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RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

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Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#31

Post by forlorn_mammoth »

ngriffiths wrote: post #27
Hendrikto wrote: post #10

I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor’s and master’s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \makeatletter \makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all…

It's kinda fascinating how dominant LaTeX is, how nice its output is, how respected Knuth is as a computer scientist, and at the same time how totally awful it feels to use it. Hard to figure out how it can be so good and so bad at once. Posts/discussion I found interesting: - http://www.goodmath.org/blog/2008/01/10/the-genius-of-donald... - https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/24671 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

part of the challenge is the inherent irreducible complexity of the domain. "Make text look good on page" leaves lots of details unspecified.

another part is many people built their own solution to their own corner of this domain, and not all of them had the deep appreciation for how the rest of the TeX system works.

I hear similar complaints about "Make web page look good", which is popular but also a huge mess of a system.

Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#33

Post by wmkn »

Hendrikto wrote: post #10

I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor’s and master’s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \makeatletter \makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all…

Yups, I love the idea of LaTeX, LaTeX itself not so much.

Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#34

Post by xienze »

Hendrikto wrote: post #10

I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor’s and master’s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \makeatletter \makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all…

> The only drawback I can see is the ecosystem being smaller and less mature.

This seems like the _perfect_ use for an LLM: systematically porting over as much of the "ecosystem" to Typst as possible. Is anyone doing that?

Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#35

Post by abdullahkhalids »

Hendrikto wrote: post #10

I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor’s and master’s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \makeatletter \makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all…

Latex is used because writing math in latex is very good, and despite how everything else (like tables and figures) is so bad.

That's why people take the math subset of latex and use it in other contexts - exactly like this product.

Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#36

Post by rafram »

DominikPeters wrote: post #3

The landing page (clearly to a large part written by LLM) does not mention that both KaTeX and mathjax can render to SVG in node. This wasm approach might still be lighter, but the advantage is not as clear as the page makes it seem. (It also contains LLM dishonesties like that the bundle size is 0 KB.)

If RaTeX gets to brag about having a 0 KB JS bundle, the other libraries should be able to say they have 0 KB WASM bundles!

Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#37

Post by luz666 »

xienze wrote: post #34
Hendrikto wrote: post #10

I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor’s and master’s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \makeatletter \makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all…

> The only drawback I can see is the ecosystem being smaller and less mature. This seems like the _perfect_ use for an LLM: systematically porting over as much of the "ecosystem" to Typst as possible. Is anyone doing that?

Two hours ago a coworker told me that he let an llm port his latex template to typst. According to him, it was perfect.

Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#39

Post by tialaramex »

groos wrote: post #28
noelwelsh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This mirrors my experience. It's worth noting that TeX was developed in the same time period that the details of lexical scope were being nailed down by Guy Steele in the Rabbit compiler for Scheme. It's not that TeX is an ad hoc system; it's more the case that people didn't actually know how to implement a better system at the time.

'People' in this case were Don Knuth (TeX) and Leslie Lamport (LaTeX). Both are Turing Award winners.

That's true. Do you know who else won a Turing Award? Tony Hoare.

What is Tony famous for? Well, lots of things, including his very important comparison sort algorithm Quicksort, but, in this context how about the Billion Dollar Mistake ? That's a pretty nasty booboo in many programming languages for which Tony blames himself because it was his idea.

Like your parent said, TeX shipped a long time ago and we learned a lot since then, it is not a surprise that we know how to do better today, in fact it would be a serious black mark for Computer Science if we couldn't.

Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust

#40

Post by auggierose »

huijzer wrote: post #26
Hendrikto wrote: post #10

I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor’s and master’s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \makeatletter \makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all…

I’ve been using Typst for years now. Wrote my PhD thesis in it [1] as well as a book. Works great; can’t recommend it enough. I usually barely use plugins because it’s either already included or pretty easy to write a bit of code yourself [1]: https://github.com/rikhuijzer/phd-thesis

How about adding a PDF release ;-)
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