TeX, LaTeX and Friends

egreg

06:55

@PauloCereda It depends on what the column type is; if the centering is correct, it means that the column is l and \hfil$x$ would work as well. The safest method is \multicolumn{1}{c}{$x$}. Just for the record.

Brent.Longborough

08:15

@AlanMunn Yes, thanks, very informative, and prejudice-purgative! :)

@PauloCereda Of this water I shall not drink...

Paulo Cereda

10:48

@egreg I had no idea. :) I just looked at the Appendix I to find some \hfill mentions, and found that sample code. :)

egreg

@PauloCereda LaTeX always does \unskip at the end of a cell, so \hfill A\hfill and \hfill A are equivalent. If you want to center an entry no matter whether the type is l or r, you have to say \hfill A\hspace*{\fill} so that the glue is not removed by \unskip. The normal filling is done with \hfil, so \hfill and \fill override it. But \multicolumn{1}{c}{A} is perhaps easier.

Paulo Cereda

@egreg Ah got it! :) I was trying to understand the Exercise 12.3 (talking about \hfill and \hfil), but I had no luck so far. \multicolumn{1}{c}{A} is definitely the way to go. :)

egreg

@PauloCereda Don't take the chapter on alignments as a model for tabular which is based on \halign, but with many attached features.

Paulo Cereda

@egreg I'm scared of it. :)

Paulo Cereda

11:24

I know this might sound odd, but IMHO documents typeset in TeX speak for themselves. :) I recently created a song booklet for my parish and everybody was amazed by the quality! People came to me and asked how I made "Word produce such beautiful documents"; then I gently explained about TeX and friends. :) — Paulo Cereda 3 mins ago

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda I replied to that on site, but deleted before sending:-)

Paulo Cereda

Trivia: I was tempted to write a line in the new booklet I made with "Thou not shalt forget babel". :) I forgot to include babel in the first booklet, so hyphenation was messy. :P

@DavidCarlisle Oh. :)

David Carlisle

It went something like" did you explain that tex was so easy to use that you only needed the entire global tex community to customise it to typeset the layout and a million parallel indices)

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Think of the juicy rep points we can get if we lure people to register here! :) I'm gonna burn in hell for that. :D

David Carlisle

@egreg unless of course you use colortbl when putting fil* glue into the entries has predictable (but predictably unwanted) affects

egreg

11:30

@DavidCarlisle I never use buggy packages. ;-)

David Carlisle

@egreg neither do I (just make them)

4

@PauloCereda remember we have the "interviewee's revenge" interview planned......

Paulo Cereda

@DavidCarlisle Oh no!

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda could you do a tex lion in Brazillian garb being lead to the gallows?

Paulo Cereda

I'll try to draw one. :D

Paulo Cereda

12:17

@AlanMunn, @BrentLongborough: I was talking to a friend today and we used a funny idiomatic expression: "boi de piranha". Do you guys know it? :) Believe it or not, it's also used in the academic context in some regions. :)

David Carlisle

@egreg ah just saw your edit. hmm You might think I knew the syntax of \def by now:(

egreg

@DavidCarlisle We might ask Knuth to extend it: \def\cs#4 might stand for \def\cs#1#2#3#4

It would simplify the definition of \newcommand. :)

David Carlisle

@egreg ah I was rather proud of that newcommand code at the time:-)

egreg

@DavidCarlisle It's very clever, indeed!

Stephan Lehmke

@egreg But \def\cs#1.#4 would be ambiguous.

egreg

12:26

@StephanLehmke That was only for undelimited arguments. :)

egreg

12:39

@DavidCarlisle LaTeX2.09 did it with a loop. Hairy.

David Carlisle

@egreg yes. It meant you could supply the number of arguments as <number> but we decided we could lose that feature

Paulo Cereda

2

Q: How to cite a paper I didn't read?

The problem I have is that a paper that is cited by other papers I've read is not to be found. I've read only its abstract. I understand that what I want should look like Featherstone et al 1900 (as cited in Thomas and Cullen 2002) but I have no idea how to do it in LaTeX or BibTeX for that...

Isn't this the apud thing?

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Not very useful, I'd say, except for defining a macro that gobbles a number of arguments that depends on some value: \newcommand{\cs}{{...\newcommand\xgobble[\@tempcnta]{}...}}. But three \expandafter's and a \number would do.

Brent.Longborough

@PauloCereda Yes, we used the word (and the concept) a lot in IBM :)

David Carlisle

@egreg yes we worried about it for a bit, but I don't think anyone noticed the change in practice

Paulo Cereda

12:47

@BrentLongborough Oh! :D

egreg

@DavidCarlisle I just can't think of a real application.

N3buchadnezzar

dupe

0

Q: TeXworks symbole finder

Unlike most other TeX editors, TeXworks dose not provide any facilities to find and insert symbols, is there any plugin or any program that can be used in parallel with texworks?

texworks

egreg

13:53

@N3buchadnezzar No, as explained.

N3buchadnezzar

I mean still, you do not look up symbols in the program. How to use external programs and software is explained in the related post.

percusse

15:54

OK, I think I'm running out of random gravatars. Everyday I see more structure :) One of these days I'll get the TeX logo in it.

2

user19161

16:38

@N3buchadnezzar What do you mean by crash?

user19161

@N3buchadnezzar The good thing about TL is that if your install goes through halfway you can resume where it stopped and not have to start all over. Just run the install-tl command again.

user19161

@RyanReich I still like xypic for its concise syntax. For a commutative diagram, the pgf code is 3 times as long as the xypic one.

Ryan Reich

@JasperLoy It's true, but (well written) it can be parsed as prose. xypic may as well be xii-pic for a complex diagram.

user19161

@RyanReich Also pstricks has better support for 3D than pgf, so I think pgf is the loser to me here. :-)

Ryan Reich

@JasperLoy Poor Till Tantau, just can't get a break on this forum :)

Ryan Reich

17:15

@DavidCarlisle I'll bet Word has had twice as many programmers working on it as LaTeX has.

user19161

@RyanReich Hmm, but TL has over 2000 packages!

Ryan Reich

@JasperLoy My point was that it's not like Word was some easy-breezy piece of code and LaTeX is a Herculean effort. Both are Herculean. (There will be no argument here as to which managed to clean the Augean stables, though)

user19161

@RyanReich Hmm OK. Actually I confess that I think Word is very good. I imagine the day where everyone will switch from LaTeX to word. It is not a bad idea actually.

Ryan Reich

@JasperLoy You say this in the safety of an empty chat room :)

I should hope that it's good, though. It really makes me sad to think that thirty years of development by the world's foremost software company would produce something bad.

Werner

@PauloCereda: Have you ever experienced this:

5

user19161

17:25

@RyanReich I know LaTeX may have better spacing and the various packages make drawing special things easier, but seriously, Word is very powerful too and I was thinking if the LaTeX authors could just write macros for Word instead the same things could be accomplished.

user19161

@Werner Oh I experience this quite often on another site. :-)

Werner

@JasperLoy That's epic... almost like a formal request to double click.

user19161

@Werner Oh sorry, I just realized the "just now" just now. :-)

user19161

I think I have not come across this in that case!

Marco Daniel

19:15

@Werner He sees this box every day ;-)

egreg

@MarcoDaniel Hardly: in the best circumstances it's "vote again in 20 hours". ;-)

Werner

19:39

@MarcoDaniel Sure. I was just amused by the "vote again just now" part. Perhaps a mild eagerness on my part, most certainly echoed by Paulo!

David Carlisle

20:42

@Werner, @egreg: whose idea was it to pad \colorbox by fboxsep:-)

egreg

@DavidCarlisle I have some suspects. :)

Werner

@DavidCarlisle He he... will keep looking.

egreg

@DavidCarlisle The idea of a wiiiiiide tilde is really terrible.

David Carlisle

@egreg well true but the mathtime one looks interesting. better than my flat one. even the light version of mt isn't in the tl2012 I just got yesterday is that licensing issues?

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Yes, there are licensing problems. I don't know precisely, but the license of the light version is definitely not free.

David Carlisle

20:53

@egreg I had the full set once but they are probably on floppy disks somewhere but I don't know where and I haven't a floppy disk reader

egreg

@DavidCarlisle Ask Lance for a replacement.

David Carlisle

@egreg so I can generate documents with wide tildes in and send them to you in the post?

egreg

@DavidCarlisle This could be considered harassing. :)

Joseph Wright

@egreg Free as in money, not as in speech, I think

percusse

3

A new \stretch primitive.

2

egreg

21:00

@JosephWright mirror.ctan.org/fonts/mtp2lite/EULA-MTPro2Lite.txt

David Carlisle

@percusse looks more like \skipping to me

percusse

@DavidCarlisle with talented people making the rope oscillate in the second fundamental.

N3buchadnezzar

@percusse Kill it with fire.

I liked the Catalan number question. Since it is labeled as very easy.

percusse

@N3buchadnezzar Smoke signalling

David Carlisle

21:23

tex.stackexchange.com/posts/63545/revisions

should we really be adding such signs to the question rather than in comments? It seems belittling to new users to me. (just asking here for opinions rather than adding more comments to that question)

Alan Munn

@PauloCereda I've never heard this expression and neither had Cristina. It must be pretty local.

Paulo Cereda

@Werner Every day. :)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle I'm minded to roll this one back

Alan Munn

@JosephWright I would do that. I agree with David (and you too, I think.)

Joseph Wright

@AlanMunn OK, done

egreg

21:33

@AlanMunn +1

David Carlisle

@JosephWright thanks

Paulo Cereda

@AlanMunn I thought so. :) I think it's more common in the central west region (maybe from Pantanal) and also in the countryside areas of the southeast region. When the cowboy needs to cross his cattle across a river full of piranhas, he chooses the oldest or a sick ox to go ahead. While piranhas attack and devour the old ox, the others make the crossing safely.

The expression is used to denote one who submits or is subjected to a sacrifice to get someone rid of a difficulty or guilt.

Alan Munn

@JosephWright I somehow missed the meta question this was based on, but I really think we should leave the editorializing about best practices to the answers and not edit questions to reflect that editorializing at all. Or just leave a comment saying "This isn't a good idea". If there's a better practice, someone will likely post an answer which will get plenty of votes.

Paulo Cereda

In the academic context, we use this expression when we deliberately put errors in our text to give something to the reviewers. :D

Alan Munn

22:14

@PauloCereda Ha, that's pretty funny. Reviewer bait.

David Carlisle

@PauloCereda in case you thought we'd forgotten

8

I chose the font especially for you

percusse

23:02

@AlanMunn Thank you for the edit.

Alan Munn

@percusse You're welcome. I think that question is also really helpful (and not just because I have an answer there.)

@percusse Nice gravatar today, BTW.

percusse

@AlanMunn chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/5383307#5383307

:)

doncherry

@AlanMunn Just wanted to pop in and say that I agree about not flagging questions with the "that's ugly" picture (tex.stackexchange.com/questions/63545/…) Whether or not we want to react to questions that will likely result in typographically inferior results in a standardized way would still be up for discussion on meta, I guess.

Alan Munn

@doncherry I don't think there should be any standard way. Also, in some cases people are simply required to do awful things (anyone who's had to write a thesis at a US university can attest to that) and it's really unhelpful to be told that you simply shouldn't do what your requirements tell you to do. (Of course sometimes you can fight and win: chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/41?m=5337996#5337996).

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$TeX - LaTeX$ TeX, LaTeX and Friends