Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python • Hacker News Board

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

#101

Post by phaemon » Wed, Nov 06, 2013, 7:48 AM UTC

andor wrote: post #97

phaemon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm not trolling. I don't know what pdfTex is either. Why on earth are you telling me what a project does in terms of another project I'm not familiar with?! Edit: that's what I meant by "none of their links", the pdfTex page doesn't say what it does either!

Maybe it's not what you intended, but to me you seem to be proud of your ignorance about a piece of software that's part of computer science history. Instead of writing that comment, you could have learned something by reading about TeX on Wikipedia.

I shouldn't seem that way to anyone reasonable.

I know what TeX is. I should know what luatex is because I've been to their website, read through some links and even read through the introduction to their manual, and still I don't know.

And just listen to yourself: if I want to know what luatex is I shouldn't find out on their own website, I should have to go to Wikipedia?!

Do you know what it is? You've managed to reply to me twice and in neither of those replies have you simply stated: "luatex is software that does x. You'd want to use to to do y."

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

#102

Post by phaemon » Wed, Nov 06, 2013, 7:50 AM UTC

qznc wrote: post #100

phaemon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm not trolling. I don't know what pdfTex is either. Why on earth are you telling me what a project does in terms of another project I'm not familiar with?! Edit: that's what I meant by "none of their links", the pdfTex page doesn't say what it does either!

Because people do not care about their TeX interpreter. Today, nearly every LaTeX writer uses pdfTex. If they switch to luaTex nothing changes, because luaTeX is (intended to be) fully backwards compatible. If you start writing your own packages, then luaTex becomes interesting.

> Because people do not care about their TeX interpreter.

I think they might if they're at the luaTex website. How does it become interesting? Is it a secret?

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

#103

Post by CatMtKing » Wed, Nov 06, 2013, 5:58 PM UTC

phaemon wrote: post #101

andor wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's not what you intended, but to me you seem to be proud of your ignorance about a piece of software that's part of computer science history. Instead of writing that comment, you could have learned something by reading about TeX on Wikipedia.

I shouldn't seem that way to anyone reasonable. I know what TeX is. I should know what luatex is because I've been to their website, read through some links and even read through the introduction to their manual, and still I don't know. And just listen to yourself: if I want to know what luatex is I shouldn't find out on their own website, I should have to go to Wikipedia?! Do you know what it is? You've managed to r…

Coming from a position such as yours, here's how I interpreted it:

pdfTex will take TeX input and output PDF (and apparently other file formats as well).

LuaTeX should do the same (being a drop-in replacement), the difference being that it can also use Lua scripts to control how the output is formatted (versus everything being written in TeX).

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

#104

Post by phaemon » Wed, Nov 06, 2013, 10:35 PM UTC

CatMtKing wrote: post #103

phaemon wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shouldn't seem that way to anyone reasonable. I know what TeX is. I should know what luatex is because I've been to their website, read through some links and even read through the introduction to their manual, and still I don't know. And just listen to yourself: if I want to know what luatex is I shouldn't find out on their own website, I should have to go to Wikipedia?! Do you know what it is? You've managed to r…

Coming from a position such as yours, here's how I interpreted it: pdfTex will take TeX input and output PDF (and apparently other file formats as well). LuaTeX should do the same (being a drop-in replacement), the difference being that it can also use Lua scripts to control how the output is formatted (versus everything being written in TeX).

> pdfTex will take TeX input and output PDF

Ok, well, maybe I don't understand TeX at all, because I thought that's exactly what it did.

EDIT: Ahh, wait, I have it! When they say "extension" they mean "implementation"! They actually replace TeX as an engine. Is that right? So, luaTex is just an implementation of TeX written in Lua?