When you solve that one, you can try to figure out why people still listen to Chopin's music, or read Shakespeare.
Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
101–110 of 127 posts
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#102The 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'm glad you like LyX, and I encourage other people who haven't found a TeX editor they like to try it out.
Personally, I don't want my editor to do anything with my source code except color code it, like turning the source code into into manipulable objects (or whatever you call that).
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#103The 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…
seamlessly hide the compilation process There are several editors for Tex&co that do on-the-fly compilation. Have you seen Kile's two panelled interface, for example? feature a modern debugging environment Well, this is a problem with the language: macro expansion is notoriously tricky to debug. I'd like to see work done on a static analyser for Tex. robustly handle all modern image types This is not a problem I have…
> There are several editors for Tex&co that do on-the-fly compilation...
Yes, I have two-panelled TeXworks open as we type. It's not seamless because I had to spend an hour fussing with it to set it up with my LaTeX distribution, and another 2 hours dealing with it when I needed to move from pdflatex to regular latex because the journal I was submitting to used some bizarre packages.
It's not that you can't eventually get it working, it's that you ever have to think about it at all.
>Well, this is a problem with the language: macro expansion is notoriously tricky to debug. I'd like to see work done on a static analyser for Tex.
Fine. When I said that the language was fine, I meant that the language as a means for the user expressing an idea was fine, not that there aren't problems at a deeper level with the language. I'm a physicists, not a programmer. Still, I can't imagine the debugging situation can't be greatly improved with the given language if actual people were employed to fix it.
>This is not a problem I have ever had. What are you thinking of? The only file types needing special handling in Luatex are Postscript and SVG; both convert painlessly to PDF, and the converter can be run automatically by Luatex.
I have had many, many headaches with getting images into a document. Last month, I spent 4 hours trying to solve one particular problem. Yes, maybe if I were deeply familiar with all the technical stuff surrounding TeX's relationship with images, I could have figured it out.
It should just work. I should type \includeimage{filename}, and it should just work.
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#104I argue that TeX isn't widely used in nearly all of academia. Microsoft Word is awkwardly common, for what I've seen. The likelihood of TeX use grows with the probability of having to include complex equations into papers. This will emphasize—with perhaps the notable exception of CS—the sciences without the word 'science' in them.
Generally, it's easier to write logically structured text rather than physically structured text. Thus, instead of battling with physical layout people have a subtle incentive to try to let a computer automated some of that work for them in hope for productivity gains. Various text authoring tools and word processors can help with that to some extent.
The differences come into play as different software start cracking broke in different ways. Some people are never able to cross the border to something more complex and powerful and are thus forever limited to pixel-perfecting their MS Word layouts, equations, and formatting—quite complex and powerless in itself! Now, TeX has that power but comes with a steep learning curve and a significant load of archaic baggage. This means that, for people with certain inclination, it will be at some point be easier to battle with TeX than with other typesetting or text authoring programs.
TeX users don't probably drool its unlimited awesomeness. It just means that for many of them TeX is the best known tool for the job. If there ever is an another tool that allows them the power of TeX and yet comes with a good library of facades that shield them from the inevitable ugly innards it will probably win over many people over time. Nobody likes to write HTML/XML and MathML but think something like Markdown with cross-references, TeX-like equations, a good chaptering markup, and you're close.
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#105The 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…
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…
>I would disagree that the base is wonderful and it's the editors that are bad
OK. (As I said elsewhere...) When I said the language was fine, I meant that the language as a means for the user expressing an idea was fine, not that there aren't problems at a deeper level with the language. I'm a physicists, not a programmer. Nevertheless, the limitations of the given language could be massively ameliorated with a powerful editor.
>At least in LaTeX...
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I wasn't distinguishing between TeX and LaTeX. Everyone I know in Academia used LaTeX. I was just using TeX as a catch all to distinguish from other typesetting options.
> The features you mention would be needed to put it in front of less geeky users...
There's no reason I should have to go on the internet to find out how to use columns. Or sub figures. Or appendices. It should just work.
I'm not a less-geeky user who needs to be coddled (unless by "less geeky" you mean 99.99% of users). I just want to write up my research, and I don't want to have to think about typesetting theory.
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm sure its possible and useful for specialty cases but would you want to write TAOCP in it? My experience of using LaTeX compared to WYSIWYG is that it's easier to focus on the text in the editor instead of fighting with the UI interface but it then requires some chasing around package bugs and compile errors. In total it's clearly a net positive for me. Writing pure TeX would seem to push the tradeoff quite a bit,…
The idea is that you put together the few macros that you need and then the book is mostly tag-free.
IDK you can find the source to the TeXbook on CTAN, see if it seems too noisy to you (I don't remember).
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#107why is it still used? WYSIWYW >> WYSIWYG modern alternatives? nothing i can think of.
Adobe's FrameMaker?
I used to work for a Framemaker competitor, Interleaf, which was better at long documents and customizable in Lisp to boot. The longest document i participated working on was 30,000 pages and was successfully published on schedule. But Interleaf is not available now in any meaningful way.
I hate trying to produce anything longer than a couple of pages in Word and get predictable results. But it is often the required document standard in academia those days.
Fortunately I discovered Scrivener, albeit not available on Linux. But I find it a great writing tool without having to code in TeX, which just isn't something i want to do anymore. :)
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#108FWIW, 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 ve…
Seconded. AsciiDoc is enough like writing a plain-text e-mail that everything but the writing just falls away.
For a little more control, you can feed the generated DocBook to something like Remko's DocBook kit (https://github.com/remko/docbook-kit), which downloads and runs the various document processors for converting to PDF in stages--with gnarly XML config files available for each stage. This can be helpful for trying to match a specific conference template, for instance.
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#109The answers on HN are better and have more variety than SE!
Re: Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?
#110Off-topic, but the closing of interesting open-ended discussion points is one of the reasons I avoid stack overflow.
Agreed. I think the stack exchange sites hould just openly state:
"If you ask a questions that harms the ego of any of our mods, your question will be summarily closed. Be advised that our mods identify with the technology at hand, so any criticism of the underlying technology will almost certianly be taken as a personal attack on our mods."
It's a cancer that affects all of the SE forums (and they _are_ forums).