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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?”

#151

Post by epicureanideal »

im3w1l wrote: post #70
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.

If I had a few million dollars budget for improving latex, I'd spend 90% of it UX research. What are people using it for? What are the biggest pain points? Which easy wins are there? Then try to modify it as little as possible while improving things.

Or just improve HTML text rendering such that Latex isn't necessary to generate beautiful documents.

And add better support for concepts like page numbers, page headers, page footers, which while theoretically supported by HTML and CSS, aren't well supported in practice.

Given that many people use Python now for scientific purposes, and it's a straightforward language, to add extensibility to this Latex replacement, maybe just use Jinja templates and Python packages.

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

#152

Post by j-pb »

marvy wrote: post #148
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…

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?

Single column layouts often work semi-acceptably for text only, when not purposefully tampered with.

However if you try to select the text on page 2, you'll see that the layout engine didn't actually place the formula into its own section. Not only is it broken, with the sum signs missing, it is also jumbled up with the text below it, resulting in weird - text broken formula - text - broken formula - mumbo jumbo.

This would make it extremely hard if not impossible to properly follow the paper with a screen reader.

The figures on page 6 also produce weird artefacts on the text layer. In HTML for example you'd simply present the alt-text to the person with the screen reader, but TeX doesn't have such a feature in most vector drawing libs afaik.

The table on page 8 is also not correct in terms of the text layer. If you select it you can see that you get the top half of the leftmost column followed by the rightmost column, followed by the rest in some order.

If I may also direct your attention to this gem on page 9: "Then at least half of allnodeshaveh ̄=lgn =lgn−1(seethepaperforthedefinitionofh ̄),and 2√ thus a potential of Ω( lg n). Therefore, the total heap potential would be lg n). Conjecture: the same construction works for the fancy potential √ √ function, which would give a bound of Θ(n · 4 lg lg n)."

Shall I go on ^^?

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

#153

Post by ergl »

j-pb wrote: post #79
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.

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.

I admit I've been lucky with deadlines. The shortest span has been 3 weeks, but that was one time where most of the work was already done, and only then we looked for suitable conferences to submit the paper.

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

#154

Post by marvy »

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…

Just read your rant/blogpost. You didn't give too many examples of what's wrong with LaTeX, but you did mention putting two images next to each other. Isn't this just:

\includegraphics{img1} \includegraphics{img2}

Or is that not what you meant?

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

#155

Post by inimino »

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?

It's a fantastic product for locking the organizational knowledge of countless teams in the data centres of the biggest (publicly traded) enemy to privacy the US has ever seen. This would be a disaster for science, would suck the life out of the TeX ecosystem, and would be a perfect acquisition target for evil science publishing parasites (you know the names) to further strangle the scholarly discourse in the name of convenience. If the files don't live in my hard drive and aren't published to my web server, I don't want it and will fight against it.

And before someone asks, yes, I feel similarly about GitHub, and wasn't the least bit surprised when it sold itself to the self-declared enemy of open source of previous decades (now reformed, of course!).

Yes, these things are convenient, they have great UX nudging you toward what serves the interests of whoever owns them. I'm not arguing against the usability of Google Docs but against transplanting that model to a community built on entirely different principles.

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

#156

Post by drwu »

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…

The automatic microtype is the killer feature for my own `unprofessional' publishing without Adobe suite.

Besides, the macro language of TeX is not the best programming language IMHO, but it just works, especially for the flexible control of long document.

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

#157

Post by viklove »

derefr wrote: post #133
j-pb wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 la…

flexbox sort of invalidates most of your argument

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

#158

Post by est31 »

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…

You should check out Tectonic.

https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io

It fixes some of the issues that LaTex has.

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

#159

Post by ergl »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #99

I always wondered the opposite: how do researchers can get any work done when they have to formalize it using LateX? I've tried writting a book using LateX, and it's been nothing but a miserable experience. I'm been coding for 15 years, and tweaking my Linux machine for longer. I know what it means to face rought edges. But LaTeX is another level of shenanigans. I seem to understand that researchers use latex because…

Network effects have a lot to do with it. Conferences will give you style files that only work with Latex, and some require the .tex sources when you submit your article.

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

#160

Post by blackrock »

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 sounds like an opportunity for someone to create a python module to generate scientific documents.

You’ll get all the benefits of python, with the added benefits of generating formatted text.

Call it pyTeX.

LOL..

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