The biggest advantage of latex is that by (mostly) separating content from presentation, you can use revision control systems like git or svn to collaborate on papers. You can be in that final hour before the paper submission deadline, on a skype call with four authors scattered around the world, all simultaneously editing the paper (each using whatever tools they prefer), and be reasonably confident it won't all end in tears. That's when you really understand the advantage of this latex-style markup. Don't get me wrong - there are lots of things I hate about latex, but I'll almost certainly keep using it because of the workflow it enables.
The LaTeX cargo cult
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Re: The LaTeX cargo cult
#22> LaTeX input files are proprietary to LaTeX, just as .doc is Word. The only definition of LaTeX as a language is “whatever LaTeX does”. I am sorry but I don't see this point... Everybody is free to write a parser for .tex files and use it for whatever reason they want... You are not free to do so with .doc or other proprietary format...
His trouble seems to be not with LaTeX, but with materialism.
No matter what medium he put his texts down in, will he find that the text is somewhat bound to that medium now and it'll take work to modify and/or transfer it.
Pen and paper is "proprietary" in this line of thinking.
Re: The LaTeX cargo cult
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
I too agree with all of his points... but what's a realistic alternative stack that satisfies those points without drastically cutting down on the available rendering tools and packages for specialized tasks?
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.
Yes, it's what I do when I submit to a journal that accepts submissions as RTF/DOC. It even has acceptable recoding for the maths.
Re: The LaTeX cargo cult
#24> LaTeX input files are proprietary to LaTeX, just as .doc is Word. The only definition of LaTeX as a language is “whatever LaTeX does”. I am sorry but I don't see this point... Everybody is free to write a parser for .tex files and use it for whatever reason they want... You are not free to do so with .doc or other proprietary format...
The multitude of third-party .doc readers would seem to disprove that assertion.
In any case, it's clear from the text that he uses "proprietary" to mean "specified only by the canonical implementation". In this respect, .tex qualifies but .doc no longer does, although .doc is so bizarre and complex that writing another parser from the spec is... challenging.
Re: The LaTeX cargo cult
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
doc format is not documented, obviously.
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 viewed the government requirement as onerous and excessive and we produced docs that were perhaps technically correct, but did not provide insight into why things were the way they were. No effort at ease of readability was made, either.
Re: The LaTeX cargo cult
#26LaTeX 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 compared to browsers which can re-flow complex HTML documents in milliseconds.
IMHO this is because of the ad-hoc nature of people using Latex, its been cobbled together by researchers based on their needs at the time while HTML+browsers have been carefully designed and optimized by people who know the intricacies of document rendering. Researchers just aren't very good software engineers as a rule so perhaps its not surprising that they produce something that more or less works but is not very well designed
Re: The LaTeX cargo cult
#27I 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…
Sphinx has most of these, though not all (it doesn't have the literate programming part, it could probably be done though; and the standard builders are html4). And I'll acknowledge that ReST is hard to love.
Re: The LaTeX cargo cult
#28> a. It’s an operational rather than a declarative language.
If TeX was declarative you should wait for somebody to implement in the engine any features...
Re: The LaTeX cargo cult
#29latex2e is 20 years old. I appreciate that's not the same as permanence, but in terms of stability in computer science, it's far from shoddy.
Re: The LaTeX cargo cult
#30I wish the meme about the supposed superiority of "declarative" languages would go away. They have tradeoffs, like everything else. "Make" is also declarative — and horrific.
TeX has plenty of warts by modern standards (and the LaTeX macro package even more so), but the suggestion that HTML+CSS work better for general layout use is ridiculous (the standards committee only heard that multi-column layouts are impossible without major hackery what, last year?). I tried docbook for a document a while ago, and it was horrible. SGML might be acceptable for machine generation, but not for human writing. The toolchain is even worse than TeX's, hard as that may be to believe.
A replacement for TeX would be fantastic, but its absence over the last 30 years suggests that it's difficult to get right and achieve critical mass.