Top new questions this week:

Any difference between \newcommand{\foo}{foo} and \newcommand{\foo}[0]{foo}?

I have a co-author who defines many macros as e.g. \newcommand{\foo}[0]{foo}, explicitly giving the number of arguments even when it’s zero, where I have always previously used and seen ...

{macros} {optional-arguments}

asked by Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine 15 votes answered by David Carlisle 20 votes

Why does the TeX scanner process tokens for register numbers and macro names differently?

This is a "How does TeX know when to stop" question. Case 1 Note: I have since found out that my understanding here is wrong. See SPOILER and answers. When TeX is constructing a macro name, it ...

{macros} {tex-core} {token-lists} {registers}

asked by macmadness86 14 votes answered by David Carlisle 15 votes

How to Finish this Complex Plot using Tikz?

One more time, I am trying to get a rather complex figure in tikz and I can't. This is the output I desire: This is my best attempt so far: And this is the MWE of my best (yet poor) attempt: ...

{tikz-pgf}

asked by Héctor 14 votes answered by Torbjørn T. 19 votes

How do you pronounce letters generated with \Bbb and \mathbb?

I'm writing LaTeX to speech software. In LaTeX, I pronounce R as "Boldface Ar". How should I pronounce $$\Bbb R$$?

{bold} {letters} {italic} {accessibility} {pronunciation}

asked by Akiva 11 votes answered by Chris H 23 votes

How can I use \not with more than one symbol?

When using \not in math mode only the following symbol gets crossed, is there any way to apply it to more than one symbol evenly as if it were one operator? I tried \not{<:} but it doesn't work. ...

{math-mode} {pdftex}

asked by Panayiotis 11 votes answered by Ruben 9 votes

If newlines are converted to spaces, then where does catcode 5 come into the picture?

My goal is to understand the relationship between character bytes and character tokens with respect to new line bytes. I likely do not have my facts straight. When TeX reads a file of bytes, encoding ...

{tex-core} {token-lists}

asked by macmadness86 9 votes answered by David Carlisle 15 votes

How do I align enumerated equations to the left and text to the right?

I am listing a few relations with short and descriptive statements about them. The way I envision it, I'm trying to put relations on the left and labels on the right, aligned with respect to the left ...

{spacing} {horizontal-alignment} {numbering} {lists}

asked by giusti 9 votes answered by Werner 13 votes

Greatest hits from previous weeks:

How to add a forced line break inside a table cell

I have some text in a table and I want to add a forced line break. I want to insert a forced line break without having to specify the column width, i.e. something like the following: ...

{tables} {line-breaking}

asked by Denilson Sá Maia 396 votes answered by egreg 282 votes

How can I explain the meaning of LaTeX to my grandma?

I wrote a book about LaTeX, and my proud grandma wanted to have a copy. So she got it, said "What a beautiful picture on the cover!" and - "What is this, LaTeX?". She doesn't know Word, never used a ...

{latex-misc}

asked by Stefan Kottwitz 645 votes answered by Paul Dulaney 359 votes

Can you answer these?

table width automatically to page width

I am new user of LaTeX. I would like to ask a question, is there any command that automatically set the width of table to page width. I am using following code to add tables. Let us say for such ...

{tables}

asked by Waqas 3 votes

Biber and \printbiblist{shorttitle}: a problem with filters and shortened bibliographical descriptions

My question is related to this discussion: How to get abbreviations of the bibliography into the list of shorthands? Please take this code into consideration: \documentclass{article} ...

{biblatex} {biber} {acronyms}

asked by Aleksandar Zec 4 votes

PGFPlots: Understanding how to draw plots on different layers and arrange them

I have gone through previous questions [1,2,3], but I still couldn't figure out how to draw plots on different layers and change their order of drawing. For this MWE, I would be grateful if I could ...

{pgfplots} {pgflayers}

asked by Diaa Abidou 3 votes