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

Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 204 posts

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#111

Post by abdullahkhalids »

derefr wrote: post #97
j-pb wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bUt MuH TypESeTtInG! I think you're absolutely right. But people seem to value a specific flavour of aesthetics over easy to understand and reproducible research. I guess that's maybe partly caused by the publication pressure, once you start to pump out papers for pumping out papers sake, there is little incentive to go beyond the superficial.

I have a dream that one day we'll get a language for typesetting that isn't a markup language. Rather, this language would be designed to come after writing, in the same way that flagship Desktop Publishing software (InDesign, Publisher) make the assumption that layout happens after writing. (Sure, you can write inside the layout software, but you're not supposed to. They're assuming e.g. a journalist–editor–layout–t…

Its not as straightforward. Converting a document from one column to two, often means that some equations have to be intelligently broken up across lines. There have been times when I have defined new variables, so I would not constantly have to break the two column layout for long equations.

Figure sizes are also a function of document fonts and size.

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#112

Post by leephillips »

I really enjoyed looking at the examples of old books and manuscripts. But Matplotlib is only the go-to tool for graphs if you are using Python (and some Python users prefer something else). It’s not a universal tool like [La]TeX. The closest thing to that in this sphere would be gnuplot.

TeX appeared when I was in graduate school. Before it did, we were using troff, or whatever it was called, which produced hideous output. TeX was a revelation. That’s why everyone switched to it, despite the hardships endured when trying to get it to do what you wanted. The output looked like a beautiful, hand-set book. There was nothing else that came anywhere close. I wrote my thesis in plain TeX, using a Mac Plus ($1400 with a deep student discount). When LaTeX appeared, the selling point was not formatting, but automatic handling of labels and references. You could add a numbered equation in the middle of your document, without having to re-number, and track down references to, the hundred equations that came after it. Glorious.

Before LaTeX? The previous generation, my professors, wrote things out in hand and gave the result to a secretary. Those with terrible handwriting might type the text, leaving spaces for the math, which they added with a pen. They didn’t waste time time formatting the paper; that was someone else’s job. TeX created a generation of typographical obsessives, including me. Whatever the secretary did wasn’t good enough.

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#113

Post by utopcell »

OT.

I am surprised that the LaTeX name didn't end up in a heated argument between Don Knuth and Leslie Lamport, like the infamous GNU/Linux vs Linux dispute between Stallman and Torvalds.

Maybe scientists are more civilized, maybe it helped that LaTeX already has TeX embedded in its name.

In retrospect, Lignux might not have been a bad name. The 'g' would be silent of course.

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#114

Post by im3w1l »

xamuel wrote: post #62
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #44

What I don’t understand is why Latex so cumbersome, complicated, unintuitive, ugly and slow. Is it simply a technical debt of choices made in time when computers were different and when there were different constraints? Is it just a nature of the problem and every tool will feel the same? Is it a result of evolution with a lack of direction? Was literate programming a bad design decision?

If you're an actual mathematician writing pages and pages of equations, LaTeX is not complicated, unintuitive, ugly, or slow. It's actually extremely well designed for addressing what is a very difficult problem, the problem of translating mathematics into ASCII. For how difficult that problem is, LaTeX is quite genius. I think a lot of the would-be LaTeX-disruptors lack enough experience actually writing mathematics…

For mathematics it is the best tool hands down. For papers without a single equation, I'm not as sure.

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#115

Post by abdullahkhalids »

narrationbox wrote: post #103
jessriedel wrote: post #14

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…

I have an alternative view: The fastest way to speed up research would be to fund an open source Wolfram software suite with feature parity. For a lot of hard tech you need good multiphysics and CFD simulations, both of which suffer from a severe lack of open source tooling. Most of the proprietary engineering software can be cloned rapidly once a solid foundation is built. Even though Julia and Python are making pro…

Python ecosystem is not even close. I recently switched from Mathematica to Python, and I am going mad from juggling half a dozen packages with overlapping features.

Really wish somebody would make a meta package consisting of numpy, scipy, sympy, sage that removes conflicts and overlaps, and renames all functions with the same naming scheme.

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#116

Post by zitterbewegung »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #75
zitterbewegung wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is going to be really unpopular but you could allow people to write their papers in Microsoft word . Either that or the other answer would be to say that’s why you have grad students .

Proprietary payware that doesn't support Linux and doesn't work with Git? For current users of LaTeX, it's dead in the water. > other answer would be to say that’s why you have grad students . Of which discipline?

Any of them. Professors generally chase grants to fund grad students who need tasks to get a PhD.

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#117

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #110

LaTeX is great, but it's obsolete (bad Unicode support), and is output to a problematic format (pdf).

Unicode support in LaTeX has not been an issue since XeTeX became mature technology, so over a decade already.

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#118

Post by abdullahkhalids »

truckerbill wrote: post #90
jessriedel wrote: post #14

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…

Using a scripting language to format text always seemed insane to me. People love LaTeX but it's nowhere near as intuitive as writing formulas down on a piece of paper. Having two panes, one for the output seems also very hacky and unintuitive. Instant feedback in one view, typing at the speed of thought should be the goal, and if it means a new paradigm I'm all for it. Imagine it was something you could actually pro…

Remember that scene in the matrix when he says "I don't even see the code anymore". After a short while (about a couple of hundred pages of typing latex math for me), the code is mostly as intuitive as the visual formulas. At least for not too long equations.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvEXkd3O2ow

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#119

Post by magicalhippo »

ketzu wrote: post #88
xamuel wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're an actual mathematician writing pages and pages of equations, LaTeX is not complicated, unintuitive, ugly, or slow. It's actually extremely well designed for addressing what is a very difficult problem, the problem of translating mathematics into ASCII. For how difficult that problem is, LaTeX is quite genius. I think a lot of the would-be LaTeX-disruptors lack enough experience actually writing mathematics…

Are you specifically talking about the math syntax within latex, or actual latex commands in general? Because I would disagree on the latter one. (But I'm a computer scientist not a mathematician.) uglyness is porbably hard to discuss as it's just a matter of taste. I personally consider compile times that are measured in seconds for "simple" tasks slow (here's the question of it being an inherent problem of the spac…

As someone who did both math courses and programming courses, I found LaTeX to be awesome for writing equations. It felt so natural I would more often then not solve equations in LaTeX directly.

However when writing stuff for my comp-sci courses, man what a chore. Pseudo-code was a PITA, as was getting decent tables of results where I wanted. So for a lot of those I threw my hands in the air and finished the paper using Word.

It might have been me, I try to learn as I went along, but it certainly was not as easy as math.

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#120

Post by ploxiln »

rimunroe wrote: post #26
AlexandrB wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering what "modernizing" other parts of the tech stack has meant, I would expect a 21st century LaTeX to be hundreds of megabytes, require running a buggy, slow electron app, and phone home to a variety of SaaS providers when you use it. Edit: Someone beat me to it by suggesting VSCode as an IDE.

Hundreds of megabytes would be a considerable improvement for me. I think my last installation of LaTeX and the few packages I depended on was around two gigabytes.

I've enjoyed using TinyTex, which is sort of the Arch Linux of TeX distributions: https://yihui.org/tinytex/
Post reply on HN