Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 204 posts

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

#191

Post by abdullahkhalids »

marvy wrote: post #190
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the images are not related to each other, but you want to place them on top of the page together for stylistic reasons, you probably want a simple minipage environment with two figure environments inside.

I meant they might be so closely related that you want them share the same caption and figure number and everything.

Subcaption works perfectly for that. You can skip the subfigure caption - "The gull" etc in this picture

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Latex_example_subfig...

You can reference either the whole figure by using the label inside the figure environment, or you can reference the subfigures using labels inside the subfigure environments.

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

#192

Post by solinent »

j-pb wrote: post #125
solinent wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

As I already wrote. PDF already has exactly that. They separate they have a view layer and a text layer. But it simply doesn't work, because people can't be bothered to get the text right, once the view layer is acceptable. Also TeX minus the tags, is not the final text in any way, because it's not markup, it's code.

> But it simply doesn't work, because people can't be bothered to get the text right,

That's hardly "it's broken beyond compare." I think with accessibility formats which represent fully typeset written documents (as opposed to pre-typesetting, like Latex), it's always going to be an issue because they're mainly produced for people who are sighted initially.

We should simply start shaming programs which export to PDF wrongly, it's not really a difficult thing to get right.

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

#193

Post by marvy »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #191
marvy wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant they might be so closely related that you want them share the same caption and figure number and everything.

Subcaption works perfectly for that. You can skip the subfigure caption - "The gull" etc in this picture https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Latex_example_subfig... You can reference either the whole figure by using the label inside the figure environment, or you can reference the subfigures using labels inside the subfigure environments.

> Subcaption works perfectly for that

I'm not saying it doesn't work. I'm saying that if your needs are simple enough, you can get away without it.

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

#194

Post by marvy »

j-pb wrote: post #188
marvy wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to go on, that's already more than I bargained for, thank you so much for taking the time to respond :) I suspect we're using different PDF viewers; I'm using the one that comes with my browser. The results are somewhat less disastrous than you describe, but still bad. (I'm seeing maybe half the problems you mentioned.) I'm a bit curious which viewer you're using. I can describe what happens when I copy/paste…

I was using the builtin viewer of chrome I think, could also have been safari. Using the original TeX source for the screen reader is significantly hindered by the fact that TeX isn't a markup-, but a programming language. TeX is turing-complete by design, making it infinitely extensible, in order to avoid knuth ever having to re-typeset his books. After all if it's a programming language and a new system, problem, s…

I just tried in Chrome; at least for page 2 it actually did a bit better than my browser: it actually managed to preserve the line breaks! (I don't have Safari installed.)

(Also, if you look closely, the summation signs are not gone, they are replaced by the letter P. Which is not helpful I admit.)

Do you think there's any place here for education/advocacy? For instance, everyone who makes web pages knows to provide alt text for images.

If there was a standard package that everyone knew they had to include or else it breaks everything from ctrl-F to copy/paste to screen readers, presumably people would use it, right?

I'm less interested in speculating what would have been if troff had "won", (though it is indeed fun to speculate), and more interested in how to fix the mess we're in now, so that 10 years in the future, blind people have better choices than OCR.

(Though OCR is still an improvement over the best option in the 1980s I bet. Though I wasn't around so just guessing.)

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

#195

Post by teleforce »

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 am surprised nobody here mentioned TeXmacs. It's nothing to do with TeX or Emacs, but it's inspired by them. Basically the concept is structural graph based document editing software similar to Tioga/Cedar by Xerox back in 1980s but unfortunately the research and improvement for better tools for editing document seems to stagnate a lot after 90s. I think the idea of having an easy to use WYSIWYG editor for scientific document editing need to be popular now to significantly increase scientist productivity. Remember that web was invented to increase scientist productivity and the rest is history.

On a related note, personally I think Overleaf or Google Docs is missing the point or the pain points. Even though both of them enabled offline editing but they are really a cloud first applications. The better approach is to have something like TeXmacs (native desktop first application) and make a seamless integration with synchronization and versioning to the cloud. With a proper use of synchronization and versioning technology like rsync and Git, together with seamless connectivity tools and protocols for examples Wireguard VPN, WebDAV or even the latest SMB over QUIC approach, I really think this is very feasible. The CONCEPT is similar to the useful and successful Watcom product or now SQL Anywhere database editing application.

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

#196

Post by j-pb »

solinent wrote: post #192
j-pb wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I already wrote. PDF already has exactly that. They separate they have a view layer and a text layer. But it simply doesn't work, because people can't be bothered to get the text right, once the view layer is acceptable. Also TeX minus the tags, is not the final text in any way, because it's not markup, it's code.

> But it simply doesn't work, because people can't be bothered to get the text right, That's hardly "it's broken beyond compare." I think with accessibility formats which represent fully typeset written documents (as opposed to pre-typesetting, like Latex), it's always going to be an issue because they're mainly produced for people who are sighted initially. We should simply start shaming programs which export to PDF…

"The way a tool is used is the way that is encouraged by the tool."

Knuth is one of the most perfectionist computer scientists out there, and he still got it wrong.

The market economics are simply not in the favour of people doing extra work, and no amount of shaming will get that to change.

The alternative needs to be designed with accessibility builtin, and with decidability/markup as a conscious design choice.

We have such a format, HTML. The chances to get academics to use HTML with the coming open access wave are much better than getting them to rewrite all of their TeX templates.

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

#197

Post by j-pb »

marvy wrote: post #194
j-pb wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was using the builtin viewer of chrome I think, could also have been safari. Using the original TeX source for the screen reader is significantly hindered by the fact that TeX isn't a markup-, but a programming language. TeX is turing-complete by design, making it infinitely extensible, in order to avoid knuth ever having to re-typeset his books. After all if it's a programming language and a new system, problem, s…

I just tried in Chrome; at least for page 2 it actually did a bit better than my browser: it actually managed to preserve the line breaks! (I don't have Safari installed.) (Also, if you look closely, the summation signs are not gone, they are replaced by the letter P. Which is not helpful I admit.) Do you think there's any place here for education/advocacy? For instance, everyone who makes web pages knows to provide…

"Do you think there's any place here for education/advocacy? For instance, everyone who makes web pages knows to provide alt text for images."

That's not a culture thing, this is by the mechanism of "If there was a standard package that everyone knew they had to include or else it breaks everything from ctrl-F to copy/paste to screen readers, presumably people would use it, right?"

Then it would still be nigh impossible because TeX commands, like all programming languages, compose rather poorly. It would be a herculean effort to produce a kinda but not really TeX that is both accessible with a focus on semantics, yet still compatible with the billions of lines of LaTeX/TeX out there.

"I'm less interested in speculating what would have been if troff had "won", (though it is indeed fun to speculate), and more interested in how to fix the mess we're in now, so that 10 years in the future, blind people have better choices than OCR."

Boycott LaTeX/TeX and PDF everywhere you can. Whenever you publish a paper, also publish it in markdown/html. Publish in OpenAccess Journals like [PeerJ](https://peerj.com/) which convert all of their papers to html in addition to pdf. Consider publishing papers in alternative forms like nextjournal.com .

We need to get our priorities straight in academia :/. This entire "but latex produces such beautiful documents", "I'm working towards getting into the most prestigious journal" culture of snobbery and vanity needs to stop. We need to go back to caring about the content, not the presentation, something TeX ironically was meant to do.

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

#198

Post by marvy »

j-pb wrote: post #197
marvy wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tried in Chrome; at least for page 2 it actually did a bit better than my browser: it actually managed to preserve the line breaks! (I don't have Safari installed.) (Also, if you look closely, the summation signs are not gone, they are replaced by the letter P. Which is not helpful I admit.) Do you think there's any place here for education/advocacy? For instance, everyone who makes web pages knows to provide…

"Do you think there's any place here for education/advocacy? For instance, everyone who makes web pages knows to provide alt text for images." That's not a culture thing, this is by the mechanism of "If there was a standard package that everyone knew they had to include or else it breaks everything from ctrl-F to copy/paste to screen readers, presumably people would use it, right?" Then it would still be nigh impossi…

So basically, give up on LaTeX to PDF as the primary workflow. Either convert LaTeX to semantic HTML instead of to PDF (probably doable for simple cases... \emph to , \section to , \begin{tabular) to , and so on), or better yet just author HTML without going through LaTeX at all. If needed, convert the semantic HTML to PDF as well, for printing or whatever, and then the PDF might end up sane.

Fine, fair enough. If fixing TeX is hopeless, then so be it. I assumed it just needed a few small tweaks, maybe combined with slightly cleverer PDF viewers. Guess I was wrong.

But then what should people use for math? I suppose there's MathJax, which seems to have put some thought into accessibility.

There's still a problem though. I can't help but notice that the journal you linked to is a biology journal. In some math/CS circles which are TeX's "home turf", TeX is far more entrenched to the point where I'm not sure such things even exist. For instance, arxiv sort of supports HTML, but not really:

https://arxiv.org/help/submit_html

So there I guess step 1 is to make HTML a viable option.

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

#199

Post by j-pb »

marvy wrote: post #198
j-pb wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Do you think there's any place here for education/advocacy? For instance, everyone who makes web pages knows to provide alt text for images." That's not a culture thing, this is by the mechanism of "If there was a standard package that everyone knew they had to include or else it breaks everything from ctrl-F to copy/paste to screen readers, presumably people would use it, right?" Then it would still be nigh impossi…

So basically, give up on LaTeX to PDF as the primary workflow. Either convert LaTeX to semantic HTML instead of to PDF (probably doable for simple cases... \emph to , \section to , \begin{tabular) to , and so on), or better yet just author HTML without going through LaTeX at all. If needed, convert the semantic HTML to PDF as well, for printing or whatever, and then the PDF might end up sane. Fine, fair enough. If fi…

PeerJ has actually quite a few publications, one of them is CS ;) https://peerj.com/computer-science/ the dropdown on the top left allows you to switch between them.

I think MathJax is certainly a step in the right direction, they even support rendering to MathML.

But I agree that there is a certain lack there in terms of full semantic representations. MathJax is more accessible than TeX but it's still describing visual layout, instead of semantic meaning.

Pushing HTML to arxiv is also a step into the right direction.

I think the most important thing we can do is not be complacent with the state of the art. We need to go back to an age of computing where we didn't think we had it all figured out. We need to experiment, and not be afraid to take a step back in some aspects, like layout and kerning, in exchange for other advances like semantic representations and knowledge representation.

I think bred victor has a great talk on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4

I think we need to experiment with things like observablehq.com or nextjournal.com or the many other that are coming into existence.

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

#200

Post by marvy »

j-pb wrote: post #199
marvy wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically, give up on LaTeX to PDF as the primary workflow. Either convert LaTeX to semantic HTML instead of to PDF (probably doable for simple cases... \emph to , \section to , \begin{tabular) to , and so on), or better yet just author HTML without going through LaTeX at all. If needed, convert the semantic HTML to PDF as well, for printing or whatever, and then the PDF might end up sane. Fine, fair enough. If fi…

PeerJ has actually quite a few publications, one of them is CS ;) https://peerj.com/computer-science/ the dropdown on the top left allows you to switch between them. I think MathJax is certainly a step in the right direction, they even support rendering to MathML. But I agree that there is a certain lack there in terms of full semantic representations. MathJax is more accessible than TeX but it's still describing vis…

re: PeerJ: I missed that, nice!

re: semantics vs visual layout of math... Wikipedia says OpenMath is a thing, but... that only solves half the problem. Once you have a format that encodes what you want, someone has to actually it.

Like, if some writes x^{-1} and f^{-1}, it's hard for a computer to figure out that the first one means "the number you get when you divide 1 by x", whereas the second one means "the function you get when you compute the inverse of f".

And if the author can't be bothered to slow down and say which is which, then the reader will have to guess.

re: HTML to arxiv: not ready for prime time, if you actually follow that link.

re: kerning: TeX's advantage here is not fundamental, I think. Just need a good font, as far as I know. (Actually that's not far; I know almost nothing here.)

re: layout: CSS is finally getting good at this from what I hear.

re: talk: looks familiar; maybe I should re-watch it.

Post reply on HN