TeX, LaTeX and Friends

12:03 AM

@UlrikeFischer yes I think the mathml argument needs to be read verbatim, getting the quoting right for the current version is quite tricky but other than that I don't mind much. whatever you add I'll make the examples match.

Joseph Wright

8:05 AM

Some Lua coding to start the day :)

mickep

8:28 AM

@JosephWright Oh, the joy.

David Carlisle

8:52 AM

@mickep well a second best if you can't be writing xml

mickep

@DavidCarlisle Oh no, the hassle...

samcarter

9:34 AM

The French Knuth-Plass talk is now on youtube.com/watch?v=48JNXcaKj2A

2

mickep

@samcarter Ohh

@samcarter Maybe one can now add translation subs, so one understands what is said as well. :)

samcarter

@mickep French subtitles seem to be available :)

mickep

@samcarter Autotranslating (can be fun...)

samcarter

9:51 AM

@mickep They should ask David for a flawless translation :)

mickep

@samcarter We could have a stream event where he translates live.

David Carlisle

@samcarter Oui, ils devraient

samcarter

@mickep great idea! :P

Joseph Wright

12:56 PM

Hi @WillRobertson

samcarter

1:13 PM

adding the output-directory option to tex was such a bad idea, it adds far more problems than it solves — David Carlisle 2 days ago

^^^ such wise words!

Will Robertson

@JosephWright hi :-) I see that visiting the chat on my phone is dangerous because the tabs stay active for a long time!

Joseph Wright

@WillRobertson :)

@samcarter That and \outer and \scantokens ;)

Ulrike Fischer

@JosephWright and \mathchoice and \over ...

Joseph Wright

@UlrikeFischer Not quite as bad though I know what you mean

Skillmon

1:31 PM

@JosephWright \mathchoice and \over is worse than \scantokens. \outer can have its useful edge-cases (bm).

David Carlisle

1:52 PM

@samcarter as always

@UlrikeFischer did we decide on the html format mathml file?

Joseph Wright

@Skillmon \scantokens is basically broken, \outer you could disable and still use TeX just fine ...

David Carlisle

@JosephWright exactly but \over (and so \mathchoice) is a broken design you just can't really avoid. \Ustack helps a bit but as you can't disable \over it's only opt in so doesn't help much

@JosephWright add scantextokens to classic tex and deprecate scantokens?

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Certainly worth exploring

@DavidCarlisle Well yes I do see that, but my point was you could drop \outer (as Hans more-or-less does) and it would be fine

David Carlisle

@JosephWright yes agreed outer can/should be disabled. \scantokens is broken but only affects that one function, \over affects the entire math processing pipleline just to support an infix syntax latex hides anyway

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle I wonder what LuaMetaTeX does: @mickep?

David Carlisle

2:04 PM

@JosephWright the very first change for 2e was to redefine \newcount and friends not to be outer:-)

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle :)

Alan Munn

2:26 PM

Shell scripting question: if I loop over files with e.g. for file in *.tex the files are ordered by name. Is there a simple way to have them be ordered by creation timestamp?

Ulrike Fischer

@DavidCarlisle We didn't decide anything ;-). I just repaired the faulty verbatim-in-tabular in amsldoc (need tagpdf from develop and my newest code ...) and wanted now write something to output a stubs from tex. Syntax is open ...

David Carlisle

@UlrikeFischer oh would that fix the line endings without me having to patch css into ngpdf's css menu?

@UlrikeFischer let's go with the html format I think it's easier to control white space and quoting around the math in that version and has the advantage of debugging via a browser view

TeXnician

@AlanMunn There is no portable way for creation because some file systems and unices do not feature this. On some systems ls will have a proper switch so show it and then you can post-process the ls output. But not a portable sh/bash way.

Joseph Wright

@TeXnician Also VMs can give 'interesting' results

David Carlisle

@AlanMunn ls -t $(for file in *.tex; do echo $file; done ) (which is filemod not file create but...)

TeXnician

2:32 PM

@DavidCarlisle One can always try if stat -c '%W %n' * | sort gives a sorted list matching one's intuition on the system (file birth time is mostly closer than modification, depends if the file system supports it). One can loop through that as well.

Alan Munn

@TeXnician I suspected that might be the case. For the moment I'll be happy if it works on a Mac, which @DavidCarlisle's suggestion seems to.

David Carlisle

@AlanMunn for that simple case you can just do ls -t *.tex of course you don't need the nested for. but it depends what you need to do

Alan Munn

@DavidCarlisle What I'm trying to do is write a script that renames a bunch of files sequentially based on their creation date.

David Carlisle

@AlanMunn ok but ls -t is modification not creation and if for example it's stuff checked out of git it's more or less arbitrary depending when you checked things locally as git doesn't try to force the filedates to track the upstream repo

barbara beeton

@UlrikeFischer and @Skillmon -- I asked Knuth about \over vs. \frac. He told me something I already knew -- he chose that method because it sounded most natural to a mathematician. That is, if a mathematician is explaining something to another mathematician on the phone, "over" is what will be spoken, and he will never change. But coding is rather different, and I agree that \frac is easier to cope with; no scoping problems.

3

David Carlisle

2:40 PM

@barbarabeeton even great men can make fundamental massive design errors.

Alan Munn

@DavidCarlisle The files are screenshot images that will typically have identical creation and modification timestamps, so that's likely not to be a problem.

David Carlisle

@AlanMunn you don't use AI to improve your screenshots and remove compromising duck images? shocking.

Ulrike Fischer

@DavidCarlisle sorry which line endings?

David Carlisle

The other css I forced on the public ngpdf display for these examples are code lines where verbatim blocks are wrapping

If you look at section 3.3 of the amsldoc pdf you see it renders as

image.png
If I use the sidebar css field to add

span[data-pdf-se-type-original=codeline] {display:block}

then the original codelines are preserved

image.png

I'm not sure if this CSS is something you could do by default or if we should adjust the tagging of verbatim formatted code blocks to change the default derivation to preserve lines?

barbara beeton

@DavidCarlisle -- I don't disagree.

Ulrike Fischer

2:47 PM

@DavidCarlisle ah that. It is perhaps possible to add a placement attribute to the code lines, (assuming that ngpdf respect that). I can try. But this isn't what I fixed. You got parent-child warnings and a faulty structure from a verbatim in a p-column where table tagging was disabled and I change the code here.

David Carlisle

@barbarabeeton infix \over itself would be OK, it doesn't fit latex style and we'd still have \frac but the way it is implemented which means you never know what mathstyle you are in and end up with \mathchoice setting everything 4 times and you not knowing which of the 4 is used is just broken and massively complicates more or less all aspects of handling tex math

@UlrikeFischer ah didn't you add something in to the document for that, you have moved it to the latex-lab code?

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle :)

twitter.com/CeliaRichards0n/status/1747233950290837762

David Carlisle

@JosephWright head something along those lines on the radio this morning

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle :)

@DavidCarlisle I go with 'rhymes with gone'

David Carlisle

@JosephWright I really want to claim I pronouce cone to rhyme with gone

Joseph Wright

2:52 PM

@DavidCarlisle Ha!

David Carlisle

@JosephWright we should ask someone with geographically more interesting background such as @AlanMunn

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle :)

Alan Munn

@DavidCarlisle I didn't read the original tweet. My 'scone' also rhymes with 'gone' but here in the US the things they call scones (which aren't) rhyme with 'cone'.

David Carlisle

:65012335 I think I do (if I ignore my desire to collapse the chart to a point), although 40 years of being married to someone from the wrong part of the country does mess up your pronunciation biases

Alan Munn

@DavidCarlisle Not quite a pronunciation battle, but still involving a baked good, is the 'chocolatine' vs 'pain au chocolat' split in the French speaking world.

@DavidCarlisle Given my Scottish parents, the chances of me have the 'cone' pronunciation were nil.

Joseph Wright

5:48 PM

@UlrikeFischer, @mickep Seen the ConTeXt list?

mickep

@JosephWright For fractions? Essentially as luatex, I think. Or \outer? I do not think it is used.

David Carlisle

@UlrikeFischer I pushed amsldoc mathml file in html for now, can do the others later after mathml call if it looks useful)

Joseph Wright

@mickep About \over

mickep

@JosephWright Oh, then Ustack or what it is called.

@JosephWright I don't know why it is so slow :(

Joseph Wright

@mickep Ah, right, yes

@mickep :)

David Carlisle

5:52 PM

@JosephWright because (unless you break the distribution conditions) the texbook stops at the start and doesn't do anything so is very fast?

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle :)

@DavidCarlisle I think we can assume that the person involved hasn't taken that particular point into account

David Carlisle

if people used to be happy with 15 minutes per page and now moan about 40 seconds, what would they be doing with all those saved minutes?

barbara beeton

6:05 PM

@DavidCarlisle -- 15 minutes? I remember twice that on occasion, with something like a telephone book! (3 columns, 40+ lines/column, 9pt type.) If I remember correctly, when it was time to recompile The TeXbook, Knuth would start it up in the evening, and hope it would be close to ready in the morning.

mickep

@DavidCarlisle This was 40 pages/s. More than what I get...

Marcel Krüger

@JosephWright While \over still exists in LuaMetaTeX, it also has \Uover which is basically \frac as a primitive. Therefore you can drop \over completely if you want to.

Joseph Wright

6:23 PM

@MarcelKrüger Hmm, but Hans hasn't removed the_mechanism_, which was @DavidCarlisle's point

Marcel Krüger

@JosephWright Sure, but if your format removes the relevant primitives than e.g. \mathchoice is no longer needed since you can rely on \mathstyle providing correct values. (I haven't checked, but I think the \mathstyle bugs are fixed too.) While the complicated mechanism then still exists in the engine, the macro code can basically ignore it. (It's a start...)

Alan Munn

TIL I can write Mac scripts/apps in JavaScript instead of AppleScript. One less language whose syntax I need to remember.

Ulrike Fischer

@JosephWright ?

Paulo Cereda

6:41 PM

@AlanMunn oh no

Ulrike Fischer

6:55 PM

@DavidCarlisle ^^

@UlrikeFischer ooh

@UlrikeFischer ooh

@PauloCereda dinner

@DavidCarlisle oh no

7:10 PM

@DavidCarlisle I added a class display to the code lines and then attached a css to the pdf. You could add also other css instructions in this way:

\begin{filecontents}[overwrite,noheader]{test.css}
.display {display:block}
\end{filecontents}
\ExplSyntaxOn
\pdfdict_put:nnn{l_pdffile/Filespec}{AFRelationship}{/Supplement}
\pdffile_embed_file:nnn{test.css}{}{tag/csstest}
\ExplSyntaxOff
\tagpdfsetup{root-AF={tag/csstest}}

David Carlisle

@UlrikeFischer ah that's good to know

Alan Munn

7:28 PM

@PauloCereda Oh no? I take this as an improvement. :)

Paulo Cereda

@AlanMunn JS is... interesting :)

@AlanMunn I actually don't know AppleScript, so maybe JS is better. :)

Alan Munn

@PauloCereda It's actually a pretty nice language I've found. And AppleScript is annoying in that it was designed with non-programmers in mind so the syntax is very wordy and "conversational".

Paulo Cereda

@AlanMunn oh no, it sounds like COBOL. :)

Joseph Wright

@UlrikeFischer Speed of LuaMetaTeX

@MarcelKrüger It's still there - I mean that the underlying code has to support it

Paulo Cereda

@JosephWright you better come home, Speedy González

Ulrike Fischer

7:56 PM

@DavidCarlisle yes it gives one lots of control. but nevertheless it would be good to know how to tag the verbatim so that it gives lines directly. ngpdf seems to ignore the Placement=Block.

CarLaTeX

@PauloCereda What do you have against COBOL? (former COBOL programmer here)

Paulo Cereda

@CarLaTeX nothing in particular. :) I just pointed out that Alan's comment on AppleScript being deisgned with non-programmers in mind is a trait of the design of COBOL itself. :)

CarLaTeX

@PauloCereda ah ecco :D

Alan Munn

@PauloCereda Yes a bit. But it's been a long time since I wrote a COBOL program.

David Carlisle

@UlrikeFischer ok see if I get a response to that question but good to know there is a fallback if not

Alan Munn

8:27 PM

@PauloCereda it seems my initial optimism misguided. It’s so badly documented that it’s almost unusable.

David Carlisle

9:13 PM

@UlrikeFischer all 5 examples now have html versions of the mathml file