Ask HN: LaTeX is great. Has anyone tried to build something better? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: LaTeX is great. Has anyone tried to build something better?

#11

Post by bluepoint » Mon, Sep 26, 2022, 6:52 PM UTC

Latex is there and it works. People learn how to create their favorite macros and style files and once you have that you can mostly focus on the text. If you are interested in note taking you can try markdown with equations and when you need to publish or share with others you can convert the relevant parts to latex with pandoc or manually. Actually the process of transcribing notes may sound like a waste but helps rephrase and improve things catch errors or sloppy logic so it is good if you have to do it imho.

Re: Ask HN: LaTeX is great. Has anyone tried to build something better?

#12

Post by baruchel » Mon, Sep 26, 2022, 7:12 PM UTC

I have been using Troff for about 25 years. I migrated from GNU Troff (groff) to Heirloom Troff because the latter has a very great support for typography and micro-typography.

Not only does it use Knuth's algorithm for typesetting, but it also includes many features unknown to LaTeX (you can even typeset paragraphs with constant spacing between words if you agree to put your extra spaces between letters or even by hiding them in applying a tiny horizontal zoom to your glyphs!). Support for arbitrary OTF fonts is much easier than with LaTeX also.

Re: Ask HN: LaTeX is great. Has anyone tried to build something better?

#13

Post by zaphar » Mon, Sep 26, 2022, 7:46 PM UTC

I actually have really enjoyed SiLE[0] as a replacement. The only caveat being that it has no where near the ecosystem that LaTeX has built up over the years. I do think that it is better under the hood than LaTeX though and much easier to customize.

[0]: https://sile-typesetter.org/

Re: Ask HN: LaTeX is great. Has anyone tried to build something better?

#14

Post by lordfosco » Mon, Sep 26, 2022, 7:55 PM UTC

Not sure how far typst[1] already got with their public beta, but at least they are claiming to be a veritable alternative to LaTeX.

[1]: https://typst.app/

Re: Ask HN: LaTeX is great. Has anyone tried to build something better?

#15

Post by CoolestBeans » Mon, Sep 26, 2022, 8:19 PM UTC

In college I used pandoc to write in markdown and then use LaTeX math notation inline when it was needed.

Re: Ask HN: LaTeX is great. Has anyone tried to build something better?

#16

Post by auxym » Mon, Sep 26, 2022, 8:22 PM UTC

It's been a while, but I wrote my master's thesis with LyX, exported to latex (luatex I think) for rendering.

Re: Ask HN: LaTeX is great. Has anyone tried to build something better?

#17

Post by auxym » Mon, Sep 26, 2022, 8:25 PM UTC

There is https://patoline.github.io/ but it's been in alpha / active development for years now.

I agree that TeX's errors is one of the worst things about it. Strongly suggest you track your changes in git, I found it was often easier to go back to some version that compiled and re-add the changes, rather than try and track down the missing bracket or extra backslash that broke it.

Re: Ask HN: LaTeX is great. Has anyone tried to build something better?

#18

Post by istillwritecode » Mon, Sep 26, 2022, 9:35 PM UTC

I've used TeX since the 80s. I also find it surprising that nothing has come along to replace it. The entire LaTeX ecosystem is showing its age, and one of the problems is that it is not designed for reading on variable width screens. TeX is all about typesetting on fixed-width pages. The real wizardry of LaTeX involves three things: 1. line and page breaks 2. hyphenation 3. mathematical typesetting.

The first two are much less important today than they were in the 80s, because an increasing amount of reading is done on screens that are not fixed width. It's noteworthy that bibtex is also showing its age, and biblatex has not been a completely successful replacement.