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?”

#131

Post by leephillips » Thu, May 28, 2020, 6:45 PM UTC

svat wrote: post #124

( The link goes to a thread on beautiful scientific communication (especially figures/diagrams), so it would have been nice to discuss that rather than discuss LaTeX. But as the conversation here seems to be mostly about the latter… ) What a lot of people don't realize about LaTeX is that much of its awkwardness comes from it being a product of two very strong personalities (both Turing Award winners for unrelated wo…

Many good points. I would just point out that plain TeX itself is a format, a set of macros on top of TeX—just not a elaborate as LaTeX. So I’m not sure there is that much conflict between the two visions.

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

#132

Post by CJefferson » Thu, May 28, 2020, 6:47 PM UTC

solinent wrote: post #102

j-pb wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Minus the tex commands doesnt work for maths and tables, they are almost all tex commands.

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

#133

Post by derefr » Thu, May 28, 2020, 6:51 PM UTC

j-pb wrote: post #127

derefr wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a dream that one day we'll get a language for typesetting that isn't a markup language. Rather, this language would be designed to come after writing, in the same way that flagship Desktop Publishing software (InDesign, Publisher) make the assumption that layout happens after writing. (Sure, you can write inside the layout software, but you're not supposed to. They're assuming e.g. a journalist–editor–layout–t…

That sounds a lot like EPub, where you have html and CSS. It's an interesting idea, but a counterpoint would be: Why all this work for a dying medium? Paper is on it's way out, and there are so many different screen formats (including E-Inc) that dynamic layout is the way to go.

> That sounds a lot like EPub, where you have html and CSS.

Eh, kinda. CSS requires the assistance of the HTML, though; HTML is "the boss" in the relationship, in that it gets to define where markup boundaries are, declare what CSS classes and identifiers apply to what elements, etc. So "I write the HTML, you lay it out with CSS" isn't really a valid pipelined workflow, if you expect to do anything fancy with your layout.

In GUI desktop-publishing programs, the layout document is "the boss." It's as if CSS could target its rules by byte-slices, rather than needing HTML to hand it ready-made selectors. You can take arbitrary bits and pieces of the linked source, style them how you please, and throw them onto parts of pages as you please.

Consider: in GUI desktop-publishing programs, a "pull quote" is not a second copy of the text in the source. It's just a second reference to the same text-slice of source-text, within the layout.

> Why all this work for a dying medium? Paper is on it's way out.

Layout/typesetting isn't just for books. Posters need layout. Billboards need layout. Business cards need layout. None of these are dying out in the least.

Heck, even for screen media, text within videos (e.g. title cards, ad copy, etc.) has static layout, and so benefits from layout/typesetting.

There will always be a place for tools that allow someone to efficiently describe (or hint) the best way to show text (on a screen, or on a page) for best readability — or best impact.

And even leaving aside the practical uses of text layout, I should note that kinetic typography is also an artform, done for its own sake—and one that often requires the assistance of a layout-constraint engine to achieve it. Do you think you can write something like House of Leaves purely using design tools like Adobe Illustrator? ;)

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

#134

Post by derefr » Thu, May 28, 2020, 6:53 PM UTC

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #111

derefr wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a dream that one day we'll get a language for typesetting that isn't a markup language. Rather, this language would be designed to come after writing, in the same way that flagship Desktop Publishing software (InDesign, Publisher) make the assumption that layout happens after writing. (Sure, you can write inside the layout software, but you're not supposed to. They're assuming e.g. a journalist–editor–layout–t…

Its not as straightforward. Converting a document from one column to two, often means that some equations have to be intelligently broken up across lines. There have been times when I have defined new variables, so I would not constantly have to break the two column layout for long equations. Figure sizes are also a function of document fonts and size.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to modify the way the source appears, even going so far as saying "there should be a new variable here." I'm just saying that those modifications should live in the layout document, rather than in the source itself.

Think of it like an archivist restoring a painting. First, they add a (removable) clear-resin barrier layer; and then they do restoration work on top of that barrier. In essence, rather than the paint they're adding becoming part of the painting, it instead becomes part of a "wrapper" for the painting, which can always be "unwrapped" back to the source.

Except this analogy isn't perfect, because you can only override a painting point-by-point; whereas a layout document can "losslessly" cut a linked source up into chunks and put each chunk in a different place, repeat chunks, insert things between chunks, etc.

A better analogy, actually, might be a DAW project. The input audio samples are immutable; the DAW project takes samples from the inputs, applies changes to those samples, and then sequences the results.

And note that a large part of the point of this workflow (in desktop publishing, at least) is that the upstream can continue iterating on the linked document as the downstream lays it out. Those changes may break the downstream layout, but they usually don't, because the downstream layout has usually been defined by constraints.

For example, in a newspaper article, if the source-text of the article gets more wordy, then up to a point, the layout engine just packs those same paragraphs tighter on the page it already decided they appear on, while keeping the paragraphs that appear on the next page spaced as before, and not allowing any lines from the paragraphs on page A to migrate to the flow-box on page B. But at a certain point, it switches strategies, moves an entire paragraph from A to B, and then relaxes the spacing of A back down. At that point, the layout may have been broken (because now B might be either too long to fit its flow-box, or unreadably tightly-spaced.) But that happens surprisingly rarely, compared to constraint-based reflow "just working" to absorb linked-document changes. (And note that either the writer or the layout designer can aid this process by inserting explicit page/section breaks that add weights to these constraints, to keep reflow from flapping lengths around.)

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Note that everything I'm talking about is already how a very domain-specific kind of Desktop Publishing already works: "engraving", a.k.a. sheet-music publishing. The score itself (the thing that contains information that could be converted to MIDI) and the engraving details (the way to present the score to a human) are kept separate in most engraving-tool formats.

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

#135

Post by milquetoastaf » Thu, May 28, 2020, 7:01 PM UTC

MperorM wrote: post #126

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 wish I could upvote this a thousand times and then some. Already in the 80's Jeff Bezos refused to use latex due to its absurd difficulty to use. I can't believe it's been 40 years and there still isn't a better tool to write papers with. It took me less than an hour to create a Google Docs template that looks roughly as good as a standard Latex document. The reason Latex looks beautiful is due to a set of wisely c…

That's a great template - mind sharing?

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

#136

Post by nerdponx » Thu, May 28, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

jfk13 wrote: post #100

nerdponx wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leave TeX alone, just build better tools on top of it.

While it's possible to build a lot of things on top, maybe it'd be worth making some minor updates to the core TeX engine itself, to bring it into the world of Unicode and OpenType fonts... Oh, there are a couple of such candidates, actually, built with very different philosophies: there's XeTeX, intended to graft Unicode and OpenType support onto TeX with as little disruption as possible, such that it "just works" w…

Good points.

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

#137

Post by nerdponx » Thu, May 28, 2020, 7:04 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #92

nerdponx wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leave TeX alone, just build better tools on top of it.

I mean, that's what they were proposing; LaTeX is "on top of TeX", and LaTeX is what they were suggesting should be fixed.

Yes, but I was responding to a comment about TeX.

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

#138

Post by lou1306 » Thu, May 28, 2020, 7:05 PM UTC

specialist wrote: post #54

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?

The VS Code Latex-Workshop extension (which imho is great) allows to build LaTeX sources from a Docker container [1].

[1]: https://github.com/James-Yu/LaTeX-Workshop/wiki/Install#usin...

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

#139

Post by jessriedel » Thu, May 28, 2020, 7:09 PM UTC

jpab wrote: post #101

jessriedel wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I mean, it wasn't merely emphasis. Likewise, "NBA" is not mere emphasis in the statement "Muggsy Bogues is the shortest person in NBA history".

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

#140

Post by svat » Thu, May 28, 2020, 7:12 PM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #131

svat wrote: post #124

( The link goes to a thread on beautiful scientific communication (especially figures/diagrams), so it would have been nice to discuss that rather than discuss LaTeX. But as the conversation here seems to be mostly about the latter… ) What a lot of people don't realize about LaTeX is that much of its awkwardness comes from it being a product of two very strong personalities (both Turing Award winners for unrelated wo…

Many good points. I would just point out that plain TeX itself is a format, a set of macros on top of TeX—just not a elaborate as LaTeX. So I’m not sure there is that much conflict between the two visions.

Oh yes definitely: some of the “sins” of LaTeX (doing too much with TeX macros, etc) do start with Knuth himself (though he seems to have been doing it for fun rather than prescribing it for general use), and some are in plain TeX too. But though I wouldn't call it conflict, I think there is a difference (of focus at least), which comes across in the way they are used: Knuth does all his writing, editing, and polishing with pencil on paper, and only uses the computer to finally type it up for typesetting and fine-tuning the appearance. (Also, he tends to use not plain TeX necessarily but take ideas from it and create a separate “format” for other documents.)

On the other hand, LaTeX is clearly designed with the vision of being a complete “document preparation system” for authors from the moment they first turn their thoughts into words. The former approach I guess is feasible today if you do most of your “document” stuff in another place (if not pencil and paper, then maybe a plain text editor or Markdown or…) and use TeX only at the end, for typesetting.