111–120 of 181 posts
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Not even close, these are not plaintext based so you can't track changes with git, let alone automatic generation of formulas.
.docx files are a zip folder of plaintext XML files. Theoretically they could be tracked with git if you unzip/zip every commit/checkout.
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TeX itself is not really complex. The implementation is fine. The hard part is the ecosystem. Any contender is going to face a daunting task of explaining why adopters should throw away 50 years of collective work of thousands of people that went into TeX packages in CTAN. Math notation is at best 1% of the reasons why people use TeX. Packages are.
I think the argument comes down to complexity. Getting Markdown --> Pandoc featureset up to a reasonable fidelity is the next stage IMO, especially if Markdown can be made to support the most common downloaded TeX extension packages.
(which is why markdown still doesn't officially have any maths support, only certain non-standard flavours do)
I am really desperate for an alternative.
Something I've wondered, and the Tex users here can probably answer - why not just use Acrobat or Word for math? Does it not support something?
LaTeX is an art form. The output is perfect, based only on the code used to make it. Typesetting mathematical expressions or even creating complex diagrams using a library such as `tkz-euclide` is just code. There is no WYSIWYG. No invisible bold spaces[1]. No forgetting which changes you made to try to get it to look right. Everything is right there in the code. (I am aware of the difference between LaTeX and TeX; I…
Also, pushing figure around to nice places can be so frustrating that people settle for less than perfect layout.
TeX is one of those bits of software that's so complex to replace, it'll take another few decades (and likely a few false starts) before we can get there. The fundamentals of TeX's typesetting are amazing, but everything else is just bolted on. You'd probably want to rebuild it with its own, custom language, perhaps inspired more by modern XML/markdown rather than the old TeX language. The biggest problem that we're…
Ideally there would be a replacement of TeX that shares little of its non-math typesetting capabilities but retains (or only slightly modifies) the math syntax. The rest of the system is where the the problems lie, or at least where I waste a lot of time on little things.
As far as I could get, Sile is exactly that.
TeX and Literate Programming (and Lisp) are my fundamental, day-to-day tools. Code it, explain it, generate a Literate PDF containing the code. The programming cycle is simple. Write the code in a latex block. Run make. The makefile extracts the code from the latex, compiles it, runs the test cases (also in the latex), and regenerates the PDF. Code and explanations are always up to date and in sync. I have found no b…
TeX and Literate Programming (and Lisp) are my fundamental, day-to-day tools. Code it, explain it, generate a Literate PDF containing the code. The programming cycle is simple. Write the code in a latex block. Run make. The makefile extracts the code from the latex, compiles it, runs the test cases (also in the latex), and regenerates the PDF. Code and explanations are always up to date and in sync. I have found no b…
I've been struggling with keeping track of research experiments and code at the same time. This seems pretty cool! I like how this method is language agnostic and uses "matured" tools. Question: I'd love to give this a try; do you have any public code snippets?
This is (most of) the source code for Axiom. The code is extracted from the latex for these pdfs.
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I work with TeX quite a lot and I can't even really understand intuitively the principles of the language design let alone the grammar. Like 15 years later and I'm still copy and pasting spells. I'd love to see an CST of my document and figure out why I'm writing the characters I'm writing!
TikZ is the worst for this. I don't usually have any problem picking up esoteric programming languages, but whatever the hell is going in with TikZ/TeX will be forever beyond my comprehension.