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?”

#201

Post by mikhailfranco » Tue, Jun 02, 2020, 3:16 AM UTC

duskwuff wrote: post #147

derefr wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Also check out Noteflight:

https://www.noteflight.com/

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

#202

Post by solinent » Thu, Jun 04, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

j-pb wrote: post #196

solinent wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I disagree, I mean HTML would be even worse for text-flow if you rendered a PDF directly to HTML. The text-flow of HTML is not guaranteed, in the same way that the PDF text section is not guaranteed to be correct.

It's more about the social economics --but if you can find me a tool that supports the PDF export wrongly, I'll fix it myself.

> The market economics are simply not in the favour of people doing extra work,

Most of the tools are open-source. Does Word or any of the closed source tools do a bad job of this? That would be the main stopping point I guess.

It's still super trivial for them to implement, and shaming them will get their PR team evaluating the risk of not implementing such a feature. You just have to be successful at shaming them.

An HTML file also doesn't represent a document on paper, most people writing papers wouldn't switch to a electronic-only format at the moment--each page is carefully typeset and designed, HTML is not at this level even today.

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

#203

Post by scubbo » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 4:55 PM UTC

inimino wrote: post #155

scubbo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OK - thanks for clarifying! I was wondering if there was some objection beyond privacy and control (which are certainly sufficient in-and-of themselves!).

> evil science publishing parasites (you know the names)

Not being part of the scientific community, I don't - but I trust you that they exist!

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

#204

Post by scubbo » Mon, Jun 08, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

btmiller wrote: post #76

scubbo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

2 things, 1) Why do you consider Google Docs to be any different than Word? They both serve the same market, so you might as well be asking why not standardize around Word. And 2) given the intended uses of Google Docs/Word, the biggest reason not to use it for research are exactly the set of asides you mentioned.

> you might as well be asking why not standardize around Word.

The comment I was replying to specifically called out Google Docs as bad, so that was what I was referring to. I agree that they appear to have mostly-similar features (though, to me as someone who doesn't use either as a Power User, GD seems to be more focused on online collaboration, and MW on local editing, the output of which is then shared)