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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?

#31

Post by microtonal »

microtonal wrote: post #9

There 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 customi…

Before I forget: yes, hand-editing XML is no fun. I did this for years when writing the 'Slackware Basics' book. It is tedious and annoying, even with the excellent nxml-mode for emacs.

For Natural Language Processing for the Working Programmer, we use the XML editor, which really takes the pain out of writing DocBook documentation. It provides WYSIWYG mode that also renders inline or xincluded XML, such as SVG and MathML. I rarely switch back to the non-WYSIWYG mode, unless I want to reorder some elements quickly.

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

#32

Post by cturner »

It's good at what it does. We need useful layers on top of it.

We need a simple, hot-key friendly outliner that persists to something very much like docbook. Then you'd transform to TeX when you need something printed, and to html if you want the same content on the web, and to some sort of braile engine if you want blind people to interact with it.

A major obstacle to better document production is the WYSIWYG is a bad but strong meme.

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

#33

Post by Argorak »

Why I still use TeX? First of all, it still compiles my documents and samples from 1998. Try that in any other equally sophisticated system.

Second, it is the only system where I can expect a constant error rate. No feature is "done in no time", but can be solved in a rather constant time using Google and some TeX knowledge. In other systems, I am usually lost, because most of the stuff has not been tried or is not intended.

Also, it is actually quite fast in batch usage.

If you want to have a look at what can be done with TeX, have a look at the PGF documentation.

Also, don't mistake TeX with LaTeX, there are other TeX environments around that are better in certain regards.

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

#34

Post by vmind »

I think TeX notation for maths is still very good, sometimes you just need that bulk to properly handle equations, though finding symbol keywords can be a pain.

I recently released a web editor for Markdown/LaTeX mix (http://notepag.es/introduction) using Showdown/Mathjax. Have found it very useful for quick technical docs (assignments at university primarily). Though it still needs some smoothing between markdown and tex.

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

#35

Post by patrickg »

pedrocr wrote: post #30
_delirium wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core algorithms are pretty creaky as well. Knuth did a brilliant job coming up with efficient algorithms that could do a fairly good job at breaking lines/paragraphs/pages and could handle book-length documents even on 70s-era hardware, but they've had minimal improvement since then. Figure placement in particular is pretty bad, especially for two-column, relatively short conference papers, which is currently a f…

I don't have any insight at that level of abstraction. Figure placement like a bunch of other things has required me to hack around to get my desired result. Is there any newer research on these algorithms that could make it better given much better hardware? As for LuaTex I wasn't able to find any examples of actual markup written in it. I would expect that for the actual markup you'd want a language with a bigger a…

LuaTeX has the same macro language as the other TeX engines (pdftex and it's ilk). The true power of LuaTeX comes into play when you use Lua scripting. I am not sure if ConTeXt has more advanced figure placement algorithms due to LuaTeX. LaTeX for sure has the same algorithms as before.

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

#36

Post by kalessin »

WYSIWYG editors are not an example of intuitiveness either, most people don't get the concept of Style in MS Word like editors.

For that, I find the hierarchy macros of Latex much simpler to apprehend as well as lot of goodies: footnotes, references, hyperref, mathematic mode, bibliography management…

Also, and it's blocker for lot of my use cases, Latex is version control friendly. The WYSIWYG editors are not.

Changing fonts may become a PITA and I recommend to use the koma-script classes for that (btw, the whole system of packages and the build system are a mess), but at least people can't use Comic Sans.

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

#37

Post by cskau »

I've recently taken to MultiMarkdown + HTML5 + CSS3 + MathJAX.

As CSS3 support gets better and libraries like MathJAX brings beautiful math to HTML, I see less and less reason to stick with TeX.

One of the remaining issues I'm struggling with is margins which browsers unfortunately seem to have real problems with. However, if you can do with just default margins, MultiMarkdown -> HTML in your browser -> PDF works perfectly.

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

#38

Post by jamii »

TeX is great for typesetting but it does very little else. It's a nightmare to parse and analyse. The equation language doesn't convey any information about the equation other than it's appearance (eg syntactic scope, semantics). This makes it really hard to build things like search engines or screen readers (screen readers for LaTeX tend to end up saying things like 'sum-symbol subscript x equals zero superscript infinity x subscript one superscript two plus x subscript two superscript two' rather than 'the sum from x = 0 to infinity of x one squared plus x two squared).

I spent months building an equation search engine for Springer's math/science corpus so I've experienced the pain and horror of parsing LaTeX first hand. HTML + Semantic MathML is so much easier to work with. Its easy to parse, it allows the author to easily convey scope and semantic information and it can handle resizable displays. It just needs better tooling (eg a sane macro language which outputs MathML).

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

#39

Post by chalst »

zem wrote: post #23
chalst wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

it's a decent middle ground between the clunkiness of wysiwyg word processors and the typing-to-reward ratio of pure markup. personally i prefer just writing markup in ascii, but if you want some of the control of tex, but dislike doing that much typing, texmacs or lyx might be just what you are looking for.

I guess I should look at it. It sounds like Kile is its natural competitor.

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

#40

Post by amichail »

chalst wrote: post #17
zem wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

TeXmacs is a true WYSIWYG scientific word processor. It's not a TeX/LaTeX GUI front-end. Rather, it has its own typesetter that produces quality comparable to TeX in real-time as you type.
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