[OS X TeX] White vs. Transparent?

[Victor Ivrii]

On 3/23/06, david craig <dac at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 23 Mar 2006, Victor Ivrii wrote:
> >> I would like to be able to make certain  portions of some equations
> >> "transparent".*  How can this be done?
> >
> > invisible? $2+2\phantom{=5}$.
>
> Jeepers, would it have been too much @&^$%@$!!#% trouble to put the
> words "invisible" or "transparent" in the index of the bloody Companion?
>
> I tried guessing, but I would not have stumbled on THAT.  Yes, I see it
> now in some of the gnarly examples in Companion 2/e.
>
> Thanks for letting me in on the secret!  It's one Google didn't turn up
> for me.
>
> (It's &@@$& like this that makes TeX only for those with a strong
> constitution....)
>
> THANK YOU!
>
> David Craig
>
>

Let me tell you another secret: \phantom has two less potent siblings:
\hphantom snd \vphantom. And another: if on the white paper you write
\color{white}{big secret} nobody will see it physically - but
copy/paste, find or Google will see (so the text actually will be
there exactly as if you covered it by black \colorbox{black}{big
secret} - there were at least two cases when lawyers working for US
government covered the classified part of the document in black using
M$ Word, placed documents on the web... and were VERY surprised that
"hackers" or Google read it :-) On the other hand, phantomed text is
not there. One can try to guess by the size of the box what was meant,
but not much

One more secret: there is texhax at tug.org group (and other) which is
much more suitable for non-Mac specific questions.
--
========================
Victor Ivrii, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto
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