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XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?

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Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?

#51

Post by jwr »

gchpaco wrote: post #38
jvm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't they just maintain both a bloated legacy version and a stripped down version that they focus on?

The TeX community in general has a philosophy that anything written since 1983 (TeX'83) or so should a) compile and b) produce precisely the same typeset document if it is recompiled today. This has obnoxious issues and is one of the reasons for the profusion of packages--the norm is to change the name for incompatible changes so that old users can continue on.

Which is a ridiculous goal, because, in general, most documents found in the wild are portable if transported together with the author's computer system. Chances of successfully producing typeset output from a .tex file (+ a bunch of external files) that you get from someone else are slim to none.

I'm glad there is a movement to do something. I used to use TeX but stopped a long time ago, because it was simply too much pain for too little gain. I still have to deal with it sometimes when helping my wife who publishes scientific papers. Whenever she mentions that she needs "a small modification in the BibTeX style", I get nightmares.

Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?

#52

Post by jwr »

There are two problems with TeX (in general):

1. It is a local maximum. It produces great output and works now. Changing it requires a huge effort which will result in a system that is inferior, for many years to come. Only then another maximum could be achieved. This means there is resistance to change — it's easier to adapt to TeX's flaws than it is to write something completely new. Many systems suffer from similar fate (think Emacs).

2. It is a black hole, a programmer sink. People start using TeX and curse it, then they learn it, and by the time they know its limitations and are ready to take on a job of writing something better, they are proficient enough in TeX to stay within it. Many systems suffer from similar fate (think Emacs).

I wonder if something will eventually happen to budge the TeX community from where it is now.

Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?

#53

Post by JadeNB »

radarsat1 wrote: post #49
Avshalom wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I understand, but I'm not convinced that the macros couldn't be somehow compiled down to some more compressed binary representation.

My understanding is that this is what .fmt files are for. I'm not sure where the line is drawn between what goes in a .fmt file and what is packaged as ordinary TeX code; I imagine that, like much else about TeX (which I love), it reflects the machine constraints with which Knuth was faced while writing it (in the late '70's and early '80's).

Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?

#55

Post by gnosis »

jwr wrote: post #52

There are two problems with TeX (in general): 1. It is a local maximum. It produces great output and works now. Changing it requires a huge effort which will result in a system that is inferior, for many years to come. Only then another maximum could be achieved. This means there is resistance to change — it's easier to adapt to TeX's flaws than it is to write something completely new. Many systems suffer from simila…

The (La)TeX ecosystem is still evolving. For instance, see:

LuaTeX - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuaTeX

ConTeXt - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConTeXt

LaTeX3 - http://www.latex-project.org/latex3.html

Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?

#56

Post by JoshTriplett »

larsberg wrote: post #22

XeTeX-generated PDFs are not compatible with the toolchains of some academic publishers (Cambridge University Press, which publishes the Journal of Functional Programming comes to mind, but I seem to recall Springer-Verlag having issues as well). Without full support for academic publishers, I believe that majority of TeX users could not upgrade.

What about XeTeX-generated PDFs makes them incompatible?

Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?

#57

Post by jpdoctor »

TylerE wrote: post #44
jpdoctor wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I can edit in an efficient plain text editor

... which is probably the real reason I don't use LyX either. Emacs + Latex are second nature to me.

Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?

#58

Post by JoshTriplett »

JoachimSchipper wrote: post #5

Umm, 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 doe…

I agree that XeTeX doesn't provide a drop-in replacement for TeX-with-dvips, but neither does pdftex/pdflatex, and many people already use that. Generating postscript or DVI first and converting to PDF produces suboptimal PDFs.

For quite a long time, pstricks didn't work very well with pdflatex, until eventually pstricks added limited support for PDF.

Also, I do consider TikZ sufficiently better than pstricks to switch. The low-level PGF library alone wouldn't provide enough benefit, but the addition of the high-level TikZ makes it extraordinarily good.

Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?

#59

Post by viraptor »

_delirium wrote: post #6
siphr wrote: post #2

In 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 i…

Is not changing the stylesheet a bad thing really? I definitely always prefer documents from people who use latex without style to those using word without style. Wasn't that one of the main reasons for creating Tex anyway? Of course it wasn't word at the time...

Re: XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?

#60

Post by scott_s »

_delirium wrote: post #21
SeanLuke wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It varies by sub-area, but artificial intelligence is also my area, and I don't see that dominance anymore, especially in the more interdisciplinary areas (anything that overlaps with HCI, psychology, cognitive science, etc.). I also don't see the stigma anymore among younger researchers; I detect that attitude from older people mostly, and some of the "harder core than thou" people in math-heavy sub-areas, but there…

In the areas of high performance computing, systems and languages, Latex is still dominant. Every conference I've submitted to has a Word template, but I've never known anyone to use it.
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