61–70 of 247 posts
I thought Latex was dead? It's a system I see no one ever use. With right, as it's as horrible as a doc system can get.
Can anyone explain the downvotes? Thanks.
LaTeX is about as far from dead as the desktop computer.
In this paper[1], they say that much of the latex running time is eaten up in the startup and shutdown of the program and the actual typesetting time is in the microseconds. A long-running process (daemon) is therefore a much more efficient way to run (La)TeX. [1] www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb27-0/fine.pdf """ On my current 800 MHz PC, the command $ tex story \\end takes about 0.137 seconds, while $ tex \\end takes 0.133 se…
It strikes me that TeX ought to take a page from Lisp interpreters and dump core after loading all the standard configuration files, so that future runs won't need to waste so much time on initialization.
Which is not to say it's not a good idea here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
4G is a bit over the top. My install (TeXLive 2010 on OpenBSD) is ~2G, and that includes gobs of rarely-used packages and documentation. Really, borrowing MikTeX's install-on-first-use for packages and making documentation optional should result in a much more reasonable size. If you want to get fancy, teach LaTeX how to decompress packages on demand.
I'd rather go with a rewrite that also redesigns the typesetting language. It feels like C++ of typesetting to me, although of course maybe I'm just not familiar enough with the language to see its key concepts clearly. Maybe the Lout system will pick enough traction one day.
Lout's equation formatting is especially primitive as I recall, and that is a huge amount of work to get TeX-like quality for. I am unaware of any system that typesets mathematics as nicely as TeX does.
The iPad is made for content consumption, not creation. Trying to write TeX (or any kind of markup) with a virtual keyboard sounds horrific.
The 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 interested to see how this could be justified, instead of "hit'n'run" style.
Noting here that other than the source problems, performance was a considerable issue.
Why have no one suggested to split LaTeX into two parts like the Emacs server, or something?
With a client and a server to run on your desktop/laptop/etc.
I think the salient question here is why would you want to work with LaTeX on a tablet?
"iPad is the most beautiful platform out there" Sorry, but I fail to understand, why any serious TeX-Head would say that. The platform is crippled and your problem shows it. You are ranting in the wrong direction. -jsl