Interesting thing to try to do
twist...@gmail.com
stronger than a paragraph break but weaker than a section break of any
sort (and not titled, or listed, or anything, as such).
I've got this:
\newcommand{\zbreak}{\\*\begin{center}$\blacklozenge$ $\blacklozenge$
$\blacklozenge$\end{center}}
It produces a vertical space and then a line with three black diamonds,
centered.
First of all, I'd like to know if I can selectively suppress the
diamonds so only vertical space appears unless it's at a page boundary,
in which case vertical space and the diamonds are to appear before the
page boundary, and whatever follows the \zbreak after.
Secondly, if that can't for some reason be done, the space below the
diamonds is a fraction of the space above the diamonds, and I'd rather
they were equal, splitting the difference so the whole interruption is
the same height it is now.
Any TeXperts around here know how to achieve either of these?
(Preferably the former. Messing around with /vspace would achieve the
latter with some trial and error, but would be sort of ugly, although
at least encapsulated in one \newcommand...)
Ulrike Fischer
A real name would be fine. A better description of you problem in
the subject too.
> Here and there in one document I'm working on, I want to have a break
> stronger than a paragraph break but weaker than a section break of any
> sort (and not titled, or listed, or anything, as such).
>
> I've got this:
>
> \newcommand{\zbreak}{\\*\begin{center}$\blacklozenge$ $\blacklozenge$
> $\blacklozenge$\end{center}}
This will not work. center is a list environment, so * won't be able to
suppress a page break. (Using \\ isn't good anyway).
Look at the memoir class, it has a \fancybreak command.
--
Ulrike Fischer
e-mail: zusätzlich meinen Vornamen vor dem @ einfügen.
e-mail: add my first name between the news and the @.
twist...@gmail.com
My "real" name is none of your business.
> A better description of you problem in the subject too.
Couldn't come up with one.
Is this the kind of help people get around here? Unintelligible
responses and criticism first, and then maybe, and only grudgingly,
actual answers to their questions?
> Look at the memoir class, it has a \fancybreak command.
Unfortunately, this document's class is different from "memoir" and I
can't change it without ruining things. Is there a way to implement a
similar command in the "book" or "article" class? That is basically
what I am asking here.
David Kastrup
> Ulrike Fischer wrote:
>> twist...@gmail.com schrieb:
>>
>> A real name would be fine.
>
> My "real" name is none of your business.
Neither is answering your questions, unless you pay her for it.
>> A better description of you problem in the subject too.
>
> Couldn't come up with one.
>
> Is this the kind of help people get around here? Unintelligible
> responses and criticism first, and then maybe, and only grudgingly,
> actual answers to their questions?
You won't get answers worth anything if you don't get your attitude
under control. The most useful answers come from people who have
spent a long time with TeX and this group, not from people who drop by
for a while and leave again. Pissing off the regulars in the manner
you do will leave you with little or no knowledgeable correspondents
quite soon. The FAQs are there to help you avoiding this. Not
consulting them is making things tiresome for your conversation
partners at best. But your attitudes don't make for "at best", so
heeding the FAQs would be doubly important for you in order to get
most mileage out of this group.
--
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum
UKTUG FAQ: <URL:http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html>
Ulrike Fischer
>> A real name would be fine.
>
> My "real" name is none of your business.
Fine, then I think helping you is also none of my business.
>> A better description of you problem in the subject too.
>
> Couldn't come up with one.
>
> Is this the kind of help people get around here? Unintelligible
> responses and criticism first, and then maybe, and only grudgingly,
> actual answers to their questions?
That's the kind of help people get that post unintelligible questions
and criticism first and then only grundgingly give actual informations
about their problem.
>
>> Look at the memoir class, it has a \fancybreak command.
>
> Unfortunately, this document's class is different from "memoir" and I
> can't change it without ruining things.
> Is there a way to implement a
> similar command in the "book" or "article" class? That is basically
> what I am asking here.
As you didn't bother to post a minimal example (which would e.g. have
shown the document class you are using), how should anybody could have
come up with a solution for your class?
Good answers need good questions.
Minimal example?
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=minxampl
Ask questions?
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=askquestion
And to answer your question: sure they is a way to implement such a
command in other classes. As you are so smart that you don't need to
read the FAQ of this group you will certainly be able to find the
solution yourself.
Maurizio Loreti
> Is there a way to implement a similar command in the "book" or
> "article" class? That is basically what I am asking here.
Yes, there is.
--
Maurizio Loreti http://www.pd.infn.it/~loreti/mlo.html
Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Padova, Italy ROT13: ybe...@cq.vasa.vg
Maurizio Loreti
> Yes, there is.
to be more effective: you have been already pointed to the solution.
1) find memoir.cls
2) grep memoir.cls for the definition of \fancybreak
3) understand that \fancybreak is defined in terms of \@sfbreak and
\@fbreak --- defined in the following few lines
4) cut-and-paste from there the definitions of \fancybreak, \@sfbreak
and \@fbreak and use them
5) the other thingies there, \@afterindent, \@afterheading and so on,
are AFAIK LaTeX stuff (already known by your class)
6) say "thanks Ulrike", and go
twist...@gmail.com
> twist...@gmail.com writes:
>
> > Ulrike Fischer wrote:
> >> twist...@gmail.com schrieb:
> >>
> >> A real name would be fine.
> >
> > My "real" name is none of your business.
>
> Neither is answering your questions, unless you pay her for it.
Point is, this is comp.text.tex, not alt.debate.first-amendment.
Arguing about whether people should be allowed to be pseudonymous or
anonymous is off-topic here.
> You won't get answers worth anything if you don't get your attitude
> under control. The most useful answers come from people who have
> spent a long time with TeX and this group, not from people who drop by
> for a while and leave again. Pissing off the regulars in the manner
> you do will leave you with little or no knowledgeable correspondents
> quite soon.
I asked a simple question about how to achieve a specific objective.
How is that "pissing off" anyone?
> The FAQs are there to help you avoiding this.
What FAQs? Either they haven't been reposted recently, or the group is
high enough traffic that they've scrolled way down.
twist...@gmail.com
> twist...@gmail.com schrieb:
>
> >> A real name would be fine.
> >
> > My "real" name is none of your business.
>
> Fine, then I think helping you is also none of my business.
Why do you care what my offline identity is?
> That's the kind of help people get that post unintelligible questions
> and criticism first and then only grundgingly give actual informations
> about their problem.
I thought my posting was quite intelligible. I included the snippet of
code that generated the breaks, and asked how to modify it to achieve a
specific effect.
> As you didn't bother to post a minimal example (which would e.g. have
> shown the document class you are using), how should anybody could have
> come up with a solution for your class?
I don't want a solution for a specific document class. I'd rather have
a break /newcommand that will work more or less universally, if that's
possible.
> Minimal example?
> http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=minxampl
> Ask questions?
> http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=askquestion
What is this? That's twice this little chunk of ascii has been posted
here, and it is far from self-explanatory. There is such a thing as
being too concise.
> And to answer your question: sure they is a way to implement such a
> command in other classes. As you are so smart that you don't need to
> read the FAQ of this group you will certainly be able to find the
> solution yourself.
What is the way to implement such a command? Nobody has bothered to
divulge it, and as I believe I mentioned before, scanning the first few
pages of article headers for this froup doesn't reveal the most recent
FAQ posting.
twist...@gmail.com
> twist...@gmail.com writes:
>
> > Is there a way to implement a similar command in the "book" or
> > "article" class? That is basically what I am asking here.
>
> Yes, there is.
Go on?
twist...@gmail.com
> Maurizio Loreti <m...@foobar.it> writes:
>
> > Yes, there is.
>
> to be more effective: you have been already pointed to the solution.
>
I already said, I can't change the document's class.
David Kastrup
You could try reading the posting to its end. Maurizio was not
suggesting you change your document's class. You are wasting people's
time with your refusal to follow advice.
twist...@gmail.com
> You could try reading the posting to its end. Maurizio was not
> suggesting you change your document's class.
[goes back and has another look]
Ugh. That's even worse. I have to locate and download some file (from
where? archie's long dead, and google only finds html files) and
cannibalize it? Why can't I just type something in,
/newcommand{/zbreak}{whatever}, and have done with it without all this
complication?
Maarten Bergvelt
> twist...@gmail.com writes:
>
>> Maurizio Loreti wrote:
>>> Maurizio Loreti <m...@foobar.it> writes:
>>>
>>> > Yes, there is.
>>>
>>> to be more effective: you have been already pointed to the solution.
>>>
>>> 1) find memoir.cls[snip]
>>
>> I already said, I can't change the document's class.
>
> You could try reading the posting to its end. Maurizio was not
> suggesting you change your document's class. You are wasting people's
> time with your refusal to follow advice.
Well, the guy is a troll. Nobody can be that stupid. As a troll he is
quite good. The bit that FAQs should having links starting with
www.google.com was hilarious. Calling something in Usenet "this little
chunk of ascii" is very good, too.
Telling him that he is wasting people's time seems beside the
point. Unless of course you want to make him happy, so that he keeps
coming back for our amusement.
--
Maarten Bergvelt
David Klassen
> David Kastrup wrote:
> > You could try reading the posting to its end. Maurizio was not
> > suggesting you change your document's class.
>
> [goes back and has another look]
>
> Ugh. That's even worse. I have to locate and download some file (from
How so?! It's copying out a command that appears to do what you
want it to do. You just need to add it to your preamble and you're
done.
> where? archie's long dead, and google only finds html files) and
No, Google finds text *within* html files. I think it also finds text
within PDF, and even MS-Word files. Thus, typing memoir.cls
will lead you to the right place (CTAN, by the way). Heck, I
even mispelled it and Google suggested the correct spelling
for me when it couldn't find any pages with my text.
> cannibalize it? Why can't I just type something in,
> /newcommand{/zbreak}{whatever}, and have done with it without all this
> complication?
How is doing a cut-and-paste from the memoir class file any
different than doing a cut-and-paste from c.t.t? Why is one
canniblaizing and the other not?
twist...@gmail.com
> How is doing a cut-and-paste from the memoir class file any
> different than doing a cut-and-paste from c.t.t? Why is one
> canniblaizing and the other not?
Source diving is something I always try to avoid if I can.
I have hunted down a download for memoir.cls using google, and
curiously, based on the text description on the download page, it's not
apparently a memoir class. Or at least not solely.
In fact, it sounds like it can be used in place of the book class and
others. If that's the case, I may be able to use the class after all --
but I'll need to know if it's liable to break anything in something
that was written originally using the book class and has a few (not too
fancy) newcommands and newenvironments thrown in.
Well, I suppose I could just try to use the thing and hope it doesn't
choke, and if it does come back here if the fix isn't obvious (aside
from "revert to the book class and source-dive the memoir class", that
is)...
We've run into a lot of strange stuff lately though haven't we?
Misleading FAQ links (that don't go back to the froup, where the FAQ
ought to be, but off to the Web, and aren't given text descriptions);
misleadingly-named class files...it's no wonder a spate of
misunderstandings have erupted of late. The truly remarkable thing is
that this is presumably a group frequented by writers, and honestly,
I'd expected better of a bunch of writers than conciseness taken to
such extremes as to result in obscurity, unclear writing, misleadingly
labeled objects, and so forth. Then again, maybe the respondents
haven't been primarily writers (who use LaTeX) but rather primarily
coding geeks (who make and develop LaTeX and would also post here), in
which case I guess it was par for the course...and the resulting
miscommunications are then just a culture clash between a user who
wants simple how-tos and coders who think they are dealing with someone
who's not averse to plunging into the existing class files to reverse
engineer everything in sight rather than who just wants to get on with
their writing with a minimum of fuss or delay.........
twist...@gmail.com
> Well, I suppose I could just try to use the thing and hope it doesn't
> choke, and if it does come back here if the fix isn't obvious (aside
> from "revert to the book class and source-dive the memoir class", that
> is)...
Bah. It seems to clash with fancyhdr, and there's no clear explanation
in the manual for memoir.cls as to how to achieve the same effects,
though it's implied that you can. The manual seems to be written for a
more technical audience, and for one intending to read the damn thing
cover to cover, not for someone who's used LaTeX before, and book.cls
and the like, and just wants to know how to convert their document
quickly...
Source diving it is, I guess. :P
twist...@gmail.com
Or maybe not. I found the relevant chunk in memoir.cls,
\newcommand{\fancybreak}{\@ifstar{\@sfbreak}{\@fbreak}}
\newcommand{\@fbreak}[1]{\par
\penalty -100
\noindent\parbox{\linewidth}{\centering #1}\null
\penalty -20
%% \vskip -\onelineskip
\@afterindentfalse
\@afterheading}
\newcommand{\@sfbreak}[1]{\par
\penalty -100
\noindent\parbox{\linewidth}{\centering #1}\null
\penalty -20
%% \vskip -\onelineskip
\@afterindenttrue
\@afterheading}
and pasted it verbatim into the preamble of my tex file. I also changed
one of the zbreaks to fancybreak. The result was spectacular.
Spectactular failure, that is:
Document Class: book 2005/09/16 v1.4f Standard LaTeX document class
("C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.5\tex\latex\base\bk10.clo"))
("C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.5\tex\latex\amsfonts\amssymb.sty"
("C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.5\tex\latex\amsfonts\amsfonts.sty"))
("C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.5\tex\latex\fancyhdr\fancyhdr.sty")
! LaTeX Error: Command \@ already defined.
Or name \end... illegal, see p.192 of the manual.
See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation.
Type H <return> for immediate help.
...
l.41 \@afterheading}
Looks like just that section of code alone clashes with fancyhdr? Or
something else way too obscure for a mere end user to fix without
assistance anyway.
It's starting to look like I was right all along to want simple
instructions on how to do this myself, rather than copy random chunks
of code from other document classes. :P
So, how can I simply make a \newcommand that behaves differently, but
where I get to specify both possible behaviors, depending on whether it
is adjacent to a page break or not? I'd rather just know that, and then
DIY, than fiddle around with memoir.cls any further.
Besides, there's nothing about that /fancybreak implementation that
seems to provide a way to set up the break's appearance; I get the
feeling from the word "star" in the code that it's hardcoded to use
asterisks. And as I don't see asterisks anywhere in the code, I don't
know how to change it to whatever I might prefer instead. So I'd end up
with something more flexible (and that I actually understand well
enough to further customize) if we go the "you guys tell me how to
selectively do different things depending on whether we're just before
a page break and I'll do the rest by myself" route.
Which is what my original question in this thread was basically asking
-- and it doesn't seem too difficult a question. Why it led to this
day-long digression and waste of time, including actual flamage,
instead of being answered simply and directly, I still can't fathom.
In fact, I think this is the sort of thing that would be nice to have
in lshort.pdf's next version, whenever that comes out, in the section
on customizing with new commands and environments, because I bet lots
of people want to be able to do so without importing a whole package,
changing document class, copying code wholesale from elsewhere, being
variously ignored and lambasted on usenet, or encountering confusing
errors and conflicts when imported packages, changed document classes,
or copied code that they don't understand.
So someone, please tell me there's some simple way to just create a
\newcommand that behaves differently based on whether it's at a page
break or has text both above and below it on the current page, without
any worrying about details like what I specifically intend to implement
with this knowledge.
Will Robertson
> ! LaTeX Error: Command \@ already defined.
> Or name \end... illegal, see p.192 of the manual.
This problem is addressed by another FAQ answer. Your verbose replies
have convinced me well enough that you're not exactly a troll.
<http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=atsigns>
That's a link you should read the contents of, not spam :)
Having pointed you towards it, I realise that the answer there is only
implicit, so here it is: you need to surround your code snippet with
\makeatletter...\makeatother.
Good luck,
Will
twist...@gmail.com
> \makeatletter...\makeatother.
It would have been helpful if the poster who initially suggested
copying that chunk of code had mentioned this.
Anyway, I've already decided to go a different route. I found (on pp.
17-18 of fancyhdr.pdf of all places) a candidate that is explicitly
going to be compatible with the document class and fancyhdr setup I'd
chosen.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to quite work. Including extramarks and
changing zbreak to
\newcommand{\zbreak}{\begin{center}\extramarks{}{$\blacklozenge$
$\blacklozenge$
$\blacklozenge$}\vspace{1ex}\vspace{1ex}\end{center}\extramarks{}{}}
seemed like it should work, but failed. I initially used a single
\newline only for it to choke -- seems to not like people inserting
blank lines just anywhere? So I changed it to a single \vspace{1em} but
it was too wide a space. None of them hit near a page boundary so I
found a paragraph that ended just before a page boundary and added a
temporary extra \zbreak there to test it. It failed: no triple black
diamond, though the blank space did end up adjacent to the page
boundary. I thought maybe it had to be split up by the page boundary so
I changed it to the two separate \vspaces above. Still no dice,
although the test break is definitely being divided: there's a gap at
the end of one page before the nominal bottom margin position, and a
gap between the header of the following page and the text that's taller
than normal. But still no diamonds.
Stumped again dammit. Why isn't this simpler and more obvious?
There's also reference to an "afterpage" package that can add stuff
after the next page break. Sounds useless for adding stuff before the
page break. A search for any "beforepage" turns up scanty results on
google; anyway I'd have to issue it, then do the break thing, and then
be able to cancel it so that if the break didn't hit just before a page
boundary it didn't stick the diamonds at the end of the page anyway;
and moreover, if the page break did happen, canceling it on the next
page when it had already happened wouldn't cause LaTeX to choke (or
even revoke the diamonds on the previous page).
I definitely need more help with this.
twist...@gmail.com
> Will Robertson wrote:
> > \makeatletter...\makeatother.
>
> It would have been helpful if the poster who initially suggested
> copying that chunk of code had mentioned this.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, the error message the tool displayed
wasn't exactly self-explanatory either. In fact few of them are. A lot
of usability improvement to LaTeX could probably be gotten in just the
area of error diagnostics. Knuth may be a computer programmer, but
these days TeX/LaTeX is used by mathematicians, physicists, musicians,
authors of books and essays, and God alone knows who else, most of whom
are daunted enough by the command line, nevermind when things don't
"just work" and moreover it's completely unobvious why they didn't
"just work"...
Meanwhile, does anyone at all know how to get extramarks to do what I
want it to do? Indeed, from what I understand of it, it should actually
have worked, but nonetheless, the fact remains that it didn't...
mariano.su...@gmail.com
You can get the assistance you need at
<http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=atsigns>. I know, the
URL does not start with www.google.com. Life can be hard sometimes.
In short, just wrap the code you pasted with
\makeatletter
<code>
\makeatother
The \fancybreak command defined by that snippet of codetakes an
argument, which is what will be typset in the break. For example,
you might say
\fancybreak{\textbullet\ \textbullet\ \textbullet}
where you want a break. This is explained in the documentation
for the memoir class, which is a rather natural place to look for
information on commands you take from the memoir.cls file.
> [snip]
>
> So someone, please tell me there's some simple way to just create a
> \newcommand that behaves differently based on whether it's at a page
> break or has text both above and below it on the current page, without
> any worrying about details like what I specifically intend to implement
> with this knowledge.
I'm afraid you've by now predisposed most people capable of coming
up with a macro doing that in such a way that they'll feel no urge
whatsoever to come and help you.
If you intend to obtain any help from c.t.t, be sure to read
<http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=askquestion>
and <http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html> (or, if that makes
you feel safer,
<http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+ask+questions&btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky>)
-- m
Ulrike Fischer
> Well, the guy is a troll. Nobody can be that stupid. As a troll he is
> quite good. The bit that FAQs should having links starting with
> www.google.com was hilarious. Calling something in Usenet "this little
> chunk of ascii" is very good, too.
Trying to use fancyhdr and \extramarks to get his diamonds in the
textbody (and to wonder that they don't appear) is also a quite nice
idea.
Will Robertson
> It would have been helpful if the poster who initially suggested
> copying that chunk of code had mentioned this.
It's often taken for granted.
> I definitely need more help with this.
I don't know how to do what you want. It's not exactly easy. Still,
read on:
The previous advice about memoir wasn't entirely accurate: you want the
macro \plainfancybreak or \pfbreak. Read the memoir manual (memman.pdf)
page 79 to learn what it does and how to use it (fairly straightforward
all up). Then either grab the code as you now know how to do, or switch
to the memoir class.
I'd recommend switching to memoir for two reasons: it does what you
want; and, if you need to customise your formatting somehow, it's just
a matter of searching through memman. Rather than having to search
endless packages.
Page 185 of memman.pdf will help you how to do headers and footers
without fancyhdr.
Good luck.
Sounds like you'll need it.
Will
twist...@gmail.com
> Meanwhile, does anyone at all know how to get extramarks to do what I
> want it to do? Indeed, from what I understand of it, it should actually
> have worked, but nonetheless, the fact remains that it didn't...
Well, I can now confirm that extramarks is well and truly broken. I
tried this
\newcommand{\zbreak}{\begin{center}\extramarks{}{$\blacklozenge$
$\blacklozenge$
$\blacklozenge$}stuff\\stuff\end{center}\par\extramarks{}{}}
And got this
[what was before an occurrence of /zbreak]
stuff
_________________________________11
stuff
[what was after that occurrence of /zbreak]
No diamonds, even though there can be zero doubt that the stuff after
the first "extramarks" use got split. Also the \par I added should
ensure the "stuff\\stuff" is typeset with the marks in effect, before
they are blanked again, as I understand things.
Gah. What is the matter with this? I begin to wonder if there was an
intentional effort to make things not be easy here ... I can only
imagine how much worse plain TeX is to work with!
I also tried
\newcommand{\zbreak}{\begin{center}\extramarks{foo}{$\blacklozenge$
$\blacklozenge$
$\blacklozenge$}stuff\\stuff\end{center}\par\extramarks{}{}}
in case the documentation had it wrong and the first argument should
contain the diamonds, not the second. No go. Neither "foo" nor the
diamonds appeared after the first "stuff".
I tried removing the use of the center environment too. Nada.
Will Robertson
> Oh, and I forgot to mention, the error message the tool displayed
> wasn't exactly self-explanatory either. In fact few of them are. A lot
> of usability improvement to LaTeX could probably be gotten in just the
> area of error diagnostics.
The problem is that by the time someone willing to help with this
problem learns enough to implement better error checking, they no
longer think the errors are confusing.
TeX is an idiosyncratic tool dating back almost 30 years. LaTeX is over
20 years old. Back then, they couldn't spare cycles pandering to new
users who could learn better. Maybe the situation will improve in
LaTeX3, but the problem is fairly intractable.
Will
twist...@gmail.com
> The previous advice about memoir wasn't entirely accurate: you want the
> macro \plainfancybreak or \pfbreak. Read the memoir manual (memman.pdf)
> page 79 to learn what it does and how to use it (fairly straightforward
> all up). Then either grab the code as you now know how to do, or switch
> to the memoir class.
Thanks, but the \plainfancybreak code I have in my memoir.cls doesn't
have a [3] in it, yet the manual suggests
\plainfancybreak*{space}{num}{text} for what I want to achieve.
This makes me suspect that there's a discrepancy between the copy of
the class I have and the copy of the manual I have. :P
> I'd recommend switching to memoir for two reasons: it does what you
> want; and, if you need to customise your formatting somehow, it's just
> a matter of searching through memman. Rather than having to search
> endless packages.
>
> Page 185 of memman.pdf will help you how to do headers and footers
> without fancyhdr.
Too bad memman.pdf is difficult to navigate for specific information.
Most other package documentations I've bumped into today are even
worse, with the pdf not showing a left navigation frame for jumping to
chapters and sections, leaving you to scroll all the way through.
Addendum: I finally have it working. I copied all the break code from
memoir.cls inside \makeatletter ... \makeatother and used not
\plainfancybreak* but \pfbreak* with a
\renewcommand{\pfbreakdisplay}{whatever}. So as not to have to change
everything I just had \newcommand{\zbreak}{\pfbreak*}, though now I've
tested it and seen that it works, I may as well just change all
\zbreaks to \pfbreak*s and have done with it.
What a mess. Thank goodness it's working now.
Ulrike Fischer
>> Meanwhile, does anyone at all know how to get extramarks to do what I
>> want it to do?
No.
>> Indeed, from what I understand of it, it should actually
>> have worked,
No.
> Well, I can now confirm that extramarks is well and truly broken.
No, it is working fine. But you will never get it to do what you want.
You will not find the solution to your problem in the fancyhdr
documentation. After all fancyhdr is a package to put text in the
header and footer while you are trying to put something in the
textbody.
\documentclass{report}
\usepackage[ansinew]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{fancyhdr,extramarks,amssymb}
\pagestyle{fancy}
\lhead{\firstxmark}
\rhead{\lastxmark}
\begin{document}
\extramarks{$\blacklozenge$}{$\blacklozenge\blacklozenge$}
text
\end{document}
Will Robertson
> Addendum: I finally have it working.
Phew.
> I may as well just change all
> \zbreaks to \pfbreak*s and have done with it.
No, better to keep it abstracted behind a command so you can change it
from one place later on. It's better to do something like
\newcommand\thoughtbreak{\pfbreak* ....}
> What a mess. Thank goodness it's working now.
You'll find things start to make a lot more sense, especially if you
learn to post minimal examples of your problems so that people can see
at a glance where your problem lies and whether they are qualified to
answer. It takes us time to look into things as well.
Will
twist...@gmail.com
> TeX is an idiosyncratic tool dating back almost 30 years. LaTeX is over
> 20 years old. Back then, they couldn't spare cycles pandering to new
> users who could learn better. Maybe the situation will improve in
> LaTeX3, but the problem is fairly intractable.
Not that it matters, given that LaTeX3 is vaporware anyway. ;)
Maybe a total rewrite is needed. Macro-based might be argued to have
been a design mistake, as compared to something that is to TeX as C
itself is to C preprocessor defines...
but I expect that's getting into rwar territory in this froup. ;)
Will Robertson
No, just tired.
TeX's not going away because of the huge amount of infrastructure
around it.
There are lots of good ideas how it can be improved, and there are even
some people doing something about it. The ExTeX project looks
particularly ambitious, for example.
Will
David Kastrup
> David Klassen wrote:
>> How is doing a cut-and-paste from the memoir class file any
>> different than doing a cut-and-paste from c.t.t? Why is one
>> canniblaizing and the other not?
>
> Source diving is something I always try to avoid if I can.
Then you should practice being polite. It might make people more
inclined to do your work. No guarantees, though.
David Kastrup
> twist...@gmail.com wrote:
>> Will Robertson wrote:
>> > \makeatletter...\makeatother.
>>
>> It would have been helpful if the poster who initially suggested
>> copying that chunk of code had mentioned this.
>
> Oh, and I forgot to mention, the error message the tool displayed
> wasn't exactly self-explanatory either.
So paste it into a Google search.
twist...@gmail.com
> So paste it into a Google search.
Eh. It said something wasn't a command. That would give a very generic
result set. Unless the exact error message was included, which would be
document-specific enough to give no result set whatsoever.
Trust me, I know what's googleable and what isn't (either because it
will give too general results, such as with most TLAs, leaving
ambiguity, or because it will give none).
Will Robertson
Sorry, I trust David any day.
Google itself might not help much, but a Google Groups search in c.t.t
of your error ("Command \@ already defined.") gives the solution to
your problem as the very first hit.
Will
Ulrike Fischer
> David Kastrup wrote:
>> So paste it into a Google search.
>
> Eh. It said something wasn't a command. That would give a very generic
> result set. Unless the exact error message was included, which would be
> document-specific enough to give no result set whatsoever.
When I search at google groups for "Command \@ already defined" the
first hit gives the solution. I even didn't need to refine the search
to a tex group.
> Trust me, I know what's googleable and what isn't.
If you say so.
twist...@gmail.com
> When I search at google groups for "Command \@ already defined"
Google *groups*. Hrm.
Surprising since "command already defined" is very generic and "command
\whatever already defined" is liable to be fairly specific to whatever
you happen to be working on. I wouldn't expect good results from either
search, generally...
Michele Dondi
>In fact, it sounds like it can be used in place of the book class and
>others. If that's the case, I may be able to use the class after all --
>but I'll need to know if it's liable to break anything in something
>that was written originally using the book class and has a few (not too
>fancy) newcommands and newenvironments thrown in.
Memoir is a replacement for the book class aimed at providing the same
default behaviour of it as long as integrating a vast amount of
functionality that one would normally obtain with a long list of
packages.
In the past I used my own class based on book and a bunch of code
blindily hacked away from various sources. For my thesis, after a few
years of fundamental LaTeX inactivity, due to severe restrictions in
time I wanted to stay as fast and efficient as possible so I switched
to (my own class based on) Memoir, and trust me, it went smooth like
silk. (With the help of gentle people here, too - of couse!)
You may see the result at <http://mosquito.scumm.it/~blazar/laurea/>,
although there's no source code (yet).
Michele
--
>It's because the universe was programmed in C++.
No, no, it was programmed in Forth. See Genesis 1:12:
"And the earth brought Forth ..."
- Robert Israel in sci.math, thread "Why numbers?"
Michele Dondi
>Bah. It seems to clash with fancyhdr, and there's no clear explanation
>in the manual for memoir.cls as to how to achieve the same effects,
There's plenty of information. As a newcomer to Memoir with only an
experience with LaTeX that in the course of years had become rusty, it
took me a few minutes to understand it. Then I had somewhat of an
unusual layout design in mind, and the gentle contributors here kindly
provided me with code examples that I could easily adapt to obtain it.
>though it's implied that you can. The manual seems to be written for a
>more technical audience, and for one intending to read the damn thing
>cover to cover, not for someone who's used LaTeX before, and book.cls
>and the like, and just wants to know how to convert their document
>quickly...
*More* technical audience... than what?!?
As I wrote in my other post, I had severe time restrictions and I most
certainly didn't read it from cover to cover. I only read completely
but quickly (i.e. innacurately) the first part about design and then I
made large use of the index and toc to look up whatever I had the need
to know more in depth, from time to time.
Michele Dondi
>area of error diagnostics. Knuth may be a computer programmer, but
>these days TeX/LaTeX is used by mathematicians, physicists, musicians,
>authors of books and essays, and God alone knows who else, most of whom
>are daunted enough by the command line, nevermind when things don't
>"just work" and moreover it's completely unobvious why they didn't
>"just work"...
Yes, TeX has shortcomings. So does LaTeX. There's hardly an
alternative for a qualitatively similar typesetting system though. So
I'm afraid you have to live with them and their shortcomings.
If you are frightened by the cli, you should either get more familiar
with it, which would help you to get rid of your fears rather quickly
and is what I personally feel like recommending you, or switch to a
gui based editor that would hide the details of compilation and all
the correlated operations behind the click of the mouse pointer on
some suitable buttons. There are semi-wysiwyg solutions, too.
Michele Dondi
Surprising, since we have to "trust you to know what's googleable and
what isn't"! ;-)
twist...@gmail.com
> On 26 Jun 2006 23:12:43 -0700, twist...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> >Bah. It seems to clash with fancyhdr, and there's no clear explanation
> >in the manual for memoir.cls as to how to achieve the same effects,
>
> There's plenty of information.
Perhaps, if you've got the time to sit back and spend a few hours
reading memoir.pdf from cover to cover. But it can't be found quickly.
> >though it's implied that you can. The manual seems to be written for a
> >more technical audience, and for one intending to read the damn thing
> >cover to cover, not for someone who's used LaTeX before, and book.cls
> >and the like, and just wants to know how to convert their document
> >quickly...
>
> *More* technical audience... than what?!?
Than someone who knows as much as they needed to to get what they've
done so far done, but no more.
> As I wrote in my other post, I had severe time restrictions and I most
> certainly didn't read it from cover to cover.
I looked around in the index and toc, and there was no clear
explanation of how to get it to work with fancyhdr. I got cryptic
errors that weren't mentioned anywhere; a look at the TOC didn't
mention fancy headings or the clashing package by name ... I did look,
but there was nothing about this particular issue and its resolution.
The error messages I got also didn't make it clear what needed to be
changed/fixed to work around them (as is typical).
twist...@gmail.com
> If you are frightened by the cli, you should either get more familiar
> with it, which would help you to get rid of your fears rather quickly
> and is what I personally feel like recommending you, or switch to a
> gui based editor that would hide the details of compilation and all
> the correlated operations behind the click of the mouse pointer on
> some suitable buttons. There are semi-wysiwyg solutions, too.
No need to condescend to me. Its being a console app isn't the problem.
It doesn't have a ton of wacky options you *must* memorize to do
*anything*, at least. Try using grep without reaching for the man page
every five minutes. :P
On the other hand, it would be nice if it just cleanly exited on error;
instead it gives you various weird options, when on any modern hardware
it's much quicker to fix it in the source file and recompile. Control-C
kills it, but you have to answer 'y' to some prompt, and then your
command history has a lone "y" in it instead of the damn batch file you
use to run your compile.
But the real problem is that the error messages are not generally
self-explanatory, and the one useful-looking option, 'H', isn't given
half the time and doesn't tell you anything very useful the rest of the
time. The @ thing, in particular, was completely not self-documenting.
Would that it were the only one...
It almost seems designed to make anyone attempting to do something
nontrivial post frequently to this froup...
twist...@gmail.com
> or switch to a
> gui based editor that would hide the details of compilation and all
> the correlated operations behind the click of the mouse pointer on
> some suitable buttons. There are semi-wysiwyg solutions, too.
The only ones of those I can recall seeing weren't free. (As in beer,
or as in speech.)
Jussi Piitulainen
> On the other hand, it would be nice if it just cleanly exited on
> error; instead it gives you various weird options, when on any
> modern hardware it's much quicker to fix it in the source file and
> recompile. Control-C kills it, but you have to answer 'y' to some
> prompt, and then your command history has a lone "y" in it instead
> of the damn batch file you use to run your compile.
Start your files with \nonstopmode if you don't want TeX to stop to
talk to you when it finds something funny. There's also \batchmode if
you want to compile blind. You still get the log file.
twist...@gmail.com
Hrm. Now the funny command-line option suggestions begin. :)
twist...@gmail.com
> Hrm. Now the funny command-line option suggestions begin. :)
Suggestions that, I might add, don't work. So far, at least. As
supplied, the option has no effect on error response. If I use /
instead of \, it behaves identically, and if I use the POSIX-standard -
it actually complains about the command line option.
Jim Diamond
If you re-read the suggestion, the poster said to start your file with
\nonstopmode
He didn't say to use it as a command-line argument. Try that and see
if it help.
Jim
Ralf Stubner
And if he insists on command line arguments: The man page for TeX knows
more about '-interaction'. At least for web2c based distributions ...
cheerio
ralf
Jussi Piitulainen
I guess I have wasted your precious time, just like the others did,
but I find myself unable to offer you a sincere apology for that.
Start your document source file with "\nonstopmode". I don't mean the
command line. I mean the file. Below is a transcript of processing a
minimal file called "roska.tex" that consists of just the TeX command
"\nonstopmode". The first command, "cat roska.tex", just writes the
file so that you can see its contents really are what are say they
are. The second command, "latex roska", invokes latex on that file,
and latex outputs some diagnostics without stopping for any input from
me.
[509] venus$ cat roska.tex
\nonstopmode
[510] venus$ latex roska
This is e-TeX, Version 3.14159-2.1 (Web2C 7.4.5)
entering extended mode
(./roska.tex
LaTeX2e <2001/06/01>
Babel <v3.7h> and hyphenation patterns for american, french, german,
ngerman, finnish, nohyphenation, loaded.
)
! Emergency stop.
<*> roska
No pages of output.
Transcript written on roska.log.
[511] venus$
Ulrike Fischer
[About memoir manual]
> I looked around in the index and toc, and there was no clear
> explanation of how to get it to work with fancyhdr.
Why should it? Memoir has its own commands to handle headers and
footers. And the manual contains quite clear explanations of how to us
them.
There is absolutly no need to use fancyhdr.
twist...@gmail.com
> start your file with \nonstopmode
Er, what? Directives that affect error handling belong on the command
line, not in the source file. I thought that went without saying. You
don't put -wall -werror at the start of your .c files, after all; you
write gcc foo.c -o foo -wall -werror -O3 or whatever.
twist...@gmail.com
> And if he insists on command line arguments: The man page for TeX knows
> more about '-interaction'. At least for web2c based distributions ...
This is MiKTeX on Windoze. No man pages here. There's a Windows help
file somewhere though, I think.
twist...@gmail.com
> twist...@gmail.com schrieb:
>
> > I looked around in the index and toc, and there was no clear
> > explanation of how to get it to work with fancyhdr.
>
> Why should it? Memoir has its own commands to handle headers and
> footers. And the manual contains quite clear explanations of how to us
> them.
>
> There is absolutly no need to use fancyhdr.
Apparently, somebody wasn't thinking. The scenario is this: some guy
has started off using the book class, grabbed fancyhdr, and is
generally doing OK, then runs into something that might work better
with the memoir class. So they convert their document over, only for it
to go nuts.
This is a conversion. The guy wants to change as little as possible. He
already has his headers and footers set up just the way he wants them,
and just wants to make the thing work -- not redo the whole thing from
scratch.
What may be obvious or natural for someone who starts a project using
memoir from the outset will be anything but for someone who's just
converting an existing document and wishes to do so with a minimum of
fuss. *That person isn't asking "how do I do fancy headers and footers"
-- he already knows how. He's asking "how do I make this stupid error
message go away so I can get on with my work"*. And on THAT question,
the memoir.pdf manual was mum.
Ralf Stubner
Then you have to search that file. I don't use MikTeX, hence I have no
idea about its options ...
cheerio
ralf
mariano.su...@gmail.com
That there be people still willing to help you out at this point is
just humbling.
-- m
twist...@gmail.com
Why? Because I explain my reasoning? I saw what looked like a switch
when skimming a post that dealt with something that normally goes on a
commandline somewhere. What do you think I do, actually carefully read
and re-read every usenet post in a high traffic group like this? You
must have me mistaken for some autistic savant somewhere. Sorry to
disappoint you -- I'm just a normal human being.
twist...@gmail.com
> Then you have to search that file. I don't use MikTeX, hence I have no
> idea about its options ...
Fortunately, it wasn't hard to find again, and being a winhelp file,
which is viewed using browser software that actually possesses a user
interface, it was also not hard to search.
The command switch is actually -halt-on-error for those who are curious.
Jim Diamond
>> twist...@gmail.com wrote:
>> > Jim Diamond wrote:
>> > > start your file with \nonstopmode
>> >
>> > Er, what? Directives that affect error handling belong on the command
>> > line, not in the source file. I thought that went without saying. You
>> > don't put -wall -werror at the start of your .c files, after all; you
>> > write gcc foo.c -o foo -wall -werror -O3 or whatever.
>>
>> That there be people still willing to help you out at this point is
>> just humbling.
>
> Why? Because I explain my reasoning? I saw what looked like a switch
> when skimming a post that dealt with something that normally goes on a
> commandline somewhere. What do you think I do, actually carefully read
> and re-read every usenet post in a high traffic group like this?
Really? I would have thought that most normal human beings would
carefully read the responses to *their own* questions. I stand
corrected.
> You must have me mistaken for some autistic savant somewhere.
So are you telling us that (semi-)carefully reading the suggestions
people write to help you solve your problem is an expectation for
autistic savants and not ordinary (whatever that means) people?
> Sorry to disappoint you -- I'm just a normal human being.
Apparently a number of people here (me included) had you mistaken for
someone who was being rational. Our mistake?
Jim
Ulrike Fischer
> > I looked around in the index and toc, and there was no clear
>> > explanation of how to get it to work with fancyhdr.
>>
>> Why should it? Memoir has its own commands to handle headers and
>> footers. And the manual contains quite clear explanations of how to us
>> them.
>>
>> There is absolutly no need to use fancyhdr.
>
> Apparently, somebody wasn't thinking. The scenario is this: some guy
> has started off using the book class, grabbed fancyhdr, and is
> generally doing OK, then runs into something that might work better
> with the memoir class. So they convert their document over, only for it
> to go nuts.
>
> This is a conversion. The guy wants to change as little as possible.
Then I would suggest that he stays with the book class. Memoir changes
a lot of things as the class contains a lot of commands that replace a
lot a separate packages. It is certainly easier to add the
fancybreak-stuff to your document than to switch to memoir.
> He already has his headers and footers set up just the way he wants them,
> and just wants to make the thing work -- not redo the whole thing from
> scratch.
>
> What may be obvious or natural for someone who starts a project using
> memoir from the outset will be anything but for someone who's just
> converting an existing document and wishes to do so with a minimum of
> fuss. *That person isn't asking "how do I do fancy headers and footers"
> -- he already knows how. He's asking "how do I make this stupid error
> message go away so I can get on with my work"*. And on THAT question,
> the memoir.pdf manual was mum.
>
Sure, if the guy is only able to search for words like fancyhdr in the
manual.
A more clever guy could have got the idea that as memoir clashes with
fancyhdr and as fancyhdr is about headers and footers one should look
up in manual what it says about header and footers.
You are complaining about the long manual. It would be even more longer
if it had to describe possible interactions with a lot of packages (in
a lot of versions) which aren't needed anyway as the class already
provides the needed functionality. It would be also longer if it had to
describe how to convert all possible documents.
As you haven't yet posted a minimal example that demonstrates your
problem it isn't even clear if there is really a clash. It is also
possible that your code contains an error that shows up only with
memoir. It is certainly not possible for a manual to explain all errors
from erronous code. Buy the LaTeX companion. It has a section about
almost all errors with quite good explanations about how to handle
them.
TeX/LaTeX isn't easy, you can't learn it in 5 minutes. You can't use it
without reading quite a lot documentation. Error messages aren't always
helpful (you haven't got the really mysterious ones yet). Nobody claims
that every class/package combination works without any problem. If you
can't cope with this difficulties: use another application that is
better adapted to your needs.
Michele Dondi
>*anything*, at least. Try using grep without reaching for the man page
>every five minutes. :P
I do. But I have to reach for it every few days indeed. However I tend
to use Perl one-liners instead of fileutils nowadays. All this is just
"btw", btw!
>it's much quicker to fix it in the source file and recompile. Control-C
>kills it, but you have to answer 'y' to some prompt, and then your
>command history has a lone "y" in it instead of the damn batch file you
>use to run your compile.
I use x, and q.
Michele Dondi
>> There's plenty of information.
>
>Perhaps, if you've got the time to sit back and spend a few hours
>reading memoir.pdf from cover to cover. But it can't be found quickly.
Well, I didn't. Or else I'm a lier focusing on making fun of you. Just
choose what the most probable option may be...
>> *More* technical audience... than what?!?
>
>Than someone who knows as much as they needed to to get what they've
>done so far done, but no more.
Personally I didn't find it harder to read than the average LaTeX
package or class. The first part about typography, which is a very
nice and precious reading, is more in-depth than you may want. If you
don't need it, just skip it.
>> As I wrote in my other post, I had severe time restrictions and I most
>> certainly didn't read it from cover to cover.
>
>I looked around in the index and toc, and there was no clear
>explanation of how to get it to work with fancyhdr. I got cryptic
In the index for the manual I have I can find:
fancyhdr (package), 183
At page 183 I can read:
These facilities were inspired by the fancyhdr package [Oos96],
although the command set is different.
So read on, to find out that switching from fancyhdr's command set to
memoir's is just a matter of a few keystrokes...
>errors that weren't mentioned anywhere; a look at the TOC didn't
>mention fancy headings or the clashing package by name ... I did look,
>but there was nothing about this particular issue and its resolution.
Peter Wilson is a very nice person, and I'm sure that if you have
suggestions as to how to improve the manual, or the class altogether,
he will be glad to pay attention to your remarks.
>The error messages I got also didn't make it clear what needed to be
>changed/fixed to work around them (as is typical).
Yes, it's typical. And yes, it's suboptimal. Others kindly explained
why it is so. OTOH some more experience and you'll learn how to
(better) cope with them. Hopefully.
Michele
--
{$_=pack'B8'x25,unpack'A8'x32,$a^=sub{pop^pop}->(map substr
(($a||=join'',map--$|x$_,(unpack'w',unpack'u','G^<R<Y]*YB='
.'KYU;*EVH[.FHF2W+#"\Z*5TI/ER<Z`S(G.DZZ9OX0Z')=~/./g)x2,$_,
256),7,249);s/[^\w,]/ /g;$ \=/^J/?$/:"\r";print,redo}#JAPH,
Michele Dondi
>> There is absolutly no need to use fancyhdr.
>
>Apparently, somebody wasn't thinking. The scenario is this: some guy
>has started off using the book class, grabbed fancyhdr, and is
>generally doing OK, then runs into something that might work better
>with the memoir class. So they convert their document over, only for it
>to go nuts.
[snip]
>fuss. *That person isn't asking "how do I do fancy headers and footers"
>-- he already knows how. He's asking "how do I make this stupid error
>message go away so I can get on with my work"*. And on THAT question,
>the memoir.pdf manual was mum.
There's not such a thing as "doing fancy headers and footers" in the
abstract sense. The question you asked implicitly referred to the
standard classes. In that context the answer is the fancyhdr package.
But memoir is not a standard class: it's aimed at replacing the
standard classes while incorporating at the same time the
functionality of many commonly used packages, one of which is fancyhdr
itself. You'll find the interface for each piece of this added
functionality is not much different from that of the corresponding
package, and all in all is mostly consistent across the class, which
is a big plus, imho.
Michele
twist...@gmail.com
> Really? I would have thought that most normal human beings would
> carefully read the responses to *their own* questions.
When there are dozens and the bulk of even those are off-topic and
uninteresting, skimming is the order of the day.
> So are you telling us that (semi-)carefully reading the suggestions
> people write to help you solve your problem is an expectation for
> autistic savants and not ordinary (whatever that means) people?
No, that reading and memorizing huge volumes of mostly uninteresting
information (phone books, everything posted to a high-traffic usenet
group, whatever) is.
[Insult snipped]
twist...@gmail.com
> You are complaining about the long manual. It would be even more longer
> if it had to describe possible interactions with a lot of packages (in
> a lot of versions) which aren't needed anyway as the class already
> provides the needed functionality. It would be also longer if it had to
> describe how to convert all possible documents.
A companion volume then? Or just a list somewhere of packages it's
known to clash with, and for those whose functionality it subsumes, a
note of that fact and a link to the relevant section.
> As you haven't yet posted a minimal example that demonstrates your
> problem it isn't even clear if there is really a clash.
Eh -- just the document class and usepackage sufficed. Didn't that go
without saying?
> Buy the[snip]
No.
I will not be coerced, subtly or aggressively, into paying money to
support supposedly-free software. If that is the real reason for the
evasive answers, flamage, and generally hostile tone here -- that it's
becoming evident I didn't pay up and it's time to make me -- then the
lot of you can sod off. I expected free (if volunteer) support with
good intentions in this newsgroup, not an unsubtle sales pitch and
other tactics aimed at effectively enforcing a paid support model of
some sort.
I wouldn't ordinarily instantly suspect your motives at the first
suggestion using words like "buy" or "pay", but when the "free" support
seems to be artificially degraded (simple questions get evasive
answers, civil ones get uncivil replies, when actual implementable
change suggestions are given they are incomplete and generate even more
cryptic error messages/confusion, etc.) then the weight of
circumstantial evidence that this is really a sales channel rather than
user-to-user support has become too great to ignore. I'm just surprised
that there hasn't been a whole series of asides along the lines of "If
you owned a copy of ... If you bought ... Perhaps the foobar would be
more helpful than this curmudgeonly bunch of usenetters, and it's only
$149.99!?"
Perhaps it's because too obviously flogging various for-fee products
and services drove people away as they realized the whole thing was
just aggressive sales pitches? Or of course, perhaps there hasn't been
an invasion of salesmen here to a) suppress it as a cheaper competitor
and b) manufacture a new sales channel, and it just happens to look
rather like there has. Still, I wonder what I will find in a google
groups search -- a bunch of people flaming helpful long-standing
regulars and using other tactics until they all left, then assuming the
mantle of quasi-helpful regulars that occasionally suggest various
non-free products?
> TeX/LaTeX isn't easy, you can't learn it in 5 minutes. You can't use it
> without reading quite a lot documentation.
At least you can get started with lshort and only need to find
harder-to-find info incrementally at particular points usually when
doing something new. Still, it's amazing that a simple "how do I..."
question provokes instant flamage and chaos here, along with a dumbass
request for a "mimimal example", as if I were reporting a bug rather
than asking how to accomplish something. "I want a break that looks
different at page boundaries" isn't something that has a "minimal
example". Given that several people have behaved almost identically,
it's clear there's either some weird subculture here that has a
n00b-hazing tradition, or there's an outright conspiracy (apparently,
to sell stuff, which would make the lot of you constitute spammers if
it's true).
> Nobody claims that every class/package combination works without any problem. If
> you can't cope with this difficulties: use another application that is better adapted to
> your needs.
If I got actual answers when I asked questions, I probably could cope.
Eventually, I was able to adapt the pfbreak code from memoir.
Nonetheless, getting the requisite information was like pulling teeth.
The responses that weren't completely rude were generally evasive, by
ignoring or not directly answering the question; some answers were
(presumably intentionally) incomplete, so that if implemented exactly
as stated they would cause even more errors and problems.
Why is this? I have formed a theory that this group has been turned
into an unofficial sales channel for whatever it was you were trying to
sell me two paragraphs ago; if a Big Business of some kind was selling
a LaTeX support service of some kind, it would be their inclincation on
discovering a useful user-to-user support froup to invade and destroy
it in the name of profit, driving out anyone who was genuinely helpful
and replacing them with shills that would give half-hearted,
half-assed, snarky "help" instead of the real McCoy who would also
frequently suggest products and services the company happened to sell
(probably at grossly inflated prices, relative to their marginal
costs). Given what I have observed here over the last two weeks, and
that this has already happened to other usenet groups in the past (the
whole alt.sex.* hierarchy comes to mind), the theory seems plausible.
Although the evidence is circumstantial, the theory does fit the facts.
If it is not, in fact, true, prove it to me -- explain the real reason
for the astonishing reception my "How do I make a break look different
at a page boundary" question got? One time in the past I dropped in on
comp.lang.c++ asking about a diamond-shaped inheritance pattern -- I
had B and C derived from A, and D derived from B and C, which caused
two separate copies of A rather than one shared by the B and C -- and
got a quick answer in hours, and it wasn't a flame, an RTFM/RTFF, or a
sales pitch for Bjarne Stroustrup's C++ bible; it suggested a
previously unfamiliar use of the heavily-overloaded keyword "virtual"
that did the trick. Probably this was one page below the top of the
google search, and buried in documentation somewhere, but I still got
an answer. Nobody asked for a "minimal example" -- let alone wrote
"Minimal example some-web-link" or something else suspicious-looking
due to its brevity and high url-to-plain-text ratio. (Any answer I have
to follow a link to get I'm ignoring anyway -- either it could have
been included in the posting, or it is too long and complicated which
means I want a simpler one, or it's something bogus -- probably a
spyware infection waiting to happen, or at least a fragmentation
grenade with advertisements on the casing and a small nuclear device at
the core, ready to blast my system into oblivion with an explosion of
pop-ups and other crap...)
So -- people -- what happened? Bad days at the office for all of you? A
newbie-hazing culture that the C++ froup doesn't have? Some taboo
against asking how to make breaks behave differently at page
boundaries? Or are you really just a bunch of spammers using a
less-brazen-than-usual approach to peddle stuff and render a free
alternative unusable? (After all, alt.sex was simply invaded by
enormous carpetbombings with obvious porn site sales-pitch spams.
Perhaps modern cancelbots, the successful creation of the fortified
soc.sexuality.* group hierarchy as a redoubt, and the horrid
click-through rates of obvious spam necessitate subtler tactics in the
21st century? Perhaps you're really trying to be helpful but just
manage somehow to come off looking hostile, inept, and a bit
suspicious?)
twist...@gmail.com
> I do. But I have to reach for it every few days indeed. However I tend
> to use Perl one-liners instead of fileutils nowadays. All this is just
> "btw", btw!
Perl -- that's a cure worse than the disease if ever I saw one. Gimme a
box where I can put a search query and get a scrollable list of results
in a bigger box, along with a decent "advanced search" option that lets
me build up a more complex query bit by bit, anyday. I prefer being
able to see to navigate, unlike some people. Using older command-line
anythings for anything beyond compiling/rendering/print jobs is like
blinding yourself and then going everywhere and doing everything by
telling a guide where you want to go, what you want done, for a
description of your surroundings, and so on -- one who isn't fluent in
English, either, and has to be muttered at in pidgin and still usually
gives obviously-bogus responses or says he didn't understand you. Of
course, you have this (fortunately in Braille, so you can read it) list
of things the guide does understand, though it is incomplete in some
respects, and often arranged precisely as a list rather than as a
"how-to" organized by user tasks and goals...
The amazing thing is that when Xerox PARC granted computer users the
gift of sight and, especially, the ability to navigate visually in the
seventies, it took until well into the nineties for it to become
widespread in its availability to ordinary citizens.
> I use x, and q.
?
twist...@gmail.com
> In the index for the manual I have I can find:
>
> fancyhdr (package), 183
>
> At page 183 I can read:
>
> These facilities were inspired by the fancyhdr package [Oos96]
And at that point, it's obvious that the link doesn't lead to the
information I'm looking for (namely, "how do I make this error message
go away", rather than "how do I completely replace fancyhdr with
something else I'd have to learn to use from the bottom up, wasting
ages of my time", a question that truth be told it had never even
occurred to me to ask.
(Another point: a quick explanation of doing basic things in fancyhdr
with a useful code excerpt -- one that does not cause weird @-sign
errors if pasted in verbatim, by the way -- is in lshort. I don't
expect the memoir manual has a quick-start guide to its fancyhdr
alternative, somehow, but rather just a list of commands it's up to you
to figure how to arrange. Like a Lego kit, it's nice to get stuff you
can assemble creatively to suit ideas of your own. Also like a Lego
kit, it's nice to get some plans for assembling the pieces into some
basic things without having to reinvent them yourself, and which
furthermore you may adapt. Basically, for fancyhdr, because of lshort,
there's actually a shallow end of the pool you can start in. Another
point is that because of lshort, people will be starting off using
standard article classes and, quite often, fancyhdr, and not jumping
into memoir or other classes with both feet. Assuming that everyone is
starting a new project from scratch and not adapting an existing
project is foolish at best.)
> Peter Wilson is a very nice person, and I'm sure that if you have
> suggestions as to how to improve the manual, or the class altogether,
> he will be glad to pay attention to your remarks.
If he lurks (or actually posts) here, such suggestions can already be
inferred -- a quick conversion guide for any packages it clashes with
but provides equivalent functionality to, perhaps as a separate file or
as a chapter. Basically, any content geared toward people used to
existing document classes, chiefly book, rather than assuming a cold
start, and which provides a guide or shortcuts of some sort for getting
to the bits that differ and how to cope with the differences and turn
them to your own advantage. Getting-started stuff. Lshort can be
considered such (and consideres itself such) for the standard article
classes. A follow-on for getting started with memoir.cls (and maybe
others) assuming basic (lshort) knowledge of the system from the outset
and expanding from that point would be excellent IMO.
> Yes, it's typical. And yes, it's suboptimal. Others kindly explained
> why it is so.
I don't seem to recall anyone justifying it -- only explaining how it
got to be that way.
> OTOH some more experience and you'll learn how to
> (better) cope with them. Hopefully.
Perhaps I should go beyond that, and provide a mini-FAQ with
explanations/fixes. It might save other n00bs from unexpected side
trips to hell in the course of trying to write a document. And if doing
so gets me flamed, it will at least confirm the spammer theory --
there'd be no other logical reason, save that I directly infringed on
somebody's sales channel by providing for free something substantially
similar to what they hoped to make people who come here with problems
pay them for.
> {$_=pack'B8'x25,unpack'A8'x32,$a^=sub{pop^pop}->(map substr
> (($a||=join'',map--$|x$_,(unpack'w',unpack'u','G^<R<Y]*YB='
> .'KYU;*EVH[.FHF2W+#"\Z*5TI/ER<Z`S(G.DZZ9OX0Z')=~/./g)x2,$_,
> 256),7,249);s/[^\w,]/ /g;$ \=/^J/?$/:"\r";print,redo}#JAPH,
Don't you have any broadband in your area? Dial-up is so 1990s. Never
mind dial-up with *no error correction* -- frequent disconnects and
ugly line noise everywhere! How can you stand it?! ;)
twist...@gmail.com
> There's not such a thing as "doing fancy headers and footers" in the
> abstract sense. The question you asked implicitly referred to the
> standard classes. In that context the answer is the fancyhdr package.
> But memoir is not a standard class: it's aimed at replacing the
> standard classes while incorporating at the same time the
> functionality of many commonly used packages, one of which is fancyhdr
> itself.
Fascinating, but completely irrelevant to the end-user perspective,
which is goal-oriented, not architecture-oriented. Users are concerned
with how to do X, how to fix Y, and things of that nature, and their
questions are always framed in such terms. How it works under the hood
is an implementation detail they don't care about, or want to have to
know about to get their work accomplished by day's end. This basic fact
of user psychology does, unfortunately, seem to be often overlooked or
misunderstood by software developers (and I would count in their ranks
those that develop packages and document classes for LaTeX). This is
despite the fact that developers are users too, and think like users
when they are acting as users. Most C++ programmers couldn't care less
how a C++ compiler works, as long as it does; they ask questions like
how to do X, how to fix Y; anything that depends on a detail of the
compiler's implementation and has nothing to do with the C++ language
in the abstract is most certainly a nuisance at best and a bug at
worst. Not that this stops them turning right around and thinking the
users of their C++ program know or care how it works inside, or even
that it was written in C++...
That's another basic rule of psychology -- the default model for
somebody else is me. So you program application A, and use application
B, and then expect people to use application A with the level of
knowledge of the guy who programmed it, and application B as just a
user, because your default model for other people is you, and that's
how YOU approach these applications now.
Unfortunately, this leads to some of the problems common to volunteer
and commercial support in the IT world. Commercial support usually
includes a monkey-script level that doesn't actually read the
complaint, doesn't base their answer on any specifics, and just
suggests a list of canned remedies, most of them useless,
already-tried-and-didn't-work, or obviously inapplicable. Usually they
all involve rebooting the computer. If you can get a proper human
being, rather than either an actual robot or a human being doing a
robot impression, they may still know no more than you do about how to
fix the problem. Of course, the next tier is usually a) for pay, in the
commercial-support area, or b) the lowest tier available, in the
volunteer-support area (though there do seem to be some scripted
monkeys here in comp.text.tex, amazingly enough). Their problem is that
although they know a lot about the product's internals and how to do
whatever or fix whatever, they are also, as a result, usually stuck in
the developer mindset and expect the user to know or care about the
internal architecture and implementation details -- and their answers
are framed in such terms, or they get mad at the "stupid user" for not
knowing how it works (they actually "don't care" and the *smart* user
is one who focuses on getting the job done and avoids any digressions
into irrelevant matters of implementation of the tools they use --
what's stupid, for a user, is actually wasting time learning such
matters, unless you intend to modify/improve the tool). They also tend
to assume the user knows things that most users don't, and get
mad/frustrated and short tempered when they demonstrate how little they
know (or care) about the implementation details by following your
instructions exactly and complaining about the error message they got
as a result. "What an idiot -- didn't he know you have to do X first,
to disable foobar processing and bypass the xyzzy interpreter when
directly addressing the core" and thoughts along those lines.
So users and developers talk right past one another, then get mad at
one another, developers over users' perceived ignorance and stupidity,
users over developers' giving answers they can't understand, answers
that don't work exactly as given, and (often in the case of open
source) even answers that assume they have a compiler and development
tools, know the language the app was written in, know the app's
internals, and are willing to actually modify and recompile it. They
probably a) don't, b) don't care, c) don't care, and d) *hands raised,
backing off* uh-uh, no-way, I'm not sticking my arm in there, I'll get
a shock or pull back a bloody stump or something! (Well, that's what
you expect if you suggest someone work in the guts of an engine or
electrical equipment or something, anyway.)
Will Robertson
> Why is this? I have formed a theory that this group has been turned
> into an unofficial sales channel for whatever it was you were trying to
> sell me two paragraphs ago;
That's an impressive rant. It should go without saying that your theory
is incorrect.
To be brief, here's why, in a nutshell, you don't receive good answers
here.
You don't use your real name. While you don't seem to think this is a
problem, it's impolite in this newsgroup. When in Rome...
You don't read what people write in enough detail, or look into their
solutions in enough depth, and then waste further time with follow-up
questions. This is disrespectful, as it shows you don't care for
others' time.
Better luck next time,
Will
Will Robertson
> Perhaps I should go beyond that, and provide a mini-FAQ with
> explanations/fixes. It might save other n00bs from unexpected side
> trips to hell in the course of trying to write a document.
Please do. It may undo all of the ill will you have earned up until
now.
Will
twist...@gmail.com
Since I am not hostile unless fired upon first, and not out to swindle
anyone, it is not possible for me to earn ill will. Your remark
therefore implies a lie.
twist...@gmail.com
> It should go without saying that your theory is incorrect.
No, it shouldn't. I base my beliefs upon evidence in preference to
hearsay or naive assumptions of goodwill.
> To be brief, here's why, in a nutshell, you don't receive good answers
> here.
>
> You don't use your real name.
That is not a logical requirement for receiving useful answers to
questions (other than, perhaps, questions related to "What's my
name?").
> You don't read what people write in enough detail, or look into their
> solutions in enough depth
Enough, as defined by whom? The Usenet Cabal? There is no great Usenet
Authority to determine arbitrarily, and impose upon me, a particular
definition of "enough". Not that I am aware of. I don't always have
much time to devote, and getting a lot of mainly both voluminous and
content-free replies with a few potentially-useful ones mixed in
further reduces the time I can devote to each response. I'm looking for
quick fixes now, not involved discussions, as a general rule. So are
most users who are looking for support info, as a general rule, so get
used to it. So yes, proposed solutions that seem to be either total
overhauls instead of quick fixes and messages that seem to be
completely beside the point fall by the wayside. Sales pitches get a
bit of my attention when they indicate a possible motive for the
peculiar behavior of some people here, but don't get any real interest
from me. Actual answers get quickly skimmed to make sure they are
relevant and don't involve completely redoing everything from scratch,
then the gist (which could be as little as a single command-line
switch, if that's what I'm expecting/looking for, or as much as a code
snippet; a detailed explanation only if nothing like those is there to
zero in on) extracted and tried. I just don't have the time or
inclination to read often-verbose posts, re-read them, answer a short
comprehension quiz, and so forth -- especially when much of the excess
verbiage is hostility and flamage not at all worthy of my attention.
[snip some amazing remark about my not caring for your time]
You obviously don't care much about my time! Suggestions that won't
work "out of the box", suggestions phrased misleadingly, responses that
aren't answers, nonsense and flamage.
You lot conduct yourselves quite differently from those in
comp.lang.c++. And are, it seems, a lot less friendly, a lot less
tolerant, and a lot less generally helpful and/or charitable than they.
Why the difference? And why do you care what my offline identity is? It
is none of your goddamn business, that's what it is. It is wise to
separate one's offline life from most online activities -- especially
Usenet. Otherwise one puts oneself at risk of actual physical
stalking/harm, increased risk of fraud or identity theft, and so forth.
By using a pseudonym, as nearly every net user has since time
immemorial, you reduce these risks and generally insulate different
parts of your life from being unduly affected by one another. You stop
an online flamewar from potentially escalating to physical assaults,
for instance. Since this is widespread online practise with good
personal privacy and even safety reasons behind it, anyone who starts
discouraging a particular person from engaging in it, most especially
if they use hostility/coercive tactics (such as, say, threatening to
withhold information selectively from pseudonymous people), must be
viewed with a great deal of suspicion. There can be no legitimate use
for their offline name if they are reluctant to share it; the only
reason you might want it is to track down offline contact information
and either bother them through some channel, such as snail mail, that
they obviously don't want you bothering them through, or outright
harass, stalk, attack, or generally disrupt them.
So yes, when one person in this group makes a sales pitch and several
others ask me for offline contact information, I get suspicious, and
rightly so. You have no legitimate use for the information, and sales
pitches are generally considered bad form on Usenet. Prying into
someone's identity, should they choose to keep their offline identity
private, is another online faux-pas last I checked. That includes
asking them if they don't volunteer the information, probing less
directly, or speculating that they are <insert name here> and anything
of the sort.
Your own handle looks to be a pseudonym (isn't that a character's name
from the old Lost in Space show?), which makes you look like a
hypocrite, too.
And all of this is utterly off topic here. This is a TeX newsgroup, not
a newsgroup about people's names, a biz newsgroup or a foo.bar.buy-sell
newsgroup, nor alt.flame. Can we get back to the topic at hand? The
particular motivation for this thread was a TeX related problem that
has now been solved, so, discussion over -- any post to it now is
necessarily going to be off-topic and therefore better left unposted.
Ulrike Fischer
>> As you haven't yet posted a minimal example that demonstrates your
>> problem it isn't even clear if there is really a clash.
> Eh -- just the document class and usepackage sufficed. Didn't that go
> without saying?
No. But I wonder why you don't understand the meaning of the error
message. It is a quite clear one. It is quite easy to avoid it. I'm
sure you can find the necessary line of code through a search in
google.groups. But I advise you not to use it. It is only a hack, the
clean solution is not to use fancyhdr.
>> Buy the[snip]
>
> No.
>
> I will not be coerced, subtly or aggressively,
I'm quite sorry that by mentioning a book to you I tried to coerce you.
I hope I never have to mention the TeXbook or the LaTeX manual to you.
> into paying money to support supposedly-free software.
You are not willing to buy a book about a free software because until
now it hasn't cost you money? That's quite a silly distinction you are
making here. The decision if one buys a book should be based on its
usefulness, e.g. if it can save time to have the information assembled
in one place or if it contains informations that can't be found
somewhere else, and not on the question if it is about a free or
nonfree software.
Do you really expect as you got free entrance you also have a claim to
get free drinks and free transport to the show? Do you think your
behaviour doesn't matter because you have a right to get a correct and
complete answer in any case? That you somehow payed for a professional
service by using a free service and a free group? Perhaps you should
sue the group because it doesn't fulfil your expectations? I certainly
will not be coerced, subtly or aggressively, into wasting my time in
giving you free support.
Robin Fairbairns
>twist...@gmail.com schrieb:
>>> Buy the[snip]
>>
>> No.
>>
>> I will not be coerced, subtly or aggressively,
>
>I'm quite sorry that by mentioning a book to you I tried to coerce you.
>I hope I never have to mention the TeXbook or the LaTeX manual to you.
>
>> into paying money to support supposedly-free software.
>
>You are not willing to buy a book about a free software because until
>now it hasn't cost you money?
it's a common view; indeed, back in the 80s and early 90s, when there
really wasn't much by way of free documentation, there was an awful
lot of bozos who argued this way. not many of them quite so rude as
to get into my killfile (as twisted as done), but they did exist.
>That's quite a silly distinction you are
>making here. The decision if one buys a book should be based on its
>usefulness, e.g. if it can save time to have the information assembled
>in one place or if it contains informations that can't be found
>somewhere else, and not on the question if it is about a free or
>nonfree software.
rationalisation. just because it's rational to buy a book doesn't
mean anyone actually _wants_ to buy a book.
and it has to be said, they _are_ expensive. when i started with tex,
i really couldn't afford many books. but then, there wasn't c.t.t, so
i couldn't go out and be rude to the people for not providing the
books for free.
--
Robin Fairbairns, Cambridge
twist...@gmail.com
> No. But I wonder why you don't understand the meaning of the error
> message. It is a quite clear one.
In this case, the problem was that it didn't reference any code *I*
wrote, and therefore could fix.
> I'm quite sorry that by mentioning a book to you I tried to coerce you.
> I hope I never have to mention the TeXbook or the LaTeX manual to you.
Nobody *has* to mention anything. This isn't a usenet group for sales
pitches.
> You are not willing to buy a book about a free software because until
> now it hasn't cost you money? That's quite a silly distinction you are
> making here.
No; I am not willing to let some d00d on the Internet tell me I *have*
to in order to progress. There's a difference.
Firstly, whether or not it's useful, a non-free reference manual or
similar should emphatically not be *crucial* to making full use of a
piece of free software, or else it effectively isn't free anymore --
it's a "free" razor for which you have to pay to get blades, or a
"free" cell phone for which you must buy time on a particular company's
plan, or something along those lines.
Secondly, pushing seekers of free support towards a pay support channel
is just not right. If they had the money, would they be bothering with
a bunch of hostile flamers on usenet, taking their chances with
spammers and dodgy advice, instead? Now really. :)
Will Robertson
Sure thing. In that case, let me re-phrase. Please do: a nice getting
started guide incorporating modern classes such as memoir would be most
welcome. When you've written something, post it up here for suggestions
and then upload it to CTAN (www.ctan.org/upload).
Good luck,
Will
Will Robertson
> > You don't use your real name.
>
> That is not a logical requirement for receiving useful answers to
> questions (other than, perhaps, questions related to "What's my
> name?").
Nice one. Anyway, no, it's only polite.
> > You don't read what people write in enough detail, or look into their
> > solutions in enough depth
>
> Enough, as defined by whom?
Enough, as defined by the fact that you have posted followup questions
that should not be necessary since enough detail was provided in the
original replies.
> I just don't have the time or
> inclination to read often-verbose posts
Oh, the irony.
> Your own handle looks to be a pseudonym (isn't that a character's name
> from the old Lost in Space show?), which makes you look like a
> hypocrite, too.
No, that was Will Robinson.
Search here for my name if you care:
<http://www.mecheng.adelaide.edu.au/people/>
Will
P.S. I guess the difference between the TeX community here compared to
your c++ group is similar to the difference in idiosyncrasy between the
two languages.
P.P.S. Considering the subject you chose for this thread, not much
could really be off-topic besides a discussion of paint drying or
similar.
Jonathan Fine
"Ulrike Fischer" <ne...@nililand.de> wrote
> TeX/LaTeX isn't easy, you can't learn it in 5 minutes. You can't use it
> without reading quite a lot documentation. Error messages aren't always
> helpful (you haven't got the really mysterious ones yet). Nobody claims
> that every class/package combination works without any problem. If you
> can't cope with this difficulties: use another application that is
> better adapted to your needs.
I thought this might be worth discussing in its
own right.
My view is that some parts are easy, some are hard.
--
Jonathan
William F. Adams
But, most importantly, _all_ things are possible, and most are
automatable. The only limit for the capability of producing a job in
TeX is human ingenuity and available computer processing power, by
contrast, work in Quark or InDesign is limited by in-built limits in
those programs (e.g, InDesign CS2 can only have 100 files in a book),
available # of licenses and work-stations and available operator
man-hours (assuming the work can be sub-divided --- lots of them, e.g.,
journals or books which start on new rights _and/or_ lefts can't be).
I'm finishing up converting a journal from production in Quark XPress
to XeLaTeX and where in Quark every issue requires _hundreds_ of manual
adjustments (admittedly mostly related to page breaking --- having
something better than one-line-at-a-time H&J would help a lot) or
decisions or user interventions, in XeLaTeX, it looks like one will
have to intervene on the ToC of certain sections (there're only 9, so
the upper limit there is 9 --- in Quark _all_ section ToCs had to be
manually adjusted) run various pages short or long (this had to be done
in Quark as well) and adjust the size of various graphics to tweak
pagination (this had to be done in Quark as well). XeLaTeX is however
automating:
- bullet placement
- end of story graphic placement
- placement of graphics as one or two columns
- automatic switching from 1 to 2 columns and back
- selection of appropriate master pages for each section after the
first
- generation of all ToCs (there's a master one for the sections, a
special ToC calling out specific articles and then mini-ToCs for each
section)
Since I started producing this journal, Quark has crashed 143 times on
this and other projects (mostly this one though), and a typical issue
resulted in my having ~3GB of backup files (each file for the journal
was ~175MB). XeLaTeX in Mac OS X hasn't crashed once, and the beta of
TeXshop only twice and the files are a _lot_ smaller.
The only documentation I've had to consult has been _The LaTeX
Companion 2nd Ed._, _TeX for the Impatient_, archives of the XeTeX
mailing list, Google Groups' archive of comp.text.tex and once this
group (though a careful re-reading of the FAQ would've saved my
bothering Donald A. about varwidth).
William
David Kastrup
> But, most importantly, _all_ things are possible, and most are
> automatable. The only limit for the capability of producing a job in
> TeX is human ingenuity and available computer processing power,
Both are hard limits seriously impacting the usefulness of TeX for
actually getting a job done. There are many tasks for which TeX's
requirements for ingenuity and/or processing power are making it
infeasible.
--
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum
UKTUG FAQ: <URL:http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html>
William F. Adams
> "William F. Adams" <will...@aol.com> writes:
>
> > But, most importantly, _all_ things are possible, and most are
> > automatable. The only limit for the capability of producing a job in
> > TeX is human ingenuity and available computer processing power,
>
> Both are hard limits seriously impacting the usefulness of TeX for
> actually getting a job done. There are many tasks for which TeX's
> requirements for ingenuity and/or processing power are making it
> infeasible.
Where is there a better game in town? I'm still trying to get the
development version of ANT compiled again (failing both in Mac OS X
here at work and at home in cygwin and mingw), and lout just hasn't
pique my interest.
My previous employer used Miles 33, we've got Xyvision here at my new
job (and are looking at 3B2), FrameMaker is now limited to Windows and
Unix workstations w/ no Mac port, Quark still has brain-dead one-line
at a time H&J, InDesign is seriously limited in terms of numbering (so
primitive you'll laugh until it hurts was how the author of one book on
ID said I'd view it), cross references (there're expensive plug-ins),
total number of files in a book (100 in CS2) &c. --- what other options
are there?
William
mariano.su...@gmail.com
William F. Adams wrote:
> Unix workstations w/ no Mac port, Quark still has brain-dead one-line
> at a time H&J,
What's "H&J"?
-- m
Will Robertson
Hyphenation and justification: the act of composing the lines of text
in a paragraph with flush edges.
Will
William F. Adams
> What's "H&J"?
Hyphenation and Justification, the process of breaking up a paragraph
into lines, spacing them out to justify them on the right (if so set)
and applying hyphenation (if allowed).
William
Michele Dondi
>Perl -- that's a cure worse than the disease if ever I saw one. Gimme a
>box where I can put a search query and get a scrollable list of results
>in a bigger box, along with a decent "advanced search" option that lets
>me build up a more complex query bit by bit, anyday. I prefer being
>able to see to navigate, unlike some people. Using older command-line
I prefer being able to what I have to do as efficiently as possible.
Sometimes a visual tool is the best means to do so. Other times a cli
based approach is much better. For many of my needs, including the
ones you're referring to, the latter happens far more frequently than
the former. As with most anything else, YMMV.
>> I use x, and q.
C:\TEMP>cat foo.tex
\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}
\begin{document}
How about a fraction like $\frac1$ or so?
\end{document}
C:\TEMP>latex foo
This is pdfeTeXk, Version 3.141592-1.30.3-2.2 (Web2c 7.5.5)
%&-line parsing enabled.
entering extended mode
(./foo.tex
LaTeX2e <2003/12/01>
Babel <v3.8g> and hyphenation patterns for english, usenglishmax,
dumylang, noh
yphenation, basque, german, ngerman, french, greek, monogreek,
ancientgreek, ib
ycus, italian, latin, pinyin, ukenglish, loaded.
(c:/TeXLive2005/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2004/02/16 v1.4f Standard LaTeX document class
(c:/TeXLive2005/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size12.clo)) (./foo.aux)
! Missing } inserted.
<inserted text>
}
l.5 How about a fraction like $\frac1$
or so?
? x
No pages of output.
Transcript written on foo.log.
Michele Dondi
>example". Given that several people have behaved almost identically,
>it's clear there's either some weird subculture here that has a
>n00b-hazing tradition, or there's an outright conspiracy (apparently,
Ah! Since I mentioned Perl... try asking a webserver configuration
question in comp.lang.perl.misc!! That's just the same in all good
technical newsgroups I'm familiar with, and although it may not be
pleasant for the n00b, like it or not, that's precisely what makes
them good.
Would you mind finding evidence for any of the supposed n00b-hazing
tradition or conspiracy in other threads?
I know you won't particularly care about my own personal experience,
but just in case you do, at least to a minimum amount, let me tell you
that it's that of a somewhat advanced n00b who still considers to be a
beginner, with no particular skill nor know-how who's NEVER EVER been
bashed here and on the contrary received tons of precious help from
the group. Said this, I'll repeat myself: YMMV.
Michele
Michele Dondi
>> You don't read what people write in enough detail, or look into their
>> solutions in enough depth
>
>Enough, as defined by whom? The Usenet Cabal? There is no great Usenet
>Authority to determine arbitrarily, and impose upon me, a particular
>definition of "enough". Not that I am aware of. I don't always have
Enough as defined by the general consensus of those who kindly spend
their time here providing help to people interested in "TeX & C." -
it's a sort of an average: enough may be less than that average for
some particular contributor and more than it for some other one. Your
will to flame and make claims about newbie bashing subculture or
surreal conspiracies IMHO by far exceeds your will to read in enough
depth the proposed answers. Here, enough is defined by the amount that
would have given you an answer which would not need further questions
to be clarified. So by the more or less general consensus (and also
IMO) the depth in which you looked into the proposed solutions was way
out of the standard deviation around the average enough. Below it, of
course!
Michele Dondi
>Enough, as defined by whom? The Usenet Cabal? There is no great Usenet
>Authority to determine arbitrarily, and impose upon me, a particular
>definition of "enough". Not that I am aware of. I don't always have
>much time to devote, and getting a lot of mainly both voluminous and
>content-free replies with a few potentially-useful ones mixed in
>further reduces the time I can devote to each response. I'm looking for
Yet, this particular post of yours is 92 lines long, only a tiny
minority of which are quotations. Offhand, I may be wrong but nobody
thus far has been writing such long posts as your latest ones. Of
course you don't have much time to devote to read the replies to your
posts. Quite curiously you have the time to write them, and indeed
they're quite voluminous too. And indeed I did not read them, since I
know more or less what to expect from them: rants, rants and more
rants. Rants about how bad the people here are. Rants about the
conspiracy, etc. We all understood, you think that people here are bad
and/or that there's a conspiracy. That simply doesn't conform to the
experiences of most of us here, period.
Michele Dondi
>> There's not such a thing as "doing fancy headers and footers" in the
>> abstract sense. The question you asked implicitly referred to the
>> standard classes. In that context the answer is the fancyhdr package.
>> But memoir is not a standard class: it's aimed at replacing the
>> standard classes while incorporating at the same time the
>> functionality of many commonly used packages, one of which is fancyhdr
>> itself.
>
>Fascinating, but completely irrelevant to the end-user perspective,
>which is goal-oriented, not architecture-oriented. Users are concerned
>with how to do X, how to fix Y, and things of that nature, and their
>questions are always framed in such terms. How it works under the hood
>is an implementation detail they don't care about, or want to have to
>know about to get their work accomplished by day's end. This basic fact
(BTW: did I wrote anything about implementation details?!? I don't
think so. But maybe I did and I just didn't realize...)
Unfortunately the implementation details can't always be abstracted as
you wish. In an ideal world, maybe. But we've never claimed to live in
an ideal world. And we've never claimed TeX to be perfect. We've never
claimed LaTeX to be perfect. We've never claimed memoir to be perfect.
We've never claimed the whole set of LaTeX packages to be perfect. And
your example with C code and C compilers is not completely wrong, but
largely misleading. LaTeX is just a set of macros over TeX, so it is
much on the same level as the document you're writing in LaTeX itself.
The implementation language of your C compiler, by contrast, is mostly
irrelevant even if it happens to be C. And a package is much similar
in nature to a class: they're alike beasts. So there are unavoidable
obstacles to the kind of simplicity you dream of. Live with that or
cure that. Evidence is that most other people do live with that, and
quite happily too.
OTOH if a user is concerned with how to do X, you may disagree with me
but you will have hard time trying to convince me that "use the
package XX or use the class XYZ which incorporates the functionality
of XX or hack away some code from XYZ" is not an answer that quickly
addresses your concern.
Wanting to use fancyhdr with memoir is more like wanting to use a C
library over another language. Which may be possible, if there are
appropriate interface libraries (or how the hell they're called) for
that particular language, and if it just supports that kind of thing,
of course. Memoir does not offer such a thing since it has its own
facilities which are better integrated in the UI of the class. Note:
in the UI - not speaking of any implementation detail...
Michele Dondi
>And at that point, it's obvious that the link doesn't lead to the
>information I'm looking for (namely, "how do I make this error message
>go away", rather than "how do I completely replace fancyhdr with
>something else I'd have to learn to use from the bottom up, wasting
>ages of my time", a question that truth be told it had never even
>occurred to me to ask.
I have resisted the temptation to switch to a personal attack thus
far, but now I feel the need to make such an attempt for judging from
the volume of your posts one should infer that your typing abilities
by far exceed your cognitive skills since it took me a few minutes to
understand how to set up headers and footers with memoir after years
of virtually no use of LaTeX at all. And it would take me a few
seconds to convert code written for fancyhrd to code using memoir's
own facilities. Especially since part of the interface is actually the
same! But then maybe I'm just a genius and sadly enough nobody ever
told me. To be honest, though, I've never been thinking so myself,
either.
>> {$_=pack'B8'x25,unpack'A8'x32,$a^=sub{pop^pop}->(map substr
>> (($a||=join'',map--$|x$_,(unpack'w',unpack'u','G^<R<Y]*YB='
>> .'KYU;*EVH[.FHF2W+#"\Z*5TI/ER<Z`S(G.DZZ9OX0Z')=~/./g)x2,$_,
>> 256),7,249);s/[^\w,]/ /g;$ \=/^J/?$/:"\r";print,redo}#JAPH,
>
>Don't you have any broadband in your area? Dial-up is so 1990s. Never
>mind dial-up with *no error correction* -- frequent disconnects and
>ugly line noise everywhere! How can you stand it?! ;)
Thanks for the compliment!
Michele
--
#!/usr/bin/perl -lp
BEGIN{*ARGV=do{open $_,q,<,,\$/;$_}}s z^z seek DATA,11,$[;($,
=ucfirst<DATA>)=~s x .*x q^~ZEX69l^^q,^2$;][@,xe.$, zex,s e1e
q 1~BEER XX1^q~4761rA67thb ~eex ,s aba m,P..,,substr$&,$.,age
__END__
Mark Mephinasony
> Where is there a better game in town? I'm still trying to get the
> development version of ANT compiled again (failing both in Mac OS X
> here at work and at home in cygwin and mingw), and lout just hasn't
> pique my interest.
Ant isn't very googlable. Just "ant" produces mostly entomology, as one
would expect. "ant latex" does better -- cartoon characters, an Eclipse
IDE plugin for some purpose or another probably related to Java
development, and "Ant's Not TeX". Ah, a classic recursive acronym. Add
"not tex" to the query string, and you mainly get relevant hits. All of
which state the obvious (it's a TeX alternative/fork/rewrite of some
kind) without giving much detail. The top Google hit for this one just
says the obvious and links to something named "download.htm", which
isn't promising if you want a less vague and more detailed description
*before* committing to downloading a probably-massive and
potentially-infected executable.
And, as it so turns out, the "download.htm" page is 404 anyway.
Vaporware?
Mark Mephinasony
> Enough as defined by the general consensus of those who kindly spend
Since that appears to be a vacuous set, the consensus of which you
speak doesn't seem to be well-defined I'm afraid...
Mark Mephinasony
> Unfortunately the implementation details can't always be abstracted as
> you wish. In an ideal world, maybe. But we've never claimed to live in
> an ideal world. And we've never claimed TeX to be perfect.
Imperfection, even though it may be unavoidable, does not in general
provide a justification defense. Ask any lawyer. :)
> OTOH if a user is concerned with how to do X, you may disagree with me
> but you will have hard time trying to convince me that "use the
> package XX or use the class XYZ which incorporates the functionality
> of XX or hack away some code from XYZ" is not an answer that quickly
> addresses your concern.
One of them actually was. If the answer hadn't been a) incomplete, b)
gotcha-riddled, and c) buried in a pile of crap like a needle in a
haystack maybe I'd have solved it sooner and maybe I'd be in a better
mood now. :P
> Wanting to use fancyhdr with memoir is more like wanting to use a C
> library over another language.
Unlike the latter, it's not obviously problematical at a glance to
someone with a user-level understanding.
> Note ... in the UI ... implementation detail ... etc.
UI that was far away from the /pfbreak* UI that I was actually
interested in.
John Harper
I asked a question earlier today about a LaTeX problem, and a
useful answer was provided here.
-- John Harper, School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science,
Victoria University, PO Box 600, Wellington 6140, New Zealand
e-mail john....@vuw.ac.nz phone (+64)(4)463 5341 fax (+64)(4)463 5045
Achim Blumensath
> Ant isn't very googlable.
> The top Google hit for this one just says the obvious and links to
> something named "download.htm", which isn't promising if you want a
> less vague and more detailed description *before* committing to
> downloading a probably-massive and potentially-infected executable.
That seems to be some random blog entry you found (dated 2004). The
official homepage is
where, among other things, you can find a manual.
Achim
--
________________________________________________________________________
| \_____/ |
Achim Blumensath \O/ \___/\ |
TU Darmstadt =o= \ /\ \|
www.mathematik.tu-darmstadt.de/~blumensath /"\ o----|
____________________________________________________________________\___|
Robin Fairbairns
Michele Dondi <bik....@tiscalinet.it> writes:
>On 4 Jul 2006 17:54:42 -0700, twist...@gmail.com wrote:
>>example". Given that several people have behaved almost identically,
>>it's clear there's either some weird subculture here that has a
>>n00b-hazing tradition, or there's an outright conspiracy (apparently,
>
>
>Would you mind finding evidence for any of the supposed n00b-hazing
>tradition or conspiracy in other threads?
jonathan fine has attempted to retrieve something from the wasted time
of dealing with the twisted troll. while it's not a topic i would
have proposed, i would urge people to try his sub-thread on whether
tex is easy, in order to avoid wasting time on the troll. or start
something of your own: there's plenty to discuss.
trolls eat posts. if we don't feed this one, it'll go away and lurk
under another bridge.
admittedly, this is a long-established and mostly good-tempered news
group, and we can survive a bit of pointless rudeness. however, it's
not good for joiners who actually want to learn, to find a cascade of
rubbish and responses to rubbish (more than half the posts that
appeared on my spool overnight, for example!).
--
Robin Fairbairns, Cambridge
David Kastrup
> In article <necoa2d6emd72uev4...@4ax.com>,
> Michele Dondi <bik....@tiscalinet.it> writes:
>>On 4 Jul 2006 17:54:42 -0700, twist...@gmail.com wrote:
>>>example". Given that several people have behaved almost
>>>identically, it's clear there's either some weird subculture here
>>>that has a n00b-hazing tradition, or there's an outright conspiracy
>>>(apparently,
>>
>>[...]
>>
>>Would you mind finding evidence for any of the supposed n00b-hazing
>>tradition or conspiracy in other threads?
>
> jonathan fine has attempted to retrieve something from the wasted
> time of dealing with the twisted troll. while it's not a topic i
> would have proposed, i would urge people to try his sub-thread on
> whether tex is easy, in order to avoid wasting time on the troll.
The trolls occur in chapter 2, "Roast Mutton". "Out of the Frying Pan
into the Fire" is chapter 6.
> admittedly, this is a long-established and mostly good-tempered news
> group, and we can survive a bit of pointless rudeness. however,
> it's not good for joiners who actually want to learn, to find a
> cascade of rubbish and responses to rubbish (more than half the
> posts that appeared on my spool overnight, for example!).
Well, I could not refrain from adding another one. While certainly
being no more useful than the rest, it might be less redundant.
Glyn Millington
> The trolls occur in chapter 2, "Roast Mutton". "Out of the Frying Pan
> into the Fire" is chapter 6.
> Well, I could not refrain from adding another one. While certainly
> being no more useful than the rest, it might be less redundant.
Slipping into bad hobbits, eh? :-)
atb
Glyn
William F. Adams
> Ant isn't very googlable.
Doesn't need to be if one reads the faq.
Alternately, search for ``tex faq ant'' which has
http://www.tug.org/teTeX/tetex-texmfdist/doc/help/faq/uktug-faq/FAQ-ant.html
as its ``I feel lucky'' hit.
William
Mark Mephinasony
> I had good evidence an hour or two ago that it is not vacuous.
> I asked a question earlier today about a LaTeX problem, and a
> useful answer was provided here.
Really?
My, my. Time to call the news crew. This deserves nationwide coverage.
Never saw the like before, myself.