TeX, LaTeX and Friends - 2018-05-12

« first day (2750 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (2187 days later) »

10:05 AM

user image

^^^ We ducks are protesting because all those human beings invaded our swimming pool

4

2 hours later…

12:07 PM

How do I do \Needspace in Google Docs?

I have a table that got broken over a page break in Google Docs.

I'm using Polyglossia and have set my main (default) language to english with latin and greek as other langs. But I keep getting this warning, "Package biblatex Warning: Language 'latin' not supported.
(biblatex) Using fallback language 'greek' on input line 67." Why does biblatex appear not to see that my default language is English?

@ahorn Add a page break before the table with Ctrl + Enter. (I wouldn't expect Google Docs to have anything like \needspace anyway.)

1 hour later…

1:32 PM

@ahorn google docs using TeX??

@CarLaTeX They are going sightseeing in Nijmwegen: v v v

@DavidCarlisle I was referring to the concept of \Needspace

user image

@ahorn I doubt you can apply many tex concepts to wysiwyg document processors:-)

@DavidCarlisle after you learnt LaTeX, didn't you start to look harder for the same sorts of features in Word? Granted, the features are sometimes non-existent or very difficult to find, and LaTeX makes it easier to control what's happening. But I find that, after learning LaTeX, my eyes were opened as to what is possible on a word processor, and I tried to replicate to some extent the results I was getting in LaTeX on other word processors.

1:44 PM

@ahorn after one learns TeX and friends, there's no need to use other softwares. :)

Brazilian soil!

🇧🇷

@DavidCarlisle I am back, what did I miss?

@CarLaTeX ooh a duck parade

@PhelypeOleinik I've come across someone who wanted a list of footnotes... go figure. I can even suspect where this came from...

@PauloCereda duck soup, it was delicious

@ahorn I have never used word. Well I have used it a few times as a reader if someone sends a docx file but I have never made a document in it.

@PauloCereda most of the people I work with on group assignments don't know how to code in LaTeX, so they can't learn it in a short space of time just to fit in with what I want.

@ahorn actually wikipedia says first version of word for windows was 1989, and I was already using latex for a couple of years by then.

@PauloCereda except Fortran

@DavidCarlisle :)

@DavidCarlisle oh no

1:58 PM

@PauloCereda actually I made that up, just to cheer you up

@ahorn compromise solution it is then. It is not exactly fair to ask for homogeneity when the group itself isn't... :)

@DavidCarlisle ooh

@PauloCereda 4842

I'm using biblatex to produce a subdivided bibliography. It works great, but I'm wondering if anyone has thoughts about how I might tweak the size, boldness, etc. of the section headings so that it doesn't look like this. i.imgur.com/3AWEKOs.jpg

(Please don't tell me to shorten the title for the first part of the bibliography. Yes, I've thought of it, but there should be another way...)

@Telemachus not easy to say just from that, you could shorten the title (sorry:-) or force a line break after the : or use a smaller font or make the page wider but most changes neeed to fit in with heading style for the rest of the document

2:15 PM

@DavidCarlisle To try to clarify my question: I'm wondering what heading settings biblatex is using. If it relies on global definitions, then I could (in theory) simply redifine those at the end of the document, before \printbibliography, correct?

@Telemachus it is easy to change it, you only need a different (new) heading style. But would it fit to your document?

@UlrikeFischer Thanks. Again, I wasn't sure that biblatex was using the document's own heading style or inventing its own. And I'm not comfortable enough with LaTeX to read the source to see. Your answer and David's suggests it does use default heading styles.

@Telemachus sure, by default it uses chapter or section depending on your class and your settings. But you can define your own styles with \defbibheading.

@Telemachus I know absolutely nothing about biblatex:-)

I found this as well, but only after I posted my question. tex.stackexchange.com/questions/102692/…

@DavidCarlisle Fair! Thanks for thoughts anyhow.

@UlrikeFischer \defbibheading sounds like what I need. I'll read the documentation on that. Thanks.

2:26 PM

@Telemachus something like this:

\documentclass{book}
\usepackage{biblatex,xcolor,tikzducks}
\defbibheading{duck}{\par\bigskip\textbf{\tikz[scale=0.3]\duck; \textcolor{red}{#1}}}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}
\begin{document}
\cite{doody}

\printbibliography[heading=duck,title=OOH]

\end{document}

user image

@UlrikeFischer Thanks for the example. I went somewhat the lazy route

\defbibheading{smaller}[]{%
    \subsubsection*{#1}
}

user image

Crude but effective for the moment.

And in fact, \subsection for the size is an even better compromise.

user image

@UlrikeFischer Thanks very much again.

2:43 PM

@UlrikeFischer Oooh

3:16 PM

Sometimes academics publish a document that doesn't use LaTeX properly (such as the tables on pages 14/15 of this report).

Why do you think they do that? Do they think they are "supposed" to use LaTeX?

@ahorn Many academics are forced (by an editor, publisher, etc.) to use LaTeX.

Also, many software users write documents in <AnySystem-TM> and don't use it properly. That's the nature of the world, I'd say.

@ahorn Not sure it's even written in LaTeX: doesn't particularly look that way

3:35 PM

@JosephWright which room is good for asking user issues in SO network?

user image

I can't see my downvotes but system counter says 4. Probably they are deleted questions

Do you have the infrared mod vision on those?

@percusse I can't see individual votes

@percusse You'd have to ask on meta: there's no public chat that the staff are active in, as far as I know

@percusse (I can ask in mod chat, but I think I'll get 'why are you worrying' or similar)

@JosephWright Ah, I'd rather stay away from that place :-)

Nevermind, I was just curious. Not worth the effort

Thanks though

1 hour later…

4:43 PM

@ahorn But why would you try to do that?

Oh, I see you answered that.

Though simple LaTeX isn't really much overhead. Especially if templates are provided.

Random poll for anyone here. How many people did you successfully introduce to TeX personally?

By successful means that they became TeX users.

I'm sad to say my personal number is zero.

5:01 PM

@FaheemMitha I've got one friend in mind. My other mathematical friends found LaTeX by themselves.

@ahorn Well done.

Or should that be - good work?

Are you really in South Africa? If so, congratulations at getting rid of that terrible President of yours. I hope the next one will be less dreadful.

@ahorn I'm not sure about your takeaway message in "Economic Development of India and Papua New Guinea: A comparative study".

Incidentally, I live in India.

Which is a place where, increasingly, is all about making the rich richer. Rather like the US, really.

I was just at the bank yesterday, and was reading some articles in a magazine (India Today), which was all about celebrating the richest and powerful Indians. In India and abroad. Which was sad. Particularly sad because in a place like India, if you are rich and successful, you have probably done bad things.

(Anyway, excuse the ramblings.)

@FaheemMitha Quite a number of our grad and undergrad students (maybe 10 or more) are using LaTeX. I don't push it on people, but students see that I and another professor use it and word gets around. This spring I also did a workshop for the undergrads. All of my grad students use it.

@AlanMunn How many people would you take credit for? :-)

5:17 PM

@FaheemMitha It's really hard to tell. I think the students encourage each other. My students use it and I teach my intro syntax students how to draw trees with it. Most of them still write up their assignments with Word, but some do switch to using LaTeX. Both undergrad thesis students I supervised this year used LaTeX as well.

@FaheemMitha So over the past 10 years or so probably well over a dozen, I would say.

@AlanMunn Impressive.

Do you point them to TeX SE in case of difficulties?

@FaheemMitha Yes.

@FaheemMitha I think in fields where there are clear advantages to using LaTeX (and linguistics is definitely one of them) getting people to use it is a bit easier.

It takes a certain amount of bravery to start using TeX. The error messages can be terrifying. And imagine trying to deal with those alone when one is on a deadline.

These days it's a bit easier, partly because of TeX SE. Also, I suppose there is more and better documentation now.

@AlanMunn Yes, like math/maths.

@FaheemMitha Yeah, errors are the worst thing about it for a beginner, for sure. And Sharelatex makes it worse because you have to tell it to force a compile to see some of the errors, but it's not obvious.

I've never used Sharelatex. And don't really see why one would use it.

5:23 PM

@FaheemMitha Yes, for sure. I think everyone in math beyond a certain level uses it. In linguistics it's still a minority I think, but my impression is that the numbers are growing.

@AlanMunn Linguistics can be quite mathematical, I think.

@FaheemMitha It makes the entry into using it very easy. And the editor is very helpful for beginners too.

@FaheemMitha Yes, and for some areas that's the reason latex is used, but not really the main one. The huge selling points are the packages for displaying and numbering linguistic examples (which are all text). And trees, of course.

@AlanMunn Oh.

@AlanMunn I see. Well, TeX is certainly very flexible and powerful.

@FaheemMitha See e.g. tex.stackexchange.com/q/77937/2693

Now, if only they could devise a TeX that one could actually understand, it would sweep the planet.

5:41 PM

@marmot First duckmath attempt:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikzducks}
\usepackage{phaistos}
\usepackage{starfont}
\usepackage{wasysym}

\newcommand{\mathduck}{\raisebox{-0.05em}{\tikz[scale=0.12]\duck;}}

\begin{document}

A duck with cookies and water is happy:

\[
 \mathduck + \textrm{\Aquarius} + 3 \times \textrm{\scalebox{0.6}{\PHshield}} = \smiley
\]

\end{document}

2

6:08 PM

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikzducks}
\usepackage{starfont}
\usepackage{tikzsymbols}

\newcommand{\mathduck}{\raisebox{-0.05em}{\tikz[scale=0.12]\duck;}}

\begin{document}

A duck with all the tool to bake a $\pi$zza is happy:
\[
\mathduck + \oven + \rollingpin + \garlicpress
+ \SchrodingersCat{0}= \dSmiley\times \mathduck + \SchrodingersCat{1}
\]

\end{document}

@samcarter ;-)

6:37 PM

Anyone here using tcolorbox for posters?

@marmot ananas (or chocolade) is missing.

@UlrikeFischer Yes, I agree, but in English these are \pi\ne\apples. Like all marmots, I love pineapple cake and honey liquor and I am somewhat hesitant to share those with ducks ;-)

@yo' Sorry, I am just a marmot. What do I have to do to opt out?

6:55 PM

@marmot You need to send an actual hard copy letter to the powers that be within 30 days of having accepted the new terms. (You need to read through the Public Terms of Service document to find it.)

@AlanMunn Thanks! But am I not supposed to get a letter or an email first?

@marmot No, at some point recently you may have clicked Yes to a "We have changed our terms of service" popup when you visited the site. That was when you accepted it...

@AlanMunn No I didn't. Strange. But thanks, I'll write the letter... in LateX of course ;-) Any chance you know a draft for such a letter?

@marmot No sorry, I don't.

7:48 PM

@ahorn that isn't made by tex (it's iText)

@DavidCarlisle e-pTeX binary updated on Windows

@JosephWright yes I got a new ptex via tlmgr today (no \expanded though:-)

@DavidCarlisle They only do fixes during the year

@DavidCarlisle We will get it for TL'19, I'm sure

@DavidCarlisle interesting

@JosephWright yes

7:54 PM

@FaheemMitha sorry, I meant to say I have a friend whom I'm planning on introducing to LaTeX

@DavidCarlisle And the RNG in XeTeX I think

@FaheemMitha I'm not really an expert, but I welcome further criticism.

@ahorn most pdf viewers let you see the producer in the properties menu, so you don't have to guess

@JosephWright heard from JK?

@ahorn I wasn't intending criticism, exactly. I just missed the point of what you were getting at there.

@DavidCarlisle Nope

8:05 PM

@JosephWright any progress on compiling the file utils?

@DavidCarlisle Working on it

@DavidCarlisle I'm trying to track down the C functions that need to be enabled: I have a feeling this is where I've gone wrong

@DavidCarlisle Much easier with the bash setup (currently rebuilding everything as I'm not sure the Work/texk/web2c/make trick deals with that)

@JosephWright OK (I think I'm done for PL5, but want Frank to peer review the roillback stuff, not sure when he's fully back)

@DavidCarlisle Also back on siunitx v3 (might offer a third talk for Brazil: the package is now 10 years old)

@JosephWright yes you rely on all the dependencies being tracked in the Makefile and considering the interesting pipeline it probably isn't complete, so doing a full build every now and then can't hurt:-)

@DavidCarlisle Exactly: I also do that when I change branches

@DavidCarlisle I'm trying a tack where I forget the reordering for these tricky functions, and just try to have stuff 'similar' to the pdfutils.ch file

@DavidCarlisle Could do with a faster laptop for this 'real' development work ;)

8:09 PM

@JosephWright proper source control systems check out branches in separate directories and don't confuse Make so much:-)

@JosephWright we do have some funds...

@DavidCarlisle :)

@DavidCarlisle Yeah, 1 Gb per checkout ...

@DavidCarlisle :)

@DavidCarlisle So do other people, if I can convince them to spend anything

@JosephWright I still can't work out why travis is so much faster than my laptop, I think I blame the corporate virus checker, it's a basic dell box but it's got an ssd and an i7 processor so it shouldn't be so much slower (but it is:-)

@DavidCarlisle I wonder too

@DavidCarlisle It's running on Amazon S3 ...

@JosephWright but there is limited scope for parallelism I suspect, eg when doing a l3build check, it could be massively quicker if it checked each test on a separate node, but I don't see how it could know to do that

@DavidCarlisle You can have multiple set ups: we could run the script separately for each bundle

@DavidCarlisle See what the TL tests do (three parallel builds)

8:18 PM

@JosephWright I mean automatically, travis can install and setup a vm and run all the tests before my laptop gets half way through. But I don't think it's parallelising the main loop (which would be theoretically possible but...)

@FaheemMitha I've just read through my essay again (I wrote it 2 years ago). The assigned question was to compare and contrast the development of two countries from different regions (for a development economics course), so it was just an overview of the development of the two countries (the course was at second year level).

@ahorn I see. Could you choose any two countries you wanted?

I'd personally have gone with India and one of its neighbors. Say Pakistan and Bangladesh.

@JosephWright oi Bruno's sending me amsmath bugs now, I guess i'm supposed to fix them:-)

Yes, but they had to be from different regions.

Because they are so similar, it's more meaningful to compare them.

@ahorn Different continents?

India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have gone off in quite different directions, I think.

Though I don't know the details.

8:22 PM

Yes. South Asia was counted as a different continent to East Asia though.

They're all disaster zones, but India is certainly the best off of the three.

@ahorn Ok.

I think it's not that hard to do interesting work in economics, but that's a field where there is a lot of lying, I mean ideology.

@FaheemMitha this was the instruction for the topic: i.stack.imgur.com/SrQ1U.jpg

@DavidCarlisle oh no

@FaheemMitha well, there's lies, damn lies, and statistics

And yes, economics leans towards capitalist ideology, but that isn't necessarily right.

8:40 PM

@PauloCereda I don't suppose "you've got write access" is an acceptable response on the public issue tracker.

@marmot Oh, I did not know the \SchrodingersCat command! Thank you for showing it!

@samcarter I was also not very certain about the package it is in. ;-)

Anatoly Makarevich

Hi. I'm having issues with TexStudio, LaTeX, Unicode, and pdf.

The PDF generates correctly and looks fine, but when I try to copy the text it gives bad symbols

Is this a pdflatex issue?

8:55 PM

@AnatolyMakarevich for most of latex's existence that's been the normal case but these days for most font encodings there are supposed to be mappings set up to map to font encodings to unicode so cut and paste has a chance, but of course it's easier to get it right with xetex or luatex which are using unicode fonts

@AnatolyMakarevich in classic tex fonts every character is encoded on positions 0-255 (or 0-127 for math) and so if you cut and and paste as plain text all non ascii symbols just come out as whatever ascii character slot was used in the font encoding unless the pdf encodes a to unicode mapping and the pdf renderer uses it when cutting and pasting

@AnatolyMakarevich you should make an example.

Anatoly Makarevich

Example:

\documentclass{beamer}

\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1,T2A]{fontenc}
%\usepackage{header}
\usepackage[english,russian]{babel}
\selectlanguage{\russian}

\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
привет
\end{frame}
\end{document}

@ahorn I read it.

It's a pretty interesting topic, actually.

Why countries develop or don't.

I might have gone with South Korea vs India.

Very different development paths.

Anatoly Makarevich

@DavidCarlisle Yeah, I'm aware of encoding problems in general, just it's odd to me how apparently the UTF symbols are converted to an ASCII codepage

South Korea was a basket case after the Korean War, but it came back strongly.

9:03 PM

@AnatolyMakarevich I eouldn't ise utf8x unless there is some special reason

Anatoly Makarevich

I tried with utf8, same thing occurs

I think it's reasonable to include cultural factor when talking about development. But I have a book by an eminent Cambridge economist which says that's all poppycock.

@AnatolyMakarevich well that;s exactly what inputenc/fontenc is doing mapping the Cyrillic characters to the T2 encoding which is slots below 256 so if that gets cut and pasted without recording the custom tex encoding and a reverse mapping to Unicode it will not be cyrillic when you paste it anywhere

add `\input glyphtounicode
\pdfgentounicode=1` to your preamble.

@AnatolyMakarevich yes (or in the latest release you don't need inputenc at all)

I was just going to say, more details here tex.stackexchange.com/search?q=glyphtounicode

but @UlrikeFischer got there first:-)

9:06 PM

@DavidCarlisle I just had this 4 days ago: tex.stackexchange.com/a/430599/2388 ;-)

@UlrikeFischer why isn't there a glyphtounicode .sty ?

Anatoly Makarevich

Unfortunately, after adding that, I still get 'ïðèâåò'

Edited example:

\documentclass{beamer}

\input glyphtounicode
\pdfgentounicode=1

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1,T2A]{fontenc}
%\usepackage{header}
\usepackage[english,russian]{babel}
\selectlanguage{\russian}

\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
привет
\end{frame}
\end{document}

@AnatolyMakarevich I tried and it worked. With: привет without: ïðèâåò (tested in the adobe reader).

Anatoly Makarevich

Tried in Firefox (should be Adobe there), Edge - still fails. Maybe it's a problem with my tex installation?

using MikTeX

@AnatolyMakarevich firefox is most likely using it's build in javascript pdf renderer rather than adobbe plugin

привет <<<< but I just copied that from the pdf in firefox (firefox 62 on windows)

@AnatolyMakarevich ^^

Anatoly Makarevich

9:13 PM

yeah, I don't think the problem is in the reader (I've copied russian from firefox before)

@AnatolyMakarevich Are your sure the pdf got reloaded? Change the text to be sure.

@AnatolyMakarevich Russian from latex? (If the pdf is using opentype fonts (eg from Word etc) there is no problem as the internal encoding is already Unicode so no mapping is needed, it is just systems using legacy 8-bit fonts that have an issue.

Anatoly Makarevich

PDF definitely got reloaded. Adobe Reader also gives the text ïðèâåò âñåì for привет всем

Again - it displays correctly, but copying fails.

I could link a github repo

github.com/NowanIlfideme/diploma-present-tex

@AnatolyMakarevich try cutting from here (made from your tex file) monet.nag.co.uk/~dpc/zz.pdf

Anatoly Makarevich

Yep, it works for that file. привет

So it's probably something to do with my installation then?

9:22 PM

@AnatolyMakarevich I have never used miktex so i drop out here but the site expert on Miktex is @UlrikeFischer .....

Anatoly Makarevich

Is there any good link on how to "properly" set up tex/latex?

@AnatolyMakarevich how old is your setup (eg what date does latex say in the log when it starts)

Anatoly Makarevich

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.19 (MiKTeX 2.9.6630 64-bit) (preloaded format=pdflatex 2018.3.24) 13 MAY 2018 00:25
entering extended mode

@AnatolyMakarevich Your document is using bitmap fonts. Install the cm-super package.

Anatoly Makarevich

Alright, on it. How did you find that out?

Inspecting the pdf?

9:30 PM

@AnatolyMakarevich I looked in the properties of the pdf. But you only need to zoom in to see that the fonts are ragged:

user image

Anatoly Makarevich

Understood. I haven't had to work with pdf's much before, other than converting things such as Word docs into them. Switched to tex about a year or two ago, so still learning. :)

Ok, so it's still not rendering with a vector font. What do I have to do to change it?

@AnatolyMakarevich You mean you installed cm-super but it is not active? Call updmap on the command line, or in the miktex console in the task menu "refresh font maps" (or something like this)

Anatoly Makarevich

command ran, still bitmap

I'm tempted to just nuke the installation and start from scratch :P

@AnatolyMakarevich Wait a minute. I have to look up the map name.

@AnatolyMakarevich What happens if you add \pdfmapfile{=cm-super-t2a.map} to your document?

Anatoly Makarevich

Hooray, it works. Is there a way to make this consistent on all my docs?

Besides just importing a custom preamble, I mean.

9:44 PM

@AnatolyMakarevich Did you run updmap (or the console command) as user or as admin?

Anatoly Makarevich

as admin

and miktex was installed as admin, as well

@AnatolyMakarevich do it as user. You have a user map file, it takes precendance and you need to change this.

Anatoly Makarevich

I see

I still need to add the following though for unicode support, it seems, right?

\input glyphtounicode
\pdfgentounicode=1

I tried without them (on an old doc) and still got gibberish when copying (though vector font)

Anyways, it's working now, big thanks @UlrikeFischer and @DavidCarlisle :)

10:18 PM

@AnatolyMakarevich :-)

Phelype Oleinik

@Joseph Oh, you're Brazilian too! So you've also seen some pretty weird stuff done by "following standards" :/

10:51 PM

@PhelypeOleinik We all love ABNT. :)

Phelype Oleinik

@AlanMunn People love it so much that its fame is international! :P

11:15 PM

@DavidCarlisle What's the rationale behind having .clo files loaded by classes as opposed to e.g. a package?

@PhelypeOleinik, ABNT = Hydra. ABNT worshipers = minions. Brazil = a Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Been there. Using Latex to follow typewriter-era standards isn't very rational.

@AlanMunn history, mostly

11:30 PM

@DavidCarlisle Ok. So there's no problem to make a package for custom sizes modelled after a .clo file.

@AlanMunn in the beginning there was a unified syntax \documentstyle[12pt,longtable,fleqn]{article} but some options were built in and any unknown onws were tries as file load for an contributed style file, The built in ones stayed as options (and .clo if there was a lot of code) and the contributed ones became packages

@DavidCarlisle Ah, ok. (I started using LaTeX long after the switch, so I've never had the pleasure of using \documentstyle. :) )

@AlanMunn no, although a new class (like extarticle etc) might be better as size options are (usually) closely tied with a particular document class, but there are already lots of packages patching te standard classes so one more won't hurt..

@DavidCarlisle Well it's for my own use for now. It's for posters, which need everything much bigger, and I don't like the values that extsizes has chosen.

@AlanMunn ah well a poster really is a class of document:-)

@Joseph could I sell them this? ctan.org/pkg/typewriter?lang=en

11:36 PM

@DavidCarlisle Right, but I'm looking into the tcolorbox poster library which seems to be independent of a poster class, hence the difficulty. But the library seems good and I like tcolorbox generally, so I'll fix the font size issue myself.

@AlanMunn since it's an open secret that .clo files .sty package files and .cls files are really just \input in disguise it's hard to get too worried about which form is used:-)

@DavidCarlisle :)

@DavidCarlisle :)

@AlanMunn @PauloCereda :) :)

@marmot ooh

11:49 PM

@PauloCereda Now you broke the Fibonacci series :-(

@marmot oh no

Phelype Oleinik

@Joseph I'm part of the coordination of my postgraduate program, then I'm in charge to make the template for the future generations. I asked if I had to stick to ABNT and they said no, so:

user image

@DavidCarlisle Only if they could use it with double line spacing (or more!)

@PhelypeOleinik @Joseph I just realised this is an abnt thing isn't it? overleaf.com/read/bpqdkmgxznvh#/11388571

for this question

0

A: Positioning of Elements

The class defines \newenvironment{table}[2][] {\@float{table}\begin{center}\begin{minipage}{#2}\begin{center}} {\end{center}\end{minipage}\end{center}\end@float} so the optional argument [htbp] comes before the width argument but it (#1) is never used so [ht] is the same as [htp] or [hello...

« first day (2750 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (2187 days later) »

Transcript for

May '1812

$TeX - LaTeX$ TeX, LaTeX and Friends

\begin{chat}

join this room
about this room

00:00

06:00

12:00

18:00

all times are UTC

$TeX - LaTeX$

site design / logo © 2024 Stack Exchange Inc; legal

mobile