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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?”

#161

Post by ansgri »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #24
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 is going to be really unpopular but you could allow people to write their papers in Microsoft word . Either that or the other answer would be to say that’s why you have grad students .

I work in a lab which publishes in both CS and biology journals. Biologists require Word. Most our people hate it more than LaTeX, since in LaTeX it is at least difficult to break the template accidentally. Often the writing starts in GDocs, then gets moved to LaTeX, then converted to Word and cleaned up manually.

I'd love Word if it had that one feature, disable direct formatting, to enable changing formatting only through styles.

BTW Latex with embedded Markdown is a rather pleasant combo after you have it set up properly.

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

#162

Post by godelski »

ajmurmann wrote: post #36
rimunroe wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hundreds of megabytes would be a considerable improvement for me. I think my last installation of LaTeX and the few packages I depended on was around two gigabytes.

And it's already slow and needs to run multiple times to generate a table of contents and bibtex Edit: phone autocomplete typo

Generally I use a Makefile that looks like this

```

SRC :=$(wildcard .tex .bib)

Paper.pdf: $(SRC)

pdflatex Paper

bibtex Paper.aux

pdflatex Paper

pdflatex Paper

short: $(SRC)

pdflatex Paper

clean:

rm -f .glo .log .dvi .gls .toc .aux .ist .out .glg .pdf .bbl .blg .lof .brf *.sta

.PHONY: clean

```

I hate that you have to run things multiple times to get references right. Really it should just be `pdflatex Paper` and you should be done.

Every once in awhile I just get references that don't want to stick. Same with images. [ht!] and floatbarriers only go so far. As much as tikz is a pain (and beautiful), I'd definitely invest more time into making image placement and references easier for the average user.

EDIT: code has a lot of wildcards before every extension but I'm not sure how to escape those on HN

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

#163

Post by abdullahkhalids »

marvy wrote: post #154
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…

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?

Subcaption package https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Floats,_Figures_and_Capt...

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

#164

Post by Bromskloss »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #24
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 is going to be really unpopular but you could allow people to write their papers in Microsoft word . Either that or the other answer would be to say that’s why you have grad students .

I don't trust articles written in Word.

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

#165

Post by derefr »

viklove wrote: post #157
derefr wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Not at all. No matter how much power you have over HTML elements using flexbox, HTML still has the ultimate say over how the document is split into HTML elements.

In a desktop-publishing program, you can just highlight some text in the linked source, and make it bold, and the layout file will remember that that part of that paragraph should now be bold (using a targeting heuristic that will mostly work unless the paragraph is severely changed.)

You can't do that with CSS.

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

#166

Post by jessriedel »

truckerbill wrote: post #90
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…

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 pro…

LyX exists. It is used only by a small minority of physicists even though it's been around for 25 years.

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

#167

Post by contravariant »

jessriedel wrote: post #86
contravariant wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is markdown anything other than syntax? But yes quite a big part on (mostly) pagination is missing, which will need to be added.

I still think this is easier than merging the commonly used LaTeX packages into one code base and then building a proper IDE and a method to output to HTML.

Much better to start with markdown, extend KaTeX to support whatever you still need for math notation, and then work on making pandoc output to PDF (or equivalent) natively.

On of the bigger problems is bridging the gap between unpaginated HTML and paginated PDF. However if you start from the LaTeX side you'll need to deal with decades of technological debt as well.

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

#168

Post by j-pb »

derefr wrote: post #165
viklove wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

flexbox sort of invalidates most of your argument

Not at all. No matter how much power you have over HTML elements using flexbox, HTML still has the ultimate say over how the document is split into HTML elements . In a desktop-publishing program, you can just highlight some text in the linked source, and make it bold, and the layout file will remember that that part of that paragraph should now be bold (using a targeting heuristic that will mostly work unless the pa…

Well you could mark every div with an individual tag, and then have a realllllyyyyy big css file. ^^'

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

#169

Post by LudwigNagasena »

xamuel wrote: post #62
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #44

What 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…

But what if you a computer scientists or an economist that needs to write graphs, charts, tables, code, etc? Last time I tried to strikeout a column it required some weird TikZ shenanigans.

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

#170

Post by inimino »

epicureanideal wrote: post #151
im3w1l wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

You are greatly underestimating (1) the effort it took (in committees, over decades) to get CSS where it is now (and DSSSL, XSL-FO, and all the related work in this area) and (2) the vastness of the gap between where the Web platform is after all these years vs. where TeX already was before the Web even existed.
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