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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

#171

Post by hyperbovine »

nailer wrote: post #124
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…

> For whatever reason, they cannot allow applications to use the existing capabilities of the underlying OS. This goes against the Unix mindset; of course there will be unpleasant consequences, but one cannot hold Unix mindset responsible for these. 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 thin…

You forgot my favorite TeX non-feature: completely uninformative error messages!

All kidding aside, I use (La)TeX almost every day and it's bulletproof. It's not going anywhere, so you might as well learn to love it, worts and all.

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

#172

Post by spitfire »

jen_h wrote: post #155

One real issue is that most users' LaTeX environments are highly customized and tweaked to our own liking. Even if it weren't absolutely nuts to put every-package-and-extension-known-to-man inside a iOS binary, it still wouldn't be right. Like, what if I want LaTeX2HTML (I've never not had to highly tweak this)? What about my snazzy custom fonts? That bibliography style that only one journal accepts and requires thes…

LaTeX as a service. LaaS has a nice ring to it.

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

#173

Post by fadzlan »

magice wrote: post #158

This article is a proof of the stupidity, ignorance, and general jerkiness of an Apple user. It's like, the world must resolve around some standards set by Apple because it fails to deliver a system that actually works. Oh, and never mind that the stupid guy never understands the reason why the code base is set up as it is. All in all, here is my opinion: who ever upvote this should feel ashame of yourself for wastin…

Have you actually spent a little moment to at least really RTA?

The author states that even with the restriction lifted, it wouldn't make much sense, as with all the extension that it requires to meet the author's need it would take 4GB.

The situation would be pretty much the same in Android, despite it being rooted in Linux. The article is not so much about Apple as it is about LaTeX.

If you would like to make a point, at least read the article.

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

#174

Post by jawaddeo »

magice wrote: post #158

This article is a proof of the stupidity, ignorance, and general jerkiness of an Apple user. It's like, the world must resolve around some standards set by Apple because it fails to deliver a system that actually works. Oh, and never mind that the stupid guy never understands the reason why the code base is set up as it is. All in all, here is my opinion: who ever upvote this should feel ashame of yourself for wastin…

Thanks for contributing nothing but personal insults to a very serious argument. LaTeX is extremely useful, while the computing is going more and more mobile. How do we reconcile the situation and enable people to use LaTeX going forward on devices they like is I believe I an important issue.

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

#175

Post by rmc »

HnNoPassMailer wrote: post #159
rmc wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LaTeX is still massively used to typeset and print up academic papers.

I had to write a paper with it. I found it so horrible that I ended up not writing the paper (on a very interesting topic) and failed class. I just assumed the professor was nutty and kept onto some weird niche software.

Nope, the professor was requesting that you use the standard typesetting software. Some of your classmates might have to write many papers, and hence it's good that they start learning.

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

#176

Post by anghyflawn »

gizzlon wrote: post #127
anghyflawn wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Why? Emacs doesn't really need X.." 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…

> Guess this depends on how you work.

Oh, absolutely. If I were a actual road warrior, the iPad wouldn't work at all for me. However, between my laptops at home and at work I don't really need a third one, and since I already have the iPad I'd rather make as much I can with it for short trips where I am not going have too much time and/or wifi to pull sustained work sessions.

> It could be used for reading I guess..

That too. For an academic, GoodReader is a blessing. I have finally stopped printing out loads of articles and/or finding that I printed out this same article a couple of years ago. Not to mention Kindle etc. Again, if I were spending significant amounts of time away from either home or the office, I'd consider investing in a proper portable laptop; but I'm not, and for my use case the iPad is ideal.

> can't run what I want to run

Yep, I agree that it's frustrating.

> (not an Eee ffs, a real laptop).

No everybody can afford another proper laptop that's as easy to carry around as an iPad, y'know.

Anyway, YMMV, of course. I was just pointing out that solutions are available.

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

#177

Post by jff »

If anyone is interested in a simple, no-nonsense version of TeX, check out Thierry Laronde's KerTeX (http://www.kergis.com/en/kertex.html). The whole thing comes in at a bit under 10 MB, and it can run on Linux, *BSD, and even Plan 9! I compiled it on Plan 9, built LaTeX as per his instructions in the README, and have been happily generating LaTeX documents since then :)

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

#178

Post by jmmcd »

gizzlon wrote: post #127
anghyflawn wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Why? Emacs doesn't really need X.." 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…

Starting many instances of emacs and using tabs, of all things, suggests a certain "you're doing it wrong".

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

#179

Post by r00fus »

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.

What about in-app purchases? Why not a set of free in-app "purchase" options for large sets of these packages?

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

#180

Post by Joeri »

roel_v wrote: post #114
gjm11 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tur…

Of course not, it's hyperbole to illustrate the point. In the specific cases of Qmail and TeX, the 'bug free' aspect of it however is overblown and a marketing gimmick. It's not that hard (given enough time) to make something bug free, it's a whole different thing when the software needs to evolve at the same time to meet the (changing and expanding) requirements of actual users.

Are you implying that qmail and tex don't have actual users?

The point those packages make is that some problems can have a solution that lasts years or decades instead of mere months.

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