I think the salient question here is why would you want to work with LaTeX on a tablet?
The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad
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Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad
#32The price of a LaTeX rewrite would be even higher: incompatibility. If one tries to rewrite TeX, the problem gets much much worse, since TeX is, for all intents and purposes, bug-free. A new implementation will certainly not be. Joel Spolsky said it very well http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html I disagree that the current situation is LaTeX developers' fault. TeX and LaTeX are complex pieces of…
I'm curious where you get the idea that LaTeX is bug free. In my experience it is rare to find two packages that work together bug free, yet alone the collections of them needed to form even a respectable document.
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Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad
#33The iPad is made for content consumption, not creation. Trying to write TeX (or any kind of markup) with a virtual keyboard sounds horrific.
Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad
#34how about making an app that just stores the .tex files, and to convert them to pdf or something, the .tex file gets sent to a server
Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad
#35The price of a LaTeX rewrite would be even higher: incompatibility. If one tries to rewrite TeX, the problem gets much much worse, since TeX is, for all intents and purposes, bug-free. A new implementation will certainly not be. Joel Spolsky said it very well http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html I disagree that the current situation is LaTeX developers' fault. TeX and LaTeX are complex pieces of…
I'm curious where you get the idea that LaTeX is bug free. In my experience it is rare to find two packages that work together bug free, yet alone the collections of them needed to form even a respectable document.
I assume he meant that core TeX (the part written ages ago by Knuth) is in effect bug-free. However you do have a good point that one effect of core TeX being ancient and not really updated is that, in practice, what people actually use is TeX plus giant macro packages whose size is bigger than TeX itself, and those are certainly not bug-free. It's at least plausible that a rewrite wouldn't lead to more bugs total, if the rewrite made it easier to write less-buggy macro packages that interacted more nicely (the TeX macro/module situation is not great for that).
Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad
#36The price of a LaTeX rewrite would be even higher: incompatibility. If one tries to rewrite TeX, the problem gets much much worse, since TeX is, for all intents and purposes, bug-free. A new implementation will certainly not be. Joel Spolsky said it very well http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html I disagree that the current situation is LaTeX developers' fault. TeX and LaTeX are complex pieces of…
Unless I'm forgetting something from the article, the author never said it was the LaTeX developer's fault -- he simply said Apple was right for not allowing it in its current state. Not all situations are someone's "fault", and thus just because Apple is not at fault doesn't mean the developers are. It's just as you declared it, an unfortunate result of many decisions which were right at the time.
That being said, I also think you have a low bar for definitions of "bugs". Terrible performance is very much a "bug" in my book. Even the things that aren't "bugs" in the strictest sense can still make for bad software. The executable described here is 4GB, that's 1/4 thte total space on a low end iPad! Also, if tomorrow someone does discover a bug, it sounds like this would be a mess to fix. The jumble of source simply won't be attracting many new developers (whether it be to fix existing bugs, add new features, or port to new platforms).
Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad
#37Does no one use ScribTeX? Check it out: http://www.scribtex.com/
Looks like a great idea. What's your experience with it? Does it have a good selection of packages, or just the bare-bones?
Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad
#38The price of a LaTeX rewrite would be even higher: incompatibility. If one tries to rewrite TeX, the problem gets much much worse, since TeX is, for all intents and purposes, bug-free. A new implementation will certainly not be. Joel Spolsky said it very well http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html I disagree that the current situation is LaTeX developers' fault. TeX and LaTeX are complex pieces of…
Unless I'm forgetting something from the article, the author never said it was the LaTeX developer's fault -- he simply said Apple was right for not allowing it in its current state. Not all situations are someone's "fault", and thus just because Apple is not at fault doesn't mean the developers are. It's just as you declared it, an unfortunate result of many decisions which were right at the time. That being said, I…
The LaTeX executable isn't 4GB, it's 3MB or so (pdflatex/pdftex) or 16MB in the case of XeLaTeX. The 4GB consists of billions of extension/modules/packages for typesetting documents.
Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless I'm forgetting something from the article, the author never said it was the LaTeX developer's fault -- he simply said Apple was right for not allowing it in its current state. Not all situations are someone's "fault", and thus just because Apple is not at fault doesn't mean the developers are. It's just as you declared it, an unfortunate result of many decisions which were right at the time. That being said, I…
The LaTeX executable isn't 4GB, it's 3MB or so (pdflatex/pdftex) or 16MB in the case of XeLaTeX. The 4GB consists of billions of extension/modules/packages for typesetting documents.
Yes I noticed that in the comments before I posted which is why I was careful to specifically say "The executable described here is 4GB" so as to refer to whatever it is he was trying to work with. I suppose whether all of the 4GB is needed for what he wanted, whether it could easily be taken apart, or could now be remade in a much smaller package, are all valid questions.
Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad
#40Maybe we should let LaTex be the way it is now and focus instead on generating better HTML authoring tools. With eBooks becoming more popular, there is certainly a need for such tools. While I understand HTML is no match for the power of LaTex currently, we need to think ahead and maybe help to create a platform for the future rather than getting bogged down by technologies of the past.