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Modern LaTeX

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Re: Modern LaTeX

#201

Post by SebastianKra »

dgfl wrote: post #193
SebastianKra wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, maybe they’re not printed by yourself. But many academics, often young people included, still print papers.

Which they can still do. Printed HTML is perfectly serviceable (definitely better than non-printed PDF).

Or are you arguing that there are somehow more people reading printed papers than digital?

Re: Modern LaTeX

#202

Post by KeplerBoy »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #56
KeplerBoy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Academic publishing standards are about as much of a joke as academia itself.

Sure, but if you ignore academia, you might as well ignore LaTeX.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#203

Post by einpoklum »

DemocracyFTW2 wrote: post #178
einpoklum wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 specif…

> Given the technology at the time, it's not clear to me whether Word's behavior was a feature or a bug

A bug, because even if this was merited somehow, they could have just made it a nice prominent checkbox for the user to decide what behavior they wanted.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#204

Post by meinersbur »

wtallis wrote: post #188
SebastianKra wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) separ…

Both claims are incorrect.

LaTeX would rather produce a bad document if it cannot produce a good one. Example: overfull hbox. A designer is still required who creates the documentclass, it is just that LaTeX comes with some predefined ones intended for scientific publishing.

HTML+CSS require pixel-perfect rendering. Example: ACID2 test. While it might have been the idea of plain HTML at some point ( instead of ), control has never been taken away from the author thanks to CSS.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#205

Post by goku12 »

agubelu wrote: post #175
goku12 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't find LaTeX too pleasant either. But what is preventing Typst from replacing LaTeX in academia?

Re: Modern LaTeX

#206

Post by phorkyas82 »

billfruit wrote: post #81
dochtman wrote: post #5

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

Asciidoc is also a good alternative. Are people looking seriously at shortcomings of latex and moved towards modern replacements? Major problems include: - Tables are a huge pain. - Customized formatting like chapter headings, footers, etc is painful. - Latex as a language somehow felt like it was having issues with composability of functions, the details of the problem eludes me now, but it was something like if you…

The biggest pain I remember was placement of figures. I think the [h] parameter would advise to place the graphic right "here", but even if added the exclamation mark for extra force, it would often wind up somewhere else.

Like when our chess trainer could not put six diagrams on one page with latex, s.th. that is very feasible with typst (https://github.com/Phorkyas/typst-samples/tree/main/chess)

Re: Modern LaTeX

#207

Post by leephillips »

naikrovek wrote: post #155
phanimahesh wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that pdf made interactive? It has options to toggle the behaviour, which work even in an in browser pdf viewer. I did not think PDFs could do that.

PDFs can do a lot more than show static content. There was one time where Adobe strongly advocated for PDF to be the page format of what would come to be called "The World Wide Web". Where we have HTML now, Adobe wanted PDF. Thankfully that did not happen. But I suspect it would have made more sense technically than [whatever this mess is that we have now.] A lot of things are possible in PDF.

It’s cool, but using these features severely limits the portability of your document.

These interactive links did not work for me (using Linux) in the in-browser reader in Brave nor in sioyek, but they did work in evince.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#208

Post by wolfgang42 »

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…

Markdown as specified lets you break out HTML whenever you want, and even understands the difference between inline and block tags. Most places where you can use markdown support this.

Personally I’m also a fan of https://github.com/pugjs/pug , which is an alternate syntax for HTML that I find easier to work with when I need the full power of HTML but don’t want a thicket of angle brackets.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#209

Post by laurmaedje »

Arrowmaster wrote: post #177
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?

That's fixed, thanks to a community contribution! [1] For what it's worth, Typst did have font subsetting from the start, but it was rather bad for CFF-flavoured OpenType fonts.

The same contributor has recently put a lot work into building a better foundation for Typst's PDF export [1], which decreases file sizes further, and brings many further benefits.

[1]: https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/4373

[2]: https://github.com/typst/typst/pull/5420

Re: Modern LaTeX

#210

Post by int_19h »

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.

Why is that a bad thing, though? To me this actually sounds a net positive for two reasons: first, there's a single coherent overarching design, and second, so long as their business model is sustainable, it means that the product won't suddenly disappear because of maintainer burnout etc.
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