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TeX Live 2017 released

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Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#41

Post by flukus »

jon_richards wrote: post #16
lindbergh wrote: post #11

LaTeX is still one of my favourite piece of technology of all time. It is at time so alien, yet beautiful. I now get closer to 10+ years of programming experience, yet nothing comes close to debugging a faulty LaTeX custom command... it can quickly turn to an unreadable mess, but you have to admit that once everything is swept under a preamble.tex file, the rest of the code is very clean. Especially with auctex in em…

I once heard a professor talk about writing a book 30 or so years ago. He looked at all the available options and decided latex wasn't perfect, but was the best available. 20 years later he decided to look at everything again and was appalled that latex was still the best option he had. Have you ever tried to color a latex table? If you color a cell, most readers will cover ~1 pixel of the upper and left table border…

> 20 years later he decided to look at everything again and was appalled that latex was still the best option he had.

I've always wanted to build a latex based reporting system for similar reasons, all existing reporting systems suck and I wouldn't be surprised if I could build a latex based system to be the least worst option.

I wonder if there are other areas that it would be useful?

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#42

Post by dom0 »

gkoller wrote: post #29
jon_richards wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once heard a professor talk about writing a book 30 or so years ago. He looked at all the available options and decided latex wasn't perfect, but was the best available. 20 years later he decided to look at everything again and was appalled that latex was still the best option he had. Have you ever tried to color a latex table? If you color a cell, most readers will cover ~1 pixel of the upper and left table border…

> I once heard a professor talk about writing a book 30 or so years ago. He looked at all the available options and decided latex wasn't perfect, but was the best available. 20 years later he decided to look at everything again and was appalled that latex was still the best option he had. Many many years ago I evaluated the available options as well to write internal documentation for the company I worked for. Looked…

Nowadays Sphinx is quite usable for writing both long-form documentation and reference docs.

It's a really complex piece of software (much more complex than everyone thinks at first), but most of the time that isn't noticeable. The rST syntax can be somewhat confusing with advanced constructs, but for most stuff a short primer gets everyone going in the right direction. Since it's Python, deployment is a little bit annoying on non-Linux machines, but for docs you want CI anyway. To tweak PDF (i.e. latex) output it requires a fair bit of knowledge of both Sphinx and latex (and possibly rST [0]).

Like I said... it's quite usable.

[0] rST again being much more complex than everyone thinks at first. It's an enterprise markup language.

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#43

Post by jimhefferon »

fithisux wrote: post #33

Congratulations guys for the hard work.

Yes, indeed. It is quite an accomplishment.

If you find TeX, LaTeX, and friends useful, check out the TeX Users Group at http://www.tug.org. If you'd consider supporting the folks who bring you TeX Live, you can read the Aims and Benefits page at https://tug.org/aims_ben.html.

Note that a membership is very reasonable-- if you choose an electronic copy of the journal then membership is $45 annually, or $15 annually if you are a student, senior, etc. The details are at https://tug.org/join.html.

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#44

Post by vog »

mkl wrote: post #23
jon_richards wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once heard a professor talk about writing a book 30 or so years ago. He looked at all the available options and decided latex wasn't perfect, but was the best available. 20 years later he decided to look at everything again and was appalled that latex was still the best option he had. Have you ever tried to color a latex table? If you color a cell, most readers will cover ~1 pixel of the upper and left table border…

You have much more control if you make your table in TikZ using a matrix of nodes. If you want borders, the key thing is setting "row sep=-\pgflinewidth, column sep=-\pgflinewidth" so the border doesn't get doubled up (see e.g. [1]). Latex is far from ideal, but it's still the best because it hasn't stood still - many people are constantly contributing improvements and new packages, and it's very hard for a new repla…

The takeaway is: If you are to judge LaTeX, judge its whole ecosystem.

Otherwise, this is like saying Python is not suitable as HTTP client because "urllib" has too many quirk - ignoring the fact everyone else uses the excellent "requests" libraray.

Although there are interesting developments at its code (XeLaTex, LuaTex), it is the packages which are ever evolving at a rapid pace. Have trouble with the "graphics" package? Use "graphicx" instead. Don't like the old "letter" class? Use "scrlttr2". And of course, use TikZ, it is one of the most well-designed, best-documented and comprehensive packages out there.

Compared to most programming languages, what I really like about LaTeX is their almost almost merciless take on backwards compatibility. This means that your old "article" document almost certainly works with later LaTeX versions. There will never be a breaking new version of "article" that forces you to adapt your LaTeX code, like we see with so many libraries in other languages. But this also means that you are stuck in your "old world" if you don't keep your eye open for new packages, and are willing to learn them. There are quite a lot of StackExchange questions that are essentially like this:

"Q: How do I fix my issue with package X? A: Use the newer package Y instead (or in addition)."

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#45

Post by cormacrelf »

Lxr wrote: post #28
mscholz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you set `conceallevel' to 2 and use syntax highlighting, you should get it in vim without any plugins needed (although I have only neovim installed). For example, \AA -> Å, $\pm$ -> ±, and {\'e} -> é. http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/syntax.html#tex-concea...

Does anyone else find this "feature" really annoying? I always set conceallevel to 0 but vim seems to constantly find a way to replace my code with unicode.

It could be that you're using a font with OpenType ligatures, like Fira Code.

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#46

Post by [deleted] »

Lxr wrote: post #28
mscholz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you set `conceallevel' to 2 and use syntax highlighting, you should get it in vim without any plugins needed (although I have only neovim installed). For example, \AA -> Å, $\pm$ -> ±, and {\'e} -> é. http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/syntax.html#tex-concea...

Does anyone else find this "feature" really annoying? I always set conceallevel to 0 but vim seems to constantly find a way to replace my code with unicode.

[deleted]

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#47

Post by ygaf »

svat wrote: post #34

It's amazing how many different and dissimilar components go into a TeX distribution like TeX Live: - At the base, there is Donald Knuth's program `tex`, itself written in a strange language (WEB) that is essentially an ad-hoc macro-expansion system (not used by many others, and not even by Knuth today, who prefers CWEB), and compiles (via `tangle`) to a dialect/version of Pascal (“Pascal-H”) for which a compiler has…

Amazing is a friendly word for it.

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#48

Post by xvilka »

There is still no uniform way to insert animation in the slides/paper. Partly it's because a problems of PDF readers, but there are problems in TeX-parts too.

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#49

Post by xvilka »

pmoriarty wrote: post #18
radarsat1 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ask this as a totally naive person regarding novels and publishing, but who is fairly happy with writing papers in Latex: what is difficult about typesetting a novel? I ask because I would think that novels would be on the easier end of typesetting situations, but clearly your experience is different.. I just can't imagine what you are struggling with. I've "typeset" many novels by converting them from text formats…

I've typeset novels, technical manuals, math, poetry, articles, chess diagrams, posters, presentations, my resume, and probably a bunch of other things in LaTeX. It wasn't a big deal, though it's definitely a rabbit hole in terms of the amount of tweaking that's required if you want everything just right, if you're doing something fancy, and if what you're doing doesn't quite fit any of the many pre-written templates…

Well, for doing fancy stuff including complex programming macroses LuaTeX suits much better these days.

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#50

Post by ivansavz »

lindbergh wrote: post #11

LaTeX is still one of my favourite piece of technology of all time. It is at time so alien, yet beautiful. I now get closer to 10+ years of programming experience, yet nothing comes close to debugging a faulty LaTeX custom command... it can quickly turn to an unreadable mess, but you have to admit that once everything is swept under a preamble.tex file, the rest of the code is very clean. Especially with auctex in em…

Yes .tex programming is probably the least intuitive kind of language I've ever seen. Here is a FizzBuzz in vanilla .tex for anyone who curious to see what that's like:

    % fizzbuzz.tex -- Compile with pdftex, not pdflatex
    \def\modulo#1#2{(#1-(#1/#2)*#2)}	% a mod n = a-(a/n)*n   where / is integer division

    \newcount\X
    \X=1
    \loop
    	\ifnum \numexpr\modulo{\X}{15} = 0
    		FizzBuzz
    	\else
    		\ifnum \numexpr\modulo{\X}{3} = 0
    			Fizz
    		\else
    			\ifnum \numexpr\modulo{\X}{5} = 0
    				Buzz
    			\else
    				\the\X
    			\fi
    		\fi
    	\fi
    	\endgraf
    	\advance \X by 1
    	\unless \ifnum \X>100
    	\repeat
    \bye
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