But isn't that what XSL-FO is for?
well, I thought it was funny.
Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX
31–40 of 52 posts
Re: Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX
#32Standard LaTeX has worked just fine for like 35 years for the use cases it was intended: academic papers to write better looking mathematics and figures/citations, and heavyweight typesetting of things like books.
Not really sure why people are insistent on building on top of stuff - it's taking abstraction to a new level that imho is not needed - LaTex isn't particularly unreadable.
Re: Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oddly, Knuth prefers ${a \over b}$. I think I agree, if only because it actually reads well. An odd thing I found, was the once I learned how to verbalize many of the maths that I encountered, reading them became much easier. LaTeX actually helped a lot here, because most of the constructs have good readable macros to typeset them.
Also, if you're interested in readable languages, there's the family of roff languages that might seem terse at first when coming from LaTeX but actually have a very enjoyable grammar. The LaTeX ecosystem is so great that I don't really miss roff but I do have nice memories of writing reports in roff a couple of years ago. More to the point I found it wonderful to write graphics in the roff pic sublanguage. Edit: act…
It's not a coincidence: in fact, eqn (the ACM paper by Kernighan and Cherry was published in 1975) predates the initial design of TeX (1977), and Knuth explicitly based the math notation in TeX on that of eqn. Initially, like eqn he had no backslashes, but quickly (before any code was written) changed it to one with backslashes.
He discuses these matters of syntax in his Gibbs lecture of of January 1978 (https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.bams/1183544082): see Figure 3 on the top of page 344, where the notation of eqn is marked "Type B" (“developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories”) and the third column is "Type T".
Re: Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX
#34Standard LaTeX has worked just fine for like 35 years for the use cases it was intended: academic papers to write better looking mathematics and figures/citations, and heavyweight typesetting of things like books. Not really sure why people are insistent on building on top of stuff - it's taking abstraction to a new level that imho is not needed - LaTex isn't particularly unreadable.
Latex works fine but is far from perfect. People use it for lack of better options, but it's not exactly a joy to use (not for me at least). After 35 years, surely we can expect something better. So thanks to those working on that!
Re: Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX
#35SugarTeX is a more readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX. Designed to be used instead of $formula$ insertions to Markdown. I use Markdown with Python code blocks for document programming via [Pandoctools]( https://github.com/kiwi0fruit/pandoctools ) (like R-Markdown). Both Python and Markdown are very readable languages. Unfortunately LaTeX is not like this. So I wrote SugaTeX extension+transpi…
NEW EXAMPLES ADDED
==================
Examples of input to output conversion see in this PDF:
https://github.com/kiwi0fruit/sugartex/blob/master/examples/...
Re: Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX
#36Standard LaTeX has worked just fine for like 35 years for the use cases it was intended: academic papers to write better looking mathematics and figures/citations, and heavyweight typesetting of things like books. Not really sure why people are insistent on building on top of stuff - it's taking abstraction to a new level that imho is not needed - LaTex isn't particularly unreadable.
I'd say the problem isn't so much about readability but about ease of doing certain things. Case in point: non trivial tables, with multirows/multicols, newlines inside cells, and so on
Re: Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX
#37Standard LaTeX has worked just fine for like 35 years for the use cases it was intended: academic papers to write better looking mathematics and figures/citations, and heavyweight typesetting of things like books. Not really sure why people are insistent on building on top of stuff - it's taking abstraction to a new level that imho is not needed - LaTex isn't particularly unreadable.
I wrote my thesis using latex, and can with confidence say, no, it is not "working fine".
Maybe in the sense that COBOL is "working fine", so we should all just stick to that too.
Re: Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX
#38I would be interested to hear if this is a workflow that suits people that write mathematics papers or other complicated TeX documents. My TeX code is very macro heavy (I know some mathematicians who define almost everything through macros so that they can rewrite the paper quickly) and, as a result, I've never really seen the benefit of unicode mathematics.
To go one step further: I think writing Greek letters (or, for that matter, any Latin letter that does not have a standard mathematical meaning) is an anti-pattern in mathematical prose: I think it is much, much better to write \coercivenessSymbol than \gamma or the unicode variant for the same reasons I would not name a floating point number gamma.
Re: Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX
#39Standard LaTeX has worked just fine for like 35 years for the use cases it was intended: academic papers to write better looking mathematics and figures/citations, and heavyweight typesetting of things like books. Not really sure why people are insistent on building on top of stuff - it's taking abstraction to a new level that imho is not needed - LaTex isn't particularly unreadable.
I'd say the problem isn't so much about readability but about ease of doing certain things. Case in point: non trivial tables, with multirows/multicols, newlines inside cells, and so on
But aren't hard things going to be hard to do?
There are things that, if you did them in a GUI, would be multiple steps down the tree of menus. It seems natural to me that they require multiple commands.
(Not that LaTeX is perfect, for sure. Admit I only glanced at this. But after trying a bunch of things that the author asserts are simplifiers, I've not found one that is as capable. All too often they make super simple things that are already simple, and then fall back to LaTeX for the rest.)
Re: Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX
#40Standard LaTeX has worked just fine for like 35 years for the use cases it was intended: academic papers to write better looking mathematics and figures/citations, and heavyweight typesetting of things like books. Not really sure why people are insistent on building on top of stuff - it's taking abstraction to a new level that imho is not needed - LaTex isn't particularly unreadable.
Have you tried debugging LateX? Miss a comma somewhere or screw up a package's options, and you'll be left wondering why your paper is broken, and then you're at the mercy of Google to help you find another person with the same issue.
LaTeX produces beautiful papers, but it's old and showing signs of its age.