Before LateX? Just do a rough cuneiform sketch on papyrus before you carve into the clay tablet for storage, right?
I think you've got your writing mediums swapped around.
Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
21–30 of 204 posts
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#22I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…
Considering what "modernizing" other parts of the tech stack has meant, I would expect a 21st century LaTeX to be hundreds of megabytes, require running a buggy, slow electron app, and phone home to a variety of SaaS providers when you use it.
Edit: Someone beat me to it by suggesting VSCode as an IDE.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#23I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…
Seems easier to take org or markdown and add stuff to it until it's on par with LaTeX.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#24I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…
This is going to be really unpopular but you could allow people to write their papers in Microsoft word .
Either that or the other answer would be to say that’s why you have grad students .
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#25I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…
Knuth wrote TeX as a labor of love. The surest way to kill everything good about it would be a few million dollars, and a team, and to turn it into fucking Google Docs for science.
Ask Knuth to name one person who has the clearest vision for the future of TeX, and give that person a stipend to work on it for the next ten years, or for life, and you might actually do some good.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#26I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…
Considering what "modernizing" other parts of the tech stack has meant, I would expect a 21st century LaTeX to be hundreds of megabytes, require running a buggy, slow electron app, and phone home to a variety of SaaS providers when you use it. Edit: Someone beat me to it by suggesting VSCode as an IDE.
Hundreds of megabytes would be a considerable improvement for me. I think my last installation of LaTeX and the few packages I depended on was around two gigabytes.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#27I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…
This is going to be really unpopular but you could allow people to write their papers in Microsoft word . Either that or the other answer would be to say that’s why you have grad students .
It is like asking developers to write html pages and code in Word.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#28They were done faster
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#29I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…
Imo papers of the future should be authored in semantic HTML, which can be rendered to PDF, but most importantly be reflowed and read on any digital device, also by people with disabilities, and indexed/searched.
The capabilities are all there - MathML, CSS for print layout, , SVG, highlight.js, LaTeX.css, ...
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#30I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…
You can use VSCode as LaTeX IDE and git to sync to overleaf... Which costs slightly less than $20M
My thoughts exactly. I'm currently working on a paper together with an older professor who barely manages to use Overleaf, and this is how I make it work. I keep my copy of the paper on my personal remote git repo. On my local workspace, I keep a clone of that repo with an additional branch tracking the Overleaf version. Then it's just a matter of merging branches whenever any of us make changes. She gets to enjoy the convenience of using Overleaf and I get to keep using VSCode and all my extensions without hassle.