61–70 of 70 posts
The lack of microtype support in XeTeX is a deal breaker. That's the main reason why I continue to use pdflatex.
There are two problems with TeX (in general): 1. It is a local maximum. It produces great output and works now. Changing it requires a huge effort which will result in a system that is inferior, for many years to come. Only then another maximum could be achieved. This means there is resistance to change — it's easier to adapt to TeX's flaws than it is to write something completely new. Many systems suffer from simila…
I don't really see this. Tex requires a huge investment to learn, but so do most programming languages. That doesn't mean the languages are bad or need replacing. I think that the high cost of entry to tex programming is not necessarily a tex problem -- it's difficult to visualize a system with equal power being much easier to learn. (Though the rough edges could be smoother.)
More importantly, when you say "Take on the job of writing something better", I have to believe that there are very very few who are up for this task in the world, and it would probably require their combined efforts. It doesn't seem likely at this stage. Maybe eventually, though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Outside of mathematics and physics conference/journal publishing, there's a widespread perception that it's losing ground. In CS some conferences are slowly switching to Word, or offering an option to authors (who are slowly switching to Word, especially outside of theory-heavy areas). In book publishing it's shrunk to a very small niche, even in technical areas. Part of the problem is cruftiness of tools, and part i…
Yeah, TeX is a really broken tech in 2012. When I tried to look at the base languages to edit a BibTeX file, it blew my mind. I'm lucky that LaTeX has templates that I like, I have no possible means of making one myself. It seems like the whole article misses the point. pdftex doesn't need replacing, TeX needs replacing. Pandoc (with some better extension method) + CSS style sheets + TeX algorithm layout engine would…
In all honesty I did not realise LaTeX needed saving.
I don't know. I can write LaTex but I must admit at times I would prefer something that could be written from a real language but still use LaTeXs typesetting, kerning, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The TeX community in general has a philosophy that anything written since 1983 (TeX'83) or so should a) compile and b) produce precisely the same typeset document if it is recompiled today. This has obnoxious issues and is one of the reasons for the profusion of packages--the norm is to change the name for incompatible changes so that old users can continue on.
Which is a ridiculous goal, because, in general, most documents found in the wild are portable if transported together with the author's computer system. Chances of successfully producing typeset output from a .tex file (+ a bunch of external files) that you get from someone else are slim to none. I'm glad there is a movement to do something. I used to use TeX but stopped a long time ago, because it was simply too mu…
And I'm hesitant to complain about it too greatly; my father's PhD thesis cannot be reproduced without a specific type ball for a Selectric and I know of numerous people who have kept dragging their old text files off disk packs to magtape to 8" disks to 5 1/4" disks to 3 1/2" disks and finally to CD ROMs where they have to duplicate all the CDs every few years lest they become unreadable due to dye fade. I know several photographers who are downright paranoid about an almost literal bitrot—if you ever want to see someone spitting mad with rage, telling a photographer that his precious negative or RAW file cannot be located, or read, or even decoded (a nontrivial issue with RAWs and older image formats, and depending on language and system even with text files!) will get you there.
Saying "if you preserved the files, we will recreate your masterpiece exactly" might be an overreaction to this but it's not impossible to understand where people are coming from. Particularly the poor dears coming from Word where moving a document from 2002 to 2008 will change the typesetting subtly and sometimes not so subtly.
There are two problems with TeX (in general): 1. It is a local maximum. It produces great output and works now. Changing it requires a huge effort which will result in a system that is inferior, for many years to come. Only then another maximum could be achieved. This means there is resistance to change — it's easier to adapt to TeX's flaws than it is to write something completely new. Many systems suffer from simila…
That happens so much in software there needs to be a word for it, a term of its own.
After a while, you get deep enough in the rabbit hole so that it seems your initial judgement of redundant complexity was wrong. Even though it's still true, you've adapted to it. You just can't see it from the viewpoint of someone new anymore. For this reason I tend to carefully write down my initial concerns with something.
More on-topic, I don't think what TeX needs is a complete, sudden break with the past. It would be better to deprecate old, flawed features, and later on disable them and provide and optional compatibility mode (which is a bigger download).
I didn't understand why they wanted to port LaTeX to the iPad when they first wrote about it: http://lee-phillips.org/latexipad/
I'm sorry, but your logic here is just terrible. Your argument is that "I don't want an iPad" and "The iPad isn't a full computer" implies that "Nobody needs/wants LaTeX on an iPad". This doesn't logically follow and is instead a self-centered presumption that because you don't want something, nobody else does. They want LaTeX on their iPads, I would like LaTeX on my iPad, and I have met other people who also want La…
XeTeX-generated PDFs are not compatible with the toolchains of some academic publishers (Cambridge University Press, which publishes the Journal of Functional Programming comes to mind, but I seem to recall Springer-Verlag having issues as well). Without full support for academic publishers, I believe that majority of TeX users could not upgrade.
What about XeTeX-generated PDFs makes them incompatible?
Some, like Springer-Verlag, also have an editorial process where you have to send your .tex files to them and they will merge all of the documents and run LaTeX on them. I don't even know how you could get xetex (or pdflatex) to work with that system.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The TeX community in general has a philosophy that anything written since 1983 (TeX'83) or so should a) compile and b) produce precisely the same typeset document if it is recompiled today. This has obnoxious issues and is one of the reasons for the profusion of packages--the norm is to change the name for incompatible changes so that old users can continue on.
Which is a ridiculous goal, because, in general, most documents found in the wild are portable if transported together with the author's computer system. Chances of successfully producing typeset output from a .tex file (+ a bunch of external files) that you get from someone else are slim to none. I'm glad there is a movement to do something. I used to use TeX but stopped a long time ago, because it was simply too mu…
Well, I did have to deal with such documents, hence my comment. It was an informed rant.