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Modern LaTeX

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Re: Modern LaTeX

#171

Post by xboxnolifes »

mariusor wrote: post #49
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The special naming convention is mostly used as a form of elitist gatekeeping; it's a tribal shibboleth. You should be able to figure out whether someone is talking about latex (polymer) or latex (markup) from context, so having a special naming convention is rather pretentious and superfluous. If calling it lay-tek was important, they should've called it laytek. Historically, as I understand it, distinctions between…

They did call it Latek, the X in the name is the Greek letter χ (Chi) and in my opinion, it's not an elitist shibboleth but a way to showcase the advantages of their typesetting system over existing, at the time, methods that didn't invest a lot in rendering non ASCII character sets.

So it's not actually LaTaX, it's LaTeχ. Make sure you type it properly i guess.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#172

Post by croemer »

IshKebab wrote: post #130
croemer wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TFA dedicated one of the book's 11 chapters to it. Doesn't matter whether most users know about it or not.

A feature can only make LaTeX stand out if people actually know it exists.

Nope, people don't need to know that something is done to appreciate the outcome. You might not know that modern MacBooks use ARM processors, but you might still appreciate that they have a long battery life.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#173

Post by immibis »

enriquto wrote: post #136
goku12 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know anything about quarto, but you're missing a lot of useful software if you're limiting yourself to the distro repo - especially Debian stable.

As a matter of principle, i prefer to use really stable software that does not change wantonly, and whose authors took the care to put it into debian. My 20 year-old .tex documents still compile today. Will the same happen with quarto? (or typst, for that matter?) The fact that they offer no packages in the debian standard distribution signals they have likely succumbed to the awful trend of version churning, where y…

FWIW software gets in Debian because of Debian, not because of the authors of the software.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#174

Post by godelski »

josephg wrote: post #121
godelski wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's why I find it baffling how so many blogging & documentation tools lock you in to using I feel this about so many things and it boggles my mind why people often choose to do things the hardest way possible. Honestly, I think a good portion of it of the unwillingness to toss something aside and write something new. If it's just a hack on a hack on a hack on a hack then no wonder it's shit. It's funny that ofte…

> I'm worried that with LLMs and vibe coding on the rise we're just going to get more. I'm hoping the opposite, at least eventually. I think before long it'll be easy to get chatgpt to build your own version of whatever you want, from scratch. Eg, "Hey, I want something kinda like markdown but with these other features. Write me the spec. Implement a renderer for documents in Go - and write a vs code extension + lang…

You missed my concern. Even if LLMs get much but it doesn't mean the users will ask the right questions. Even now many don't ask the right questions, why would it be any better when we just scale the issue?

Re: Modern LaTeX

#175

Post by agubelu »

goku12 wrote: post #88
agubelu wrote: post #41

LaTeX is great. It also sucks. I'm happy to have learned it and I'm happy to never have to use it again.

What's your alternative?

For personal use, maybe Markdown + pandoc, or Typst for more complex stuff. For academical use I don't think there are any, because everything still revolves around LaTeX. But the lack of alternatives doesn't mean LaTeX is pleasant to use.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#176

Post by kzrdude »

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…

Is there a microtype (latex package) for the web?

Re: Modern LaTeX

#177

Post by Arrowmaster »

dochtman wrote: post #5

Typst is the modern LaTeX. https://typst.app/

I recall a recent criticism of Typst being that it doesn't strip unused glyphs from fonts when making PDFs so they end up excessively large compared to other solutions. Has there been any change to that?

Re: Modern LaTeX

#178

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

einpoklum wrote: post #73
DocTomoe wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word 20 years ago was a very different beast compared to word today. For starters, it still had a closed, binary (read: not friendly to source control) format. It also had more bugs than Klendathu. When you are losing your semester's 25-page seminal work an hour before deadline because Word had that weird little bug about long documents and random CJK characters (and whether or not the moon was currently in the House…

> For starters, it still had a closed, binary (read: not friendly to source control) format Word still has a closed format. It supposedly standardized OOXML, but - it doesn't follow that standard; Microsoft apparently managed to warp the XML standard to accommodate its weirdness; and all sorts of details encoded by MSO in that format are not actually documented. There also used to be the problem of different renderin…

> You opened a document on another person's computer and things were out-of-place, styling and spacing a bit different, page transitions not at same point etc.

When this happened to me on my job in the late 90s we were able to locate that problem in the printer driver that was visible in the Word print dialog. I don't remember the details but it looked like Word was adjusting font metrics to the metrics of the specific printer, and all the shifted pixels quickly added up to destroy the finely balanced lines of our print publication (yes, an official public health periodical by a European government was typeset with MS Word, and there was a lot of manual typographical work in each print). Given the technology at the time, it's not clear to me whether Word's behavior was a feature (in the sense of: automatically adjusts to your output device for best results) or a bug (automatically destroys your work without asking or telling you when not in its accustomed environment).

Re: Modern LaTeX

#179

Post by fryktelig »

watusername wrote: post #162
fryktelig wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: why do you prefer lualatex to xetex?

LuaTeX is the de facto successor of pdfTeX and is basically a more maintained pdfTeX with Unicode support and Lua scripting, whereas XeTeX has its own engine. In practice, it means that LuaTeX "just works" with most documents while with XeTeX you run into all sorts of weird incompatibilities. Fancy packages that make use of Lua scripting (e.g., graphdrawing) will only work with LuaTeX. Edit: Looks like it's not de fa…

Thanks! I vaguely remembered getting a bit of mixed messages with regards to the two last year when I was looking into Tectonic. I just read a bit into the github issues and it seems like the Tectonic devs happened to fork Xelatex and not Lualatex. https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/issues/158#...

Anyway, what they made works perfectly for me, I luckily don't use any of the fancy graphics packages that use Lua. I use Latex a few times a year at most, and Tectonic just works for me. With my previous Lualatex workflow I had to deal with Tlmgr and that whole ant's nest, figuring out one by one which packages I was missing each recompile.

Seems like the main argument against Xetex in the article you linked is that it is unmaintainted, so it doesn't really apply to Tectonic, but it's a bit frustrating that an opportunity for ecosystem convergence potentially has been missed.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#180

Post by DemocracyFTW2 »

IshKebab wrote: post #61
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The special naming convention is mostly used as a form of elitist gatekeeping; it's a tribal shibboleth. You should be able to figure out whether someone is talking about latex (polymer) or latex (markup) from context, so having a special naming convention is rather pretentious and superfluous. If calling it lay-tek was important, they should've called it laytek. Historically, as I understand it, distinctions between…

Is arXiv not pronounced the same as "archive"? I agree with you about LaTeX but arXiv seems like an obvious allusion to "archive"?

Well it does lack that final -e of archive, and—fun fact!—like LaTeX which I know as ['la:teç], arXiv could plausibly be pronounced [ar'çi:f] in German although I've never heard anyone pronounce that name. So why is it arXiv not at least arXive with an -e?
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