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Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine

tectonic-typesetting.github.io

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Re: Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine

#41

Post by GiovanniP »

DarkUranium wrote: post #39
IshKebab wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't tried TeXmacs (thanks to the truly abysmal name I assumed it was something to do with Emacs), but I have used LyX and it changed my opinion on WYSIWYG. It isn't a fundamentally flawed idea, it's just that most implementations of it are.

LyX is specifically advertised not as WYSIWYG, but WYSIWYM ('M' = "Mean"). Note how the exported/final document looks very little like the in-UI one. Typora & Obsidian apply the same ideas to Markdown. I do think WYSIWYG is an absolutely broken paradigm for anything outside of literally just desktop publishing --- but WYSIWYM has a lot of merit. Enough that I've been working on a stand-alone Markdown editor component…

I think it is fair to point at a paper where Van der Hoeven argues in detail in favor of the WYSIWYG paradigm:

J. van der Hoeven. GNU TeXmacs: a free, structured, wysiwyg and technical text editor. In Daniel Filipo, editor, Le document au XXI-ième siècle, volume 39–40, pages 39–50. Metz, 14–17 mai 2001. Actes du congrès GUTenberg.

Reproduced at https://www.texmacs.org/Data/TeXmacs.pdf

For why so few people use TeXmacs, it may be that it is because few people believe that it is worth trying, as one would not expect that it works so well :-)

Re: Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine

#42

Post by IshKebab »

GiovanniP wrote: post #41
DarkUranium wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LyX is specifically advertised not as WYSIWYG, but WYSIWYM ('M' = "Mean"). Note how the exported/final document looks very little like the in-UI one. Typora & Obsidian apply the same ideas to Markdown. I do think WYSIWYG is an absolutely broken paradigm for anything outside of literally just desktop publishing --- but WYSIWYM has a lot of merit. Enough that I've been working on a stand-alone Markdown editor component…

I think it is fair to point at a paper where Van der Hoeven argues in detail in favor of the WYSIWYG paradigm: J. van der Hoeven. GNU TeXmacs: a free, structured, wysiwyg and technical text editor. In Daniel Filipo, editor, Le document au XXI-ième siècle, volume 39–40, pages 39–50. Metz, 14–17 mai 2001. Actes du congrès GUTenberg. Reproduced at https://www.texmacs.org/Data/TeXmacs.pdf For why so few people use TeXmac…

> For why so few people use TeXmacs

It's because they gave it a terrible name that strongly implies it's some kind of Emacs TeX editor.

Re: Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine

#44

Post by eigenblake »

Other solutions get a lot right, but I don't know if I will ever use something other than LaTeX. Nothing gets math typesetting feeling so right. The justification and bin packing feels right. I might be esoteric for it. Maybe I care too much about things looking excellent. Maybe Claude is just good enough at debugging anything I'm facing. But I'm not interested in anything realtime/live if it means giving up on output quality. Overleaf has a live preview mode right there. I think a lot of the "problems with latex" are actually just problems with people developing packages in isolation in a decentralized manner. I don't care for LaTeX the language, or its implementation, but I do care for the output a whole lot, in a way that not the font alone or any approximation can reach. Maybe it's just inside baseball and people don't care about advanced typography. If I'm working on a piece of research that will carry my name on it, waiting for that compile is worth it. I still remember Scholarly Markdown. I might genuinely one day implement some other transpiler so I can always do my last pass in LaTeX. As long as your thing emits some decent IR, I'm happy.

Re: Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine

#45

Post by leephillips »

eigenblake wrote: post #44

Other solutions get a lot right, but I don't know if I will ever use something other than LaTeX. Nothing gets math typesetting feeling so right. The justification and bin packing feels right. I might be esoteric for it. Maybe I care too much about things looking excellent. Maybe Claude is just good enough at debugging anything I'm facing. But I'm not interested in anything realtime/live if it means giving up on outpu…

Typst math output looks nearly identical to TeX math output. I have a simple comparison at https://lwn.net/Articles/1037577/. This is to be expected, as they began with the same algorithm.
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