!!/battle

@DavidCarlisle Psmith, the TeX bot: The current score is egreg 0 vs. 0 David. So far, nobody is winning today.

:)

@DavidCarlisle: We need more easy questions. :)

@PauloCereda like this:

@DavidCarlisle o.O

Oh wait, I can upvote it!

@PauloCereda 20 past 1 and you still have votes left?, what are you playing at:-)

@DavidCarlisle I'm playing Minecraft as we speak. :)

@PauloCereda Gonzalo's ahead again (you should make it a 3-way battle:-)

@DavidCarlisle LOL

@DavidCarlisle: will you get M a PS3? You can definitely install emacs on it. :)

@egreg: is it me or you are aiming at 100k in Math.SX too? :)

@PauloCereda probably not (not yet anyway:-)

@DavidCarlisle :)

@PauloCereda we may need some deep statistical analysis to detect whether there is an upward trend:

@DavidCarlisle Oh my!

@DavidCarlisle perhaps I am misusing your code for highlighting? The following doesn't produce the desired result:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{color}
\makeatletter
\def\savepos#1{\leavevmode\pdfsavepos\write\@auxout{%
\gdef\string\save@#1{{\the\pdflastxpos sp }{\the\pdflastypos sp }}}}

\def\xx#1{\expandafter\expandafter\expandafter\@firstoftwo\csname save@#1\endcsname}
\def\yy#1{\expandafter\expandafter\expandafter\@secondoftwo\csname save@#1\endcsname}


\def\hl#1#2{%
\ifx\save@a\@undefined
\else
\leavevmode\smash{\rlap{\vtop{%
\parindent\z@\parskip\z@
\leavevmode\color{yellow}\endgraf
\vskip-\baselineskip

@GonzaloMedina yes I used {c} and {d} in the definition instead of #1 and #2 so it only works once. I just noticed that:-) I suppose I should fix before going to bed:-)

@GonzaloMedina should work now:-)

@DavidCarlisle Yes, it's working now :-) No page breaks are allowed, though, but that addition can wait until tomorrow ;-)

Is this syntax $\{x|\,x\leq 2\quad \text{or}\quad x\geq 3;\, x\in \mathbb{R}\}$ correct as I am new to this field?

@Bugbusters I'd rather use

$\{\, x\in \mathbb{R} \mid x\leq 2\vee x\geq 3\,\}$

or

$\{\, x\in \mathbb{R} \mid x\leq 2\text{ or } x\geq 3\,\}$

I prefer the first one.

@GonzaloMedina: OK. Thank you. I will try both.

In any case, it's better to use \mid for sets instead of | (notice the spacing)

@GonzaloMedina: Confirmed. I will use the first version.

@GonzaloMedina yes page breaking is harder

!!/battle

@PauloCereda Psmith, the TeX bot: The current score is egreg 70 vs. 120 David. So far, David is winning.

Hello!!

@PauloCereda Non at all.

I see @willrobertson has popped up on the main site :-)

@JosephWright Nice to see him

Yesterday a student asked what program I used to create my exercise sheets – they'd look so good. Guess what I answered :)

@cgnieder emacs ;-)

@MarcoDaniel :)

@MarcoDaniel You are now expelled from arara.

:)

@PauloCereda :(

@PauloCereda Nope ;-)

@MarcoDaniel <3

@PauloCereda Indeed the correct answer would have been arara ;-)

@David I see a Lisp answer today! I upvoted it, but also noted that, this upvote "doesn't count"... :)

@kan thanks for the vote (might count for a badge or two one day:-) Yes I'm sure @PauloCereda wishes he used an editor that used lisp as its extension language.

@DavidCarlisle I love Lisp, it reminds me of happier days. :) I always remember a professor of mine that always said to me, "a good prolog system is always made in Lisp." :)

@PauloCereda see you know, deep in your heart you want to be an emacs user.

@DavidCarlisle Don't count on it. :)

@MarcoDaniel That's of course correct :) Everybody loves birds!

!!/eighball will Paulo finally abandon vim for emacs?

hmph, never there when you need him.

@DavidCarlisle Hold on.

!!/help

@PauloCereda Psmith, the TeX bot: Good morning! I'm Psmith, the friendly TeX bot - the p in my name is silent, as in pshrimp. I'm here as a companion to our fellow users in the typographic land. As you probably noticed, I always reply under Paulo's account, but do not despair, I say, my replies are always preceded by my own name. Enjoy your stay at TeX.sx! If you need any help, just ask our chat residents. Cheerio!

!!/eightball will Paulo finally abandon vim for emacs?

@DavidCarlisle Psmith, the TeX bot: I'm deeply sorry, old chap, but the command eighball does not exist. Did you mean: eightball

@DavidCarlisle Psmith, the TeX bot: The great 8-ball says: outlook good.

@PauloCereda your destiny is foretold^^^

@DavidCarlisle LOL

@egreg: First time I saw that you are working with a scr package ;-)

@MarcoDaniel Not really: I find the \deffootnote command quite good.

Can a Windows user help me:

hi

(unstable i-net)

in bibtex with natbib,

got two citations which appear in the text as [14, 15]

to both I'd like to add sth

so far I'm just using plain \cite{a,b}

e.g. [14 (see Appendix VII.), 15 (see Appendix 3)]

(doesn't look good, I do welcome better suggestions of how to add those "comments" to the in-text citation)

(am just reading the natib manual p 7 / 26 ... :)

unfort. there I don't see an example of two citations together

@nuttyaboutnatty use biblatex and then you can work with \cites

so individually that ought to work

@MarcoDaniel should've mentioned I'm looking for a non-bibLAtex solution (unless I'll still have time to spare before the deadline... after which I'll be happy to learn biblatex, too)

could this thing work in bibtex/natbib, too?

@nuttyaboutnatty You can create your own cite command. But as often it's difficult to help without an mwe ;-)

I'll probably stick it into a footnote

[14, 15]²

@MarcoDaniel In those cases \patchcmd of etoolbox works.

@egreg I tried it and I got an error.

@MarcoDaniel Watch out for the spaces in front of \@sect

@MarcoDaniel I removed them. If I change \xpatchcmd to \patchcmd I get the desired result

@egreg Ok. Thanks

@PauloCereda Did you play well?

@egreg I think so. :)

Can somebody please tell me how I can align table cells to the top left?

@moose Use column specifier l

@MarcoDaniel this does only align it to the left, but not to the top. See github.com/MartinThoma/LaTeX-examples/tree/master/documents/… (the facharbeit-rsa.pdf file, at page 20 - its "Literatur.tex")

@moose See e.g.: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/113022/…

@moose l cells only have one line so there is no top or bottom. If any multiple line cells are p then the l cells will align with the top of the p cells.

@moose Your bibliography is really odd. Why do you use parbox inside a column p? Remove these parbox

github.com/MartinThoma/LaTeX-examples/blob/master/documents/…

@MarcoDaniel I wanted to make linebreaks. I've just recognized that I can use \newline. Then I can remove parbox and the cells get aligned to the top. Thanks :-)

@MarcoDaniel @moose that would explain the alignment (as \parbox gives centre alignment by default) (@moose shouldn't you be using bibtex or biber or something for a bibliography f that length rather than making a list by hand?

@DavidCarlisle It's not my decision ;-) I wrote odd ;-)

@MarcoDaniel yes I know:-)

@DavidCarlisle I thought so, too. But I don't know how to do it right. In this case, I just wanted to re-create a document I wrote 4 years ago with OpenOffice. I wanted my LaTeX document to produce roughly the same output as OpenOffice did and I didn't know how to get this with bibtex (and I didn't hear of biber before). Do you know some minimal working examples for bibtex / biber?

@moose biber/biblatex are a bit modern for me but if you are starting out now it might make sense to go that way rather than traditional bibtex (they both use bibtex file format for storing your references) There are lots of examples on this site:-) (but it may not be worth changing an existing document, using either allows you to just use \cite{some-name} and then later your bibliography style can decide if that produces [1] or [Marco2013] or whatever after it has sorted the bibliography...

@moose so it is a far more flexible way of producing a reference list, but since you already have one, then just making it look right perhaps makes sense...

@DavidCarlisle I try to make this document as good as I can (so I really like to switch to biber/biblatex) as I might use this as a template later. I'd rather like to spend some time now trying to do it right than when I have to write my bachelor thesis. Now I'll go through the biber / bibtex tags to learn how they are used, what's the difference and related questions (currently: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/25701/…).

@DavidCarlisle Are you old fashion? You are a member of the LaTeX3 core team.

@MarcoDaniel Didn't you know? LaTeX3 wil only support BibTeX, not BibLaTeX

@PauloCereda Which team won? :P)

@Brent.Longborough Oh no ;-)

@MarcoDaniel Seriously, though, although I'm much more old fashion than David, I can't understand why people still stick to {pdftex,bibtex,ps-anything} for new documents...

@MarcoDaniel Oh, and type 1 fonts

@Brent.Longborough All the good things ;-) Whereby my first document written with LaTeX used \begin{thebibliography} ;-)

@MarcoDaniel And I even have my doubts about Computer Modern. (A hushed silence falls on the chat. Rarely has such a sacrilege ever been published here. The moderators, overcome by bewilderment, clutch at the margins for support...)

@MarcoDaniel I'm sure I can think of more. Oh yes, and .dvi

@Brent.Longborough Penitentiagite!

@Brent.Longborough LaTeX team of course

@egreg I'm also an adept of the Comte de Saint-Germain

@MarcoDaniel Yes but I haven't really uses latex3 since before LaTeX2e came out, I got a bit distracted:-)

@PauloCereda We have to organize a novena for reparation of the sacrilege.

@DavidCarlisle Yesss. They say that's going to be ALex Ferguson's next job

!!/choose Write a book in Comic Sans, Write a book with Word, 10 Ave Marias, 10 Magnificats

@Brent.Longborough Psmith, the TeX bot: The great oracle says: Write a book in Comic Sans

No! Please

@Brent.Longborough don't argue with an oracle

@DavidCarlisle Sun did, and look what happened to Java.

@Brent.Longborough it got used to build a parrot?

@DavidCarlisle I think Parrot is written in C; there's also (at least) an implementation of the interpreter in Ruby

@Brent.Longborough arara! But it's not a parrot!

@egreg some kind of squawking bird :-)

@egreg Just pulling legs here, nothing to see, move along...

!!/eightball is java a good language?

@DavidCarlisle Psmith, the TeX bot: The great 8-ball says: only egreg knows the answer.

Now, more seriously. Has anyone studied Free Sans, from a typographical viewpoint?

@egreg is Java a good language ?

!!/eightball Is Java a good language?

@Brent.Longborough Psmith, the TeX bot: The great 8-ball says: yes.

Unglaublich

!!/eightball Is Java a good programming language?

@Brent.Longborough Psmith, the TeX bot: The great 8-ball says: don't count on it.

!!/fortune

@Brent.Longborough Psmith, the TeX bot: Here is your fortune: Stop procrastinating.

@Brent.Longborough I don't think it's any better than StixGeneral. It's just a collection of Times based fonts, integrated by whatever is available, I believe.

@egreg And so the search goes on...

@egreg Basically, I want to avoid things like Times, because I want to stand out (but, of course, I still need to be beautiful and readable)

But somehow, EB Garamond seems a bit out-of-place in technical documents

Except for alchemy

@Brent.Longborough Are you that old?

@Brent.Longborough Have you ever met the emperor Rudolph II? ;-)

@egreg LOL. The Comte de Saint-Germain has many secrets

@egreg No, definitely not

@egreg But Jacques de Molay was a great friend of my father's

@egreg It was my father who drove the charrette de foin

@egreg :)

@Brent: I'm back from a churrascaria. :)

@PauloCereda Oh, drool!

@PauloCereda Did you have the Vegetarian option?

@Brent.Longborough Quite expensive, though. I almost had to leave a kidney there. :)

@Brent.Longborough Nope. :)

@PauloCereda What's a good rodízio cost these days, if that's not rude?

@Brent.Longborough Not at all. :) I think it's around R$ 45,00.

The full rodízio.

@PauloCereda About €17 - almost gratis LOL

I'd heard that in SP and Rio, the "more sophisticated" rodízios were charging around R$100

But then the Memsahib moves in very refined circles... LOL

@Brent.Longborough LOL

@Brent: when I organize a TUG conference, I'll take the guys to a rodízio. Sounds like a good plan, don't you think? :)

@PauloCereda I'd say, yes, definitely. However, one possible problem in this potential trend: TeX => Academic => Vegetarian?

@Brent.Longborough Oh. I can't think of any vegetarian options nearby.

@PauloCereda What, no capim?

@Brent.Longborough what? vegetarian scientists? Definitely not in Prague or Paris

@Brent.Longborough Ah, in that case, the menu would be napiê, sugar cane and a lovely capim-gordura. :)

@tohecz No, I was thining a bit more about "Social Sciences", but then again, they use Word...

@PauloCereda Napiê, eh? I learn something new every day...

@Brent.Longborough Social Sciences? What an oxymoron :D

@Brent.Longborough From the old times when I had a horse. :)

@Brent: don't forget, I'm a typical caipira. :)

@tohecz Hence the quotes. We need new Unicode characters "LEFT/RIGHT SATIRICAL QUOTE MARK"

As Oscar Wilde might have said, 'It is not Social, neither is it Science'

@PauloCereda I'm not sure a typical caipira would understand LaTeX, much less Java! :p)

btw, have you seen this question? any opinions?

@Brent.Longborough Quite. :) I also know how to shoe a horse, deal with crops, play berrante and viola. :)

What is the "cool TeX compilation tool arara."

@User17670 I never heard of it am the author. :) It's a tool written in Java which can help with the automation process of producing a document. You can add all the needed steps for compiling your document, say, run pdflatex 2 times, then bibtex once, then pdflatex 2 more times, and so on.

Oh right, like that seen in Texmaker. Cool

@User17670 Paulo is very modest. arara can also deliver babies... :-)

That's always a bonus...

@Brent.Longborough That's a cegonha, Brent. :)

@User17670 Of course, babies delivered by arara usually don't have very happy lives, as they are constantly irritated by poor keming

@PauloCereda That's for everyone else; baby typographers are delivered by the arara

Yay, @JosephWright is here. :)

@Brent.Longborough aaaaaah! :)

Quack!

@JosephWright: I need your opinion. For me all question of the user adam related to the package cleanthesis are too localized. The package isn't part of CTAN. Adam can ask the developer of the package

@MarcoDaniel 'Not on CTAN' \neq 'too localized'

Hello

@JosephWright :-)

@MarcoDaniel: arara was not on CTAN and you were asking questions and answering stuff. :)

<3

@PauloCereda Ok you convinced me ;-)

@MarcoDaniel <3

@JosephWright missing $ inserted

@DavidCarlisle He used \ensuremath

@MarcoDaniel There is documentary evidence to the contrary (although he could tamper with the evidence using extra powers at his disposal)

!!/eightball was @JosephWright using \ensuremath?

@PauloCereda Psmith, the TeX bot: The great 8-ball says: there's a disturbance in the Force.

Proof. ^^

@PauloCereda Lemma

@MarcoDaniel Oh. :)

!!/cricket

Psmith, the TeX bot, in fixed font mode: Let's take a look at the last cricket results:

- England Lions 444/7 * v New Zealanders 285/10
- Surrey 237/10 &  164/6 * v Durham 286/10
- Sri Lanka 195/3 * v Sri Lanka Cricket Combined XI 277/7
- Kolkata Knight Riders 116/5 * v Royal Challengers Bangalore 115/9
- Zimbabwe 134/9 * v Bangladesh 168/7
- Warwickshire v Sussex
- Worcestershire 132/5  v Nottinghamshire 61/1 *
- Derbyshire 12 * v Lancashire
- Scotland 147/3 * v Essex 217/7
- Glamorgan v Unicorns

ooh Unicorns!

hello

@user4035 Hi

@PauloCereda I've been playing with tables yesterday, and found the same issue as the guy here: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/68732/…

They used a dirty hack to fix it: adding an empty column. How can it be reported?

@user4035 Maybe reporting it to the author.

@PauloCereda author of array package?

@user4035 Did you look at the array manual? :)

@DavidCarlisle: ^^

Author has been notified. :)

@PauloCereda no, I looked into wikipedia article about latex tables

or what do you mean?

@user4035 Every package has a manual, which describes the implementation and usage. And there's always the contact info.

Seems old

Try here: texdoc.net

Type the package name and the manual will popup.

@tohecz Hi Tom! :)

!!/eightball Should I update Sublime Text 3 while I do heavy text editing?

@dıʞsdoʇ Psmith, the TeX bot: The great 8-ball says: outlook not so good.

@PauloCereda There are 2 authors: Frank Mittelbach and David Carlisle

Good, I'll wait.

So, we can notify 1 of them easily

@user4035 Yep, gods of the TeX pantheon. :)

Actually, both are reachable here, but we prefer annoying @DavidCarlisle. :)

!!/eightball Can @dıʞsdoʇ have some ice cream? :)

@PauloCereda Psmith, the TeX bot: The great 8-ball says: never in a million years.

Hey, that was rude, Psmith. :(

@PauloCereda don't tell psmith that I have some delicious in the freezer :)

@dıʞsdoʇ ooh! :)

@PauloCereda hello! Btw, don't you know how much a quality of a microphone depends on its price? :)

@tohecz What happened? :)

@PauloCereda I'm buying a microphone :)

@tohecz Cool! :)

(and a volume pedal, too)

@tohecz: vocal?

(and I've ordered a special note stand for my piano table from my good friend)

@PauloCereda Yes, basically for singing (not that I would like to sing on a microphone, but you know ...)

@tohecz How nice! Which one did you order?

@PauloCereda none, yet

@tohecz Ah.

If I ordered one already, I would not be asking for the PQR

If it's not too expensive, Shure is probably one of the greatest brands available.

@PauloCereda like this one? kytary.cz/shure-pg48-xlr/HN073636

or it is quite reasonable to pay a bit more than $50 ?

@tohecz PQR or SPQR? :)

@tohecz It's a basic model, but I think it's quite good. The best option is to take a look in some models in a real store. :)

@PauloCereda My present number of bronze badges is 888

@egreg ooooh! :)

!!/eightball Does 888 have a special meaning?

@egreg Psmith, the TeX bot: The great 8-ball says: I sense conflict.

!!/answer 888

Psmith, the TeX bot, in fixed font mode:

888
eight hundred eighty-eight
DCCCLXXXVIII
1101111000_2
2^3×3×37
m | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9
888 mod m | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 0 | 6 | 0 | 6
888 is an even number.
888 has the representation 888 = 2^5 3^3+24.
888 divides 73^2-1.
888 repeats a single digit in base 10.
Unicode: U+0378  (decimal: 888)
Mathematica:  \:0378
(Greek and Coptic)

@egreg PQR, price-quality ratio

@tohecz: do you intend to sing while playing the piano? My suggestion would be for you to get headset and not a handset. :)

@tohecz SPQR, Senatus PopulusQue Romanus. Also Romans were fond of acronyms.

@egreg We have a city nearby with the SRPQ acronym: Santa Rita do Passa Quatro. :)

@egreg and its $\sigma([P..S])$

@PauloCereda Hi, when is the interview scheduled with Nicola Talbot

@MarcoDaniel Are you going to answer the "with contributions from" question?

@egreg A very famous TeXnican has SPQR as his initials

@texenthusiast We are still working on a date. :)

@PauloCereda I'll more want to "experiment", not necessarily me singing ... having fun you know :D

@PauloCereda Great,Ok, I think @JosephWright makes an announcement when its fixed.

@egreg No. I think Mico is going to do this ;-)

@dıʞsdoʇ Yes, Sebastian Rahtz. Probably he added "PQ" just for fun. :)

I made a local TeX Live mirror in my machine. I have synced it with the nearest TeX Live mirror outside so now it is up to date. I setup TeX Live Manager to use my local TeX Live mirror. However, TeX Live manager always informs me that TeX Live 2012 has been frozen and stop updating. How to skip this stupid frozen warning?

I doubt that you can! You simply have to wait. :-) But, of course, egreg is the expert. Also, may be try prerelease test versions of TL?

@Bugbusters Wait when TL 2013 is released. There will be no update to TL 2012 any more.

@egreg So only manual update is possible right now?

@Bugbusters Yes.

@egreg It is very bad feature in TeX Live 2012 that should be deprecated in the next TeX Live. :-)

The objective of this feature cannot be understood. :D

@Bugbusters have you seen this:

@Bugbusters Considering how many people manage TeX Live, I always find miraculous that it's so actively and well developed. Updating two branches requires a lot of work that's better spent in releasing the new version.

@egreg But I just need to update the existing packages, no need to update the compilers and their friends. :-) Why does updating packages make it complicated?

And updating packages manually (without using TeX Live Manager) should be much more complicated I think. :-)

Any suggestions on how to stop a footnote from creating an awful page break? When the footnote is present, I get page with a single line on it and then the following content. The line is the first line of a list environment.

@Bugbusters Maintaining two branches at the same time, that's the problem.

@AlanMunn I'll answer with the immortal words by Jill Knuth: "Don't use footnotes in your books, Don". ;-)

@egreg Well that's actually good advice in this case. Maybe I should just do that.

@AlanMunn Some well placed \enlargethispage might solve the issue.

@egreg Thanks. I've just put the footnotes into the text and things got a lot better.

Trivial edits! :(

tex.stackexchange.com/posts/44678/revisions

!!/eightball Should @Alan use footnotes? :)

@PauloCereda Psmith, the TeX bot: The great 8-ball says: you betcha.

@kan Oh well. Silly, but not worth doing too much about. Had the question been recently edited on independent grounds?

@AlanMunn I fear not! :(

@PauloCereda \footnote{Psmith is misinformed}

The last edit is as old as Feb '12.

While it is worth looking at this question, I am afraid what would happen if the user went about editing every other post.

@kan On every answer in the question, or just the edited answer? This makes a difference, since if the question had risen to the top independently because of another edit, then a minor edit at the same time is not so bad. Perhaps a comment is in order then, something like "It's generally not helpful to make very minor edits since this causes an old question to replace a newer question on the front page" (and a link to the relevant meta discussion.)

@AlanMunn The question has never propped up on the list because of an edit in the recent past. The latest edit to anything in the question prior to this one is Feb '12.

But, I am not going to leave a comment, as I am not sure how the user will react. There is another user, who I have planned to steer clear of: Persian TeX User Group. Everything is obvious to this user.

</rant?>

Bye! Exam tommorrow, Algebra! :)

@Paulo, SHURE PG58, volume pedal, microphone stand and some cables, and that all delivered tomorrow to my office, so nice :) I got no-the-cheapest SHURE ...

@kan Ha ha. We all know him. I'll leave a comment then. Good luck on your exam.

@tohecz Cool! :)

@PauloCereda well, I gotta go, I had a long day, see ya tomorrow!

@tohecz See ya, Tom! :)

!!/battle

@egreg Psmith, the TeX bot: The current score is egreg 275 vs. 245 David. So far, egreg is winning.

@egreg Could you please help me fix a brain glitch:

How to compute a^{p^{mn}}?

I know this must be trivial... but, brain glitch I need to delete.

@kan No hypothesis? Is it modulo p?

@egreg No, simple plain arithmetic...

@kan Well, there's not much to do: a^{b^c} is just that. You may use p^{mn}=(p^m)^n, but I don't see how it helps.

Hmm... quite so.

On meta, we have a 3-year thread bump. /shivers

OK. I was looking for something along the following lines (once again, please do not laugh at me. This brain glitch needs to be deleted):

a^{p^{mn}} = (a^{p^m})^{p^{(n-1)m}}

Fixed! Woohoo!

I'll be here after tomorrow's exam! Bye!! :)

Does anyone knows if there is any way to cancel / recast a vote on a review? I just distractly pushed the wrong button...

@Xavier Doesn't look like it's possible: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/152641/…

@TorbjørnT. Arf :( Thanks for the answer!

@TorbjørnT. why delete? (although I'd have suggested redefining in the preamble rather than editing the file)

@DavidCarlisle It didn't work, because I hadn't seen parskip=full in the document class options.

@TorbjørnT. ah I only skimmed the source listing in github, not downloaded it or looked that carefully:-)

@DavidCarlisle Well, it wasn't in the .sty, but in the example-file that was included.

@TorbjørnT. +1 for tracking that down:-)