TeX, LaTeX and Friends

David Carlisle

6:50 AM

@marmot there is a picture in the comment above (goo.gl link)

Joseph Wright

8:56 AM

@DavidCarlisle uktug.github.io/uk-tex-faq

David Carlisle

@JosephWright via tex to html or a conversion to markdown?

Joseph Wright

@StefanKottwitz, @PauloCereda A heads up: @DavidCarlisle, Karl Berry and I are looking at the UK TeX FAQ with a view to updating the sources and (probably) putting the 'live' version on GitHub pages. At some stage I'll likely try to shift the DNS, once we have things 'stabilised' (basically, the current TeX-to-HTML backend is not really sustainable)

@DavidCarlisle Just used your script at the moment: I'll start on Markdown conversion later today (unless you beat me to it)

@DavidCarlisle Thought we should have a branch on the 'official' version that is set up for GitHub Pages

David Carlisle

@JosephWright sounds good, probably can't do anything today so all yours for a bit:-)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Cool: my plan is first to just spit out Markdown files rather than HTML, but without them doing anything, then try to get to something working ...

@DavidCarlisle Then we can worry about styling and the like, plus I think it would be good to automate the 'last edited' stuff

@DavidCarlisle I wonder if longer-term we might go for a strictly pull-request based workflow here (for content): there is a logic in the FAQ being a bit more 'formalised'

Joseph Wright

9:40 AM

@DavidCarlisle What I think I'll do is take your script and check in lots of little changes that slowly edge towards Markdown (so we can see what I was up to): one obvious question is do we want GitHub-flavoured Markdown with the three-backtick stuff for code quotes (and thus allowing for syntax highlighting), or do we want classical four-space indenting ...

@DavidCarlisle Actually, help.github.com/articles/creating-and-highlighting-code-blocks seems pretty clear

David Carlisle

@JosephWright that was what I thought would be a plan to moving towards markdown last night but I decided to sleep instead

Joseph Wright

10:20 AM

@DavidCarlisle Cool :)

@DavidCarlisle Not like we'll need the script long-term ...

@DavidCarlisle You've done most of the grind: it's largely a question of how we want things to look. I suspect we might want a few new pages to give us some structure rather than one massive index, but that's easily sorted by hand

@DavidCarlisle Looking forward to your view on the last part of my most recent mail ...

Maïeul

10:36 AM

it seems to me I read recently an article about the problem of space after optional argument

but I don't remember where

Joseph Wright

10:52 AM

@Maïeul Might have been me ...

Maïeul

@JosephWright maybe

Stefan Kottwitz

11:27 AM

@JosephWright @DavidCarlisle Do you plan to keep TeX as FAQ source? Or switch to Markdown?

@JosephWright @DavidCarlisle I was working some time with the TeX markup: tex.ac.uk/uk-tex-faq-br-01.tex

Joseph Wright

@StefanKottwitz Currently we are exploring switching to Markdown entirely

@StefanKottwitz github.com/uktug/uk-tex-faq/tree/Markdown

@StefanKottwitz The .tex version is really not that easy to work with and we have to wonder who uses the PDF here

@StefanKottwitz The key is really to have an easy-to-update FAQ with proper curation

David Carlisle

@JosephWright er was working, let me check mail....

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle The one to you and Karl about 9 this morning

@DavidCarlisle Your conversion script is very good :) Making Markdown should be easy enough (I can probably get it all done today)

@DavidCarlisle Just a few 'cleanup' areas, but they probably needing addressing anyway

@StefanKottwitz Obviously, if there are objections we can look at other approaches, e.g. a cron job to grab the updates

David Carlisle

@JosephWright oh that:-) yes that seems to be true (even if it is surprising some people:-)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle I know ... particularly plain users I suspect

Stefan Kottwitz

11:35 AM

@JosephWright I'm half way through with tedious TeXing a translation so I better not continue and wait what happens with the Markdown way

Joseph Wright

@StefanKottwitz Ah

@StefanKottwitz Don't want to cause any issues

Stefan Kottwitz

@JosephWright take a look at my link above ;-)

Joseph Wright

@StefanKottwitz The idea is to script the conversion, so any additional TeX sources can be handled the same way

@StefanKottwitz I did notice it was in Portuguese

Stefan Kottwitz

@JosephWright (Brazilian Portuguese)

Joseph Wright

@StefanKottwitz We've been somewhat drifting with the FAQ, so getting stuff easier to edit (and update) would I think be good. A TeX source is great, but one does wonder how useful it is.

@StefanKottwitz That too

Stefan Kottwitz

11:39 AM

@JosephWright Some time ago I had setup a WYSIWYG editable wiki with the UK TeX FAQ content with the same reasons (maintainable,editable, readable, browsable, exportable, rich interlinks and indexing)

@JosephWright Perhaps you remember (if you knew it at that time)

Joseph Wright

@StefanKottwitz Indeed

@StefanKottwitz Yes, I remember: I'd wondered about the status for a while

@StefanKottwitz You OK with a Markdown/'easy' editing conversion?

Stefan Kottwitz

@JosephWright Sure, I use Markdown (converted to LaTeX) in my work anyway

@JosephWright Observing the feedback, I removed that site quickly at that time.

Joseph Wright

@StefanKottwitz Wasn't that when Robin was still active?

Stefan Kottwitz

@JosephWright Yes, it was. Robin sent positive feedback about a wiki for maintaining. (though he won't work on it, but it was a way to ease his burden of work anyway)

@JosephWright Frank's feedback was, a wiki base isn't needed.

Joseph Wright

11:58 AM

@StefanKottwitz Ah

@StefanKottwitz I see

@StefanKottwitz Probably I saw that email ...

Stefan Kottwitz

@JosephWright I use a wiki with markdown editing for a German faq. A very easy way of adding good content to it, was: taking some of the highest voted and most linked questions of texwelt.de (that is in markdown), then it's nearly just copy and paste and adding reference to the author, tweaking a bit, since all is Markdown.

The German wiki was publicly editable, but after vandalism I locked it for the public, so editing for real maintainers only. Anyway it's an easier content management.

Paulo Cereda

12:13 PM

Quack from SP!

egreg

@PauloCereda Did you wear your parka?

David Carlisle

@JosephWright next I guess a pull request to add a latex3 grammar to github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/vendor/README.md ...

Paulo Cereda

@egreg Yes! :)

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda as you may have seen over the weekend, it's always hot and sunny in England

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle ooh

yo'

1:07 PM

@samcarter looks good! As for the colours, there's yellow for cubs and brown for scouts. So the yellow one would be perfect, but it clashes with the body colour...

Also, we would typically wear one of these, but they are tricky to draw, so I would let it be ...

the default colour of the turban-tie is also brown, but it can be in any colour

samcarter

@yo' Hi! I like the yellow colour from the images you linked to, but it is not very visible if the duck has its default colour :( Brown would work very well as default colour.

Does the neckpiece has a special name for scouts?

yo'

@samcarter well, it could also be brown by default, but the yellow on beige could be in the showcase in the manual maybe? (beige is the colour of the uniform here)

samcarter

The knot could maybe drawn with this celtic knot library (I could do it in the showcase section, but it is maybe too complicate to include it as default)

yo'

@samcarter you mean the tie? Well, we call it turbánek (literally little turban)

samcarter

@yo' Yes, including it in the showcase section is the plan, together with the cap

yo'

1:16 PM

@samcarter :)

samcarter

@yo' Cute name :) I'm not if tikz allows á in keywords

yo'

@samcarter please no! That would be very unstable w.r.t. latex/pdflatex/lualatex/xelatex

David Carlisle

@samcarter in English it's en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neckerchief

@yo' ^^ or at least I assume it's the same thing

yo'

@DavidCarlisle by usage yes, by shape not so quite :)

David Carlisle

@yo' I noticed it's folded wrong, you'd never have passed inspection with it (not) rolled as shown in your image:-)

yo'

1:27 PM

@DavidCarlisle ah no, the whole thing is called simply scout scarf! But we speak about the small buckle you put it through

David Carlisle

@yo' it's always called a woggle (in UK) (which is I think a term only used in scouting) with the scarf called a neckerchief.

yo'

@DavidCarlisle ok never heard of it really :)

David Carlisle

@yo' Tasmanian term according to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woggle

Penguinlay

Hi, is it possible to conditionally format an environment? I don't want to break an environment, say theorem, into two pages. If it doesn't fit in one page, I want it to show up in the next page. (Assume that the contents are no longer than a page.)

David Carlisle

@Penguinlay needspace might do what you want (or just put the environment in a minipage, then it will never break)

yo'

1:34 PM

@DavidCarlisle cool

David Carlisle

@yo' I was in the scouts for a long time (ages 7 to 18, more or less)

Penguinlay

@DavidCarlisle Yeah, those two were what I needed. Thanks!

samcarter

2:32 PM

@DavidCarlisle Thanks for your input! Woggle sounds so funny -- I'll have to use it :)

TeXnician

@PauloCereda You got mail (among others).

Paulo Cereda

@TeXnician Thank you! I will reply as soon as possible. <3

TeXnician

@PauloCereda I'm sure you have many things to try :D

Paulo Cereda

@TeXnician :D

@TeXnician I am very excited with these things. :)

yo'

2:51 PM

@DavidCarlisle cool

@samcarter So in the end it's neckerchief and woggle?

marmot

@yo' @samcarter and a Marmot jacket? ;-)

yo'

@marmot scouts don't kill animals for fur. We love to use leather, but we still consider it as a by-product of butchery.

marmot

@yo' That's why I wrote Marmot jacket as opposed to marmot jacket, which would be really cruel. ;-)

samcarter

3:23 PM

2

@yo' neckerchief and woggle are what I currently use in my development version. And in the showcase description I plan to include your little turban word. How do you call the neckerchief?

@yo' I'm currently looking into the various knots libraries :)

yo'

@samcarter šátek (scarf) and turbánek

@samcarter and "Handbook" = "Scouting\\for Boys" I think :-)

Ulrike Fischer

@yo' we suggest "How to Help Old Ladies" @samcarter ;-)

2

yo'

3:38 PM

@UlrikeFischer you're so clichéy :)

Ulrike Fischer

@yo' "How to Help Old Ducks"?

egreg

@samcarter You should also add a “mathematician duck”, which would be appropriate for @yo' as well as for me.

@samcarter A hat like in the famous picture of Hilbert would be nice

David Carlisle

This hat would suit you better @egreg

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Or this one

David Carlisle

@egreg you would look fetching in this

G. Bay

4:19 PM

lol, Fermat hat is great

Ulrike Fischer

@G.Bay That's not Fermat but Euler.

G. Bay

facepalm

egreg

@G.Bay In order from top: David Hilbert, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Leonhard Euler, Ada Lovelace

G. Bay

still a great mind, and great hat

egreg

Ada Lovelace

Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is sometimes regarded as the first to recognise the full potential of a "computing machine" and the first computer programmer. Ada Lovelace was the only legitimate...

Steven B. Segletes

5:45 PM

@egreg Concerning your answer at tex.stackexchange.com/questions/50777/… on redefining the \url macro. I've used that a long time, but just found that it seems to break when used with package bibentry and the \nobibliography* declaration. I have not yet worked it down to an MWE. Any quick ideas? The error is ! Illegal parameter number in definition of \BR@r@wiki15.

egreg

@StevenB.Segletes Oh, that's not too surprising, I'm afraid.

Steven B. Segletes

@egreg OK, got it. I will find another way, then.

egreg

@StevenB.Segletes If you are able to work out a MWE, I can have a look.

Steven B. Segletes

5:59 PM

@egreg Still don't have an MWE, but narrowed it down to url's possessing a # symbol. If I use \#, the error disappears, but of course the backslash appears in the URL.

My workaround: `WEBSITE = "\url{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_state}\texttt{\#}%
\url{Jones-Wilkins-Lee_equation_of_state_for_explosives_.28JWL-equation.29}",`

egreg

@StevenB.Segletes Not surprising. ;-)

thymaro

6:41 PM

"Before you try the script on anything important (like your thesis), test it out on the sample files in the test-case directory."

from latexindent.pl-PDF

I don't like this file. It reads my intentions and the future

it is of the devil!

@UlrikeFischer you say Bärlein... I wonder where you're from. I hope I can attend some kind of TeX meetup in the near future to find out. Very interesting, indeed.

David Carlisle

7:25 PM

@JosephWright on curl I think it may work best to write everything to single file as for the ctan-o-mat back end, then you can use curl -K zzz.txt and pull all the arguments from the file, that means the arguments are never processed by the comandline shell and I can easily make multi-line notes that have ' and " get posted to the server and returned intact

egreg

8:12 PM

@DavidCarlisle And the tick changes direction. :-P

David Carlisle

@egreg got to let old men have their fun

David Carlisle

8:50 PM

@PauloCereda spot the slight error in this duck family (not sure you can see this outside the UK though:-) bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-cambridgeshire-44202975

samcarter

9:04 PM

3

Harald Hanche-Olsen

Hello, everybody. I am back from a (long) week long vacation. Did anything happen while I was gone?

samcarter

@egreg ^^

@HaraldHanche-Olsen You missed @yo's birthday

marmot

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Yes. It rained. In California!

samcarter

@HaraldHanche-Olsen and welcome back from your holiday!

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@samcarter Oooh, happy belated birthday, @yo'

yo'

9:10 PM

@HaraldHanche-Olsen thanks :)

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@marmot I had rain only during the boat trip to our island paradise. After that, not a drop. For a whole week! And not only that, we had water warm enough to swim in! In May! That's unheard of!

@samcarter Thanks! It was so good, I might go back for more.

David Carlisle

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Lots of different new things, @egreg steals ticks, @samcarter, @CarLaTeX and @PauloCereda discuss ducks

Harald Hanche-Olsen

I forgot to bring the charger for my laptop. That was the best part of this vacation, as it turned out. (Though i did miss you guys a bit.)

@DavidCarlisle Ooh ducks. More geese where I went. And some swans. A few ducks though, of the eider persuation.

egreg

@samcarter Would you add also 1+1=2? :-)

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@samcarter Nice. But might it not be better stated in the original German? Wir müssen wissen – wir werden wissen?

@egreg That's Russell and Whitehead, isn't it? After one or two hundred pages?

egreg

9:23 PM

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Yes! :-D

2

Hi, @barbarabeeton

3

@UlrikeFischer That's quite some book title!

samcarter

@UlrikeFischer Can you recommend the book? It sounds interesting.

barbara beeton

9:32 PM

@HaraldHanche-Olsen -- hi. am finally home from vacation, after spending a night at the charlotte airport when we missed our connection on account of severe thunderstorms. looking forward to a good night's sleep. hope there's nothing urgent?

Ulrike Fischer

@samcarter yes it was very interesting.

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@barbarabeeton No, nothing urgent. Back from vacation myself, just saying hello to everybody here. Tomorrow I get to pick up my new car that I ordered after the accident with the old one.

samcarter

@UlrikeFischer I added it to my list of book to read :)

marmot

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Yes, unbelievable. Probably you also like the 300 club, don't you?

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@marmot I don't know if I like the 300 club or not, since I never heard about it. Oh wait, it's a link; let me have a look … oh, that seems too extreme for my taste.

marmot

9:41 PM

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Oh, I see. So the water was really warm. ;-)

samcarter

@UlrikeFischer About your suggestion that the ducks scouts could help with road crossing: nordbayern.de/region/roth/…

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@marmot Yes! I did not have a thermometer at hand, so couldn't check it. But I think it was as warm as it might be after a relatively cool week in late June or early July.

Ulrike Fischer

@samcarter did you see the video @AlanMunn posted? chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/44672657#44672657

marmot

@HaraldHanche-Olsen Here it is currently as cold as the average temperature in February, but the latter is 20 degrees Celsius....

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@marmot There is a club for those who took a swim at Bjørnøya, though. If you do, you need someone to stand guard against polar bears.

@marmot Um, right. My guess is about 18 °C, where somewhere around 12–14 °C would be expected this time of year.

marmot

9:48 PM

@HaraldHanche-Olsen I prefer Marmot Island over Bear Island, though. ;-)

@HaraldHanche-Olsen And the climate in southern California is a bit crazy. From December till end of June, the daily maximum is around 20 degrees Celsius, and the hottest days are usually in October or even November. (But close to the coast it doesn't get really hot either.) And normally there is little or no rain from April to November...

barbara beeton

@yo' and @samcarter -- i was a girl scout for years, and the scarf was part of the regalia. (as well as being useful when camping.) neckerchief is the usual term that i remember, but we tied it with a square knot. i'm not familiar with the term woggle, but the slide you show is what i know as a turk's head knot, and when i looked that up (animatedknots.com/turkshead ) it's also identified as a woggle. so now i know that tool

yo'

@barbarabeeton the square not is called the good turn knot here :)

G. Bay

A little showoff

this is the acknowledgements page of my master dissertation, where in the last paragraph I thank all TeX community

4

barbara beeton

10:05 PM

@yo' -- great name! so many people think they're tying a square knot but really tie it backward, so it won't come apart. that's called a "granny". and then there's the "bread knot" which superficially looks like a square knot but has the ends on opposite sides; used by clever ship's captains to tie up the bread chest so that they can tell if someone is tampering with it. (none of these are useful for tying neckerchiefs.)

David Carlisle

@G.Bay :-)

G. Bay

I also have the Adobe Utopia trade mark in the last page, I couldn't resist such nice looking

Paulo Cereda

10:16 PM

@G.Bay Congrats! And boo abntex2. :)

@DavidCarlisle You can try your Portuguese. :)

G. Bay

hehehe, thank you! whats wrong with abntex2?

Paulo Cereda

@samcarter lovely! I suggest Naughty Gödel as book title. :)