evenwicht

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/39371179

I want to produce a PDF that looks good on the screen in color. Of course if I do that well with color backgrounds and all, the same document will look lousy when printed on a monochrome laser printer. E.g. consider a text box with color background. The background will go through a dithering algorithm which often enshitifies the text layer on top of that. Likewise on mono e-readers.

In principle, the doc needs two different representations. One for color and one for mono. As rich as the PDF standard is, I don’t think I have ever seen a PDF with multiple modes. So LaTeX aside, does the PDF standard even support this?

I can think of a hack using PDF layers which is supported by the ocgx2 LaTeX package. Color backgrounds could be isolated to a switchable layer. This is not great though because the end user needs to be aware of the layer and must take a manual action to turn off the background layer before printing as black and white. And still, non-black foreground text will print as gray unless foreground text is in a layer too (yikes).

Am I S.O.L?

I want to produce a PDF that looks good on the screen in color. Of course if I do that well with color backgrounds and all, the same document will look lousy when printed on a monochrome laser printer. E.g. consider a text box with color background. The background will go through a dithering algorithm which often enshitifies the text layer on top of that. Likewise on mono e-readers.

In principle, the doc needs two different representations. One for color and one for mono. As rich as the PDF standard is, I don’t think I have ever seen a PDF with multiple modes. So LaTeX aside, does the PDF standard even support this?

I can think of a hack using PDF layers which is supported by the ocgx2 LaTeX package. Color backgrounds could be isolated to a switchable layer. This is not great though because the end user needs to be aware of the layer and must take a manual action to turn off the background layer before printing as black and white. And still, non-black foreground text will print as gray unless foreground text is in a layer too (yikes).

Am I S.O.L?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/39370362

lemmyonline.com is dead, yet this community came up in a search. Anyone know the history? Is lemmyonline.com perhaps new and access restricted? Or old but dead with residual ghosts?

I haven’t tried to connect to it yet. But I see that there is a “Kobo Desktop” which is the official way to manage the Kobo. But that app is not linux and hacks to make it work on linux are apparently gone?

But then I find this thread saying that it simply attaches as a mass storage device. I’m glad to hear I can expect that to work. So is there any reason to want to get the Kobo Desktop working, which I assume would entail emulating Windows?

Some Kobos can be liberated to run PostmarketOS, but looks scary for the Aura, which apparently does not even boot.

In cases where a Kobo can be liberated, someone mentions that you have a choice between staying with the vendor kernal or switching to the mainline. But you lose the ability to run some of the vendor apps if you go mainline. So I wonder what it means in the end to liberate it but to keep the vendor’s kernel.

Has anyone fiddled with liberating the Kobo Aura, w/PostmarketOS or others?

I use LaTex to create 2-column documents, one column for each language. Works great for me, but I wonder what other people use.

I have a 2-column latex doc where one column is my mother tongue and the other column is a machine translation. I will need a collaborator to manually improve the machine translation. I cannot expect them to handle LaTeX. My code-heavy doc would be painful for someone who does not know latex. So I wonder what 2-column format and tools would normal people use.

@hesburger@sopuli.xyz

Is it to discuss machine translators? To find human translators?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/38677119

Indeed it was stupid for someone to send a large sensitive dataset over email. But what I find annoying is the lack of chatter about which email servers were compromised.

Was it Microsoft, considering probably 90+% of all gov agencies use it?

Indeed it was stupid for someone to send a large sensitive dataset over email. But what I find annoying is the lack of chatter about which email servers were compromised.

Was it Microsoft, considering probably 90+% of all gov agencies use it?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/38675590

I unwittingly had shares in a company that made fentanyl before the crisis hit. I had the shares for something else they produced; didn’t know the company made fentanyl. The CEO and top managers were arrested and convicted because of some perversely unlawful activity. The stock became worthless and I was severely burnt. It felt a bit off that the millionaires at the top apparently got to keep their own money as they went to prison. They were naturally shielded from the company structure. My stock was worth zero and I recovered nothing from the bankruptcy. Lost every penny.

I thought perhaps fair enough. The risk was mine as a shareholder. Risk is what we sign up for when playing in the stock market.

Yet Facebook shareholders are suing Zuck personally on the basis of a civil offense, not criminal, for deliberately violating the privacy policy? FB is nowhere near bankrupt. Did it even take a notable long-term hit from the Cambridge Analytica scandal?

From a utilitarian standpoint, FB shareholders are scum for supporting that shitty company (neglecting holders of mutual funds and other managed funds where they lack awareness and control). OTOH, Zuck himself is the biggest piece of shit. It’s bad-on-bad, and Zuck losing his ass is justice.

But then I have to wonder, if Zuck loses the corporate shield that protects his personal money over a violating a contract, why do shareholders of a drug company not get the same privilege when it acts criminally?

I unwittingly had shares in a company that made fentanyl before the crisis hit. I had the shares for something else they produced; didn’t know the company made fentanyl. The CEO and top managers were arrested and convicted because of some perversely unlawful activity. The stock became worthless and I was severely burnt. It felt a bit off that the millionaires at the top apparently got to keep their own money as they went to prison. They were naturally shielded from the company structure. My stock was worth zero and I recovered nothing from the bankruptcy. Lost every penny.

I thought perhaps fair enough. The risk was mine as a shareholder. Risk is what we sign up for when playing in the stock market.

Yet Facebook shareholders are suing Zuck personally on the basis of a civil offense, not criminal, for deliberately violating the privacy policy? FB is nowhere near bankrupt. Did it even take a notable long-term hit from the Cambridge Analytica scandal?

From a utilitarian standpoint, FB shareholders are scum for supporting that shitty company (neglecting holders of mutual funds and other managed funds where they lack awareness and control). OTOH, Zuck himself is the biggest piece of shit. It’s bad-on-bad, and Zuck losing his ass is justice.

But then I have to wonder, if Zuck loses the corporate shield that protects his personal money over a violating a contract, why do shareholders of a drug company not get the same privilege when it acts criminally?

URLs can be long and ugly as fuck, littered with special LaTeX-reserved characters like “#”, “_”, “%”, “&”, “@”, “~”, …etc.

The hyperref package apparently does some sophisticated gymnastics to handle the special chars. The \url{} and \href{}{} macros work for most (if not all) chars. But it becomes a shit-show when the same URL is used in multiple places in multiple representations. E.g. I often need to have a hyperlink as a readable string that visits an URL when clicked. \href from the hyperref pkg does that. But of course the URL is lost when the doc is printed. So the URL needs to become a footnote, which means the shitty-looking ungodly long URL must be entered twice. For example, a first attempt might look like this:

The \href{https://lemmy.sdf.org/c/tex_typesetting}{TeX community}\footnote{\scriptsize\verb|https://lemmy.sdf.org/c/tex_typesetting|} is where we discuss `\LaTeX`.

There is an underscore, which probably has to be escaped in the \verb but not the \href (not sure ATM- it’s hard to keep track of all the exceptions). Of course it’s quite annoying that the URL appears twice. So the temptation to thwart redundancy leads to this:

\newcommand{\hardlink}[2]{\href{#1}{#2}\footnote{\scriptsize#1}}

Disaster, because some chars need to be escaped for the footnote but if you escape those same chars for the \href, the backslashes appear literally in the hyperlink which is broken as a result. Another problem is when using minipages to get two columns, the footnote width is cut in half thus forcing long URLs to wrap at the horizontal midpoint of the page instead of continuing and using the wasted footer space under the right column. \mbox fixes that. So after much fiddling with blind hacks like \urlescape, \noexpandarg, \normalexpandarg, and \expandafter, I arrived at this:

\newcommand{\hardlink}[2]{\href{#1}{#2}\footnote{\scriptsize\mbox{\detokenize{#1}}}}

The \detokenize works for some special chars but not others. So still a fuckin’ mess. A LaTeX wizard of sorts went off to work on this problem for me, and came up with this:

\makeatletter
% NOTE: The following is an ugly hack that temporary redefines an internal
%       command of hyperref to process the verbatim URL. There is no warranty
%       and no support for this code or documents using this code!
\newcommand*{\footnotelink}{%
  \global\let\original@hyper@@link\hyper@@link
  \let\hyper@@link\onetime@special@hyper@@link% ugly hack
  \href
}
\newcommand*{\onetime@special@hyper@@link}[3]{%
  \global\let\hyper@@link\original@hyper@@link% ugly hack
  \hyper@@link{#1}{#2}{#3}%
  \IfArgIsEmpty{#2}{\footnote{\tiny\nolinkurl{#1}}}{\footnote{\tiny\nolinkurl{#1\##2}}}%
}
\makeatother

That monstrosity is the nuclear option that works in most cases. But IIRC it still fucks up in some situations, so I must use a combination of \hardlink and \footnotelink.

But what about QR codes? Fuck me. Another dimension of the same problem. Producing a doc with QR codes but not the URL strips the reader of some dignity. But a footnote is a bad way to expand a barcode. The URL should appear close to the QR code so the reader need not hunt for it. But URL size and circumstances ensure we cannot simply make a macro that hard codes it. Every layout situation is different.

Having a bibliography section helps force a standard presentation, but that still requires the URL to be repeated and we don’t necessarily want to be forced to have a bibliography anyway.

What we really need is an URL database, which maps tokens to URLs in the preamble. Consider how the datetime2 pkg works. You can store a list of dates like this:

\DTMsavedate{event1}{2021-12-10}
\DTMsavedate{event2}{2022-02-21}
\DTMsavedate{event3}{2022-03-10}
…
\begin{document}
yada yada \DTMusedate{event1} yada yada \DTMsetstyle{ddmmyyyy}\DTMusedate{event3}…
lorem ipsum \DTMsetstyle{mmddyyyy}\DTMusedate{event2} lorem ipsum \DTMsetdatestyle{default}\DTMsetup{datesep=/}\DTMusedate{event1} …etc.

We need that for URLs. Simply making a \newcommand for each URL would not work because \qrcode, \href, \texttt, \verb and family of verbatim envs all treat the special chars differently and some do not even expand commands. It needs to be a macro that can probe its own user to know which chars to escape.

One of the markdown languages supports URL references. E.g. you can declare ergonomic names for the URLs:

[diseasePlusCure]: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/spreading-the-ddos-disease-and-selling-the-cure
[diseasePlusCure-ia]: http://web.archive.org/web/20230713212522/krebsonsecurity.com/2016/10/spreading-the-ddos-disease-and-selling-the-cure
[mislabelling-ia]: <http://web.archive.org/web/20211006120915/people.torproject.org/~lunar/20160331-CloudFlare_Fact_Sheet.pdf#page=3>
[fediThreat]: https://write.pixie.town/thufie/dont-trust-cloudflare
[fediThreat-ia]: http://web.archive.org/web/20230827161847/write.pixie.town/thufie/dont-trust-cloudflare
[testamony]: https://dragonscave.space/@BlindMoon38/111954315299607397
[personalisedPricing]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240601161454/http://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website

Then in the doc write: “Cloudflare exploits [personalised pricing][personalisedPricing]” so the shitty URL does not obnoxiously pollute the text.

A LaTeX approach could be:

\savelink{CloudflareLies}{http://web.archive.org/web/20211006120915/https://people.torproject.org/~lunar/20160331-CloudFlare_Fact_Sheet.pdf#page=3}
…
\begin{document}
Yada yada.. This QR: \uselink[form=qr, width=20mm]{CloudflareLies} leads to \uselink[form=fixedwidthfont,wrapping=false]{CloudflareLies}.

We have something that partially works and is not well documented. There is an url package and there is a hyperref package. The hyperref package is said to supercede the url pkg. In fact, hyperref uses the url pkg. So you would generally ignore the url pkg and just use hyperref. But the docs for hyperref conceal the existence of the \urldef command from the url pkg. The docs for url show that you can do this:

\urldef{\nastyurl}\url{http://www.musical-starstreams.tld/~william@orbit/very_long_using_underscores/and%20spaces/file+with^caret.pdf?arg1=x&arg2=y#page=5}

Then you can use \nastyurl throughout your doc, including inside footnotes. But it screws up when used inside \href (no wonder hyperref docs neglect to mention it). It also falls over when used inside \qrcode.

When visiting git.openprivacy.ca over tor but without using Tor browser, it automatically redirects to gitopcybr57ris5iuivfz62gdwe2qk5pinnt2wplpwzicaybw73stjqd.onion. The privacyinternational website used to do that, but not the last time I checked. A lot of sites seem to make use of a return header that tells the browser what the onion is without actually redirecting. Of course the problem with that is non-Tor browsers obviously do nothing with such headers. I thought it’s worth mentioning here that auto-redirection is the smart way to do this.