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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

#51

Post by nkmnz »

xworld21 wrote: post #48

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 Math…

AFAIK, KaTex has accessibility via MathML included, but it doesn't provide an export as image - it rather renders as html. So why would you want the utility that you use to render an additional image to take care of something that KaTeX already does?

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

#52

Post by NewsaHackO »

dev_hugepages wrote: post #47
quantummagic wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yea, I don’t see a point of criticizing minutiae from a thesis that has already been accepted, but I agree, the graphs look out of place and generally not in the same style of the other text. Also, I guess I am just really used to latex’s font, it just automatically gives an academic style that I do t get from this. Again, pure personal bias.

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

#53

Post by sombragris »

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 necessarily my experience. I wrote (and I am writing) several academic documents with it. There are its quirks, of course, but with good classes such as memoir, I don't feel the need to do a lot more than basic customization in the preamble. Still is a good tool for me.

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

#54

Post by TheRealPomax »

I am so confused. There's already a native version of LaTeX... it's... it's LaTeX. Why would a Rust implementation need to match KaTeX instead of properly implementing a real (and modern, so unicode-out-of-the-box) TeX engine, that LaTeX (which is a set of convenience macros) then trivially runs on top of?

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

#55

Post by adamnemecek »

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…

+1 for Typst being amazing.

I can actually like write my own functions when I need to. I don't think I have ever written a LaTeX macro without having to look up a lot of stuff.

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

#57

Post by blenderob »

jedberg wrote: post #56

I don't know why but this chain amuses me: RaTeX -> KaTeX -> LaTeX. I guess it shows how everyone loves but hates LaTeX and is always trying to bolt on that one last thing that will make it good.

Aren't these 3 different implementations with totally different use cases? Katex is latex-like implementation for web. Ratex is really 'rewrite katex in rust'. I don't understand what is getting "bolted on" to what here.

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

#58

Post by zem »

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…

to be fair to knuth, he had nothing to do with latex. it's conceivable that one could start over from plain tex and build up a different high level system. (then again perhaps some of the brittleness of latex comes from unavoidable issues with the tex layer; lamport is a very respected computer scientist too!)

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

#59

Post by bb88 »

ajkjk wrote: post #50
ngriffiths wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There was a point in the 1990's where microsoft word wasn't truly WYSIWYG. IIRC it was like an infinite page and the line breaks and page breaks were "estimates"

Further many docs from that era are plagued with abandonware.

TeX did one thing well for an era when often the only interface to the machine was over a Xyplex terminal server connecting to a tty at 9600 baud.

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