No birthday cake today, I'm sad. :)

@egreg thanks for the answer about breqn. way over my head, but I am sure some would understand it. I guess I have to learn to break long equations myself (i.e. without using this package), which means I have to learn how to write them in Latex myself first instead of using the GUI, or become better at math, and make all the equations small in first place. Not sure which is easier now :)

@NSA : Assuming you're reading this, too: in your own words 'If you're doing nothing wrong, what have you got to hide?'

@Brent.Longborough I don't think they're actually reading all the stuff. It's more of a hoarding disorder type of thing.

@PauloCereda your birthday?

Hi is it correct that TeX development is close to zero?

I like the code-to-pdf idea of tex typesetting, but after 15 years using TeX I still miss the same features. Finally I don't like the syntax either. Is there a primising successor? I tried ConText in 2009 but it was not ready for use in a thesis.

@JonasStein no

no to >>is it correct that TeX development is close to zero?

@JonasStein Without knowing what feature you miss, it's difficult to say. As per the syntax problem: I don't like how goods are displayed in supermarkets. ;-)

@JonasStein Certainly not.

@JonasStein XeTeX and LuaTeX should suffice as an example.

@JonasStein TeX itself hasn't changed apart from increasingly esoteric bug fixes, but luatex and xetex are making continual improvements to interfaces to unicode and fonts (and lua) and at the macro layer context continues to evolve as do latex packages

I want a typesetting system which includes a modern computerlanguage and which separates code from text. It should be object orientated.

@JonasStein well luatex is probably what you should be looking at although lua isn't exactly the purest OO language in the world:-)

What I dislike in TeX is that it mixes layout and the content, lacks of a powerful language, does not support UTF8 well. Creating a glossar or other automatic lists is real pain.

@DavidCarlisle I was told Xetex is dead?

LuaTex might be a try. Is it a good suggestion to use it for a thesis?

@JonasStein Really? By whom?

cool picture ;-)

Soemone in our local TeX group

@JonasStein Here's what I get from xetex --version

XeTeX 3.1415926-2.5-0.9999.3-2013052718 (TeX Live 2013)
kpathsea version 6.1.1
Copyright 2013 SIL International and Jonathan Kew.
There is NO warranty.  Redistribution of this software is
covered by the terms of both the XeTeX copyright and
the Lesser GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the file
named COPYING and the XeTeX source.
Primary author of XeTeX: Jonathan Kew.
Compiled with ICU version 51.1; using 51.1
Compiled with zlib version 1.2.7; using 1.2.7
Compiled with FreeType2 version 2.4.11; using 2.4.11

Apart from the last line that depends on my OS, you can see that development is going on; for example, newer libraries for font management are used, but it's not only that.

What is that

@JonasStein No I wouldn't recommend either to be honest but exactly because your initial statement was so false:-) xelatex and luatex are both in pre version 1.0 development stage and so undergo development (= breaking change) from time to time (especially luatex which recently incorporated lua 5.x+1 updating 5.x and lua doesn't really do backward compatibility) For a thesis you should be worrying about the content, not about whether an update to your typesetter will break everything.

so sad.

@JonasStein ?

sad that there is no stable alternative

The decision is stable, but completely outdated and can not solve standard tasks or pre alpha software which can do anything today and nothing tomorrow

That is what I called "sad"...

@JonasStein Outdated? I'd say no. What "standard task" are you talking about?

What happened with latex3?

@DavidCarlisle I've updated the question on unicode with the material you asked for, put the result on a folder with a zip file. Please let me know if you like me to try something else.

@JonasStein we're working on it, and large parts are available as expl3 and xparse packages and often used in answers on this site.

@DavidCarlisle yesterday. :P

@egreg UTF8 support is very broken, it still needs many runs, is very slow, even does no syntax checking and crashes on every bug with an useless errormessage...

@JonasStein stable and 'development ended' are the same thing but with different implied connotations. It's no different from when we brought out latex2e, quite a few people and journals said latex2.09 was "more stable" but a system that is not open to change or bug fix or development in anyway is bound to be stable.

will LaTeX3 run without TeX?

@JonasStein I fully disagree with each of your statement.

@JonasStein no it's written in TeX

sounds good. Can I use LaTeX3 for a thesis?

@PauloCereda ohh happy belated birthday.

@DavidCarlisle awww thanks. :)

@JonasStein It isn't available as a format but parts are available for package authors so for example in the sciences you can, probably should use siunitx for handling units and numeric data, that is all written in latex3 code (but designed for latex2e documents)

sounds if latex3 is the "hope"

@JonasStein perhaps but we've been working on it since 1990, it's a long term project.

Why is there no ready to use successor of TeX? Would a few faid coders help?

@egreg Your experience may depend on what you use TeX for. In the past it was often used for scientific papers and thesis in physics, but the pain starts after 30 pages. When you want nice tables, a register of cited persons, footnotes, greek letters, quick preview...

@Nasser foo.html in that directory is served as utf-8 but has NULL (codepoint 0) for ff I don't get that but something went wrong:-)

@PauloCereda Added to my calendar. ;)

@egreg Uh-oh. :)

@JonasStein My 300 page book has indices, tables, graphics, footnotes, Greek letters. The preview is not instant, of course, but I don't find the delay so long. And there is TeX-PDF synchronization, nowadays.

@DavidCarlisle it is foo.htm not foo.html I do not know anything about NULL terminated and all that. THis is all over my head. I am using firefox 20 on windows. I also tried it on chrom, and same problem shows there. Anything you like me to try, please let me know. thanks.

@JonasStein Some people say Word is (and a lot of documents done with Word these days would have been done with TeX before) lout claimed to be (and still has some supporters) XSL-FO systems do a lot of bulk typestting that in some sense replaces TeX, but basically for some kinds of documents tex is still better than the newcomers (and even where it isn't, the weight of community support means that it's easier to get the job done using a system that is well understood than something "better"

perhaps I can learn from your source. My experience is, you need many additional packages like booktabs and so on. And it is just a question of time when the packages clash.

@Nasser yes .htm (why use .htm by the way it was needed for MSDOS but now??) you will see problems with any browser because the file is corrupt.

@egreg i guess your source is not available right? If it is online I would be glad to learn from your code.

@DavidCarlisle I did not use .htm, this is how the extension came out automatically. I just typed the command you showed, as is.

@JonasStein No, sorry; it's commercial.

@JonasStein That isn't a problem that is the latex design: It is designed to be extensible via packages.

@DavidCarlisle I switched to using ISO encoding. That seems to work fine. No funny looking "ff" any more.

@Nasser isn't that what the "htm" means, to use .htm rather than .html If you just use htmlatex foo you get foo.html

@DavidCarlisle, yes. Sorry, I did not know that what you asked. Yes, I use "htm" myself, so that the generated files have 3 letter extension. That is more common than "html" to my understanding. But browsers support both.

Also DOS likes 3 letters extensions.

I think VMS also likes 3 letters extensions.

@Nasser UTF-8 is also an ISO encoding, so best to call it latin1 or iso-8859-1 (although browsers ignore the iso spec and use microsoft code page windows-1252 anway...

@Nasser is more common than "html" to my understanding. perhaps we look in differnt places I only see it in ancient MSDOS based sites.

@Nasser when did you last see a VMS machine:-)

@DavidCarlisle on wiki en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX when I was browsing something the other day. But I do not think any one uses it any more. I really do not understand all this HTML encoding stuff. But iso works, so will use it for now, and not use the utf-8 one. thanks.

@Nasser fine but as I say don't call it "iso" as that's meaningless the ISO publish many encodings (and standards for road safety and business practice and everything else) if you need to refer to an encoding you need to say which encoding it is not just the organisation that published it.

@egreg you used xetex for the book?

is there a preview online of a few pages?

@JonasStein No, still plain old pdflatex

where can I find a good introduction into luatex?

@JonasStein There are good articles on TUGboat

Does anyone fancy a Brazilian feijoada for lunch today? :)

@PauloCereda Yummy! Keep some for me!

@egreg Sure! :)

... while the doc is loading on my dated pc : in a pgfplots figure, how do I make the data points (the actual circles) smaller?

and b)

how can I make the description of individual data points

e.g. (13.5 , 29.7) [AAA]

@PauloCereda Sounds nice. We often make something quite similar based on Lentils (the larger green ones). But we're bound for barbecue already...

bold ?

(the doc has finished loading)

am using \addplot+[only marks, point meta=explicit symbolic, nodes near coords, every node near coord/.append style={font=\tiny}] coordinates

--2013-06-16 19:26:16--  imsc.res.in/hotwifi/login/?gw_address=172.16.15.254
Resolving www.imsc.res.in (www.imsc.res.in)... 61.95.189.10
Connecting to www.imsc.res.in (www.imsc.res.in)|61.95.189.10|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 7562 (7.4K) [text/html]
Saving to: 'index.html?gw_address=172.16.15.254.1'

100%[=====================================================================================================>] 7,562       --.-K/s   in 0.005s

@StephanLehmke Oh how nice! :)

An atttempt to update using tlmgr... ^^ /scary

@kan Change the mirror. Apparently you are getting an error page from the server. :)

@nuttyaboutnatty mark size=<size>. See section 4.6.1 Markers in the manual.

:) am there already ;)

Oh!! OK! Got what the problem was!

@PauloCereda Thanks to your hint!

@PauloCereda Talking about Brazilian: I gave my older son something called "Jewels of the Amazon" last christmas, consiting of some seed of exotic (for us) plants and a small plastic "greenhouse" to plant them in. Not all of them took root, but he got some nice little granadilla plants by now which are getting a bit too lagre for the small greenhouse already.

I was not logged in the network!

So yesterday we set up a slightly larger greenhouse in the garden so we could put the plants in larger pots. I'm expecting a veritable jungle in our garden and some passion fruit in the next years :-)

@TorbjørnT. any idea how to / where exactly to find how to make the font bold for individual "node near coord" ?

@nuttyaboutnatty Never actually used nodes near coords, so no.

@egreg: Do you know whether the solution here is part of L3 now:

@StephanLehmke Granadilla? :) My Spanish is very rusty, but I believe it's our romã. :) It's a lovely fruit (well, some purists will say it's technically not a fruit), very tasty and good for blood pressure control. :) Beware, it will become a big tree. :)

@PauloCereda Well this aught to be the english name ;-) The one with the passion fruit ;-) It's expected to be a "climbing" plant.

@StephanLehmke Is it the sour or sweet passion fruit? :)

figured out a work-around

@MarcoDaniel You should ask @JosephWright

@PauloCereda Well honestly I doubt they will live several years to really yield fruit in our climate ;-) The latin names are " Passiflora edulis" and "Passiflora quadrangularis". But I guess if we ever really see a fruit, it'll be sour for sure; too little sun and warmth ;-)

But my son is very excited and already googled pictures of the grown-up plants (beautiful flowers), so he's really looking forward to our "taste of the jungle" :-)

@StephanLehmke :) We have both sour and sweet around here (sweet being very tasty to eat "standalone", and sour for making juice and candies). :) I love the name "passion fruit" (in Portuguese, it's a completely different name - maracujá), usually it gives fruit in the end of the Lent around here (near Easter), hence the name "passion". :) >>>

There's also a very beautiful poem around here telling why the passion fruit flower is purple: there's a legend telling that there was a passion fruit plant in the Calvary, very near to where Jesus was crucified; the flower was white, but one drop of Jesus' blood felt in the plant and the flower colour transformed from white to purple. :)

@StephanLehmke I'll take some nice pictures of our plants and send them to you, hope your son likes them. :)

@PauloCereda I'm sure he'll love that! Btw, we also say "Maracuja" in Germany :-)

A bug in LaTeX? ;-)

Of course it's not in tabularx ;-)

@StephanLehmke ooh how nice! :)

@egreg :)

@PauloCereda There is also a Dutchmans pipe plant though I'm not sure I'd like it to survive as it's supposed to stink and be poisonous :-(

@PauloCereda Another plant which took root very nicely is the african tulip tree but that's not from the amazon of course ;-)

@StephanLehmke ooh that's a cool plant! :)

@PauloCereda If we ever see a flower I'm gonna make a photo, but that's supposed to take several years ;-)

Of course it's a bit absurd to try to raise plants which don't belong here at all, but we already have strawberries, red current, raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, apples and cherries (and tomatoes ;-)

@StephanLehmke wow, that's a big list! :)

@PauloCereda And it's a really small garden ;-)

But I thought it's nice for the kids if they can just pluck off stuff to eat everywhere they go :-)

@StephanLehmke Peach trees come from Persia, apricot from Armenia and so on. :)

It's curious that in our dialect the name of those fruits still reflects their origin: "persego" and "armelin" (the trees are "persegaro" and "armelinaro").

@egreg Well it's a bit more natural that plants should travel around the mediterranian, as the climate is at least comparable all around. But Germany can have some really cold winters (and summers with little sun), so you won't see so many peach or apricot trees there.

@egreg of course not:-) of course \thinspace comes from plain (and the fact that skips come in v and h variants but kerns do both comes from TeX. Not sure if one should "fix" \, or \thinspace although I suppose it's conceivable someone has used \thinspace intending it to be vertical??

@DavidCarlisle Sorry, I was watching the football game. I'd be surprised seeing \, used to get a vertical space. But, as we know well, users are always able to surprise.

I am trying to find the best way to do this. Before I used to have this

\setlength{\parskip}{5pt}
\setlength{\parindent}{0pt}

Now I removed these. But I find the result a little hard to read? What is the recommend way to do this? I like to have space between paragraphs. Now it looks too close to each others:

Is the above really how it is suppose to be?

What do the experts use for their writings?

Also, what is the recommended pt size to use? 10pts I think too small. is 12pt more common? I do not think 11pts is common at all.

12pts is a little easier to read I think.

@Nasser Don't use a nonzero parskip. Ever. You get more readable output with zero parskip and an indent. Really.

@egreg Ok. but I find the new par starting up right next to the last annoying, with no vertical space in between, as you can see the screen shot. Do you really think this would be more readable than having a little bit (5pt?) vertical space but zero indent? I've seen some papers do it one way, and some the other way.

@Nasser Have you ever read a book? I have never seen a good book that uses a nonzero parskip.

You think Latex will align things better if use zero parskip?

@Qrrbrbirlbel, Have not read a book yet. But plan to do some reading this summer for sure.

@Nasser A great master of the typographical art, Jan Tschichold, was in his young years attracted by spaced out paragraphs; later he changed his mind and advocated using the good old method that has served typography for centuries.

@egreg You are right, I just went to google books search site, and looked at some book. all the ones I've seen have zero parskip. Strange I never noticed that except now. Ok. I will do zero skip then. How about 12 pt vs. 10 pt? 10 pt too small I think. any though on this? I now do \documentclass[12pt]{report} in all my latex files.

@Nasser 10pt is good; 11pt also. 12pt is too big.

@Nasser Do you know why the standard setting in the-program-I-don't-mention-the-name-of is 12pt? Because with dot matrix printers getting good output at 10 or 11 pt was very difficult (unless you used TeX, of course).

@egreg dot-matrix-printer same as ink-jet? I use laser printer for printing my HW's. Brother 2270DW. Someone said laser printers are better for latex. Do not know why and how. But that is what I have now.

@Nasser Dot matrix ≠ ink-jet. The resolution was 72dpi, 144dpi or, with the fanciest and most expensive, a whopping 240dpi.

@Nasser Dot-matrix are the ones when you get a bill for electricity or something like that. Usually you see in the offices with a loooong toilet paper like paper feeds and weird noises... The shapes are formed as in the calculator (only more refined dots). Ink-jets and lasers are much better in terms of precision. But that's a Mac vs. PC debate because ink-jets caught up lasers some time ago. So it depends on paper, (image or text), the color mix etc. etc.

@percusse I dont know much about dot-matrix printers. But a person at best buys computer store told me ink-jet printers are cheaper for color printing and laser are cheaper for black and white. (cost of ink). I think also laser printers are supposed to be faster.

@Nasser You must be quite young, then. ;-)

quick question please: Should one write {\small text} or \small{text} I am always confused by these/

@Nasser They keep one-upping each other. So those are very temporal opinions. Better check the specs and the reviews. Ink-jets are also very fast now.

By the way, WTF?

Go to a church and get married ?

@Nasser \small{text} is incorrect and does not work as you would expect. Try {\Huge This is huge. \small{This is small.} And this is huge again?}.

@Qrrbrbirlbel so rule of thumb is this: {\small TEXT} ? I have complicate latex with lots of verbatim, and for the last hrs trying to figure why Latex keeps saying I have missing }

Is this ok then: {\small {\begin{verbatim} ....... \end{verbatim} } }

Or should it be {\small \begin{verbatim} ..... \end{verbatim} } ?

@Nasser The latter is correct. The first is not wrong but the { } aren’t needed.

@Qrrbrbirlbel ok. thanks. Will use this pattern from now on:

{\small \begin{verbatim} ..... \end{verbatim} }

debugging latex is harder than debugging c++

@Nasser None of these is correct, sorry.

@egreg please tell me what is the correct way? I keep getting syntax error :(

If you want to reduce the size of the verbatim environment, use the fancyvrb package and \begin{Verbatim}[fontsize=\small]...\end{Verbatim}

@egreg thanks! Will do that now

@Nasser Try compiling this example and you'll see what happens:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{fancyvrb}
\begin{document}
\lipsum*[2]
{\tiny\begin{verbatim}
abd
ddx
\end{verbatim}
}
\lipsum*[2]
\begin{Verbatim}[fontsize=\tiny]
abd
ddx
\end{Verbatim}

\end{document}

In the first case, the paragraph preceding the verbatim is typeset using the baselineskip pertaining to \tiny. This is exaggerated, but the interline spacing is wrong also with \small

@egreg That could be solved with a \par before the \tiny group, though?

@Qrrbrbirlbel Not really a good solution. Moreover fancyvrb has many other useful features.

This is the result

@egreg True, but “not correct” is a little exaggerating, isn't it? (I usually don't use verbatim stuff and if then lstlisting.)

@Qrrbrbirlbel They're incorrect without a \par

what do people use to debug latex error? I have been at this for 4 hrs now, and can't find where the error is coming from. run-away argument. I remove some text, then an error shows up somewhere else. Should I be using some tool to help me find these?

it is a long file, 1500 lines I wrote long time ago. And now it won't compile.