Related
I'm playing around with ANSI escape sequences, e.g.
echo -e "\e[91mHello\e[m"
on a Linux console to display colored text.
Now I try to use superscript and subscript output like a=b².
I read here and here about: Partial Line Down (subscript) and Partial Line Up (superscript) but I'm not sure about the exact syntax and even which terminal client might supports this.
Any suggestions about this?
Possibly some commercial product supports it, but it's not supported by any terminal emulator you'll encounter (unless someone modifies one just to prove a point).
The standard describes possible escape sequences, but there is no requirement that any given sequence is supported by any terminal. There are commonly supported (and assumed) sequences such as clearing the screen, but even for that, not all terminals have supported the feature.
The reason is that terminal emulators are generally used with applications (such as text editors) which assume a regular set of rows/columns, and that the text is shown compactly (no extra space such as would be needed to allow for partial line movement. Back in the day when people used typewriters, it was common to have 1.5 or 2.0 line-spacing, and get no more than 33 lines on a page. That changed, long ago.
The need for subscripts/superscripts didn't go away — Unicode provides a usable set of characters with that representation (see Superscripts and Subscripts
Range: 2070–209F)
Further reading:
Your New Royal Portable (1953).
Line Spacing - Butterick's Practical Typography
console_codes - Linux console escape and control sequences
I have a markdown document that I convert to PDF via pandoc's latex engine. I'm trying to render an n with a tilde over it, as in "niño", with markdown like the following:
ni\~{n}o
...but this just gets rendered in the PDF as "ni~no" -- i.e. the tilde gets interpreted literally. I've also tried escaping the backslash (ni\\~{n}o), surrounding everything in brackets (ni{\~{n}}o), and basically what I think is every possible combination of escaping characters in this sequence, but nothing works. It also fails even when the sequence is on its own (i.e. \~{n}).
But, other similar sequences that are based on letters rather than symbols work just fine (e.g. Otter\r{a} gets rendered correctly to "Otterå"). Pandoc is specifically failing to handle the tilde (or maybe more generally non-letter-based latex character sequences -- I haven't tested others).
The command I'm using to build the pdf is pandoc file.md -o file.pdf. I've also tried specifying -f markdown+raw_tex, but it still fails (nor should I need to, since the \r{a} works without it, and I think raw_tex is enabled by default anyway).
Any thoughts? I know I can use xetex to just enter these characters directly, but that's not really a satisfying solution...
Besides using the ñ character directly (which apparently works in native Pandoc because it's magic!), an alternative is to create a simple LaTeX \newcommand for forcing native TeX interpretation.
\newcommand{\tex}[1]{#1}
ni\tex{\~n}o
Thanks to John McFarlane for introducing me to this clever workaround!
Is it possible to have a TeX command which will take the whole next word (or the next letters up to but not including the next punctuation symbol) as an argument and not only the next letter or {} group?
I’d like to have a \caps command on certain acronyms but don’t want to type curly brackets over and over.
First of all create your command, for example
\def\capsimpl#1{{\sc #1}}% Your main macro
The solution to catch a space or punctuation:
\catcode`\#=11
\def\addtopunct#1{\expandafter\let\csname punct#\meaning#1\endcsname\let}
\addtopunct{ }
\addtopunct{.} \addtopunct{,} \addtopunct{?}
\addtopunct{!} \addtopunct{;} \addtopunct{:}
\newtoks\capsarg
\def\caps{\capsarg{}\futurelet\punctlet\capsx}
\def\capsx{\expandafter\ifx\csname punct#\meaning\punctlet\endcsname\let
\expandafter\capsend
\else \expandafter\continuecaps\fi}
\def\capsend{\expandafter\capsimpl\expandafter{\the\capsarg}}
\def\continuecaps#1{\capsarg=\expandafter{\the\capsarg#1}\futurelet\punctlet\capsx}
\catcode`\#=12
#Debilski - I wrote something similar to your active * code for the acronyms in my thesis. I activated < and then \def<#1> to print the acronym, as well as the expansion if it's the first time it's encountered. I also went a bit off the deep end by allowing defining the expansions in-line and using the .aux files to send the expansions "back in time" if they're used before they're declared, or to report errors if an acronym is never declared.
Overall, it seemed like it would be a good idea at the time - I rarely needed < to be catcode 12 in my actual text (since all my macros were in a separate .sty file), and I made it behave in math mode, so I couldn't foresee any difficulties. But boy was it brittle... I don't know how many times I accidentally broke my build by changing something seemingly unrelated. So all that to say, be very careful activating characters that are even remotely commonly-used.
On the other hand, with XeTeX and higher unicode characters, it's probably a lot safer, and there are generally easy ways to type these extra characters, such as making a multi (or compose) key (I usually map either numlock or one of the windows keys to this), so that e.g. multi-!-! produces ¡). Or if you're running in emacs, you can use C-\ to switch into TeX input mode briefly to insert unicode by typing the TeX command for it (though this is a pain for actually typing TeX documents, since it intercepts your actual \'s, and please please don't try defining your own escape character!)
Regarding whitespace after commands: see package xspace, and TeX FAQ item Commands gobble following space.
Now why this is very difficult: as you noted yourself, things like that can only be done by changing catcodes, it seems. Catcodes are assigned to characters when TeX reads them, and TeX reads one line at a time, so you can not do anything with other spaces on the same line, IMHO. There might be a way around this, but I do not see it.
Dangerous code below!
This code will do what you want only at the end of the line, so if what you want is more "fluent" typing without brackets, but you are willing to hit 'return' after each acronym (and not run any auto-indent later), you can use this:
\def\caps{\begingroup\catcode`^^20 =11\mcaps}
\def\mcaps#1{\def\next##1 {\sc #1##1\catcode`^^20 =10\endgroup\ }\next}
One solution might be setting another character as active and using this one for escaping. This does not remove the need for a closing character but avoids typing the \caps macro, thus making it overall easier to type.
Therefore under very special circumstances, the following works.
\catcode`\*=\active
\def*#1*{\textsc{\MakeTextLowercase{#1}}}
Now follows an *Acronym*.
Unfortunately, this makes uses of \section*{} impossible without additional macro definitions.
In Xetex, it seems to be possible to exploit unicode characters for this, so one could define
\catcode`\•=\active
\def•#1•{\textsc{\MakeTextLowercase{#1}}}
Now follows an •Acronym•.
Which should reduce the effects on other commands but of course needs to have the character ‘•’ mapped to the keyboard somewhere to be of use.
I want LaTeX to automatically replace strings like " a ", " s ", " z " with " a~", " s~", " z~", because they can't be at line end. Any suggestions?
For Czech typographic rules, there is a preprocessor called Vlna" by Petr Olšák - download . The set of (usually prepositions in czech) is customizable - so it might be usable for other languages as well.
You can use \StrSubstitute from xstring package.
e.g.
\StrSubstitute{change ME}{ ME}{d}
will convert change ME into changed.
Although, nesting is not possible, so to make another substitution you must use an intermediate variable in this way
\StrSubstitute{change ME}{ ME}{d}[\mystring]
\StrSubstitute{\mystring}{ed}{ing}
Finally, your solution would be
\usepackage{xstring}
\def\mystring{...source string here...}
\begin{document}
\StrSubstitute{\mystring}{ a }{a~{}}[\mystring]
\StrSubstitute{\mystring}{ s }{s~{}}[\mystring]
\StrSubstitute{\mystring}{ z }{z~{}}[\mystring]
\mystring
\end{document}
Note the use of the empty string {} to avoid the sequence ~}.
I'm afraid (to the best of my knowledge) this is basically impossible with LaTeX. A LuaTeX-based solution might be possible, though.
It's not actually clear to me, however, that " a ", for example, shouldn't appear at the end of a
line. Although I might be used to different typographic rules.
(Is there anything wrong with the line break in the last paragraph? :))
As far as I know there is no way to do this in LaTeX itself. I'd go for automating this with some external tools, as my typical setup involves a Makefile handling the LaTeX run by itself. This makes it rather easy to run tools like sed on the sources and do some replacements using regular expressions, and a simple rule would do this for your case.
If you use some LaTeX editor that does everything for you you should check the editors regular expression search and replace functionality.
Yes, this is the age old argument of data processing vs. data composition. We have always done these things in a pre-processor environment responsible for extracting the information from its source environment, SQL or plain-text, and created the contents of a \input(file.tex).
But yes, it is possible (TeX is after all a programming language) but you will have to become a wizard. Get the 4 volume set TeX in Practice by Stephan von Bechtolsheim.
The approach would be to begin an environment (execute a macro) whose ''argument'' was all text down to the end of the environment. Then just munge though the tokens fixing the ones you want.
Still, I don't think any of us are advocating this approach.
If you are using TeXmaker to write your LaTeX file, then you may click on the Edit button on the toolbar, then click on Replace.
A dialogue box will come up, and you can enter your strings one after the other.
You put the strings to be changed in the Find text input and what you want it to be changed to in the Replace text input.
You can also specify where you want the replacement to start from.
Click Find and Replace (or similiar) in the menu of your text editor and do it.
When I write math in LaTeX I often need to perform simple arithmetic on numbers in my LaTeX source, like 515.1544 + 454 = ???.
I usually copy-paste the LaTeX code into Google to get the result, but I still have to manually change the syntax, e.g.
\frac{154,7}{25} - (289 - \frac{1337}{42})
must be changed to
154,7/25 - (289 - 1337/42)
It seems trivial to write a program to do this for the most commonly used operations.
Is there a calculator which understand this syntax?
EDIT:
I know that doing this perfectly is impossible (because of the halting problem). Doing it for the simple cases I need is trivial. \frac, \cdot, \sqrt and a few other tags would do the trick. The program could just return an error for cases it does not understand.
WolframAlpha can take input in TeX form.
http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2010/09/30/talk-to-wolframalpha-in-tex/
The LaTeXCalc project is designed to do just that. It will read a TeX file and do the computations. For more information check out the home page at http://latexcalc.sourceforge.net/
The calc package allows you to do some calculations in source, but only within commands like \setcounter and \addtolength. As far as I can tell, this is not what you want.
If you already use sage, then the sagetex package is pretty awesome (if not, it's overkill). It allows you get nicely formatted output from input like this:
The square of
$\begin{pmatrix}
1 & 2 \\
3 & 4
\end{pmatrix}$
is \sage{matrix([[1, 2], [3,4]])^2}.
The prime factorization of the current page number is \sage{factor(\thepage)}
As Andy says, the answer is yes there is a calculator that can understand most latex formulas: Emacs.
Try the following steps (assuming vanilla emacs):
Open emacs
Open your .tex file (or activate latex-mode)
position the point somewhere between the two $$ or e.g. inside the begin/end environment of the formula (or even matrix).
use calc embedded mode for maximum awesomeness
So with point in the formula you gave above:
$\frac{154,7}{25} - (289 - \frac{1337}{42})$
press C-x * d to duplicate the formula in the line below and enter calc-embedded mode which should already have activated a latex variant of calc for you. Your buffer now looks like this:
$\frac{154,7}{25} - (289 - \frac{1337}{42})$
$\frac{-37651}{150}$`
Note that the fraction as already been transformed as far as possible. Doing the same again (C-x * d) and pressing c f to convert the fractional into a floating point number yields the following buffer:
$\frac{154,7}{25} - (289 - \frac{1337}{42})$
$\frac{-37651}{150}$
$-251.006666667$
I used C-x * d to duplicate the formula and then enter embedded mode in order to have the intermediate values, however there is also C-x * e which avoids the duplication and simply enters embedded mode for the current formula.
If you are interested you should really have a look at the info page for Emacs Calc - Embedded Mode. And in general the help for the Gnu Emaca Calculator together with the awesome interactive tutorial.
You can run an R function called Sweave on a (mostly TeX with some R) file that can replace R expressions with their results in Tex.
A tutorial can be found here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/6451985/Learning-to-Sweave-in-APA-Style
My calculator can do that. To get the formatted output, double-click the result formula and press ctrl+c to copy it.
It can do fairly advanced stuff too (differentiation, easy integrals (and not that easy ones)...).
https://calculator-algebra.org/
A sample computation:
https://calculator-algebra.org:8166/#%7B%22currentPage%22%3A%22calculator%22%2C%22calculatorInput%22%3A%22%5C%5Cfrac%7B1%2B2%7D%7B3%7D%3B%20d%2Fdx(arctan%20(2x%2B3))%22%2C%22monitoring%22%3A%22true%22%7D
There is a way to do what you want just not quite how you describe.
You can use the fp package (\usepackage[options]{fp}) the floating point package will do anything you want; solving equations, adding dividing and many more. Unfortunately it will not read the LaTeX math you instead have to do something a little different, the documentation is very poor so I'll give an example here.
for instance if you want to do (2x3)/5 you would type:
\FPmul\p{2}{3} % \p is the assignment of the operation 2x3
\FPupn\p{\p{} 7 round} % upn evaluates the assignment \p and rounds to 7dp
\FPdiv\q{\p}{5} % divides the assigned value p by 5 names result q
\FPupn\q{\q{} 4 round} % rounds the result to 4 decimal places and evaluates
$\frac{2\times3}{5}=\FPprint\q$ % This will print the result of the calculations in the math.
the FP commands are always ibvisible, only FPprint prints the result associated with it so your documents will not be messy, FP commands can be placed wherever you wish (not verb) as long as they are before the associated FPprint.
You could just paste it into symbolab which as a bonus has free step by step solutions. Also since symbolab uses mathquill it instantly formats your latex.
Considering that LaTeX itself is a Turing-complete markup language I strongly doubt you can build something like this that isn't built directly into LaTeX. Furthermore, LaTeX math matkup itself has next to no semantic meaning, it merely describes the visual appearance.
That being said, you can probably hack together something which recognizes a non-programmable subset of LaTeX math markup and spits out the result in the same way. If all you're interested in is simple arithmetics with fractions and integers (careful with decimal fractions, though, as they may appear as 3{,}141... in German texts :)) this shouldn't be too hard. But once you start with integrals, matrices, etc. I fear that LaTeX lacks expressiveness to accurately describe your intentions. It is a document preparation system, after all and thus not very suitable as input for computer algebra systems.
Side note: You can switch to Word which has—in its current version—a math markup language which is sufficiently LaTeX-like (by now it even supports LaTeX markup) and yet still Google-friendly for simpler terms:
With the free Microsoft Math add-in you can even let Word calculate expressions in-place:
There is none, because it is generally not possible.
LaTeX math mode markup is presentational markup and there are cases in which it does not provide enough information to calculate the expression.
That was one of the reasons MathML content markup was created and also why MathML is used in Mathematica. MathML actually is sort of two languages in one:
presentation markup
content markup
To accomplish what you are after you'll have to have MathML with comibned presentation and content markup (see MathML spec).
In my opinion your best bet is to use MathML (even if it is verbose) and convert to LaTeX when necessary. That said, I also like LaTeX syntax best and maybe what we need is a compact syntax for MathML (something similar in spirit to RelaxNG compact syntax).
For calculations with LaTeX you can use a CalcTeX package.
This package understand elements of LaTeX language and makes an calculations, for example your problem is avialble on
http://sg.bzip.pl/CalcTeX/examples/frac.tgz
or just please write
\noindent
For calculation please use following enviromentals
$515.1544 + 454$
or
\[ \frac{154.7}{25}-(289-\frac{1337}{42.})
\]
or
\begin{equation}
154.7/25-(289-1337/42.)
\end{equation}
For more info please visite project web site or contact author of this project.
For performing the math within your LaTeX itself, you might also look into the pgfmath package, which is more powerful and convenient than the calc package. You can find out how to use it from Part VI of The TikZ and PGF Packages Manual, which you can find here (version 2.10 currently): http://mirror.unl.edu/ctan/graphics/pgf/base/doc/generic/pgf/pgfmanual.pdf
Emacs calc-mode accepts latex-input. I use it daily. Press "d", followed by "L" to enter latex input mode. Press "'" to open a prompt where you can paste your tex.
Anyone saing it is not possible is wrong.
IIRC Mathematica can do it.
There is none, because it is generally not possible. LaTeX math mode
markup is presentational markup and there are cases in which it does
not provide enough information to calculate the expression.
You are right. LaTeX as it is does not provide enough info to make any calculations.Moreover, it does not represent any information to do it. But nobody prevents to wright in LaTeX format a text that contains such an information.
It is a difficult path, because you need to build a system of rules superimposed on what content ofthe text in Latex format needs to contain that it would be recognizable by your interpreter. And then convince the user that it is necessary to learn, etc. etc...
The easiest way to create a logical and intuitive calculator of mathematical expressions. And the expression is already possible to convert latex. It's almost like what you said. This is implemented in the program which I have pointed to. AnEasyCalc allows to type an expression as you type the plane text in any text editor. It checks, calculates and generate LateX string by its own then. Its very easy and rapid work. Just try and you will see that.
This is not exactly what you are asking for but it is a nice package
that you can include in a LaTeX document to do all kind of operations including arithmetic, calculus and even vectors and matrices:
The package name is "calculator"
http://mirror.unl.edu/ctan/macros/latex/contrib/calculator/calculator.pdf
The latex2sympy2 Python library can parse LaTeX math expressions.
from latex2sympy2 import latex2sympy
tex_str = r"""YOUR TEX MATH HERE"""
tex_str = r"\frac{9\pi}{\ln(12)}+22" # example TeX math
sympy_object = latex2sympy(tex_str)
evaluated_tex = float(sympy_object.evalf())
print(evaluated_tex)
This Python 3 code evaluates 9𝜋/ln(12)+22 (in its LaTeX from above) to 33.37842899841745.
The snippet above only handles basic algebraic simplification (math expressions without variables). Since the library converts LaTeX math to SymPy objects, the above code can easily be tweaked and extended to handle much more complicated LaTeX math (including solving derivatives, integrals, etc...).
The latex2sympy2 library can be installed via the pip command: pip install --user latex2sympy2
<>
try the AnEasyCalc program. It allows to get the latex formula very easy:
http://steamandwater.od.ua/AnEasyCalc/
:)