Better title would have been: ‘How was research ever presented in a clean, pleasantly formatted document before LaTeX?’
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Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
81–90 of 204 posts
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#82I'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…
Actually the monolithic Tex has been done. Its called context. (Every couple of years I try for a few hours to install it under windows but then give up). Sometimes I manage to install it and then give up because of the introductory texts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConTeXt
(but I still believe there is gold at the bottom of this)
Edit: woooah. I see there is now an installer for context, since april 2019! https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Installation
here we go again....
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#83I'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.
Nothing in my comment suggests a bottleneck. It's just a matter of making people a few percentage point more efficient at a very low price.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That seems irrelevant in this context as both Microsoft Word or Google Docs would fit the analogy in the same way.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#85I'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 used LyX to write a pretty significant paper back in 1.6, a decade later Lyx is now on 2.3; I just installed it and opened my old research paper. Obviously, I haven't done a thorough test, but from 5 minutes poking around there's a huge improvement in appearance, documentation, and usability!
There's a similar story for the electronics design software package KiCAD - I played with that a bit in school as well, when it was more like a group of separate software packages duct-taped together with some import/export scripts. The enthusiasts weren't bothered by and seemed to actually enjoy the lack of polish. Recently, though, CERN has injected a bunch of money, programming time, and real-world use engineer's time into the project and it really shows.
I definitely agree that the NSF (or any major LaTeX-using organization) injecting a few million dollars into LyX would be an incredible boon to human productivity. I do feel that it would be better for an organization with internal consumers of the software to undertake this effort than for an outside team to just start with a blank canvas.
The latter too frequently ends up with the primary users being developers, where bug reports or feature requests will be responded to with "Just compile with -D FEATURE_ENABLE" or "For the syntax of that menu item, read the block comment and source code of the foo.cpp/bar() method" - basically, where TeX is right now. Most users of most software will install it with the Windows .exe, a few will use the .dmg/.deb/.rpm or their package manager: a vanishingly small subset are compiling it from source. And if you expect that your users should be able to read C++, your user base is going to very small.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#86I'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.
Markdown is not even 10% of the way toward a full document typesetting system, so you might as well throw it away and create a new codebase. The only thing you're really suggesting then is making it backward-compatible with the markdown syntax.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#87I'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.
People do dissertations, articles, etc using Word/Google Docs, etc
Of course it's a work of love, but it's a tool from the 70s
Clinging to the past might be interesting but in the end it's that, a tool
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#88What 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?
If you're an actual mathematician writing pages and pages of equations, LaTeX is not complicated, unintuitive, ugly, or slow. It's actually extremely well designed for addressing what is a very difficult problem, the problem of translating mathematics into ASCII. For how difficult that problem is, LaTeX is quite genius. I think a lot of the would-be LaTeX-disruptors lack enough experience actually writing mathematics…
Are you specifically talking about the math syntax within latex, or actual latex commands in general? Because I would disagree on the latter one. (But I'm a computer scientist not a mathematician.) uglyness is porbably hard to discuss as it's just a matter of taste.
I personally consider compile times that are measured in seconds for "simple" tasks slow (here's the question of it being an inherent problem of the space).
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#89I think org-mode is the best of all these worlds. I can breakout into latex where I need to, or can export to latex. I can export to html5 and css3 with custom templates, and can run code in blocks. I just wish other editors would work on org support because it feels like jupyter will eat a lot of the cake that org mode should be getting.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#90I'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…
Using a scripting language to format text always seemed insane to me. People love LaTeX but it's nowhere near as intuitive as writing formulas down on a piece of paper. Having two panes, one for the output seems also very hacky and unintuitive.
Instant feedback in one view, typing at the speed of thought should be the goal, and if it means a new paradigm I'm all for it. Imagine it was something you could actually program with; those gross inline math functions would suddenly be so much more parsable.