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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?

#51

Post by bane »

maigret wrote: post #13

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 H…

http://code.google.com/p/hyphenator/

And example in action http://www.bramstein.com/projects/typeset/flatland/

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

#52

Post by Derbasti »

kalessin wrote: post #36

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. Chang…

If only people would know how to use styles! This is probably the most important thing to know about word processors. Styles make documents consistent and beautiful. Most word processors these days ship with really beautiful and professional styles (not OOo, though). Maybe not as beautiful as TeX, but easily good enough for most applications.

But people don't know about styles, and their documents are ugly.

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

#53

Post by jasonmorton »

I think Tex is wonderful just as it is. It does have a learning curve, like any powerful system, but so does e.g. html+css or any programming language. Emacs is a great editor and I run it with a simple inotify script to get automatic compilation. The error messages could be better, but that too comes with experience; I can almost always tell exacty what is wrong from the error message. Tex is so well suited to the purpose of producing mathematical documents that I really think asking for a modern replacement is like asking for a modern replacement for HTML. If you are not interested in becoming an expert user, go with a front end (the equivalent of frontpage or dreamweaver or similar). For the heaviest users, learning Latex is not a big deal relative to the other arcane knowledge one must acquire to write something worthwhile with it. As others have said, the investment is paid off in beauty, speed, and control.

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

#54

Post by limmeau »

cturner wrote: post #32

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 b…

org-mode can export HTML and LaTeX (and many more). However, I would not describe it as "hotkey-friendly", rather as "hotkey-happy".

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

#55

Post by bootload »

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…

"... 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... ..."

Would it really take a $1M dollars to achieve a useful enough fix for TeX editing? And a better question, "is there are market for such an editor?"

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

#56

Post by crocowhile »

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…

>no financial incentive for anyone to fix it.

What? What is the financial incentive of fixing ANY of the classical open source software?

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

#57

Post by amichail »

nimrody wrote: post #48
amichail wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why don't you try the experimental Qt port? It's easy to install.

ftp://ftp.texmacs.org/pub/TeXmacs/macosx/qt/TeXmacs.dmg

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

#58

Post by bluekeybox »

crocowhile wrote: post #56
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…

>no financial incentive for anyone to fix it. What? What is the financial incentive of fixing ANY of the classical open source software?

Well the Linux project has demonstrated that many companies who use Linux internally have financial incentive to keep the kernel working well.

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

#59

Post by cemerick »

FWIW, I and my coauthors are writing "Clojure Programming" for O'Reilly using asciidoc[1]. Our source ends up being converted to a beautiful PDF using a post-commit hook that performs a translation from asciidoc -> docbook -> PDF.

I've enjoyed it so much that I'm now using asciidoc for my github readme's and such, and will likely use it for future documentation-generation requirements (e.g. generating PDF and HTML versions of library developer guides and such). For those that need mathematical notation, it appears that asciidoc just uses passthrough blocks of LaTeX math notation (or direct MathML if you're so inclined)[2].

[1] http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc

[2] http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/userguide.html#X78

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