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Modern LaTeX

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Re: Modern LaTeX

#181

Post by foldr »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #3

Trivia: the correct capitalization is LaTeX and it's pronounced "lay-tek". Knuth & friends were on a roll naming things - the 80s must've been quite a time. As always wiki knows all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX

From a linguist's point of view this is a perfect example of the chaos that ensues when people try to say how things are pronounced without describing the speech sounds using standard vocabulary.

Here are the inept pronunciation instructions on the LaTeX project website:

> «Lah-tech» or «Lay-tech» (to rhyme with «blech» or «Bertolt Brecht»)

The pronunciation of the 'ch' in 'blech' isn't really standardized, so that's not much help. If we go by the German pronunciation of Brecht then the sound should be [ç], i.e. a voiceless palatal fricative. But this seems to be a mistake, as Knuth intended the X in TeX to be [x], i.e. a voiceless velar fricative. In German, [ç] is an allophone of /x/ (conditioned by the preceding vowel), but they are distinct sounds, and Knuth's directions for the pronunciation of TeX unambiguously specify [x]. It seems unlikely that this difference between the X in LaTeX and the X in TeX is intentional, so maybe this was a confused attempt to identify the [x] sound.

Really then, it's anyone's guess how LaTeX is supposed to be pronounced, since no-one with authority to specify has bothered to look up the IPA symbols for the relevant speech sounds. But IMO while [leɪtɛk] is a perfectly common and acceptable pronunciation, it can only really be understood as an anglicization of [leɪtɛx] rather than the canonical pronunciation.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#182

Post by maegul »

Semaphor wrote: post #157
maegul wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We use CSS paged media to create e-books and invoices (using weasyprint [0]). One of the most helpful resources for me was print-css.rocks [1], they cover a lot of what’s possible and include which tools support which parts of it (tools targeting paged media, browser support is essentially non-existent and outside using JS to fake it with paged.js, not relevant). The expensive tools tend to support more features, but…

> I have no idea why you’d want to do that. Browsers are bad at it, dedicated tools are great at it.

Fair! I was just aspiring to a place where web pages and documents converge more.

Thanks for the recommendations!

Re: Modern LaTeX

#183

Post by IshKebab »

DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #180
IshKebab wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because they're trying to be quirky I guess, but it is still unmistakably a weird spelling of "archive" (especially given the context).

Re: Modern LaTeX

#184

Post by minifyre »

jsmith99 wrote: post #151
throwanem wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've used it for my own such production, perfect binding with a hand guillotine and screw clamps in my attic - nothing remotely professional, but you still have to start by making a book block, and Paged.js is a solid call there. Unless beauty of typography (more than TTF/OTF hinting can handle) is of particular merit, it's usually my preferred first typesetting option. As an old hand with PDF-in-browser production,…

I've also used pagedjs for a relatively complex booklet with bidirectional text in different languages, images and long footnotes. The result was great but there were some annoying bugs, some of them seeming to be possible underlying bugs in chrome and Firefox. Still, latex would have been even more frustrating.

Coincidentally, I've also used pagedjs for a project recently (125K novel) and encountered some bugs/minor issues. Overall though, I would say I had an immensely positive experience (because even when stuff broke, it was still just HTML, CSS, and JS--so I, like any other web developer, could fix it).

That said, it's a shame that the relevant W3C specs (see https://pagedjs.org/about/) still aren't fully supported by browsers (but perhaps such is the fate of niche features), but with that being the case, I'm infinitely thankful that pagedjs exists as a polyfill.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#185

Post by matthewdgreen »

dochtman wrote: post #5

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

I live in fear that one of the major typesetting services like Overleaf will convince people to move away from a very durable standard and adopt something that’s much more change-oriented. Then we’ll all have to learn not one, but two standards. Rinse repeat.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#187

Post by jvns »

maegul wrote: post #105
chabska wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I pay for a tool to convert HTML/CSS into PDFs https://www.princexml.com/ and it seems to work well. I don't have the best idea of how it compares to the various free options though.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#188

Post by wtallis »

SebastianKra wrote: post #161
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…

That seems contradictory, when Latex is rather famously imprecise at placing figures and such. Weren't both languages (at least at some point) intended to take layouting control away from the writer? But regardless, I think that, in addition to moving away from Latex we should also reconsider the primary output format. Documents are rarely printed anymore, and inaccessible, fixed-size A4 pdfs are annoying to read on…

LaTeX isn't intended to take layout control away from the author so much as it is intended to automatically produce a good-enough layout allowing a single author to produce a very large document without employing a designer.

HTML by contrast explicitly does remove control over layout from the author and place it in the hands of the user (and their chosen user agent).

Both languages have mechanisms to (somewhat) separate the content from the formatting rules.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#189

Post by adiabatty »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #145
tcfhgj wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't feel like the template itself is the issue. In typst it's quite easy to recreate the templates without being years into typst (according to my experience). The real problem is acceptance of non-word/latex papers

The problem is the user-base and acceptance of latex vs Typst. I use latex and as aware as I am about its deficiencies, I can create a doc faster in it than any other tool that I have not ever used before. I also have a bunch of utilities I created for my specific use-cases automating data into tables, figures, etc, ready for latex import. So its a mass and momentum problem. Typst not only has to be better/easier/fas…

The other option is people who never got into LaTeX get into Typst (usually by being too young to have gotten into LaTeX in college), and Typst takes over slowly that way.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#190

Post by setopt »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #26
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…

Because HTML is not an option. For academic papers you usually have to submit pdfs conforming to either a latex or word template.

In many math and physics journals, as well as on arXiv, you usually submit the TeX file itself so they can adjust it and recompile.
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