221–230 of 338 posts
Tangential, do LLMs pick up new languages that have less internet discussion and which develop rapidly after knowledge cutoff dates? To naysayers, AIs are supposed to generate hands with 6 fingers and ossify language and framework versions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why does the premier word processing software (Microsoft Word) care so little about typesetting? I am biased however, as my thesis was written in LaTeX with all the plots regenerated at compile time from the raw data.
> Why does the premier word processing software (Microsoft Word) care so little about typesetting? Because its target userbase is people who don’t give a single shit about typography.
In thirty years LaTEX will still be open source and probably will be maintained. Typst appears to be a mix of open source and closed source; the general model here tends to be neglecting the open source part and implementing critical features in the closed source portion. Which is to say, it's unlikely to live beyond the company itself.
The latter is a genuine concern. Will it be maintained? I like LaTeX a lot, but would I want to maintain its internals? No. Could I? If I were paid handsomely, yes. Emphasis on handsomely.
Which leads to another worry: LaTeX itself may be OSS, but down the line it is possible that maintained forks will be controlled by big publishers paying maintainers to deal with the insanity of its internals. And we all know how lovely those publishers are (凸ಠ益ಠ)凸
I'm sticking with LaTeX, not as a fetish, but because journal/conferences still do not accept e.g. typst. Will they ever do? I don't know, depends on their willingness to integrate it into their toolchains I guess?
I'm not familiar with how journal submissions work, but don't you simply submit a pdf at the end? Does it matter what engine you used to render it?
Why not use javascript, JSX and TypScript to produce PDF? You use the language you know already.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results. By coincidence, this is the basic way to compile latex.
Last time I checked, flipping a coin twice gave different results.
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What in microtype makes "a big difference"? I don't recall using it (my LaTeX years are long behind me), but all of the examples on https://www.khirevich.com/latex/microtype/ seem incredibly minor. I don't think I'd notice any of them as the reader.
It will tweak spacing, kerning, margin protrusion, and font size to improve readability avoid big word gaps and excessive end-of-line hyphenation. It is what sets professional typography apart. Only Adobe InDesign provides a comparable implementation, tweaking all those details. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hz-program for a better explanation and an example. IMHO, the difference is obvious and not minor. Without…
TeXmacs claims to have implemented microtypography as well (https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/news.en.html, as I am reading it, in the opening paragraph on version 2.1)
Why not LyX or TeXmacs? Both seem to be better options than yet another markup language.
I have only two peeves with typst. 1. They should have carried forward the latex standard as-is for math, instead of getting rid of the backslash escape sequence, etc. 2. There is no way to share a variable across a file's scope - so can't have a setting that is shared across files - not even with state variables. Other than this, typst is solid, and with the neovim editor and tinymist lsp, is great to write with.
$
ZZ &= { ..., -1, 0, 1, ... } \
QQ &= { p/q : p, q in ZZ }
$
$
a = cases(
0 & quad x 0
)
$
\begin{align*}
\mathbb{Z} &= \{ \dots, -1, 0, 1, \dots \}, \\
\mathbb{Q} &= \left\{ \frac{p}{q} : p, q \in \mathbb{Z} \right\}
\end{align*}
\[
a = \begin{cases}
0 & \quad x \leq 0, \\
\begin{pmatrix}1 & 2\\ 3 & 4\end{pmatrix}
\begin{pmatrix}5\\6\end{pmatrix} & \quad x > 0
\end{cases}
\]