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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?”

#141

Post by jessriedel »

generationP wrote: post #19
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…

Yes for IDE. Yes for HTML+ output (though what exactly the "+" entails is a tricky thing; HTML+CSS won't suffice). Not sure about merging the 100 most popular packages. Most likely their conflicts cannot be resolved in a backwards-compatible way, and then you have the standard "101 standards" outcome and old tex files start rotting.

Yea, I really meant merging in the functionality of the most popular packages, and keeping as much of the syntax as possible without compatibility issues. I agree with you about those risks.

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

#142

Post by jyriand »

It was an interesting read, as I never thought that this might be a problem in the first place. It seems that to really care/know about LaTex you have to be hard core scientist working on academia. I was wondering why it's being mentioned so often on HN. I think research specific typography can only be advanced by someone who is experiencing these problems firsthand.

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

#143

Post by mNovak »

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…

I agree beautiful defaults help LaTeX, all the more so because I always use someone else's well defined template. But, my main issues with Docs/Word is not just "look", rather:

- smart figure/caption/table handling (no orphaned captions, no figures hanging out in the middle of the page) - easy, label-based cross referencing (not selecting each from a popup interface) - text-based equation input

All that being said, I still have an elaborate Word template I use for proposal writing. Because often I have to pass it off to others (who may not know TeX) to contribute, and sometimes I need to quickly bastardize my nice formatting to squeeze into hard page limits.

ShareLatex / Overleaf is very good, but I'd love to see slightly more ease of use as OP suggests. I'd like to see a switchable WYSIWYG / code editor, so laypeople can make simple formatting changes visually without needing to know the right commands, and it propagates correctly into the underlying LaTeX.

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

#144

Post by shuckles »

rimunroe wrote: post #45
shuckles wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are confusing RAM with storage.

I suppose they could have meant that, but I think it's pretty reasonable to interpret that as having meant size on disk

You’re right. The original post was not clear.

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

#145

Post by leephillips »

svat wrote: post #140
leephillips wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 polishi…

Ahh, now that you put it that way, yes, I think you are exactly right. For me, the real reason I started to use LaTeX had nothing to do with document formatting, which I had already figured out how to do with plain TeX (writing a 200-page thesis in it). It was the automatic handling of equation numbers and other labels.

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

#146

Post by JadeNB »

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.)

There are other TeX dialects, too. AMSTeX bid to become its own dialect, for a while, but I think what's mainly happened is that people who want its functionalities use them as a package (or packages) on top of LaTeX. ConTeXt is the big non-LaTeX dialect of which I'm aware.

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

#147

Post by duskwuff »

derefr wrote: post #134
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> 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.

You may be amused to learn that there's a TeX for sheet music -- Lilypond [1]. I don't believe it's commonly used in the industry, but it can generate decent-looking output.

[1]: https://lilypond.org/

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

#148

Post by marvy »

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…

Let's take an example:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06389.pdf

A cursory inspection seems to indicate ctrl-F is fine here? Or am I missing something?

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

#149

Post by epicureanideal »

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…

Don't most journals accept MS Word submissions now? Doesn't Word provide all the formatting needed?

I also prefer Latex but I wonder if we're talking about solving a problem nobody has?

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

#150

Post by MperorM »

mNovak wrote: post #143
MperorM wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree beautiful defaults help LaTeX, all the more so because I always use someone else's well defined template. But, my main issues with Docs/Word is not just "look", rather: - smart figure/caption/table handling (no orphaned captions, no figures hanging out in the middle of the page) - easy, label-based cross referencing (not selecting each from a popup interface) - text-based equation input All that being said, I…

Totally agree with your points. Latex remains the best tool for many tasks.

But none of the things you described, I think latex does particularly well either. Better than Google docs and the likes, sure, but I think it's possible to do better.

I truly think Google Docs could be so much more than it currently is.

They for example built a brilliant speech-to-text feature that is only available on desktop. Mobile is the one place I could imagine using such a feature. Imagine writing your documents with speech while hiking deep in the woods. Feeling the fresh air with a view of a beautiful brook as Google transcribes your thoughts. That's how I want to write!

Why on earth put so much effort into such a brilliant feature, and then have it only be available to users already sitting in front of a keyboard!?

Apologies for the tangent, it was where my mind wanted me to go!

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