TeX, LaTeX and Friends

1:55 AM

@samcarter Wow, special mention by Boris Veytsman! @ChristianHupfer please help us find a better way to write the code for the stripes!

Christian Hupfer

6:41 AM

@CarLaTeX What kind of stripes do you mean? The stripes on the football shirts?

David Carlisle

@ChristianHupfer none of my requests have been implemented (@samcarter clearly biased against me:(

Christian Hupfer

@DavidCarlisle Most likely your requests all contained tikz pictures of dead ducks being cooked/fried/roasted or any other form to be served? ;-)

CarLaTeX

@ChristianHupfer Yes, those ones!

Christian Hupfer

@CarLaTeX You do know my knowledge of TikZ, don't you? ;-) (Which is basically at the same level as my knowledge of TeX internals ... :-( )

CarLaTeX

@ChristianHupfer The same as @DavidCarlisle?

David Carlisle

6:54 AM

@ChristianHupfer not all of them, some contained code improvements like replacing tikz by picture mode.

@CarLaTeX he hasn't even got a gold badge for tikz-pgf

Christian Hupfer

@CarLaTeX @DavidCarlisle is legendary ...

@DavidCarlisle I don't even have a silver badge for that

CarLaTeX

@ChristianHupfer I know :)

@DavidCarlisle Stripes in picture mode are also welcome!

Christian Hupfer

@CarLaTeX Can't you use \rule and glue(!!!) them together to a bunch of TeX \box es? ;-) That's what I call stripes

CarLaTeX

@ChristianHupfer Everything which makes the options simplers is welcome! :)

Christian Hupfer

7:13 AM

@TorbjørnT. Do you want to provide an answer to the tcolorbox question from yesterday, that one about the ex units failing in shifting specification? You have provided the relevant explanation in a comment

Torbjørn T.

@ChristianHupfer I was just confirming what @daleif already wrote.

Christian Hupfer

@TorbjørnT. Yes, I saw that @daleif wrote, but you gave the reference to the manual position

Harald Hanche-Olsen

I have just now (belatedly) become aware of xparse. One thing I am immensely curious about, though it is of no consequence whatsoever (I assume), is the “Document” part of the names: \NewDocumentCommand, etc. Why not simply \NewCommand, CamelCased to distinguish it from \newcommand? Is there a difference between DocumentCommands and other commands? It sort of makes me expect to find corresponding \NewClassCommand or \NewPackageCommand.

Or was the Command stuck into the names to make them harder to type? Like, “think twice before even thinking of using these complex beasts”?

Christian Hupfer

@HaraldHanche-Olsen I think this was done to write code on document-level instead of design and programming level

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@ChristianHupfer Hmm, okay. Maybe. It still strikes me as odd.

(Rats, I keep hitting the return key when I am aiming for the backspace, thus posting messages prematurely.)

Christian Hupfer

7:23 AM

@HaraldHanche-Olsen I think \NewDocumentCommand is absolutely fine in class or package codes if want to provide code that is meant for the end user, say \NewDocumentCommand{\section}{som}{....} in a class that is not loading another class that has \section already, for example

@HaraldHanche-Olsen: I am using xparse macros almost exclusively for my (limited) packages, in the lower level they are wrappers to expl3 macros, however, in most cases

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@ChristianHupfer Thanks for the clarification. (Though your edit to your previous answer already hinted at that.)

@ChristianHupfer Um, yeah … expl3 is somewhere on my infinite list of stuff to learn …

Christian Hupfer

@HaraldHanche-Olsen I think it is worth to learn it. I started about two years ago and don't want to miss it. I am still learning, of course

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@ChristianHupfer When looked at from the outside, expl3 looks overengineered and needlessly complex, and that has put me off. But I suppose it is that way for good reasons. I just need a strong dose of motivation to get started on learning it.

Ulrike Fischer

@CarLaTeX @PauloCereda from the news letter of the city Mönchengladbach (moenchengladbach.de/de/aktuell-aktiv/newsroom/news/…)

4

Christian Hupfer

7:41 AM

@HaraldHanche-Olsen I've got that impression too, but when I started to learn it I was not too much into TeX/LaTeX internals (and still am not ;-)), perhaps this is cause it was easier to get into expl3 for me.

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@ChristianHupfer My learning path was unusual, I think. I read a large part of the TeXbook long before I had access to any TeX system. Not sure I would recommend it today.

Christian Hupfer

@HaraldHanche-Olsen I work as a teacher -- everyone has a different learning path for the same topic ...

CarLaTeX

@UlrikeFischer Wow, prof. van Duck is very proud of it!

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@ChristianHupfer True. And it did get me a flying start once I got access! (I still tend to prefer \halign over the tabular environment, because I feel I understand the former better.)

Joseph Wright

8:04 AM

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Because they are for defining document commands ;) A document command is one that is defining a syntax for a LaTeX document

@HaraldHanche-Olsen It depends on what your aims are. For people with a strong plain background it's always going to look that way: Petr Olsak would be a good example of someone who really doesn't like it

@HaraldHanche-Olsen If you start from say a more etoolbox like starting point (don't rename primitives, only use letters), you run into questions about how you provide any form of namespacing: we do see users wondering why calling something \if or \number or \box causes them problems. Once you decide you need to move 'stuff' and want a systematic approach to expansion then you get somewhere like expl3

@HaraldHanche-Olsen I've tried various 'experiments': perhaps I'd do a few things differently if starting today, but I'd keep a lot of the ideas. (One might also go LuaTeX-only of course: while that doesn't avoid needing a set of TeX token-based tools, it does change some of how it might look.)

daleif

@DavidCarlisle ahh, man, wasted so much time on that crap yesterday. They only thing we need to take care about is that it has to be purely functional programming. No seeting variables. Thus xparse document commands seems fine. Now to get the real example to work ;-)

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@daleif So you really want to work with \NewExpandableDocumentCommand and friends, then?

daleif

8:22 AM

@HaraldHanche-Olsen well, in some cases it works, in others it does not. Basically the issue is that I'm treating the hyperref bookmarks as a black box device, just trying to poke at it to figure out exactly what it needs

samcarter

@PauloCereda Random ducks would be useful for tex.stackexchange.com/questions/390357/… :)

daleif

@HaraldHanche-Olsen It is sort of like \NewExpandableDocumentCommand expands too much, so some inner parsing never gets done for some reason

samcarter

@DavidCarlisle Many of your request have been implemented, just not in the combination you have intended :)

David Carlisle

8:42 AM

@CarLaTeX \multiput(10,10)(1,0){5}{\line(0,1){3}}

@HaraldHanche-Olsen xparse is designed to be a way of declaring document-level interfaces for code implemented in a lower level (typically but not necessarily) expl3 using the foo_bar:nnn syntax

CarLaTeX

@DavidCarlisle This seems very simple, @samcarter see if you can use it!

David Carlisle

FOOTBALLDUCK

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\begin{picture}(100,100)
\put(50,50){\oval(50,20){}}
\put(70,65){\circle{20}}
\put(35,50){\line(1,0){30}}
\put(70,65){\circle*{2}}
\put(75,67){\line(6,-1){10}}
\put(75,63){\line(6,1){10}}
{\thicklines\multiput(30,40)(9,0){5}{\line(0,1){17}}}%
\put(70,42){\circle*{10}}
\end{picture}
\end{document}

CarLaTeX

9:00 AM

@DavidCarlisle LOL :P

samcarter

@CarLaTeX More or less what we are already doing in tikz :)

CarLaTeX

@samcarter What a pity :)

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TeX, LaTeX and Friends

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