GeneralHow to trick your friends with LaTeX

LaTeX specific issues not fitting into one of the other forums of this category.
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Gaussler
Posts: 4
Joined: Sun Jul 28, 2013 8:34 pm

How to trick your friends with LaTeX

Post by Gaussler »

Can people come up with good (funny) code that you could put into documents in order trick people? Currently, I am working on a project with a collaborator where I put this into the preamble:

Code: Select all

\let\oldpar\par
\def\par{\oldpar And go get me coffee!\oldpar}
Other, similar ideas I can come up with include

Code: Select all

\catcode`.\active
\def.{, and I love pudding!}
However, that is likely to kill lots of other functionality in my document.

Can people think of other funny jokes? As long as it is funny, there should be no moral issues there.

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Johannes_B
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Re: How to trick your friends with LaTeX

Post by Johannes_B »

I always try to give answers with my best knowledge to help people. I know that people will run code provided in a forum post without thinking about it, without checking if it could do any harm.

Many many people are running LaTeX in a mode that makes it pretty easy to do malicious things. Expressing your love for pudding in documents of your friends and coworkers might be considered funny, but the chance is high that this will lead to annoyance and distrust. I would advice against stuff like that.
The smart way: Calm down and take a deep breath, read posts and provided links attentively, try to understand and ask if necessary.
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Stefan Kottwitz
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Re: How to trick your friends with LaTeX

Post by Stefan Kottwitz »

Nice ideas already, if it would be ok with your friends. :-)
You can break anything and redefine anything, hook into existing code... or draw something onto the document using some TikZ code.

Instead of tricking them you could impress them with some clever code too. ;-)

Stefan
LaTeX.org admin
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