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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

#231

Post by dextorious »

coliveira wrote: post #209
dextorious wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Maybe you misunderstood me? I wrote "it doesn't lead itself to easy incorporation of features" (such as the above). I also acknowledge several attempts to fix this. What I lament is that "We're stuck with a codebase that works, but is messy, too complicated and obsolete in many parts".

I know a lot of the above are supported (I use LaTeX myself, and follow the developments quite closely) in newer TeX implementations, but not in clean way and not with first class support, to the legacy limitation.

I was asking for a clean implementation, no something like XeTex --that while supports several modern features it inherits tons of design problems from the original TeX.

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

#232

Post by zem »

dextorious wrote: post #229
zem wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yeah, lout is dead as far as active development goes, but it's still pretty usable, particularly for non-mathematical stuff.

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

#233

Post by dextorious »

thefre wrote: post #208
dextorious wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

"""Once you are talking about a multiple GB system, of course it's messy. """

Only there's no need for a typesetting engine + layout templates + graphing, math, bibliography etc add-ons, to ever be a "multiple GB system".

It just carries too much legacy garbage.

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

#234

Post by antihero »

patrickg wrote: post #21

* First of all, the OP mixes up LaTeX and TeX. TeX is written in a very portable language and has been ported to more platforms than most other software, including PDP-10 and others. * LaTeX is working on the iPad, see for example: http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2010/talks/2010-09-14-arthu... * LuaTeX ( http://luatex.org ) is written in C, not WEB. * You only need one binary to work with TeX. Either PDFTeX or LuaTe…

I may be being dumb, but is there a good tutorial for LuaTeX?

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

#236

Post by antihero »

w1ntermute wrote: post #128
praptak wrote: post #53

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.

Yeah, I'd like to see someone do a modern rewrite of the whole TeX/LaTeX/XeTeX/XeLaTeX/etc. mess. Something that has modern syntax and support for modern features (such as output to PDF, HTML, even OOXML). 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 wi…

Indeed, once you get set up with LaTeX it's okay, but if I were to go and make a new essay I'd have a hard time remembering wtf packages I used for the last one and what they actually did.

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

#237

Post by HnNoPassMailer »

william42 wrote: post #204
HnNoPassMailer wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A div/span with vertical aligment containing 2 divs, of which one has border-bottom or border-top set.

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

#238

Post by pnathan »

coliveira wrote: post #201
pnathan wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree. I think it looks quite nice for normal prose.

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

#239

Post by podperson »

ajarmst wrote: post #219
podperson wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds to me like a LaTeX App for iPad that offloaded page rendering to a server which also handled configuration would be a nice product. I'm guessing the market might not be large enough.

Main problem is that most people who would want it could write the short script to implement it themselves. :-)

The integration is where the value is. Even LaTeX users value some kind of ease of use or they wouldn't sully themselves with LaTeX, they'd use TeX or just write PostScript directly like a true neckbeard.

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

#240

Post by asdfasdf1 »

HnNoPassMailer wrote: post #237
william42 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A div/span with vertical aligment containing 2 divs, of which one has border-bottom or border-top set.

Now make it machine-searchable.
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