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Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX

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Re: Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX

#41

Post by Ar-Curunir »

jimhefferon wrote: post #39
blackbear_ wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sim…

Debugging those tables is still a pain in the ass. I am certain that we there's a better way than today, where if you accidentally add or remove a newline your table breaks

Re: Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX

#42

Post by jhbadger »

kingkongjaffa wrote: post #32

Standard 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.

But LaTeX itself was (and still is) just a wrapper on top of pure Knuth TeX to make it seem more like a once popular markup language called Scribe.

Re: Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX

#43

Post by kiwi0fruit »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #40
kingkongjaffa wrote: post #32

Standard 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.

Is it that bad? Have you tried to debug Markdown + LaTeX MathJax? Is it the same of differs? As for me it seems enough easy to debug each single math object. But I only used Markdown + LaTeX insertions so I cannot compare.

Re: Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX

#44

Post by kiwi0fruit »

drwells wrote: post #38

I 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,…

SugarTeX is tweakable. You can write your own Panflute Pandoc filter that additionally defines new non-standard replacements alike yet defined in SugarTeX. But I dont know if you need it: LaTeX macroses are valid SugarTeX too after all and they are quite powerfull.

Re: Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX

#45

Post by skywal_l »

Although not the easier to read, I think LaTeX language is still OK. The downside of this approach is the difficulty to learn the new Unicode character and how to type them!

Just a couple of days ago I built a little editor to manipulate markdown, latex and even simple pictures thanks to the pspicture latex environment: http://mathdown.novidee.com/96699b9ccd482d662cd3332c2a53db25 I am using marked, katex and Latex2JS.

Re: Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX

#46

Post by [deleted] »

drwells wrote: post #38

I 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,…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX

#47

Post by kiwi0fruit »

drwells wrote: post #38

I 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,…

Looks like it already have been implemented: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/28033/133525

I mean having any macros name you want, even Unicode.

So you can even have \γ macros. But if you want to write \coercivenessSymbol (even on the blackboard) we cannot stop you - after all it gives you pleasure.

My conclusion about this feature: https://github.com/kiwi0fruit/sugartex/issues/1

Re: Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX

#48

Post by Ar-Curunir »

kiwi0fruit wrote: post #43
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is it that bad? Have you tried to debug Markdown + LaTeX MathJax? Is it the same of differs? As for me it seems enough easy to debug each single math object. But I only used Markdown + LaTeX insertions so I cannot compare.

I've written papers with some complex tables, probably over 150 pages worth of dense latex, and I still have trouble debugging :/

Re: Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX

#49

Post by kccqzy »

jgtrosh wrote: post #30
taeric wrote: post #14

Earlier 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…

> I found it wonderful to write graphics in the roff pic sublanguage.

I happen to have fond memories of using lots of TikZ to do lots of graphics, making full-color posters with it. It was only because I was too poor to buy InDesign.

Re: Show HN: SugarTeX – readable LaTeX language extension and transcompiler to LaTeX

#50

Post by yesenadam »

kingkongjaffa wrote: post #32

Standard 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.

(Disclosure: Not an expert.) Standard LaTeX, meaning what exactly? Since 1983 there's been LaTeX2, LaTeX2e, and amsmath and the hundreds of packages that are now standard. The LaTeX used nowadays is a lot of stuff built on top of the improved later versions of LateX, which itself was built on top of Plain Tex (itself built on Tex).

I love how LaTeX/TeX is completely programmable, and anything particularly unreadable/messy can be made readable with user-defined commands, environments etc.

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