Hi chat!

I am giving finishing touch to the poster

in the last part or column i have made Methods used , conclusions , future work , and there is till some space left should i use it or leave it! filling tht may appear clumsy i think?

@barbarabeeton sounds somewhat familiar vvvv

@Johannes_B I didn't know there was a stack exchange site about rocket propelled grenades. What's the world coming to?

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Role Playing games

@Johannes_B If you say so. ;->

@DavidCarlisle Yay!

@DavidCarlisle Clearly a typo. :)

@TeXnician Arch would be my second option. :)

@PauloCereda May it be that TeXprinter is not really usable? Just tried to generate a TeX output for "390683" and it had invalid UTF-8 sequences...

@TeXnician I forgot about that tool. :)

@TeXnician I will take a look.

@PauloCereda Right, I remember having given you another "error report" some time ago...

@PauloCereda Btw: Have you had a look at that TeXworks Arara killing issue? ;)

@TeXnician Yes, I have it here. SE changed its API not too recently, but I wasn't able to catch up.

@TeXnician Yes, I am investing quality time on it. :) I might give a talk with the TeXworks developers. I think their "stop" signal to the underlying application is not sufficient. :)

@PauloCereda Of course they should send a SIGTERM by killing init :D

@TeXnician I like this approach. :D

I've just updated TeXlive and there was a biblatex update (to the new version 3.8). Does anyone know when biber will be updated so one can compile documents again? Currently biber throws errors about the biblatex control file.

Anyone use TexMaker here? Do you know how to make the working space bigger? I mean I want to see the bigger font while typing, not at the PDF viewer.

@Jan Options --> Configure Texmaker --> Editor, set Editor font size.

@PauloCereda how to increase the value of your car from $500 to $100000, film it with rubber ducks: bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-41871936

@TorbjørnT. Thanks!!!

@DavidCarlisle The girl in the ad is not a good example of driver, however :)

@CarLaTeX What – doesn't everybody pour coffee and drink it while driving? And the cat! Having a cat on your lap will mellow you. This lady won't have any attacks of road rage.

Morning all

@Johannes_B I see spaces …

@HaraldHanche-Olsen So?

@JosephWright Morning

@Johannes_B No problem, if the command is always to be used in vertical mode, of course. But I suppose you posted the picture for other reasons than the actual contents?

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Yes.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen tex.stackexchange.com/questions/371725/…

@Johannes_B Ah, that's an interesting use of chat. Quite confusing when you don't know whence it came.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Also answering questions on TeX.SX while driving is a way to relax. I do it all the time on my motorbike. ;-)

@egreg @HaraldHanche-Olsen I hope not to be on your way when you are driving :):):)

@CarLaTeX It's a bit awkward on mountain roads, otherwise it's easy. 😇

@UlrikeFischer Does MikTeX still support Win XP? latex.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=103232#p103232

@HaraldHanche-Olsen The guitar is too large, a laptop doesn't extend outside the bike. ;-)

@egreg Just be careful so that a USB cord doesn't fly off and wrap itself around a yield sign.

@egreg And if it does, let go of the laptop.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen On this road, for instance

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Col de Braus, near Nice.

@Johannes_B No. miktex.org/kb/prerequisites. The guy also asked a few days ago on the miktex list about " MiKTeX on PC with win32" but I have no idea what he means by "win32" and hadn't nerve yet to ask back.

@UlrikeFischer Ah, ok. Since i don't have any clue about MikTeX, i let it sit for somebody else.

@egreg Or this one? ↑↑

@TeXnician normally it should go fast, but the newest biber isn't on ctan yet. So you should either revert the update or try a binary from here sourceforge.net/projects/biblatex-biber/files/biblatex-biber/….

@Johannes_B I think you didn't try texdoc deluxetable

@UlrikeFischer I did after i posted the comment. :-) But i left the comment.

@UlrikeFischer Thanks. I've seen that the latest git commit is "Preparing 2.8 release", so probably we'll have an update within the next few days.

@DavidCarlisle ooh :)

@PauloCereda @CarLaTeX you got mail (I hope)

@UlrikeFischer answering it. :)

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Wow! I want to do it!

@HaraldHanche-Olsen A mere 2500 km to go there. :-)

@egreg A mere 306 km for me.

@UlrikeFischer Just replied!

In TikZ, is it possible to run a few commands in a context where coordinates are relative to some fixed point?

Writing all these 364.1267s is getting annoying

@LegionMammal978 Of course it's possible, you can position a node relatively to some other node with below\above\right\left\etc. =... of where ... is a lenght (positioning library) or in a path you can use \draw (somenode) -- ++(...,...);

Mario Odyssey was posted to me yesterday. I won't be able to play the game until next weekend. :(

@PauloCereda s/next weekend/after thesis done/

@DavidCarlisle Oh

@CarLaTeX Those are very handy, but somewhat specialised. I imagine @LegionMammal978 wants to move the whole coordinate system temporarily.

@DavidCarlisle: It was very nice of you to enjoy my emacs alias. :)

@PauloCereda I think we should stop the video after 20 seconds and just give an overview that says @PauloCereda demonstrates how to use auctex to insert document fragments.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Sorry, I didn't understand the question, then :)

@DavidCarlisle ooh I could try this at TUG 2018. :)

A vampire hedgehog

@CarLaTeX Or maybe I didn't. But it's the question I would have asked. ;-)

@LegionMammal978 \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{scope}[shift={(3,2)}] \draw [red] (0,0) -- (1,1); \end{scope} \draw (0,0) -- (1,1); \end{tikzpicture}

@JosephWright Wow. The text is coloured #888, the links are coloured #777. Can you actually tell the difference? I can't, without hovering the mouse cursor over likely locations.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen They are similar, I know: it's a 'subtle' format I guess :)

@HaraldHanche-Olsen I might add an explicit list of videos ...

@JosephWright That would be good. Then I could actually find them on the ipad.

@JosephWright can't we stick to a "write your documents in English" plan?

@DavidCarlisle :)

@TorbjørnT. Thanks! Remembered there being something for that...

@TorbjørnT. Ah, so that's how you do it. I remember now, I used to know it, then forgot.

@JosephWright I can't see any good way to do \MakeLowercase with \protected\def characters, I think you'd have to give up on \lowercase completely and do it all by hand, decoding the utf8, lowercaseing then re-encoding as utf8. That might be too much to add.

@DavidCarlisle Sure

@JosephWright and just as I'd convinced myself that \protected was the way to go...

A lot of 2 in there.

@UlrikeFischer did you see you get an honourable mention here: github.com/ho-tex/hyperref/issues/49

@Johannes_B The important thing to note is "42"!

@TeXnician Exactly :-)

@TeXnician tex.stackexchange.com/questions/399754/…

@DavidCarlisle ;-). But I don't understand the difference in the output of choice and text field.

@UlrikeFischer no, sorry I haven't had chance to look at this at all yet.

@DavidCarlisle I will perhaps look later.

@UlrikeFischer thanks. I'll carry on worrying how to best to make \MakeLowercase not destroy utf8 input:-)

nice palindrome for me ...

@DavidCarlisle I tried once to implement a "make uppercase" in a sectioning command and to get it safely into the toc and the bookmarks and decided at the end that all make uppercase variants (include expl3) are meant only for english people who don't know accents and used a font with uppercase letters in the lower case positions instead (along this line tex.stackexchange.com/questions/370799/…).

@UlrikeFischer back in 1993 we wrote (in ltfinal.dtx) :

%    And whilst we're doing things with uc/lc tables, here are two
%    commands to upper- and lower-case a string.
%
%    \emph{Note} that this implementation is subject to change!  At
%    the moment we're not providing any way to extend the list of
%    uc/lc commands, since finding a good interface is difficult.
%    These commands have some nasty features, such as uppercasing
%    mathematics, environment names, labels, etc.  A much better
%    long-term solution is to use all-caps fonts, but these aren't

@UlrikeFischer main worry at present is doing this for pdftex so building a virtual lua font isn't really an option:(

@Kurt Oooh very nice!

@CarLaTeX :-)

@DavidCarlisle I would use fonts with pdftex too. Imho at the end it is less work to build a virtual font for a uppercase shape then trying to get people understand why some commands/input doesn't work or needs protection or a special input.

@UlrikeFischer it's sort of tempting but there are thousands of fonts available and no way to build virtual fonts "on the fly" except in luatex. Also for pdf bookmarks etc don't you need to actually do the numeric mapping anyway as if you want the bookmark to appear uppercase you need to really change the character not just use an all caps font don't you?

@UlrikeFischer anyway my plan is to make a section heading that has \MakeUppercase work for any reasonable input (that is the lower and upper case character are in the font) including tables of contents and bookmarks. It's just that I don't yet have a plan on how exactly to make that work...

@UlrikeFischer Huh? The expl3 one should be fine with a Unicode engine

@DavidCarlisle Also accessibility/copy-paste, etc.

@JosephWright The problem was with pdflatex, I only showed the lua code to clarify what I meant with a "font solution".

@UlrikeFischer On the team we have argued a bit about fonts and case changing: in a sense the idea that case is a property of the font is the correct one ...

@UlrikeFischer In pdfTeX the question becomes what input to support and more importantly what the long-term of such approaches is ...

@UlrikeFischer I have considered some code to deal with UTF-8 in pdfTeX, but the question is how far to go (OK, most east Asian stuff doesn't have case so it is probably a tractable problem). At least in part, it's not been clear until recently that assuming UTF-8 for pdfTeX would be acceptable: that may now be changing ...

@JosephWright I would say in 95% of the case "property of the font" is the correct view.

@JosephWright ah well accessibility and copy/paste answers depend on whether you think an uppercase David should be David styled to look like DAVID or should be really DAVID:-) (But if we start discussing that the utf8 update may take longer than @Paulo's thesis)

@UlrikeFischer If you have use cases where an expandable case changer for say western European accents in pdfTeX is useful, please let me know: most of the time one can \protected@edef somewhere first

@UlrikeFischer Well yes, but that's not how fonts are set up

@UlrikeFischer One reason for the limit in the pdfTeX version in expl3 is that I suspect longer-term we have to work on the basis that using an 8-bit engine for anything other than English is extremely questionable

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{expl3}
\begin{document}
\ExplSyntaxOn
\edef\test{\tl_upper_case:n{éüß}}\show\test
\end{document}

@UlrikeFischer ^^^

@JosephWright don't tempt me....

@DavidCarlisle Only deals with some characters ...

@JosephWright yes, I know but some is more than none:-)

@JosephWright The main problem is not that you can't uppercase but that if you use it generally e.g. to format a section you have to pay attention to so many details. See e.g.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\usepackage{siunitx}

\begin{document}
\tableofcontents
\section{\MakeUppercase{\SI{5}{\kilo\meter} äöü \cite{doody} $a=b$}}

\end{document}

@UlrikeFischer For example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\usepackage{siunitx}
\usepackage{expl3}
\ExplSyntaxOn
\cs_new_eq:NN \ExplUppercase \tl_upper_case:n
\tl_put_right:Nn \l_tl_case_change_exclude_tl { \NoChangeCase }
\cs_new_eq:NN \NoChangeCase \use:n
\ExplSyntaxOff

\begin{document}
\tableofcontents
\section{\ExplUppercase{\NoChangeCase{\SI{5}{\kilo\meter}} äöü \cite{doody} $a=b$}}

\end{document}

@UlrikeFischer We might still need some more 'lists of exceptions' stuff: here, an expandable 'swap out' for \SI would be handy ...

@UlrikeFischer You remind me that I did completely rejig the pdfTeX UTF-8 support: should be usable for western European work

@JosephWright And if I want \kilo\meter to output KM in this context?

@UlrikeFischer then you will get a letter of reprimand from the siunitx author.

@UlrikeFischer More tricky

@UlrikeFischer Remember that this is still down as experimental :) Some of this also links to 'document command contexts', an xparse issue

@UlrikeFischer I was mainly trying to highlight that there's been a reasonable amount of work on accents

@JosephWright enough to make it feasible to use \protected characters by default in 2e?

@DavidCarlisle I have code (in expl3 style of course) that covers all of the T1 accents

@DavidCarlisle See l3candidates, line ~3570

@DavidCarlisle We could just make \MakeUppercase equivalent to a version of \tl_upper_case:n: without the need to do language-dependent stuff it can be simplified quite a bit

@DavidCarlisle I suspect a reasonable number of people rely on the raw \lowercase behaviour!

@UlrikeFischer We should arrange another meeting in Europe to discuss these things ;)

@JosephWright I know and imho \tl_upper_case:n{some normal text} works very good. But as I wrote the problem is there are lots of situation where actually a \tl_upper_case:n {arbitrary input but not math and handle cites and ...} is wanted, and in such cases a font solution is much saner: if mostly gives the expected output and seldom explodes because of a unknown command.

@UlrikeFischer Oh sure: like I said, case is arguable a property of font (I notice ConTeXt doesn't attempt to do anything beyond \uppercase at the TeX side)

Is there an easy way in TikZ to move to the point whose x coordinate is dx greater than that of the current point, but whose y coordinate is specified absolutely? Like you go to ++(dx,0) and then set the y coordinate? The -| or |- notations seem useless here.

@JosephWright yes but it does mean that all those documents that have \lowercase and sort of work will fail with very weird errors (as it messes up the utf8 decode)

@UlrikeFischer The thing is that is also non-trivial to generalise, and most programmers expect to be able to case change 'strings', so we need something beyond the primitives (in my opinon)

@UlrikeFischer How does the font approach get on with context-dependent stuff (final sigma, languages, etc.)?

@JosephWright that might mean we can't default to utf8-at all, even with using \protect :(

@DavidCarlisle Well yes, that is an issue

@DavidCarlisle One for the team list I guess: something has to give somewhere, it's a question of what

@JosephWright yes will try to write something in a bit

@UlrikeFischer In LuaTeX one can I guess tag each node with both a case requirement and a language, so deal with everything 'late' ...

@JosephWright but perhaps enough people have been using \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} for long enough that raw uses of \lowercase are not as common as they were. I hope so...

@UlrikeFischer Thanks for reminding me to look again at my own code :) I probably should write something for TUGboat on this (@barbarabeeton will be pleased)

@JosephWright Yes, case-changing macros are useful, there is no doubt about it. But like \edef or \xdef one should avoid to use them if one doesn't have enough control over the argument (I hope @DavidCarlisle agrees ... ;-)).

Answer to my own question above: ++(dx,0) coordinate (p) (p |- 0, y) will do it. Turns out coordinates can be redefined, so no problem using this umpteen times (with a macro of course).

@UlrikeFischer but I'm looking at coding in the kernel where ultimately the argument is a user supplied string like a section title so I have no control over that, so you say I should avoid case changing macros but I also have no control over the users font choice...

@UlrikeFischer Sure: in the end comes down to I guess that in an ideal set up all of this is done by hand, but then we get into retyping stuff that can be done automatically, which is not popular

@UlrikeFischer I did write something for TUGboat before, but it would be suitable for more detail

@DavidCarlisle but font changes are normally harmless. If I set \addtokomafont{section}{\bfseries} it works but \addtokomafont{section}{\MakeUppercase} is much more picky.

@Johannes_B -- oh, yes. sadly, too familiar.

@barbarabeeton I am going to add a TUG advertisement. As it was discussed on EduTeX.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen -- for some of us fossils, this is/was "report program generator". (i managed to avoid it, but my husband didn't.) that's the trouble with "tla"s -- there are too few to choose from.

@UlrikeFischer sure but that's abusing the system as makeUppercase isn't a font selection but is being passed to a font selection command (the abuse is necessary as that's the only hook there is , same thing in the standard classes) but the equivalent thing to \bfseries would be to provide an all-caps entry via NFSS font selection commands but that wouldn't be harmelss, most people (ie everyone except you:-) would get missing font or missing glyph errors an almost all input.

@barbarabeeton Mm. And the birthday paradox doesn't help, not at all.

@DavidCarlisle I think we are back at the start ;-). But I don't think that problem is the hook -- the problem wouldn't be different if it would be called \addtokomaformat or if there was another one. But using \fontshape{uppercase}\selectfont abc is harmless: you don't get missing glyphs errrors or no output -- you only get a warning about a substituation if the font shape doesn't exist. That's imho much better than an error Undefined color RED'.` from a \MakeUppercase.

@UlrikeFischer I guess the issue then is that almost always the output will look wrong with a warning that gets ignored ...

@UlrikeFischer Worth at least considering for L3 work

@UlrikeFischer Problem is I suppose that most other software does 'actually' change the chars, so we are back with the whole copy-paste/accessibility/... issue

@JosephWright well naturally a class that uses \fontshape{uppercase} in a sectioning should also provide the fonts ;-).

@JosephWright No idea actually. I think I will have to try.

@UlrikeFischer getting \color{RED} is fixable (eg textcase package which doesn't make colour safe by default but fixes \cite{foo} from being \cite{FOO} and could do the same for colour)

@JosephWright that's true but might do it less now that for example CSS text-transform: uppercase; works in a reasonable range of browsers. <p style="text-transform: uppercase;">abc</p> renders as ABC but cuts and pastes as abc in the browsers I tested on just now. (firefox/chrome/edge)

@DavidCarlisle Hmm: still uses a normal font so presumably picks glyphs from the upper case range and does the equivalent of 'actualtext' when copy-pasting

UK-TUG post now has pictures :) uk.tug.org/2017/11/04/speaker-meeting-2017