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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

#71

Post by Tomis »

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #63
JoachimSchipper wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here comes the problem: Apple requires it to be a single binary, distributed once. You can't install packages the LaTeX ways should you want to, so you have to bundle most (if not all) packages into the single binary.

You could use a virtual machine library (if anything suitable exists) and run everything inside one executable - it would probably have horrid performance but you get rid of the single binary restriction. You can put on a nice front-end and tell the user how much longer he has to wait until the operation is complete.

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#72

Post by patrickg »

_delirium wrote: post #35
pantaloons wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, i…

Nobody uses (Knuth's) TeX anymore. They use PDFTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX. None of these are as stable as TeX, but in practice a whole lot better than most other software I use.

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#73

Post by deadcyclo »

tolmasky wrote: post #39
merijnv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well you obviously weren't careful enough. Nowhere in the article does he talk about a 4 GB binary or binaries. To quote him:"A 4GB Tex distribution dependant on over a 100 binaries" He is talking about the _whole_ distribution not a single or several binaries. So even though you were careful, you still misquoted the article.

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#74

Post by po »

Loic wrote: post #57

I don't know, maybe the author is trying to do something with the iPad which is simply not supposed to do. The iPad is beautiful, pleasant to use etc. but writing a book on the iPad is maybe not the things one does. I use my tablet to write — quite a lot — way slower than on my regular keyboard, but with time to think. Everything is in text files, synced to my desktop where the typesetting is really performed. Writin…

What if you just wanted to implement a TeX based ebook reader? I think the fact that you can't think of a use-case doesn't negate the problems he's facing.

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#75

Post by patrickg »

HnNoPassMailer wrote: post #46
HnNoPassMailer wrote: post #43

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.

Only someone not related to typesetting can say that LaTeX is dead. Exactly the opposite is true. Even though there are good alternatives these days such as InDesign and (I hate to say that:) MS Word (which now has a much better formula editor and OpenType Math fonts), great developments are taking place, for example LuaTeX. Not directly LaTeX but TeX: I have built a high quality database publishing system based on LuaTeX: http://speedata.github.com/publisher/

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#76

Post by roel_v »

pantaloons wrote: post #27
atakan_gurkan wrote: post #10

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 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.

It's 'bug-free' in the same sense that qmail is bug free: you take a piece of software, design it very carefully to do only the minimum amount required to make it fulfill its purpose, spend a lot of time on making sure there are no 'bugs' under a very strict technocratic definition of 'bugs' (i.e., few features, slow running speed, idiosyncratic workings aren't 'bugs') and then make a career out of marketing yourself as being able to write 'bug free' code.

Of course to make the software useful in the real world, a lot of things have to be added to it - make sure to not include any of it in the 'core' otherwise the 'bug free' claim will go out the window really quickly.

So yeah, in that sense I guess it's technically (which I use as a euphemism for 'autistically') correct to call TeX bug free (the bounty program for bugs found in it is quite famous, and part of fore-mentioned marketing).

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#78

Post by Luyt »

patrickg wrote: post #75
HnNoPassMailer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone explain the downvotes? Thanks.

Only someone not related to typesetting can say that LaTeX is dead. Exactly the opposite is true. Even though there are good alternatives these days such as InDesign and (I hate to say that:) MS Word (which now has a much better formula editor and OpenType Math fonts), great developments are taking place, for example LuaTeX. Not directly LaTeX but TeX: I have built a high quality database publishing system based on L…

I think that page could benefit from some examples created by speedataPublisher; now I only see a list of features and requirements, not what I'm able to create with it.

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#79

Post by shaggyfrog »

Tomis wrote: post #71
joelhaasnoot wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here comes the problem: Apple requires it to be a single binary, distributed once. You can't install packages the LaTeX ways should you want to, so you have to bundle most (if not all) packages into the single binary.

You could use a virtual machine library (if anything suitable exists) and run everything inside one executable - it would probably have horrid performance but you get rid of the single binary restriction. You can put on a nice front-end and tell the user how much longer he has to wait until the operation is complete.

Virtual machines are generally prohibited by the guidelines as well. (Exceptions exist for things like script interpreters, which need to be present for some games to run, e.g. Lua.)

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#80

Post by chalst »

EdiX wrote: post #48
patrickg wrote: post #21

* First of all, the OP mixes up LaTeX and TeX. TeX is written in a very portable language and has been ported to more platforms than most other software, including PDP-10 and others. * LaTeX is working on the iPad, see for example: http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2010/talks/2010-09-14-arthu... * LuaTeX ( http://luatex.org ) is written in C, not WEB. * You only need one binary to work with TeX. Either PDFTeX or LuaTe…

> * You only need one binary to work with TeX. Either PDFTeX or LuaTeX. All other binaries are just glue code (for example to generate missing Metafont fonts, but who wants them these days anyway? A lot of TeX uses Computer Modern to typeset the body (a metafont font) and I don't think I have ever see a TeX document that doesn't use Computer Modern or Euler (another metafont font) for equation typesetting. I also won…

Latin Modern, which is in the larger part an extension of Computer Modern to provide better multilingual support, is supported as OTF.

I can think of no reason to prefer CM to LM for typesetting purposes.

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