relevant: http://xkcd.com/927/
Nope, not relevant.
Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python
41–50 of 104 posts
Re: Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python
#42I looked at the sample output ( http://www.mos6581.org/files/intro_template.pdf ) and is it just me or does the vertical spacing seem off? (for example, look at the tables and how the text goes right up to kiss the horizontal bars).
Wow, that really is hideous, e.g. the table at the beginning of section III. I wish this guy the best, but TeX was written by a very smart and utterly obsessive man, and typography is an ancient and complex field. I doubt this will work out.
Re: Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python
#43So, 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…
If you're curious, I wrote implementations of the Knuth-Plass line breaking algorithm in ruby [1] and clojure [2]. Nothing you'd want to use in production but it was a fun experiment.
1. https://github.com/scpike/word-wrapping/blob/master/ruby/lib...
2. https://github.com/scpike/word-wrapping/blob/master/clojure/...
Re: Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python
#44While I understand you generally shouldn’t rewrite software from scratch, maybe TeX should be one of the few exceptions to this rule? I think the rule is better stated as, "It should be a long time before you choose to rewrite usable software from scratch. But after 35 years, you can maybe consider it." TeX is great, but it is definitely showing its age, and it shows a lot of the inconsistencies many (other) programm…
That's a double-edged sword. On the other hand, TeX isn't changing much which, given it's space, is necessary: (La)TeX can still typeset documents written in the 90s. If you would start shaking those foundations, you are in a world of pain, probably.
Re: Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python
#45While I understand you generally shouldn’t rewrite software from scratch, maybe TeX should be one of the few exceptions to this rule? I think the rule is better stated as, "It should be a long time before you choose to rewrite usable software from scratch. But after 35 years, you can maybe consider it." TeX is great, but it is definitely showing its age, and it shows a lot of the inconsistencies many (other) programm…
Time is pretty much irrelevant, at least directly. The time to rewrite software is when one of the following is true (which are really the same thing from different viewpoints):
1) It has critical defects in serving its intended usage domain that can be resolved by incremental updates because they are caused by fundamental architectural features, or
2) You need something to be used in a similar-but-not-identical domain to the originally intended domain of the software, to which it cannot be incrementally adapted due its fundamental architecture.
And, really, if the software is designed well for maintainability, either of these should be rare, since if its is loosely coupled, you can change either the low-level implementation details that need to change without touching the high-level organization, or change the high-level organization while preserving the low-level implementation details that are staying the same, in an incremental change.
Re: Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python
#46I respect Latex users, but I believe it should die. However I see no actual replacement now or in near future :/ I wish one of the big guys eliminate it once and for all. But there is little value in developing a replacement for academic paper publishing.
Amusingly, I feel the same for html. :) I would much rather write something using LaTeX than I would any of the xml based document systems.
What, for the curious, is the reason you wish it would die?
Re: Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python
#47Very nice project, however for everybody listening:
I believe that in such project, but in every project, you should post some kind of document online explaining what is the big design of the project, the biggest problem you have encountered and how you fixed, the limitation of your design choice and why you made those choice.
Why that ?
1) Because if I want to code something similar I don't have to read all your code to understand what is going on, I just need to read a simple(r) English document where you explain it.
2) Because if someone else what to get involved in your project will have a way easier/happier time to understand the whole project and won't spend days just hacking around, s/he understand the project in the first couple of hours and at the 3rd hour is ready to start code some useful feature or refactor the code.
At the end, such document will make easier to everybody to be involved.
Re: Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python
#48Very interesting and great effort you put into it! I know exactly what you mean by cleaning up taking time. I am in the same stage (making it look good) of a document processing toolchain I am working on, which supports HTML, (La)TeX and plain text output backends. I thought I could be done this year, but I will probably take longer. I have started working and thinking on this problem about three years ago and am ver…
Do you have a github repo for your project ? Or somewhere where I can take a look at the code ?
I was hoping to find the time to write something similar in Clojure (a lisp dialect), and the idea should be to take hiccup[1] as starting point.
Why hiccup ?
Because it is death easy to use, because I think it to be extensible, and because I hate write html while I love to write hiccup-code...
The real problem (other than the lack of time) is that I have no idea how to start, and it bring me to this other comment:
Re: Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python
#49So, 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…
What are the "cruder but friendlier" alternatives that you use?
Re: Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python
#50"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?
People I know who work in the math publishing area say that one of the main problems they have is un-tweaking authors's sources. So, yes.