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

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

#21

Post by iXce »

qznc wrote: post #19
gjm11 wrote: 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.

Well, I think we all expected a "modern LaTeX" based on the title, not something that's much closer to a PDF producer than a LaTeX equivalent. The title is the issue.

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

#22

Post by fusiongyro »

The rendering of the test document is very strange in FF on RHEL 6 on Linux. Acrobat also gave me garbage for a few seconds and then somehow spontaneously figured it out.

I'm skeptical of these sorts of enterprises, but I'm glad the author took the challenge and I look forward to seeing where it goes.

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

#23

Post by fusiongyro »

houshuang wrote: post #3

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…

I think Markdown and semantic markup are nearly incompatible, unless you want some kind of highly hacked version of Markdown. You might look into Textile though, which looks similar to Markdown but has built-in support for annotating with HTML classes and IDs and whatnot.

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

#24

Post by abritishguy »

gjm11 wrote: 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…

So much this! I hate latex but this is not a replacement in any way.

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

#25

Post by p4bl0 »

gjm11 wrote: 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…

I would add that the original title "Introducing RinohType the Python document processor", is way better than the one of the HN submission. It is not a "modern LaTeX", let alone a "LaTeX rewrite" (which is implied by the "in 6500 lines of Python").

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

#26

Post by sanskritabelt »

koralatov wrote: post #20
sanskritabelt wrote: post #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?

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...

My thoughts exactly. Someone at the publisher is looking at a lot of similarly formatted documents, any deviation should stand out.

And isn't separating content from style what a .sty file is supposed to do anyway?

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

#27

Post by 1_player »

fusiongyro wrote: post #22

The rendering of the test document is very strange in FF on RHEL 6 on Linux. Acrobat also gave me garbage for a few seconds and then somehow spontaneously figured it out. I'm skeptical of these sorts of enterprises, but I'm glad the author took the challenge and I look forward to seeing where it goes.

Yes, it's all wrong on Evince too.

Chrome PDF reader displays it correctly, though.

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

#29

Post by yannis »

houshuang wrote: post #3

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…

Markdown is very limited and you will soon hit a wall, when you get down to writing a thesis rather than a paper. For example if you want to write something to the Table of Contents which is not the section title itself.

       \section[short]{Long Title}
It is also possible within pdfLaTeX or LuaLaTeX to write shorter commands.

A GUI will eventually slow you down and is impossible to cater for the hundreds of commands including commonly used packages.

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

#30

Post by StevenXC »

LaTeX does a lot of stuff - it'd take a long time to replicate all that functionality.

However, on my todo list is to write some sort of "TeX-down" wrapper for LaTeX - I want to write my dissertation in a modified form of Markdown, with inline LaTeX equations and sectioning of "theorem" and "proof"-type environments, and then run a make to generate the TeX and PDF based off of a type of TeX template. I'm familiar with Pandoc but haven't delved into it far enough to know if it's robust enough to do what I want.

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