[HN Gopher] I don't always use LaTeX, but when I do, I compile t...
___________________________________________________________________
I don't always use LaTeX, but when I do, I compile to HTML (2013)
Author : pyjamafish
Score : 184 points
Date : 2024-01-26 01:13 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.peterkrautzberger.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.peterkrautzberger.org)
| pyjamafish wrote:
| So, I originally posted this last year. When I posted it, I was
| using tectonic as my LaTeX compiler, and since it didn't support
| HTML output yet, I didn't actually try the article's suggestion.
|
| Today, when I saw that I got an invitation to repost this article
| from the mods, I thought I'd take the time to try it out.
|
| The two commands that the article suggests can be combined into
| one: latexmlpost --dest=mydoc.html
| --format=html5 <(latexml mydoc.tex)
|
| I did a comparison[1] of pdflatex and latexml using some old
| assignments, and it looks like compiling to HTML isn't fully
| there yet: the spacing was off in some places, and manual line
| breaks didn't work. But, I remain hopeful. If this gets polished,
| viewing LaTeX documents on phones would be much nicer.
|
| [1]: https://imgur.com/a/yyyXWL8
| thewakalix wrote:
| What's the advantage of that subshell redirection over a simple
| pipe?
| pyjamafish wrote:
| I don't know if there's an advantage, haha. It was just the
| first thing that came to mind.
|
| Looks like a pipe is also supported; you just need to pass
| `-` as the name of the file to `latexmlpost`.
| latexml mydoc.tex | latexmlpost --dest=mydoc.html
| --format=html5 -
| tkw01536 wrote:
| You can actually also use the latexmlc omni-executable [1]
| (that is part of the latexml distribution), which can
| convert to html in one command: latexmlc
| --dest=mydoc.html --format=html5 mydoc.tex
|
| [1] https://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/LaTeXML/manual/commands/
| latex...
| marknazzaro wrote:
| There's some good news... arXiv just adopted LaTeXML for in-
| house HTML conversions of its papers. They allow users to
| submit bug reports and have collected over 700 so far.
|
| LaTeXML is maintained by a team at NIST, and they are actively
| responding to the bug reports on github issues.
|
| The LaTeX team headed by Frank Mittelbach is also working to
| add more structural information to the output of LaTeX, which
| will make compiling to HTML much easier.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| > Today, when I saw that I got an invitation to repost this
| article from the mods
|
| The mods personally invited you to repost a year later?
| pyjamafish wrote:
| Yes! I was surprised too. It's a cool hidden mechanic of HN,
| the second chance pool[1].
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| Interesting! Thanks for the link :)
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Sphinx and reStructuredText are, IMHO, underrated power houses of
| document building. With extensions, you can hook them up to
| Zotero (or whatever)-managed bibtex files. You can render to
| beautiful HTML files, and you get latex PDFs and epubs for free.
| First class latex-math support, plenty of integrations with
| things like mermaid, graphviz, and the ability to build super-
| powerful custom directives to do basically anything. And way
| simpler/easier than pure LaTeX.
|
| Heck you can even integrate a full-on requirements management
| system in them using sphinx-needs https://sphinx-
| needs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
| mr_mitm wrote:
| One of the selling points of PDF is that it is a single self-
| contained file. I found this lacking in Sphinx and wrote an
| extension for it to zip and bundle the assets into a single
| HTML file: https://github.com/AdrianVollmer/Zundler
|
| Also works with HTML documents produced in other ways.
| o11c wrote:
| Hmm, the disadvantage of your approach is that it
| unconditionally requires Javascript, even if the original
| didn't.
|
| Also if you're going to embed a giant binary blob, _please_
| ship way to extract it.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Yes, it's a trade-off.
|
| Not a bad idea, thanks for the suggestion.
| 3rd3 wrote:
| Aren't the image blobs embedded in the URLs using
| Base64-encoded strings rather than using JS?
| markdoubleyou wrote:
| You're getting close to making your own CHM format, which
| Sphinx could make for you.
|
| I always thought CHM files were a nice self-contained option
| for multi-page HTML docs. (Though they'd happily execute
| whatever JavaScript the author embedded in there... Maybe
| that's why they fell out favor?)
| mr_mitm wrote:
| It would be great if there was an open CHM-like format that
| was supported by all major browsers. The nice thing about
| browsers is that everyone already got one installed. They
| can even open PDFs natively these days. Sadly, they cannot
| even open epubs (which is almost like CHM without
| interactivity). I believe firefox used to be able to open
| epubs, not sure what happened.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Edge could. MS cut it out long before the move to the
| chrome rendering engine.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Edge supported epub until the bitter end of the Spartan
| renderer. It was only Microsoft's attempt at an ebook
| store that died long before that. Admittedly, most
| people's visibility into Edge epub support was through
| the Store and the sidebar dedicated to store purchases,
| but if you had no other book reader app take over the
| .epub file extension (or if you realized that you could
| drag and drop DRM-free .epub files into new tabs) Edge
| would still read them right up to the Chromium switch.
| Shorel wrote:
| And it was probably the best EPUB reader available on
| Windows.
|
| Particularly because of the text-to-speech engine
| features.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I think it was too. I also think a lot of people missed
| that there was an app in the Microsoft Store from some
| team adjacent to the Edge team at the time called the
| boring and easy to overlook name "Reader" that _just_ had
| the PDF and EPUB viewers from Edge in a file-based UI
| instead of browser chrome UI. It was such a useful app
| and you could set it to default for PDF (in Windows 8 and
| the early years of 10) and EPUB files (in early Windows
| 10, with some effort). I never understood why their ebook
| store effort focused on a sidebar in Edge that didn 't
| work like anything else in Edge instead of beefing up a
| file-based app like Reader. Reader also died when Edge
| went to Chromium and I still miss it as a lightweight and
| fast PDF reader.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| The "Portable EPUBS" discussion happening nearby is on
| this subject, too.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138042
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| If you just run sphinx-build with the latex builder and then
| run xelatex or pdflatex on the result you'll get one fully-
| consistent PDF with everything it it, including fully
| functional internal hyperlinks. That's what I do for PDF. I
| can make big documentation packages this way building 2000
| page pdfs in a minute or two on a modest laptop.
|
| Wait: also, how is what you're saying different from the
| built-in singlehtml builder? https://www.sphinx-
| doc.org/en/master/usage/builders/index.ht...
| mr_mitm wrote:
| In the product of the singlehtml builder, you will have the
| entire document in one single DOM tree. For large
| documents, even modern browsers on a modern machine will be
| brought to its knees.
|
| Check out the CPython docs for example:
| https://adrianvollmer.github.io/Zundler/output/cpython.html
|
| This is a huge document, and having this all rendered
| naively in one single page will not only be hard to
| navigate, it will also feel really sluggish if not crash
| the browser.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Ah, ok, so you want a PDF-like single file but in HTML in
| a way that's more efficient/scalable than the built-in
| singlehtml builder. Ok fair enough.
|
| For my use cases, the default multi-file HTML builds are
| ok, and I just pound out a latex-builder generated PDF
| for the archives.
| anta40 wrote:
| I guess latex is still unbeatable for writing complex math
| expressions. These days, when I don't need that, I'm happy with
| AsciiDoc.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Sphinx/reStructuredText supports math in LaTeX input format
| [1], so you can still go nuts with complex math expressions
| while still benefitting from the relative simplicity.
|
| [1] https://www.sphinx-
| doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/...
|
| Looks like AsciiDoc supports similar latex math blocks [2].
| Are there reasons you can't stick with that when doing math?
|
| [2] https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/stem/#block
| anta40 wrote:
| For example: writing complicated expression invovling
| calculus/matrix. That's not something I need everyday,
| though.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I have documented at least 10 x 10 matrices with rst math
| directives and found it to be pretty convenient. I don't
| understand what the benefit of pure latex is in this
| context.
| chaxor wrote:
| Typst.
|
| Typst is better IMO
| jamiedumont wrote:
| As a certified grumpy old developer I spent years writing
| off the "X but in Rust" projects, but I have to confess
| that a lot of good things with meaningful improvements have
| come from the rewrite-everything-in-Rust movement.
|
| I've not used Typst and not authored much LaTeX (but worked
| on a project with a group of scientists who used nothing
| but LaTeX) and can see obvious advantages to Typst. Same
| with many, many other Rust libraries.
| kuschkufan wrote:
| So funny to me that people assume, oh it's written in
| Rust, so it must be a rewrite of something else just so
| they can use Rust.
|
| They never imagine that people choose Rust for something
| they want to implement anyway and not just to replicate
| something existing, that they do not want to use since
| it's not implemented in Rust????
| jamiedumont wrote:
| Oh I know there's loads of original Rust work, but you
| have to acknowledge that the "X, but in Rust" trope
| exists.
| reaperman wrote:
| Yep even as a big fan of it...it's definitely a trope.
| And one that's very easy to either dismiss or make fun
| of. It would be a bit strange for fans to feel
| defensiveness or denial over that.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| jamiedumont let out a rambonctious laugh to himself.
|
| - Ah, you got me good you meddling kids!
|
| jamiedumont was talking to himself again.
|
| hackerbod slowly leaned over and squinted at the screen.
|
| - Uh Typst?
|
| - Yeah! It's a typesetting markup language. It's supposed
| to be better than things like latex.
|
| - Ok. What's so funny about it?
|
| - Oh hehe, it's written in--guess what?
|
| - I dunno?
|
| - Rust!
|
| jamiedumont started giggling but hackerbod remained
| neutrally unamused.
|
| - Oh come on! Rewrite in Rust? Language zealots? Young
| adults who can't program without some Ruby syntax
| sprinkled in?
|
| - So this "typt" thing--
|
| - Typst.
|
| - Right, Typst, this typesetting thing was created to
| promote Rust in some way?
|
| - Oh I don't think so.
|
| - It doesn't mention Rust on the homepage or something?
| You know, Written in Rust?
|
| - Nope. Not to my recollection.
|
| - So is it a rewrite of something else in--
|
| - Nope.
|
| - So then what does that have to do with--
|
| - Ah, but you're missing the bigger picture, hackerbod.
|
| - Ok.
|
| - Year after year of this eye-rolling promotion and
| nagging, blah blah blah memory unsafety is bad, blah blah
| this is why we used angle brackets for generics, and
| these sly bastards went and pulled off the most epic
| Trojan Horse that I've ever seen been--
|
| - And what's that?
|
| - They made an actually useful language!
|
| hackerbod had to scoot back as jamiedumont fell off his
| swivel chair because he was laughing so hard. hackerbod
| scratched his head.
|
| jamiedumont finally recovered from the ab-induced
| euphoria.
|
| - Ah hackerbod, I hate to admit it but they got me good!
| Those cursed language zealots got one over on me!
| jamiedumont wrote:
| I...I don't know what to make of this!
| chaxor wrote:
| I think that typically a rewrite in, well _anything_ ,
| can be helpful - simply because the first write wasn't
| sure of what may work or what the correct model for the
| system should be, or how to handle specific parts of the
| system etc.
|
| A rewrite in Rust can be good for those reasons, as it
| removes the "cruft" of old implementation, but also gets
| the nice properties of speed and such.
|
| But ultimately the thing I love most about Rust is not
| even the safety and such - it's the package management
| and build system. Just look at the horrible python/js
| scene for how bad packaging and build systems can be, and
| you'll understand why that basic uniform experience can
| be so nice.
| kuschkufan wrote:
| No HTML export yet. Which this post is about.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| I wish Textile had won instead of plain Markdown. What are
| the benefits of Typst over the ConTeXt family?
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Asciidoc supports math blocks, and there's an extension to
| render them at compile time
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I write a fair amount of reports professionally and I use word.
|
| Getting data from my Python analysis into the reports are
| tedious at best and updating numbers last minute is hair
| pulling frustrating.
|
| But because of the good wysiwyg I can cheat on my adjustments
| when I need a graph to go "just there", I can edit my paragraph
| wording such that I don't get a almost completely blank page in
| between sections, etc, etc which is important to make a good
| looking report, imho.
|
| How do you go about that with rst? I'd love to write a
| templates rst file that can be fed from my excel sheets and
| Python scripts, but how do I go about final layout adjustments?
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I've gone a few routes. I have used sphinx's singlehtml
| builder to make a huge HTML file and then used pandoc to
| convert it into docx for final adjustments. This worked
| surprisingly well on a 2000-page document. But it's a bit
| cludgy.
|
| Another (non-Sphinx) thing you can do is just write (portions
| of) your docx reports directly from Python using python-docx
| [1]. I use this approach when people give me strict docx
| templates that need to be filled in from Python in a very
| specific way. It can drop data-generated tables in at special
| placeholder sections and everything.
|
| [1] https://python-docx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
|
| I will say that I've been more and more happy with just using
| sphinx straight to pdf for very professional looking reports.
| Given some latex preamble work in the config you can get it
| looking quite nice. I haven't personally struggled recently
| with too many egregious formatting issues on the sphinx-built
| latex stuff. You do have to swap over to landscape mode for
| large tables, etc. so it takes some work. But you're right
| that in many cases, formatting issues do still happen, so
| YMMV.
|
| Another neat trick in sphinx is the csv-table directive [2],
| which loads table data directly from a csv file you have
| around, which you can obviously get from your xlsx.
|
| [2] https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/rst/directives.h
| tml...
| michaelrpeskin wrote:
| I do something similar for my reports. I write most of it
| in markdown using Typora and then I export the last draft
| to docx for fine tuning and distribution (the agencies I
| work with want docx submissions, not pdf, which always
| bothers me).
|
| Typora uses pandoc to do the conversion. My reports are
| mainly text, charts, and lots of math formulae and it works
| great. You don't get fine adjustment of layout, but I find
| that a feature not a bug. I see so many people waste time
| to put a figure in just the right place. It doesn't matter.
| The goal is clear information transfer so just get the
| figure in the doc where it makes sense and go on.
| chaxor wrote:
| Try out Typst.
|
| It senses changes to any file and auto-updates the doc
| _lightning fast_ - it 's far better than LaTeX IMO
| kuschkufan wrote:
| No HTML export yet. Which this post is about.
|
| Though I too like typst and am subscribed to their Github
| issue for HTML export, that maybe some day will be
| available.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| There's a lot you can do with latex to automatically import
| data and update automatically from external sources, and
| while it might seem counter-intuitive it is much easier and
| less effort than Word's wysiwyg interface.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I'm jealous of how easy it is to import data when using a
| structured source code like format such as rst, markdown or
| latex. I'm sticking with word because I can easily do small
| layout adjustments like decreasing the margins of a table
| to make it fit on a page, or easily see when a paragraph is
| 1 or 2 words too long, causing it to shift all sorts of
| elements across pages.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| You can do that with Latex as well? I use TexStudio which
| has a preview pane. Any time I make changes I hit f5 and
| it updates pretty quickly. It's not instantly but pretty
| close to it, and there are already less problems with
| things shifting around because it manages that better
| than Word does, by design.
| spinningslate wrote:
| I've recently switched to Quarto[0] with RStudio desktop[1]
| as the editor. It's my preferred approach for all writing
| now:
|
| 1. Great markdown editor with both source and WYSIWYG views
|
| 2. Render to a wide range of formats including html, pdf,
| epub, docx
|
| 3. Generate books, web sites, single page docs, presentations
|
| 4. Incorporate code (like jupyter) except the source is plain
| text with fenced blocks
|
| 5. Supports code in a number of languages including Python
| and R.
|
| 6. Can use other editors too (iirc there's a plugin for VS
| Code though never tried it).
|
| 7. Built in support for MathJax for mathematical formulae and
| Mermaid for text-based diagramming with auto inline preview
|
| I prefer it to Word for writing and jupyter for notebooks. No
| affiliation to Posit, the company that develops both Quarto &
| RStudio. Just a fan of the products.
|
| --
|
| [0]: https://quarto.org/ [1]:
| https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/
| DrSantow wrote:
| I agree! I've been also using this as a personal website (for
| academia). This works like a charm. It's easy to render any
| equation, and it's fast (because not bloated).
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| It is too complex compared to Markdown and hasn't got enough
| features to be comparable to Latex. And I still (almost) use
| the same Latex templates that I used at university, 25 years
| ago.
| mgaunard wrote:
| I forced myself to use it recently, I mostly found it to be
| both limited (cannot have part of a link in bold or italics)
| and inconvenient (each line of inline code must be indented).
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| It does have some limits, for sure. I havent tried bolding a
| portion of a url before.
|
| I have enjoyed including inline code using the literal-
| include directive, which allows you to just include sections
| of code directly from a file in disk. This is great because
| you can cover your example code with unit tests while also
| talking about it in docs without replication. You can even
| use little border comments to mark snippet sections so that
| it's not sensitive to specific line numbers.
|
| https://www.sphinx-
| doc.org/en/master/usage/restructuredtext/...
| fireflash38 wrote:
| Sphinx/rst are a nice middle ground between the simplicity of
| markdown and complexity of LaTeX. I used it to generate a lot
| of html docs for test reports. I did try pdf gen using via
| LaTeX and pdflatex for a bit, but stopped after the pdf was
| breaking the multiple thousands of pages.
|
| And it's really tweakable, especially with html output where
| you can provide your own templates, or add in your own
| CSS/scripts even manual tags.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Providing my own templates is kind of a weird feature,
| because that's not really what I want (in the sense "people
| don't want to buy drills, they want to buy holes") -
| obviously that's a necessary feature, but I never ever want
| to make my own template, what I want instead is to have a
| template that does _exactly_ what I need but that 's made and
| maintained by someone else.
|
| E.g. I don't care about a configurable formatting for
| bibliography, but I would want a pre-made template that
| implements the APA bibliography guidelines with _all the tiny
| nuances_ correctly. I don 't want to configure margins for
| columns, I want a template that does the IEEE formatting
| standard exactly. (95% compatibility doesn't work, if a
| single missing feature means the tool can't produce the
| required document because it's wrong at one spot on page 3,
| then I'd need to abandon the tool and pick something that
| works). And crucially, I want the separation between content
| and formatting so that I can easily take a blob of content
| that was formatted for one layout and just copy it in a
| completely different template and have it match the new
| formatting guidelines, e.g. automatically moving all the
| image captions to the other side, changing how they're
| numbered and referenced, etc.
|
| Latex has all this baggage solved, almost everyone who wants
| a specific format from me will provide a Latex template with
| their weird typesetting fetishes included, and I just need to
| provide the content - while any upcoming tool has an uphill
| battle to become compatible and provide the same things, at
| the very least pre-made (and _well_ made) templates for all
| the major formats (each discipline of science generally uses
| something different).
| mattl wrote:
| I write markdown, use pandoc to make LaTeX and from that a PDF
| for a printed thing and just supply markdown for non-printed
| stuff.
| davidthewatson wrote:
| I was surprised recently when I changed up my HTML and PDF
| toolstack not just how good pandoc was, but the entire
| ecosystem that had emerged around pandoc including pandocomatic
| and pandoc-resume.
| mattl wrote:
| pandoc is so good. And volunteer maintained.
| chaxor wrote:
| Typst is pretty close to markdown for simple things, and scales
| nicely to hard things. So you don't really need to worry about
| the markdown-pandoc shuffle anymore.
| amai wrote:
| Unfortunately typst doesn't support HTML output. It can only
| generate PDFs.
| xattt wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but there isn't a way to do a compile
| that incorporates Biblatex.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| I've started auto-exporting Zotero-managed references to a
| bibtex file using better bibtex [1] and then using Sphinx and
| reStructuredText to process them uniformly into nicely
| formatted HTML, pdf, and epub using sphinxcontrib-bibtex [2].
|
| [1] https://github.com/retorquere/zotero-better-bibtex
|
| [2] https://sphinxcontrib-
| bibtex.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage....
| bradrn wrote:
| I honestly don't see the point of using LaTeX if you're
| generating HTML. The great strength of LaTeX, in my view, is the
| precise control it provides over typography and formatting. As
| such, it works best with an output format which can faithfully
| render these documents -- such as PDF. For an output format like
| HTML, which encourages reflowability over faithful rendering, I'd
| much prefer to use an 'easier' document format like Markdown or
| reStructuredText.
| golol wrote:
| Exactly, there is a triangle of tradeoffs here: prettyness vs
| easyness vs responsiveness. You can only have 2 of them. pretty
| and easy is Latex. The reason people call CSS a nightmare is
| because responsiveness fundamentally makes it much more
| difficult to make a document pretty. So HTML+CSS gives you
| pretty + responsive or easy + responsive. That's not the same
| functionality as a pdf for a fixed scientific document.
| seeknotfind wrote:
| I spent a few weeks last year doing the opposite, HTML to LaTex
| in order to print and nicely typeset top HN articles, so I'd have
| a nicely printed booklet each morning. I think creating hard
| copies of web content for offline reading holds a lot of promise,
| but the internet is a beast.
| AzuraIsCool wrote:
| Interesting, I have done exactly that too! I have it sent to my
| laser printer to print out just before I wake up.
| PrimeMcFly wrote:
| > so I'd have a nicely printed booklet each morning.
|
| Why? If you're just printing to read on the train or whatever,
| wouldn't you just discard after reading?
| generationP wrote:
| This is from 2013, so the bet that "nobody will want to read
| [PDFs] in 5 years" can be considered failed. If anything, PDF has
| become the lingua franca of the academic web, crowding out even
| DjVU at the thing that DjVU was made for and PDF was not.
|
| I have not been following the development of mathjax, pandoc,
| etc. carefully, so I'm wondering: Have the main issues been
| solved? By these I mean
|
| (1) support for most popular packages,
|
| (2) automatically breaking long outputs into small pages that
| don't overheat my laptop or crash my browser and yet reference
| each other properly,
|
| (3) printability (without lines broken in half, senseless
| overflows and the likes) or cross-compilability with a regular
| PDF compiler?
|
| I know the ar5iv project is getting closer and closer to (1) and
| (3), but is that available to regular users?
| bloaf wrote:
| And it is a shame. The current AI explosion is the poorer for
| it, due to the greater difficulty of extracting the text from
| PDFs.
| adastra22 wrote:
| mathjax has come tremendously far, but not on the problems you
| mention :(
| bowsamic wrote:
| The problem with DjVu is that its viewers suck, especially on
| macOS, which is very popular in modern academia
| roel_v wrote:
| But don't worry, 2024 is going to be the Year Of Math On The
| Web.
|
| (I've been trying to do 'math on the web' (ish)) since 2002,
| and it's always sucked in some way; and all that time,
| images/pdf have Just Worked(TM). The emphasis in the OP on how
| much you'll have to report/chip in/fix is telling...)
| matt3210 wrote:
| At work all reports are html. If you want pdf, cmd-P
| whatever1 wrote:
| I dont always use latex but when I do I always hate it.
| IAmLiterallyAB wrote:
| Tangently related, does anyone have experience with AsciiDoc?
| I've used reStructuredText before, but AsciiDoc is tempting, it
| looks cleaner.
| pbronez wrote:
| Asciidoc has potential. Last time I dug into it the ecosystem
| was lacking, but there were glimmers of a reboot. I hope that
| pulls through because it's a great format.
|
| Edit: yeah it's managed through the Eclipse Foundation now.
| They're slowly working towards a formal spec, haven't hit 1.0
| yet.
|
| Details here https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipse/asciidoc-
| lang/asciidoc-la...
| pbronez wrote:
| yeah it's managed through the Eclipse Foundation now. They're
| slowly working towards a formal spec, haven't hit 1.0 yet.
|
| Details here https://gitlab.eclipse.org/eclipse/asciidoc-
| lang/asciidoc-la...
| jiehong wrote:
| Using it for internal docs, but we don't generate pdfs so I
| can't comment on that part.
|
| I personally find asciidoc easier to write manually.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I had experience with AsciiDoc and personally not a fan. IMO it
| has weird features like totally illegible compact table syntax
| (seriously, that stuff is worse than XML) and the spec looks
| abandoned. But I keep seeing it being used, I guess it appeals
| to people who want something more flexible than Markdown (and
| who like Ruby, or they would go with RST)
| lkuty wrote:
| You have also AsciiDoctor ( https://asciidoctor.org/ ) which is
| alive and well. I am using it for technical CS documentation
| internally, but only for single page documents. I did not try
| to deploy their whole multi-document setup called Antora (
| https://antora.org/ ).
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| LaTeML [1] is presumably the latex to html tool that arXiv is
| testing right now. What are peoples thoughts about it compared to
| other such tools?
|
| [1] https://github.com/brucemiller/LaTeXML
| j2kun wrote:
| The recommendation to use Markdown+MathJAX fall short when you
| want to write longer documents with numbered section, subsection,
| and theorem/definition/figure etc tracking and referencing.
|
| I'm sure with Sphinx and reStructuredText you can get that large-
| scale document tracking stuff, but with LaTeX it just works for
| the most part and you don't need to juggle a bunch of different
| side-projects and extensions. Plus you get things like automatic
| index generation (for a physical book).
| bigpeopleareold wrote:
| I searched for a comment to supports the fact that LaTeX shines
| in certain areas.
|
| My memory of LaTeX has weakened over the years, since I am not
| writing long texts with lots of figures and such, but I know
| it's more than this statement let's on in the article:
| "Something that is more modern than learning a hundred bits of
| print typesetting that your student will never, ever need?"
|
| What exactly is, in the end, is 'modern'? Is it because there
| is less syntax in Markdown to remember and the Modern is
| syntax-adverse? :D Aren't there editors for these in the first
| place to avoid the daily grind of remembering syntax?
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Modern as in "more recent" (and not as in "the modern era"
| that ended decades ago). More recent doesn't mean better
| though : the likes of Overleaf, Google Docs, Github are also
| "more modern" than some of their alternatives, yet ought to
| be avoided like the plague.
| phiresky wrote:
| Markdown actually works great for larger documents when you use
| it with pandoc [1]. That way you get HTML output _and_ PDF
| output via Latex, without the HTML being a second class
| citizen.
|
| I wrote my thesis (50 pages) and multiple published papers this
| way. Maybe it seems janky but honestly my experience with Latex
| and it's 10 incompatible compilers and thousands of semi-
| incompatible packages has been much worse.
|
| I also don't understand why (academic) publishing is so PDF
| focused. It's a horrible format to read on screens (think
| multi-column PDFs, and scrolling / jumping up and down to find
| references), and who actually prints stuff anymore?
|
| The thing I love most about Pandoc is that my notes can just
| slowly turn into a fully fledged document. Like bullet points -
| The syntax in Latex is far too verbose to make taking notes
| with it comfortable.
|
| It's also much easier to extend, I wrote a simple tool that
| automatically converts URLs into full and correctly formatted
| citations, so I don't even need a citation manager to get the
| same results: The GAN was first introduced in
| [@gan](https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5423-generative-
| adversarial-nets).
|
| Turns into https://github.com/phiresky/pandoc-
| url2cite/blob/master/exam...
|
| Another great project with similar structure is Manubot [3],
| though the PDFs there are not generated by LaTeX.
|
| [1]: https://pandoc.org/ [2]:
| https://github.com/phiresky/pandoc-url2cite [3]:
| https://manubot.org/
| dwheeler wrote:
| One solution is to embed alternatives within PDF itself.
| LibreOffice can embed inside a PDF the original editabble source
| in ODF format. You could also embed ePub. That would mean you
| would have a single file that could be processed in many useful
| ways.
| froh wrote:
| I just moved "up" from gfm markdown to asxiidoc and oh do I miss
| LaTeX.
|
| html rendering of LaTeX is a godsend. and imnsho asciidoc a work
| around to not fully having that.
| bmacho wrote:
| I feel ambivalent to LaTeX.
|
| I don't like the language, the ecosystem is too big, complicated
| and breaks, but the end result is hard to do any other way.
|
| This applies both the equations part, and the text reflow part (I
| think them as separate things, but they usually go together).
|
| It should be possible to write text in HTML or markdown, and
| write the equations in latex or asciimath, and turn it into a
| beautiful/article style pdf, but sadly it is not.
|
| Although CSS (colored and rounded boxes and such) + MathJax-SVG
| also can look nice.
| loxdalen wrote:
| I believe I have used pandoc to convert markdown to PDF. Maybe
| this is something you could try?
| criddell wrote:
| That's probably what they were referring too when they
| described it as big, complicated, and fragile.
|
| https://pandoc.org/chunkedhtml-demo/2.4-creating-a-pdf.html
| Muehe wrote:
| Well you need to install the appropriate texlive
| dependencies which can be somewhat complicated, but once
| that's done it's just writing inline Latex
| $$\like{this}$$
|
| into your Markdown files and then doing
| pandoc -f markdown -t pdf -o output.pdf input.md
|
| Haven't used this in a while and just tried it again, was
| just a matter of searching a few error messages, gleaning
| the missing texlive package names from the results, and
| installing them. Works like a charm now.
|
| I also had this working for Markdown to HTML conversion
| back in the day when I needed it, but that requires the
| website using a JS library like Mathjax.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Using REVTeX I honestly have no issues with LaTeX, especially
| if I just stick to Overleaf
| i_am_proteus wrote:
| It's entirely possible. One tool one could use for this is
| Quarto: https://quarto.org/
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Time to sunset Latex
|
| https://github.com/typst/typst
| kuschkufan wrote:
| No HTML export yet. Which this post is about.
| datadeft wrote:
| I am hoping this is going to be implemented soon:
|
| https://github.com/fenjalien/obsidian-typst/issues/5
| Diti wrote:
| How do you handle internationalization, and, in particular,
| hyphenation? That's the main reason I use LaTeX for (well,
| specifically XeTeX & Tectonic, which are pretty modern).
| Without those two features, one might as well use
| LibreOffice, no?
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| It will be hard to replace LaTeX. I still use it. It's
| virtually bug-free and compiles documents from 30 years ago.
| I sincerely think it will be around for another 30. It's
| tried and tested and that's hard to find in the software
| world. Typst looks interesting though. I'll keep my eye on
| it...
| martopix wrote:
| Might still be pretty limited, but I've been looking for
| something with a more modern syntax for years, and this seems
| a good candidate! Thanks for sharing.
|
| Of course it will take years to replace LaTeX, but we need to
| begin working on it.
| mbirth wrote:
| This is from a week ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39027543
|
| Talks about "htmldocs" (which shows maths formulas on one of
| their templates) but there are also various other alternatives
| mentioned in the discussion.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Document formatting seems like one of those problems where 80%
| or so of the problem space is simple and the remaining 20% is
| an unfathomable pit of nightmares.
|
| There are so many different ways people could want characters
| printed on a sheet of virtual paper that the problem is
| virtually unconstrained in its difficulty.
|
| TeX was a major theoretical advance, and LaTeX is a nice enough
| UI layer on TeX that has gotten significant traction. But even
| outside of TeX, it feels like even software like MS Word are
| impossibly complex and clunky.
|
| You can make something nicer by dramatically simplifying or
| cutting the feature set. I think that's probably how Google
| Docs has a pretty simple interface. But I'm not convinced
| there's a real replacement for the incumbents that simply tries
| to improve UI without having a deep technical insight about
| document layout the way Knuth had with TeX.
| pydry wrote:
| Latex has a lot of caked in design mistakes which are never
| going away.
|
| Unfortunately typst seems to have replicated the primary one
| - inventing a new turing complete programming language rather
| than piggybacking off an existing one.
|
| It's possible to conceptualize a much better latex but it
| would take years to build properly and build the ecosystem
| around it to do all the odd things people need when doing
| markup requiring 1000-2000 community packages.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| What are the other caked-in design mistakes in LaTeX, and
| which existing language(s) would you like to see a DSL
| piggybacked off?
| PeterisP wrote:
| Thing is, you can't really cut the feature set much. Nobody
| needs 90% of the features but for almost everyone there's
| some 10% of the less-used features that's a must-have, a
| total dealbreaker if the other tool doesn't have them or does
| them poorly; and that's a _different_ 10% for different
| people, so if you have a cut-down feature set you lose many
| people - some because you don 't have A, some because you
| don't have B, some because you don't have Z, and they all
| instead use the same old, complex tool that has support for
| "their thing".
| da_chicken wrote:
| Every time I encounter LaTeX, I think of something I heard:
| "You shouldn't need a build environment for a word processor."
| I can't get away from that sentiment. Almost nobody I've seen
| using LaTeX has actually been using it for _typesetting_.
| Usually they 're using a typesetter for word processing.
|
| Sometimes it feels like they're only using LaTeX because they
| "learned it in college." You ever notice that? So many people
| in LaTeX threads say they learned it in college, or they've
| been using the same setting since college, or whatever. People
| learn LaTeX to make college papers look nice, and then they
| _never need to configure it again_? Isn 't that strange?
|
| The worst part, though, is that people complain if you call it
| latex. Which I think says quite a lot about it's userbase.
| bowsamic wrote:
| If I'm using LaTeX, I'm writing scientific articles. I expect
| scientific articles to be read by people on computers with normal
| screen sizes or printed off. Therefore there's no reason to
| bother with anything other than PDF. PDF works great.
| Retr0id wrote:
| > don't just produce PDFs that nobody can read on small screens
|
| I was thinking about this recently. If you get pedantic enough*
| about it, the typesetting quality you can get from a LaTeX+PDF is
| strictly better than what can be achieved using (sane) HTML.
|
| I wanted to blog in LaTeX, and to solve the screen-size issue I
| thought I'd pre-bake to a wide range of page geometries, and then
| serve up an appropriate one to the client using pdf.js.
|
| Fortunately for everyone, I decided against it in the end and
| continued blogging in markdown+html (with mathml support)
|
| *well beyond what most readers would possibly care about
| mbid wrote:
| For me, the main problem with most tools that render to HTML was
| that they don't support all math typesetting libraries that latex
| supports. I used to work with category theory, where it's common
| to use the tikz-cd library to typeset commutative diagrams. tikz-
| cd is based on tikz, which is usually not supported for HTML
| output.
|
| But apart from math typesetting, my latex documents were usually
| very simple: They just used sections, paragraphs, some theorem
| environments and references to those, perhaps similar to what the
| stack project uses [3]. Simple latex such as this corresponds
| relatively directly to HTML (except for the math formulas of
| course). But many latex to html tools try to implement a full tex
| engine, which I believe means that they lower the high-level
| constructs to something more low level (or that's at least my
| understanding). This results in very complicated HTML documents
| from even simple latex input documents.
|
| So what would've been needed for me was a tool that can (1)
| render all math that pdflatex can render, but that apart from
| math only needs to (2) support a very limited set of other latex
| features. In a hacky way, (1) can be accomplished by simply using
| pdflatex to render each formula of a latex document in isolation
| to a separate pdf, then converting this pdf to svg, and then
| incuding this svg in the output HTML in the appropriate position.
| And (2) is simply a matter of parsing this limited subset of
| latex. I've prototyped a tool like that here [1]. An example
| output can be found here [2].
|
| Of course, SVGs are not exactly great for accessibility. But my
| understanding is that many blind mathematicians are very good at
| reading latex source code, so perhaps an SVG with alt text set to
| the latex source for that image is already pretty good.
|
| [1] https://github.com/mbid/latex-to-html
|
| [2] https://www.mbid.me/lcc-model/
|
| [3] https://stacks.math.columbia.edu/
| ykonstant wrote:
| Tangentially, for me the stacks project is the gold standard of
| mathematical typography on the web. Look at this beauty:
| https://stacks.math.columbia.edu/tag/074J
|
| Also check the diagrams:
| https://stacks.math.columbia.edu/tag/001U
|
| If anyone can explain to me, a complete noob regarding html,
| how they achieve this result with html, css and whichever latex
| engine they use, I would be grateful. I want to make a personal
| webpage in this style.
| dolmen wrote:
| uMatrix tells me there are 8 external sites to grant
| permissions for access to resources. Definitely not a
| "beauty".
| ykonstant wrote:
| I don't understand what this has to do with typography.
| artagnon wrote:
| It's standard MathJaX that's rendered client-side. I managed
| to get MathJaX + XyPic rendered server-side on my website,
| which is a lot nicer.
| ykonstant wrote:
| Oh, you misunderstand the level of my question; rephrased,
| how do maek wabpag with "MathJaX that's rendered client-
| side"? (o'V`o)
| red_trumpet wrote:
| Take a look at MathJax's website:
| https://www.mathjax.org/#gettingstarted
|
| They have a link to JSBin which contains an easy example
| html page.
| ykonstant wrote:
| Thanks!
| datadeft wrote:
| Have you seen typst? I have moved over from LaTex to Typst and
| most if not all your use cases are covered.
|
| https://typst.app/
| _flux wrote:
| Except the main theme, which was HTML export?
| https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/721
|
| Though it's in the roadmap!
| opentokix wrote:
| LyX is the way to LaTeX
| notpushkin wrote:
| Instead of MathJax, maybe also consider KaTeX: https://katex.org/
|
| It's faster than MathJax and also can be pre-rendered on the
| server (or in your SSG!).
| amai wrote:
| That is old news. Mathjax 3 is a lot faster nowadays than it
| used to be and it supports more LaTeX keywords than KaTex.
| Especially the important \label and \ref are still not
| supported by KaTex.
| bovermyer wrote:
| When I use LaTeX, it's because I want a way to store book
| manuscripts and their layout as code in version control. I never
| use any of the math layout. I get the impression that my use case
| is rather in the minority.
|
| I would use CSS+HTML for layout, but what do I do about
| automatically generating tables of contents and indexes?
|
| I guess I could write my own tool for that. Hmm.
| gglitch wrote:
| Looks like Pandoc can generate tables of contents for HTML,
| though I don't see anything about indexes. Roff and friends,
| and Texinfo, can do both, though with their own tradeoffs.
|
| https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html
| riperoni wrote:
| This article really doesn't get what LaTeX does. Of course it is
| overkill to have 5 lines of text rendered with LaTeX into a PDF.
| But the point of LaTeX is exactly to set the typesetting of an
| output document in stone. PDF is meant to do that and HTML cannot
| do that. A PDF conserves everything and that is precisely the
| point to have a set layout for printing or displaying on
| different devices.
|
| Yes, there should be easy ways to display math on the web. No,
| this doesn't mean that LaTeX is obsolete.
|
| Besides, what about references, both external and internal?
| Probably needs more "modern" tooling.
| geon wrote:
| > to have a set layout for printing or displaying on different
| devices.
|
| That's a horrible way to go about it. Already in the 90s it was
| clear that varying display sizes was a problem, and it has
| gotten orders of magnitudes worse since then.
|
| The concept of a single set layout that is suitable for
| everyone is utterly absurd.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| Then do not use a tool that was designed for typesetting
| printed pages which is what LaTex is for. The author of the
| article seems to think about LaTex only for math rendering.
| But that is just a fraction of what it is used for. Complex
| diagrams with tikz or typesetting entire books, so that
| adding content in an arbitrary place still makes the rest of
| the book look good without breaking layout are some of the
| examples of why I would use LaTex instead of html
| geon wrote:
| That's exactly what the author says at the beginning:
|
| > are you sure you have to use LaTeX?
| artagnon wrote:
| LatexML has come a long way. Even arXiv uses LatexML internally
| to offer HTML5 versions as of late 2023. It does have limitations
| in not supporting all packages, or producing a high-quality
| translation in all cases.
|
| If you don't need to convert entire LaTeX documents, MathJaX and
| KaTeX are really good at rendering a subset of LaTeX as
| MathML/SVG. I run MathJaX + an xypic extension for commutative
| diagrams with server-side rendering on my website, and it works
| great in practice.
| kkfx wrote:
| I like LaTeX for the quality of it's pdf output, I use in for
| docs that need to be "printed" (non necessarily on paper, but
| still 'fixed typographical form for potentially long term
| archiving) not for anything else and yes I DO HATE pdfs because
| of their design, but PostScript is not much common these days and
| while a bit better for certain aspect is not much better in
| general, dvi is even worse.
|
| For my notes, for anything that need to be "live" I use org-mode
| because:
|
| - it's a far more natural markup than anything else
|
| - it's rendered INLINE, no need to jump between a source form and
| a rendered one, a thing MD lovers fails to understand
|
| - it's an outlining tool, another thing most other tools fails
| miserably to understand
|
| - it easily incorporate live things in other languages (org-
| babel) a thing no modern REPL-alike DocUI like Jupyter can't do
|
| Long story short I prefer the best tool depending on the job.
| HTML might be the least common denominator tool, making it the
| worst in essentially all cases. XML for machine usage, SGML in
| general, are good for machine usage, but they are very
| impractical in current usage, just see the actual crappy state of
| things for e-invoicing with XML/XADES docs + XSL to render them
| in the end as pdf for the human. They are a good too in some
| case, but again not the best for any specific case.
| amai wrote:
| A lot has happened since 2013. Have a look at
| https://quarto.org/, if you plan to publish in HTML. Quarto has
| already support for Typst: https://quarto.org/docs/output-
| formats/typst.html
| DominikPeters wrote:
| Another LaTeX-to-HTML tool is lwarp
| (https://github.com/bdtc/lwarp) which starts from the idea that
| there only exists one program that can parse LaTeX: the LaTeX
| compiler itself. Implementing a new parser is almost futile. So
| instead, the lwarp package redefines all the macros to output
| HTML. Something like \renewcommand[1]{\textbf}{<b>#1</b>} This
| way, compiling LaTeX gives you a PDF whose text is HTML code, so
| now you can extract the plain text from it and you have an HTML
| file. The advantage is that it can easily deal with custom macros
| etc., because these are natively resolved by the LaTeX compiler.
|
| I use lwarp to make https://tikz.dev/, an HTML version of the
| TikZ manual, which is probably one of the most complicated LaTeX
| documents in existence.
| magnio wrote:
| You are the author of tikz.dev? I have always thought it was
| made by the tikz author. Mad props to you, the site is very
| functional and helpful to me. With it, using tikz feels a bit
| less like a chore.
| soegaard wrote:
| Note that one can convert PDF to HTML using tools like:
|
| https://pdf2htmlex.github.io/pdf2htmlEX/
|
| Example of a paper with equations:
|
| https://pdf2htmlex.github.io/pdf2htmlEX/demo/demo.html
| eadmund wrote:
| Oh, now that is beautiful! Thanks for sharing.
| smaddox wrote:
| That's just HTML that looks like a PDF, though. Incredible
| feat, but not really what I want from PDF turned to HTML. I
| want something mobile friendly.
| setgree wrote:
| I learned LaTeX in grad school in 2013, starting with LyX.
| Yesterday, I compiled an Rmarkdown document into an
| APA6-conformant PDF with just a bit of YAML, with a tex file as
| an intermediate output.
|
| We're almost there for skipping LaTeX entirely, but in my
| experience, Google Docs and Overleaf still offer vastly superior
| collaborating tools. Now if we could just edit {.md; .rmd;
| .ipynb} files directly on Overleaf, with comments and track
| changes, we'd be in business...
| asimpletune wrote:
| I love the author's "if you want to leave a comment email me". I
| saw this somewhere else and it motivated me to make an automated
| system that works like that: https://r3ply.com
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