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:2, Insightful)
What a strange thing to ask of a website that refuses to allow non-ASCII characters in 2013.
What about pictures? (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA doesn't address the extreme crapitude of embedding pictures in Tex. I could drive myself to drink converting everything to EPS, or poorly scalable bitmaps before embedding them, but I don't want to.
The issues of imperfect typesetting are not the barrier to entry for potential TeX users. Picture embedding is.
Re:Old tech, and limited (Score:5, Insightful)
structure is one thing, output is another. show me some docbook-rendered math that doesn't suck.
The last command-line word processor (Score:2, Insightful)
I always thought of TeX as the last gasp of the RUNOFF/nroff/troff/ditroff line of document preparation; the last of the command-line oriented word processors. Having had access to Interleaf [wikipedia.org] from 1985. TeX seemed so retro. (Interleaf was like Microsoft Word for Sun workstations. It was very early, very good, and very expensive.) 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. Then you could go to the phototypesetting machine.
Once everybody got an interactive display good enough to view the output of TeX, formatting via macro calls was obsolete. Which is why almost everybody uses something like Microsoft Word now.
Re:TeX for Math (Score:4, Insightful)
Way back when my wife was getting her PhD math, I had to learn Tex to help her. She let me bounce my head against Tex while she was busy with her fluid dynamics and then I'd get to explain it to her. I could never understand how there are mathematicians who can easily write in Tex the way I'd write in a word processor. It all just seemed so opaque. De-bugging errors was among the most frustrating things I've ever done on a computer. But the results are impeccable. I still don't think there is a better program for typesetting equations. Or I should say, I don't know of a better one. But if there is one, can someone kindly tell me?
Re:TeX for Math (Score:4, Insightful)
Whereas now, people are still not accustomed to seeing correctly typeset documents and are now completely used to vast numbers of typos, malformed web pages, poor indexing via the semantic web, gratuitous XML, excessively long style sheets, browser incompatibilities, Javascript...
mixed feelings (Score:5, Insightful)
while i have written a thesis in latex, and could not imagine using anything else for papers, i still get frustrated by it.
* any problem is solvable with enough searching online, but the solutions are often like magic. for example i often have figure filenames like "x2.3_y3.4.pdf" latex gives a weird message, search around and eventually you find a forum thread that tells you to put some extra arguments in the includegraphics call, or if you are lucky you might find a mention of the grffile package. in all the years of using it I have never built up an intuition for solving these issue (by comparison programming and linux pretty much make sense to me).
* multiple ways of doing things. should i use \begin{center} or {\centering text text tex}. probably they both work fine, but each of them breaks something else in some obscure case.
* why are some things \command{text text text}, some {\command text text text} and some \begin{command}. compare with XML/SGML where everything is achieved with nesting tags.
* can the output be cleaned up? when i run pdflatex i get several screen-fulls of messages. really it should be showing me errors and optionally warnings.
* the interactive mode when it hits an error. i am sure there is nothing productive i can do in that shell. why is it so hard to get out of. why is -halt-on-error not default?
* why do i have to run pdflatex twice? why can't it figure out if a reference has changed? latexmk (or a good makefile) helps, but it took me years to find it.
Re:TeX for Math (Score:4, Insightful)
I could never understand how there are mathematicians who can easily write in Tex the way I'd write in a word processor.
I can't really explain it other than to say "you get used to it." After a while, the markup becomes transparent; if you're typesetting an equation, for example, you see the layout in your head while you're typing the markup. Which makes it much easier than using an equation editor in a word processor, really--compounded by the fact that equation editors are universally awful.
Re:TeX for Math (Score:5, Insightful)
At some point there was an internal study at Bell Labs after WYSIWYG word processors were beginning to be available that found most people spent 20% of their time futzing with how the document looked instead of writing. Most of that time was wasted because subsequent changes were going to wipe out whatever the little tweaks had been intended to accomplish.
Interesting that today you can buy programs whose primary purpose is to blank all of your display except for a green-on-black mono-spaced text window. Sold as an aid for professional writers who need to pound out umpteen pages of text per day, so need to avoid interruptions and distractions while composing.
Re:TeX for Math (Score:5, Insightful)
TeX is a document typesetting language. HTML, regardless of its flavor, is a markup language that describes the document's contents but doesn't tell the browser how to lay it out.
There's no hope for TeX-as-HTML ever working because they're built on fundamentally incompatible document models.
-JS
P.S. If you want to see what math for HTML looks like, go look at MathML. Next, try actually writing a non-trivial equation in MathML, something like
$\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} e^{-x^2} dx = \sqrt{\pi}$
Then you'll understand why those of use who do this for a living still write our papers in TeX. Even if you don't know TeX, you can probably guess what my equation should look like; you wouldn't say that about the MathML.
Re:hah (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty much just incidental. Reagan's interest in "High Tech" was mostly limited to military applications (like Star Wars) which turned out to be huge financial boondoggles. He killed financial support for solar and other alternative energy technologies and put James Watt in charge of the environment (a man who believed we should use up the environment as soon as possible to hasten the second coming.)
By comparison, Eisenhower set the economic stage for Bell Labs, IBM, Dupont and DOW Chemicals and a brand new government space program named NASA. The JFK expanded all of these things dramatically including the mandate for a man on the moon. Clinton was the seminal power behind America's global advance in internet technologies and in 2000 we were leading the world. With Bush's cutting of support of the internet and redirecting economic focus on fossil fuel, war and housing, America has fallen behind Asia and even Europe. So Ronny may have presided over the 1980s expansion of high tech it would be very hard to claim he was a friend to advancing technology.