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12:42 AM
Hey folks; sorry to intrude, but I was scanning the conversation from earlier & wanted to provide a few corrections
@JosephWright SE sites provide very little in the way of advertising. That's true both in the sense of "advertising for Stack Overflow" (SO gets nearly all of its traffic from folks searching Google for programming problems) and in the sense of "serving ads" (a handful of sites do run ads, but there's not a ton of money in it).
The best way to think of SE sites is probably... They exist because folks wouldn't allow non-programming questions on Stack Overflow.
Most other sites got their start from people who used Stack Overflow and liked the way it worked, but had some other vocation or interest that they prefer to spend their time on.
@JosephWright Canonical graciously allows us to use some of their branding for AU, but they don't pay for its operation. The closest thing to a "paid site" that we have currently is Quantum Computing, which is sponsored by (but not owned by) Strangeworks.
@FaheemMitha First venture capital investment was, I believe, in 2010. That was what led to the creation of Stack Exchange - prior to that, there were 3 Q&A sites (SO, SF and SU) and meta, all funded by ads, and a separate product called Stack Exchange that allowed folks to pay to run their own sites (with their own rules on their own domain).
The 2015 investment was notable primarily because Joel wrote a blog post about it, wherein he mostly didn't talk about the investment at all... Preferring to try to explain our rationale for continuing to operate these non-Stack-Overflow sites:
> Stack Overflow is the big city in the middle.
Regarding the health of the company... It's in reasonably good shape. That is, we're bringing in more revenue than it costs to operate, which is an improvement over a year ago.
That revenue comes primarily from three sources: advertising on the sites, the Jobs product, and the "private Stack Overflow" products (Enterprise and now Teams). The first is mostly Stack Overflow, while the last two are exclusively Stack Overflow.
That's not really much of a change. For better or worse, Stack Overflow has always been the only part of this that's really made any money; the rest of the sites are something we operate primarily as a service to the folks who make Stack Overflow work.
A long time ago, we had this idea that we'd be able to scale out each site in much the same way that Stack Overflow had scaled, funding the development of new sites with revenue from the ones that were growing. But, while collectively these sites have quite a number of people using them, no one site is even a tenth of the size of Stack Overflow.
And, that's ok. They're still useful, they're still mostly making the Internet a better place to find information. But, that left us with the problem of how to pay for their continued operation.
For a long time, the idea was that the Jobs (formerly Careers) product would solve this. But... Hiring is a bit of a fickle market. It's a good product and it makes a fair bit of money, but it also takes a pretty hefty amount of money to operate.
Perhaps more problematic: there's very little overlap between the product itself and what we're doing here with Q&A. Programmer jobs are hot; mathematician jobs, not quite so much. There's no benefit to the vast majority of people using the network from the work we put into building out Jobs, beyond the fact that the sites continued to exist.
That's what led to Enterprise and Teams: the work that's being done on them goes back into the same software that runs all the other sites. Bug fixes, new features, improved performance, etc... It doesn't just feed out bottom line, it has the potential to benefit everyone who uses this software, private and public.
...but that's also where the present bitter pill presents itself: while nominally the same software as the rest of the sites, the truth is that Stack Overflow had diverged significantly.
This is particularly true for the designs, which in some cases differed in major ways from those present in the base software.
If we want this to work, we need to get back to a state where every site is running the same software, where a bug doesn't have to be fixed dozens of times (or left unfixed on some sites), where a new feature can't be enabled without first investing time into styling it for every site.
That's a nice idea in abstract, but the problem we're facing is simply that... Some sites worked better than Stack Overflow. They had had more time put into their designs, into their typography, etc.
So it's a major step down when that's tossed away to bring the site in line with the base software.
Now... Long-term, the solution is to improve things for everyone. To fix all the bugs, to smooth the rough edges, to make things adjust smoothly to the needs of each community and individual.
But that's long-term. And that's only if we're both diligent in listening to feedback, and actually get feedback.
In the meantime, this isn't much fun for anyone.
And... We probably could've been a bit more clear about that. I apologize; it wasn't our intent to mislead or blindside anyone, but I suspect a fair bit of that happened all the same.
We'll try to do a better job of it next time around.
And with that, I'll stop messing up the place with this wall of text & wish y'all a good evening.
3 hours later…
4:40 AM
@Shog9 I personally appreciate your suggestions, but since it's entirely a wall of purely text with no style I can not distinguish which words are yours and which are from another users. If you could add bold of italic fonts I think we will all thank you
Btw hi! First time seeing you here (I'm new he...)
@CarLaTeX this is the moment when you know that job would be perfect for you but then you realized that you are studying Systems Engineering... and there is a 0,0001% of chance to be hired...
5:13 AM
@manooooh Why should studying System Engineering be a flaw?
@Shog9 Thanks for taking the time to drop in
@Shog9 I guess I mean 'advertising' in a different way :) Each site shows that the StackExchange model can be applied to a different area. That's the advertising I mean: you can point to this for people looking at self-hosted internal Q&A (I assume SE sells self-hosted solutions)
@Shog9 All makes sense, and fits in with how I've imagined the situation: certainly it's pleasing to hear that the main site actually makes money!
5:39 AM
@CarLaTeX we have a good general base, but programming LaTeX does not ... in fact it's weird, because I went to several teachers to ask them if I could collaborate with them transcribing the documents to LaTeX but they refused
@manooooh I don't thing the job concerns programming LaTeX, it is more for the help desk to the users. Teachers are jealous of their documents, they always think someone is stealing their ideas.
@CarLaTeX yup, are you teacher?
If it's not pure programming it sounds very nice
@manooooh No, I'm a bank clerk
@CarLaTeX Cobol to the rescue! Haha
@manooooh I programmed in COBOL for 20 years!
5:45 AM
@CarLaTeX yeeey
Prof. Van Duck would be proud
@manooooh I think the structure of a COBOL program is very similar to a LaTeX document, you have the preamble (identification division, working-storage section, etc.) and the main (procedure division), and you have to compile it. I think having worked in COBOL facilitated me to write in LaTeX :)
@CarLaTeX that seems worked ;). TeX/LaTeX language is about functional or logic paradigm? Or am I crazy using that concepts here?
@manooooh Too difficult to me to answer
6:03 AM
@manooooh Please don't star every message of mine, you should star only the ones which could be interesting also for other people :)
@CarLaTeX ok, let's unstar
Oh, a bad message appears above the screen
@manooooh Thanks :)
@manooooh Which one?
"It is too late to undo this operation"
@manooooh Don't worry, next time :)
@CarLaTeX will there be a "next time"? Quack
6:09 AM
@manooooh There's already been a next time. You didn't star my previous message :)
@CarLaTeX hmmmMMmM
@manooooh :)
@CarLaTeX "buddy I think she did checkmate"
@CarLaTeX have you ever played TEG?
Or anyone from here
@manooooh No, you know that I don't play videogames more complicated than Pac-Man :)
@CarLaTeX yes I know but it's a board game!
6:16 AM
@manooooh I didn't know it, sorry
@manooooh It seems something like Risiko
@CarLaTeX it's okay, with that game you can conquer the whole world by being a good strategist and putting together a tactical plan to fight with other players. Instead of the typical chips of all board games we would use ducklings
@CarLaTeX exactly
That game can me, I swear
@manooooh Yes, @UlrikeFischer already did it for the pieces of a chessboard :)
@CarLaTeX I want a picture of that!
@CarLaTeX Oh are you talking about @UlrikeFischer's photo profile?
6:37 AM
@manooooh No, I'm talking about real pieces. She posted a phito in chat, I'll search for it.
@CarLaTeX I'll wait for it. Btw I thought Ulrike was a man lol
@UlrikeFischer why did you answer ":)" for every Paulo question in a TeXtalk interview? That has caused me a lot of grace hahaha :)
6:57 AM
@manooooh the interview is a cleaned up version made by @PauloCereda from a conversation here in the chat.
@UlrikeFischer ahh, that's was so funny!
7:23 AM
@manooooh TeX is an expansion lanuage, so neither of the two you mention. If you want, you can say it's a paradigm on its own. Needless to say, other similar systems (LilyPond, Patoline, ...) are mostly based on functional languages.
@CarLaTeX cfr too?? Omg
@manooooh Yes, look at that conversation about sexual bias
@CarLaTeX that "till contrary evidence..." was proved lately?
@CarLaTeX I don't find it
7:37 AM
@UlrikeFischer nice board!
@UlrikeFischer You did it also with cardboard, didn't you?
@manooooh before the message I linked
@CarLaTeX I didn't, @samcarter gave them too me as a present: chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/43846848#43846848
@UlrikeFischer Those ones! I forgot they was a gift by @samcarter
@manooooh ^^^
@CarLaTeX oh I see now
@CarLaTeX woooh, how did she print them? Will she have cut them by hand?
7:56 AM
@manooooh I think so, but let's ask @samcarter
8:25 AM
@manooooh No hand cutting, else I would still be occupied :) Luckily there are machines for this: silhouetteamerica.com
8:46 AM
The following two images are comparison what a new users sees on the old vs. the new page
@samcarter WHY IN THE WORLD IS THE HUGE THING BLACK??? It feels worse then shouting!
@samcarter please, do you plan to mention this in meta?
@boycott.se-yo' That's probably the result of all this recent talk about being more welcoming etc....
@boycott.se-yo' Please feel free to add a post on meta - I'm not in the mood right now
@samcarter ok I will
@samcarter I'll use your screenshot if you don't mind
@boycott.se-yo' Sure
The black is a bit aggressive but it fits the top bar and the cookie message and the x to close the windows is clearly visible. It is obviously a try to clearly separate this stuff from the site content. Imho the main problem is that (unlike the cookie message) it does reappear when you reload the page. There should be a "don't show me this again" option.
A: TeX new site theme is live

boycott.se - yo'this-is-horrible-and-horrifying Unregistered vistors view Picture worth a thousand words: The issues: IT'S ALL BLACK! If I came to a site with this amount of black, I would frighten away! The middle black thing is so dominant that you barely see anything else. Maybe it's the intent, to sep...

9:18 AM
@boycott.se-yo' I like your idea i.stack.imgur.com/HZAvC.png very much. A small change but it looks much better!
@samcarter well, it makes the white background clearly the background, whereas before it was confusing whether the site is white or black
@boycott.se-yo' Previously my first impression was that the site did not render correctly, that somehow the either the logo with the light background or the big black box are positioned incorrectly - but this feeling all vanished in your mock-up.
@boycott.se-yo' Really a good and constructive feedback - thanks for writing the post!
@samcarter well, let's hope SE is able to react to it properly :-)
@boycott.se-yo' How could they not, I read that they are listening :)
@samcarter but you can be listening in various modes: God, Google, CIA, ...
1 hour later…
10:29 AM
github.com/vihanb/PPCG-Design That is an interesting project - they created a whole site theme for main, meta and chat and many more functions with only 1k lines of code.
@samcarter impressive, but sadly it needs js :(
@Skillmon Yes, but only because they have to apply it to the finished site. If Stackexchange would integrate the users of their communities in the branding process, it could be much easier to come up with customised themes.
1 hour later…
12:01 PM
@JosephWright @DavidCarlisle quick Q for xparse, the arg for the t specifier should be a single char, what if we what it to look for a specific macroname? (currently that works but gives a warning)
12:15 PM
@DavidCarlisle I had to Google how to exit emacs. :)
12:38 PM
@CarLaTeX just sent my job application to Overleaf.
@Skillmon May I ask what is your "best LaTeX package ever"? tikzducks, tikzmarmots, ducksay?
@Skillmon Great! Good luck!
@TeXnician No, duckuments!
@CarLaTeX Oh right, I forgot about that :)
@TeXnician :)
12:54 PM
@PauloCereda answer: never
@PauloCereda you don't exit your operating systems, you shutdown them :)
@boycott.se-yo' ooh
@TeXnician honestly, I chose graphicx. I think it is the most useful in average, especially thinking of the number and frequency of uses.
@boycott.se-yo' :) But what if Emacs had a decent text editor?
@Skillmon that's the dream come true, that your OS and your editor are completely unified.
@boycott.se-yo' well, you could use VIM for the editor part. But I think VIM doesn't have a good web browser built in
1:03 PM
@Skillmon You don't use lynx inside vim? See vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=4315
@Skillmon but it works the other way around!
@boycott.se-yo' not any more. That used to be the case with Pentadactyl. I didn't find a perfect replacement for that, though.
@Skillmon there seem to be things like Vimium-FF, but I've never used these. Since I started doing the editor's job, I became quite a mouse guy
@TeXnician while Lynx is a funny experience, it certainly is no good one (the web turned pretty coloured and image heavy, Lynx might have been something useable but it is no more).
@boycott.se-yo' I'm using Tridactyl, but it is slower and less stable than Penta was, and due to WebExt limitations it can't do everything (like launching a VIM instance for the every insert box)
@Skillmon Well, what I love about Lynx is their user experience. Questions like "Möchten Sie Kekse akzeptieren" are always funny :)
1:07 PM
@TeXnician didn't use it that much, I think.
@TeXnician also my OS is in English, so my Lynx is also English, not German.
@TeXnician and that joke really doesn't work as good in English :(
@Skillmon I guess a few people did. Probably text-based browser have been abandoned by the most (but I love them as I can use them while installing a GUI on my machine).
@Skillmon That's really unfortunate, yes. But in the times of the IoT, the question will become more relevant :)
@TeXnician I love them in principle, too, and they are certainly useful while setting up a new Arch installation, but most of the web doesn't work that way anymore :(
@Skillmon Well, we obviously share experiences on Arch installations :) Fortunately, I know which sites to browse then.
@TeXnician and fortunately the Arch Wiki is well legible in Lynx :)
1:20 PM
@Skillmon Well yes, that's pretty important. Although I still feel a bit displaced when reading the article about installing (or fixing) a specific desktop environment in the TTY :)
I am using command \setlength{\parindent}{5ex} in my TeXmaker. Every para is well adjusted: there is a little blank space on the left, as I would expect. But the very first para in every section does not show a blank space on the left. How to overcome this?
@Silent this depends on the used class.
@Skillmon I am using documentclass report.
@Silent Try loading the package indentfirst.
ok, thanks!!!
1:24 PM
@TeXnician excellent package:-)
@TeXnician Wow that really worked! Thanks a ton
@DavidCarlisle Yes, its complexity is astonishing. I guess that you are very safe pretending it is bug-free :)
@Silent You're welcome.
@TeXnician and probably has the highest documentation to code ratio of any package
@DavidCarlisle Probably. Just out of interest: TeX Live contains v1.03, how did the previous versions look? Simpler?
@TeXnician it hasn't changed this century.there are only 4 tokens in the actual code.
1:29 PM
@DavidCarlisle Yeah, I know, but I just wondered how a previous version could have looked like because I can't imagine a less verbose version. Probably I'll have to look into the SVN.
@DavidCarlisle last change 1994? Let me guess, 1.01 was an adaptation for LaTeX2.09, 1.02 was for LaTeX2e beta, and 1.03 was for LaTeX2e.
@Skillmon something like that it's all a long time ago:-)
2:18 PM
@DavidCarlisle that's such a dirty trick!!!
I have a question. I just compiled my CV with pdflatex with texlive2018, and I notice that the resulting pdf is more than twice the size of my previously compiled CV, which I did with pdflatex in texlive2017. What is the reason behind this massive increase?
For what it's worth, my new pdf is produced with pdfTeX-1.40.19, my old with pdfTeX-1.40.18
@Sverre what size are the pdf files? This could be many things: different font embedding, compression on/off, ... I haven't encountered this, bud someone else may have
Old files are 140kb and 160kb, new files are 302kb and 316kb
2:41 PM
@boycott.se-yo' you hadn't looked before? I am sure you meant to say concise and elegant code
@boycott.se-yo' and other math-centric folks -- here's a cute effect i encountered today: a table embedded in a theorem environment ended up with everything in italic. the copyeditor marked every cell individually to be made roman. yikes! (the author actually tried to change the font of the cells in the header by wrapping them in $...$, then gave up.)
@Sverre what does pdfinfo say about them?
@barbarabeeton that was new
@daleif -- nothing is foolproof. even with one's best efforts, fools are getting more devious.
2:58 PM
@barbarabeeton that's so cute :)
@DavidCarlisle in TeX, elegant and dirty seem to coincide.
@boycott.se-yo' -- somehow, i knew you'd appreciate it.
RIP Aretha Franklin.
3:33 PM
@JosephWright I guess; that's not really how they're used / seen though. TeX exists because folks wanted to share information about TeX/LaTeX, not because anyone wanted to target TeX users.
SO is always the best (and... worst) ad for SO
@Shog9 thanks for your comments above, I linked to them from my answer in the meta site tex.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/7781/…
@JosephWright you remember ExpertsExchange by any chance? That site was pretty much the reason why SO was created... Here's a bit of history on how it ended up the way it did. The worst thing that can happen, from our perspective at least, is that SO gets itself into a bind and has to sell to someone who'll just try to wring money out of it.
Hence the effort to keep it self-sustaining (without relying too much on ads).
@DavidCarlisle not sure I said anything relevant, but... Glad it helped somehow :)
/cough backslash issue cough
@DavidCarlisle How do I use pdfinfo?
@Shog9 well I guess you didn't say anything we didn't know or guess, but sometimes it's better if you say anything rather than saying nothing:-)
@Sverre on the command line type pdfinfo myfile.pdf and it gives you some information about the pdf (more or less same as a "properties" menu in a pdf viewer).
3:45 PM
@DavidCarlisle sadly, I didn't even say anything that we hadn't already said publicly... Just not in the right places I guess.
Software folks often have this fixation on Don't Repeat Yourself. But... That's counter to how effective communication works, as any educator can tell you.
You gotta say the same thing, to each audience, each time they need to hear it, in whatever way is understandable to them.
And... Sometimes that means telling the same story every month for years.
@Shog9 before the change I had seen public statements that the back ends of the sites would be unified and that as a result some custom styling would be lost. That's actually quite understandable. What we were not warned about that was that the new layout would be indescribably ugly, and actually unusable at many reasonable window sizes and that users would be forced to re-style the site with user css in order to be able to continue at all.
@DavidCarlisle Their output is identical expect that one says the producer is pdfTeX-1.40.18 and the other pdfTeX-1.40.19
@Sverre hmm I give up then, sorry:-)
Oh no! I was right on track for 12345 points, but someone upvoted a question of mine, landing me at 12340. I am going to overshoot that nice rep now.
@DavidCarlisle well... I'm not sure we really knew what the results would look like beforehand, much less how they'd be received. Design is often a very personal thing; folks like what they like and woe betide you if you say otherwise. We talked about the general concepts of this design several times, going back to the end of last year where our head designer at the time shared the research he'd been doing.
But, there's a vast difference between the abstract and the concrete here.
3:53 PM
@Shog9 yes I don't assign any malice here (and I don't expect to get the old style back) but some movement on the width of the main content would be appreciated. really it hardly seems worth the effort trying to formulate a good answer if it is going to be squashed into insignificance by two sidebars taking more than half the window width and with virtually no useful content in either.
@DavidCarlisle mmm, yes. AFAIK, we haven't really touched the right sidebar design yet; the only major concession to responsiveness there is shoving it to the bottom at some threshold. And, honestly, that's better than nothing - I use mobile devices quite a bit, and sorely missed having stuff like linked questions available in the mobile theme. But, we can do so much better; it'll just take time and a whole lot of work.
but more important issues (like food) to deal with now, discussion of web design will have to wait:-)
@Shog9 politically that was probably a mistake, almost all the frustration has been generated by the right sidebar....
Politics has never really been our strong point
But, yeah... Lesson learned.
The irony here is that this all went through a LOT of usability testing & refinement already... Just goes to show, nothing beats actual hands-on use by power users.
4:04 PM
@Shog9 I wonder, why hamburgering or similar designs are not an option? I know you have plans with the left side, but as of now, all that's there could be 5 icons. This would leave much more space horizontally
@Shog9 one of your collegues wrote somewhere that the (in my eyes too) enormous width of the right bar is due to "industry standard ads sizes". You don't want many ads (which is good), but imho large ads intruding in "my" space are even more problematic -- even if like in tex.sx there are actually no ads or only very few.
@UlrikeFischer IMHO, this is a first bad tradeoff between advertising ("money making") and usability. So far SE did very very very well in incorporating ads.
@samcarter nice
4:22 PM
@HaraldHanche-Olsen Commisserations.
@boycott.se-yo' hamburgering?
like, a button you click to get the sidebar?
that's an option for the left sidebar. Two hamburgers seems excessive though.
@Shog9 I'm puzzled by this. Because, IMO it's blindingly obvious that the text is being squished, at least. I know sod all about HTML, or CSS of any of those things, and it was blindingly obvious to me. I wonder who did all this usability testing. And why not ask high rep users from the affected sites to do a look at a preview first? Which doesn't seem to have happened, because we've seen said high rep users make caustic remarks about the changes. Personally, I'd at least have asked @Gilles.
@Shog9 I never say no to a hamburger. :)
I mean, if I didn't have a department for usablity and testing, and needed to hire one person, Gilles would be a pretty good candidate
@FaheemMitha Thanks; I'll live through it. 8)
4:30 PM
@FaheemMitha it's a lot better on phones (well... My phone; standard-size android phones - iphones may have issues). And at 1280px wide or above window sizes it's pretty solid. But if you're doing, say, half-width browser on a medium-size monitor, that's another story.
@Shog9 Yes, I've noticed (and others are commented), that the site seems to have been optimized for phones. And I realise it's the 21st century and so on. But I personally don't use a phone to browse the web. And would hate to have to do so.
@UlrikeFischer there's a loooong story there
@FaheemMitha well, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, but it is convenient at times
@Shog9 Yes, I realise that too.
As I said before, I kinda feel like this is a bit of a stop-gap; long-term, a proper responsive layout should probably break up the right sidebar, integrate some information into the post(s), some into the footer, some maybe interleaved with answers, and some hidden behind menus.
Or, heck, put some of it into the left sidebar. Lotta free space there.
But... That's a project. There are a lot of different things that can show up on the right right now - everything from the bulletin (which isn't really relevant to any one post) to linked questions. And, of course, ads, which we have contracts for (some probably negotiated before this "responsive" thing was even a concept) and can't just change on a whim.
So it's gonna take a bit of time to sort all that out.
@Shog9 yes, let me dig a screenshot. Well, the point is that if the left menu collapses, the right panel need not to
4:38 PM
@boycott.se-yo' oh. Yeah, that's an option in user preferences right now. I tend to think it should be an option on the page itself - pin/unpin. I have two web apps - VSTS and Tweetdeck - open right now that just shrink up to a thin column of icons if you click an arrow at the bottom, and expand just as fast.
I don't much care for the icon idea, but a button that shrinks the sidebar into a hamburger when you don't need it regularly and pins it open when you do seems like a reasonable thing to have.
@Shog9 yeah, well, I think that the left menu should do this automatically on narrow screens, in some way
^^ example from an information system I work with regularly.
@boycott.se-yo' yep, that's pretty close to what VSTS does
@Shog9 -- what seems to have happened on my monitor is that the text in the q&a and meta sites, the size of the type has decreased. it's now noticeably smaller than the type in the chat (i'm comparing them side by side). that, along with the decreased width of the text block makes it quite hard on the eyes. also, by company policy, i can't install anything (like the mods suggested by other tex users) that would help. so it makes my job harder.
@barbarabeeton Ctrl + NumpadPlus could help, browsers tend to remember this setting between sessions... If there's no numpad, then it can be found in the menus I think
@barbarabeeton really? That's odd. Text here is smaller for me
You know how to use the DOM inspector in your browser?
4:42 PM
@Shog9 then I think this should be the default behaviour. Then I believe you accommodate for much many more users than currently. Should I post this suggestion somewhere?
I get 15px Arial on main right now, and 12px Verdana in chat.
@boycott.se-yo' sure, go ahead - grab as many examples as you can.
@boycott.se-yo' Here's a similar idea:
@Shog9 it's gonna be my 5th or so answer in the thread I think...
A: Live: Left nav, new theming and responsiveness

Steven Vascellarofeature-requeststatus-review Instead of adding a "hide" option in user settings, have you considered making the sidebar toggleable with a button instead? Advantages of a togglable sidebar: Site maintains a consistent look and feel between users. More intuitive than searching through setting...

@barbarabeeton I don't have smaller size in the main site (and I didn't adapt font size, only the one of the titles). Also can't your browser zoom in?
@Shog9 -- how can i check that? (i've noted elsewhere that when anyone else looks at my screen, they already comment that they don't see how i can read it because everything is too small.)
4:45 PM
@barbarabeeton what browser?
@Shog9 my suggestion is yet slightly different, I don't like hiding, I prefer collapsing.
@boycott.se-yo' yup. Still might want to reference it, I think the intent is largely the same.
@UlrikeFischer -- yes, the browser can zoom in, but then i'm left with a scrollbar, which i find unpleasant.
@Shog9 I'll ping Joe there, no need to create a separate answer now I think. If he does not reply, I'll change into an answer.
@Shog9 -- firefox 52.7.4 (32 bit), on a windows workstation. (it's the version standard for my employer, unmodifiable by me.)
4:48 PM
@JoeFriend Have you considered simply making the left navigation hamburgered (I hope I use the right word)? That is, not hide it, but rather _collapse it into icons only. See OPEN vs CLOSED in a system I use elsewhere. — yo' 51 secs ago
@barbarabeeton mmm, yeah that's a wee bit old, but I'll take a guess
First, sanity-check: hit Ctrl+0
that'll reset the zoom level to 100%
no sense in messing with the DOM inspector if that's off
@barbarabeeton doesn't happen for me. When I zoom the responsiveness kicks in and at the end I see something like this (that's the full monitor!)
if the font still looks small after that then right-click a bit of normal text and select "inspect element"
then click the "computed" tab on the right-hand pane of the inspector and scroll down until you find "font-size"
(or just type "font-size" into the filter area of that right-hand pane)
SHOULD say "15px"
if it says anything else... Take a screenshot with the inspector open pls
@Shog9 -- okay. that does enlarge the text, but given that i've narrowed the browser window to where i can still work in other windows, the result is at the cutoff point where the right-hand panel cuts out. so that's my problem. regarding old browser version, i can ask systems about that -- they're so diligent about installing new microsoft patches, i rashly assumed that they would also upgrade other necessary software. apparently wrong ...
@barbarabeeton yeah; that probably isn't affecting things in this particular instance, but it'd be a good idea to get updates for other reasons. Newer versions of FF are considerably more snappy if nothing else; that just makes life a bit nicer in general.
Anyway, timely example of why pushing the right-bar to the bottom of the page ain't great either.
while you're talking to IT, see if you can cajole a bigger monitor out of 'em ;-)
4:58 PM
@Shog9 -- actually says 16px, and font is reported as arial.
Arial is correct
16px is not, but... That's actually bigger than what I get for some reason
gotta run to a meeting, will poke at this later
@Shog9 -- hah! i've already got about the biggest monitor in the place, except for the ones used by the graphics folks -- i think it's a 27in. but i keep x-windows open for three different unix boxes, as two different "users". (i'm a support person for authors and typesetting production for a math publisher. so i have to be able to segregate in-house from "public" environments.)
@Shog9 -- thanks much. i've learned some useful stuff here.
Background image on the main site seems to have changed...
@Werner it has!
@Werner hello, btw :)
@boycott.se-yo' Hi hi! :D
Haven't been here in a while.
Seems like the design discussions are still lively.
5:09 PM
@Werner that's what I thought (but given my bad memory on people, I didn't dare say anything...)
@boycott.se-yo' My track record: chat.stackexchange.com/users/20341/werner
4 posts this week. :-o
So it seems like some things are happening to accommodate graduated sites?
@Werner I seem not to get any record (may be only for oneself?)
@Werner well, people put it here in various words, mostly sarcastic and worse :D
@boycott.se-yo' Oh...
@boycott.se-yo' The reception of the "go live" post has been negative...
With TeX new site theme is live scoring a solid -34.
@Werner well, my favourite is by @percusse :D
A: TeX new site theme is live

percussestatus-90s-calling boxes-boxes-everywhere look-even-tags-are-boxes status-if-yahoo-can-why-shouldnt-we screen-space-is-overrated Don't forget to install our favorite Stackexchange AOL toolbar and SE! Messenger

@boycott.se-yo' Ha ha!
5:14 PM
@Werner it's a record-maker at our site. I think no other post has made it this deep ever, not even spam and stuff... Joseph had to make it featured because it disappeared from the question feed!
@boycott.se-yo' Well, it doesn't display on the main Meta page.
@Werner exactly :-) that's why the second post has to exist :D
5:46 PM
@PauloCereda ^^^^
@UlrikeFischer ooh
Hi :)
I want to use \xrightarrow{} without argument, but I get an undefined control sequence error, even though I get the expected result. How can I omit the argument of xrightarrow syntactically correct?
@Felix.C Show a minimal example that replicates your issue...
@Felix.C and you don't get any error with \xrightarrow{a}?
6:18 PM
@boycott.se-yo' Thx for the hint, actually abs was undefined...thx for the help though^^
2 hours later…
8:02 PM
@UlrikeFischer why is my first association "RUBBER GODZILLA"?
@boycott.se-yo' are you actually boycotting anything, or just changed your name?
8:22 PM
@Werner the surprising thing is that it is actually 10-44, how come it got 10 upvotes, are there really people who like the new scheme?
@DavidCarlisle I'm not providing answers (not that I made lots of answers recently :D )
@boycott.se-yo' I'm not providing questions
@DavidCarlisle me neither :)
@boycott.se-yo' actually my restyled site theme hasn't got an ask a question button, it seemed even less useful than the sidebars, so it had to go.
@DavidCarlisle lol
8:32 PM
@DavidCarlisle I would add the sans-serif fonts, if I decided to do so many customizations anyway.
@boycott.se-yo' i didn't do so many customisations, actually I only changed the relative widths of the right sidebar and the main content. The duck background is just so I can tell the customisation is in effect (typicallly I have it in FF and off in Chrome, so I can compare) and the missing ask a question is just because I could.
9:03 PM
Funny to see someone as cool and laid back as David using words like "complete design disaster".
2 hours later…
10:55 PM
@DavidCarlisle It might not be in support of the concept, but rather that they're encouraged by the process of having a "discussion."
I understand some people use the voting mechanism as a form of "read check" on posts, regardless of the content.
