yes. the system is called Panoptico. what could possibly go wrong?

@cfr :)

@JosephWright yes, that is a big part of it. being recorded that way also affects my teaching, though it took me a while to figure that out. I have no problem with individual recorders, but I realised I was behaving weirdly with the room recording.

@cfr Fair enough

@cfr Some colleagues say the same - I guess my view is that it's better if it's entirely automatic, as you then don't think about it at all - I really don't care about the recordings, I think they are useless but 'expected' so just get on with it

@JosephWright I didn't think about it consciously. after about 6 weeks, I worked out I was very reluctant to go near the green light and realised why.

@JosephWright I can't imagine having this kind of system.

@AlanMunn It's very common in the UK - Warwick were doing it 15 years ago

@AlanMunn Students expect recordings, at least in science subjects

@AlanMunn it is horrible. it was supposed to be opt-in, but they changed it at the last moment.

'How can I catch up if there is not a recording'

@JosephWright ;)

@cfr I guess it very much depends on expectations - for my subject, what I say is entirely 'standard', so all that a recording shows up is how I choose to present stuff that's all in the textbooks

@cfr We've had pressure about live streaming - at the moment that's receded, but I think it will be back at some point

@JosephWright I can see that. but there are things I say which would sound terrible taken out of context. I often need to play devil's advocate and argue for something nobody else is inclined to argue. it would be very, very easy to present 'evidence' that I'm in favour of eating babies or something.

@cfr Sure - we don't have to lecture recordings, we have to have something recorded - so here probably a 'vingette' (~5-minute video) would be the way I can imagine people going - again, I have colleagues who put a lot of effort to do that sort of thing

@JosephWright do students not come up and tell you confidential things at all? that's the other thing I worry about: with instant release, there's no chance to edit at all.

@cfr There is a bit of a worry, which is why we have a light (as you seem to have - ours is green for 'safe', red for recording) - but if we go out-out, there will still be a time delay to let us chop the ends off the recording - the rumour is a 2h delay

@JosephWright ah, yes, I can see that.

@cfr I've never had a student say anything to me in a lecture space, but perhaps I'm just unapproachable :)

@JosephWright ours is green for recording.

@cfr Well that's nice and clear :)

@JosephWright really?

Not like studio lights are always red/orange

@cfr Yeah, I get 'can I talk to you' but that's it - even that is extremely rare

@cfr Only my advisees (personal tutees) would have a reason to, and at the moment I'm lucky I don't have too many of those

@JosephWright huh.

@cfr I get the odd student walking up and asking 'can I talk to you', I say yes, we walk back to my office before I ask what about

@cfr I always say that recordings are not the issue with confidential stuff in a lecture space - it's not the right place for that conversation, recording or not

@JosephWright my students expect to be able to talk to me in the break/after class in situ. and I don't have anywhere private to talk to them anyway. plus they very rarely start with 'can I talk to you?' they usually just start talking.

@cfr You are clearly more approachable than me :)

@JosephWright in an ideal world ...

@JosephWright ;)

@JosephWright given that my class discussions often involve people talking about personal experiences, I suspect this may be subject-related. also, I think gender affects it, too.

@cfr Like I said, the pushback at UEA has been from subject areas like yours where personal experience comes in (I guess perhaps because I'm a scientist, I'm surprised that personal experience is ever a topic for discussion ...)

@JosephWright really? I can see it wouldn't be in some subjects. but you think you can talk about philosophy without any discussion of personal experiences?

less relevant if I'm teaching logic, I admit.

@cfr Like I said, I'm a scientist with very much a 'system based' outlook

@cfr I was thinking e.g. social science - we all have personal experience, but research is based on anonymised data using statistically-significant sample sizes

@cfr :)

@cfr I've no idea what you actually teach in in philosophy, so that might be an issue :)

Anyway, back to Unicode

Hello guys, me again with a possibly noob question

What can cause \includegraphics[width=\linewidth]{fig.pdf} to result in a overfull too wide warning?

got it, I am big dummy

@JosephWright yes, I tend to forget this.

@JosephWright a chemist might present evidence that water is H2O. a philosopher might argue that the ancient greeks meant (or did not mean) H2O when they used (the ancient greek word for) 'water'. I guess a linguist would want a full sentence? (@AlanMunn)

@nathdwek something else on the line? is it indented at the start of a paragraph?

@DavidCarlisle you, on the other hand, are of course occupied celebrating the brexit day.

@cfr Oh some linguists like words too, although it's probably the most ill-defined concept we have. But linguists also like the H2O vs water discussion too; it's basically the same as Frege's morning star/evening star example.

@mickep The day my citizenship became (relatively) useless.

@mickep that's not nice

@DavidCarlisle indeed, would have been better if you stayed...

@cfr

@cfr yes indeed (sorry for the double mention), was not paying enough attention, realized when preparing a mwe

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{multicol}
\usepackage{enumitem}

\begin{document}

\begin{multicols}{2}
\begin{enumerate}
\item I am
\item She is
\end{enumerate}
\end{multicols}

\begin{enumerate}[resume]% resume does not work here!
\item You are
\item We are
\end{enumerate}

\end{document}

You suggested me with \newlist. Is it useful here?

@DG see the doc on resume which says This is done locally. If you want global resuming, see next section on series.

@AlanMunn indeed, but Twin Earth is more sci-fi.

@AlanMunn I wasn't sure where philosophy ended and linguistics began ...

@cfr Yes it's a bit of a fuzzy line in some areas for sure.

@cfr And @DavidCarlisle personifies Searle's Chinese room. :)

@DavidCarlisle oh no

@mickep 'brexit day' ???? please, no-o-o

@AlanMunn 计算机也有思想

@AlanMunn maybe the man inside it.

@AlanMunn is word really the most ill-defined? compared with some philosophical concepts it seems almost concrete.

@DG yes:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{multicol}
\usepackage{enumitem}
\newlist{genum}{enumerate}{1}
\setlist[genum]{label=\arabic*.,ref=\arabic*,resume=*}
\begin{document}

\begin{multicols}{2}
  \begin{genum}
    \item I am
    \item She is
  \end{genum}
\end{multicols}

\begin{genum}[resume]% resume does not work here!
  \item You are
  \item We are
\end{genum}

\end{document}

@DavidCarlisle or use \newlist.

@nathdwek oh, yes. mwes are good for that.

@cfr or stick to enumerate package:-)

@cfr ’sensitive’

@mickep 'sane'

@DavidCarlisle I would not know ... I cannot say I have ever used it. I either just customised list or I used enumitem.

so 'stick' may not be entirely apt.

@cfr Yes, well that's only because you (philosophers) don't have much experience with polysynthetic or agglutinative languages where a single thing that you might reasonable call a word acts as a whole sentence. But even in languages like English it's nowhere near as defined as you might think.

@AlanMunn oh, it's not that I think it is especially defined. just that there is so much competition for ill-definedness.

@AlanMunn but now I am curious about the languages you mention.

@cfr Take, for example, the followng sentence in Inuktitut (spoken in Northern Canada): Nunaling-mi nuna-qa-lauq-sima-nngit-tuq. This has two "words" (this is a transliterated form, with hyphens indicating morpheme boundaries). It is ambiguous between meaning "There is a certain town that she hasn't lived in" and "She hasn't lived in any town".

@cfr 'Nunaling-mi' roughly means town and 'nuna-qa-lauq-sima-nngit-tuq' means she hasn't lived there

Or a Mohawk example: Kanekwarúnyu wa’-k-akya’tawi’tsher-ú:ni which also has two words and means "I made a polka-dotted dress". 'Kanekwarúnyu' means 'dotted' and 'wa’-k-akya’tawi’tsher-ú:ni' means 'I made a dress'.

@AlanMunn I usually mention Mark Twain's “Constantinopolitanischerdudelsackspfeifenmachersgesellschafft”

@egreg Yes and that's part of the problem. English has the same compounding properties as German (roughly) but we just write them with spaces.

@AlanMunn I really wasn't trying to claim 'word' was well-defined. only that it would probably not be a good candidate for 'most ill-defined' in philosophy.

@cfr That may be true.

@AlanMunn actually, I think it is worse that this. I got very frustrated in one class in grad school because the instructor seemed oblivious to languages which didn't fit the model she was explaining. (I may be being unfair here, but this was my impression at the time.) and I certainly didn't have anything as dissimilar as polysynthetic or agglutinative languges in mind.

@cfr Yes, I think that philosophers even of language have a limited understanding of how languages work more broadly.

@AlanMunn do the words break down at all to subject/verb? I mean are there connections between 'I made a' and, say, 'I cooked a' or 'you made a'? (or 'I made the'?)

@AlanMunn in welsh, we write them with spaces and then change a bunch of the letters so it isn't too obvious what we're up to.

@cfr :)

@cfr Well that's a tricky question to answer. I think the simplest way to think of it would be compare a sentence like "I walked" with the emphatic "I DID walk". I would analyze the syntax of these two sentences identically, even though 'did' is a word in the second sentence and its correspondent in the first is the affix –ed. So roughly that's what people do with these languages. Various bits of things all get combined morphologically even though the syntax is arguably the same.

@cfr But in many of these types of languages, the subject and object "positions" are not really present; instead they are null and related to agreement morphology on the verb. Of course in English we can't do this because we have no null subjects or objects except in imperatives and recipes.

@cfr A better analogy from English would be things like "That guy, I really like him" or "I really like him, that guy". which appear quite regularly in spoken English, even though we would generally not write them. So you can do that with both the subject and the object: "That guy, he's a famous linguist" or "He's a famous linguist, that guy".

@cfr Now imagine doing it at the same time with both the subject and object (which is pretty hard to do in English): "Me, I really like him, that guy" or "That guy, me, I really like him". So like that, but instead of pronouns just agreement morphology on the verb.

@cfr So the actual noun phrases aren't really in "subject" and "object" position; they can be freely ordered because they're related to null subject and object positions via the morphology.

@AlanMunn spacesareoverrated.

@AlanMunn I guess you mean something different from the verb and subject, say, being combined into a single word, but would languages which do that be a better analogy than English?

@Skillmon German's very environmentally friendly.

@AlanMunn sorry.

@cfr Yes, so Italian or Spanish, for example, do this regularly with subjects. None of the main European languages do it with objects though, except Basque.

@cfr But at least from my perspective, the English example is still pretty accurate. In a sentence like "That guy, I really like him" what the object of the verb? It has to be 'him', but then what do we do with 'that guy'? So it's not really about combining the subject and the verb, as much as the subject and object positions are simply null pronouns.