TeX, LaTeX and Friends

Oh, OK. Nice. Does this work for something like texdef -t latex empty? (I mean words with many letters?)

I guess so. :)

But, I don't understand the output too.

What does \a do?

Even others are not clear, but look very similar.

@KannappanSampath Sometimes, neither do I. :(

N3buchadnezzar

cya =)

12:07 AM

@N3buchadnezzar See ya! :D

@PauloCereda :(

@KannappanSampath I'm a newbie. :)

@N3buchadnezzar Later! Take care. :)

@PauloCereda I am an epsilon! :(

@KannappanSampath There's a nice quote from an old Pokémon game: "You're a rookie trainer, aren't you? I can tell! That's OK! Everyone is a rookie at some point!" :)

@PauloCereda :) Nice!

I'd, one day, become a newbie then!

12:15 AM

@KannappanSampath I'm still in the path, I can tell you. :)

Can you help me with this please: Why does \renewcommand{\e}{\epsilon} not work? The error I get is: "\e undefined".

The same is true of \f and \g.

@KannappanSampath I think I can help after all!

:)

From the output of texdef in the answer you linked, we can find out that \e, \f and g are undefined, which means they don't "exist". You renew a command when it already exists and you want to add another definition for it. In this case, you are renewing a command that is not defined in the first place. So you can use \newcommand instead of \renewcommand. :)

@PauloCereda Hah

OK!

Fingers crossed. :)

It worked!

12:23 AM

:)

One last thing. I want to use script fonts.

So, I loaded euscript using RequirePackage in my .sty file!

But, still I get error. I know it is because script fonts are not loaded. But, I don't know how to fix it.

if this was main TeX document, I would have used: \usepackage[mathscr]{euscript} but how would I do it in a .sty file?

The very same way, just with \RequirePackage instead.

Does \RequirePackage[mathscr]{euscript} work?

Let me check.

It works! Thank you for instilling the confidence to try out!

@KannappanSampath Yay! :)

So, I am all set for the Live TeXing session!

12:30 AM

@KannappanSampath I'm here to help. :)

user19161

@KannappanSampath Congrats! What are you using for graphics?

@ClarkKent Graphics?

BTW, Hello!

user19161

@KannappanSampath You know I am J right?

@ClarkKent Sure, i do!

user19161

@KannappanSampath So how did chatting with rob go? Did he persuade you to keep your account?

12:43 AM

@ClarkKent Yes. He and I use skype a lot.

Recently, I have been interested in seeing a .sty file. He helped me with it a lot. And, of course, here too, I received a lot of help.

user19161

@KannappanSampath Live texing sounds crazy. You will need to be really good to keep up I think!

@ClarkKent perhaps the whiskey comes for free

user19161

@leo Haha. The whiskey is for Jonas, not me. I only drink tea.

@ClarkKent I don't think so. It's about doing your homework right.

oh I see

12:46 AM

Hi @leo

@KannappanSampath glad to see you.

user19161

@KannappanSampath Well, I don't type that fast. Even if it were just words and no symbols, I think I am too slow. But yes I have seen some people bring laptops to lectures and type on the spot.

@KannappanSampath the whiskey is about this

user19161

@leo No, he was replying to me about the live texing, not the whiskey.

@ClarkKent I just realized that. Sorry

sEE YOU

1:09 AM

@PeterGrill I was really only joking about TikZ.

There I am. I think I have a reasonably good style file containing all commands in short form, that I best rememeber. I sincerely wish I have a pleasant experience Live TeXing. Wish me luck people.

Bye folks. Thanks @Paulo. With your help, all bugs were killed!

@PauloCereda O Paulo, o matador!

4:32 AM

@Stefan: I want to show a diagram to you:

Shall I mail it to you?

4:46 AM

@Stefankottwitz: mailed to googlemail ID.

user19161

5:14 AM

@KannappanSampath Good luck! So how was it?

Peter Grill

6:09 AM

@AlanMunn I know, but still it is an option :-)

8:00 AM

@JosephWright I don't think that somebody has really understood how PDF and TeX work; there's a bunch of meaningless questions. First of which, the "problem" of not rewriting the PDF if the .tex file hasn't changed! As if this might guarantee the PDF wouldn't change! This wouldn't be true even if cross-references don't change.

@egreg I know. I think he's got some specific requirements in mind where this probably does make sense, for example a set of combined files where there is no link between the files (in terms of refs) and no design changes expected

@JosephWright This is a futile exercise unless the split files produce at least a hundred pages and there are many of them. pdftk is probably a better tool than trying to do this with (Lua)TeX.

@egreg We've no idea what the use case is here, so that may of course be the situation!

@JosephWright I guess, instead, that the model is C compilation.

@egreg Huh?

8:08 AM

@JosephWright The makefile doesn't run the compiler on a .c file if it hasn't changed.

@egreg I don't really do C, so I'll take your word for it. I assume that people don't have one binary made up of several .c files, then, so a change in an earlier file can't alter a later one?

@JosephWright A C program is usually split up into smaller modules that can be compiled individually and then linked. Thus building a program needs only compiling the changed modules and linking again (it's actually a bit more complicated, but this is the idea).

@egreg Right, I see. I guess the key here is the 'compiled individually' part.

@egreg Perhaps you might answer one of the questions with that analogy, explaining why it's no good for TeX files

@JosephWright In the case of TeX, a subfile not changing cannot guarantee that it doesn't need to be run again. There should be no cross references, no section numbering, no page numbering.

8:33 AM

Hi all! I added too much (I think) information in tex.stackexchange.com/questions/55437/… for updating MiKTeX from command line. Somebody please do the difficult job of editing.

A: Lualatex after pdf is generated

I have given the same answer on very similar questions by the same OP several times today :-(

0

As Martin writes: no there is no do processing after a file has been written. The finish_pdffile callback can be used to add information to the PDF file, the stop_run callback comes close, but not quite. It is used to replace the statistic information at the end of the run.

I want to have a "change this into a smart question" button.

8:49 AM

@HarishKumar I'd be tempted to have a separate command line answer for MiKTeX, but also but watch that you are not simply writing 'everything that mpm can do'. As it stands, I wonder if the answer would be too detailed for the average user.

Martin Scharrer

9:00 AM

mwe is now also in MiKTeX: miktex.org/packages/mwe

5

@MartinScharrer great news, Martin

Martin Scharrer

9:46 AM

@JosephWright: I'm going to publish a new version of adjustbox soon, where I moved the trimming and clipping code into a dedicated small package trimclip which includes the clipping drivers. I have mentioned you in the manual and the driver files.

Thanks again for the help with the drivers!

I uploaded the manuals to bitbucket.org/martin_scharrer/adjustbox/downloads already

@JosephWright: I am running out of ideas. Please suggest/edit what can be done.

@MartinScharrer: Wow, that is great news. Thanks.

10:02 AM

@HarishKumar Okay, perhaps later today :-)

@JosephWright: Thanks. nice of you:)

10:44 AM

@HarishKumar I know that brain-boiling feeling!

11:00 AM

/me is waiting for the next question "How can I run a Lua script after \end{document}".

N3buchadnezzar

Bah, I can not figure out how to make horizontal lines in mathjax... hrule and hrulefill does not work =(

@PatrickGundlach Or "can I catch the Lua code before it's run depending on its output?"

@percusse Yes. While it is a good idea, it doesn't help solving the problem if one asks the question more than once (and not four or five times) :-((( - I know nobody forces me to answer...

@PatrickGundlach Let nature run its course. He has an idea (no matter how realistic) and doesn't want to share so we are seeing the projections of a complicated network of thoughts (most of the times confused apparently).

He might be any student of my supervisor :)

I've got 150 reputation today (which I didn't deserve) by answering "no, it does not work" several times.

4

I should give them away for some charity org :)

Q: Is there a software in Ubuntu that can analyse the cross references (theorems, lemmas, equations, etc.) in a tex project?

11:10 AM

I remember a few questions similar to this one but couldn't find one, any ideas ?

1

There are some software to analyse the cross references among codes (Java or C++). I used to use a software for code analysis under Windows many years before. But I can't remember the name. On linux, an example might be LXR Cross Referencer. Is there a similar tool that can analyse the latex fi...

11:21 AM

@AlanMunn LOL!!!

@egreg: Nice explanation on how C compilation works. :)

11:42 AM

@AndrewStacey: Yes. it was a bad day for me. First I thought that was easy and then you know aftershocks..... Thanks for saving.

Q: Is there a software in Ubuntu that can analyse the cross references (theorems, lemmas, equations, etc.) in a tex project?

12:09 PM

2

There are some software to analyse the cross references among codes (Java or C++). I used to use a software for code analysis under Windows many years before. But I can't remember the name. On linux, an example might be LXR Cross Referencer. Is there a similar tool that can analyse the latex fi...

cross-referencing tools mathtools

Checking for references - OK. Establishing relationships for them - not sure.

@PatrickGundlach: I'm tempted to reply to your comment "I have the feeling that I have given the same answer several times today." with "Glitch in the Matrix." :)

Background: in the movie Matrix, they consider a dejà vu as a glitch in the Matrix. :P

12:31 PM

@PauloCereda So true! I've seen the movie.

@PatrickGundlach :)

I saw the first question (about os.execute) before going to bed and I thought it was some restriction on which commands os.execute could execute (I saw some note on the LuaTeX manual). :)

Q: Is there a software in Ubuntu that can analyse the cross references (theorems, lemmas, equations, etc.) in a tex project?

@PauloCereda Really? I've never studied it in detail; I only deduced what I wrote from the behavior of the compilation process. Of course there's the preprocessor stage where macros are expanded and probably also many other hairy details.

The answer to this one is "LaTeX".

3

There are some software to analyse the cross references among codes (Java or C++). I used to use a software for code analysis under Windows many years before. But I can't remember the name. On linux, an example might be LXR Cross Referencer. Is there a similar tool that can analyse the latex fi...

cross-referencing tools mathtools

12:50 PM

@egreg It's correct. :) The compilation converts source files into object files, by producing the machine language instructions that correspond to each source file. If we compile two files, we will have two object representations of them (foo.o and bar.o for example). Then we have the linker, which creates a single executable file from multiple object files. :)

@PauloCereda Of course code in foo.c mustn't depend on code from bar.c, which is the problem when typesetting "included" files in TeX.

@egreg Ah yes. In that case, you need to compile bar.c first and them compile foo.c and supplying bar.o to it. :)

@PauloCereda But the rules in the Makefile will take care of that, checking dependencies. Of course one has to tell the Makefile (probably the configure script) what dependencies are to be respected. I don't think that the compiler can figure them out from itself.

@egreg The Java compiler can compile other classes if they are needed for the current compilation. If I'm not mistaken, gcc needs to be told exactly what it has to do.

1:09 PM

Aaargh, I hate MATLAB and all it's relatives together with Octave and the root of all evil Java!! Ehm, hi guys :)

@percusse LOL

Octave is written in C++. That is evil. :P

1:28 PM

@percusse Been meaning to ask: which answer of mine "really amazed [you]"? (See starred comments)

@AndrewStacey It's not hard to guess that it's the Metafont one :)

@percusse Meta**post**? You mean the curve through the points? So do I understand from your comment that you're now trying to do it entirely in pgfmath???

@PauloCereda Actually they are from the same breed it's the pet MATLAB before it went commercial. There was a nice hat trick to keep it free, nevertheless I hate them both eheh. I am pretty into porting everything to Python, R etc. Numerical routines are killing me.

asghar ashgari

I dont want to retype different style of itemize section and would like to put them in different environments and call those environments instead, any idea how I can do it?

@AndrewStacey yes actually, I have done almost all except the half-baked linsolve part. There are still missing pieces in the back substitution.

1:34 PM

@percusse I can relate to that. :) I once helped a friend of mine to get her MatLab script running on Octave. The numerical stuff took me almost two days to get it working. :)

It's quite the opposite of what you do. I use only pgfmath but needed to use xparse to receive the coordinates :)

@PauloCereda I don't know why but Python looks very very tempting. Is there any obvious dark sides to this sleeping kitten before I make yet another mistake? :)

@asgharashgari Maybe enumitem can help. :)

@PauloCereda Coders always find something to hate anyway but I mean to ask quite generally. I don't care about syntax or white space-sensitivity etc.

@PauloCereda Feels like I'm using the Windows of the numerical computing :)

@percusse I'd say you are pretty safe with Python. :) Something that bothers me (and it's a personal opinion) is the language fragmentation with all those 2.x and 3.x versions. You can encounter code that won't run on a certain version (or even release number) of Python. :(

@percusse The syntax of Python is very clearer. :) Personally, I'm not fond of dynamic typing, but that's me again. :)

@PauloCereda I'm using extensively convex optimization stuff and they are relatively new so I think you can't find much written in 2.x. I also liked R a lot after Alan Munn introduced it to me.

1:42 PM

@percusse LOL

@PauloCereda So I would guess that they will all integrate together nicely when I'm about 75 years old.

@percusse I tried R for a very very short time. I had a good impression of it, so I'd say, "go for it". :)

@percusse I want the text in my tombstone to have an exception thrown. :P

@PauloCereda Division by zero error would be nice too.

@percusse LOL

@PauloCereda That gave me a nice idea about the Blue screen of Death.

1:45 PM

@percusse haha I have a blue T-shirt with that message. :D

@PauloCereda Simulation time! I'll try to switch to this window during the run if Matlab behaves :)

@percusse Yay! :) Beware, this chatroom can disturb your data. :D

2:04 PM

without words :)

2:31 PM

@PauloCereda But dynamic typing is so 33059451623009330. :)

@AlanMunn Quack! :D

(Duck typing is an idiom of dynamic typing) :P

3:03 PM

@percusse you need nag.co.uk :-)

@DavidCarlisle I'll get back to you after discussing with my financial advisor. There must be some change left in my coat pockets. :P

Wow, that's an impressive library functionality list!

@percusse well we've been doing it for over 40 years, gives you time to accumulate a line or two of code.

@DavidCarlisle Do you know any document on the website for some error checking comparison with Matlab? Scratch that, any comparison would do. This is really interesting.

@DavidCarlisle Hmm I might request them I guess.

3:19 PM

@percusse we have a matlab toolbox that integrates all the functions (and documentation) into matlab but we don't publish side by side comparisons. If you search around walkingrandomly.com (interesting lead article on octave at present) for "nag" or "matlab" you will see some discussion of such things from a big university user

@DavidCarlisle That's very helpful thanks a lot! It is another world out there.

Keks Dose

3:37 PM

Hey, @everbody here

Sorry for the noise. You can not have paragraphs in a chat. OK. I started a bounty for a question of somebody else some days ago and nobody cared: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/54896/line-spacing-in-parcolumns-environment Hey, guys, is this that complicated?

4:01 PM

@KeksDose well parcolumns is only 200 or so lines long, so it isn't that complicated but you would have to change almost all of them. What the package is doing is splitting each column up line by line and then re-assembling the page a line at a time constructing each line out of the lines from the columns, so the final result is even line spacing and the line spacing in the original column settings is necessarily lost

If you don't do that then you have to work a lot harder if you want to allow page breaks at arbitrary points mid-paragraph as if the columns have different line spacing there may not be any feasible break points in general

Keks Dose

@DavidCarlisle Thank you. Would you mind giving that as an answer, so I can give you the bounty? It's a pity, because paracol prints footnotes under the column where the mark is, what was my motivation to use paracol.

done, it seems a bit of a non-answer to get the bounty though:-) You may want to wait to see if someone does implement a package with similar syntax but different internals.

Keks Dose

4:16 PM

@DavidCarlisle I'm usually optimistic, but expecting a complex package about multicols seems overoptimistic to the point of foolishness. Really, even two columns are not supported well, regarding footnotes or marginpars. Hicks implemented marginfix, yes. But we still lack a package which allows marginpars (which is nothing but a second column) with a pagebreak.

5:42 PM

Brrr it's cold today.

so just how cold is cold?

It's around 16ºC, I guess. :)

@PauloCereda lovely spring weather here at moment, got as hot as 13 today. although not forecast to be so warm tomorrow

@DavidCarlisle Cool! :) Wait a minute, did you say 13?!

:P

Torbjørn T.

@PauloCereda Here we've had some snow the last couple of weeks.

5:52 PM

@DavidCarlisle Sounds about right: it was perhaps 16 yesterday where I am (near Northampton)

@TorbjørnT Oh my! I can't even imagine how's the thermal sensation of that.

@JosephWright yes yesterday was so warm there were children in bathing costumes paddling in the village pond. I suspect that @PauloCereda wouldn't consider water coming out of a natural(ish) UK spring to be bathing temperature though:-)

@DavidCarlisle We should take him to the North Sea :-)

@JosephWright I'm curious about the love of spaces expressed in the l3 syntax. Is this just an intuitive sense among you that the spaces make the code more readable? (I'm thinking particularly of spaces after/before braces and also spaces separating argument specification in e.g. \DeclareDocumentCommand.

@JosephWright venu for next years UKTUG: a week at skegness?

5:57 PM

@AlanMunn Most 'proper' programming languages use quite a lot of free space, so this is pretty standard

@DavidCarlisle Oh my, it gives me shivers already!

@JosephWright Is it cold? :)

@AlanMunn In for example xparse declarations, the idea is to make things easier to read, as you say. I have no evidence to support this, of course. It's likely that things which follow the convention, whatever it is, are easiest to read!

Torbjørn T.

@PauloCereda Snow's not that usual in May though, the mean temperature in Bergen in May is for example 10.5°C.

@PauloCereda Yup

North Sea

The North Sea is a marginal sea of the Atlantic Ocean located between Great Britain, Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands, and Belgium. An epeiric (or "shelf") sea on the European continental shelf, it connects to the ocean through the English Channel in the south and the Norwegian Sea in the north. It is more than long and wide, with an area of around . The North Sea has long been the site of important European shipping lanes as well as a major fishery. The sea is a popular destination for recreation and tourism in bordering countries and more recently has developed into a rich sour...

@JosephWright It takes some getting used to, I must say. (Maybe I don't know any 'proper' languages :) )

6:00 PM

@AlanMunn reallydoyouonlyspeakenglish ;-)

@AlanMunn It's just for us to read: the computer does not mind

@JosephWright Oh, sure, I understand that. I just don't know if it is actually more readable. But I'm not complaining, just curious.

Torbjørn T.

Speaking of cold: I knew a guy from Yakutsk, Siberia, who was at Svalbard. He didn't think it was that cold at Svalbard, but he had experienced -70 °C at home. That had been a bit cold.

@AlanMunn It's a question of habits. You'll get used to it.

@TorbjørnT Yeah, just a bit. :)

@TorbjørnT Wow, pretty cold for me. :)

@JosephWright I'd need a scarf. :P

The coldest weather I ever faced was a freezing 4ºC morning.

6:04 PM

@AlanMunn Mainly about having a set of rules we stick to: that makes more difference for me than any particular approach

@MarcoDaniel Yeah, right. And you who speaks a language that gives us Allgemeinesprachwissenschaft and Zweihundertvierundachtzigtausend. :)

@AlanMunn Also in Italian we write numbers as one word: duecentottantaquattomila. But of course we don't invert tens and units.

@AlanMunn ;-) ... Unfortunately true. A small example. Working with a Makefile requires 8 spaces

@AlanMunn I wonder if Germans play hangman. Think of "Zweihundertvierundachtzigtausend" as _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ . On the bright side, the word has almost all letters of the alphabet. :P

@egreg And you have no (large) compound words, so other issue doesn't arise.

6:09 PM

@PauloCereda :-)

We are limiting the length

@AlanMunn We join two as a practical maximum. There used to be conjuctions formed by many words such as "conciossiacosaché": they were used only in the 17th century.

@MarcoDaniel Thankfully I still have my faithful Langenscheidt Portugiesisch-Deutsch. :)

Anyway, thanks for the discussion. I don't want to turn this into space wars. :) If I set myself to learn l3 this summer I'll get used to using them.

@AlanMunn good choice ;-)

@egreg Right. It's actually quite a linguistic mystery why none of the Romance languages have >2 compounds.

6:12 PM

@egreg It reminds me of a story that my advisor told, which I now tell my students as a lesson on how a good theory can be explanatory rather than merely descriptive.

Q: Why are there 1-humped camels and 2-humped camels, but no n-humped camels for n>2?

A: There are only two types of camels: concave and convex.

4

6:28 PM

Is there a tag flame-war? I think we should create one.

Stefan Kottwitz

@PatrickGundlach This would be a meta-tag, unfortunately.

6:44 PM

Is the following sentence an idiom "I won't shoot you!"

Q: Tips and tricks to tightly couple LaTeX paper and Beamer presentation

@MarcoDaniel Yes. It means "Say what you like, I won't get angry just because you say something I don't like.".

Another one for the [tag:don't-do-this]:

6

My typical approach is to write the paper in LaTeX, then (in a new file) to write the presentation in Beamer. I am now getting to the point in my education/career where the first version of a paper and presentation won't be the last. The two will evolve together over some (hopefully not too long...

beamer workflow

(How you do get tags to format nicely in chat?)

@AndrewStacey I think the ' is the one to blame. :(

@PauloCereda do-not-do-this

@AndrewStacey Yay! :)

@AndrewStacey Thanks

6:58 PM

@PauloCereda do-not-use-apostrophes-or-spaces

Stefan Kottwitz

@AndrewStacey please-do-not-use-long-tags-with-many-dashes

@MarcoDaniel It is, but hopefully it is also true if taken literally.

@DavidCarlisle This was an answer to my e-mail :-(

@StefanKottwitz i-find-that-slightly-ironic-coming-from-a-german-with-all-your-compound-nouns-not-that-norwegian-is-any-better

i-should-add-that-the-capitals-were-there-in-the-original-i-have-not-started-mimicing-barbara

@PauloCereda Incidentally, I haven't forgotten the interview. Been a bit busy lately with end-of-semester (or end-of-semester) stuff.

@AndrewStacey Don't worry, it's just a friendly reminder. :)

There is quite an audience ready for your interview. :)

7:07 PM

@PauloCereda Due to time zones, I need to find an evening when I can do it. I'd prefer it to be an evening when my wife's busy anyways, but that can be hard to predict. This week is out as it's the Norwegian national day on Thursday. I'll ask if there's likely to be a day next week.

@percusse You should definitely post what you have on the smooth curve stuff before the bounty deadline, even if it's not fully worked out. I'd award the bounty to the most PGF-like solution and it sounds like that's yours.

@AndrewStacey and @percusse: Yes please, post whatever you've got! The bounty can also be awarded to the solution with the most potential.

7:32 PM

It says that I have a deadline in 15 hours :)

at least I'll get the linear equation set ready for good. But I really I mean reaaally @AndrewStacey or JLDiaz should get it anyway.

7:57 PM

@AlanMunn We don't like to compose words. Latin didn't too (> 2), IIRC.

@percusse, @Jake How's this for syntax for specifying tensions: (1,2) .. ([tension fore=.5]3,4) .. ([tension aft=.3]5,6) .. (7,9)?

@percusse, @Jake Bounties aside, this question really needs to be a blog post.

@AndrewStacey I think you don't earn too much by omitting the remaining letters. I would vote for being fully verbose. Other than that I think it's pretty nice!

@AndrewStacey Seems fine. I think personally I'd prefer (1,2) .. [tension=0.5] (3,4) .. (5,6) [tension=0.3] .. (7,9), but let's not be fussy.

@AndrewStacey I hope Ryan doesn't have a heart attack after seeing my \pgfkeys mayhem :) I'm dumping whatever I can find into keys hehe.

8:13 PM

@Jake The tension is two-sided. I could make it so that tension=<n> sets both the fore and aft tensions. That's a good idea.

@percusse Which letters are being omitted?

@AndrewStacey: I thought the placement of the [tension...] (before or after the coordinate) could determine the direction.

@AndrewStacey As in before and after but you can also use atension,btension almost meaninful abbreviations.

@Jake Ah, I see. No, I'm taking advantage of the fact that ([keys]x,y) is a valid coordinate specification and is processed "correctly" by \tikz@scan@one@point.

@percusse I see. (Just checked your location, I'm guessing not native-English speaker). "Fore" and "aft" are words for the two ends of a boat.

@AndrewStacey Arrrr, now I get it!

@AndrewStacey Yeah, I thought there might be a technical reason for that syntax suggestion.

8:40 PM

Yay MacPorts!

9:02 PM

@Werner fleqn doesn't use the display skips, it's a list environment (which is probably wrong but that's what amsmath is for, to do it less wrong:-)

Werner

@DavidCarlisle Thanks, I saw your comment...

...with the little detail provided I guess even you want more information.

Or not, since you've answered it already. :)

@Werner I deleted the comment and made it an answer as I made a picture once id checked exactly which lengths have an effect

Werner

@DavidCarlisle Pictures are always good...

If this thing works, I'm going to run my simulations in LaTeX :)

10:05 PM

@egreg, so you supply the fleqn answer and I get the tick:-) thanks for supplying the clarifying comments I was away from machine:-)

@DavidCarlisle I just put the comment you made here. I don't know why one would want to write a "class" from scratch: that one is missing many important things. And requiring babel in a class is wrong.

Moreover you're in need of some rep: you're short from cap by 7 upvotes. How come? There were few TikZ questions today. :)

@egreg actually I crashed my browser about 6 times in the last hour: makes it hard to follow the site:-) javascipt (or my understanding of it) is rubbish compared to tex...

11:06 PM

@AlanMunn: one day, my dad was asked to execute two commands in a Linux shell. My dad knows nothing about English. The other person - by phone - said to him, "Now type root as the user and 123456 as password.". My dad, "Hold on. (pause) It didn't work." The support guy, "It has to work, try again." After the fifth unsuccessful attempt, the guy asked how my dad was typing the words. My dad replied, "Well, I typed root: r + u + t + e." :D

@PauloCereda I'm with your dad. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. In my experience, getting people to type shell commands who don't know any unix is difficult even when they do speak English.

@AlanMunn true but getting people to log in as root and type whatever they are told over the phone is wrong whatever language they speak:-)

@AlanMunn Indeed. And "Rute" is a common Brazilian name. :) In other situation my dad had to type arj. He went with arge. :D

@DavidCarlisle LOL

@DavidCarlisle Well that's true too. I use a Mac and the root account isn't even enabled.

@AlanMunn well I'm a windows user so need admin privileges to do just about anything:-)

11:17 PM

@DavidCarlisle Oh, the Mac also needs admin privileges, but all is done with sudo and there's never any need to actually login as root. I've never found anything I needed to do which couldn't be done with sudo.

@AlanMunn This is so true. The last time I actually had to use my root password, I lost a few minutes trying to remember it.

@AlanMunn yes sudo kind of makes sense. to be fair win7 isn't quite so bad but on xp the usual problem was you couldn't install unless you were admin, then (whatever the installer said) you couldn't use the program unless you used the install account, so basically you had to have administrator rights on all the time.

@DavidCarlisle I'd say UAC is annoying, but disabling is not a good option IMHO.

@PauloCereda between windows uac and the corporate virus checker it's amazing that it's possible to do anything at all. One of my favourites was after a clean cygwin install a big scary dialog box warning me that a program was attempting to move my files. the program? cp well yes....

@DavidCarlisle That is pretty stupid. Although most Mac users also tend to work with their admin account too. I've never really seen the need to make a separate non-admin account for my personal laptop.