@AlanMunn It is irritating. They seem randomly sprinkled over my recent answers and there's never any explanation. I don't know if there's something actually wrong with my answers, if people are just jealous of my cauldron or it's just random fire. I guess the cauldron's out now @DavidCarlisle has a clearly superior one, but who knows? Maybe people think I'm a gwrach?

@AlanMunn Do you use OED online? I'm wondering if I'm the only one who finds the new site intensely irritating.

@cfr No you're not the only one. I just discovered the new version a few days ago, and absolutely hated it. The old one was very much suited to people who actually use it for research; the new one is clearly aimed at a different audience.

@AlanMunn Finally got fed up and filled in the feedback form yesterday. Not that it will make any difference. As you say, the target audience is clearly very different.

@cfr Yes, I'm sure it won't. I have a feeling these days the kinds of things that catch attention would some sort of Twitter bombing of OUP by researchers. (Not that I actually have a Twitter account, but it seems to be thing.)

@AlanMunn I do, but it accuses me of violating the terms and conditions if I actually use it and keeps locking me out. (Whatever it is I'm violating, I have no clue. None of the things they list even remotely applied.) Then they decided you can't even read stuff without logging in, so I just gave up. (There were a couple of very interesting things to follow during the pandemic. iSAGE used it, for example.)

@cfr Maybe it doesn't like Welsh?

@AlanMunn Why would I want to use an English company's dictionary for Welsh? Especially since the Academy dictionary is not only online, but free.

(Geiriadur yr Academi | The Welsh Academy English-Welsh Dictionary)

geiriaduracademi.org

@cfr I was talking about Twitter and violating its terms.

@AlanMunn Oops. Sorry. I'm a bit distracted by an argument I'm having with the printer.

[OED is a much bigger deal than Twitter!]

@mickep acquiring some users, i see:-)

@DavidCarlisle Well, I don't know exactly what he wants to change in his examples.

@mickep he wants his 100000 page document to get to the end without overfull boxes:-)

@DavidCarlisle Oh, well

@JosephWright make users (or a user) happy?

@DavidCarlisle They still don't sound very happy :)

@samcarter I do have a cooking pot now, that could perhaps help

@DavidCarlisle :)

@JosephWright you got to love \DeclareSIUnit[number-unit-product = \;] \inch{"} 😜😜😜

@Rmano Or even: this

@user1271772 The math looked like computer modern to me, but maybe I was too quick.

@mickep The .tex source file just says "palatino" at the top.

@user1271772 Yes, but look at this:

Compare with:

(The second one uses TeX Gyre Pagella, for text and math.)

You're right, the second one is palatino and the first one looks like the default font that is obtained with \usepackage{amsfonts}.

@mickep Oh strange.

@user1271772 I think your "palatino" at the top changes the text font but for the mathfont you need some other package. Somebody else will tell you which one, I don't know.

(But didn't you see that it was two different fonts?) :)

@mickep That's a good question. This paper was from 2019, and I just new that I used palatino for (almost?) all my papers back then. I looked through my Google Scholar page and clicked on a few papers to find examples, and I opened the first page of each PDF, and selected papers based on the first page of each paper. The first page of this paper is all palatino right?

@user1271772 While at it, your formulas look very squeezed. For example (32) (still first article), the minus is sometimes overlapping the digits. I'd suggest to break the formulas over (at least) two lines.

I had actually opened a 2020 paper too, and noticed that it was not with palatino, so I didn't include that example. All three examples that I provided were from 2019.

@PauloCereda ^^^ rare footage of the duck-matrix!

@user1271772 No, first page is not all palatino.

Compare this with the corresponding formula in your text.

@mickep I totally agree that they were very squeezed in this paper. You can probably tell that this was very intentional (default LaTeX would not make it that squeezed, and it takes a lot of work to make these formulas fit on one line... lots of experimenting with custom negative spaces!).

I would have to investigate further to determine why it was that I decided to make Eq. 32 one line, but you could be totally right that it would look better on two lines instead of one!

@user1271772 Horrible, if you excuse my honesty. Why play against TeX when it would be much more readable not to?

Did you make that yourself?

This isn't from the paper is it?

@user1271772 Yes, I made that. With TeX Gyre Pagella (Math).

Thanks for clarifying :)

@user1271772 No problems. Time for food here. @DavidCarlisle, no ducks are served tonight.

@mickep The paper was done in 2019 so I would have to investigate further to find out why I decided to make it one line. Maybe it was because it was near the end of the page? I don't agree that TeX defaults are always the best choice. I do play against TeX from time to time, especially when it comes to making certain things fit on a page rather than being broken in half to overflow into the next page:

But I also agree with you that those minus signs are very squished!

I'd prefer there to be at least a bit of space around each minus sign.

Perhaps if Eq. 32 was two lines long, the next sentence would be on the next page, which would actually be a good thing because that subsequent sentence was broken anyway.

I think it's just easier to "read" when it's on one line. This might not be obvious, but for the specific thing being presented, the people reading the paper will be looking for certain things, such as the locations of the blue terms vs red terms vs orange terms, etc., and I think (or at least probably thought at the time) that the experience would be better for the reader if the equation was on 1 line.

Anyway, thanks for pointing out that the paper used palatino for the regular text and computer modern for the math!

@Skillmon wow, are you using that?

@user1271772 no, I'm a rabbit, why should I end up in the duck-matrix?

@Skillmon I meant to ask if you're using that image for a publication or something like that :)

@user1271772 :) No, I just took it today and wanted to show it to @PauloCereda

(more precisely, I only took it to show it to @PauloCereda)

@Skillmon What do you mean by "took" it? I'm familiar with the term "took" in terms of taking pictures with a camera, but not in the context of making or downloading figures on a computer. Am I understanding something incorrectly?

@user1271772 today I took a photo using my smartphone of the duck-matrix, because I found a hole in it. So: Image is courtesy by me :P

So, yes, "took" as in "taking pictures with a camera".

@Skillmon I see, so it's a screenshot of a picture that was somewhere else?

@user1271772 no, it's a picture I took, of an object that looks like this if viewed from the right perspective. Genuinely, my picture.

Or do you mean, this was not a computer-generated image, and that you literally took a picture of this in real life?

@user1271772 yes, this.

Wow!

Where was this?

@user1271772 unfortunately I had no better camera on me than my smartphones...

@user1271772 in a museum in Fulda, Germany.

@user1271772 don't believe @Skillmon has a real life

Okay, thanks for clarifying everything! The reason why I was so interested was because I had just been looking at ducks in TikZ 90 minutes ago:

@DavidCarlisle Why not?

@user1271772 no worries, everyone here is obsessed with ducks, one way or the other

@user1271772 he's just envious of my skills to write a package that doesn't have bugs regarding braces.

I wouldn't call myself "obsessed", but I do think they're cute :)

@Skillmon which package was that?

@user1271772 the "obsessed with ducks" think is a joke in the TeX world. @DavidCarlisle for instance is obsessed with eating them.

@user1271772 his is the faulty and buggy keyval, mine is expkv.

@user1271772 and don't worry, he's not really envious, we're just joking around and pretend to be mocking each other all of the time.

I see.

Do we really need to be able to add a red beard to a duck in TikZ though?

@user1271772 you're able to add a beard, and you can use any colour by providing a valid colour-expression as the beard's value. So beard=red is not separately defined, and no special case, you could as well say beard=green, or beard=green!75!red to get a 75%-green rest red mixture.

@user1271772 the tikzducks package adds a few decorations to the ducks, and each of those decorations is customisable via keys, the most obvious customisation is colour, which comes at practically no cost. So the right question would be "is it really necessary to add a beard to a duck?" The colour is just a gimmick.

@Skillmon I totally agree that the color is not that big of a deal, but why is it that someone made it possible for us to add beards to ducks?

@user1271772 ask @samcarter :) Probably the answer is: Because it was fun and possible.

@Skillmon As good as an answer can be. :)

@user1271772 then you discover the bearwear package, and ask yourself why that is possible. Then you discover a whole bunch of fun-packages, none of which serve an obvious need. The answer is simply: Because it is fun. And fun doesn't hurt in this world.

@user1271772 for Christmas. You can't make a Santa Duck without a beard.

@Skillmon I see. It just seems like a waste of time though, but making diagrams that won't go into publications, is not one of my hobbies. If it was my hobby, then I can imagine myself doing it too. This is why I asked if your "duck matrix" photo was going into a publication, in case you wondered why I asked that!

I thought you generated it TikZ or something!

@Skillmon you must be mistaken, none of my packagages have bugs.

@user1271772 Why do ducks need beards? Simple: The Dante Clause duck looked strange without one :)

@user1271772 You see, many of us package maintainers aren't right in their head. Because we invest our free time into a system such as TeX, and we actually have fun doing so. We're crooked beyond repair. So if we occasionally vent creating weird things, that's for the better of mankind!

@DavidCarlisle \define@key{where-are-my-braces?}{foo}{\def\bar{#1}}\setkeys{where-are-my-braces?}{foo={{baz}}}\expandafter\@gobble\bar% why does that throw an error of missing \begin{document}?

@Skillmon removed via feature

@Skillmon so many ducks! Great museum!

@DavidCarlisle see this, @user1271772? Obviously envious of my non-brace-removing code.

@samcarter thanks for the explanation :) I'm curious how long it took to make the TikZducks package in total (approximately)?

@Skillmon I see, but I think some of these things are not for the better of mankind (or peoplekind), although many of them certainly are!

@samcarter but why tikz?

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{color,amssymb}
\begin{document}

\begin{picture}(100,100)
\put(50,50){\oval(50,20){}}
\put(70,65){\circle{20}}
\put(35,50){\line(1,0){30}}
\put(70,65){\circle*{2}}
\put(75,67){\line(6,-1){10}}
\put(75,63){\line(6,1){10}}

\put(74,54){\color{red}\Large$\blacktriangleright$}
\end{picture}

\end{document}

@DavidCarlisle This is how it should look nowadays?

@mickep personally I would set this as 8

@DavidCarlisle you are so bold...

@DavidCarlisle LOL.

@user1271772 No idea about the total time. The first version was about an evening worth of coding and then maybe another couple of hours to write the doc. As this was my first own package, it took a bit longer to figure out things like package options etc. Following packages then went considerable faster. The first draft of TikZbricks was written while listening to a talk at a TUG meeting while chatting with a couple of other attendees, so about half an hour.

@DavidCarlisle The red black triangle is great!

@samcarter I assume that the design of the beard would not be included in those time estimates though?

@user1271772 No, all the accessories were added later (and also not all by me, a lot of people contributed code)

Was the beard added by you?

@user1271772 The version history is public, you can look it up on github.

I'm actually on the GitHub page at the moment!

And I had already clicked the "older" button several times to get to the bottom of the 400+ commit history:

However, I wonder why you don't want to answer whether or not you added the beard accessory?

@user1271772 I don't think knowing who added the beard is important enough to open my git client and look it up.

I see.

For the record, it looks like you added the beard: github.com/samcarter/tikzducks/commit/…

Also, when I asked that question, I assumed that you would remember whether you added that feature or not, which I don't think is unreasonable!

And also not too important...

@mickep isn't that the same as what samcarter said?

@user1271772 Oh, indeed.

@mickep The "And also" threw me off, because it looked like you were trying to add something new?

@user1271772 OK.

@user1271772 Not unreasonable, but if you don't get an answer to something unimportant at the first attempt, please don't keep pressing. Didn't we already have this earlier this week with the CM discussion or when you tried to press a user to add an example despite asking you to post a new question?

@samcarter I do not understand why you are being so rude.

@user1271772 I find it rude that you try to force people to answer your questions.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

You find me rude so you respond with rudeness?

I also haven't tried to force you to answer questions.

When you made it clear that you didn't want to give an example in the CM discussion, I walked away.

@user1271772 Repeating questions and making speculations makes me feel pressured to answer.

Even this time, I was just genuinely curious why you wouldn't answer the question about whether or not you created the beard feature!

@samcarter I see, but you "feeling pressured to answer" is different from me trying to "force you to answer".

Also, you made it seem like there's so many contributions to TikZducks from other people that you don't know who added the beard feature, but there seems to be a total of 10 commits in 6 years from 4 users (the only new duck added by someone else seeming to be "Easter Duck"), versus 427 commits from yourself. I find it unbelievable that you didn't know that you added the beard, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, if you are wondering why I'm no longer responding to you, I've clicked "ignore user" for you, @yo' and @TeXnician, so I won't see your messages anymore. There have been too many attacks from the three of you against me, and you probably feel like it's the other way around, so it's probably better for all of us that we avoid each other.

I'm sure we might be able to have valuable conversations some time in the distant future, but for now I'm clicking "ignore user" to save us all from further headaches.

@Skillmon OOH <3

@PauloCereda yay, Paulo is here! Welcome, Mr. Duck!

@Skillmon ooh Mr. Rabbit is here! Hi Mr. Rabbit! <3

The nicest rabbit of the entire world!

@PauloCereda yay my daily dose of vitamins! Here, have a carrot as well: <3

@PauloCereda awwww

@Skillmon ooh carrots

at the southern most of Puglia

@UlrikeFischer Looks very nice!

@mickep yes, but windy, I had to secure them :-)

@UlrikeFischer that's the trouble with picnics, lunch can blow away

@DavidCarlisle and ducks can flow away