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XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
41–50 of 70 posts
Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
#42I didn't understand why they wanted to port LaTeX to the iPad when they first wrote about it:
Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
Yeah, TeX is a really broken tech in 2012. When I tried to look at the base languages to edit a BibTeX file, it blew my mind. I'm lucky that LaTeX has templates that I like, I have no possible means of making one myself. It seems like the whole article misses the point. pdftex doesn't need replacing, TeX needs replacing. Pandoc (with some better extension method) + CSS style sheets + TeX algorithm layout engine would…
I agree that markup/stylesheets is what most strongly needs to be improved. I've only just started experimenting with it, but Biber, positioned as a BibTeX replacement, does really seem to be an improvement for the citation piece of the puzzle; its stylesheets look like something a mortal might be able to edit. It can also be used to generate HTML output, which has long been pretty crufty with BibTeX (I already have paper lists in BibTeX, so I should be able to generate things like my web page's publication list, and be able to customize the generated HTML, maybe even have some sorting/grouping options, all of which Biber can do).
If I had to predict, I would guess that something like HTML+CSS, or possibly a Markdown-ish input language with some kind of CSS-ish stylesheet, will eventually overtake TeX in significant areas, once the PDF renderers get good enough. Maybe someone will even find a way to pipe it into TeX as a renderer, as you suggest. A plus of that workflow is that it also makes it easy to produce good-looking HTML versions of articles, which is getting more important. And the "math in HTML" question is (finally) converging on a constellation of acceptable solutions. Advanced typography in HTML is slowly creeping forward as well.
Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know. I can write LaTex but I must admit at times I would prefer something that could be written from a real language but still use LaTeXs typesetting, kerning, etc.
Probably OT: I haven't had much of a chance to use LyX, but it looked promising. (I know folks that swear by it.) Any reviews here welcomed.
LyX is ok for what it is. It certainly gets some use, even in publishing.
But at least for me a big part of the appeal to TeX is that it isn't a (%*#% GUI. It's text. I can edit in an efficient plain text editor, "refactor" styling, etc. I've even at times generated TeX code programmatically (It's often less painful for stuff like receipts than writing a PDF generator by hand, usually looks better too.)
So, I'd like a better input language, but I _don't_ want to fundamentally change the way it works. Just don't make me use a textual-replacement macro language.
Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
> 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). Huh? In my research areas (evolutionary computation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, multiagent systems, robotics) this isn't remotely true. CS conferences of almost all stripes have always offered non-LaTeX submission routes. But LaTeX domina…
This kind of has been my experience as well in Statistics/EE/Machine Learning. While, IEEE/ACM have word style files, I have seen very few submissions that use word. In fact, I know reviewers who have had a significant bias (which whether it is right or not exists) against word submissions.
Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
#46Why 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?
From what I understand everything above TeX is one giant text manipulation macro, which means it all has to be available to the programs in text form, you could compress it but that would me decompressing hundreds (thousands?) of files every time you compile.
Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, TeX is a really broken tech in 2012. When I tried to look at the base languages to edit a BibTeX file, it blew my mind. I'm lucky that LaTeX has templates that I like, I have no possible means of making one myself. It seems like the whole article misses the point. pdftex doesn't need replacing, TeX needs replacing. Pandoc (with some better extension method) + CSS style sheets + TeX algorithm layout engine would…
I agree that markup/stylesheets is what most strongly needs to be improved. I've only just started experimenting with it, but Biber, positioned as a BibTeX replacement, does really seem to be an improvement for the citation piece of the puzzle; its stylesheets look like something a mortal might be able to edit. It can also be used to generate HTML output, which has long been pretty crufty with BibTeX (I already have…
With docutils you can already convert restructuredtext to pdf directly (not very nice) or to latex.
Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
#48I just use XeTeX so I can get proper kerning and ligatures. Oddly enough, as a typography nerd LaTeX just doesn't cut it.
I understand that XeTeX allows some fancy ligatures and access to other opentype features, but what's lacking in [La]TeX's kerning, and basic ligature support?
Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
#49Why 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?
From what I understand everything above TeX is one giant text manipulation macro, which means it all has to be available to the programs in text form, you could compress it but that would me decompressing hundreds (thousands?) of files every time you compile.
I understand, but I'm not convinced that the macros couldn't be somehow compiled down to some more compressed binary representation. Regardless, I still think keeping them on disk in a tarball or something would be more economical. Decompression can be quite fast if the right compressor is used.
Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
#50I didn't understand why they wanted to port LaTeX to the iPad when they first wrote about it: http://lee-phillips.org/latexipad/
I'm sorry, but your logic here is just terrible. Your argument is that "I don't want an iPad" and "The iPad isn't a full computer" implies that "Nobody needs/wants LaTeX on an iPad". This doesn't logically follow and is instead a self-centered presumption that because you don't want something, nobody else does.
They want LaTeX on their iPads, I would like LaTeX on my iPad, and I have met other people who also want LaTeX on their iPads. When I'm taking notes, LaTeX works well for me (I'm not claiming for everyone) when I need to type up equations. I use my iPad with a bluetooth keyboard to take notes (the iPad's battery life (amongst other things) makes it very attractive for this application). I'd like to be able to render my equations to make sure I didn't make a transcription error.