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Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
41–50 of 204 posts
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#42Reminded me of the recent piece: Crafting Crafting Interpreters, in which Nystrom describes his process for creating hand-drawn diagrams.
http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2020/04/05/crafting-crafti...
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#43I'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, ...
It's the right platform, but it's the wrong authoring experience for people who might not be able to code at all, much less understand the nuances of CSS and how it interacts with the DOM. People using LaTeX don't want to code something, they want to write something and just have requirements that go beyond the typical use-case for "writing something". A layer is needed on top.
Maybe that could take the form of a single JS and/or CSS file that gets dropped into an HTML page and then the author can create their documents with nothing but special tag attributes/classes. But likely it would need to be even more abstracted than that.
Here's a good attempt that's being made. It's an extended version of Markdown that covers charts, equations, etc.: https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#44What I don’t understand is why Latex so cumbersome, complicated, unintuitive, ugly and slow. Is it simply a technical debt of choices made in time when computers were different and when there were different constraints? Is it just a nature of the problem and every tool will feel the same? Is it a result of evolution with a lack of direction? Was literate programming a bad design decision?
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think you are confusing RAM with storage.
I suppose they could have meant that, but I think it's pretty reasonable to interpret that as having meant size on disk
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#46I'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…
I'd say, make sure it's backwards compatible with the old way of doing it because there's a lot of scientists who have been using it for a looong time and don't like change. You have to remember, for a scientist, a tool is just a tool, not all of them are going to invest a lot of time in learning a whole new process.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#47In the late 80s I remember looking at many SIGARCH papers that were printed on crappy dot matrix printers. I thought this was kind of awesome- it's a combination of "who cares about the font when my paper has a good CPU architectural innovation" and "with my new microcomputer there is no need to pay for professional typesetting".
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#48I'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.
Leave TeX alone, just build better tools on top of it.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#49Why is latex needed? If we use can integrate a good math renderer to docs, why can't people use that instead?
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#50I'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…
The "Website" point brings up an important point.
LaTeX is suprisingly terrible at producing accessible documents. There are various systems and packages which make heroic efforts to make accessible output, but you have to use them from the start, as they work like you suggest -- they reimplement (or at least heavily modify) various LaTeX packages to make their outputs accessible.
I've had a blind PhD student and the standard of using LaTeX to produce PDFs for academic papers has been the single biggest block in his progress.