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

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

#101

Post by jpab »

jessriedel wrote: post #83
ergl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You referred to it as "the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research". I don't think it's so surprising that people are interpreting that to mean you think LaTeX is a bottleneck in the research process.

I guess you intended emphasis on the "cost effective" part of the statement, but not everyone will read it like that (I didn't).

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

#102

Post by solinent »

j-pb wrote: post #77
marvy wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

> PDF and TeX are broken beyond repair in terms of accessibility.

All that needs to be done is to have a accessible text section of the PDF--then Tex can just include the source of the document minus the Tex commands into the PDF, and PDF readers can have the screen reader work. The text could also just be stored per page, if the blind require to communicate where they found a particular item to a sighted person.

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

#103

Post by narrationbox »

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 have an alternative view: The fastest way to speed up research would be to fund an open source Wolfram software suite with feature parity. For a lot of hard tech you need good multiphysics and CFD simulations, both of which suffer from a severe lack of open source tooling. Most of the proprietary engineering software can be cloned rapidly once a solid foundation is built. Even though Julia and Python are making progress, in terms of ergonomics and productivity it is still hard to beat the offerings by Wolfram.

(If somebody is looking for a project for Mozilla's "fixing the internet" incubator, maybe give this a shot.)

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

#104

Post by marcosdumay »

the_svd_doctor wrote: post #10
petschge wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LaTeX is a bit like democracy. It is horrible, but all the alternatives I have tried a worse.

Gosh yeah. Imagine writing a 150+ pages thesis in Word. Would give me nightmares. EDIT: To complement: I think it's obviously possible, lots of people do it. But I feel I would spend a lot of time on "keeping the structure right" as I edit it. Feels more straightforward with Latex. And then Math is kind of hard to write efficiently, but that's field specific.

I've done a 70 pages proposal on a computer vision study on Word once (plenty of images). I don't have nightmares with it anymore because I'll never open it again, and never make that stupid decision again (Even if the other side requires it!).

I've edited some ~100 pages regulations (so very few pictures and tables) on Word files too. It's not a nightmare because Open Office works quite well with those.

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

#105

Post by Spivak »

raverbashing wrote: post #87
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.

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

Yes, it is ostensibly a tool from the 70's but it is also the most complete, correct, and featureful typesetting engine that exists.

TeX's downfall is the macro system. It makes it too easy for people to pile on poorly written abstractions that make working with any given document a nightmare because it has its own DSL. But because those packages and macros grew organically by researchers solving problems for themselves they are too practically useful to just drop them. So there are lots of annoying unintuitive quirks that you end up just having to put up with.

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

#106

Post by johannes1234321 »

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…

Luckily Knuth himself has this on his radar as this "earthshaking anouncment" by him shows: https://youtu.be/eKaI78K_rgA (Won't spoil it by giving more details)

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

#107

Post by BiteCode_dev »

alphagrep12345 wrote: post #49

Why is latex needed? If we use can integrate a good math renderer to docs, why can't people use that instead?

If you cram a lot of formulas, images and graphs into a world document, you'll have an instable slug to work with.

Also, rendering a beautiful word document is quite chalenge.

Rendered latex document looks stunningly clean and professional out of the box.

They also are plain text, which mean they can be diffed, used with git indexed easily, etc. They play well with anything, being text.

You can even read them without having to render them.

And finally, latex check the structure of your doc. If you change it, it will crash, preventing you from commiting dead references.

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

#108

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

Yes. And, yes, there are better end user tools, for many use cases, for creating documents to be typeset than coding them directly in TeX, but (starting with LaTeX and moving up to many more modern solutions) a lot of them are built on top of TeX (and some even on LaTeX) rather than replacing it.

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

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

#109

Post by josefx »

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 wrote some documentation in html and wanted to export it as pdf. The main blocker: an index with page numbers. css has them, but support for them is mostly non existant.
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