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?”

#71

Post by j-pb » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

setgree wrote: post #55

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…

bUt MuH TypESeTtInG!

I think you're absolutely right. But people seem to value a specific flavour of aesthetics over easy to understand and reproducible research.

I guess that's maybe partly caused by the publication pressure, once you start to pump out papers for pumping out papers sake, there is little incentive to go beyond the superficial.

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

#72

Post by rjsw » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

My mother worked as a typist for a research lab, the stuff to type up could be handwritten or spoken.

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

#73

Post by brzozowski » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

fermienrico wrote: post #51

inimino wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you tried the TeXiFy IDEA plugin? It's well-maintained and has saved me a bunch of time.

https://github.com/Hannah-Sten/TeXiFy-IDEA

https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9473-texify-idea

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

#74

Post by henrikeh » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:33 PM UTC

zitterbewegung wrote: post #24

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…

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 .

Word is the preferred format in many fields.

In my field, Word is preferred for conference submissions, because the tight page limits (2-3 pages) is easier to work with in a WYSIWYG editor.

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

#75

Post by MaxBarraclough » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:35 PM UTC

zitterbewegung wrote: post #24

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…

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 .

Proprietary payware that doesn't support Linux and doesn't work with Git?

For current users of LaTeX, it's dead in the water.

> other answer would be to say that’s why you have grad students .

Of which discipline?

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

#76

Post by btmiller » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:37 PM UTC

scubbo wrote: post #63

inimino wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you elaborate on what you think is bad about Google Docs? Aside from the data privacy concerns from the fact that it's owned and operated by Google (which I agree with), it seems like a fantastically usable, available, and powerful product. What do you fear would happen to LaTeX in this situation?

2 things, 1) Why do you consider Google Docs to be any different than Word? They both serve the same market, so you might as well be asking why not standardize around Word. And 2) given the intended uses of Google Docs/Word, the biggest reason not to use it for research are exactly the set of asides you mentioned.

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

#77

Post by j-pb » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:38 PM UTC

marvy wrote: post #68

CJefferson wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I assumed that if ctrl-F works, then screen readers also work. Can you share a bit of information about what tends to go wrong, and/or how document authors can fix it?

Almost no documents properly support ctrl-F. You'll get at best single word search, but you won't find coherent sentences. There are arbitrary line-breaks caused by various styling and layout packages (most columns are broken). There are even publishers that purposefully put garbage into the PDF's text layer as a braindead form of "piracy protection".

PDF and TeX are broken beyond repair in terms of accessibility. The former because it allows the text and image to be split, and very few people care about text as long as it looks alright. And the latter because it's entire document representation model is based around computation. Knuth purposefully made it Turing complete in a misguided attempt at timelessness (no need for a replacement if it's infinitely extensible right?), which means there is no proper way to view a TeX document as "just text data".

I've worked in a library digitising documents, and whenever we encountered PDFs we'd just OCR the damn thing.

We need to throw the thing out, swallow the bitter pill of sub optimal kerning, and replace it with HTML asap.

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

#78

Post by jessriedel » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:42 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.

Obviously everything that can be built by an individual is better that way than if built by a team. But at some point the amount of work becomes too much for one person to finish in a reasonable amount of time (e.g., a lifetime, or before their project becomes out of date).

What I'm describing is not do-able by one person, and the result of refusing to coordinate a team around the project (and instead having a hodge-podge of tools built by various people) is the current LaTeX ecosystem mess.

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

#79

Post by j-pb » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

ergl wrote: post #59

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.

You'd be surprised.

I've spend hours debugging other peoples references, bibliographies and journal dictated styles.

Also if you think that all of academia has MONTHS to work on papers, with our current publish or perish culture, you're wayyyyyy off.

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

#80

Post by innocenat » Thu, May 28, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

zitterbewegung wrote: post #24

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…

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 .

A lot of journal and conferences accept Word file (and provide MS Word template). My dad published tens of papers per year in biology and he doesn't even know what LaTeX is. However, for Maths/Physics/CS, a lot of people just find LaTeX to be faster overall (me included, I began using LaTeX simply because I was too tired to typeset my equation in MS Word)