5 ms·

Surely. I'm just saying modern times call for modern languages, and that makes me uneasy about TeX.

by j2kun 11y ago

christopheraden 11y ago
What about something ala Neovim? I've only ever looked at Tex from the perspective of a user (I don't program my own macros too often), so I don't know how hard it'd be, but why not a language overhaul?
- _delirium 11y ago
  XeTeX and LuaTeX are projects you might be interested in.
- wtbob 11y ago
  The issue is that so many man-centuries (man-millennia?) are invested into TeX & LaTeX that sinking time into something else is very, very expensive (much like trying to build a better CPU than amd64 or arm64). TeX is really, really amazingly powerful. It can do almost anything a typesetter could want to do, fairly easily, and it can do just about everything, one way or another. And its output is heart-achingly beautiful. Sadly, the code necessary to achieve that output ranges from…heart-achingly beautiful to heart-breakingly ugly. There are other projects out there, of course. I do think that TeX & LaTeX are close to a local maximum, if not al the way there. XML, in comparison, is a booger joke.
  - goalieca 11y ago
    > XML, in comparison, is a booger joke. A dried up booger on the floor.
  - dschep 11y ago
    > I do think that TeX & LaTeX are close to a local maximum, if not al the way there. Funny you say that since TeX's version scheme (in part) is that it approaches pi. And IIRC will be pi upon Knuth's death.
  - jandrese 11y ago
    XML isn't even really in the same field as TeX. TeX is for typesetting, that's all it does. XML is for encoding general data. It's like saying PDFs are way better than protocol buffers. TeX is incredibly powerful, but it's also incredibly idiosyncratic. I also personally think Computer Modern is an ugly font.
    - leephillips 11y ago
      TeX has long ago gained the power to use any OpenType/TrueType font on your system, so dislike of CM is really not a reason to avoid using it. (I happen to like CM, but I know it's disliked by multitudes.)
    - wtbob 11y ago
      > XML is for encoding general data. No, it's really not. XML is a markup language, not a data-encoding language. JSON, S-expressions, ASN.1 &c. are all data encodings; TeX, LaTeX, HTML and XML are markup languages. > TeX is incredibly powerful, but it's also incredibly idiosyncratic. Agreed. > I also personally think Computer Modern is an ugly font. Eh, it's not great on-screen, but it looks pretty good on paper. But TeX & LaTeX have supported multiple fonts since the beginning.
- CarVac 11y ago
  The trouble is the ecosystem of packages that people would have to redo. If you replaced TeX, LaTeX itself would need replacing, as would every single LaTeX package and class that you ever want to use, ones like microtype and stuff, would have to be rewritten. To be honest, the multi-pass deal isn't that bad, but the macro expansion system is crazy complicated. Every once in a while after working in LaTeX I'll get the feeling I understand it, but that feeling inevitably dissipates after ten minutes or so.
  - e12e 11y ago
    Very much this. As far as I can gather TeX is actually rather simple - considering that it basically does what PostScript does. Now, while coding raw PostScript might be fun as an exercise, most would prefer not to. LaTeX lands somewhere between PostScript, and something higher up. To meaningfully replace Tex/LaTeX/Metafont and even just a selection of "the best" LaTeX packages... would be a herculean task. Making a "new" TeX probably wouldn't be that hard - but it's also something that wouldn't be that useful. I would very much like something that's both simpler and also keeps some of the lessons learned/implemented (word spacing/splitting, page layout, page breaks etc). As for other "tools in the same space", I do like pandoc a lot. I want to like python's ReST (Re-Structured Text) - but that's a package I feel is in need of a rewrite/redesign. Many good ideas there - but figuring out how to take a simple document and produce simple, modern (preferably somewhat semantic) html for example -- or to produce a decent looking PDF without needing all of LaTeX/Texlive on hand isn't easy. Rewriting ReST tools would be a lot of work, but I think if one didn't try for 100% backwards (output, plugin) compatibility it might be worthwhile. The astute reader will notice that ReST/Pandoc deals with structured documents, and not really layout for paper/screen (both use TeX/LaTeX as an output target/pipeline). I don't know of anything that comes close to TeX/LaTeX for "rasterized" output. On the other hand, I also don't know of any package/combination that'll make TeX/LaTeX produce anything but messy, 90s-style html -- that generally looks awful. Even if you were to try and force a modern set of CSS down over the resulting mess. If anyone knows of a modern hypertext package for TeX/LaTeX or some similar tool, I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
mjn 11y ago
I've seen projects announced on and off to make a next-gen TeX or TeX-like from a clean start, but they never seem to go anywhere. I think writing a good rendering engine is just a ton of work. Two approaches I see as plausible: 1. Use TeX as a "document assembly language" of sorts, a pure back-end rendering target not exposed to the user, and do your document markup/scripting in some other front-end language. Pandoc [1] is a start at building infrastructure for this. You can then build a new renderer too if you want, to remove the dependency on TeX, but at least in the meantime you have a pathway to producing quality output right now. 2. Build something on top of HTML+CSS (maybe also +JS). Advantages of this would be that it'd make it relatively easy to target the web with the same document source, and open-source web browsers have already sunk a ton of development time into rendering. CSS even includes a bunch of print-oriented features that in principle provide markup for most of what you might need here, though browsers for obvious reasons haven't tended to prioritize those parts. wkhtmltopdf [2] is a project aiming to build a to-print or to-PDF document workflow on top of Webkit. However imo the results are still not near TeX-replacement level. I believe the gold standard currently, if you want high-quality print out of HTML+CSS, is the proprietary PrinceXML [3]. [1] http://pandoc.org/ http://pandoc.org/ [2] http://wkhtmltopdf.org/ http://wkhtmltopdf.org/ [3] http://www.princexml.com/ http://www.princexml.com/
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
userbinator 11y ago
I seriously doubt that implementations of any "modern languages" - or any other languages for that matter - have had anywhere near the astonishingly low defect rate and efficiency of TeX.
- legulere 11y ago
  The TeX ecosystem (what you actually use) is riddled with tons of bugs. Images that end up somewhere totally wrong, text/graphics overflowing onto the page margins, are just some of the bugs that you regularly have to fight with, but there are also some more higher level systemic bugs like that there's no formal grammar. I don't know what is supposed to be efficient concerning TeX
  - jimhefferon 11y ago
    > Images that end up somewhere totally wrong, text/graphics overflowing onto the page margins, are just some of the bugs that you regularly have to fight with I write a lot of TeX, and I have never found that those things are the fault of the standard software; rather, they are my fault.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > I don't know what is supposed to be efficient concerning TeX The absence of a better alternative in the domain, even though attempts to serve the domain by other tools (including ones using more "modern languages") have come and gone over the years. TeX isn't theoretically ideal, its just practically very good and the expected cost to benefit ratio of a ground-up replacement is very high.
sklogic 11y ago
People are trying to build alternatives, see http://www.patoline.org/ http://www.patoline.org/ for example

Surely. I'm just saying modern times call for modern languages, and that makes me uneasy about TeX.

by j2kun 11y ago

Surely. I'm just saying modern times call for modern languages, and that makes me uneasy about TeX.

What about something ala Neovim? I've only ever looked at Tex from the perspective of a user (I don't program my own macros too often), so I don't know how hard it'd be, but why not a language overhaul?

_delirium 11y ago
XeTeX and LuaTeX are projects you might be interested in.
wtbob 11y ago
The issue is that so many man-centuries (man-millennia?) are invested into TeX & LaTeX that sinking time into something else is very, very expensive (much like trying to build a better CPU than amd64 or arm64). TeX is really, really amazingly powerful. It can do almost anything a typesetter could want to do, fairly easily, and it can do just about everything, one way or another. And its output is heart-achingly beautiful. Sadly, the code necessary to achieve that output ranges from…heart-achingly beautiful to heart-breakingly ugly. There are other projects out there, of course. I do think that TeX & LaTeX are close to a local maximum, if not al the way there. XML, in comparison, is a booger joke.
- goalieca 11y ago
  > XML, in comparison, is a booger joke. A dried up booger on the floor.
- dschep 11y ago
  > I do think that TeX & LaTeX are close to a local maximum, if not al the way there. Funny you say that since TeX's version scheme (in part) is that it approaches pi. And IIRC will be pi upon Knuth's death.
- jandrese 11y ago
  XML isn't even really in the same field as TeX. TeX is for typesetting, that's all it does. XML is for encoding general data. It's like saying PDFs are way better than protocol buffers. TeX is incredibly powerful, but it's also incredibly idiosyncratic. I also personally think Computer Modern is an ugly font.
  - leephillips 11y ago
    TeX has long ago gained the power to use any OpenType/TrueType font on your system, so dislike of CM is really not a reason to avoid using it. (I happen to like CM, but I know it's disliked by multitudes.)
  - wtbob 11y ago
    > XML is for encoding general data. No, it's really not. XML is a markup language, not a data-encoding language. JSON, S-expressions, ASN.1 &c. are all data encodings; TeX, LaTeX, HTML and XML are markup languages. > TeX is incredibly powerful, but it's also incredibly idiosyncratic. Agreed. > I also personally think Computer Modern is an ugly font. Eh, it's not great on-screen, but it looks pretty good on paper. But TeX & LaTeX have supported multiple fonts since the beginning.
CarVac 11y ago
The trouble is the ecosystem of packages that people would have to redo. If you replaced TeX, LaTeX itself would need replacing, as would every single LaTeX package and class that you ever want to use, ones like microtype and stuff, would have to be rewritten. To be honest, the multi-pass deal isn't that bad, but the macro expansion system is crazy complicated. Every once in a while after working in LaTeX I'll get the feeling I understand it, but that feeling inevitably dissipates after ten minutes or so.
- e12e 11y ago
  Very much this. As far as I can gather TeX is actually rather simple - considering that it basically does what PostScript does. Now, while coding raw PostScript might be fun as an exercise, most would prefer not to. LaTeX lands somewhere between PostScript, and something higher up. To meaningfully replace Tex/LaTeX/Metafont and even just a selection of "the best" LaTeX packages... would be a herculean task. Making a "new" TeX probably wouldn't be that hard - but it's also something that wouldn't be that useful. I would very much like something that's both simpler and also keeps some of the lessons learned/implemented (word spacing/splitting, page layout, page breaks etc). As for other "tools in the same space", I do like pandoc a lot. I want to like python's ReST (Re-Structured Text) - but that's a package I feel is in need of a rewrite/redesign. Many good ideas there - but figuring out how to take a simple document and produce simple, modern (preferably somewhat semantic) html for example -- or to produce a decent looking PDF without needing all of LaTeX/Texlive on hand isn't easy. Rewriting ReST tools would be a lot of work, but I think if one didn't try for 100% backwards (output, plugin) compatibility it might be worthwhile. The astute reader will notice that ReST/Pandoc deals with structured documents, and not really layout for paper/screen (both use TeX/LaTeX as an output target/pipeline). I don't know of anything that comes close to TeX/LaTeX for "rasterized" output. On the other hand, I also don't know of any package/combination that'll make TeX/LaTeX produce anything but messy, 90s-style html -- that generally looks awful. Even if you were to try and force a modern set of CSS down over the resulting mess. If anyone knows of a modern hypertext package for TeX/LaTeX or some similar tool, I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago

mjn 11y ago

I've seen projects announced on and off to make a next-gen TeX or TeX-like from a clean start, but they never seem to go anywhere. I think writing a good rendering engine is just a ton of work. Two approaches I see as plausible: 1. Use TeX as a "document assembly language" of sorts, a pure back-end rendering target not exposed to the user, and do your document markup/scripting in some other front-end language. Pandoc [1] is a start at building infrastructure for this. You can then build a new renderer too if you want, to remove the dependency on TeX, but at least in the meantime you have a pathway to producing quality output right now. 2. Build something on top of HTML+CSS (maybe also +JS). Advantages of this would be that it'd make it relatively easy to target the web with the same document source, and open-source web browsers have already sunk a ton of development time into rendering. CSS even includes a bunch of print-oriented features that in principle provide markup for most of what you might need here, though browsers for obvious reasons haven't tended to prioritize those parts. wkhtmltopdf [2] is a project aiming to build a to-print or to-PDF document workflow on top of Webkit. However imo the results are still not near TeX-replacement level. I believe the gold standard currently, if you want high-quality print out of HTML+CSS, is the proprietary PrinceXML [3]. [1] http://pandoc.org/ http://pandoc.org/ [2] http://wkhtmltopdf.org/ http://wkhtmltopdf.org/ [3] http://www.princexml.com/ http://www.princexml.com/

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

userbinator 11y ago

I seriously doubt that implementations of any "modern languages" - or any other languages for that matter - have had anywhere near the astonishingly low defect rate and efficiency of TeX.

legulere 11y ago
The TeX ecosystem (what you actually use) is riddled with tons of bugs. Images that end up somewhere totally wrong, text/graphics overflowing onto the page margins, are just some of the bugs that you regularly have to fight with, but there are also some more higher level systemic bugs like that there's no formal grammar. I don't know what is supposed to be efficient concerning TeX
- jimhefferon 11y ago
  > Images that end up somewhere totally wrong, text/graphics overflowing onto the page margins, are just some of the bugs that you regularly have to fight with I write a lot of TeX, and I have never found that those things are the fault of the standard software; rather, they are my fault.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > I don't know what is supposed to be efficient concerning TeX The absence of a better alternative in the domain, even though attempts to serve the domain by other tools (including ones using more "modern languages") have come and gone over the years. TeX isn't theoretically ideal, its just practically very good and the expected cost to benefit ratio of a ground-up replacement is very high.

sklogic 11y ago

People are trying to build alternatives, see http://www.patoline.org/ http://www.patoline.org/ for example