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Modern LaTeX

github.com

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Re: Modern LaTeX

#101

Post by tannhaeuser »

josephg wrote: post #38
BlackFly wrote: post #19

I always wonder why people compare Latex with word and not with the single most popular document markup (especially here): HTML + css + javascript. The problems are quite similar, "How do I center a div?" vs "How do I keep this float on this page?" Has latex really modernized? I don't hear a lot about new layouts or style mechanisms. Most people are probably reading articles online these days, although there is a lot…

Its the same reason that Markdown became popular. I want my document to primarily contain content. Not a sea of handwritten tags. I don't want to manually type (or read past) HTML tags littered around the place. I don't want to manually put tags on my text, or worry about how indentation will affect my rendered output. (For example, foo and foo render differently). If I'm writing a blog post, I also don't want my pos…

SGML (ISO 8879) has basically all these things: it infers tags (such as for opening paragraphs as in your example, but also infers missing html, head, and body tags, and also infers end-element tags for paragraphs, etc etc), has a built-in mechanism for recognizing custom tokens and turn those into tags to implement markdown and custom syntaxes, provides text macros, and many, many more things (including stylesheets, transformations for things such as table of content generation and search result views).

In other words, SGML is complementing the HTML vocabulary with authoring affordances, as originally intended (HTML is based on it).

Re: Modern LaTeX

#102

Post by kzrdude »

mgaunard wrote: post #65

Why LuaLaTex and not XeLaTex?

The first document compile example in the posted link (the PDF, the actual document) uses `xelatex`, so why the question?

> Feel free to try lualatex instead—there are a few differences between the two that we will discuss later, but either is fine for now

Re: Modern LaTeX

#103

Post by mr_mitm »

ayhanfuat wrote: post #95
mr_mitm wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously there are differences, but that wasn't the point of my comment. I replied to the claim that latex never needed "marketers". Or did you mean to reply to a different comment?

I meant if there is no company financially benefiting from that activity it is hard to call that marketing. But if there is a company especially if it is backed by VC that is a completely different story.

There is no VC with typst, they're bootstrapped. And I think by "marketeers" the original commenter did not mean actual marketing people, but enthusiastic fans. Unless it was a hidden accusation of astroturfing that I didn't get.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#104

Post by goku12 »

rochak wrote: post #99
goku12 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! Consistency is the reason I took up LaTeX, after suffering a disaster with Word. LaTeX feels dated and isn't flawless, but inconsistency is one complaint that I've never heard about it before.

I'd say it is more about how esoteric LaTeX extensions/plugins felt like when I picked it up (I was just getting into the field back then). I am sure that now, after years of experience, I would be more open to give it a shot again. Unfortunately, I am no longer into research anymore. I did have fun converting my LaTeX resume to Typst though.

Using extensions these days is more like searching a software registry (CTAN in this case) for packages and looking up its API documentation. But your last sentence says a lot. The reason why Typst feels so much more ergonomic is that it resembles modern programming and markup languages. They have the advantage of hindsight. LaTeX markup does indeed feel esoteric, no matter how many times you use it. Perhaps it made more sense in its days.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#105

Post by maegul »

chabska wrote: post #94
JackeJR wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many reasons this comparison is not made. I will just touch on one. The target medium is different. For html, you have monitors of different sizes as well as windows that can be resized. For latex, you choose your target at the start: A4 paper? Screen presentation? A0 poster? With a fixed medium in mind, you can be extremely particular on where on this canvas you want a piece of text/graphic or whatever. Wi…

HTML+CSS has facilities to target a page format (CSS @page rule, cm and in dimension units). Not to say that it's on the same level as LaTeX, but it's pretty impressive by its own right.

Are there good deep dives on how far you can practically this? Especially in combination with headless browser pdf generation?

Last time I looked into it, a while ago, my impression was that it would get rickety too soon. It’d be a good place to be, I think, if web and “document” tech stacks could have nice and practical convergence.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#106

Post by pbowyer »

agoose77 wrote: post #60

A shameless plug for the MyST Engine https://mystmd.org/ It's a document engine that ingests Markdown (particularly the MyST superset) and builds upon "structured data" for sharing. E.g. SciPy's proceedings: https://proceedings.scipy.org/articles/XHDR4700

Just a note on MyST's citations feature as I was researching it this morning: until this ticket [1] is worked on there's one bibliography style and that's it.

1. https://github.com/jupyter-book/mystmd/issues/1462

Re: Modern LaTeX

#108

Post by oytis »

red_trumpet wrote: post #62
kzrdude wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are a very small team and this is a known issue - there is a website refresh coming up that will fix it They developed the main face of the product first - the online webapp which has live collaboration - which sounds like a sane choice for a new company.

> sounds like a sane choice for a new company. It does, but this is actually part of the critique. Typst is developed by a company, while LaTeX is not.

Yeah, today's open source combines the worst from corporate jobs and social media. Typst looks nice though, but is indeed developed in a logic of a business

Re: Modern LaTeX

#110

Post by eru »

JackeJR wrote: post #25
BlackFly wrote: post #19

I always wonder why people compare Latex with word and not with the single most popular document markup (especially here): HTML + css + javascript. The problems are quite similar, "How do I center a div?" vs "How do I keep this float on this page?" Has latex really modernized? I don't hear a lot about new layouts or style mechanisms. Most people are probably reading articles online these days, although there is a lot…

There are many reasons this comparison is not made. I will just touch on one. The target medium is different. For html, you have monitors of different sizes as well as windows that can be resized. For latex, you choose your target at the start: A4 paper? Screen presentation? A0 poster? With a fixed medium in mind, you can be extremely particular on where on this canvas you want a piece of text/graphic or whatever. Wi…

> For latex, you choose your target at the start: A4 paper? Screen presentation? A0 poster?

You can change that as you go along.

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