Finl is not LaTeX
finl.xyz
Finl is not LaTeX
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: Finl is not LaTeX
#2Is this, like, a real thing that exists or just a blog post about a thing that should exist? I can't tell.
Re: Finl is not LaTeX
#3Is this, like, a real thing that exists or just a blog post about a thing that should exist? I can't tell.
Doesn't look to be real to me: https://github.com/dahosek/finl
Re: Finl is not LaTeX
#4I think completing the rewrite[1] of Tectonic[2] (Rust-powered XeTeX) has bigger potential and it's already working in many cases.
Re: Finl is not LaTeX
#5As far as I understand LaTeX3 is basically ready, it's just that the developers decided to make it available as an optional environment rather than a replacement to LaTeX2e - which would render it incomparable with all the things. It's also not comprehensively documented, though there are introductions. Core development work, again as far as I understand, has now shifted automatically annotated pdfs (might be the wrong term).
Re: Finl is not LaTeX
#6Is this, like, a real thing that exists or just a blog post about a thing that should exist? I can't tell.
It's real, but at very early stages. I wouldn't have posted the link yet myself.
Re: Finl is not LaTeX
#7Is this, like, a real thing that exists or just a blog post about a thing that should exist? I can't tell.
From the blog posts, it looks like they were still deciding what language to write this idea in.
Re: Finl is not LaTeX
#8As far as I understand LaTeX3 is basically ready, it's just that the developers decided to make it available as an optional environment rather than a replacement to LaTeX2e - which would render it incomparable with all the things. It's also not comprehensively documented, though there are introductions. Core development work, again as far as I understand, has now shifted automatically annotated pdfs (might be the wro…
Not exactly. Originally LaTeX3 was going to be a complete rewrite of LaTeX2e. In the last year or so, there was essentially a declaration of surrender and LaTeX2e+expl3/xparse is now LaTeX3 but still called LaTeX2e. There will never be a LaTeX3 exactly. Some issues with LaTeX development are essentially intractable. They're doable in theory (because TeX is Turing complete), but not in practice.
Re: Finl is not LaTeX
#9I think completing the rewrite[1] of Tectonic[2] (Rust-powered XeTeX) has bigger potential and it's already working in many cases. [1] https://github.com/crlf0710/tectonic [2] https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/
My goal with finl is not to re-create TeX but to reimagine it. The macro-oriented programming language is a big pain point, as are the whole concept of category codes. In many instances, LaTeX is still hemmed in by the constraints of ca 1980 computing technology. If you look through tex.web, you'll see things like weird string concatenations that were done in order to save a handful of bytes of memory. It was a radical change to TeX in the 80s to move to 32-bit addressing for the main memory array from 16-bit addressing. And Unicode support is occasionally weird, particularly in the incompatibilities between how ^^ literals are managed in pdfTeX vs XeTeX/LuaTeX (in the former, ^^D7 is a byte, in the latter ^^D7 is a code point and turns into a two-byte UTF sequence).
Re: Finl is not LaTeX
#10Is this, like, a real thing that exists or just a blog post about a thing that should exist? I can't tell.
From the blog posts, it looks like they were still deciding what language to write this idea in.
I've decided on Rust. I'm in the midst of a "short story" exploration of Rust and PDF typesetting with a replacement for gftodvi (gftopdf) which, while it will have a potential userbase in the high single digits, gives me a low-risk way to experiment with typesetting to PDF. One of the sub libraries of finl (the charsub module) will be part of this code in the 1.0 release and potentially other sub libraries will be incorporated as development continues.