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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?

#91

Post by jb55 »

zdw wrote: post #88

Pandoc is another alternative that uses Markdown for syntax and converts to a variety of formats (html, epub, rtf, odt, docbook, pdf, LaTeX, etc.): http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ Works quite well. If you known LaTeX, it allows you to customize your output template, while still composing in Markdown.

This. I do all of my school assignments in markdown + embedded latex. I convert them directly to PDF using the markdown2pdf helper that comes with Pandoc. It has pretty much replaced .doc files and monolithic word processors for me.

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

#92

Post by cemerick »

microtonal wrote: post #73
cemerick wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True enough. I've needed some bits of docbook that don't have a direct asciidoc corollary twice, and just used asciidoc passthrough blocks to use them. It's a very practical solution to a leaky abstraction, while allowing me to stay in asciidoc 99.7% of the time.

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

#93

Post by kstenerud »

nailer wrote: post #81
khaled wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, TeX's original (and only) goal was to help Knuth typesetting his books (TAOCP specifically) and he didn't think anyone but his secretary will use it.

Replying to someone else's statement with 'nope' and your own different understanding of facts is inane and rude. Either ask for a citation - which I'll gladly provide - or provide a referenced counterpoint of your own. Assuming you're actually interested in some kind of discussion rather than just trolling, see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=908946 , the same reference that's provided on the Wiki…

Regardless, TeX failed for the masses because it was too complicated to begin with (the masses are not programmers, nor are they interested in "programming" their documents). WYSIWYG word processors and desktop publishing software do a decent enough job quickly with a learning curve orders of magnitude shallower, and rightly so since it's the learning curve that poses the greatest barrier to entry.

And while many attempts have been made to flatten that curve with various tools, I'm hard pressed to find a compelling competitor to Microsoft Word or OpenOffice in terms of ease-of-use.

People in general are far more interested in the final result than the "beauty" of the steps to produce that result, especially when it comes to the written word.

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

#94

Post by bluekeybox »

crocowhile wrote: post #84
bluekeybox wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And still most majority of kernel hacking is done by private people in their free time. No mention of virtually every other software I use everyday. Think of drivers, often made and improved AGAINST a company will, by reverse engineering closed sources. Money have nothing to do with open source. Sure they help, but if a project is not followed it's not because of money incentives.

Money is not everything, but it has a lot to do with everything, including open source. Linux would still have been a hobby operating system if a number of big players (Sun, IBM, etc) didn't get on the Linux bandwagon in the early 2000s.

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

#95

Post by jackolas »

protomyth wrote: post #90

Could have been "Why is C still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?" heck this works too "Why is HTTP still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?" Because, sometimes, someone gets something right and a lot of people build some exceptional infrastructure around it and then it lasts.

HTTP is being replaced. http://www.chromium.org/spdy

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

#96

Post by sesqu »

colanderman wrote: post #72
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…

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.

I've had it crash repeatedly, but it remains the best editor I've ever called WYSIWYG, whether or not that's accurate.

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

#97

Post by juiceandjuice »

NY_USA_Hacker wrote: post #86
NY_USA_Hacker wrote: post #85

Part One I can respond here in sections: I. My Background. II. How to Use TeX. III. What TeX is Good for. IV. Warnings. below: I. My Background. I was an early member of the TeX user's group (TUG) and have been a serious and happy TeX user for 15 years. I use TeX itself just as Knuth wrote it and rarely have anything to do with LaTeX or any of the other extensions or preprocessors. The TeX installation I use is ProTe…

Part Two III. What TeX is Good for. No single piece of software is everything, and neither is TeX. It is possible to look at TeX and wish for more. So, just what is TeX and what is it good for? The history is clear: For Knuth's series of books, 'The Art of Computer Programming', the publisher Addison-Wesley told Knuth that for his next edition they were going to use an approach to typesetting that would reduce the 't…

Actually, I'd argue that HTML had a very similar goal to TeX with a very different philosophy. That goal was purely the sharing of information. Some early browsers even had postscript interpreters so you could link to papers and view them in the browser. The first website at SLAC (first site in the US) was purely meant to be a gateway to the SPIRES database.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_Physics_Information_Re...

I guess what I'm trying to say is that their histories are interwoven, and despite being different technologies, they shared a common goal and worked together. It's possible philosophy of what a web browser is probably led to their divergence more than anything.

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

#98

Post by anghyflawn »

I use LaTeX in an academic setting (theoretical linguistics) which only occasionally requires a lot of math, but I'm still saving tons of man-hours by using the LaTeX + Emacs + AUCTeX combo. Here are some frequent use cases where LaTeX blows a text processor out of the water.

* Bibliography. The median article length in our field is 30+ pages, with reference lists of 60+ not uncommon. Maintaining these in Word/OO is a nightmare, even with (non-free) bibliography software. RefTeX allows me to find and insert citations in a matter of three keystrokes, and whenever I reshuffle the reference list I'm 100% sure it's in order (i.e. everything I cite in the text is in the references and there are no uncited references)

* We don't use math, but we do use a lot of tree-like diagrams. Drawing these by hand is a chore; using logical markup to get trees which need zero to very little tuning saves enormous amounts of time and frustration.

* Floats and numbered examples. TeX floats are notoriously unreliable, but seriously, are Word's any better? And it gets worse with numbered examples (and pictures in numbered examples). For instance, a frequent feature of linguistics papers is an interlinear gloss: two or three lines of elements that have to line up with each other. These involve tables or tab stops in a word processor, and are notoriously fragile (e. g. if your sentence doesn't fit on one line, you get horrible issues with breaking lines).

All this is in addition to the common advantages like keeping track of numbering. These are all things that can be done with a word processor, but usually require significant amounts of time and self-discipline.

A lot of people in our department use LaTeX; most are not of the "programming" type, and are not deeply "into" LaTeX, interacting with the very basics and using some googling and copy-pasting. They still get much more satisfactory results in a shorter amount of time than the Word people.

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

#99

Post by colanderman »

sesqu wrote: post #96
colanderman wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've had it crash repeatedly, but it remains the best editor I've ever called WYSIWYG, whether or not that's accurate.

From the first paragraph of http://www.lyx.org/:

> LyX is a document processor that encourages an approach to writing based on the structure of your documents (WYSIWYM) and not simply their appearance (WYSIWYG).

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

#100

Post by khaled »

microtonal wrote: post #74
khaled wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 out…

Yup, except that XSL-FO output is of shitty quality, especially if you are doing heavy math typesetting, and I know at least one pretty successful open access publisher doing this DocBook->TeX workflow for all their puplications.
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