TeX, LaTeX and Friends

12:56 AM

Hello. I was wondering if I could interact with a LaTeX expert here. I have to follow a template, but my text in one box is a bit longer and it disappears on the end of the first page. The template is built made from boxes, I think. I tried to move the commands around, but this did not work.

Everything is hidden in a .sty file.

As it is so long, I don't even know really how to make a minimum example with a .sty.

Skillmon likes topanswers.xyz

6:45 AM

@AlanMunn :)

Rmano

7:16 AM

@Anush start shameless self-promotion have you checked circledsteps.sty? mirror.las.iastate.edu/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/… ? end plug

Although probably it doesn't fit, now that I see the question on topanswers

Anush

7:48 AM

@Rmano thanks! Could you add an answer on top answers?

Rmano

@Anush I'll try, but got no time now... you know, the pesky employers that want you to do real work...

Harald Hanche-Olsen

8:29 AM

@AlanMunn The window is a bit bigger than 30 seconds, to account for clock drift and the user's tardiness in typing in the number. But it is surely a few minutes at most.

Anush

9:27 AM

@Rmano swines :)

cis

@Skillmonlikestopanswers.xyz Don't be so bureaucratic. Whom it concerned knew it, based on the previous discussion.

Harald Hanche-Olsen

10:17 AM

I noticed earlier that my patches for the Libertinus math font don't work with TL2020. I finally got around to investigate. Looking at the data provided by the luaotfload.patch_font callback, I see some differences from TL2019, when applied to the LibertinusMath-Regular font: nomath has changed from false to true, and the two tables MathConstants and mathparameters are gone. Does anyone know why? (Most likely @UlrikeFischer)

cis

@VincentMiaEdieVerheyen
I added a very small cosmetic correction "vcenter" to the "Thumbnails" in the 2nd table.

% arara: pdflatex
% arara: pdflatex
% arara: pdflatex
% arara: ghostscript: {  resolution: 166  , device: png16m, allpages: true}

\begin{filecontents*}[overwrite]{\jobname-data.txt}
Object Date     North  East  Wight Vol  Dens   ImageLeft  ImageRight
1        2020.08  51.2   49.1  55    120    0.65   name1         name2
2        2020.09  61.2   59.1  66    121    0.75   name3         name4
3        2020.11  71.2   69.1  77    122    0.65   name5         name6
4        2020.08  81.2   79.1  56    120    0.65   name7         name8

Paulo Cereda

@AlanMunn unless...

5

@AlanMunn ^^ this could be your token generator. :)

Ulrike Fischer

@HaraldHanche-Olsen more likely @MarcelKrüger ;-). There were some changes in math, to avoid problems with incomplete math table. At best show an example.

cis

10:33 AM

@DavidCarlisle Yes that is true. I actually wanted to put my problem in as a normal table yesterday - because that wasn't a pgfplotstable problem in itself.
Then I didn't do it.

However, it is amazing that centering table cells vertically appears to be a non-trivial problem.

Ulrike Fischer

10:45 AM

@cis centering vertically is generally more difficult than horizontal centering, as boxes have horizontally only a width, but vertically a height and a depth. And there is more than one line along which you could define "center": the baseline, the math axis, the half of "height+depth" of the largest box. "center" has not an exact definition here.

2

Joseph Wright

@UlrikeFischer See xbox :)

Skillmon likes topanswers.xyz

@cis another reason to not do it. It is fine to ask for help, but asking for help to get help to get help is a bit over the top, don't you think?

David Carlisle

@cis vertical centering of text is almost never wanted though and vertical centering of images is trivial once you add the valign=c key to includegraphics, then you have the centre of the image on the baseline of the text and normally that's enough, so no special table code is required.

Harald Hanche-Olsen

@UlrikeFischer At least, you know enough to name names. ;-) Thanks, I'll wait and see if he speaks up. And I'll dig around and see if I can find any relevant docs.

daleif

@UlrikeFischer @DavidCarlisle the updated memoir has been uploaded to CTAN, a month delayed due to a very stressfull start of the new semester.

cis

11:07 AM

@DavidCarlisle I see. You mean

% \usepackage[export]{adjustbox}
\includegraphics[valign=c]{example-image}

That's not bad, but then I have again the problem that I get no additional space above / below the image in the table cell.

David Carlisle

@cis bookmarks horizontal rules have vertical space......

Rmano

[ 1/70, ??:??/??:??] update: adjustbox [765k] (56140 -> 56291) ... done 70! wow

cis

@DavidCarlisle Aha, I do not understand that.

David Carlisle

@cis like the version I posted, which you didn't like as it broke vertical rules

Rmano

@DavidCarlisle the problem is that @cis wants vertical rules ;-). Really the type of constraints call for a TikZ matrix, in my opinion, more than a tabular.

@daleif I am full in it... I really understand you.

cis

11:22 AM

@DavidCarlisle @Rmano Yes, I think solutions should work in all cases, not just in special cases; even if the special case may be the standard.

E.g. \addlinespace[2ex] is not bad, but only works as long as you don't use vertical lines in the table.

PS: With TikZ-matrix I can manage the arrangement without any problems, but I would also like to have a few features of the tables or of pgfplotstable.

Marcel Krüger

@HaraldHanche-Olsen The change is that we require fonts to be loaded with Math script in order to add math tables. If you have a real Math font, you probably want to set Script=Math anyway to enable the right features. Then the luaotfload change automatically disappears.

Skillmon likes topanswers.xyz

@cis Vertical rules are bad in tables, the booktabs author gave a solution that's not a general solution, but a solution for tables which don't have vertical rules. Either stop using vertical rules or stop using booktabs.

Anush

hi all

Rmano

@cis May (or may not) be helpful tex.stackexchange.com/a/224418/38080

cis

11:37 AM

@Skillmonlikestopanswers.xyz
"Vertical rules are bad in tables, ..." That may be, but it is irrelevant for the problem: a good solution works regardless of whether you use v-rules or not.

Skillmon likes topanswers.xyz

@cis no, a good solution works flawlessly in the situation it was designed for. You don't expect a Fiat 500 to be a good choice to transport a piano, but it's a car after all, and there are cars designed to be able to transport a piano, so a Fiat 500 should be able, too.

samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz

5

Rmano

@cis or tex.stackexchange.com/questions/448246/… --- once you have your data in a matrix you can do a lot of things. Even diagonal rules ;-)

@samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz how do you fit four elephants in a FIAT 500?

;-))))

samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz

@Rmano Four??? The images with one where already impressive i.pinimg.com/originals/d7/f0/49/…

2

Ulrike Fischer

@cis you could look in the documentation of adjustbox. Surprisingly it offers keys to adjust the padding.

Gudrun

11:51 AM

Hi. Do I see it correctly that it is not possible to put a figure environment into a parbox?

Rmano

@samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz Two in the front seat row and two in back one. (Very, very old and very, very bad classical italian joke)

Gudrun

The template I have, has put a parbox over the whole page.

cis

@Rmano I can handle TikZ and TikZ-matrix very well; I could easily have done that with it.
But from theoretical considerations, I wanted to implement that as a table.

Ulrike Fischer

@Gudrun no. Why would you want to?

Skillmon likes topanswers.xyz

@Gudrun correct. But you can use \captionof{figure}{<caption>} in the \parbox to get basically the same results.

David Carlisle

11:52 AM

@Gudrun yes, it would have no way of working as the only reason to use figure is to take the content out of the document flow and add in a different place.

Rmano

@cis Ah, sorry. So it's a case of "doctor, it hurts if I touch here..." ;-))))

samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz

@Rmano :D

Gudrun

I suffer from this Latex template somebody created years ago. I am really thinking to transfer it to the offical word template. Not sure if the latex version is still supported

Ulrike Fischer

@Gudrun then perhaps drop the template.

Gudrun

@Skillmon thank you

I would like to clarify: I don't suffer from LaTeX, but this strangely arranged template.

Skillmon likes topanswers.xyz

11:53 AM

@Gudrun If you get an undefined control sequence error, put \usepackage{capt-of} in your preamble. \captionof is provided in the KOMA-script classes, by the caption package, and the capt-of package. The last one is the least intrusive alternative.

David Carlisle

@Gudrun that is common, but it's usually best to ignore anything called a "template", just start from a well known class such as article or memoir or whatever, and add packages as needed

Gudrun

@David: It is a proposal for beamtime and they have a strict layout

and did not really bother to provide a nice LaTeX template

the two pages are two picture enviroments where the person placed on each page a parbox

David Carlisle

@Gudrun that's not actually unreasonable but you would never want a figure in such a docuemnt.

Rmano

@Gudrun Notice that you do not need a figure to put a picture in the document. They are different things.

David Carlisle

@Gudrun \includegraphics is all you need to include an image, the figure environment is unrelated to images (it can have any content) and is all about automatic page breaking and insertion of floating content, so in a two page docuemnt with a manual page break it serves no purpose.

Paulo Cereda

12:00 PM

WHAT twitter.com/RexChapman/status/1303819698438582273

2

Gudrun

@Rmano you are right.

But another problem is when I do \includegraphics[keepaspectratio]{Graphics/Overview.png}, half of the picture disappears out of the page on the top. I I put a \vspace{0em} above the \includegraphics, the image is fully seen, but lots of white space over it.

samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz

@PauloCereda SO CUTE!

Gudrun

I am so sorry, I wished I could give somehow a minimum example.

Paulo Cereda

@samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz <3

samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz

@PauloCereda I hope this won't provoke some comment about lunch from @DavidCarlisle

Paulo Cereda

12:04 PM

@samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz ooh

Rmano

@Gudrun But you can use wrapfig...

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{wrapfig}
\begin{document}
    \centering
    \parbox{10cm}{%
        lalla yalla

        \begin{wrapfigure}{r}{0.5\linewidth}
            \centering
            \includegraphics[width=0.95\linewidth]{example-image}
            \caption{example-image}
            \label{fig:example-image}
        \end{wrapfigure}
        Ulla lilla malla malla
    }
\end{document}

Gudrun

@Rmano thank you, i will try this out. What is the advantage of it, please?
I try to make a minimum example.....

Rmano

@Gudrun No special advantage in this case. Easy to know if you need it, otherwise it's just a matter of putting the figure with the correct alignment. adjustbox can be of great help.

Gudrun

@Rmano Does this wrapfigure offer by chance to place the caption right of the picture, please?

@Rmano: I will save your example definitve

Rmano

@Gudrun I do not know...

cis

12:09 PM

@Rmano I have already made such arrangements with TikZ-matrix. This has not only advantages, because you have to make a lot of adjustments (with pgflinewidth etc.).

It would be interesting whether tcolorbox / tbcitemize can be used to create a table layout and reads in raw data from a txt-data-table.

Rmano

But I think that no, it doesn't.

Joseph Wright

@Gudrun Which one?

cis

@DavidCarlisle A column type like @{\vskip{2mm}}l@{\vskip{2mm}} is not usable?

Gudrun

@Jospeh: I meant to save Rmanos snippet on wrapfigure, still working on this example...

I have no a working example, but it is not minimum and it is based on two files, .sty and a .tex file.
Would maybe somebody willing to have a look and could help me to understand why is the behaviour like this, please?

@Rmano Tried your wrapfigure in my parbox, but its put out on page 3, not on page 2. I can only have 2 pages

Gudrun

12:38 PM

\newcommand{\TechniquesContinued}[1]{\def\ProTechniquesContinued{#1}}

\begin{picture}(190,280)(0,0)

% Frame and main text
\put (3,265){\parbox[t]{184mm}{%
{\ProTechniquesContinued}
}

Could somebody maybe explain how this works? Why does \ProTechniquesContinued not have an argument, please?

You can see here, that my page is a big picture on which a parbox is placed. That is what I understand.

Ulrike Fischer

12:51 PM

@Gudrun because \TechniquesContinued is the command with the argument. Is your graphic at the start of the parbox? Then instead of the \vspace{0pt} you can simply use e.g. \vspace{-3cm} or some other value until it fits.

Gudrun

@UlrikeFischer: Yes, that is right.
Dummy text looks like this:
\TechniquesContinued{

\includegraphics[width=3cm, height=6cm]{example-image}

}

I just did not understand why is required in first place any vspace command. Without it half of the image is pushed out of the page.

@UlrikeFischer: That worked, the picture moved up, there is less space.

David Carlisle

1:13 PM

@cis you can't have a vskip in an @ expression (it's like an \mbox)

cis

1:31 PM

@DavidCarlisle A column type could be declared with your method like

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{array}
\usepackage{collcell}
\newcommand\MakeVcenter[1]{$\vcenter{\vskip4pt\hbox{#1}\vskip4pt}$}
\newcolumntype{K}{>{\collectcell{\MakeVcenter}}c<{\endcollectcell}}

\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{c| c | K}
\hline
1&2&3  \\  \hline
a&b&c  \\  \hline
{\tiny a} & b & {\Huge C}  \\  \hline
a&b&c  \\   \hline
\end{tabular}
\end{document}

Rmano

1:43 PM

@Gudrun probably because there was too little space. Sorry, it's very difficult to try to help without a kind of example...

David Carlisle

@cis that's why I provided \newcolumntype :-)

cis

@DavidCarlisle Seems pgfplotstable don't like collcell; but this could have multiple reasons

David Carlisle

@cis well as I said using pgfplotstable seems to be making it a lot more complicated for little advantage, but whatever.

Gudrun

3:15 PM

@Rmano, yes. I understand fully. Even my example was long. It was too artificially created imho. I will work on another minimum example.

yo'

4:05 PM

Can anyone explain me why Windows 10 include a PATH-searchable python.exe file that's empty?!

Alan Munn

@yo' No. :)

yo'

@AlanMunn thanks. This is reassuring. :)

Alan Munn

@yo' It's not reassuring, it's Windows. :)

yo'

@AlanMunn it's reassuring me that I might not be as much of an idiot as I feel.

@PauloCereda Do you have a reasonably working svg to tikz conversion tool?

Paulo Cereda

@yo' I do! Would you like the link? :)

yo'

4:09 PM

@PauloCereda yep please!

Paulo Cereda

@yo' gimme a minute...

@yo' github.com/kjellmf/svg2tikz.git

yo'

@PauloCereda ah one of the about half a dozen tools called svg2tikz :D

Paulo Cereda

@yo' LOL

yo'

@PauloCereda no LOLZ: github.com/paagu

Paulo Cereda

@yo' oh

yo'

4:14 PM

and how in the world do you use it?

sometimes I believe I'm not a person for the 21st century :(

David Carlisle

@yo' \node(A){\includesvg{file.svg}} ?

yo'

@DavidCarlisle well, if I wanted that, I could have done \includegraphics :)

but I managed to get the tikz code finally now, and I'm happy :)

David Carlisle

@yo' but I did the authentic tikz node thing as well :(

Ulrike Fischer

@yo' to make installing python easier on windows: devblogs.microsoft.com/python/…

yo'

4:34 PM

@UlrikeFischer didn't work for me, apparently. No installer or anything was launched when I first tried. And I had to manually delete the file from a folder that's not accessible via the Explorer.

Paulo Cereda

snakes are mean

Ulrike Fischer

@yo' worked fine for me. The store is launched (I had to go in the folder as there a python before in the path).

@PauloCereda I did it ;-)

Paulo Cereda

@UlrikeFischer ooh

@UlrikeFischer ooh miscellaneous

Ulrike Fischer

@PauloCereda I thought "Fun" wouldn't fit, the content is too dramatic ;-) And perhaps more will be added later.

cis

3 hours ago, by David Carlisle

@cis well as I said using pgfplotstable seems to be making it a lot more complicated for little advantage, but whatever.

@DavidCarlisle I have a table here. There is so much calculation and distinction and ... in it. For me that would break the dam with plain LaTeX. I like to have a professional tool (pgfplotstable) there.

Anonymous

4:51 PM

@cis Thank you for letting me know!

barbara beeton

@yo' -- You're not alone.

David Carlisle

@cis but all pgfplotstable is doing for you is parsing the comma separated value list and then writing out the latex tabular syntax that you specify, and the only reason that it needs to do that is because you entered it with , instead of & between the entries, unless I miss something, but no matter whatever works for you is fine.

barbara beeton

@PauloCereda -- Not all. There are friendly little green garden snakes that keep the place free of rodents.

Ulrike Fischer

@cis pgfplotstable is quite nice for some things. But it has the problem that processing and calculation of the data and the formatting of the output are intertwined, and that makes it quite difficult to know in which part of the processing you are and so to create complex formatting. And debugging it is real pain. If you look at the documentation you will see that all examples are quite straightforward tables.

cis

@DavidCarlisle Yesn't. There are versions of this table that calculate the cell values. With pgfmath. And pgfplotstable goes arm in arm with pgfmath, so ...

But at some point the calculation accuracy was no longer sufficient, so I took Mathematica for the raw data. But e.g. search cells and create the gaps ("value very exactly equal to 1") continued to be based on pgfmath.
So still worth using pgfplotstable.

David Carlisle

5:06 PM

@cis quite possibly:-) The one you show here is rather fancier than the earlier MWE:-)

Rmano

@barbarabeeton Ouch! :_;

wrong smiley ;-)

Alan Munn

One thing I'm learning from all this online teaching stuff is that fancily formatted LaTeX documents in PDF form are a total non-starter for conversion to other formats. So things that I would normally hand out in class on paper for students to work on can't be used electronically very easily at all unless they have some sort of tablet.

Alan Munn

6:11 PM

Does htlatex work with LuaTeX? If so how. I can't seem to find any documentation that discusses engine choice.

Ulrike Fischer

@AlanMunn make4ht -l uses luatex.

@AlanMunn search for answers of michal.h21 on the main site.

cis

I find the method (for vertically centered columns or cells, without (!) Mandatory length [m {3.45cm}])

$\vcenter{\vskip3pt\hbox{#1}\vskip3pt}$

so good.

I think you should issue a 1-command package.

David Carlisle

@cis we are (as far as possible) removing all such hidden uses of math and doing things like centering by explicit raising and measuring of boxes this gives other possibilities like centering on the baseline or x height rather than the math axis, and axis loading math fonts.

Ulrike Fischer

6:30 PM

@DavidCarlisle hm, should the second axis be read as "avoids"?

David Carlisle

@UlrikeFischer er yes

Ulrike Fischer

@DavidCarlisle ;-) three chars are right ;-)

David Carlisle

@UlrikeFischer that's Ok then

Ulrike Fischer

@DavidCarlisle yes, it was enough to guess the meaning

cis

@DavidCarlisle Yes, I also find it strange that the trip goes into math mode and back again.
Obviously, nobody has wanted a vertically centered cell since the 1970s. And the m column, unlike the l, r, c column, requires a mandatory argument that I may not even know.

So I'm afraid you have to write 'tabularz'. But without a mandatory length measure for the overall table; because I don't necessarily know the total width either.

Harald Hanche-Olsen

7:15 PM

@MarcelKrüger Thanks; adding [Script=Math] is likely a good idea, though it didn't cure the problem in my case. Rather, it turns out that running \setmathfont[Script=Math]{Libertinus Math} results in multiple calls to the callback, some of them due to the different sizes needed. And in the first two, nomath is true. In the remaining instances, it is false. So the cure is simply to not try to patch the math parameters of the font unless nomath is false. (A.k.a. defensive programming.)

David Carlisle

@cis m is just the same as the standard p except that it (used to) use \vcenter instead of \vtop so like \parbox instead of \parbox[t] so like parbox has to have a length, for line breaking.

@cis if you don't want to specify a total table width just use tabular

@UlrikeFischer you only needed to guess a couple of letters, easier than German where you have to guess all the word divisions

Marcel Krüger

8:43 PM

@HaraldHanche-Olsen IIRC if you use fontspec or similar, the font is first loaded without features and scripts (to detect feature availability and similar). You could request that the math parameters should always be added, but this again would be a feature and therefore ignored for this script... But you could avoid this by making your patch a feature too. But yes, as a simple solution checking the font is probably best, but I would check for the existence of mathparameters instead of nomath.

Gudrun

8:57 PM

Thank you again for your help. I submitted it and I could solve the problems.

cis

10:58 PM

4 hours ago, by David Carlisle

@cis if you don't want to specify a total table width just use tabular

With this statement we would be back at the beginning.

Again: I want to create a table

· with variable overall width (i.e. nothing tabularx or similar)

· in which the columns, rows or cells are centered vertically.

There is no trivial solution to this.

One have to make weird contractions here by switching to math mode and using vcenter and hbox.

All in all, this is an incompleteness of the table creation of LaTeX.
Just because nobody else seems to care or everyone is satisfied with m-columns with a mandatory fixed width does not mean that the problem has been solved.

PS: And is not a solution to say that there is an option vcenter = c for images via adjustbox. A real solution is independent of the content.

David Carlisle

@cis I don't see why that is an issue at all, just use tabular, and for vertical centering the solutions are unrelated to the table, just any way that you can center any item as you could in normal text, vcenter, a one-item table, \raisebox, adjustbox valign=c, whichever you find convenient, apart from images, and headings (for which a nested tabular works well) vertically centering cells is pretty uncommon anyway.

@cis you can use adjustbox vcenter key for any content, not just images, if you wish.

@cis it seems basically you are just asking to wrap each cell in \zzz{...} where \zzz is defined by \newcommand\zzz[1]{\begin{tabular}{@{}c@{}}#1\end{tabular}

@cis that \zzz usually gets called \hd (for heading) in answers eg this one tex.stackexchange.com/questions/325789/…

Skillmon likes topanswers.xyz

11:23 PM

@cis There you go, two variants to vertically centre the cells of a column, one based on \vcenter, one based on box dimensions.

\documentclass[]{article}

\usepackage{array}
\usepackage{grabbox}

\newcolumntype\vcenter[1]{>{$\vcenter\bgroup\hbox\bgroup}#1<{\egroup\egroup$}}

\makeatletter
\newsavebox\vcenterbox@box
\newcolumntype\vcenterbox[1]
  {%
    >{%
      \@grabbox{}\vcenterbox@box{}\hbox{}
        {%
          \raise
            .5\dimexpr\dp\vcenterbox@box-\ht\vcenterbox@box\relax
            \box\vcenterbox@box
        }%
      \bgroup
     }%
   #1%
   <{\egroup}%
  }
\makeatother

\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{\vcenter{l}\vcenter{c}\vcenter{r}}

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$TeX - LaTeX$ TeX, LaTeX and Friends