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Modern LaTeX

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Re: Modern LaTeX

#191

Post by setopt »

MortyWaves wrote: post #147
tcfhgj wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't feel like the template itself is the issue. In typst it's quite easy to recreate the templates without being years into typst (according to my experience). The real problem is acceptance of non-word/latex papers

But I thought one of the points of latex was to emit pdf files? Are you saying these places are so backwards they only accept latex and word files? What stops them being edited by someone?

Scientific journals do edit the TeX file. Both to update the visual style (e.g. enabling commercial fonts that they use for print but are not allowed to distribute with the template), and to update the content itself (to revise the grammatical style to fit the style guide followed by that journal, to update scientific references to have clickable links, etc.). Usually, at the end of all these edits, the journal sends a PDF “proof” back to the authors to verify that the final version is OK, or ask for corrections if they broke something (which they often do).

Re: Modern LaTeX

#192

Post by mariusor »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #171
mariusor wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did call it Latek, the X in the name is the Greek letter χ (Chi) and in my opinion, it's not an elitist shibboleth but a way to showcase the advantages of their typesetting system over existing, at the time, methods that didn't invest a lot in rendering non ASCII character sets.

So it's not actually LaTaX, it's LaTeχ. Make sure you type it properly i guess.

I'm not sure why you're telling me that. I didn't spell it either way.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#193

Post by dgfl »

SebastianKra wrote: post #161
JackeJR wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many reasons this comparison is not made. I will just touch on one. The target medium is different. For html, you have monitors of different sizes as well as windows that can be resized. For latex, you choose your target at the start: A4 paper? Screen presentation? A0 poster? With a fixed medium in mind, you can be extremely particular on where on this canvas you want a piece of text/graphic or whatever. Wi…

That seems contradictory, when Latex is rather famously imprecise at placing figures and such. Weren't both languages (at least at some point) intended to take layouting control away from the writer? But regardless, I think that, in addition to moving away from Latex we should also reconsider the primary output format. Documents are rarely printed anymore, and inaccessible, fixed-size A4 pdfs are annoying to read on…

Well, maybe they’re not printed by yourself. But many academics, often young people included, still print papers.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#194

Post by chabska »

SkiFire13 wrote: post #138
chabska wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML+CSS has facilities to target a page format (CSS @page rule, cm and in dimension units). Not to say that it's on the same level as LaTeX, but it's pretty impressive by its own right.

Note that this won't prevent the page from being displayed in other sizes, where it will most likely have a broken layout instead.

True, but with CSS you define one layout for the web format alongside a different layout for the print format, using the @page rule.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#195

Post by jltsiren »

tcfhgj wrote: post #129
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big con is that there are no typst templates for journals and conferences that academics submit papers to. For me, this is a show-stopper. I would love to be able to ditch latex because honestly it's old and it shows a lot , in spite of apologists saying that it's perfect. But 90+% of my usage starts from a conference or journal template, so at the moment it's not gonna happen.

I don't feel like the template itself is the issue. In typst it's quite easy to recreate the templates without being years into typst (according to my experience). The real problem is acceptance of non-word/latex papers

The real problem is that LaTeX is often an interchange format. Whatever tools you use to write the paper, they must ultimately output LaTeX. In the publisher's template, using only the features and packages approved by the publisher, and consistent with any other requirements the publisher may have. The publisher then takes the LaTeX output and processes it further to generate the actual document in whatever format they prefer.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#196

Post by dev_l1x_be »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #124
dev_l1x_be wrote: post #115

For me Typst replaced Latex years ago. pros: - one small compiler that can output: pdf, png, svg, html - compilation is fast (see below) - syntax is much cleaner than Latex - few ways of to a thing - already has all the templates most people need - tooling is good enough with VS Code - supports SVG images cons: - less users? time typst compile cv.typ ________________________________________________________ Executed i…

A big con is that there are no typst templates for journals and conferences that academics submit papers to. For me, this is a show-stopper. I would love to be able to ditch latex because honestly it's old and it shows a lot , in spite of apologists saying that it's perfect. But 90+% of my usage starts from a conference or journal template, so at the moment it's not gonna happen.

These journals have no incentive to include it. This is a classical chicken and egg problem.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#197

Post by dev_l1x_be »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #145
tcfhgj wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't feel like the template itself is the issue. In typst it's quite easy to recreate the templates without being years into typst (according to my experience). The real problem is acceptance of non-word/latex papers

The problem is the user-base and acceptance of latex vs Typst. I use latex and as aware as I am about its deficiencies, I can create a doc faster in it than any other tool that I have not ever used before. I also have a bunch of utilities I created for my specific use-cases automating data into tables, figures, etc, ready for latex import. So its a mass and momentum problem. Typst not only has to be better/easier/fas…

Until Typst showed up I was a heavy Latex user. My co-workers did not buy into it (Latex) because their claimed that using Google Docs / Docs is faster.

My experience with word processing is that spending a lot more time on UI bugs and incosistencies using any wysiwyg editors, compare to those any markup based system (md, latex, typst) is significant improvement. Typst is just simply faster, cleaner alternative to LaTex. I hope it gets much more popular.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#198

Post by mgaunard »

fsh wrote: post #82
mgaunard wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good slides is about good diagrams. LaTeX has all the tooling to write high-quality ones.

I disagree. LaTeX is very good at layouting test, and can also (reluctantly) put figures into the text. Anything else is a huge hack (like TikZ), and one constantly runs into crazy limitations such as the fixed-point math and the lack of a decent visual editor. Slides should never have paragraphs of text on them, so the layouting is not very useful, but the other limitations are very annoying.

The whole point is to focus on the data and how it is connected, not on the rendering. You want the ability to model your figures as a program which can be tweaked and extended as needed, used as a framework throughout the deck.

Drawing every single figure by hand with a graphical tool is not at all something I'd even consider.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#200

Post by maxnoe »

BlackFly wrote: post #19

I always wonder why people compare Latex with word and not with the single most popular document markup (especially here): HTML + css + javascript. The problems are quite similar, "How do I center a div?" vs "How do I keep this float on this page?" Has latex really modernized? I don't hear a lot about new layouts or style mechanisms. Most people are probably reading articles online these days, although there is a lot…

HTML + CSS is only half of the equation. The renderer is also important. So you need a layout engine that turns the HTML+CSS into something you can view.

Most of the time, this is one of the browser engines, but there are many more things.

There is e.g. weasyprint to produce PDFs from HTML and CSS, which would be the closest alternative to LaTeX taking HTML+CSS as input.

For simple documents, it's a much cleaner alternative, I used it to autogenerate documents in a python backend.

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