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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

#81

Post by tehwalrus »

has anyone thought of just having a bunch of cloud servers with LaTeX built there, and then writing a front-end which uploads your docs, compiles them and downloads the resulting PDF? with fast enough servers and good enough data speeds, this might even rival the estimated 10 seconds for a fully ported LaTeX app.

I'm assuming it's been ruled out for other reasons though.

EDIT: this would also make it trivial to use it on android/blackberry, without any extra effort. apparently, also, http://www.scribtex.com/

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

#82

Post by microtherion »

Having ported a TeX distribution to MacOS classic some 15 years ago, I feel that the author overstates some of the difficulties. In particular, it's not all that hard to get kpathsea to work without callouts to bash scripts (it's not like Mac OS classic supported system() or anything like it). Basically, kpathsea is an API, and the implementation can be switched out (e.g. I implemented a dbm based file name cache).

Admittedly, getting everything linked into a single binary might be fairly hard.

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

#83

Post by seabee »

jorleif wrote: post #14
nhoss2 wrote: post #3

how 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

This is an interesting solution, because the problem is that the original codebase is messy and therefore not portable. It seems to happen to most software as it ages. Putting it on a server makes the architecture more robust against messy code (and changes in programming languages and environments), because pieces can be changed independently.

The problem isn't that the original codebase is messy (it's aged, but there are still comparatively new projects working on it e.g. LuaTeX) or that it's non-portable, as demonstrated by the multitude of platforms it's available for.

The problem is roughly equivalent to producing a non-upgradable perl. It's not very useful on its own, but it's completely impractical to include a copy of the entire CPAN with it. And Apple's policies prevent you from downloading additional packages. It's just not worth the effort.

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

#84

Post by junklight »

tehwalrus wrote: post #81

has anyone thought of just having a bunch of cloud servers with LaTeX built there, and then writing a front-end which uploads your docs, compiles them and downloads the resulting PDF? with fast enough servers and good enough data speeds, this might even rival the estimated 10 seconds for a fully ported LaTeX app. I'm assuming it's been ruled out for other reasons though. EDIT: this would also make it trivial to use i…

that was my thought too

I wouldn't sasume it has been ruled out - people (myself included) sometimes get mentally stuck on one solution and fail to spot another obvious avenue.

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

#85

Post by tolmasky »

deadcyclo wrote: post #73
tolmasky wrote: post #39

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.

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.

"The App Store guidelines insist that any iPad app be a single executable. Jailbreaking would ease this restriction, but in this case Apple’s gatekeepers are right. A 4GB TeX distribution dependant on over 100 binaries is not acceptable on the iPad."

From that quote ("A 4GB TeX distribution dependant on over 100 binaries is not acceptable on the iPad."), it is clear that he is musing about a scenario where he ships all 4GB. As stated many times (and also in that same quote), on the iPhone you are forced to ship something as one executable. Thus, the theoretical distribution he is referring to would in fact be a single executable of about 4GB. In fact I think that's the whole point of those two sentences. So it appears that I was indeed quite careful.

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

#86

Post by chalst »

patrickg wrote: post #56
JoachimSchipper wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One binary" is a bit optimistic; even if you never do anything fancy with fonts, you'll want bibtex. And makeindex, if you're writing a large work. PSTricks does not work with PDFLaTeX (Tikz is arguably better than PSTricks, but PSTricks won't be dead anytime soon). XeLaTeX is required to use system fonts easily. And that's before getting into anything truly gross.

I am running a TeX distribution with only one binary. And with bibliography and index: these could be done with the Lua part of LuaTeX. True about the others.

Indeed, Norman Ramsey essentially reimplemented Bibtex in Lua: look at bibtex.lua.in in his Nbibtex; tarball avilable from http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/nbibtex/

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

#87

Post by jsilence »

maximusprime wrote: post #70
jsilence wrote: post #15

"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

I don't see any reason why LaTeX should be shelling out to bash. And having a mish-mash of loads of different languages creates unmaintainable bloatware.

I don't see any reason why it should _not_ shell out to bash. TeX/LaTeX was developed in a UNIX environment, which has the explicit philosophy of "the tool box with lots of little tools which do whatever little they do extremely good". The iOS Philosophy of "It has to be one binary app" resembles the philosophy of Windows Programs. Big single programs with lots of functionality unter one big GUI.

How can anyone really be suprised that one of the oldest and mightiest gods of one religion can not be coerced into the shrine of a completely different religion?

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

#88

Post by mbq »

jsilence wrote: post #15

"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

Fully agree; computer is something on which you can write, compile and run a native program without using external machines. And TeX is a computer typesetting system.

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

#89

Post by gmac »

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…

Yep, it always surprises me how few people change off the default Computer Modern -- which I find really spindly and ugly -- given that a single \usepackage{...} will give you a beautiful Palatino, for example. I sometimes suspect they're just wanting to hit me in the face with the fact that they're LaTeX users...

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

#90

Post by chalst »

gamble wrote: post #2

I was agog when I downloaded the LaTeX binary install for my new Mac a few years ago and discovered how massive it was. LaTeX is almost as big as the entire operating system disk! What on earth is in there?

Uncompressed, it's about 50% documentation and 35% fonts.
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