Something I've wondered, and the Tex users here can probably answer - why not just use Acrobat or Word for math? Does it not support something?
Word doesn't support many things in math mode, and entering it is overall slower and more fragile.
Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
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Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#12Something I've wondered, and the Tex users here can probably answer - why not just use Acrobat or Word for math? Does it not support something?
Some more points, collaboration using e.g. git and its ecosystem, a representation that does not force you to use proprietary software (not sure about libre office for formulae), the ability to easily produce tex files by other scripts, e.g. to compile maths exercises from a set of templates.
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#13The scripting parts look promising.
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#14TeX is one of those bits of software that's so complex to replace, it'll take another few decades (and likely a few false starts) before we can get there. The fundamentals of TeX's typesetting are amazing, but everything else is just bolted on. You'd probably want to rebuild it with its own, custom language, perhaps inspired more by modern XML/markdown rather than the old TeX language. The biggest problem that we're…
TeX itself is not really complex. The implementation is fine. The hard part is the ecosystem.
Any contender is going to face a daunting task of explaining why adopters should throw away 50 years of collective work of thousands of people that went into TeX packages in CTAN. Math notation is at best 1% of the reasons why people use TeX. Packages are.
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#15Something I've wondered, and the Tex users here can probably answer - why not just use Acrobat or Word for math? Does it not support something?
> why not just use Acrobat
Does Acrobat have any typesetting capabilities? I thought another app did that and just finalised through Acrobat.
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#16Something I've wondered, and the Tex users here can probably answer - why not just use Acrobat or Word for math? Does it not support something?
Not even close, these are not plaintext based so you can't track changes with git, let alone automatic generation of formulas.
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#17Am I having a stroke or are the examples not looking good? Subtle kerning issues and the page layout reminds me of a Word letter page. Maybe I'm not understanding its potential.
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#18Does it come with a context-free syntax? If not, that would be a grave mistake. Being unparseable is one of the biggest problems of TeX, IMO. Not the least because you cannot automatically work with TeX "documents".
I work with TeX quite a lot and I can't even really understand intuitively the principles of the language design let alone the grammar. Like 15 years later and I'm still copy and pasting spells. I'd love to see an CST of my document and figure out why I'm writing the characters I'm writing!
TikZ is the worst for this. I don't usually have any problem picking up esoteric programming languages, but whatever the hell is going in with TikZ/TeX will be forever beyond my comprehension.
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#19Reminds me of reportlab, which I loathe only because of their lack of documentation. Typesetting is hard. But at this point why not use semantic html and a specially crafted css?
MathML is not even supported in browsers these days
Re: Sile: A Modern Rewrite of TeX
#20TeX is one of those bits of software that's so complex to replace, it'll take another few decades (and likely a few false starts) before we can get there. The fundamentals of TeX's typesetting are amazing, but everything else is just bolted on. You'd probably want to rebuild it with its own, custom language, perhaps inspired more by modern XML/markdown rather than the old TeX language. The biggest problem that we're…
TeX itself is not really complex. The implementation is fine. The hard part is the ecosystem. Any contender is going to face a daunting task of explaining why adopters should throw away 50 years of collective work of thousands of people that went into TeX packages in CTAN. Math notation is at best 1% of the reasons why people use TeX. Packages are.
> TeX itself is not really complex
I'm not sure if we're getting hung up on the word "complex", but here's 60+ pages on paragraph line breaking alone:
http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf
Digital Typography is 700 pages long (not everything is going to be TeX fundamentals, but...):
https://archive.org/details/digitaltypograph0000knut/page/n7...