The LaTeX cargo cult
joshparsons.net
The LaTeX cargo cult
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Re: The LaTeX cargo cult
#2I don't disagree with his arguments. But, it's still the best typesetting tool that I know of.
Re: The LaTeX cargo cult
#3I don't disagree with his arguments. But, it's still the best typesetting tool that I know of.
I too agree with all of his points... but what's a realistic alternative stack that satisfies those points without drastically cutting down on the available rendering tools and packages for specialized tasks?
Re: The LaTeX cargo cult
#4I don't disagree with his arguments. But, it's still the best typesetting tool that I know of.
I too agree with all of his points... but what's a realistic alternative stack that satisfies those points without drastically cutting down on the available rendering tools and packages for specialized tasks?
If .rtf/.doc is in such high demand, can't we output to those formats using LaTeX? I think of it as just another output alongside dvi/pdf/etc, but I know very little of the internals that would generate those additional formats.
Re: The LaTeX cargo cult
#5Though he points out this mostly applies to philosophy papers. Many of the points do not really apply in some other scientific fields (I usually had no trouble submit LaTeX papers for CS journals/conferences).
Re: The LaTeX cargo cult
#6While (La)Tex could be better/faster/easier to use, it's still the best typesetting system there is.
Re: The LaTeX cargo cult
#7I like Latex (Math/CS background), but I would definitely like to try some alternatives (like Asciidoc discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8509062 ). The problem is I never can tell which Markdown/Docbook inspired systems actually have working implementations and which ones are hot air. I don't want to end up with a big SGML mess that I can't do anything with or have to edit CSS just to render a book in a standard format.
Any recommendations/tutorials?
My ideal system would allow something like literate-programming/sweave/knitr. The notation could be any of markdownish/xml/ascii. I would have to be able to do call-outs/annotations on listings with tags (not insane/fragile region specifications). I need figures and charts. And I would have to be able to produce at least HTML5, PDF, epub, mobi. And I need support for footnotes, endnotes, tables of contents, indexes, and bibliographies. Flexibility in back-ends (like being able to render to Latex) would also be good.
Edit: the sweave/knitr thing I can live without (could probably arranged a pre-process to do this).
Re: The LaTeX cargo cult
#8> LaTeX input files are proprietary to LaTeX, just as .doc is Word. The only definition of LaTeX as a language is “whatever LaTeX does”.
I am sorry but I don't see this point... Everybody is free to write a parser for .tex files and use it for whatever reason they want...
You are not free to do so with .doc or other proprietary format...
Re: The LaTeX cargo cult
#9Personally, I could just as well use Word for most of my work, but I like not having to use shortcuts or plough through menus to format my text. Markdown is a nice alternative, but doesn't support referencing figures and tables nor does it support citations.
Re: The LaTeX cargo cult
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I too agree with all of his points... but what's a realistic alternative stack that satisfies those points without drastically cutting down on the available rendering tools and packages for specialized tasks?
If .rtf/.doc is in such high demand, can't we output to those formats using LaTeX? I think of it as just another output alongside dvi/pdf/etc, but I know very little of the internals that would generate those additional formats.
I mean, I view .DOC was worse than Latex in terms of ability to correctly render it in the future, ability to generate complex documents correctly from originals, ability to programmatically interact with it, and generally anything to do with the future.
I'm tempted to go down some XML path, because that separates concerns between the semantic structuring of the document/corpus and the rendering of it, but is that really better than just using a declarative subset of LaTeX and worrying about correctly implementing the styling scripts to render them as desired?
I have my doubts it would really be an improvement.
For context, I have a project at work coming up for which I have a bit of time to establish a toolchain and our format for things like documentation, specifications, etc. I'm open to the suggestion I should spend some of that time working on a system to make sure we don't hit a rendering issue on a technical manual in a few years when technologies change. (I'd also like to look in to literate programming tools, so semantic demarcation for automatic selection of certain kinds of elements in the document is high on my list of things to look in to, as well as relationships between and metadata in those blocks.)
I'm just not convinced that trying to replace Latex with XML or anything of that nature is actually going to make my life better in those regards, rather than being a waste of time.
(If you haven't noticed, XML is sort of the main alternative to Latex in my mind for the things I'm trying to do; perhaps there are better options.)