@HenriMenke Fine, you're the boss. But honestly I cannot see how this is a bug whereas the original definition of canvas is xy plane at z= in the old version of the 3d library was not. IMHO it is precisely the other way around.

Could you give me a suggestion please?

Assume that I have a document with n pages, with some TikZ (TikZ slows down the compilation time pretty much)

How often should I compile?

Once every page or onve every two pages or more?

@marmot What does tex.stackexchange.com/questions/489801/… have to do with xy plane at z?

@JouleV I usually have a separate document for each figure and then a Makefile to build the whole project. The separate figures are embedded using \includegraphics and they use a shared preamble with the main document to match fonts, colors, etc.

@HenriMenke Not much except that I am not sure that I understand the definition of "bug". My naive definition would be it is something where the results deviate from what is written in the manual.

@marmot The bug was that in the circuits library 0 and 1 was not treated the same as 0.0 and 1.0, respectively.

@JouleV You can externalize the figures. Overall this works great IMHO. I am just preparing many slides and it speeds up compilation quite a bit.

@HenriMenke Hmmh, I would not have expected them to give the same results. You can use e.g. 1 for \ifnum but not 1.0.

@marmot I think the behaviour was unexpected so I fixed it.

@marmot What was the problem with xy plane at z?

@HenriMenke This one: tex.stackexchange.com/a/48776/121799. It got fixed but I remember there were some discussions whether or not this is a but.

@marmot But I don't think anyone from the PGF team was part of this discussion.

@HenriMenke Maybe I misinterpreted this comment then.

@HenriMenke @marmot I don't think I need to externalize anything yet. The compilation time is still very fast (I only have about 1-2 TikZ pictures each 2-3 page). But the number of pages is not small. Also, I am writing it instead of copying it - so there may be some mistakes (grammar etc) in the document, and I am wondering if I can compile the document everytime I find an error.

So far I do like that, and now when n is about 25, it is still very good. But I don't think it is good for n about 50 or 80...

@JouleV There are some standard tricks like \includeonly, which I am using when writing huge documents or long beamer presentations. This allows you to only compile the current chapter, say, while keeping the labels.

@marmot There I was just quoting the comment from the bugtracker before I had looked into this at all.

@JouleV I managed to do something a bit strange for a book. All the figures are in an external document that can be compiled on its own and we thus have PDF versions of each. Each image has a "key" given to it. In the book we pull in the figures using a macro and the key. With a configuration in the preamble, we can switch between using the PDF version i.e. fast compilation, or, "drumroll" pulling in the actual tikzpicture environment from that external file

(just in case we had not configured the two documents in exactly the same way)

It was messy, but it worked just fine.

The "externalizing" part of tikz worked well when I tried it to reduce compiling time.

@DavidCarlisle I've been looking at epstopdf: it seems Hekio made life very complicated for what comes down to a couple of lines ...

@JosephWright yes

@JosephWright the sty or the perl script?

@JosephWright well epstopdf-base isn't too bad, half of it is the usual catcode dance

@UlrikeFischer sty

@DavidCarlisle Er, there's still a lot of set up that really isn't that useful (as far as I can see)

@DavidCarlisle How long before I end up writing xgraphics :)

@JosephWright it doesn't get started until line 185, and a lot of it is patching things eg the default graphics extensions that wouldn't need patching if it was built in from te start.

@JosephWright Sunday?

@DavidCarlisle Yes, all true

@DavidCarlisle Seems that way

@DavidCarlisle I was thinking, seriously, that if we do pre-load expl3, and my medium-term plan of moving l3color and l3graphics to l3kernel works, then it might not be a bad plan ...

@JosephWright isn't it going to look like xfp.sty and just offer a _-free interface to what you have already?

@JosephWright it will be like dvipdfm, we could have graphics, graphicx, xgraphics, xgraphicx, sgraphicx, ...

@DavidCarlisle Probably

@DavidCarlisle :)

@DavidCarlisle Depends I guess: xgraphics presumably would be keyval-based and likely deal with the 'minimum size/maximum size' stuff that for example adjustbox currently adds

@JosephWright vertical alignment as well,

@DavidCarlisle Huh?

@JosephWright \includegraphics[valign=t]{...} rather than \raisebox{\height-\ht\strutbox}{\includegraphics{....

@DavidCarlisle Ah, right

@DavidCarlisle Perhaps: I guess 'to be agreed'

@JosephWright I've been meaning to add valign to graphicx for a while (some years:-)

@DavidCarlisle Ah!

@DavidCarlisle I guess before creating a new package we would probably work out all sensible option

@JosephWright but new packages are sensible options :)

l3keys for keyval interface?

@DavidCarlisle Well yes

@Skillmon That's a good question: probably not in this area, really: it is basically a straight re-implementation of graphicx anyway

@JosephWright there might be some hackery that relies on the internals of graphicx in other packages/documents.

@JosephWright which comes back to a an email i have half written about kv interfaces to graphics inclusion...

@Skillmon Almost certainly

@JosephWright speaking of valign, this just got posted:

@DavidCarlisle not my fault

@Skillmon no: user error but if \includegraphics had had a valign key from the start aligning things would be easier.

@HenriMenke Does this still work for you to get the text back on the grid after formulas for you? It does not here (with updated mkiv). Do you know if something has changed?

@DavidCarlisle Ooh flash HTML emails!

@DavidCarlisle would be very useful.

@DavidCarlisle More flash emails!

@DavidCarlisle So we add valign to graphicx?

@JosephWright impressing Phil with feature that has been available for at least 10 years

@JosephWright it is a good addition (but if we are really going to ship xgraphics sometime soon should we just freeze graphicx as is? not sure.....)

@DavidCarlisle I'm really not sure about a 'user level' xgraphics. Unlike xfp, it won't really add anything to the existing structures. It's more a thing for l3trial, like xbox: making sure we can implement everything based on the tools we have

@JosephWright possibly true,

@DavidCarlisle Really, I'm aiming for code-level interfaces at the moment, and wanting to be sure we can provide the same document-level structures

@JosephWright ?

@UlrikeFischer texhax

@UlrikeFischer texhax email list

@JosephWright yes, sounds like a good plan

@DavidCarlisle Exclty: I think we can, more or less: most of the 'adjustbox' stuff can be done by l3box or l3coffins

@DavidCarlisle oh, I had overlooked that. Now I wonder where I can get a newer newsreader that could handle this ;-).

even with adjustbox, as it has the export option to push the extra keys on to \includegraphics rather than making the user wrap in an\adjusbox it is a bit like mathtools, in that it affects the preamble loading but not really document syntax and adding keys has a chance of breaking things, adjustbox for example:-)

@DavidCarlisle Ah, right

@DavidCarlisle So xgraphics it is then?

@JosephWright apart from anything else it makes it a lot easier for normal people to test it with real world documents if you provide such a thing

@DavidCarlisle There is that :)

@DavidCarlisle One for the team list?

@DavidCarlisle what about the name of the command then? A lot of documents load graphics/x somewhere "in the background".

@UlrikeFischer If it's in l3experimental it's explicitly for testing ... and we are talking about something with a compatible interface ... though I might also need xbox

@PauloCereda ^^^ xbox ;)

@DavidCarlisle, @UlrikeFischer Just stumbled across github.com/neomutt/neomutt/issues/new/choose: see how they've been able to make multiple templates!

@JosephWright yes, but I'm wondering what will happen if a document loads xgraphicx, graphicx and say also adjustbox. Won't there be conflicts?

@UlrikeFischer Er, no I don't think so: if I do this, I'll block loading of graphicx by setting \ver@graphicx.sty, and there should be no interference with adjustbox

@UlrikeFischer We are still talking explicitly for testing

@JosephWright and what if graphicx and adjustbox has already been loaded?

@JosephWright I don't mind testing ;-) I'm good at resolving errors.

@UlrikeFischer \cs_undefine:N ;)

@UlrikeFischer Let's resolve the ongoing discussions first :)

:@JosephWright : I am getting LaTeX3 Error: Control sequence \driver_draw_color_stroke_cmyk:nnnn already defined error with

\PassOptionsToPackage{driver=dvisvgm}{expl3}
\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{expl3}

\begin{document}
test
\end{document}

@AlexG Quite possibly ... I've not really go tests set up at the moment for dvisvgm. Give me two minutes ...

@JosephWright Thanks! No rush, though.

@AlexG Problem identified: I'd mixed up fill and stroke

@JosephWright Thank you. You are incredibly fast with everything ....

@AlexG Easy fix here

@AlexG Do you need a CTAN update on this?

@JosephWright Wouldn't be that bad, perhaps. Thank you! Do you know why keyval as class options are not forwarded to packages; is it a general L2e deficiency?

@AlexG they are or are not depending (and they are very fragile as the values get passed through multiple \edef)

@DavidCarlisle depending on what?

@AlexG the l3 package option code ignores the whole list (as you commented the other day, even dvisvgm is not seen) if the package is using kvoptions from Heiko then it should see them if I recall correctly. If it is using xkeyval I have no idea, if koma or memoir have their own package option code they do what they do if ...

@AlexG we actually "fixed" that in the github version (last year I think) but had push back from koma script maintainer and elsewhere (it broke stuff) so we backed it out, but we do hope to bring back a more generally consistent supported k-v interface at some point...

@DavidCarlisle Thanks to make that clear. I thought, L3 pkgs just don't evaluate them, although they receive them....

@AlexG github.com/latex3/latex2e/issues/85

@AlexG something like "key=value" is passed to packages, but only as string (and after spaces have been removed, and various \edef executed), if the packages then can handle this as keyval depends on their code. Eg\documentclass[pdftitle=blub]{scrreprt}\usepackage{hyperref} does work.

@AlexG check with @JosephWright on the details there:-)

@AlexG whenever this comes up, it comes down to complaining about \zap@space existing, we brought @UlrikeFischer on to the team so we could blame her for that.

@DavidCarlisle Oh my, Poor Ulrike!

@AlexG the alternative of blaming the real author seems much worse.

@AlexG If you use l3keys2e, it depends which function you choose: I was asked to make use of global options, er, optional!

@AlexG In expl3 itself, I coded a pretty minimal approach: we use \DeclareOption* to pick up things like the driver option. In l3keys2e it was a bit easier as expl3 is loaded ...

@AlexG I'm happy to re-work but I think we need to sort out the whole load-in-the-format business first

@JosephWright The problem with using l3keys2e is that expl3 has been already loaded then. Too late to tell driver options to expl3 again. But you will sort this out, I am convinced ;-).

@AlexG Yes, exactly: it's really a question of if I copy-past some code

@DavidCarlisle Oh, I make use of it (in animate). Don't remove it, please.

@AlexG That's the problem ....

@JosephWright I could replace it with an L3 function, if desired.

@AlexG yes it's Ok where it's OK, but when people started doing [foo=\wibble, bb= 1 2 3 4, something= a and b] then passing the whole lot through \zap@space doesn't end well.

@DavidCarlisle I can imagine.

@JosephWright ah looks OK actually, I did see some github alert about new template features I think a while back but I didn't look at the details then, perhaps that was related

@DavidCarlisle Yes does look good: think it might be worth considering

@JosephWright ooh

@AlexG David is mean

@PauloCereda If I was mean I wouldn't tell you about this important news from the BBC

@DavidCarlisle oh no

@daleif It seems interesting to me. Maybe I will try it. Thanks.

Never hit CTRL+C during a MacTeX update.

@PauloCereda Did you try it? What did happen then?

@AlexG Somehow tlmgr got badly corrupted and I was unable to do anything... I had to install everything from scratch...

Let me find the message.

Can someone remind me how to update my TL2018 to the final frozen version?

@PauloCereda Thus, it was in the process of updating itself (tlmgr update --self), I guess.

@AlexG Quite possible, but when I reinstalled, there were no infrastructure updates (I installed from MacTeX.pkg).

You can tell me shut up

This was terrible.

@PauloCereda lol

@AlexG Update on it's way to CTAN

@JosephWright Great! Thank you! CTAN will love you for keeping them busy :)

@AlexG I know!

@AlexG I have a feeling I am their most regular 'customer'

@AlexG Luckily, everything is semi-automated nowadays: it was a lot more work in the days of uploading to Cambridge (I always favoured 'bothering' Robin)

@JosephWright there was a time that they let us nfs-mount the host and we could just put stuff there:-)

@DavidCarlisle Still done more-or-less that way for a few cases I think

@DavidCarlisle We could ask Rainer .. he is still in charge over-all I think

@JosephWright it's probably not that advisable really, good that they have some control over who is writing to which package.

@DavidCarlisle Yes, over all I think the current scheme is OK, although I imagine at some stage they might want logins for uploads (cf CPAN)

@JosephWright Robin Fairbairns? Hope he is going well.

@JosephWright next plan: put one of the team members into the CTAN squad.

@PauloCereda Rainer, Robin

@JosephWright oh

@PauloCereda Rainer was involved from I think more-or-less the start: ctan.org/ctan

@DavidCarlisle Who ran the Aston archive?

@AlexG Haven't heard from him in a little while: I guess I should check in with him

@JosephWright I think he and Joachim are looking for successors for the server administration. At least that's what Joachim said at Dante.

@UlrikeFischer Ah, does make some sense

@UlrikeFischer They've been doing it for a long time

@UlrikeFischer did they say what's actually involved?

@UlrikeFischer Probably this is a job that a 'general TeX user' might be good for: doesn't need so much TeX experience, more server experience (@StefanKottwitz ...)

@JosephWright yes, Joachim made a rather long talk about it. But as it was quite clear to me that this is not something for me I didn't try to remember all.

@JosephWright no tex didn't seem to be involved at all. Only server administration.

@UlrikeFischer :)

@UlrikeFischer What I imagined: so it would be sensible to 'advertise'. Is there anything that could be linked to, e.g. from my blog or perhaps the team site?

@JosephWright perhaps one should ask Joachim first if he got already a feedback. There were a few people there who looked as if they know this stuff.

@UlrikeFischer Ah, cool

@JosephWright -- Aston was started by Peter Abbott. I think there are probably some reports in old issues of TUGboat.

@barbarabeeton Ah, right, that sounds familar

@barbarabeeton I could look I gues

@barbarabeeton tug.org/TUGboat/tb10-4/tb26abbott.pdf I guess

@JosephWright Aston Martin?

@PauloCereda Er, no

@JosephWright oh

@PauloCereda www2.aston.ac.uk

@JosephWright ooh

@PauloCereda Early archive of TeX stuff, transferred out I believe one weekend on tape to Cambridge ...

@JosephWright Interesting!

@JosephWright -- There are a couple of earlier articles by Peter Abbott that may allude to a code archive. (There was definitely an earlier archive of the texhax mailing list.) I just looked at the first article describing the beginning of CTAN, but Aston doesn't seem to be mentioned there.

@barbarabeeton tug.org/TUGboat/tb14-3/tb40green.pdf?

@JosephWright -- Yup. That's the one about CTAN. An earlier item regarding the Aston archive is tug.org/TUGboat/tb10-1/tb23site.pdf .

@barbarabeeton The TB14 article does mention Aston as one of the original nodes, before the move to Cambridge

@JosephWright -- If memory serves correctly, Aston was the first actual code archive. Before that, tapes were available for various architectures for the basic tex distribution from architecture-specific locations, but those contained essentially only what was created at Stanford. (Look up "site reports" in the TUGboat index.) The current TeX Live collection was largely the brainchild of Sebastian, and really did depend on the existence of CTAN.

@barbarabeeton There was also the site at SHSU, but the two soon merged to form CTAN. As far as I remember, I could access the former with Bitnet and our Vax/VMS system, but not Aston until we got linked to the Internet and TCP/IP.

@egreg -- Yes. The CTAN archive at SHSU is the subject of the article in TUGboat 14:3.

@barbarabeeton Indeed: there's a reason UK-TUG continues to be 'interested' in CTAN

@JosephWright -- One of my "treasures" is a sweatshirt with the Bibby drawing of the UK TeX archive. Quite delightful! (I used to post AMS stuff directly to Cambridge; Robin was most cooperative and patient. A super nice person. If you do get in touch, please give him my best wishes.)

@barbarabeeton Sorry if I'm going off on a tangent here. Some years ago I read a science fiction novel set a few thousand years in the future. In that world, software archaeology was a very useful discipline: If you needed code to solve an uncommon problem, you would contact a software archaelogist. Given a few thousand years of programming, few problems were so weird that nobody had written code for them in all that time. The trick, of course, was to find relevant code.

@HaraldHanche-Olsen -- Oh, that's quite a charming tangent. (I was a devotee of sci fi in high school, to the point where my senior English term paper was a treatise on robotics. At that point, still far in the future, and very different from present reality! Still accepting recommendations on well-written short stories and novels.) It pleases me to think that I may have helped to make software archaeology feasible.

@barbarabeeton @HaraldHanche-Olsen ^^

@UlrikeFischer -- I like it!

@HenriMenke Regarding my question earlier today: \setupformulas[option=depth] seems to resolve the problem. I don't know if that is the "right" way of doing it, though.

@JosephWright Peter Abbot still in contact occasionally

@DavidCarlisle did you see the typewriter question?

@mickep Hans disabled grid snapping for mathalignment some time ago. github.com/contextgarden/context-mirror/blob/…

@mickep Just restore the definitions of \math_alignment_snap_start and stop to get the old behaviour.

@DavidCarlisle True

@mickep Also both of them should be \unexpanded\def.

@HenriMenke Oh, thanks! Do you know why he did disable that grid snapping?

@mickep Source says "experimental:"

@mickep No idea. I only noticed when I tried building my master thesis with LMTX.

@HenriMenke I see. Thanks. I still don't understand what "option=depth" does, but it puts me back on grid...

I submitted PGF 3.1.3 to CTAN. I fixed the \scantokens regression in pgfkeys and hopefully worked around the local/global shadings problem. As a new feature pgf-cmykshadings is now part of the core, thanks to @DavidPurton. The pgfparser was extended to pass arguments to rules, thanks to @Skillmon.

@HenriMenke what do the shadings do now? Are they always global?

@UlrikeFischer They should always be global, but that will hopefully change once all clients fix their code.

@HenriMenke Ah, cool

@HenriMenke Makes sense to me

@HenriMenke sorry, what does that mean? If I define a shading in a group is the definition known globally?

@UlrikeFischer no been at a school production...

@JosephWright I'm pondering about global/local questions. Does it make any sense that \driver_pdf_compresslevel:n sets the variable locally (compared to pdf version)? And what about pdfpagesattr?

@DavidCarlisle I hope it was nice ;-). Someone wants to use typewriter only locally: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/490025/…

@UlrikeFischer We probably need to sort that out ... this is tricky as really the engine should handle this properly (they should be intricately global)

@UlrikeFischer I left a comment:-)

@JosephWright imho yes, but they don't set them globally. I just tried with \pdfpagesattr. And it seemed to have confused Heiko too. In \PDF@SetupDoc he has \pdfpagesattr=, and in a later command there is \global\pdfpageattr.

@UlrikeFischer I've changed the compress level stuff to be global: we should do the same for anything page-based

@DavidCarlisle that was what I thought too. It is actually not easy to load other fonts, it works with a low-level \font but not with fontspec.

@JosephWright I seem to install latex today every hour ;-). I like the idea with the props for the graphics, that fits well imho.

@UlrikeFischer Currently yes, but I want to change that in the future. Please adjust your code to export the definition out of the group if you really have to set up the shading in a group. To this end I added \pgfutil@pushmacro and \pgfutil@popmacro from ConTeXt. github.com/pgf-tikz/pgf/commit/…

@UlrikeFischer Cool

@UlrikeFischer Years ago, the expl3 sources had a warning about 'rapid' development, but nothing was actually happening ... whereas now ..

@UlrikeFischer I meant that arguably this is an engine bug

What is the best way to check whether a \toks register is empty?

@JosephWright yes, I got this, and I agree.

Does \expandafter\ifx\expandafter\relax\detokenize\expandafter{\the\toks0}\relax do the trick?

@HenriMenke Yup: what we used to use in expl3

@UlrikeFischer Speaking of toks: should we consider any of these functions to l3legacy?

@JosephWright Oops, I think I forgot one \expandafter between \relax and \detokenize. However, it works without somehow.

@HenriMenke I just meant 'the general method'

@JosephWright I haven't use toks lastly imho. But as I just saw Henri's question. What is the expl3 variant of a simply \expandafter?

@UlrikeFischer \exp_after:wN

@UlrikeFischer With hindsight, should have been \exp_after:w but there we go ..

@JosephWright Shouldn't it actually have been \exp_after:NN? It receives two tokens.

@HenriMenke Nope: we had that originally, but that was definitely wrong

@HenriMenke \expandafter applies even if the next token is for example {, so it's not N-type

@JosephWright Not sure we want to let users manage token registers.

@egreg I was thinking for places where we need 'glue' to LaTeX2e ... no rush

@HenriMenke Easier: \if\relax\detokenize\expandafter{\the\toks0}\relax

@JosephWright And one could have \exp_after:wN {{ ;-)

@egreg Well yes, like I say, we should have gone with \exp_after:w

\toks0={}
\ifx\relax\detokenize\expandafter{\the\toks0}\relax
    \errmessage{empty}
\else
    \errmessage{not empty}
\fi

@egreg This gives not empty.

@egreg Ah, \if instead of \ifx. Sorry for the noise.

@HenriMenke Expansion, expansion… ;-)