[dead]
RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust
91–100 of 114 posts
Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust
#92I 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…
Because Knuth wrote TeX, not LaTeX.
All the parent comment's grievances are about LaTeX features, not TeX.
Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well -- TeX is "80s good". We've gotten better at designing ergonomic software since and it really doesn't meet the modern standard. But it's good enough for most people, and sufficiently hard to replace, that it has stuck around. Added to that, academics specifically are more willing to suffer old crufty stuff than software engineers tend to be. After all their job is to absorb fields of material whether good or bad…
If TeX is “80s good”, Typst might be “90s” good, being generous. Celebrating batch-mode typesetting in 2026 feels like some weird cyberpunk fixation. Programmable like Emacs (but via Scheme), interfaced with major Computer Algebra Systems, tree-structured documents that are live-queryable and modifiable, and typesetting that rivals TeX without using TeX - TeXmacs provides all that, and much more ( https://www.texmacs…
erg. You're not wrong but TexMacs looks like more 80s software that no one wants to use anymore because the user experience is awful.
Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust
#94I 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
Wow. I was not expecting that topic when I clicked on the link you provided.
When I went through such a selection process years ago, we took all sorts of tests before and even after the selection process. Towards the end, the head instructor told us they don't really have a good way to measure who will make it through. What he did tell us though is that top physical fitness test scores were not indicative that a candidate will make it to the end.
Is there a PDF version or instructions for building your thesis? I'd like to read it.
Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I agree that tables are not great, but figures? Seems to work pretty well, better than word for sure.
I still find it easier to align tables with numbers in TeX on the decimal point than in anything else.
How is this even achieved with HTML or Word?
Eg. variable width numbers like
4.53
13.98765
7
-1,000,234.76
Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust
#96I 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…
It’s my understanding that Knuth has little to nothing to do with latex and he himself uses tex for his books.
Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust
#97I 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 agree re. LaTeX. I've tried Typst for some complex projects, and it's just not quite there yet. ConTeXt on the other hand ... chef's kiss.
Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust
#98I suppose somebody has to ask (and most likely complain) about this: what does RaTeX do for accessibility? I gather that it produces images. I checked the demo, and there's not even an alternative text or an ARIA label, so this seems completely invisible to anybody relying on a screen reader. This is quite a step backwards compared to modern LaTeX, which can now tag equations with MathML within the PDF, or using Math…
AFAIK, KaTex has accessibility via MathML included, but it doesn't provide an export as image - it rather renders as html. So why would you want the utility that you use to render an additional image to take care of something that KaTeX already does?
I'm working on a Neovim plugin to render LaTeX in Markdown, and I'm struggling with this. Why is it so hard to simply render an image from KaTeX?
Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust
#99I 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…
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.
The details of lexical scope where defined in Algol 60 (1960), nearly 2 decades before Rabbit (1978).
People did know how to implement things back then, and TeX is a great example of that. It is just our definitions have changed over the years of what we consider better.
Re: RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that tables are not great, but figures? Seems to work pretty well, better than word for sure.
I still find it easier to align tables with numbers in TeX on the decimal point than in anything else. How is this even achieved with HTML or Word? Eg. variable width numbers like 4.53 13.98765 7 -1,000,234.76 Not perfect in TeX either, but at least possible.
The irony of your comment...