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Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python

mos6581.org

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Re: Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python

#11
"There is no strict separation of content and style. This is mostly an issue for publishers that want to ensure a consistent style across articles in a journal. With LaTeX, academic authors can always reduce the margins or change the interline spacing to be able to squeeze in more half-truths."

Does this ever happen?

Re: Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python

#12

This looks great - hopefully wouldn't be too hard to implement Markdown as well. I really want to be writing my academic papers in Markdown or some other simple markup (my papers usually have a surprisingly simple structure), and still have them look nice. Making it _much_ easier to create nice-looking templates would be great (maybe even a GUI editor for templates). However, I would also love to see more movement to…

Pandoc does almost exactly what you want. Much of my academic writing is written in markdown and then pandoc converts that to LaTeX. For conference papers it doesn't work as well (due to the conferences having specific style requirements) but for notes and presentations it works wonderfully.

Re: Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python

#13

This looks great - hopefully wouldn't be too hard to implement Markdown as well. I really want to be writing my academic papers in Markdown or some other simple markup (my papers usually have a surprisingly simple structure), and still have them look nice. Making it _much_ easier to create nice-looking templates would be great (maybe even a GUI editor for templates). However, I would also love to see more movement to…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python

#14
So, the situations in which I would use LaTeX rather than something cruder but friendlier are these: (1) I am typesetting something with nontrivial mathematical formulae in it. (2) I want the excellent typographical quality that comes from, e.g., the very nice Knuth-Plass dynamic-programming algorithm for line breaks. (3) I want to use some clever thing someone has implemented in LaTeX (say, to add Feynman diagrams to what I write). (4) I want to interoperate with other people who are using LaTeX. (5) I want to typeset something big and complicated that triggers misbehaviour in things like Word.

This system, at least so far, (1) doesn't do formulae, (2) doesn't have Knuth-Plass line breaking, (3) isn't compatible with LaTeX, (4) isn't compatible with LaTeX, and (5) takes almost 1s/page to do its thing.

It may very well be an excellent system, and deserve to take over the world of typesetting -- but at the moment it surely shouldn't be called "a modern LaTeX".

Re: Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python

#15
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could look at Org Mode. You can write your document in a similar fashion you would with Markdown, but then you can export in many other formats (including exporting to LaTeX and PdfTeX).

Isn't Org Mode tied to one editor.

Don't think so. It's simply a file format like markdown. Github will render org files. Think they use this Ruby gem.

https://github.com/bdewey/org-ruby

Perhaps we need more complete implementations but there's nothing preventing anyone from finishing the job.

Re: Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python

#16
post #12

This looks great - hopefully wouldn't be too hard to implement Markdown as well. I really want to be writing my academic papers in Markdown or some other simple markup (my papers usually have a surprisingly simple structure), and still have them look nice. Making it _much_ easier to create nice-looking templates would be great (maybe even a GUI editor for templates). However, I would also love to see more movement to…

Pandoc does almost exactly what you want. Much of my academic writing is written in markdown and then pandoc converts that to LaTeX. For conference papers it doesn't work as well (due to the conferences having specific style requirements) but for notes and presentations it works wonderfully.

You can always define a template via `--template=MyTemplate`. You just have to place the template in `.pandoc/templates/MyTemplate.[latex|html|...]`.

Re: Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python

#17

"There is no strict separation of content and style. This is mostly an issue for publishers that want to ensure a consistent style across articles in a journal. With LaTeX, academic authors can always reduce the margins or change the interline spacing to be able to squeeze in more half-truths." Does this ever happen?

What I do to save space in papers: Squeeze figures, shorten pseudo code, remove paragraph breaks, and finally decrease font size of bibliography.

Re: Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python

#19
post #14

So, the situations in which I would use LaTeX rather than something cruder but friendlier are these: (1) I am typesetting something with nontrivial mathematical formulae in it. (2) I want the excellent typographical quality that comes from, e.g., the very nice Knuth-Plass dynamic-programming algorithm for line breaks. (3) I want to use some clever thing someone has implemented in LaTeX (say, to add Feynman diagrams t…

You want a drop-in LaTeX replacement. Use LuaTeX.

Re: Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python

#20

"There is no strict separation of content and style. This is mostly an issue for publishers that want to ensure a consistent style across articles in a journal. With LaTeX, academic authors can always reduce the margins or change the interline spacing to be able to squeeze in more half-truths." Does this ever happen?

And more to the point, shouldn't this be caught by a sub-editor prior to publishing? I find it incredibly hard to believe that publishers would blindly publish what they're sent without first checking it...
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