51–60 of 73 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Typst is a replacement for TeX. Not LaTeX. You'd of course need to read the documentation on what TeX and LaTeX are to understand this. Most people would rather write a new system.
I don't know why you think the condescending tone is appropriate. I've been using LaTeX for twenty years and I believe I understand the difference. I also respectfully disagree on your assessment of Typst.
https://www.tug.org/levels.html seems like a good start
I wonder what's the status of LaTeX 3[1][2]. Also, it would be nice to have an automation in the style of Tectonic[3][4] (which looks like a dead project itself) out of the box. [1] https://www.latex-project.org/latex3/ [2] https://github.com/latex3/latex3 [3] http://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/ [4] https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/
Look for /texmf-dist/doc/fonts/memdesign/memdesign.pdf if you want a fun non-technical one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why you think the condescending tone is appropriate. I've been using LaTeX for twenty years and I believe I understand the difference. I also respectfully disagree on your assessment of Typst.
Have you written documents in raw TeX?
Cool. I've moved on to typst and hope to never touch latex again in my lifetime...
After quite some time, and actually after reading this post[0], I took another look at GNU Texmacs, this time with a little more depth and patience. And indeed, the program is an incredibly powerful tool for creating beautiful documents. I'm also currently on a roll where I'm reappreciating the philosophical advantages of WYSIWYG. Anyway, for me it's definitely an insider tip for anyone who is annoyed by LaTeX and is…
ConTeXt often goes unmentioned in TeX threads. https://wiki.contextgarden.net/ It's a monolithic kernel with a relatively sane collection of "setup" macros that, by and large, can accomplish much of what LaTeX and its packages can do. If you're curious about how to build TeX from scratch, have a look at my TeX.SE answer: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/576314/2148 I'd imagine making a FOSS port in Rust that has non-c…
I imagine making a buggy and unmaintainable version could be done quickly, sure, if you don't mind your documents being killed by a thousand small typesetting cuts. TeX is incredibly complicated for good reasons, people should read Knuth's book. The reason TeX is written in a 1984 dialect of Pascal is that the typesetting bugs have been solved in a completely specified language; it is much easier to write a transpile…
I thought that the combination of the Pascal and Java versions[1] of TeX would be sufficient guidance to produce another language/implementation.
> is a huge cost for very little benefit
A greenfield Java implementation with an MIT license would have been useful[2] for rendering TeX inside of my desktop Markdown editor[3]. Instead, I had to rename all the Java source files to abide by the NTSPL license terms (or GPLv2, which is viral).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Typesetting_System
[2]: https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType/-/blob/main/LICENSE.t...
One thing I like about a full install of TeX Live is it comes with a large number of amazing manuals in PDF form; perfect for reading when bored on the plane without Internet access. Look for /texmf-dist/doc/fonts/memdesign/memdesign.pdf if you want a fun non-technical one.
https://ontouchstart.github.io/rabbit-holes/tex_rabbit_hole_...
This comment section has made it clear to me (and maybe others that use some of these tools every 10 years) that just finding the correct project/binary if you want to use TeX can be... interesting :) https://www.tug.org/levels.html seems like a good start
My personal recommendation would be to just always use "lualatex", or "pdflatex" if you have older documents that won't work with LuaLaTeX for some reason. I'm also a big fan of ConTeXt [2], but I realize that that isn't a practical option for most people.
[0]: https://tug.org/members/TUGboat/tb46-3/tb144berry-engines-fo... [1]
[1]: Paywalled until April, sorry. Email me and I can send you a copy though (this offer is open to anybody).
I'm one of the developers working on TeX Live; I'll try answer any questions in the replies.
What's the most exciting thing going on in TeX right now?
On the scholarly front, the use of BibLaTeX is a significant step forward re: BibTeX.