Off-topic, but the closing of interesting open-ended discussion points is one of the reasons I avoid stack overflow.
Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
71–80 of 127 posts
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#72The 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…
What exactly are your complaints against LyX? I've found it to be very stable for the past 3 or so years, and it's decidedly not WYSIWYG.
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 M…
FYI, asciidoc is great, provides a pipeline to docbook (and thence on to PDF), and is a joy to edit (not quite as concise as, say, markdown, but not ambiguously-defined, either). See my other comment on this thread about it.
asciidoc is nice, but the tag set in DocBook is far broader. Also, DocBook makes it easy to add new elements. But if you need just the basic functionality of DocBook, it is great.
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#74There 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…
DocBook is not really a TeX alternative, since it is merely a markup language and does no typesetting of its own. There are actually many DocBook workflows that do the final typesetting in TeX.
Actually, I think this is an asset. DocBook is modular, and consists of DTDs/schemas and stylesheets to translate DocBook content to other XML documents (or plain text). Since TeX is so tightly-coupled to typesetting, it kinda sucks for producing non-typesetted formats.
Using TeX to do the final typesetting in a DocBook workflow is quite old-fashioned. For years, I have used the XSL-FO stylesheet to create XSL-FO output. You can pass this to an XSL-FO typesetter, such as Apache FOP or RenderX.
This workflow has several advantages:
* You can easily tweak output by overriding templates.
* Commonly-used FO renderers render SVG and MathML. You can use one vector graphics format to create XHTML, ePub, and PDF/print output.
* Each step and output, except for the rendering step is XML and can be validated and transformed easily.
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
All true. Also, the way indexes, table of contents, bibliographies and cross references work in LaTeX are unholy, fragile hacks. Foot- and endnotes could use some TLC. And on 2011-era hardware we really should have some approximation of globally optimal page breaking.
Ugh, and fonts and character sets. Do you still have to put in magic incantations like
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
LuaTeX does seem to be experimenting with some improvements in these areas though.
About when I stopped paying attention to TeX and LaTeX many years ago (2002-ish?), there was some effort under way to rewrite all of TeX in Java. Did that go anywhere?
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#76Earlier 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 wrote a LaTeX macro package for my university's PhD thesis format, and like a lot of such packages, the bulk of the work was in TeX rather than LaTeX. It's...well, I'm struggling to find the appropriate word that means "awful, but sort of comfortably awful."
Like a lot of things, if you're handed a finished product, it looks like random noise. If you could watch it being written, it pretty much makes perfect sense. It's a hideous syntax, and sometimes I still wake up in a cold sweat with long strings of '#' signs running taunting me from the corner of my eyes. But I can't say it was all that daunting to write, although I suspect my TeX code was highly non-idiomatic.
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#77The 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?"
Clearly. It's just small.
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#78Earlier 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…
All true. Also, the way indexes, table of contents, bibliographies and cross references work in LaTeX are unholy, fragile hacks. Foot- and endnotes could use some TLC. And on 2011-era hardware we really should have some approximation of globally optimal page breaking. Ugh, and fonts and character sets. Do you still have to put in magic incantations like \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} \usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} to get wo…
> About when I stopped paying attention to TeX and LaTeX many years ago (2002-ish?), there was some effort under way to rewrite all of TeX in Java. Did that go anywhere?
I'd say no. See http://extex.org/
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#79The 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
jeffrey kingston seems to be having fun building nonpareil
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#80The 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?"
Yes. Read Yossi Gil's answer: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/13370/13435#13435. Here's an excerpt:
I believe most users (maybe not so in this site) just turn a blind eye to the not so elegant features, and produce amazing documents in no time. The very friendly bunch here does not see these not-so-elegant portions as being so annoying. To most, these are just riddles to enjoy, just like cryptic crossword puzzle.
....
The difficult part is in programming something new, something that cannot be found in existing package. There are experts of this dark art: the rest of us just watch them do their wizardry with awe. Luckily, the cases where you really need to do this kind of programming are very rare: chances are that you will find it was done.
In my experience, this is the state of the language. If you could fix this, I believe that even those who currently enjoy the riddles would move over.