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RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

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Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#41

Post by quantummagic »

huijzer wrote: post #26
Hendrikto wrote: post #10

I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor’s and master’s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \makeatletter \makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all…

I’ve been using Typst for years now. Wrote my PhD thesis in it [1] as well as a book. Works great; can’t recommend it enough. I usually barely use plugins because it’s either already included or pretty easy to write a bit of code yourself [1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/phd-thesis

Didn't see a pdf of your thesis, except on your web-site[1]. But the version there (at least as it renders on my machine), has numerous formatting issues. For one egregious example, look at the letter spacing in the title and legend of Figure 2.2 (page 27): "civilia ns", "Pe rs ona lity s core". I'm sure the content is great, but using it as an example of Typst prowess, seems ill-advised.

[1] https://huijzer.xyz/files/f72fa09561f20162.pdf

Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#43

Post by drob518 »

groos wrote: post #28
noelwelsh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This mirrors my experience. It's worth noting that TeX was developed in the same time period that the details of lexical scope were being nailed down by Guy Steele in the Rabbit compiler for Scheme. It's not that TeX is an ad hoc system; it's more the case that people didn't actually know how to implement a better system at the time.

'People' in this case were Don Knuth (TeX) and Leslie Lamport (LaTeX). Both are Turing Award winners.

Which means what, exactly.

Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#44

Post by stusmall »

DominikPeters wrote: post #3

The landing page (clearly to a large part written by LLM) does not mention that both KaTeX and mathjax can render to SVG in node. This wasm approach might still be lighter, but the advantage is not as clear as the page makes it seem. (It also contains LLM dishonesties like that the bundle size is 0 KB.)

> It also contains LLM dishonesties like that the bundle size is KB

That one jumped out to me too. The phrasing is so wiggly but technically correct it feels intentional. When I saw it I didn't blame it on the LLM, which is worse.

Otherwise it's a super cool looking project

Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#45

Post by ForceBru »

quantummagic wrote: post #41
huijzer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using Typst for years now. Wrote my PhD thesis in it [1] as well as a book. Works great; can’t recommend it enough. I usually barely use plugins because it’s either already included or pretty easy to write a bit of code yourself [1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/phd-thesis

Didn't see a pdf of your thesis, except on your web-site[1]. But the version there (at least as it renders on my machine), has numerous formatting issues. For one egregious example, look at the letter spacing in the title and legend of Figure 2.2 (page 27): "civilia ns", "Pe rs ona lity s core". I'm sure the content is great, but using it as an example of Typst prowess, seems ill-advised. [1] https://huijzer.xyz/file…

I don't see any issues with the title of Figure 2.2, but the legend and the x-axis label have weird letter spacing indeed. It seems like images like this are standalone (https://github.com/rikhuijzer/phd-thesis/blob/main/images/pe...) and probably aren't generated by Typst. So perhaps the weird spacing is not Typst's fault.

Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#46

Post by CJefferson »

Hendrikto wrote: post #10

I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor’s and master’s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \makeatletter \makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all…

Not a latex post with someone talking about typst. Come back when the html output works. Not having good accessible output was more acceptable back when Tex was invented, it definitely isn’t now, and they made a new system and somehow got this worse then modern latex.

Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#47

Post by dev_hugepages »

quantummagic wrote: post #41
huijzer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using Typst for years now. Wrote my PhD thesis in it [1] as well as a book. Works great; can’t recommend it enough. I usually barely use plugins because it’s either already included or pretty easy to write a bit of code yourself [1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/phd-thesis

Didn't see a pdf of your thesis, except on your web-site[1]. But the version there (at least as it renders on my machine), has numerous formatting issues. For one egregious example, look at the letter spacing in the title and legend of Figure 2.2 (page 27): "civilia ns", "Pe rs ona lity s core". I'm sure the content is great, but using it as an example of Typst prowess, seems ill-advised. [1] https://huijzer.xyz/file…

I took a look at the repo and it's probably the fault of the the SVG of the graphs, not of typist itself. Now, you could have used typst libraries to generate the graphs but back then (2 years ago I think?) it was probably a struggle.

Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#48

Post by xworld21 »

I suppose somebody has to ask (and most likely complain) about this: what does RaTeX do for accessibility? I gather that it produces images. I checked the demo, and there's not even an alternative text or an ARIA label, so this seems completely invisible to anybody relying on a screen reader. This is quite a step backwards compared to modern LaTeX, which can now tag equations with MathML within the PDF, or using MathJax, or any other serious tool targeting HTML, like pandoc or LaTeXML.

Is accessibility anywhere on the roadmap for RaTeX?

Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#49

Post by scuppernong »

Hendrikto wrote: post #10

I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor’s and master’s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \makeatletter \makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all…

as long as the arXiv doesn't accept Typst, it's never going to be a real alternative to LaTeX. and the arXiv maintainers seem either hostile or indifferent to Typst

Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#50

Post by ajkjk »

ngriffiths wrote: post #27
Hendrikto wrote: post #10

I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor’s and master’s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \makeatletter \makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all…

It's kinda fascinating how dominant LaTeX is, how nice its output is, how respected Knuth is as a computer scientist, and at the same time how totally awful it feels to use it. Hard to figure out how it can be so good and so bad at once. Posts/discussion I found interesting: - http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2008/01/10/the-genius-of-donald... - https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/24671 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

Well -- TeX is "80s good". We've gotten better at designing ergonomic software since and it really doesn't meet the modern standard. But it's good enough for most people, and sufficiently hard to replace, that it has stuck around.

Added to that, academics specifically are more willing to suffer old crufty stuff than software engineers tend to be. After all their job is to absorb fields of material whether good or bad, and the technology tends to be lagging behind the bleeding edge in many subfields anyway so TeX doesn't even necessarily stand out.

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