Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The LaTeX cargo cult

joshparsons.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 134 posts

Re: The LaTeX cargo cult

#41

Post by amouat »

jmount wrote: post #7

I 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…

asciidoc is quite nice. It can output DocBook which I think is pretty well supported.

I'm currently writing a book in asciidoc which produces output in all your mentioned formats and includes footnotes, endnotes, call-outs, code listings, index etc. However, whilst I write almost exclusively in asciidoc, a lot of the styling etc is done by the publisher's docbook workflow.

Re: The LaTeX cargo cult

#42

Post by DanBC »

andreasvc wrote: post #33
graycat wrote: post #16

Good news for the OP: The OP seems to want more output options than just paper or PDF. It appears that the OP also wants HTML output. Okay. TeX and LaTeX say next to nothing about the final physical form of the document and, instead, leave all that to an appropriate device driver . Or, TeX (and likely LaTeX) puts out a file called device independent with three letter file name extension DVI. Basically a DVI file says…

There are latex to HTML converters and they only work for a subset of latex functionality. It is not as simple as defining a driver that outputs HTML. Latex and HTML work in fundamentally different ways: latex typesets for a fixed paper size, and specifies its coordinates in physical dimensions. HTML is free flowing; if the user resizes the window the layout should adapt, they layout has to work on mobile devices, et…

>HTML is free flowing; if the user resizes the window the layout should adapt, they layout has to work on mobile devices, etc. The HTML way asks for a completely different way of designing layout, and Latex is simply not the right tool for that job.

I agree that HTML should re-flow. Let's try with the OP article.

" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/LWrS6pn>

Re: The LaTeX cargo cult

#43

Post by icefox »

cldellow wrote: post #25
brandonbloom wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The doc (and docx) formats are actually very well documented, thanks to pressure from the EU: [MS-DOC]: Word (.doc) Binary File Format http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/cc313153(v=of... [MS-DOCX]: Word Extensions to the Office Open XML (.docx) File Format http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd773189(v=office.12...

"Very well" is a euphemism here, I assume? I worked in Windows Server when Microsoft was under the US DOJ consent decree and had to document every thing that looked at all like an API--even internal things that were just APIfied for design reasons / ease of testability / to make servicing simpler. I can say with some confidence that no one gave a shit about producing good quality docs. Without exception, people viewe…

That is really a shame that you guys didn't use this new requirement to improve your product and internal process. Your comment comes off as a group that was just obeying the letter of the law, but not the spirit of the law and I could only guess that this would easily spill over into all cases of documentation even the cases where it matters. Having a large group of developers believe that it isn't worth the time to make good API's and produce worse than horrible docs is really sad. Taking the time to create good API, even for internal use can uncover design flaws, reduce errors, make it faster to make changes, easier to test, and faster to bring in new developers. Here with a government mandate you could have used it as an excuse to grow as a group to become better at creating software.

Re: The LaTeX cargo cult

#44

Post by tehabe »

I think LaTeX has one disadvantage and it is not mentioned in the linked article. It has nothing to do with this "Cargo cult" thing, which I'm not sure it used correctly in this text but nevermind that.

The disadvantage is, that while LaTeX has an excellent support for PDF or PS its support for e.g. EPUB is awful.

Otherwise there is nothing better to write longer text than LaTeX.

Re: The LaTeX cargo cult

#46

Post by Derbasti »

UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #12
brodney wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would be more rational to output to HTML5, since there are insane amounts of HTML to X converters around (APIs and tools alike). PDF or Doc from HTML is utterly trivial at this stage.

I am very tempted to try to write my next publication in HTML. However, I seriously worry about things like footnotes, code examples, floating figures and references. CSS3 seems to have support for many of these, but I wonder how well the convert-to-PDF pipeline really works, and how flexible it really is.

It's bad enough if I have to convert my original source to some other format years down the line, but it is absolutely critical that I can at least create the initial PDF correctly.

Re: The LaTeX cargo cult

#47

Post by new299 »

auntienomen wrote: post #40
new299 wrote: post #35

There are a few nice things about Latex for scientific publications: 1. It's style driven. I'm not sure how well you can do this is Word now. But in Latex it's pretty easy to reformat your document to match a journal or thesis style. 2. It's scriptable. I don't mean that it's Turing complete. But you can drive it with a Makefile. This is great for scientific publications I've found. You can script it such that Make w…

A footnote to your 2nd point: LaTeX actually is Turing complete. (You can find a Turing machine implemented in LaTeX at http://en.literateprograms.org/Turing_machine_simulator_%28L... .) As far as I know, this feature is more amusing than useful.

Oh sure. It's programmability gets used quite a lot I think e.g.:

http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/tag/fractals/

There are also some really nice graph drawing libraries etc. which I would guess rely on this.

Re: The LaTeX cargo cult

#48

Post by lelf »

I don't know why many people, including the author skips (or don't even see?) the important point: we are not just miles and miles far away, we are in the entirely different reality from where automatic typography is any good. So the more it's “declarative” (whatever this means) the worse it will look. This is out ugly reality. And the document in LaTeX made by someone without a clue (≈ how we want it, simple and declarative) is f*cking MSWord-level ugly.

Re: The LaTeX cargo cult

#49

Post by avian »

CrLf wrote: post #39

As much as I like LaTeX, I think it has outlived its usefulness. Let me elaborate a bit... LaTeX is pretty good for typesetting lots of text, like novels, if you want to output something that looks professional without much effort. It's also good for typesetting lots of mathematical formulas, as the GUI alternatives are pretty tedious to use and the result doesn't look as good. It's also interesting as a template lan…

> LaTeX becomes downright irritating when trying to make complex documents.

Sorry, but this is simply not true. Maybe I could agree with a general "it is irritating to make complex documents", though.

After many bitter fights with WYSIWYG software and 300+ page technical documents, I firmly believe that LaTeX is by far the least irritating way of making them.

Re: The LaTeX cargo cult

#50

Post by joemi »

mangecoeur wrote: post #26

LaTeX is a good idea with a terrible implementation. The popularity of markdown (+variants) is a testament to the usefulness of plain text writing. However, LaTeX syntax is a clunky and the ecosystem is a scrapheap-challenge amalgamation of packages with assorted cross-incompatibilities. Latex to PDF converters are also shockingly slow for this day and age, a simple document can take several seconds to compile compar…

To be fair, LaTeX has a more complicated method of processing text since it considers a lot of typographic issues that browsers do not, so it has to be slower than a browser when rendering text. That said, I don't know enough to say whether the amount it's slower is proportional or not.
Post reply on HN