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LaTeX3 Automatic Labels for Fun and No Profit

commutative.xyz

11–20 of 90 posts

Re: LaTeX3 Automatic Labels for Fun and No Profit

#11
post #2

> It’s weird I even have to say this, but don’t stalk me and email me at my personal address. I am not sure of what happened, and it must have been unpleasant, but someone going up on your website hierarchy, they reach https://commutative.xyz/~miguelmurca/ , they click the only link, and you personally list your profiles there, including email, github and insta. It is OK if someone contacts you for whatever reason on…

Hey, hope you enjoyed the article itself. I'm sorry if you felt that addendum was aggressive. However, I still feel like I'm justified in making it absolutely clear how (and if) I want to be contacted. I am in a complicated position where I'm speaking to a niche -- not an imaginary niche, by any means -- but actually addressing every reader. In the face of this, my option was to clearly state my boundaries, regardles…

The article itself is great.

> I will remove the second sentence towards this goal

Your critic decided their negative emotions about a miniscule matter are more important than the actual contents of your post and worthy of derailing the conversation. And then they called you rude.

There is really no need to cater to such people. It obviously has zilch to do with you in actuality.

Re: LaTeX3 Automatic Labels for Fun and No Profit

#12
post #6

> Yes, we are aware of typst. I think it’s cool, but C++ hasn’t replaced C, Rust hasn’t replaced C++, Typst is unlikely to replace LaTeX. Likewise, many are aware of LuaTeX, but, again, the entrenching of a 40-odd year system is not to be underestimated. I am rooting for typst, anyway, and hope it finds its place. Well here's the process I went through in the last few years: I found out about LuaTeX, saw it was suppo…

> The author is a PhD student that has been using LaTeX heavily for 10 years. But what should a new student use, and why? When the only reason to choose LaTeX is old colleagues and gatekeeping publishers, I know it's a matter of time.

Sadly its more than that. Will we be able to compile a typst file made today in 10 years? I have to do that regularly with latex. Will everybody one collaborates with also use typst? Very unlikely. A new PhD student may find it beneficial to write papers with someone who only uses latex. then why bother with typst? (and I really want typst to win)

Re: LaTeX3 Automatic Labels for Fun and No Profit

#13
post #12
post #6

> Yes, we are aware of typst. I think it’s cool, but C++ hasn’t replaced C, Rust hasn’t replaced C++, Typst is unlikely to replace LaTeX. Likewise, many are aware of LuaTeX, but, again, the entrenching of a 40-odd year system is not to be underestimated. I am rooting for typst, anyway, and hope it finds its place. Well here's the process I went through in the last few years: I found out about LuaTeX, saw it was suppo…

> The author is a PhD student that has been using LaTeX heavily for 10 years. But what should a new student use, and why? When the only reason to choose LaTeX is old colleagues and gatekeeping publishers, I know it's a matter of time. Sadly its more than that. Will we be able to compile a typst file made today in 10 years? I have to do that regularly with latex. Will everybody one collaborates with also use typst? Ve…

Typst is a single file binary. The preview packages are versioned too. If typst breaks the API in ten years, I'd still be able to download the old binary and make a PDF from scratch. I can't begin to imagine the complexity in installing multiple texlive distributions side by side.

Re: LaTeX3 Automatic Labels for Fun and No Profit

#14
post #6

> Yes, we are aware of typst. I think it’s cool, but C++ hasn’t replaced C, Rust hasn’t replaced C++, Typst is unlikely to replace LaTeX. Likewise, many are aware of LuaTeX, but, again, the entrenching of a 40-odd year system is not to be underestimated. I am rooting for typst, anyway, and hope it finds its place. Well here's the process I went through in the last few years: I found out about LuaTeX, saw it was suppo…

Typst is exciting, but I wish their roadmap would prioritize features in common use in LaTeX like microtype rather than niche new features like style revocation.

Re: LaTeX3 Automatic Labels for Fun and No Profit

#15
post #7

> Yes, we are aware of typst. I think it’s cool, but C++ hasn’t replaced C, Rust hasn’t replaced C++, Typst is unlikely to replace LaTeX. Likewise, many are aware of LuaTeX, but, again, the entrenching of a 40-odd year system is not to be underestimated. I am rooting for typst, anyway, and hope it finds its place. A good place to start would be to provide a compilation toolchain from typst to TeX, if they really want…

Come on, be serious.

Pandoc can "convert" html to things too, but you wouldn't use it as a web browser.

Re: LaTeX3 Automatic Labels for Fun and No Profit

#16
post #12
post #6

> Yes, we are aware of typst. I think it’s cool, but C++ hasn’t replaced C, Rust hasn’t replaced C++, Typst is unlikely to replace LaTeX. Likewise, many are aware of LuaTeX, but, again, the entrenching of a 40-odd year system is not to be underestimated. I am rooting for typst, anyway, and hope it finds its place. Well here's the process I went through in the last few years: I found out about LuaTeX, saw it was suppo…

> The author is a PhD student that has been using LaTeX heavily for 10 years. But what should a new student use, and why? When the only reason to choose LaTeX is old colleagues and gatekeeping publishers, I know it's a matter of time. Sadly its more than that. Will we be able to compile a typst file made today in 10 years? I have to do that regularly with latex. Will everybody one collaborates with also use typst? Ve…

> Will we be able to compile a typst file made today in 10 years?

Yes! typst is actually better than LaTeX in this regard:

LaTeX: contrary to how it sells itself, it's not good at compiling old files. The TeX core is fine but the packaging story is awful. Once I found a beamer presentation about LaTeX itself, including of course some slides about the amazing backward compatibility. Well, the slides failed to compile in multiple places due to the fancy packages used by the author, which had made breaking changes between whatever they were using and my own TeX Live installation. And using an older version of TeX Live is not trivial. Another example: a few weeks ago a colleague found himself unable to compile a document that worked before the system (Linux distribution) update. It took us two hours to figure out that one of the LaTeX packages had made a change which made it incompatible with another package unless you switch the order of \usepackage. Fun!

typst: it's a single binary, statically linked. That's it! If you care about this, you can literally commit this one file (30MB or so) in your repository and it will run flawlessly in 10 years. The packaging system is very recent and still a preview, but it's already better than LaTeX since packages are imported by specific versions. And if you're worried that the typst package server will go down it's easy to mirror it locally.

> Will everybody one collaborates with also use typst? Very unlikely. A new PhD student may find it beneficial to write papers with someone who only uses latex.

That's the reason I mention. If it's the only reason left for learning LaTeX, good luck LaTeX. Very soon it will be "Will everybody one collaborates with also use LaTeX? Very unlikely".

Re: LaTeX3 Automatic Labels for Fun and No Profit

#17
post #13
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author is a PhD student that has been using LaTeX heavily for 10 years. But what should a new student use, and why? When the only reason to choose LaTeX is old colleagues and gatekeeping publishers, I know it's a matter of time. Sadly its more than that. Will we be able to compile a typst file made today in 10 years? I have to do that regularly with latex. Will everybody one collaborates with also use typst? Ve…

Typst is a single file binary. The preview packages are versioned too. If typst breaks the API in ten years, I'd still be able to download the old binary and make a PDF from scratch. I can't begin to imagine the complexity in installing multiple texlive distributions side by side.

That old binary won't link with the shared libraries on your machine 10 years from now. Depends on 280 other crates. Ye gads.

"Yeah just use ancient binaries" is not a viable strategy for future-proofing.

It's a lot easier to move fast and break things when you don't care about stability.

Re: LaTeX3 Automatic Labels for Fun and No Profit

#18
post #7

> Yes, we are aware of typst. I think it’s cool, but C++ hasn’t replaced C, Rust hasn’t replaced C++, Typst is unlikely to replace LaTeX. Likewise, many are aware of LuaTeX, but, again, the entrenching of a 40-odd year system is not to be underestimated. I am rooting for typst, anyway, and hope it finds its place. A good place to start would be to provide a compilation toolchain from typst to TeX, if they really want…

pandoc is seriously under-powered for the kinds of things that LaTeX and Typst can do. Much of the information in Typst/LaTeX source code would simply be ignored during the conversion. It is fine for simple documents, but cannot handle a lot of stuff.

Re: LaTeX3 Automatic Labels for Fun and No Profit

#19
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typst is a single file binary. The preview packages are versioned too. If typst breaks the API in ten years, I'd still be able to download the old binary and make a PDF from scratch. I can't begin to imagine the complexity in installing multiple texlive distributions side by side.

That old binary won't link with the shared libraries on your machine 10 years from now. Depends on 280 other crates. Ye gads. "Yeah just use ancient binaries" is not a viable strategy for future-proofing. It's a lot easier to move fast and break things when you don't care about stability.

  $ ldd bin/typst
   statically linked

Re: LaTeX3 Automatic Labels for Fun and No Profit

#20
post #12
post #6

> Yes, we are aware of typst. I think it’s cool, but C++ hasn’t replaced C, Rust hasn’t replaced C++, Typst is unlikely to replace LaTeX. Likewise, many are aware of LuaTeX, but, again, the entrenching of a 40-odd year system is not to be underestimated. I am rooting for typst, anyway, and hope it finds its place. Well here's the process I went through in the last few years: I found out about LuaTeX, saw it was suppo…

> The author is a PhD student that has been using LaTeX heavily for 10 years. But what should a new student use, and why? When the only reason to choose LaTeX is old colleagues and gatekeeping publishers, I know it's a matter of time. Sadly its more than that. Will we be able to compile a typst file made today in 10 years? I have to do that regularly with latex. Will everybody one collaborates with also use typst? Ve…

I regularly can't do that in LaTeX due to changes in packages. Yeah, the core is stable, but dependencies are still an issue in TeX land.
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