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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

#201

Post by coliveira »

pnathan wrote: post #156
gmac wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I personally love Computer Modern. I consider it beautiful and one of the most pleasing fonts I have ever encountered.

Computer modern is a nice font for documents that contain equations. I suspect that it is because of the subtle changes in density. But for normal prose it really doesn't work very well.

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

#202

Post by william42 »

rflrob wrote: post #183
cavilling_elite wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. I understand that tablets are a wonderfully portable device but you can't expect to get 100% desktop functionality. Sometimes you have to find the limit of your software/hardware. I don't own an iPad, but is there git or the like? If so syncing and keeping track of changes would be simple.

> Sometimes you have to find the limit of your software/hardware. The point is that there does seem to be a software limit, but there shouldn't need to be a particular limit there. There's certainly not a hardware limit, since an iPad can run circles around almost all of the computers of the era when LaTeX was written. Unless you believe that the TeX system represents an almost magical, once-in-a-lifetime, impossible…

From what I can tell, the software limit is that everybody has a different set of custom macros and styles that they use, and that distributing extra code is a violation of Apple policy, one that can't be fixed unless you get rid of not only the reality of LaTeX but the idea of LaTeX as a macro system.

That, or Apple changes their policies.

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

#203

Post by zem »

dextorious wrote: post #167
quanticle wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? How are either of those requirements wrong? I certainly expect my programs to be bug free. LaTeX is a tool that's older than many GNU utilities. It's been reviewed and tested numerous times over by the harshest test suite of all: the real world. Yes, in theory , you coul…

"""How are either of those requirements wrong? I certainly expect my programs to be bug free.""" Good luck with that. What I said, though, was that "a problem has to be bug free to be useful" is a wrong assumption. We all use programs that have bugs, and still found them immensely useful. """Yes, in theory, you could rewrite TeX to be cleaner, while maintaining backwards compatibility and lack of bugs and regressions…

give lout a look - it was designed to have machine-generation-friendly markup

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

#204

Post by william42 »

HnNoPassMailer wrote: post #181
rmc wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apparently. It's a shame that researchers hae to use such software. Probably part of why research is so conservative and slow. Why not a funky html "paper"? With interactive formulae, clickable links (hey, wasn't PageRank based on references? Maybe time to turn that around) to references. Most important, a clickable link to an academic profile.

Please explain to me how to type the fraction (a^2+b^2-c^2)/(2ab), which is the simple $\frac{a^2+b^2-c^2}{2ab}$ in TeX, so that the numerator appears above the denominator in HTML. Or any non-TeX layout.

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

#205

Post by duncan_bayne »

This has nothing to do with a 'messy codebase'; a minimalist LaTeX installation would run perfectly well on iOS if it wasn't for the arbitrary rules that Apple imposes upon iOS.

If you want to use a 'walled garden' device like an iPad, you can't really complain when you run into artificial limitations.

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

#208

Post by thefre »

dextorious wrote: post #104
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 sp…

So the next hot article will be "OMG a GNU/Linux distribution has a messy code base"?

Once you are talking about a multiple GB system, of course it's messy. Except it is actually a very poor choosing to describe the situation. E.g. mixing multiples programming langages in a big system has nothing messy, it would even be a HUGE warning not to encounter multiple programming langages in such a huge system.

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

#209

Post by coliveira »

dextorious wrote: post #104
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 sp…

How can you say this when every item in your list is currently supported? Unicode, open type, pdf, etc. are all currently supported by new distributions.

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

#210

Post by angus77 »

msbarnett wrote: post #200
r00fus wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In-app purchases can be used to trigger your application to download new data, but not new executable code.

The packages are text files, not executables.
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