XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
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XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
1–10 of 70 posts
Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
#2In all honesty I did not realise LaTeX needed saving.
Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
#3The mission of TeXLive is to include everything and the kitchen sink. However, why should their TeXpad support everything? They could go the XeTeX+biber+TikZ route and educate their users how to switch from pdflatex,bibtex,pstricks,etc.
Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
#4In all honesty I did not realise LaTeX needed saving.
Yes, people can continue to obliviously work with the same legacy tools and the same convoluted processes for years, until something better comes along and they wonder why they put up with that shit all along.
Oh, you meant it sarcastically? Well, I didn't.
Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
#5Umm, have these people ever heard of backward compatibility? Admittedly, many TeX package authors haven't either, but just dropping pstricks is going to make a ridiculous number of documents that have a figure in them impossible to compile. Not to mention the fact that TikZ, while better, is not better enough that everyone will want to invest time learning it...
MikTeX's install-on-first-use has its problems, but does help balance bloat and not removing older packages.
Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
#6In all honesty I did not realise LaTeX needed saving.
Outside of mathematics and physics conference/journal publishing, there's a widespread perception that it's losing ground. In CS some conferences are slowly switching to Word, or offering an option to authors (who are slowly switching to Word, especially outside of theory-heavy areas). In book publishing it's shrunk to a very small niche, even in technical areas. Part of the problem is cruftiness of tools, and part is the bizzareness of the underlying languages. As far as I can tell, few people who've written significant chunks of LaTeX stylesheet code or TeX macros/packages think the language is good, and it's complex/weird enough that even the vast majority of people who've written dozens of papers in LaTeX have no idea how to make nontrivial changes to its stylesheets. Also, many of the base tools still don't have Unicode support.
Belief that something is broken and attempts to fix it are a 20-year-old refrain at this point, e.g. ConTeXt is an attempt to make TeX more usable for book publishing, LuaTeX is an attempt to reduce reliance on TeX macros in favor of a less weird scripting language, XeTeX is a project to add Unicode, etc.
Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
#7The mission of TeXLive is to include everything and the kitchen sink. However, why should their TeXpad support everything? They could go the XeTeX+biber+TikZ route and educate their users how to switch from pdflatex,bibtex,pstricks,etc.
Precisely, there are other people out there who use TeX in different ways. They should just target their preferred compilation chain and just handle that in their app (they are not wrong in thinking that _most_ people out there just wan LaTeX to spit out PDFs and use "normal" graphics).
Otherwise, has anyone used their app? How does it stack against Emacs+AucTex+RefTex+Skim?
Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
#8Why is it necessary for TeX to keep all the libraries in source form on disk? Why not use compression, or package some pre-compiled form of the library code, or both?
Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
#9I just use XeTeX so I can get proper kerning and ligatures. Oddly enough, as a typography nerd LaTeX just doesn't cut it.
Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
#10[deleted]