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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?

#11

Post by pedrocr »

jessriedel wrote: post #4

The 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…

I would disagree that the base is wonderful and it's the editors that are bad. At least in LaTeX there are a multitude of packages to do any given thing, all with varying levels of completeness, and most with incompatibilities between them. Leaky abstractions abound, and the way the macro language works probably makes this easier.

The features you mention would be needed to put it in front of less geeky users but are far from the core issues. I'd love to see a language with better flow control and abstraction features put on top of the Tex engine that indeed produces beautiful output. Maybe LuaTex will be that.

Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?

#12

Post by jacobolus »

Scramblejams wrote: post #6

I 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?

Once you're used to it it’s actually quite efficient (at least if you’re just writing mathematics; doing any kind of complex document layout gets a bit more annoying). I know people who can TeX math (including commutative diagrams even) substantially faster than I can write it down on paper full speed. Names for things are mostly pretty intuitive/memorable, quick reference cheatsheets abound, and if you find yourself doing the same thing repeatedly it’s trivial to make your own shorter names for things or encapsulate patterns.

Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?

#13

Post by maigret »

For my usage, I came to conclusion that HTML is the solution. When I need formulas, I may use TeX, for graphs I'll use Excel most of the time. For pictures Gimp etc. HTML is the glue I now use:

- You can reuse it everywhere, publish it on the web, print it

- It's easier to generate

- You can combine it with code much more easily

- Semantic tags in HTML5 (, ) remove a big feature gap with LaTeX

- You can reuse your HTML skills for much more other topics.

I use LaTeX quite a bit, still use it for special goals (resumes, articles), but outside the scientific crowd, I don't think it is the best solution any more. I know the typography is better there than on most other software, but on that I rather wished browsers and HTML got better.

Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?

#14

Post by chalst »

patrickg wrote: post #5

LuaTeX 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 (whic…

Agreed. Luatex makes the following division of labour practical: work with data structures and manipulate fonts and the backend in Lua, handle moving about text and setting parameters in the macro language.

One thing I would like to see is proper static analysis tools for Luatex. Lua has tools like https://github.com/fab13n/metalua/tree/master/src/samples/me... but there's nothing of comparable sophistication for Tex, let alone code combining the two, which makes debugging needlessly hard.

Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?

#15

Post by GeneralMaximus »

Nearly all the most beautifully typeset documents I've ever seen have been typeset in TeX. Also, it's probably the only way I can type in a mathematical formula without going crazy.

That said, I never use TeX. It's too much work. Bean.app is more than I need.

Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?

#16

Post by chalst »

jacobolus wrote: post #12
Scramblejams wrote: post #6

I 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?

Once you're used to it it’s actually quite efficient (at least if you’re just writing mathematics; doing any kind of complex document layout gets a bit more annoying). I know people who can TeX math (including commutative diagrams even) substantially faster than I can write it down on paper full speed. Names for things are mostly pretty intuitive/memorable, quick reference cheatsheets abound, and if you find yourself…

I know plenty of people who use Tex-based markup to take notes in talks and say it saves them time.

Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?

#17

Post by chalst »

zem wrote: post #7
Scramblejams wrote: post #6

I 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.

Texmacs often get recommended, but I haven't seen any arguments for it that are compelling. I guess there must be a case for it, else no one would work on it. What do you like about it?

Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?

#19

Post by chalst »

program wrote: post #10

I 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…

Note that you can't use Xetex with the current incarnation of Context, mk4.
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