Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?” • Hacker News Board

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#51

Post by fermienrico » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

inimino wrote: post #25

jessriedel wrote: post #14

I'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.

I think the idea would be more like Jet Brain’s IDE for LateX. Ofcourse I have doubts if some team can pull this off well.

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#52

Post by thechao » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:15 PM UTC

zzo38computer wrote: post #39

the_svd_doctor wrote: post #5

I have such a love-hate relationship with Latex. I use it almost every day. I love how easy it is to write beautiful math, and how easy it is to organize well large documents. It's fast (in general). And, thank god, there are lots of information online. But boy do I hate the whole semi-broken macro-based system. The package management feels so outdated. Errors are hard to decipher. Package documentation is there but…

There is also Plain TeX. Many scientists use LaTeX; a few people (including myself) use Plain TeX. (At least, I find Plain TeX less confusing.)

Right!? I feel like TeX is good, but most of the problems are actually outdated LaTeX issues.

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#53

Post by bfirsh » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #14

I'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 important/difficult problem of generating beautiful web pages is most of the way there already: https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo

There are some features in LaTeXML, which powers Engrafo, for adding some "LaTeX++" features, like embedding JS, etc.

Still could do with a lot of work, though.

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#54

Post by specialist » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

the_svd_doctor wrote: post #5

I have such a love-hate relationship with Latex. I use it almost every day. I love how easy it is to write beautiful math, and how easy it is to organize well large documents. It's fast (in general). And, thank god, there are lots of information online. But boy do I hate the whole semi-broken macro-based system. The package management feels so outdated. Errors are hard to decipher. Package documentation is there but…

Noob question: No one makes LaTeX "distros"? Failing that, what about sharing a Docker image?

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#55

Post by setgree » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #14

I'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 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

This might be a niche opinion, but I think Rmarkdown & Jupyter get us a non-negligible portion of the way there. You can use LaTeX chunks when you need equations, markdown syntax when you need formatting (IIRC this is a pain with LaTeX), and executed code chunks to (e.g.) create and insert a graph. (One advantage of Rmarkdown is that you can have as many languages in a single document as knitr can handle, each its own chunk [0]).

Neither is all the way there yet, but, as Yihui Xie puts it [1]:

> I have a dream that one day all students and researchers will forget what "formatting a paper" even means. I have a dream that one day journals and grad schools no longer have style guides. I have a dream that one day no missing $ is inserted, and \hbox is never overfull.

[0]: https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/language-engines.html

[1] https://twitter.com/xieyihui/status/1022873179532996609

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#56

Post by gibolt » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #46

jessriedel wrote: post #14

I'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.

The old way doesn't have to change. It still exists. Make a wrapper GUI that makes it far more approachable. Syncing and other funtions could be handled by a library that works with either

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#57

Post by isatty » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

felixfbecker wrote: post #29

jessriedel wrote: post #14

I'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, ...

I disagree (or maybe because I don't fully understand your comment). In my (limited, I'm not a FE dev) experience, you layout an HTML page by hand but I do not want that with a research paper.

I want to write my paper and let LaTeX lay it out for me. Of course I'll have to wrestle with an unruly table or figure now and again but for the most part, the layout and typesetting of the document is handled for me.

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#58

Post by fizixer » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #14

I'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…

No need (edit: except maybe for collaborative editing). Use TeXLive and install the updated copy every year (it has annual releases, and you simply delete the old install directory).

If you're not on linux, spin a Ubuntu VM, and install TeXLive.

(Strictly speaking you don't even need GUI on the machine where pdf gets compiled. I add 'scp output.pdf mydesktop:.' to my Makefile so the file is transferred to my desktop everytime I make. On the desktop the pdf is already open on the big screen and if your pdf reader is good, it'll update the opened pdf everytime the file on harddisk gets updated)

I never use overleaf, and I had no problem finished up my thesis in record time. LaTeX wasn't even an issue.

edit: Overleaf will be helpful for collaborative editing though. I personally would use github/gitlab instead if I ever have to do collaboration.

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#59

Post by ergl » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:20 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #14

I'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…

Writing the paper is the easy part, after spending months researching past literature, coming up with models and hypothesis, and performing experiments.

I really doubt Latex is the bottleneck for doing research.

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#60

Post by munificent » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:21 PM UTC

A couple years back, I read Niklaus Wirth's "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs", published by Prentice Hall in 1976.

It is a truly beautiful book. Cover, typesetting, illustrations. It just feels compact, clean, and elegant in a way that marvelously reinforces Wirth's own aesthetic. They really don't make them like they used to.