Extended TeX: Past, Present, and Future 300
First time accepted submitter Hamburg writes "Frank Mittelbach, member of the LaTeX Project and LaTeX3 developer, reviews significant issues of TeX raised already 20 years ago. Today he evaluates which issues are solved, and which still remain open and why. Examples of issues are managing consecutive hyphens, rivers of vertical spaces and identical words across lines, grid-based design, weighed hyphenation points, and overcoming the the mouth/stomach separation. Modern engines such as pdfTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX are considered with regard to solutions of important problems in typesetting." Note: When TeX was first released, Jimmy Carter was president.
Re:Wrong Font For Program Name (Score:4, Informative)
Re:TeX for Otherstuff (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest issue is old, dead modules (Score:2, Informative)
If you're trying to learn LaTeX, the biggest barrier is that you'll do a search and find tutorials that recommend using old, broken modules. Then you'll change something and wonder "WTF does LaTeX not ever work?!"
It's a great idea, if LaTeX is behaving mysteriously, to use nag and l2tabu, and especially ChkLatex to flag typos and mistakes \macro word. (The macro will eat the whitespace before word, either \macro{} word or \macro\ word is what you meant.) It's also best to stick with only packages in TeXLive.
But always, always before you use a package, find it on CTAN and make sure you've got the latest and greatest, and check the docs that there's not some disclaimer like, "by the way, this package is only here for compatibility, please use package X."
Re:What in the world is "mouth/stomach separation" (Score:2, Informative)
It's sort of like C where you have a preprocessor ("mouth") which does macro expansion and text replacement and then the actual compiler ("stomach").
Quoting this [www.ntg.nl] paper:
Re:TeX for Math (Score:5, Informative)
Re:TeX for Math (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Old tech, and limited (Score:4, Informative)
Never had any problem writing books in LaTeX. The main difficulty has been in deciding whether I want a modern or medieval structure.
Docbook, on the other hand, I hated. I helped with the writing of a few chapters of the Linux Advanced Traffic Control book, which was abandoned in part because Docbook was such a disgusting system.
XML is useless for typesetting. It's not really that useful for organizing anything - you'll have used XML-driven databases, but you'll have never used an XML-driven database that had any performance or serious functionality. (LaTeX doesn't do databases, either, but it doesn't pretend to. It has external engines for databases, which are actually quite nice.)
Web pages? Never had any problem embedding HTML in LaTeX. In fact, I have very very rarely found ANY document style to be LaTeX-incompatible. Load up the correct document type, load up the appropriate stylesheets and you're good. Yes, spiral text is hard. Yes, embedding HDR images can be a pain. Yes, alpha blending isn't that hot. But how often do you use any of these for owner's manuals or contracts?
There are more table classes than I'd really like, and some of the style coding is scruffy, but I challenge anyone to find a genuine, common document type that LaTeX* cannot do as well as or better than any non-TeX wordprocessor, DTP solution or XML-based system. (Non-TeX means you can't compare TeX with Scientific Word, TeXmacs or any other engine that uses TeX behind the scenes.)
(To make it absolutely clear, "as well as or better than" can refer to any one or more parameters. So if I get better-quality output, that's better than. If I can achieve comparable results with cleaner, easier-to-maintain syntax, that's also better than. To win, your solution has to not merely equal but actually exceed what I can do on EVERY parameter, or you have failed to demonstrate something that supercedes.)
A bitcoin to anyone who can do this.
*I am including all dialects of LaTeX here, so LuaLaTeX, PDFTeX, etc, are all things I can consider on my side, as are all WYSIWYG and WYSIWYM editors, Metapost, supplemental services, style sheets, etc. Since this is versus a specific alternative, anything comparable for that specific alternative is fair game for you to use, but you can't mix in other alternatives. It has to be one versus the complete TeX family if you want to prove your point.
Re:The last command-line word processor (Score:4, Informative)
"TeX still had a compile-run-debug workflow, and without a graphic display, you had to run a hard copy on something like an electrostatic printer or a daisy wheel printer to check the results."
When TeX was new, "a graphic display" was common and there were many previewers available pre-1.0. The idea that anyone previewed work on a daisy wheel printer is absolutely ludicrous. Never happened and would be useless.
"Then you could go to the phototypesetting machine."
No, you would go to screen previewer, then a laser printer, and then only to a phototypesetter if you were publishing. You sound like someone who didn't use TeX in those days.
"Once everybody got an interactive display good enough to view the output of TeX..."
You mean like a PC in 1985? Seriously, you pretend to be a historian but you aren't one. I, on the other hand, cowrote one of the first PC TeX previewers, in...1985. I am actually familiar with how these tools were used then, and it's clear you weren't a TeX user. As an Interleaf user, it seems you were the type privileged by limitless company money. Not many even had access to a machine capable of running Interleaf in those days. In my next job I worked with someone who was an Interleaf fan and who had the clout to get the company to buy him, and only him, a seat. He liked it, no one else used it or really even got to see its output, and TeX worked well at zero cost.
Many consider "compile-run-debug" to be an advantage but perhaps not since it became trendy to call that a "workflow". What-You-See-Is-All-You-Get.
Re:TeX for Math (Score:5, Informative)
I just gave a talk for management. One fellow remarked on the quality of my slides and didn't think they were done using PP. Yep, I said, they are Latex (Beamer), and I can cut and paste from my papers. Using PP for math will make you go blind.
Re:TeX for Math (Score:5, Informative)
When all your writing is text, the whole point of Tex is lost, and you might as well use word.
No it isn't. Apart from the ease of writing equations, one major point for LaTeX is that you can just write the damn text and you don't have to worry about how it looks. The final result is going to be beautiful. In Word, you can choose the font and size of all levels of headings, the line spacing and the margins, and even when you have spent time doing that, it still doesn't look as good as LaTeX does out of the box.
Re:What about pictures? (Score:3, Informative)
I know you are trying to be funny, but searching for ``latex images'' on google the first page is all tutorials on how to insert an image into a Latex document. The third link was a link to a google image search wich did have the kind of thing you are implying. still 9/10 relevant results is not bad.
Re:TeX for Math (Score:4, Informative)
We just decided to move to LaTeX again for all documents that customers do not have the right to edit (most of them). The alternative was Word 2010. Reasons are [...] svn compatible, [...]
That's a rather laconic way of putting it. Real revision control gives you a whole array of essential things, like collaborative editing, an audit trail, the ability to work on version 2 while version 1 is still being finalized ...
That's why *all* binary document formats (not just MS Office) fail my personal test.