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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?

#41

Post by ignifero »

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…

Also because building a new typesetting system could be a very very boring thing to do

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

#42

Post by amichail »

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…

TeX should be replaced by TeXmacs.

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.

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

#43

Post by psykotic »

jamii wrote: post #38

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 in…

ConTeXt Mk II has had solid MathML support for a long time. It's also there albeit still undergoing construction in Mk IV, which is the newer LuaTeX-based rewrite.

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

#44

Post by pedrocr »

patrickg wrote: post #35
pedrocr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But then is the Lua scripting at the user level? Can it be used in the building of documents? Or is it a scripting language for the underlying engine, invisible to the end-user?

Incidentally I went looking for what pure TeX actually looks like as most people say TeX when they really mean LaTeX. Here's Knuth's TAOCP Volume I errata:

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/err1.textxt

Talk about Perl being line noise... I wonder if Knuth has ended up being the only person to actually write pure TeX.

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

#45

Post by zem »

chalst wrote: post #39
zem wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

kile is more of a lyx competitor (latex frontend versus latex ide). texmacs has its own rendering engine; despite the name it does not in any way depend upon tex.

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

#46

Post by eru »

jamii wrote: post #38

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 in…

Better tooling and better displays; e.g. browsers that do justified text right.

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

#48

Post by nimrody »

amichail wrote: post #42
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…

TeX should be replaced by TeXmacs. 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.

Is TeXmacs still maintained/developed?

TeX has a huge ecosystem built around it (Latex, Contex, many others). It's going to be very difficult replacing that.

Better build on what exists rather than replace it.

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

#49

Post by EdiX »

pedrocr wrote: post #44
patrickg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But then is the Lua scripting at the user level? Can it be used in the building of documents? Or is it a scripting language for the underlying engine, invisible to the end-user? Incidentally I went looking for what pure TeX actually looks like as most people say TeX when they really mean LaTeX. Here's Knuth's TAOCP Volume I errata: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/err1.textxt Talk about Perl being line noise..…

I did a few times. It's actually easier to make something look exactly the way you want it to look in plain TeX than fight with some poorly documented LaTeX package.

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

#50

Post by cypherpunks »

I do a lot of math. That makes LaTeX much faster to write than any alternatives. At this point, in math classes, I can take notes in real time. A properly written LaTeX file is also much faster to modify -- if I'm giving a presentation, and I have an arrow between two equations on different lines, when I rearrange things, that arrow keeps pointing between those two things. I can generate LaTeX programmaticly (e.g. tables of results). I can keep it in version control and have sensible differences between versions.

My major problem is that it does not handle animation and video well. Those are increasingly coming to be critical parts of presentations, and are the major thing pushing me towards OO.Presentation or PowerPoint or similar.

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