121–130 of 247 posts
I question the basic premise here. iPad is not meant for content creating or document typesetting, it's meant for content consumption. If you want to do anything that looks remotely like work you don't want to use iDevice for it.
Oh wait.
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"Beautiful" has nothing to do with whether it's crippled or not. In any case, how is a 4GB executable + several-second runtime for trivial documents Apple's fault? Is the iPad crippled because it can't run a crappy cross-compiled version of OpenOffice with a PS/2 mouse?
I guess the argument is that it's apple's "fault" because the restrictions of the platform require the whole package to be bundled as a single binary, instead of allowing a more modular distribution mechanism. Most of the contents in the 4G are extension packages. But I am not sure if "fault" is an appropriate term here anyway, we're simply observing two different approaches to software bundling that happen to be inc…
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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.)
I never understood the exception for game engines (ala Lua). Why are those okay but other VMs not okay (from Apple's perspective, of course)?
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…
Using the native capabilities of the OS in the sense you mean - allowing TeX to use its ancient, hideous bitmap font system, goes against:
- Unix philisophy - do one thing well, link against or pipe to other apps/libraries that do their thing well
- Simplicity. The user should not be forced to make an unnecessary choice where one option is almost always superor to the other.
Knuth's concept of 'bug free' is one of an academic computer scientist. TeX has many, many issues: unnecessary dependencies, a horrible build process, and many UX issues that stopped TeX from reaching TeX's original goal of 'allowing anyone to create typeset documents'. This is fine: Knuth is a mathematically focused computer scientist from a period where everyone who had access to a computer was a programmer. It was valid in this era.
The iPad way is probably to run the messy LaTex codebase on a server that interacts with UI code on the ipad.
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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.)
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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.
I use a ZaggMate which doubles as protection, weighs about the same as any other case and is not bulky at all. It works quite well. > Maybe you just need a smaller laptop .. No, I don't want to have a small laptop as my main computer. I had an Eee before the iPad, but the difference in the writing experience is not too different in the end and the other advantages of the iPad are greater. In any case, you can hardly…
Guess this depends on how you work. I often find myself starting many instances of the editor[1] which is a pain if you have to create a new ssh connection for each (or use ctrl-z etc).
"the writing experience is not too different [..] the other advantages of the iPad are greater."
Guess the real difference between us is that you see something great in the iPad, so you are willing to live with its obvious shortcomings[2] compared to a laptop. I have yet to discover why it's so amazing, and only see a small, but pretty much useless gadget. It could be used for reading I guess..
[1] yes, it has tabs.. still
[2] low resolution, can't run what I want to run, can't type on it without a keyboard, and at that point you could just as easily carry a small laptop (not an Eee ffs, a real laptop).
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.
It would be good to see UTF-8 natively supported, and for all the common packages to be absorbed into the core libraries. Right now, you can sometimes find 2 or 3 different packages that do the same thing, often with varying benefits. Take the best package, add the missing features from the other packages, and bundle it all into one distribution. For example, the absolutely horrible table support, where merging cells is a nightmare.
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?
Isn't latex from the 80's? I think my first disk that had more than 200Mb is from the early 90's? How did people use it back then? Also it is still horribly slow even on a core2 with 4gb ram and superfetch.
What am I missing? 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.
In fact, you could run a remote Emacs and edit LaTeX with it, using the excellent AUCTeX package. Of course, that means you need to have a network connection plus a server you can ssh into.
Edit: Clarity.