Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
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Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
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Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#2Independent of the elegant typesetting it produces, TeX contains well-designed notation for mathematics, reflecting the algorithmic bent of its author, Don Knuth.
Mathematics doesn't change as frequently as desktop publishing, so it's a good bet that the TeX (e.g. $\int_0^1 \tau \, d\tau$) is going to be around as long as people talk math online.
That said, I think there are much easier-to-use and less error-prone desktop publishing tools (e.g. Scribus) for less math-heavy domains, like magazine layout.
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#3Independent of the elegant typesetting it produces, TeX contains well-designed notation for mathematics, reflecting the algorithmic bent of its author, Don Knuth. Mathematics doesn't change as frequently as desktop publishing, so it's a good bet that the TeX (e.g. $\int_0^1 \tau \, d\tau$) is going to be around as long as people talk math online. That said, I think there are much easier-to-use and less error-prone de…
yeah, definitely. i've switched to lout for non-mathematics-heavy stuff myself.
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#4The reason TeX is still used is because it is open source and beautiful, because it is the best at handling mathematical notation, and because of its inertial dominance in math and the hard sciences in Academia. The reason TeX has so, so many fixable problems after 30 years is because there is no financial incentive for anyone to fix it.
The answer is not to find a TeX alternative. This will not be possible in Academia for a very long time. The answer is for someone to plunk down a million dollars to hire some full-time developers to fix it. Honestly, the TeX language is wonderful; it's the editors which are terrible. A TeX editor should...
[] seamlessly hide the compilation process
[] feature a modern debugging environment
[] make 99% of commands (including everything you can do in MS Word) discoverable within the editor, rather than sending the user to the internet or some pdf guide, and
[] robustly handle all modern image types
...without becoming an unstable WYSIWYG hybrid like LyX. The only thing about the language itself that might need to be changed is some standardization of common packages. I shouldn't need to download anything to get appendices and sub-figures to behave sensibly.
The amount of professor, post-doc, and grad student time wasted on TeX is staggering, and easily justifies paying for an overhaul...if only the government or some benefactor would step up.
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#5LuaTeX can be used as a PDF writing library that has a "perfect" line breaking algorithm inside along with many other nice features. We use it as a base for our database publishing tool. Its absolutely reliable, has modern features (unicode, OTF) and can be programmed in a very decent language (Lua). You need to know TeX if you want to unleash all the power, but you don't need to program in TeX's macro language (which is fun but also a PITA).
I think that a new generation of TeX based applications will show up in the next 10 years.
Edit: some links:
http://luatex.org/ - official site
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuaTeX - wikipedia
http://wiki.contextgarden.net/LuaTeX - LuaTeX is now also the base of ConTeXt, a LaTeX alternative
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#6I got tired of OpenOffice's IMHO clunky formula editor, so I thought: "Ah ha! Pros use TeX! So should I!" Then I saw how much fingertyping is necessary to reproduce what I was doing in OO, and I went back. Of course, I was trying to kill a field mouse with a nuke, so I should have expected to be disappointed. Any recommendations for a math-friendly TeX-lite for those of us who don't need all that power?
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#7I got tired of OpenOffice's IMHO clunky formula editor, so I thought: "Ah ha! Pros use TeX! So should I!" Then I saw how much fingertyping is necessary to reproduce what I was doing in OO, and I went back. Of course, I was trying to kill a field mouse with a nuke, so I should have expected to be disappointed. Any recommendations for a math-friendly TeX-lite for those of us who don't need all that power?
if you want a gui equation editor, check out lyx [http://www.lyx.org/], which uses tex as its backend. texmacs [http://www.texmacs.org/] is another option worth exploring.
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#8The reason TeX is still used is because it is open source and beautiful, because it is the best at handling mathematical notation, and because of its inertial dominance in math and the hard sciences in Academia. The reason TeX has so, so many fixable problems after 30 years is because there is no financial incentive for anyone to fix it. The answer is not to find a TeX alternative. This will not be possible in Academ…
To add to your fourth point, it should also ideally handle all modern font types and all of their provided features in some relatively simple way. XeTeX/XeLaTeX is great, but that it can’t always do the right thing when any regular TeX document is dropped into it is unfortunate (cf. http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=xetex_fa...), and it doesn’t support everything it would in a perfect world.
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#9There are good alternatives, depending on the type of document being written. For instance, for technical documentation that does not contain to many equations[1], DocBook is often used. Since DocBook uses XML (or SGML previously), it is easy to transform with XSLT. The DocBook project provides excellent stylesheets for xhtml and xsl-fo output, making it easy to target the web and printed media. It is easy to customize output, by overriding templates in the default stylesheets.
Also, DocBook documents can be validated automatically using DTDs or RelaxNG schema. (Yes, XML is full of buzzword bingo :).)
[1] Equations can be typeset with MathML, but since most software only supports presentation MathML this is not ideal.
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#10I have used LaTeX, TeX and ConTeX for years as my only programming language for writing beautiful docs and I think that nowadays there isn't a good alternative if you write technical documents that have math inside.
Today I use XeTeX together with the swiss-knife memoir class and a huge preamble that I have built over the years. XeTeX is modern and lets you write your docs in UTF8 with ease. I have stopped writing a lot of commands by hand cause there are a lot of modern editors out there (TeXShop on the Mac, TeXworks/TeXnicCenter on Windows, Kile and a bunch of others in Linux.)
When you enter the TeX world you cannot go back cause you start to see typographical errors everywhere: wrong kerning, missing ligatures, wrong align in formulas, wrong page dimensions and others. As Don Knuth says: "I can't go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu."
The beauty of LaTeX (XeLaTeX in this case): http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex