[HN Gopher] Building the new hypermedia systems
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Building the new hypermedia systems
Author : mpweiher
Score : 126 points
Date : 2024-07-19 13:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (dz4k.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (dz4k.com)
| egypturnash wrote:
| _Traditional style and my own preference dictate that
| indentations separate paragraphs, so the first paragraph after a
| non-paragraph element (like a heading or a list) should not be
| indented. This is a common typographic convention, but to do it
| in CSS is impossible in the general case without dozens, maybe
| hundreds of selectors to handle every special case. In Typst, you
| just give paragraphs a first-line-indent, and they know when to
| use it._
|
| p+p {text-indent:5em} seems pretty simple? I just did a quick
| test and it seemed to work when I broke up a few paragraphs with
| an h1, a ul, and a div. This isn't anything esoteric, it's CSS2
| stuff that's been working for twenty years. Though "typst breaks
| lines 500% better than most browsers" is a compelling argument on
| its own.
| strogonoff wrote:
| There's both very little and a lot that can't be done in CSS
| when it comes to proper typesetting.
|
| p + p { text-indent } absolutely works and has been my go-to
| method of implementing proper paragraph indentation for as long
| as I can remember. Impressive drop caps, hanging punctuation,
| etc. are possible with some effort.
|
| However, balancing lines, hyphenation, eliminating rivers is
| something that browsers don't do or do not as well, and custom
| kerning is painful.
|
| If there is something that handles typesetting on par with
| InDesign but without the bloat and in a friendlier format,
| that'd be neat, but I wonder how long would it remain bloat-
| free considering features that would be needed.
| glompers wrote:
| What about the non-cloud version of InDesign (CS2, maybe
| CS3?) that Adobe made free for download around 2013-2014?
| This timing was related to the Adobe Creative Cloud being
| released in 2013, eleven years ago this week. While I believe
| others at Adobe later backtracked and decided that the
| noncloud suite was no longer free _and never had been_, that
| has been discussed on HN elsewhere.
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| Deniz did absolutely amazing work re-laying out the entire book
| using typst:
|
| https://typst.app/
|
| And the results have been fantastic when compared with the
| asciidoc version we created initially. The repo is here if you
| want to see how he uses it:
|
| https://github.com/bigskysoftware/hypermedia-systems-book
|
| You can fork it and build either a pdf or epub using the just
| commands: `just build-pdf` and `just build-epub`. I also uploaded
| the epub to libgen.
|
| We also had a pixel artist do a new cover for the paper back
| version:
|
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GSsMjBra4AAOQZ_?format=jpg&name=...
| ta988 wrote:
| that cover is great!
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| Thank you, I'm extremely happy with how it turned out, it was
| done by the pixel artist ash on fiverr, highly recommended:
|
| https://www.fiverr.com/ae1996
| jiehong wrote:
| It does look sweet! I can see that taking over latex.
|
| Someday, I hope scientific journals can all agree on a standard
| for mobile display of articles. Maybe something like a Typst
| template for it. But it probably wouldn't be a PDF file.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Sometime ago I brought Affinity publisher (I have no affiliation
| with them, I got it because it did not require a subscription).
| It is a desktop publishing application, so the intended use case
| is that you make the text separately and then you setup a layout
| and include the text.
|
| And honestly, I think that is the better way to go. You don't
| have to chase down weird commands (how do you set LaTeX to use
| Lato as the main font again?) and you get instant feedback on how
| things look.
|
| I haven't found a way to mark text up as "this is a blockquote"
| and then have that mapped to the correct style, and it seems to
| lack a few of the more esoteric font features LaTeX does support.
| The fact that you get instant feedback and can tweak the relevant
| knobs as much as you like? That means you get a much nicer
| layout.
|
| If you have a Windows machine with the Office package, you get
| Microsoft Publisher, which I believe can import Word documents
| and extract the style from that.
|
| Scribus can map styles from imported files, but last time I
| checked I couldn't get it to auto update the view when you
| changed the font.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Affinity publisher
|
| Doesn't even have real math support. Can it even be scripted?
|
| Ridiculous alternative to Typst or LaTeX, they don't even
| compete in the same category.
| owenpalmer wrote:
| Typst is truly a joy to use. Intuitive syntax, instant
| compilation, trivial installation, and it's open source.
|
| The only reason to learn Latex is the same reason to learn C++:
| Everyone else uses it
| kkfx wrote:
| Hem... We already have org-mode...
| lejalv wrote:
| You can have all that and more with TeXmacs (http://texmacs.org)
| and actually enjoy the writing as much as you hope for the reader
| to enjoy a properly typeset document instead of a fixed width
| font, and abstruse markup everywhere.
|
| Typst is a better 70s answer for a 70s-level ambition, which is a
| fine level of ambition when you're just out of punch-card
| programming.
| frabert wrote:
| Typst typesets proportional width fonts just fine...?
| globular-toast wrote:
| The commenter is referring to the editing experience, not the
| rendered output. Most people edit stuff like typst and
| (La)TeX in a code editor with a fixed-width font.
|
| Emacs supports variable-width fonts just fine and in theory
| you could use variable width for the "content" and reserve
| fixed width for the code. Not sure how well it works in
| practice, though. Of course, that doesn't go as far as
| TeXmacs.
| lejalv wrote:
| Typst is a 2-pane editing experience. What you edit is ugly,
| even if less ugly than LaTeX or (gasp!) XML.
|
| TeXmacs is an interactive typesetter. It typesets as you go.
| You can mark chunks of content up (semantically or visually
| or both) the way you do with any other batch-based
| typesetter, but you don't need to suffer the markup when you
| look up at the matrix, integral or set-theory equation you
| wrote on the paragraph above.
|
| Most of the comments just misunderstand TeXmacs. I
| wholeheartedly recommend to watch the quick tour video
| (3m40s): https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/videos.en.html
| amelius wrote:
| Yeah, what people miss is that for everything you write you
| will read it at least 10 times. Why go through the
| unnecessary pain of reading the markup yourself?
| eddd-ddde wrote:
| Because it's easier to edit markup by reading markup???
|
| I don't want to edit a rendered document. I already have
| MS Word if I wanted to do that.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| > _(gasp!) XML_
|
| I must be missing context here but I thought we were past
| side snarks out of mere generational antagonism. If not,
| please enlighten me ;)
|
| Anyway, comparing XML against a compact syntax a la
| markdown or typst (AIU!) is besides the point: XML is just
| meant as canonical SGML syntax for delivery to browsers
| while full SGML has all the additional features for
| editing, such as short references (custom Wiki syntax token
| mappings for eg markdown support), tag inference, and LPDs
| (restricted element and attribute transformations), that
| together deliver quite powerful authoring and content app
| capabilities without turning into a full-featured
| programming language. HTML, without doubt the most
| important markup language, is based on it after all though
| the vast customization features of SGML really favors
| building your own project-specific Wiki syntax that's then
| mapped to a rendering vocabulary such as HTML).
| samatman wrote:
| > _I must be missing context here but I thought we were
| past side snarks out of mere generational antagonism. If
| not, please enlighten me ;)_
|
| The context is right there in the rest of the comment:
| _editing_ XML by hand is a hideous experience.
|
| It also has its problems as a format for data exchange,
| but those are much less acute.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >TeXmacs
|
| Never had a worse experience with TeX.
|
| >instead of a fixed width font, and abstruse markup everywhere.
|
| What?
| lejalv wrote:
| The TeXmacs webpage does not do a great job of undoing the
| main confusion around it: TeXmacs is neither (La)TeX-based
| (it has its own typesetter), nor it has much to do with
| Emacs. Except perhaps that it is enormously configurable with
| a Lisp-based language, Guile Scheme.
|
| You could say: the rendered output (interactively or as PDF
| export) looks as good if not better than if it was done with
| (La)TeX, and the editor can be customized to a degree similar
| (perhaps a little less?) than Emacs. Hence the name.
|
| Incidentally, being able to customize Emacs with a Lisp other
| than emacs-lisp, is something the Emacs community would
| probably like, and there were in fact (now stalled) efforts
| to do so with Scheme.
| constantcrying wrote:
| It still was a terrible experience, no idea why you
| wouldn't use LaTeX or Typst over this, even Word felt
| better.
| lejalv wrote:
| Can you explain what exactly was bad about the
| experience?
| constantcrying wrote:
| It just felt like Word, but without any polish.
|
| The best part of TeX always was that you only had to deal
| with text. Trying to write something like TeX, but being
| forced into a Word like graphical environment felt easily
| to be the worst of both worlds.
| jampekka wrote:
| Typst seems like a real contender for LaTeX. I've used and hated
| LaTeX for over 20 years. That the horror that is LaTeX is still
| the least worst typesetting system for print is really
| depressing.
|
| I've been waiting for Typst to get HTML output. It's been under
| development for quite a while but seems to suffer from some
| bikeshedding [1].
|
| Glad to see there's Pandoc support for Typst HTML (and LaTeX)
| export as a workaround. Gotta try it for my next paper!
| laurmaedje wrote:
| Hey, Typst dev here. Regarding HTML export: It's not
| bikeshedding. It's more that, while we consider HTML as pretty
| important, we decided that fixing and improving the layout
| engine first was even more important. Basically getting what we
| have already right before starting to do more stuff.
|
| That said, our plans for HTML export have definitely become
| more substantiated and concrete over the past year and once the
| current work on layout finishes, it is the next big thing on
| our list.
| jampekka wrote:
| Thanks for the info and the good work!
|
| My bikeshedding fear came from the Github issue (forgot the
| link in the comment), where there is IMHO definite
| bikeshedding about e.g. tag names. But indeed, there seems to
| be important architectural concerns.
|
| Following with interest how Typist develops.
|
| https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/721
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(page generated 2024-07-20 23:16 UTC)