[HN Gopher] What TeX Gets Right
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What TeX Gets Right
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 28 points
Date : 2024-07-20 21:35 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newton.cx)
(TXT) w3m dump (newton.cx)
| notPlancha wrote:
| > Now, it's certainly possible that one could develop a new,
| generative typesetting language that captures the virtues that
| I've discussed above and is free of TeX's historical baggage.
|
| Like typst?
| alphabeta2024 wrote:
| typst still gets a lot of things wrong.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I tried Typst, which everyone seems to be saying is a replacement
| for LaTeX. Yes, Typst does get some stuff right and is easier to
| use in some cases. But LaTeX works out of the box with some basic
| document styles without learning much, and doesn't give you the
| freedom of a blank document.
|
| In the end I gave up Typst. Didn't like it. Yes, Typst might be
| better for some but for writing basic documents like an article
| or basic math paper, Typst didn't work for me.
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| OP's article is not about LaTeX. Why are we discussing Typst
| and LaTeX in this thread? They're not what OP's article is
| about.
| virtualritz wrote:
| I studied typography and I used LaTeX occasionally but also for
| the 150+ page master thesis in archeology, of my brother.
|
| Which required a special type of source reference/footnote
| formatting that I took from some legal/law-related LaTeX package.
| It also required sections typeset in Sanskrit and old Greek.
| Different package. There were issues when using them together.
| That was just the most headache-inducing bit I remember as this
| was way more than a decade ago.
|
| I'm also a developer, most of my life was C/C++, now Rust. But
| also Tcl, Python, Lua, some projects in specialized functional
| languages etc.
|
| Even with this BG, using LaTeX for the aformentioned thesis, a
| project where no good readymade template/package that covered all
| requirements was available, was painful.
|
| I worked as a typographer and designer for a decade from my late
| teens to my late 20's. That was mostly PageMaker and then
| InDesign (I circumvented QuarkXPress where I could).
|
| Using these desktop publishing packages was also often painful.
| Just in ways orthogonal to the painfulness of LaTeX.
|
| I think a typsetting system needs to hit a sweet spot where you
| can do almost anything you can do in a desktop publishing
| software and almost anything you can do in a system like LaTeX.
|
| I think typst (see [1], currently on HN front page) is on a good
| trajectory to be just that. Eventually.
|
| I don't think (La)TeX was or ever will be able to hit that sweet
| spot.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41014941
| openrisk wrote:
| TeX/LaTex have a bit of a C/C++ relation. Instead of replacing
| TeX one could imagine an alternative higher level abstraction.
| WillAdams wrote:
| The big thing for me is macros and programmability.
|
| Early on in my learning graphic design I found the interactive
| tools of the time (Aldus PageMaker, Quark XPress) quite primitive
| and limiting --- at one point in order to have the control I
| wanted I was using Altsys Virtuoso (basically Macromedia Freehand
| v4, a drawing program) to lay out books --- at least it would
| hang punctuation.
|
| Finding TeX on my NeXT Cube and then learning it meant that I had
| access to a tool which rather than being limited by what features
| a corporation decided to implement for a given version, was only
| limited by computer processing power, storage space, and my
| facility to write macros.
|
| A good example of this is:
| https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/31088/any-...
|
| In addition to a lot of books and so forth, I've used TeX to:
|
| - write the typesetting back-end for "HS" ads for and interactive
| phone book production system
|
| - measure all the ads for a country's phone book, check the
| dimensions against their nominal size, and then either correct
| them (so that they would fit correctly) or note that ad in a list
| (so that the ad could be re-designed at the correct size)
|
| - implement the typesetting back-end for a customizable story
| book where the text was selected by the user and their choices
| would be implemented so as to set the desired appearance of
| images
|
| More importantly, for general development, when making TeX, Dr.
| Donald E. Knuth created Literate Programming:
|
| http://literateprogramming.com/
|
| which programming style has allowed me to make larger and more
| complex programs more easily.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Irrespective of the truth that TeX will never be bulletproof, it
| is beautifully open source.
|
| I'm grinding on the thesis in emacs, zotero, texlive, and qgis.
|
| Not a proprietary package in sight.
|
| And I will use proprietary software when sensible: my Open Source
| leanings are not religious in nature.
|
| But the public nature of the product is huge.
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