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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

#101

Post by rmc »

I don't think this is a problem with LaTeX & "messy codebase", I think this is a problem with restrictions on iOS from Apple.

The crux of the problems with porting it seem to be that everything has to be in 1 executable, that there can be no scripts, and it must be in an approved language. That's merely a problem from Apple.

A correct title would be "The price of restriction on apps: No LaTeX on iPad"

The author also thinks it's be easy to just switch licence to GPL. Unless LaTex & TeX required copyright assignment, you cannot switch to GPL without getting every contributor to agree. The author is also under the believe that you cannot have commerical software that's GPL. It's DRM software you cannot have with GPL, and that's why Apple doesn't allow it.

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

#102

Post by jka »

This article seems to advocate a huge amount of work to an existing, open, and highly stable software product - all to allow it to work on a proprietary device with heavy restrictions on software availability and installation.

Should we do all this work - mandated by business-driven 'app store guidelines' - simply to allow known good software to continue to work?

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

#104

Post by dextorious »

rmc wrote: post #101

I don't think this is a problem with LaTeX & "messy codebase", I think this is a problem with restrictions on iOS from Apple. The crux of the problems with porting it seem to be that everything has to be in 1 executable, that there can be no scripts, and it must be in an approved language. That's merely a problem from Apple. A correct title would be "The price of restriction on apps: No LaTeX on iPad" The author also…

"I don't think this is a problem with LaTeX & "messy codebase", I think this is a problem with restrictions on iOS from Apple."

No. It's a problem with LaTeX & messy codebase.

Take Apple out of the picture, for a minute: the messy codebase remains a problem with TeX/LaTeX.

It doesn't lead itself to easy extension, it doesn't lead itself to easy incorporation of features such as full Unicode support, Open Type font special capabilities, and much much more. There have been several attempts to fix this, namely LaTeX3e, Omega et al, but none has been that successful. We're stuck with a codebase that works, but is messy, too complicated (ever tried to set up a LaTex/Tex distro from scratch), and obsolete in many parts.

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

#105

Post by dextorious »

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…

"""The price of a LaTeX rewrite would be even higher: incompatibility."""

Yeah. The only benefit is a codebase that reflects current needs and can grow in new directions and follow current practices, that programmers of today are familiar with. And also be faster, and more flexible. But what are those compared to compatibility right?

(Of course people interested in pure compatibility could just continue to use the old version, until the new is compatible enough, or they don't need compatibility anymore).

"""If one tries to rewrite TeX, the problem gets much much worse, since TeX is, for all intents and purposes, bug-free."""

And your wrong assumption is a) that a problem has to be bug free to be useful or b) that a new effort can't produce a relatively bug free codebase?

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

#106

Post by dextorious »

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…

"""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."""

You can pair the iPad with a bluetooth keyboard and write away at full speed.

And with something like LaTeX you won't even have formatting to slow you down.

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

#107

Post by jpallen »

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…

At ScribTeX we regularly get comments from users about how fast our compiling is. Even with the round trip to the server, the PDF appears in the user's browser quicker than if they compile it locally. This isn't due to anything especially clever that we've done but instead stands as a testament to data speeds, and the performance of the Linodes that we compile on. Particularly with Linode, I think the high disk IO performance makes for a very quick LaTeX compile.

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

#108

Post by gizzlon »

anghyflawn wrote: post #69
cullenking wrote: post #31

I think the salient question here is why would you want to work with LaTeX on a tablet?

Um, for about any other reason that you would want to use document editing software on a tablet? For instance, I use LibreOffice and its ilk only for the most throwaway documents (and open others' files). Having an iPad means I don't need to lug my laptop around to work on my thesis (I run Emacs on a VPS via SSH to do it, and while personally I don't particularly care about the aesthetics, I'd say the use case is cer…

So, do you also lug around a keyboard for the ipad? Or do you actually type using the touchscreen?

Maybe you just need a smaller laptop ..

Also, terminals are great, but writing anything serious without X is a pain.

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

#110

Post by gjm11 »

roel_v wrote: post #76
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.

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…

You think Donald Knuth has made a career for himself out of being able to right 'bug free code'?

Really?

He's made a career for himself out of being an extremely creative computer scientist and writing outstandingly scholarly books about programming. Far from marketing himself as producing bug-free code, he has published articles entirely devoted to the history of bugs found in his software.

(As for the bits that turn TeX into LaTeX, no one is making a career out of claiming that they are bug free -- for the simple reason that no one thinks they are.)

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