@egreg This is very similar some examples in a paper of the semantics of questions: scenario 1: Jill gets off a plane in Helsinki, and the flight attendant asks her "Do you know where you are?", and she answers "Helsinki". -> Jill knows where she is. scenario 2: Jill gets into a taxi and the driver takes her to some address. He asks "Do you know where you are?" and she answers "Helsinki" -> Jill doesn't (really) know where she is.
So the meaning of a question can't be modeled as (simply) the set of true propositions that answer the question.
@egreg There's yet another variation. The room is on fire. The engineer grabs the fire extinguisher and puts out the fire. The mathematician observes that there's a trivial solution and leaves it as an exercise.
@AlanMunn And yet another variation: There's a little fire on the room. The engineer grabs the fire extinguisher and puts out the fire. The physician grabs some rocks, circles the fire so it won't extend and sits in ecstasy thrilled by the fire. The mathematician observes that there's a trivial solution and leaves it as an exercise.
@PeterGrill Yes, at the time of writing that code, it was just a quick fix, i have noted it in the source attached. However it should be fixed by using the transformation coordinates to access the true angle.
@AlanMunn To return to the subject of Good Questions. You're wrong. A technical question can still be a good question (perhaps not a great question). To be a good community question: it should be clear to me (as a non-specialist reading the question) whether or not I will have the expertise to answer it. It should be clear to me what the circumstances might be where I might later encounter this problem.
It should make it so that I can evaluate an answer without understanding the technical issues behind the question. That way, 1) I don't waste time trying to understand something I won't be able to understand out of a misguided desire to be helpful. 2) I can file it away as "If I encounter X, I know where to look.". 3) I can appreciate the efforts of my fellow-TeXers and encourage them in what they do. I don't think these are impossible or unreasonable for any question on this site.
@JosephWright Yes, alright already! I'm coming round to the idea. My main difficulty will be to write it in such a way that it is clear that it is just my opinion and that I'm not trying to say "This is how things must be.". I may be opinionated, but I don't want to be dogmatic.
@PatrickGundlach First question I looked at there was effectively on the nature of electricity. It reminded me of the exam: Examiner: What is the nature of electricity? Flustered candidate: Oh, I did know! But I've forgotten. Examiner: That's unfortunate. Only two people in the entire history of the world have understood the nature of electricity: the author of nature, and yourself. Now one of them has forgotten.
3
(Since there's been a flurry of mathematician jokes recently ...)
As reflected by Can we please have a ruling about Emacs questions on SO? and Emacs questions: Super User or Stack Overflow? Emacs questions are scattered over the Stack Exchange network. Even if some Emacs questions do no really belong on Stack Overflow it might be better to ask there since the c...
I now have the new TexnicCenter 2.0 Alpha 4 and my problem is that I want the .tex files to open in tabs in one window, instead of multiple instances. This always fills my entire Taskbar as I work with many documents at once. Is there any solution to have the files opening in tabs, like in the ol...
I've noticed that when I double click on a .tex file, Texnic Center keeps opening a new window for each file. I would rather that all files just be opened in the same window. Is there a setting for this?
I'm running Texnic Center alpha 3 / windows 7
@PauloCereda Except that one got closed as "off-topic" so closing this one as a duplicate seems a little ... odd. Either close it as "off-topic" as well, or reopen the other and close one as a duplicate of the other (first of the second as the second has an answer). (That's assuming that they really are duplicates - I'm not qualified to answer that.)
@PauloCereda Exactly. My reasoning for OT here is 'does knowledge of TeX help to answer'. Even taken broadly, I'd say 'no'.
Of course, if others feel it is on-topic, then as suggested the closed question should be reopened. I'd then dupe it to the newer one, so we have one good answer.
@JosephWright Though I agree it's a borderline question, and it sounds more off-topic to me than on topic, since we have several TeXnicCenter/Windows users, and there's an actual good answer, I'd say to reopen the old one and set it as a duplicate to the newer one. :)
I'm pretty neutral on this. I agree that "does knowledge of TeX help to answer" is "No". However, I'd rate it positively on the "Is this something that a TeXer might encounter when they are TeXing?" (when taking into account the Windows factor). Those would balance out for me, leaving me with the decider as "Is this the best place for the person to get an answer to this particular question?" which I would have said was "No" - TC's support site (assuming it has one) would be better.
Except that it has received an answer that (as far as I can tell) does answer the question. So leaving it as-is seems an acceptable thing to do and I doubt it would encourage a flurry of "Help me fix my .emacs file" type questions. Then since I'm mildly in favour of not closing this one, reopening and duplicating the other one seems a fair conclusion.
One could add a comment to the effect that support questions for specific editors are better addressed to the support of the particular editor since that's where they are more likely to get the best answer.
@JosephWright You did on the original one. But since duplicates only point one way, I think it would be good to have a similar comment on the new one.
@RyanReich: Just used trace-pgfkeys again, with the verbose key to see exactly what was going on. Very nice! Saved a fair bit of grepping in the TikZ code.
You can use the standalone class for this. It loads the preview package automatically to crop the resulting PDF to the content. This makes the usage of pdfcrop unnecessary.
Simply exchange the article class with standalone. (It uses article internally but another class can be specified using the...
@AndrewStacey Could you be a little more assertive? ;-) You also seem to have introduced a new distinction, namely "community question" vs. "technical question". I don't completely disagree with you, but what I was trying to point out is that there may be some circumstances where a question may be technical without appearing to be so to the person asking the question.
@MartinScharrer Ok! That would just be easier! :) Although might i ask why it is nice to have the revision in the file? Easier visual inspection without the need for a shell call?
I am aware we all have our personal preferences, but it is good to hear others as well! :)
@AlanMunn (I've got this great new device, I call it a Soil Particle And Decomposition Extractor.) I'm saying that I think that all questions should be written as "community questions" in that your "payment" for getting your question answered here is that you provide someone else (in the community) with the opportunity to learn. The distinction you make is orthogonal to that.
If I don't know that my question is technical, then chances are that no-one else who encounters the same problem will realise that either. So I don't have to try to guess what type of answer I'll get, simply give some details about how I came across the problem in the first place, sufficient so that someone else stumbling into the same territory will automatically think of that question (and thus its answer). Community service, pure and simple.
(I was about to try to clarify some more but then thought that if I go on much longer, Joseph will start shouting "blog post" again)
@AndrewStacey While I agree in principle, I just worry that we end up with a "community question police" which would not be helpful. Especially when combined with the "piling on" mentality that I referred to earlier. The combination would be deadly.
@JosephWright I've plenty of material; it's just easier to mouth off in chat than formulate it into a well-reasoned and carefully thought-out blog post.
Since my last update of Tex Live (10 days ago), the package flashmovie has been removed from TeX Live repository. I'm wondering if it is intentional? Does any one have an idea? It is sort of annoying: after the update this morning, all the users of my team (20 persons) get compilation errors ...
@AlanMunn I completely agree that that would be a Bad Thing. But I think that we have a group who go around and help people to make their posts into good Community Questions. I'll even go so far as to call them the Question Community Police. It's a bit more awkward to say, but in the UK there used to be the notion of the Community Police Officer who was always around the town and easily available to ask for help.
Sadly, police are seen more as enforcement officers than community workers now-a-days.
@percusse I didn't know that a key could have both style and code components! Wow. That's snazzy (Oh, I'm so old). I guess that has the advantage that the command \getnodedistance is local. But it does mean that the style mystyle is global. How about:
\makeatletter
\tikzset{
save node distance/.code={\def\getnodedistance{\tikz@node@distance}}
}
\makeatother
then in the picture mystyle/.style={draw, node distance=5cm, save node distance}
@AndrewStacey That's also nice too. I would even go one step further and make it customized as follows (but I can't make it work because the macro name is not accepted as such...):
\makeatletter
\tikzset{ mystyle/.style={draw, node distance=3mm, save node distance to=getnodedistance},
save node distance/.code={\def\ #1{\tikz@node@distance}}
}
\makeatother
So I guess we have to use the store in key there...
@PauloCereda Also @HarishKumar drew my attention to TikZEdt in this comment which looks like fun stuff though I didn't use it to the limits... This is the URL: code.google.com/p/tikzedt
ohh fingers crossed, I just answered a tikz question, i wonder if blind guess based on ignorance is sufficient to earn a few points,,,,
4
@Anil yes if you just want an image in the cell that's all, If you want it to b emore like a figure with captions and entries in list of figures etc, then if you use a p-couln cell you could put a caption under the figure using \captionof{figure}{...} from captof package (I think)
@DavidCarlisle No. i'm writing a table with lots of chemical structures in it.I just have to put images to show the complicated structures in the table.
@DavidCarlisle Some cells has just H, CH3 etc. Some other cells i have to insert pngs
user19161
2:56 PM
@DavidCarlisle I once answered a tikz question by immediately looking at the manual and pretending I had used it for very long.
@percusse Nice. You need either \expandafter\def\csname #1\endcsname or \@namedef to define the macro based on the parameter passed. You should add that, or edit it into my answer - I was thinking of putting in a few more ways to access values passed to keys since that's quite a common thing that I do so I can imagine others wanting to do it as well, but I ran out of time.
@WillHunting Sssh! That's how I handle TikZ questions. If you let the secret out then there'll be no stopping David from answering all the questions on the site. He might even answer the Holy Grail of TeX-SX: the question by egreg (don't bother looking for it, you need at least 100k rep to see that question).
@DavidCarlisle And I just (well, a little earlier) answered a non-TikZ question. What is the world coming to? You answer TikZ questions, I answer an expansion question, and England lose at cricket ... oh, so actually things aren't so out of kilter after all.
@DavidCarlisle :-) I attempted to let him know earlier, but he does not seem to want to, and would spend more time arguing about it than composing the MWE would take.
@AndrewStacey :-) I don't think we have to worry about that as I think it was @DavidCarlisle that said that "reading the documentation can only lead to bad things"? :-) I don't need more competition for tikz answers. :-)
Oh dear. And it looked like it was going well since the question asked earlier by this user had a MWE and got some reasonable answers (tex.stackexchange.com/q/49888/86)
@PeterGrill I'm going to rename \tikzmark as \petermark in my code from now on.
Friends, the next Answer the Unanswered session is scheduled for the next Saturday - which is the Easter Eve. Should we keep the event to that date or postpone it to the next week?
Can you please neutralize the downvotes on the question given in David Carlisle's comment, chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/4019132#4019132 , and if you agree vote for closing. And if it is your downvote, can you please consider removing it?
@AndrewStacey I will try to make up something now!
I'm still trying to find a way to immitate "A preferred solution is probably quite subtle and has fairly clean lines and more closely resembles the work of a draftsman or artist rather than that of a child. "
@percusse Actually, it's from a Dilbert episode when there was a bus full of Nobel prizes winners; all of them were singing this song. :) Let me find the video on Youtube.
@GonzaloMedina I'm thinking of a similar tool like latexmk and rubber. The idea is to use arara document instead of e.g, running pdflatex, makeindex, pdflatex and other steps. I don't intend to write a better tool than these ones I mentioned, but I aim at being easy to extend. For example, if egreg wants arara to support imakeidx, it's just a matter of writing a small textual file with predefined rules and the tool will be able to recognize imakeidx. :)
@PauloCereda I see. Do you know why did I just receive an alert and a pop-up message about a message being flagged as offensive/spam in the mathematics chat room? Is this some new functionality?
@egreg LOL! I once had a horse when I was a kid. I was used to brush the horsehair and make braids. Then I saw a cow in the pasture and thought, "cool, I'm gonna make a braid in that cow's tail!". It didn't end well. :P
@GonzaloMedina Indeed, I have just cancelled my Math.SE account and I am a low rep user now again. It feels quite fresh now. By the way, watch out yourself in Math.SE it's nothing like TeX.SE and often pretty aggressive. :D
@AndrewStacey I guess that means I have "over-milked" \tikzmark. It should have been called \andrewmark from the beginning. Not sure how long it would have taken me to stumble across it but I find it sooooo useful. Thanks again for that answer that made me aware of it in the first place.
@GonzaloMedina Okay, not scary. More that I've yet to work out exactly what that place is for. Here's what I wrote a while back, I still think the same: meta.math.stackexchange.com/a/2124/2907
@PeterGrill No! You're welcome to it! I think you've found more places to use it than I would ever have thought of. It has certainly changed almost out of all recognition to the point where I'm a bit embarrassed to post the code that I actually use as it looks so antiquated.
@N3buchadnezzar Change the order of the coordinates in the first argument to tkzDrawArc: ` \tkzDrawArc(O,E2)(E1) \tkzDrawArc[style=dashed,color=gray](O,F1)(F2) `
@N3buchadnezzar In \tkzDrawArc(A,B)(C), A is the center of the circle, B where the arc starts and C where it ends. The arc seems to drawn counter clockwise.
I am trying to implement KPI for employees of my company.
One of the KPI have listed is the quality of code as measured by bugs created by developers.
Now my problem is: I am planning to give 40 points (my scoring system) to a developer, if he creates bug free code.
There can be bugs which are...
@N3buchadnezzar You can add arrows to the endpoint of an arc (see example 18.4 in the manual), so you could draw two arcs to get an arrow at the midpoint, but I don't know if one can add arrows along the arc easily.
I am unable to get a sidewaystable to plot even with simple documents. I've copied this code directly and I can get it to plot as a normal table. It does not work when I change it to sideways. Does anyone have any suggestions? Here's the code I'm using for the .tex file:
\documentclass[a4paper]{...
@MartinScharrer How does the process for tag creation work? If I have an idea for a new tag, do I simply go and create it or do I make a proposal somewhere?
@MartinScharrer Ah, OK. Do you think that headline and footline (as in beamer templates) are tags worth creating? I've answered a lot of questions about those templates, and perhaps having their proper tags could be useful?
@egreg: "A final comment: your institution forbids club and widow lines, but forces you to use a page format that's simply awful and unreadable." Fantastic! :)
@PauloCereda Of course the required margins come from a very well known source. :( Some secretary had heard that orphans and widows are bad, probably not knowing what they are. :(
@JosephWright: Did you see Charles Schaum's comment on c.t.t? "I do see the necessity to do eBook, MobiPocket, Kindle, etc. perhaps more than the web, These need to be considered as targets, as should perhaps the integration of multi-format graphics handling. But an integrated web target ot XML target would male LaTeX more than just a backend for paper, which is what a number of XML workflows assume. That might also standardize package formats, command syntax, etc. and promote LaTeX3." :)
So as many of you know, I'm working on my undergraduate thesis right now. As a result I just wrote my first dedication:
{\small The author would like to dedicate this thesis and all the work done on it to his brother, Christopher <removed>, in light of his ongoing battle with a brain tumour. The author has drawn constant inspiration from Christopher's fortitude in the face of adversity and the strength he has shown in the last year.}
@Canageek While I usually advise not to put dedications in undergraduate theses, I think that this one is a dedication that I'd approve without any doubt. I'd use "I" and not "the author".
Sorry for the delay, I'm running an experiment as I work on it.
@egreg heh, good idea, I've only used I in one other place (To acknowledge someone who went way beyond the call of duty in staying late to help me, when she didn't know her name was on my thesis; our prof didn't tell her for some reason, just told me to add it. Guess he knew she would deserve it)
I'll probably take that out when he edits it though, just shown him the final version.
Related, kinda, why are there so many odd size commands, and why are half of them odd, old school TeX commands?
@Canageek I mean that a dedication should be something special and this one clearly is. The usual dedications to "girlfriend/boyfriend" or "mother and father" are stereotyped: there are better ways to express the love for them.
@egreg Makes sense. Honestly, a year ago I probably wouldn't have put one in at all, might have mentioned family in my acknowledgements'.
Hmm, I wonder if I should add that? I'll think about it, right now is just my lab group and a few people from the instrumentation facility, namely the head for taking my "THE THREE MILLION DOLLAR INSTRUMENT IS FLASHING SCARY ERROR CODES" calls on the weekend and a freind who works there for not ending my experiments when I went overtime.
I wonder, if I thank an organic prof next to an inorganic prof, will they explode?
@egreg In the final version of my dissertation (after revised), I added epigraphs to every chapter. One professor of mine who was in the comittee was very surprised to see one of his quotes. :)
@Canageek Those commands should be used mainly in definitions of environments and very rarely in normal text, so the declarative form is better. Using \begin{small}...\end{small} is usually wrong.
@PauloCereda I just scroll down the list trying sizes until I find one that looks right. Normal isn't right, try small, then footnote, then script, and so on.
@Canageek \cleardoublepage\vspace*{\stretch{1}}\begin{flushright}\small\itshape<the dedication possibly on more lines separated by \\>\end{flushright}\vspace{\stretch{3}}\clearpage
@PauloCereda If I notice I'm using something three times I generally change it. Unless I don't see an upside, for example, formating that everyone demands I use I'll leave as \textit rather then \textbio or \textconformation since \textit is easier to type.
@Canageek It typesets the dedication on a page by itself, with three times blank space on the bottom as on the top. Add also \thispagestyle{empty} after \cleardoublepage
@Canageek Just remember to add \par before the closing brace. Otherwise the baseline skip would be wrong if the dedication is on more than one line. The \itshape is for distinguishing the dedication from the context.
\vfill and \vspace{\fill} are equivalent; always leave a blank line before them.
@PauloCereda I edited my name out, as long as no one reads the log file, meh. I know it is trivially easy to associate this with my real name, as long as I don't apply for security clearance above reliability status (Which I've had before) it shouldn't matter. (I tweeted some very angery things a few years ago, but they are no longer accessible from my twitter, and I'm calmer now, so whatever)
I've noticed that when I double click on a .tex file, Texnic Center keeps opening a new window for each file. I would rather that all files just be opened in the same window. Is there a setting for this?
I'm running Texnic Center alpha 3 / windows 7
Since my last update of Tex Live (10 days ago), the package flashmovie has been removed from TeX Live repository. I'm wondering if it is intentional? Does any one have an idea? It is sort of annoying: after the update this morning, all the users of my team (20 persons) get compilation errors ...
I am trying to implement KPI for employees of my company.
One of the KPI have listed is the quality of code as measured by bugs created by developers.
Now my problem is: I am planning to give 40 points (my scoring system) to a developer, if he creates bug free code.
There can be bugs which are...
