• 29 Posts
  • 47 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2024

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  • That would work if dates are not reused. But if you have a block of \DTMsavedate variables in the preamble and then refer to those dates throughout the doc by the variable name you assign, the spreadsheet would be more trouble than it’s worth because you would have to copy-paste all the dates into the spreadsheet, choose the new format, copy them back, and risk the update anomaly in the event that you revise a date in the preamble. Could be useful for some situations though. But I guess I would still rather replicate \DTMsetdatestyle{default}\DTMsetup{datesep=/} in every cell that needs it.





  • Literally just print as PDF on Windows, you can pick if you want greyscale or coloured…

    That’s a non-starter for the same reason I mention: color backgrounds are dithered and colored text becomes various shades of gray, not black. There are lots of dithering techniques to experiment with and some might yield black text, but if I am producing a PDF I would not want to impose that kind of expertise and experimentation on the end user.

    I am asking how to produce a PDF that has a mono mode and a color mode – and whether that technology even exists. If the PDF is rendered on the screen, it might have color backgrounds. But when printed to a mono device, the color backgrounds should be stripped out (or not, depending on my specification).

    If you want to produce a nice PDF from a markdown document, I recommend the knitr package in RStudio with R, and writing an .Rmd file such that you can just place all your graphs/code/text in it as you write, including LaTeX stuff.

    I am not starting from a markdown doc, but I would if that made a difference. I’ve never used RStudio. Does that produce a PDF that has two representations, mono and color?















  • I’m so tired of overly busy qr codes.

    I’m tired of having to search through text to get enough of an idea of what a QR code is before I go to the trouble of pulling out a scanner. Is it an URL? Wi-Fi creds? It’s not about being cute. It’s about being informative in as little space as possible. Do you scan a naked QR code without cause? Street wise users want an indication of what they are scanning in the very least.

    It should also be noted that the QR code pixels will get smaller and smaller the more data you’re encoding.

    You have control over that. If you want to hold the pixel size constant, the qr code’s geometry gets bigger. The qrcode LaTeX pkg includes a size parameter. Either way, up to 30% of the space could be wasted, depending on the use case.

    QR codes have countless applications. Not all QR codes need to be scanned from the other side of a room. When a QR code appears on a document that someone is holding, as opposed to a sign, it only needs to function within 10cm. I’m working on 2-column bilingal legal documents citing laws from different countries. There is insufficient space for country indicators and 30% of the QR code is just wasted space in this context, which really adds up of you have many QR codes. In a corner case, flaws from multiple generations of photocopies could manifest but 30% redundancy is overkill. So putting the country indicator for the law being referenced inside the QR code makes the most efficient use of page real estate without resorting to poor aesthetics.

    Also, QR codes are ugly. I’m happy to see creative people dress them up. Of course there is only room for clever artists in this space and easy for kids making qr codes to get carried away.






  • Two possible issues w/that w.r.t my use case:

    • not in official Debian repos – not a show stopper but definately points against it for installation and maintenance burdons across migrations
    • apparently read-only access for users. This is fine in simple cases where I would just be sharing with others, but a complete solution enables users to share with others on the same server by uploading. Otherwise everyone with a file to share must run rejetto hfs.

    Nonetheless, I appreciate the suggestion. It could be handy in some situations.






  • What’s the point of spending a day compressing something that I only need to watch once?

    If I pop into the public library and start a ripping process using Handbrake, the library will close for the day before the job is complete for a single title. I could check-out the media, but there are trade-offs:

    • no one else can access the disc while you have it out
    • some libraries charge a fee for media check-outs
    • privacy (I avoid netflix & the like to prevent making a record in a DB of everything I do; checking out a movie still gets into a DB)
    • libraries tend to have limits on the number of media discs you can have out at a given moment
    • checking out a dozen DVDs will take a dozen days to transcode, which becomes a race condition with the due date
    • probably a notable cost in electricity, at least on my old hardware