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

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221–230 of 247 posts

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

#221
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…

Which is very similar to what I did. A simple cron job with a bash script is quite sufficient (assume a *nix environment), and you can use the make utility to add your build trigger support quite simply.

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

#222
I don't think literate programming is obsolete, nor has it been superseded by "modern source code documentation".

LP means treating a program as a piece of literature. A literate program is free from the structure of conventional source code layout; this is different to simply documenting source code.

I don't claim LP is a hot topic, but I think to say it's obsolete is to misunderstand the concept.

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

#223
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about running Emacs over ssh on an iPad, but locally using the X front-end (e.g. not in a terminal), Emacs can display PDFs.

It might get tricky though to issue the latex command on the remote server from the Emacs that runs locally?!

I've never tried using auctex remotely, but in general if you have a file open in Tramp, you can also run arbitrary shell commands with M-! and M-& remotely, as well as opening shell buffers that let you run commands remotely as normal.

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

#224
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.

Exactly, so all you could do is trigger certain bundles to be 'unlocked': you would always have to ship them.

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

#226
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems the cult of Apple is touchy today and can't detect a joke. I'm sorry if I have inadvertently hurt your feelings - I will be sure to clearly state my humorous intentions next time. For the record, I do not own devices based on iOS or Android and I don't care for your little Apple-Google feud with which you seem to be so concerned with. So please, carry on with those market statistics about Android, I am dying…

This ad hominem kind of scrawl is inappropriate for HN.

I get carried away from time to time, sorry about that. No offense meant.

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

#227
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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".

It's because I work on many things, and I like to group each "project" in its own gvim window and/or virtual desktop.

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

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big problem on tablet devices is constraints in memory. Yes the unix way is to have various small utilities work together through pipes and interprocess communications. The big challenge at that point is how to do you manage memory? What if a single process in that huge chain uses up all of the memory and another process gets killed by the OS which was part of that chain (do note, no swap on mobile devices)... Ho…

A current tablet device, even a cheap one, has about 256Mb of main memory. Android (at least the cyanogen mod kernel) has also the ability to use a part of the main memory to store compressed swap partition data. That leaves about 80 Megabytes to userspace programs (on Android). About the amount a normal desktop computer had in 1998. LaTex dates back to the beginning of the 80s. Given that it has the ability to creat…

I have TeX Live available in the Ubuntu chroot on my HP TouchPad, so you're right that it's not a resource thing. Admittedly in this case webOS provides a pretty standard Linux environment under the hood, so it falls pretty firmly outside the Android model (much less iOS).

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

#229
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"""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

Thanks. A have given lout a look in the past, but I though it wasn't actively developed anymore. I also liked Prince, but it is proprietary unfortunately.
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