Does this story have to be linked to such a shitty ad-filled website? I mean, there are ads right smack in the middle of the figures and pictures of importance.
Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
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Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#62What I don’t understand is why Latex so cumbersome, complicated, unintuitive, ugly and slow. Is it simply a technical debt of choices made in time when computers were different and when there were different constraints? Is it just a nature of the problem and every tool will feel the same? Is it a result of evolution with a lack of direction? Was literate programming a bad design decision?
If you're an actual mathematician writing pages and pages of equations, LaTeX is not complicated, unintuitive, ugly, or slow. It's actually extremely well designed for addressing what is a very difficult problem, the problem of translating mathematics into ASCII. For how difficult that problem is, LaTeX is quite genius.
I think a lot of the would-be LaTeX-disruptors lack enough experience actually writing mathematics. LaTeX worked because Donald Knuth is both a great programmer AND a good mathematician. When LaTeX gets replaced, it'll need to replaced by a person (or team) with similar cross-disciplinary strengths.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#63I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…
Knuth wrote TeX as a labor of love. The surest way to kill everything good about it would be a few million dollars, and a team, and to turn it into fucking Google Docs for science. Ask Knuth to name one person who has the clearest vision for the future of TeX, and give that person a stipend to work on it for the next ten years, or for life, and you might actually do some good.
Can you elaborate on what you think is bad about Google Docs? Aside from the data privacy concerns from the fact that it's owned and operated by Google (which I agree with), it seems like a fantastically usable, available, and powerful product. What do you fear would happen to LaTeX in this situation?
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#64I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…
Knuth wrote TeX as a labor of love. The surest way to kill everything good about it would be a few million dollars, and a team, and to turn it into fucking Google Docs for science. Ask Knuth to name one person who has the clearest vision for the future of TeX, and give that person a stipend to work on it for the next ten years, or for life, and you might actually do some good.
I do totally understand what you mean, but I don't think you should dismiss the idea this swiftly. This is effectively a dictatorship vs democracy argument. I tend to suspect that neither solution would provide exactly what you wanted unless you were the dictator!
If you accept that premise, the decision has to be: which system would serve the most people the best? I'm inclined to think that a team with a budget of $20M would probably get the closest.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#65I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…
This is going to be really unpopular but you could allow people to write their papers in Microsoft word . Either that or the other answer would be to say that’s why you have grad students .
> This is going to be really unpopular but you could allow people to write their papers in Microsoft word .
Many journals do allow Word submissions. Nature, for example[0]
[0] "we strongly encourage you to incorporate the manuscript text and figures into a single PDF or Microsoft Word file" https://www.nature.com/nature/for-authors/initial-submission
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#66I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…
Oh, it is a lot of effort. Just pouring a lot of money and hoping that we can get through warts (without losing the best parts) of LaTeX is unreasonable.
And in fact, there are projects:
- https://www.mathjax.org/, and its much faster (and less feature-complete) variant https://katex.org/
- http://www.luatex.org/ - I guess this is the closest to what you mean
- https://rstudio.github.io/distill/ (using Knitr; it can generate HTML or PDFs)
etc, etc.
Even now, other libraries use BibTeX, which would be the easiest to replace in some more standardized format (JSON or YAML, so it is easy to load from web, directly).
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#67I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…
How about a modern TeX formatting layer to replace LaTeX?
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#68I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…
The "Website" point brings up an important point. LaTeX is suprisingly terrible at producing accessible documents. There are various systems and packages which make heroic efforts to make accessible output, but you have to use them from the start, as they work like you suggest -- they reimplement (or at least heavily modify) various LaTeX packages to make their outputs accessible. I've had a blind PhD student and the…
I assumed that if ctrl-F works, then screen readers also work. Can you share a bit of information about what tends to go wrong, and/or how document authors can fix it?
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#69I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…
This is going to be really unpopular but you could allow people to write their papers in Microsoft word . Either that or the other answer would be to say that’s why you have grad students .
Word with a template is the easiest way I've found to write scientific papers.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#70I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…
Knuth wrote TeX as a labor of love. The surest way to kill everything good about it would be a few million dollars, and a team, and to turn it into fucking Google Docs for science. Ask Knuth to name one person who has the clearest vision for the future of TeX, and give that person a stipend to work on it for the next ten years, or for life, and you might actually do some good.
If I had a few million dollars budget for improving latex, I'd spend 90% of it UX research. What are people using it for? What are the biggest pain points? Which easy wins are there?
Then try to modify it as little as possible while improving things.