TeX, LaTeX and Friends

12:44 AM

@marmot there will be better days :) (wow, I did not think you would compete, I thought that only you trained, good for you). I am fine, dealing with a problem of absolute maximum and minimum with my ex-teacher :/

marmot

1:02 AM

@manooooh No, we do not compete, just play. Just switch to complex analysis, there the maximum principle prevents such discussions. ;-)

manooooh

@marmot ahh so the sun is hidden earlier, right?

@marmot wow! I want complex analysis NOW (in 3rd year of univeristy I think I will see some of that, and I'm in "2nd")

marmot

@manooooh Yes, days get shorter here. Very soon the Argentinians will have longer days than people, ducks and marmots on the northern hemisphere.

@manooooh Really? When I studied long time ago, we had this already in the first semester... things seem to change...

manooooh

@marmot <3, come to Argentina dear marmot

marmot

@manooooh Are there marmots in Patagonia? ;-)

manooooh

@marmot I'm studying engineering in information systems, not mathematics or something...

@marmot idk, we can discover hihi

marmot

1:07 AM

@manooooh The landscape seems to be stunning. Definitely marmots will like it. (I always wanted to go there but did not manage so far. The best trip was to Nepal, which is also very stunning;-)

manooooh

@marmot Nepal? Omg did you have thousands of miles from where you live, isn't it?

marmot

@manooooh Yes. But I didn't crawl there, but took a plane. ;-)

manooooh

@marmot of course, although the more you travel, the more you pay :). Do you like to walk or do you prefer to go by transport?

marmot

@manooooh I try to bike as much as possible. I don't like to drive, and where I live now there is practically no public transportation.

manooooh

@marmot nice! We have a healthy marmot

marmot

1:15 AM

@manooooh How about you? Do you have public transportation in Argentina? (I never made it to South America.)

manooooh

@marmot yes we have! In Buenos Aires there are subway, buses, bike paths, airports, boats, taxis (also Uber but they are a bit confronted because here is not completely legal :/), remises. Although I mainly use my feet, subway and buses

marmot

@manooooh Good! I need to leave now, cycle to the gym. ;-) Luckily the weather is always good in Southern California, so there is no reason not to bike.

manooooh

@marmot excellent idea! Be free :))

manooooh

3:29 AM

Hello everyone

I want to read your opinion. Suppose we have a book digitized in a PDF document, which the book begins 2 pages later. So to the numbering of the PDF, to refer to any part of the book, we must add 2. My question is: if we had to reference the book, what number would we use? The PDF or the book numbering?

In my case I do it with the PDF, because it is easier for the user to enter the page number (Acrobat has this option) than to make the count of adding 2 each time I refer to a part of the book. You guys?

I want your opinion @CarLaTeX ^^^^^^^^

boycott.se - yo'

5:02 AM

@manooooh well, in that case the pdf is malformed. You can label pdf pages by their page numbers when creating the pdf and the readers then refer to the pages correctly. So you could e.g. label your pagres "i,ii,1,2,3,4,.." and you would be fine. Certainly always use the number that's physically printed on the page.

CarLaTeX

@manooooh ^^^ @boycott.se-yo' is right, I would do so

manooooh

5:21 AM

@boycott.se-yo' @CarLaTeX the PDF isn't mine. Suppose that the reference is for a cientific article available on web, and you cite it as "pp. 205-207". "205-207" (and you see that the "205" page actually is "210" PDF's file!!) is for PDF numeration or book?

What are your experiences citing books scanned in PDF?

wilx

I would use the visible page numbering on the page itself, not the PDF page number.

But I am not publishing article, so my opinion is irrelevant. :)

manooooh

@wilx I appreciate your opinion!!

@wilx hmm okay. But you are aware that every time you want to look for something from the PDF you should remember to add 10 pages to the current page, isn't it? :P

wilx

@manooooh Or you just scroll frantically with your wheel!

manooooh

@wilx hahaha scroll time!!

Okay, so far 3 prefer the numbering of the book vs. 1 of the PDF.

CarLaTeX

@manooooh I vote for the visible number on the page, too

manooooh

5:34 AM

@CarLaTeX I don't understand

manooooh

5:45 AM

Take for example this PDF version of Spivak's famous Calculus: book page: 229; PDF page: ... 243!! It is very bizarre lol

Werp, @CarLaTeX is gone, so I too, see you later

CarLaTeX

6:35 AM

@manooooh For the reference, use the numbers you see printed on the pages :)

David Carlisle

6:54 AM

@manooooh do what @CarLaTeX says (as long as it is about page numbers, she knows nothing about pizza)

manooooh

@CarLaTeX oh okay, you confirm your decisión

@DavidCarlisle ok

Skillmon

@manooooh being late on this: The visible page number for citations. If you want to point something out in a formless email to a friend, you can use the number in the pdf file, but should then make clear what you meant.

manooooh

@Skillmon that's total sense, thank you! I should distinguish the case where we send a PDF file to a friend and when not

That makes the difference

samcarter

8:29 AM

@marmot OK, if you insist, I added a second answer to tex.stackexchange.com/questions/451312/… but all the difficult parts are really taken from you nice answer.

samcarter

8:45 AM

@manooooh Just a small warning: which numbers are displayed in the pdf viewer can depend from viewer to viewer. Even if the pages are labelled correctly in the pdf, only some pdf viewer will show these labels. Others will just count from 1. So no guarantee even your friend and you will see the same numbers in the viewer.

CarLaTeX

9:55 AM

@DavidCarlisle :P

Dirk

10:46 AM

@marmot Hallo!

Skillmon

11:18 AM

@DavidCarlisle @CarLaTeX I found a solution. Pineapple pizza without pineapples:

4

CarLaTeX

@Skillmon Great! Lol!

marmot

1:08 PM

@samcarter Thanks.I hope the OP will accept yours, which is much cleaner. I just fumbled around a bit, and am still concerned about the fact that the result on preview and the converted gif are sooo different.

barbara beeton

@manooooh -- it's a requirement for publication in some journals that the page reference be what appears on the relevant page(s). (the ams adheres to this practice, whether or not the pdf file does so.)

marmot

@Dirk Hallo!

@samcarter Is this the first question that was closed by your crystal balls? ;-)

barbara beeton

@HaraldHanche-Olsen -- my print-aware source was so fascinated by the topic of "stikktittel" that he dug even further, and found this: merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/kicker-definition-meaning . i think this is pretty authoritative: "kicker" is likely to be the most widely recognized term in english.

samcarter

1:23 PM

@marmot Oh I hope the OP will be reasonable and accept yours. I just copied your code!

@marmot Can you make a screenshot of what you see in preview? I get the same as the gif, I think.

@marmot :) This should be added to the default close reasons :)

marmot

@samcarter But unlike you, I don't know what I am doing here. And I would never have found out the fontsize change thingy, for example. Below is what I get.

@samcarter ^^^ as you see, the M does not get cut on preview. But on the animated gif, the lower half is cut away.

@samcarter On the other hand, on acroread, the lower half is missing, just like in the gif. This is why I made this comment: imagine the OP would prepare his talk on a Mac, everything looks fine, he goes on a conference where they ask him to upload his talk, ad then he will use the conference computer to give the presentation, where acroread is installed. Funny for everyone but the OP. ;-)

samcarter

@marmot Interesting, this is what I see with preview.app:

marmot

@samcarter BTW, the M does not stand for marmot, it has been introduced by the OP.
And yes, that's interesting. I have a shell command `preview`, which is just an alias `open -a "Preview"`.

samcarter

@marmot And I have no idea about this tikz fading thingy. Combined we should know what the whole code does :)

marmot

@samcarter Yes, we do: it sometimes works and sometimes it does not. ;-)

Krishna

1:37 PM

A quick question here. I am using the open-type font libertinus for my thesis (typeset with LuaTeX)

What are the recommended font features that may improve the typography?

samcarter

@marmot :) A typical example of Schrödingers Code

marmot

@samcarter Meow!

Now I know what the M stands for. ;-)

samcarter

1:56 PM

@marmot Good explanation for the M!

manooooh

@samcarter thanks for you answer! Could you give an example, please? I think the viewer will always display the same numbers. In the PDF that I attached, do you see the same pages as me? Or am I missing something?

@barbarabeeton ok. I think I will never post an article into the prestigious ams but it's fine. Anyway like @Skillmon said there are cases where the PDF file is shared with friends, so to make thinks easier I refer the PDF numeración. Thanks for the info!

marmot

@samcarter Yes, I think that this solves the problem: there are quantum effects, and one should not expect that either beamer or tikz are able to get rid of them. ;-)

samcarter

2:18 PM

@manooooh For example look at the following two screenshots:

The viewer of texstudio (top) will display 21, skim will display 2

@marmot I read that there is quantikz package (but did not check what the purpose of this package is), maybe it helps :)

manooooh

2:33 PM

@samcarter wow, see to believe. skim actually process the page numberation so the display is the same as book numeration?

samcarter

@manooooh As yo' told you in chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/41?m=46777072#46777072 in a well done book pages are labeld according to their printed number. Skim uses these lables

marmot

@samcarter I am not sure, to me it looked like some means to produce quantum circuits with some fancy quantum gates. I didn't see a cat in it, nor a duck, koala or marmot. ;-)

manooooh

@samcarter yes yes I read his comment, thanks!

Harald Hanche-Olsen

Hmm, this is curious: In the code below, \intbar produces no output, yet I am not getting any warnings about a missing glyph (in lualatex):

\documentclass[a5paper]{article}
\usepackage{geometry,fontspec,unicode-math}
\setmainfont{Libertinus Serif}
\setmathfont{Libertinus Math}
\begin{document}
  \[
    \intbar_V u\,d\mu=\frac1{\mu(V)}\int_V u\,d\mu
  \]
\end{document}

egreg

2:52 PM

@HaraldHanche-Olsen I get

Missing character: There is no ⨍ (U+2A0D) in font LibertinusMath:mode=base;scr
ipt=math;language=DFLT;!

@HaraldHanche-Olsen The warning is only in the log file

manooooh

@HaraldHanche-Olsen which is the package for \intbar? I can't see it

egreg

@HaraldHanche-Olsen You get the warning also in the console if you set \tracinglostchars=2

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@egreg So I see, but with \tracinglostchars=1 (the default) I don't get it in the log file even.

@manooooh I think it's provided by unicode-math.

@manooooh To be precise, \intbar is provided by unicode-math-luatex.sty and by unicode-math-table.tex, both of which are included according to the -recorder flag to lualatex.

manooooh

3:32 PM

@HaraldHanche-Olsen oh okay, as I don't use luatex I didn't know that. So that is not the problem

Jendrik Stelzner

What kind of dots should be used for homogeneous coordinates in projective space? I’m wavering between \dotso (which seem to produce the same output as \dotsc) and \dotsb.

I’m using : to separate the coordinates, resulting in [x_0 : dots : x_n].

Johannes_B

3:50 PM

Hi @marmot, the tikzposter project could need some help. Are you interested or know anybody who could be interested? Please have a look at this Q/A. Thanks

Alan Munn

@Johannes_B There are too many poster packages/classes around. :) I've moved to using tcolorbox poster library, which is well maintained and does everything I need.

3

barbara beeton

@JendrikStelzner -- i'd go with \dotsb. in the environment where i'm working , \cdots is the desired result. but other publishers may have other ideas, which is why there's an "indirect" choice.

marmot

@Johannes_B To me this seems that there is a nice package that has been created, maintained for a while, but then abandoned. Is that right? What is the person (or duck or marmot) supposed to do who volunteers to help? Even though I have read parts of the pgfmanual, I am not an expert, and would never have found out the list in a list thingy. Of course, I will be happy to help if there is something I can do. Yet I have no real knowledge on tikzposter.

Johannes_B

4:07 PM

@marmot I am not even a TikZ user, you are one of the most skilled TikZperts I know. Maybe get in touch with the Github Repo. I guess it will just be some bug fixing and pushing to CTAN.

Alan Munn

@Johannes_B Clearly you're forgetting @DavidCarlisle.

Johannes_B

@AlanMunn Oh, of course.

Alan Munn

@Johannes_B :)

marmot

I dunno. Just looked at it. If I am not mistaken, this package puts everything in a big tikzpicture. At least this is how I interpret `\AtEndDocument{%
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{center}
}
` What that seems to imply is that you cannot use tikzpictures inside such documents without nesting tikzpictures. (Now that I look at it I actually vaguely remember that I had issues with that when trying to answer a question.) I am not convinced that this is the way to go. What I want to say is that this is certainly a nice package that turned out useful for many, but if one really wants to repair it this m…

@Johannes_B ^^^

Johannes_B

@marmot Been there, done that. Not worth the while. As @Alan said, there are other alternatives. Sometimes it's time to say good bye and declare a package officially obsolete. But this is just my opinion. The maintainer(s) might have a different idea.

marmot

4:20 PM

@Johannes_B I also agree with @AlanMunn. tcolorbox is IMHO a really great and well written package.

Johannes_B

@marmot That's why i used it here: github.com/johannesbottcher/LatexPosterExperiments/blob/master/… ;-)

Alan Munn

@Johannes_B My recent use of it:

Johannes_B

@AlanMunn Looks clean and tidy.

@marmot ?

marmot

@Johannes_B I was just kidding.

Johannes_B

@marmot Were you referring to the names of the authors of the example? :-)

marmot

4:31 PM

@Johannes_B No, just to "good taste". ;-)

Alan Munn

:46784856 Are you deleting nasty comments about my poster? :)

marmot

@AlanMunn How dare John to eat an apple? ;-)

Alan Munn

@marmot Yeah, we're pretty pedestrian in our example sentences. Cuteness gets tiring, which is why there are no marmot examples. :)

marmot

@AlanMunn Too bad. ;-)

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@JendrikStelzner A different point here: The colon is a relation. I prefer \mathbin: to separate homogeneous coordinates myself; then the spacing looks better, I think.

Jendrik Stelzner

5:05 PM

Thanks for the feedback. I’m now using [x_0 \mathbin{:} \dotsb \mathbin{:} x_n].

Stefan Kottwitz

6:32 PM

@AlanMunn I like tikzposter too.

marmot

@StefanKottwitz It is fine as long as one knows that one cannot use tikzpictures inside, at least not in the usual way. See here for an example of what could happen if you do not know that the whole thing is a big tikzpicture. I think the package would be even better if this was mentioned in the manual.

Stefan Kottwitz

@marmot I used tikzpictures inside, even fractals, tkz-euclide, pgfplots. Link: Example: Poster with TikZ

manooooh

@StefanKottwitz cute!

Hello ladies and gentlemen

Stefan Kottwitz

@manooooh Overleaf dies but local TeX compiles it.

marmot

@StefanKottwitz Yes. However, the problem is that the side effects of nesting tikzpictures are hard to predict. Sometimes there is no problem, and sometimes one is really puzzled. The key problem is that some pgfkeys may get set in/by the ambient tikzpicture and affect the inner tikzpicture. Of course, if you are aware of this, you can nest tikzpicture, but my picture was that this is to be avoided, see tex.stackexchange.com/q/47377/121799

manooooh

6:44 PM

@StefanKottwitz lol, what news! I use Overleaf for quick viewing of my documents, but in the end I use a normal TeX compiler

How would you spread the differential in an integral? \int{2\;\text dx} or \int{2\ \text dx} or \int{2~\text dx} or without spacing?

Stefan Kottwitz

@marmot Yes, I know. I would store it in a box to use.

David Carlisle

@manooooh no {} after \int and definitely not \text{d}

marmot

@manooooh If you are a physicist, you will perhaps do $\int\!\dd x\,2$, and ignore the complaints by mathematicians. ;-)

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle I always have mistakes! Where did I learn? Or ... why do not I read carefully? :/

David Carlisle

@manooooh possibly \,\mathrm{d}x for extra space before the dx

manooooh

6:47 PM

@DavidCarlisle the {} are for correct spacing David...

David Carlisle

@manooooh \ and ~ are text inter-word spaces so not used in math much

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle I always had my doubts about whether I should write \text d or \mathrm d, why not \text?

Stefan Kottwitz

@DavidCarlisle And rarely in German.

David Carlisle

@manooooh no, they will not change the space bwtween int and 2 but they will freeze the space inside the {..} so they do nothing at all in display math and are wring in inline math

@StefanKottwitz of course:-)

manooooh

@marmot haha, what is \d? A symbol from a package?

marmot

6:49 PM

@StefanKottwitz The whole discussion got started because of another issue with this class: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/243665 This issue did not get fixed because the class is no longer actively maintained. Frankly, my personal opinion is that this class might not necessarily be the number one choice for creating posters.

David Carlisle

@manooooh because \mathrm is for math and \text is for text (there is a clue in the names:-)

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle okay

marmot

@manooooh I believe the physics package defines \dd as some upright d with semi-smart spacing.

Stefan Kottwitz

@DavidCarlisle Can you translate to german? There's the official "law for the delegation of monitoring beef labelling".

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle hm... so I if write $\text{where~}x\text{~is a variable}$ it's wrong?..............

David Carlisle

6:51 PM

@manooooh in particular \mathrm{d} is an upright d in the math roman font, \text{d} is a d in whatever text font is current outside the math so it may be italic or bold or anything

manooooh

@marmot okay, I read something about that, thank you

David Carlisle

@manooooh no, those words are part of the outer sentence and \text makes them use the same font, which is what you want. but a differential d is a math symbol that should use the same symbol whether it is an an italic theorem or a roman proof

marmot

@StefanKottwitz And this is just my personal opinion, but to me it seems that there is a class tikzposter, which loads tikz and tons of libraries, and the upshot is that you should not use the tikzpicture environment inside without being particularly careful. IMHO there should be at least a warning inside the manual.

Stefan Kottwitz

@DavidCarlisle Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz :-) but that was just a quick google for a long German word in law.

manooooh

@marmot another doubt: do the (few) calculations that a physicist performs, should they make them expressing ALL the units? If so, how would you represent the second (for example)? $[\mathrm{time}]=\mathrm{s}$ or $[\mathrm{time}]=\mathrm{seg}$ or $[\mathrm{time}]=s$ ?

Stefan Kottwitz

6:53 PM

@marmot Yes, but the normal use case would be taking tikzposter for presenting text and images, less often TikZ inside

David Carlisle

@StefanKottwitz perhaps the German lawyer should move to Wales and set up an office in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle that makes sense, yeah

@DavidCarlisle so what do you recommend? $\text{where}~x~\text{is a variable}$ or $\text{where}\ x\ \text{is a variable}$ ?

David Carlisle

@manooooh different scientific communities have different conventions for units ,you could use the siunitx package which has more options than you could ever need for typesetting units like seconds

marmot

@manooooh Believe it or not, I am using the so-called natural units, in which everything is measured in positive and negative powers of energy. Length and time have the same dimensions, namely 1/energy. To me (and anyone who knows a little bit of special relativity) it is just insane to measure time and distances in different units, same is true for electric and magnetic fields. This is as sensible as measuring vertical and horizontal distances with different units, which is something ....

David Carlisle

@manooooh where $x$ is a variable

marmot

6:56 PM

... that the English really did, as @DavidCarlisle will be able to confirm. ;-)

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle nono, I'm sorry, suppose that we are in math mode, i.e. \[...\]

And we have to write text in that environment

David Carlisle

@manooooh I would go to some lengths not to be in math mode, but if that is unavoidable then \text{where $x$ is a variable}

@marmot you mean like using em for horizontal and ex for vertical measures? who would do such a crazy thing?

marmot

@manooooh And if I am doing supergravity computations, I choose units in which the Planck mass has no dimensions, and as a consequence everything is dimensionless. This is even more convenient.

manooooh

@DavidCarlisle lol is that possible? I thought as we are using \text then all inside it will convert to... text? I like that much more, although it does not seem so natural, but it seems "logically" valid

marmot

@DavidCarlisle Yes. If what I heard is true, your ancestors, as well as some parts of Germany, did this for macroscopic distances as well. If I am not mistaken, the German word Klafter has such a meaning. Maybe we should use such units for TikZ? ;-)

manooooh

6:59 PM

@DavidCarlisle thank you! I will consider that

marmot

@StefanKottwitz Yes, but you may understand that it would be really cruel to tell my fellow marmots not to use tikz even if they have loaded it. ;-)

Stefan Kottwitz

@marmot Or if they could not use TikZ animations in a poster.

manooooh

@marmot wow! It's my first year of physics in college, quiet kid :). So you would write everything like this: [\text{velocity}]=[m/s]=[km/h]=...?

@marmot hahaha

marmot

@manooooh Yes, velocities can always be written as a fraction of the speed of light.

@StefanKottwitz Nor lindenmayersystems.... ;-)

manooooh

@marmot and what about the vectors? Do you put a symbol on top of its symbol? Do you always do it like this? Because I see that my teacher sometimes puts an arrow, sometimes a segment, sometimes he does not... and I want to kill him :)

marmot

7:04 PM

@StefanKottwitz Nor \duck nor \koala nor \marmot. Really sad.

Stefan Kottwitz

@marmot SAD! covfefe

marmot

@manooooh Yes, vectors are vectors, even though a 3-vector is a really strange object. Use 4-vectors instead. This also illustrates the point: a Lorentz transformation mixes the components of the 4-vectors, so it is insane to give different components different units.

manooooh

@marmot lol! Speak to someone who did not want to risk the first exam, where MRU, MRUV, dynamics, some geometric optics, work and energy, ... were evaluated

David Carlisle

@marmot like "go to warp factor 8 Mr Sulu"

manooooh

@marmot I listened only by ear to "Lorentz" :)

marmot

7:07 PM

@DavidCarlisle They use natural units, I guess. (On my university, they offer a course "The physics of Star Trek". Seriously. Almost as good as Berkeley's "Physics for future presidents". ;-)

manooooh

@marmot seriously speaking, do you always use the measurements in your calculations?

marmot

@manooooh Then you can offer the other ear to Lorenz. Ironically, the Lorenz gauge is Lorentz invariant, but these were really two different guys. ;-)

@manooooh Measurements are deprecated. They destroy too many theories. ;-)

manooooh

@marmot ...what?? What are you saying, basketball player??!?!!! I don't understand

marmot

@StefanKottwitz Yes. I think nowadays is is no longer possible to make a good poster without any of @samcarter TikZlings. ;-)

Stefan Kottwitz

@marmot Check out the TikZling on the next Playboy cover.

manooooh

7:11 PM

@marmot werp, "Lorentz&Lorentz Inc." sounds good (?

marmot

@manooooh Almost. one of them has no t.

Skillmon

@DavidCarlisle maybe Frank will come by and add a fabulous answer (or you take the time to hack into the floats) :)

David Carlisle

@Skillmon i need to check, it may be that you can just use the \pdfpageattr thing within the float but I think it might have to be at the top of whatever page the float floats to, which would be harder

Skillmon

@DavidCarlisle but as far as I can tell tex.stackexchange.com/questions/451418/… is no duplicate of tex.stackexchange.com/questions/40683/…

@DavidCarlisle I don't think it'll work from within the box.

David Carlisle

@Skillmon yes I saw it had 2 close votes, seem wrong to me, if it closes I'll vote to re-open

@Skillmon I suspect not but can't be bothered to check just at moment.

manooooh

7:14 PM

@marmot ups!

marmot

@Skillmon Yes, but why can't the OP in the new question not just rotate the figure or table and put it in a normal float?

Skillmon

@DavidCarlisle me too, I'll add a comment precotiously.

David Carlisle

@marmot he wants the viewer page view to rotate to match

Skillmon

@marmot because he wants the page to be rotated in the PDF file.

marmot

@Skillmon If (s)he uses an iPad, this would be easy: just rotate the iPad. ;-)

Skillmon

7:17 PM

@marmot if OP uses a decent viewer it's just a single key (in my case r).

David Carlisle

@marmot are you sure that would work or would it cunningly detect the rotation and change the view back to portrait:-)

marmot

@Skillmon Even better. @DavidCarlisle No, I did not pay attention to that part of the question. To my defense I might add that in our burrow it is anyway not so easy to keep track of the directions. ;-)

Skillmon

@DavidCarlisle I think there should be an option to lock rotating (don't know, don't use an iPad)

barbara beeton

@manooooh -- i'm assuming that such an expression would appear in a display, not in-line, where \text isn't appropriate for this example. then, for a display, i think a decent latex manual would recommend \text{where $x$ is a variable}.

David Carlisle

@barbarabeeton a decent manual and a decent person!

26 mins ago, by David Carlisle

@manooooh I would go to some lengths not to be in math mode, but if that is unavoidable then \text{where $x$ is a variable}

manooooh

7:25 PM

HAHAHA

You make me bullying! I must learn faster from you

@barbarabeeton yes, I forgot to mention that we are in math mode, i.e. \[...\], @DavidCarlisle told me that, thank you btw! And as you noticed, I didn't read a full decent manual :(

samcarter

@barbarabeeton ^^ I came across this package of tissues today :)

barbara beeton

@DavidCarlisle -- yes, i noticed that, after i'd made the comment. but are you sure that at times the person isn't just a little bit indecent?

samcarter

@marmot Luckily they work fine with beamer which is all I need to make posters :)

barbara beeton

@manooooh -- regardless of what @DavidCarlisle thinks of manuals, they're written for a reason. (i'm biased. one of my functions is to write documentation. even if it has no other function, it can always be used to say "we told you so.")

@samcarter -- delightful! my husband will certainly agree!

David Carlisle

@barbarabeeton hmm I'm group leader for the group responsible for documentation in the day job...

@Skillmon I posted an answer, just about the only thing ifthen package is good for:-0

@barbarabeeton no

barbara beeton

7:37 PM

@DavidCarlisle -- and clearly, with your philosophy, you never read what the group writes.

David Carlisle

@barbarabeeton and also for some reason they never let me type anything

manooooh

@barbarabeeton okay. Do not you get tired of people who, like me, ask something that is in a manual? I feel bad for making others write something many times

barbara beeton

@DavidCarlisle -- gee, i wonder why? oh -- you never make misteaks.

Alan Munn

@barbarabeeton Back when I was doing lots of real programming, I quickly discovered that writing documentation was more lucrative: people needed it, but nobody wanted to do it, so they would pay more for it.

barbara beeton

@manooooh -- i won't answer the first part of that comment. but actually, sometimes such a question points out something that might be weak in the available documentation, so it can be improved.

manooooh

7:41 PM

@barbarabeeton okay :)

barbara beeton

@AlanMunn -- i can't claim it's more lucrative, but i do have a few people in the office who appreciate the fact that someone else here is in favor of reliable documentation. and an acknowledgment in a well-done book is a nice reward, aside from being a good addition to one's personnel file.

manooooh

@AlanMunn I want to write documents!!! <3

barbara beeton

@manooooh -- documents not = documentation.

Alan Munn

@barbarabeeton I was working independently on a per-job basis, so I set my own prices.

manooooh

@barbarabeeton @AlanMunn oh sorry

barbara beeton

7:45 PM

@AlanMunn -- my husband keeps trying to persuade me that i should do something like that after i retire. but i'd only be interested if the subject were interesting to me; not that money is no object, but being bored isn't much fun.

Alan Munn

@barbarabeeton Yes I agree. I was writing documentation for research tools being developed at an engineering research center, so the projects were always interesting (to me at least.) But I wouldn't want to document someone's widget telemarketing analysis software. :)

manooooh

@barbarabeeton https://www.ams.org/publications/authors/Communication_of_Mathematics_with_TEX.‌pdf nice example! Question: why \sqrt instead of \root\of? For the same reason that @DavidCarlisle's excellent comment gives?

Skillmon

@DavidCarlisle 1. You don't need ifthen for that (as nobody ever needs it). 2. This only solves it for that one specific environment, not on a general basis, if OP wants two of those environments placed he'd need to extent the ifthen code. I think a more general two run solution might be better suited.

barbara beeton

@manooooh -- thanks for the compliment. it's \sqrt because it really is the square root, not the third or any other "non-second-degree" root, which is what the "of" indicates.

manooooh

@barbarabeeton can I ask if the keywords have any special treatment so that search engines (such as Google) take these words into account, and thus index faster? And also to make it stand out from the rest of the searches (I do not know if it's cheating). I'm talking about that article you made

Alan Munn

7:54 PM

@Skillmon I like ifthen because of its great manual. And the fact that I can remember the syntax without consulting it. :)

barbara beeton

@manooooh -- well, searchability is supposed to be a function of keywords. whether or not it really works is a mystery to me.

David Carlisle

@Skillmon you could use heiko's zref suite but ifthenelse is possibly the easiest way to test a pageref (brilliant code for that got added by someone)

manooooh

@barbarabeeton okay, I thought that since you were talking about TeX and not LaTeX "semantically" it was more correct to use \root\of, but that makes more sense

David Carlisle

@Skillmon yes if you had two or three, you'd need to add some \OR clauses in the test but in practice just how many rotate tables is a document going to have?

manooooh

@barbarabeeton I don't understand. When writing "Keywords" in a PDF file does Google know the words? I do not think that is so simple

Skillmon

7:58 PM

@DavidCarlisle catalogue documents tend to have a lot. This really depends on the document type (but in general you're right, it's unlikely to occur a thousand times)

David Carlisle

@Skillmon yes but if you had an appendix with hundreds of rotated tables, you could use landscape for the block; this is for one off floating thing appearing "somewhere" also I'm not prepared to re-write the latex output routine just to answer this question in a more generic way:-)

Skillmon

@DavidCarlisle how very unfortunate :) I can totally understand that.

David Carlisle

@manooooh it's giving example of latex syntax

barbara beeton

@manooooh -- a pdf file is often accompanied by metadata; i don't know if that addition was applied to the referenced article. i think that metadata should yield much faster results than a full-text search, but i am neither a pdf expert nor the person who formatted that final document.

manooooh

@barbarabeeton oh okay, thank you! You take care of the back-end ;)

Alan Munn

8:24 PM

@DavidCarlisle It's this kind of attitude that gives open source software a bad name.

David Carlisle

@AlanMunn you mean it would be better to make it closed source and charge for the work, it's a plan, I agree.

marmot

@Johannes_B I guess it should be possible to "repair" tikzposter by translating their routines to basic pgf code. However, it might be that I am (almost) the only one who feels that things need to get repaired, so, as you say, it might not be worth the effort. Just for the records: I do believe that this would improve this otherwise nice package.

Alan Munn

@DavidCarlisle :)

Skillmon

8:53 PM

I have a small question: When to use a token register and when to use a macro? In tex.stackexchange.com/a/451432/117050 @egreg builds the table body using a token register (in one of the versions posted in his answer) while my answer does the same with an \edef\tmpa{\unexpanded\expandafter{\tmpa#1} construct. What are the advantages of the token register approach (if any)?

Joseph Wright

@Skillmon In the pre-e-TeX days, you had to use a toks as it can hold # tokens

@Skillmon In expl3 we just use \edef\foo{\unexpanded{...}}: the performance hit over \toks _n_={...} is minute, and it's a lot easier not to have to worry about the difference

David Carlisle

@Skillmon \unexpanded is essentially \the on an anonymous token register like \scantokens is read of an anonymous file and \numexpr is an anonymous count register. there is a certain pattern to e-tex extensions

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle All true ...

egreg

@Skillmon You don't need \edef and \unexpanded.

Joseph Wright

@egreg No, you don't need them, but if you want one method without worrying about subtleties ...

Skillmon

9:48 PM

Thank you all. The pre-e-TeX was obvious, though :)

egreg

@JosephWright And to leave playground with \toks to Bruno.

Joseph Wright