9 ms·

TeX Live 2017 released

161 points by l2dy 9y ago

kstenerud 9y ago
I've given up on tex. I'm typesetting a book right now, and getting the epub going was a piece of cake. Then I tried using LibreOffice for the print version and it was a nightmare to control via the API and buggy as hell. So I decided now would be a good time to try tex. After 2 solid days of yak shaving, I threw in the towel. It's too fragmented, the documentation is terrible (complete - all 600 pages worth, but terrible for discovery or learning). It's basically rabbit hole after rabbit hole, with most, if not all, tutorials directed towards typesetting your homework assignments. All of the CSS/HTML based solutions cost thousands per license, so that's out. I'm now on to SILE, which fixes a lot of problems with tex. I can only hope that it's advanced enough to properly typeset a novel.
- radarsat1 9y ago
  I ask this as a totally naive person regarding novels and publishing, but who is fairly happy with writing papers in Latex: what is difficult about typesetting a novel? I ask because I would think that novels would be on the easier end of typesetting situations, but clearly your experience is different.. I just can't imagine what you are struggling with. I've "typeset" many novels by converting them from text formats to latex for the purpose of reading on my e-reader and haven't had many difficulties other than dealing with unsupported character encodings. Of course I can imagine that the professional situation is quite difficult, but I'm surprised it's so different. Care to share details of the trouble you had?
  - kstenerud 9y ago
    Getting otf fonts working, getting images working and properly positioned, getting alternating left-right headers to behave themselves, especially at a chapter start. Every new thing involved going back to ctan (I had high hopes for memoir) or searching online in the hopes that someone took the time to write down how they did it. Most of the time you'd just find "how to make your math formulas look pretty" or "how to typeset your thesis" You'd think that typesetting a novel would be a gimme, but in the current ecosystem (tex or otherwise) it's a shambles.
    - radarsat1 9y ago
      Hm. Font stuff I'm not surprised, fonts can be tricky especially in Latex, you're definitely right. Bit surprised images were difficult. I guess I haven't had to deal much with margin and header issues. fancyhdr can certainly be confusing. Did you try "lyx"? I guess for what it does help with, it might not actually make any of these particular issues easier.. Of course, it's all about using a good template. Usually I find there are tons of resources out there, but it does often involve finding someone with the same problem and asking the right question.
    - stephen_g 9y ago
      OTF is dead easy if you use XeTeX (specifically the xelatex command). The fancyhdr should give enough control over headers. Yeah, floating images can be annoying. I use it mainly for technical documentation (product manuals, etc.), so I've never tried the memoir class. But what I find myself doing mostly these days is makinng my own classes, usually based on article because it seems to me to have the most 'neutral' defaults. It's a very steep learning curve, but I've found it an extremely valuable technology to be able to use. Asking questions on the TeX stack overflow is a pretty good way to get help also.
      - marvy 9y ago
        I agree with the last point: asking questions on tex.stackexchange is a GREAT way to get help. Sometimes you run into an "impossible" problem and some wizard will show up and fix it in minutes.
      - dbrgn 9y ago
        XeTeX and the KOMA document classes really bring you a long way.
    - jkn 9y ago
      I'm typesetting a series of novels with LaTeX and memoir and I share your pain. I didn't have much trouble with fonts (fontspec is pretty awesome compared to the old TeX way), but things like typesetting on a grid, that was difficult. I'm now reading on ConTeXt and it seems to be a much more adequate TeX format. For one thing, it supports grid typesetting! LaTeX's philosophy is to separate style and content, leaving the style to "someone else". It seems that ConTeXt's philosophy is to separate style and content, but still make it easy for the user to choose the style. It's also more integrated: comprehensive core, few third-party packages, meaning less compatibility issues (but less choice too). I'll definitely try it for my next project.
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    I've typeset novels, technical manuals, math, poetry, articles, chess diagrams, posters, presentations, my resume, and probably a bunch of other things in LaTeX. It wasn't a big deal, though it's definitely a rabbit hole in terms of the amount of tweaking that's required if you want everything just right, if you're doing something fancy, and if what you're doing doesn't quite fit any of the many pre-written templates. The great thing, though, is that once you've tweaked one document the way you like it, now you've got a template to use for documents of the same type, which should only require minor tweaking in the future. There's definitely a learning curve to LaTeX, but not a huge one, as it's mostly just a markup language. If you want to get in to the programming side of it, or if you want to learn one of the larger LaTeX packages really well, that would take you more time, but not even then it shouldn't scare anyone, particularly if you've learned other high level programming languages before. Diving in to TeX itself could be a different story, but I can't comment since I've never bothered to learn it myself, and haven't had to for anything that I've done with LaTeX.
    - jacobolus 9y ago
      Anyone who wants everything “just right” and is particular about what that means – and doesn’t have to make more than 2 documents in a particular template (or maybe even if they do) – should just start with InDesign, and save hours of trouble. Where LaTeX shines is for cases where you don’t really care about the details of the layout, but just want someone else to handle it all in a somewhat sensible way when you hand them a basic manuscript, and not shit all over itself the way MS Word does on a regular basis. LaTeX is great for generic college papers where you don’t have figures and don’t have time to worry about the layout. By contrast it’s a huge pain in the butt for something like magazines, coffee-table books, or posters. (It’s also the best way to typeset mathematical formulas, of course.)
    - xvilka 9y ago
      Well, for doing fancy stuff including complex programming macroses LuaTeX suits much better these days.
    - posterboy 9y ago
      That doesn't answer the question. To me as a common reader, the typesetting of a novel requires in no particular order - nice block text adjustment, line-breaks and hyphenation, line/paragraph,chapter spacing - margins and padding, page numbers, and chapter headings - font selection, supporting ligatures and kerning if you are fancy I'm sure the devil is in the details, but how much detail can there be in basic running text? I'm fine reading novels rendered by basic html engines without css, even in monospaced font. The most important consideration for a text layout engine seems to be the font data format and corresponding font engine, which I don't know much about, because I don't really care.
- xname2 9y ago
  You can try bookdown.
- chrisanthropic 9y ago
  I wrote a free tool a bit ago that wraps Pandoc/LaTeX/Jekyll and takes Markdown inputs and exports epub, mobi, and print-ready PDFs (5x8 & 6x9 Pdfx-1a compliant), specifically for fiction. You can check out the LaTeX template in the repo. http://chrisanthropic.github.io/Open-Publisher-Documentation/ http://chrisanthropic.github.io/Open-Publisher-Documentation...
  - homarp 9y ago
    you should add a LICENSE or LICENSE.txt file
    - chrisanthropic 9y ago
      done, MIT license added.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Kootle 9y ago
  Have you seen the KOMA-script or memoir latex classes? They are very suited for typesetting books and have great documentation.
- whyenot 9y ago
  I found the memoir class frustrating to use when I was writing a technical manuscript (a botanical flora). It's great if you are willing to accept the defaults, but if you want to change things, the documentation is actually pretty spare. You can waste hours or even days tweaking and rebuilding your document to have it formatted the way you would like -- tasks that could be done in a lot less time in graphical page layout software like InDesign. I ended up composing my work in Word and then importing it into InDesign. That was a lot more satisfying than using latex for me, for writing that is not math heavy.
- petters 9y ago
  Two days? I wrote my thesis in Tex and i probably spent two weeks! But the end result was typographically great! When you're in academia, you can afford to spend that time. These days, it's all Google Docs for me. I've had complete strangers email me with Tex questions just from encountering my thesis. The community on Stack Exchange was very helpful for me.
- svat 9y ago
  What 600-page documentation are you referring to? The TeXbook by Knuth goes only up to page 483 (with the appendixes starting on page 304). By the way, a really excellent book for (plain) TeX is A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy: it's truly for the beginner, yet at the end you'll be practically an expert, or at least know how to become one. I've seen people get frustrated with LaTeX (not TeX), but that's because it was designed to make it difficult to do typesetting: instead the LaTeX philosophy is to specify only the document structure, and leave all the typesetting to a package that you hope someone has written.
  - Crontab 9y ago
    Your comment is interesting to me. I've read about TeX and LaTeX from time to time and it was my impression that everyone used LaTeX because TeX itself was difficult to use. And I never questioned this because almost every article I could find only spoke about LaTeX. Your comment is making me reevaluate what I thought I understood.
    - svat 9y ago
      Yes, an overwhelming majority use LaTeX rather than TeX directly. (Well, among the tiny number of people who use TeX/LaTeX at all.) The reason, though, is not that TeX is difficult to use: it's that TeX is a system for typesetting, and most people don't need typesetting. If you're writing a paper for publication in a journal, they probably have their own typesetting style. With LaTeX you can just specify your paper as a sequence of paragraphs, "sections", a title, an author, and so on, and, by including the journal's style file (assuming it's good), your paper will come out typeset in that journal's style. This philosophy is explained at https://www.latex-project.org/about/ https://www.latex-project.org/about/ This is great for certain (many) kinds of documents. The problem with this, though, is that the moment you want to change the appearance and get into typesetting yourself, you're fighting a system that was actively designed to prevent you from doing this. An analogy may be a system like, say, WordPress: if what you have is a blog, then it would work for you, and you even get to choose one of several “themes” that others have written, and so on. The set of available plugins and customizations can even be impressively versatile (for example, I noticed that time.com runs on WordPress, and apparently so do a number of other non-blog sites: https://vip.wordpress.com/clients/ https://vip.wordpress.com/clients/). But ultimately, if you're trying to figure it out by yourself and have your own ideas about what your website should look like, a system like this will always be more frustrating than the alternative (of having full control). TeX is not difficult to use, though in the beginning you'd have to specify manually things like the typesetting of the document title (put it in a bold font at 16pt, centered on a line...). LaTeX has features to automate many such common typesettings tasks, but it has its own flaws (some stemming from the fact that it's implemented using TeX macros, which weren't designed for such heavy “programming”).
- lottin 9y ago
  It doesn't help either that all the basic references are in the form of books. Finding the relevant bits of information can take a long time. Besides documentation, another of TeX's weaknesses is its lack of debugging capabilities, which makes it really hard to figure out what goes on behind the scenes.
tehabe 9y ago
Wasn't there the idea of making TeX Live a rolling release? I guess the idea was there but it turned out it would be impossible w/o breaking thing from time to time.
lindbergh 9y ago
LaTeX is still one of my favourite piece of technology of all time. It is at time so alien, yet beautiful. I now get closer to 10+ years of programming experience, yet nothing comes close to debugging a faulty LaTeX custom command... it can quickly turn to an unreadable mess, but you have to admit that once everything is swept under a preamble.tex file, the rest of the code is very clean. Especially with auctex in emacs which displays most math symbols as their true unicode counterpart. Funny story: one of my first gig was working in a music instruments shop where I was basically the IT guy, from sysadmin to web dev. At some point the software that created the barcode labels stopped working. Now I had to find an automatic way to make those labels, so of course I turned to LaTeX. All I needed to do was to write a batch file calling `pdflatex` with a template tex file and a pdf file for the label was promptly sent to the printer! There is probably some python package for doing the same thing, but I was so proud of seeing Computer Modern font tagged to every instruments in the shop!
- Tharre 9y ago
  Does anyone know a similar plugin for vim?
  - mscholz 9y ago
    If you set `conceallevel' to 2 and use syntax highlighting, you should get it in vim without any plugins needed (although I have only neovim installed). For example, \AA -> Å, $\pm$ -> ±, and {\'e} -> é. http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/syntax.html#tex-conceal http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/syntax.html#tex-concea...
    - Lxr 9y ago
      Does anyone else find this "feature" really annoying? I always set conceallevel to 0 but vim seems to constantly find a way to replace my code with unicode.
      - cormacrelf 9y ago
        It could be that you're using a font with OpenType ligatures, like Fira Code.
fithisux 9y ago
Congratulations guys for the hard work.
- jimhefferon 9y ago
  Yes, indeed. It is quite an accomplishment. If you find TeX, LaTeX, and friends useful, check out the TeX Users Group at http://www.tug.org http://www.tug.org. If you'd consider supporting the folks who bring you TeX Live, you can read the Aims and Benefits page at https://tug.org/aims_ben.html https://tug.org/aims_ben.html. Note that a membership is very reasonable-- if you choose an electronic copy of the journal then membership is $45 annually, or $15 annually if you are a student, senior, etc. The details are at https://tug.org/join.html https://tug.org/join.html.
svat 9y ago
It's amazing how many different and dissimilar components go into a TeX distribution like TeX Live: - At the base, there is Donald Knuth's program `tex`, itself written in a strange language (WEB) that is essentially an ad-hoc macro-expansion system (not used by many others, and not even by Knuth today, who prefers CWEB), and compiles (via `tangle`) to a dialect/version of Pascal (“Pascal-H”) for which a compiler hasn't existed for years. [It also "compiles" (via `weave`) to the printed book TeX: The Program] - Then there is LaTeX, an elaborate set of macros written originally by Leslie Lamport (another Turing award winner) and later by a team, to be interpreted by the TeX program, which was never designed by its original creator for such elaborate programming. - There are entire new programs (aka TeX engines) like pdfTeX and XeTeX, created by editing the original `tex.web` in different directions. - There are the binaries of all these programs, compiled using `web2c`, a program written solely for converting all these WEB programs written in (basically) Pascal into C code, which is neither an arbitrary Pascal-to-C converter nor even an arbitrary WEB-to-C converter. - There is LuaTeX, a manual rewrite of TeX in C, embedding a Lua interpreter and adding many hooks and extensions. - There are thousands of macro packages written by thousands of people of varying levels of skill and foresight, on top of TeX, LaTeX, and other macro packages themselves: essentially everything on CTAN (which was inspiration for Perl's CPAN, and ultimately many languages' package repositories like Python's PyPI etc.) And all this without even mentioning ConTEXt, Metafont, MetaPost, BibTeX, Kpathsea, various assorted utilities, graphics drivers…
- mseri 9y ago
  A now also the recently announced tectonic [0]. I also remember watching a talk about a clojure re-implementation but I think I never saw it released anywhere. [0]: https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/
- ygaf 9y ago
  Amazing is a friendly word for it.
- styfle 9y ago
  This reminds me of Markdown before the CommonMark standard was created. Actually...even with the standard, there are so many derivatives.
SwellJoe 9y ago
I wrote my first (well, only) book in SGML Docbook, which I processed through a LaTeX toolchain. Sebastian Rahtz answered so many of my questions back then (~15 years ago), despite them often being stupid questions (because I was entirely new to TeX/LaTeX). I just read that he passed away last year. TeX Live was originally his project, among many other document-related projects. I'm happy to see it continues without him.
shawnee_ 9y ago
Looks like it has added many of the enhancements from recent updates to luatex. LuaLaTeX has saved my hide more times than I care to mention... Because for reasons I do not understand, there are still some people from the dark ages who insist on shipping PDFs with documentation that does not belong in a PDF.
xvilka 9y ago
There is still no uniform way to insert animation in the slides/paper. Partly it's because a problems of PDF readers, but there are problems in TeX-parts too.
brians 9y ago
What's new: https://www.tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x1-840009.2 https://www.tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x...

161 points by l2dy 9y ago

I've given up on tex. I'm typesetting a book right now, and getting the epub going was a piece of cake. Then I tried using LibreOffice for the print version and it was a nightmare to control via the API and buggy as hell. So I decided now would be a good time to try tex. After 2 solid days of yak shaving, I threw in the towel. It's too fragmented, the documentation is terrible (complete - all 600 pages worth, but terrible for discovery or learning). It's basically rabbit hole after rabbit hole, with most, if not all, tutorials directed towards typesetting your homework assignments. All of the CSS/HTML based solutions cost thousands per license, so that's out. I'm now on to SILE, which fixes a lot of problems with tex. I can only hope that it's advanced enough to properly typeset a novel.

radarsat1 9y ago
I ask this as a totally naive person regarding novels and publishing, but who is fairly happy with writing papers in Latex: what is difficult about typesetting a novel? I ask because I would think that novels would be on the easier end of typesetting situations, but clearly your experience is different.. I just can't imagine what you are struggling with. I've "typeset" many novels by converting them from text formats to latex for the purpose of reading on my e-reader and haven't had many difficulties other than dealing with unsupported character encodings. Of course I can imagine that the professional situation is quite difficult, but I'm surprised it's so different. Care to share details of the trouble you had?
- kstenerud 9y ago
  Getting otf fonts working, getting images working and properly positioned, getting alternating left-right headers to behave themselves, especially at a chapter start. Every new thing involved going back to ctan (I had high hopes for memoir) or searching online in the hopes that someone took the time to write down how they did it. Most of the time you'd just find "how to make your math formulas look pretty" or "how to typeset your thesis" You'd think that typesetting a novel would be a gimme, but in the current ecosystem (tex or otherwise) it's a shambles.
  - radarsat1 9y ago
    Hm. Font stuff I'm not surprised, fonts can be tricky especially in Latex, you're definitely right. Bit surprised images were difficult. I guess I haven't had to deal much with margin and header issues. fancyhdr can certainly be confusing. Did you try "lyx"? I guess for what it does help with, it might not actually make any of these particular issues easier.. Of course, it's all about using a good template. Usually I find there are tons of resources out there, but it does often involve finding someone with the same problem and asking the right question.
  - stephen_g 9y ago
    OTF is dead easy if you use XeTeX (specifically the xelatex command). The fancyhdr should give enough control over headers. Yeah, floating images can be annoying. I use it mainly for technical documentation (product manuals, etc.), so I've never tried the memoir class. But what I find myself doing mostly these days is makinng my own classes, usually based on article because it seems to me to have the most 'neutral' defaults. It's a very steep learning curve, but I've found it an extremely valuable technology to be able to use. Asking questions on the TeX stack overflow is a pretty good way to get help also.
    - marvy 9y ago
      I agree with the last point: asking questions on tex.stackexchange is a GREAT way to get help. Sometimes you run into an "impossible" problem and some wizard will show up and fix it in minutes.
    - dbrgn 9y ago
      XeTeX and the KOMA document classes really bring you a long way.
  - jkn 9y ago
    I'm typesetting a series of novels with LaTeX and memoir and I share your pain. I didn't have much trouble with fonts (fontspec is pretty awesome compared to the old TeX way), but things like typesetting on a grid, that was difficult. I'm now reading on ConTeXt and it seems to be a much more adequate TeX format. For one thing, it supports grid typesetting! LaTeX's philosophy is to separate style and content, leaving the style to "someone else". It seems that ConTeXt's philosophy is to separate style and content, but still make it easy for the user to choose the style. It's also more integrated: comprehensive core, few third-party packages, meaning less compatibility issues (but less choice too). I'll definitely try it for my next project.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  I've typeset novels, technical manuals, math, poetry, articles, chess diagrams, posters, presentations, my resume, and probably a bunch of other things in LaTeX. It wasn't a big deal, though it's definitely a rabbit hole in terms of the amount of tweaking that's required if you want everything just right, if you're doing something fancy, and if what you're doing doesn't quite fit any of the many pre-written templates. The great thing, though, is that once you've tweaked one document the way you like it, now you've got a template to use for documents of the same type, which should only require minor tweaking in the future. There's definitely a learning curve to LaTeX, but not a huge one, as it's mostly just a markup language. If you want to get in to the programming side of it, or if you want to learn one of the larger LaTeX packages really well, that would take you more time, but not even then it shouldn't scare anyone, particularly if you've learned other high level programming languages before. Diving in to TeX itself could be a different story, but I can't comment since I've never bothered to learn it myself, and haven't had to for anything that I've done with LaTeX.
  - jacobolus 9y ago
    Anyone who wants everything “just right” and is particular about what that means – and doesn’t have to make more than 2 documents in a particular template (or maybe even if they do) – should just start with InDesign, and save hours of trouble. Where LaTeX shines is for cases where you don’t really care about the details of the layout, but just want someone else to handle it all in a somewhat sensible way when you hand them a basic manuscript, and not shit all over itself the way MS Word does on a regular basis. LaTeX is great for generic college papers where you don’t have figures and don’t have time to worry about the layout. By contrast it’s a huge pain in the butt for something like magazines, coffee-table books, or posters. (It’s also the best way to typeset mathematical formulas, of course.)
  - xvilka 9y ago
    Well, for doing fancy stuff including complex programming macroses LuaTeX suits much better these days.
  - posterboy 9y ago
    That doesn't answer the question. To me as a common reader, the typesetting of a novel requires in no particular order - nice block text adjustment, line-breaks and hyphenation, line/paragraph,chapter spacing - margins and padding, page numbers, and chapter headings - font selection, supporting ligatures and kerning if you are fancy I'm sure the devil is in the details, but how much detail can there be in basic running text? I'm fine reading novels rendered by basic html engines without css, even in monospaced font. The most important consideration for a text layout engine seems to be the font data format and corresponding font engine, which I don't know much about, because I don't really care.
xname2 9y ago
You can try bookdown.
chrisanthropic 9y ago
I wrote a free tool a bit ago that wraps Pandoc/LaTeX/Jekyll and takes Markdown inputs and exports epub, mobi, and print-ready PDFs (5x8 & 6x9 Pdfx-1a compliant), specifically for fiction. You can check out the LaTeX template in the repo. http://chrisanthropic.github.io/Open-Publisher-Documentation/ http://chrisanthropic.github.io/Open-Publisher-Documentation...
- homarp 9y ago
  you should add a LICENSE or LICENSE.txt file
  - chrisanthropic 9y ago
    done, MIT license added.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Kootle 9y ago
Have you seen the KOMA-script or memoir latex classes? They are very suited for typesetting books and have great documentation.
whyenot 9y ago
I found the memoir class frustrating to use when I was writing a technical manuscript (a botanical flora). It's great if you are willing to accept the defaults, but if you want to change things, the documentation is actually pretty spare. You can waste hours or even days tweaking and rebuilding your document to have it formatted the way you would like -- tasks that could be done in a lot less time in graphical page layout software like InDesign. I ended up composing my work in Word and then importing it into InDesign. That was a lot more satisfying than using latex for me, for writing that is not math heavy.
petters 9y ago
Two days? I wrote my thesis in Tex and i probably spent two weeks! But the end result was typographically great! When you're in academia, you can afford to spend that time. These days, it's all Google Docs for me. I've had complete strangers email me with Tex questions just from encountering my thesis. The community on Stack Exchange was very helpful for me.
svat 9y ago
What 600-page documentation are you referring to? The TeXbook by Knuth goes only up to page 483 (with the appendixes starting on page 304). By the way, a really excellent book for (plain) TeX is A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy: it's truly for the beginner, yet at the end you'll be practically an expert, or at least know how to become one. I've seen people get frustrated with LaTeX (not TeX), but that's because it was designed to make it difficult to do typesetting: instead the LaTeX philosophy is to specify only the document structure, and leave all the typesetting to a package that you hope someone has written.
- Crontab 9y ago
  Your comment is interesting to me. I've read about TeX and LaTeX from time to time and it was my impression that everyone used LaTeX because TeX itself was difficult to use. And I never questioned this because almost every article I could find only spoke about LaTeX. Your comment is making me reevaluate what I thought I understood.
  - svat 9y ago
    Yes, an overwhelming majority use LaTeX rather than TeX directly. (Well, among the tiny number of people who use TeX/LaTeX at all.) The reason, though, is not that TeX is difficult to use: it's that TeX is a system for typesetting, and most people don't need typesetting. If you're writing a paper for publication in a journal, they probably have their own typesetting style. With LaTeX you can just specify your paper as a sequence of paragraphs, "sections", a title, an author, and so on, and, by including the journal's style file (assuming it's good), your paper will come out typeset in that journal's style. This philosophy is explained at https://www.latex-project.org/about/ https://www.latex-project.org/about/ This is great for certain (many) kinds of documents. The problem with this, though, is that the moment you want to change the appearance and get into typesetting yourself, you're fighting a system that was actively designed to prevent you from doing this. An analogy may be a system like, say, WordPress: if what you have is a blog, then it would work for you, and you even get to choose one of several “themes” that others have written, and so on. The set of available plugins and customizations can even be impressively versatile (for example, I noticed that time.com runs on WordPress, and apparently so do a number of other non-blog sites: https://vip.wordpress.com/clients/ https://vip.wordpress.com/clients/). But ultimately, if you're trying to figure it out by yourself and have your own ideas about what your website should look like, a system like this will always be more frustrating than the alternative (of having full control). TeX is not difficult to use, though in the beginning you'd have to specify manually things like the typesetting of the document title (put it in a bold font at 16pt, centered on a line...). LaTeX has features to automate many such common typesettings tasks, but it has its own flaws (some stemming from the fact that it's implemented using TeX macros, which weren't designed for such heavy “programming”).
lottin 9y ago
It doesn't help either that all the basic references are in the form of books. Finding the relevant bits of information can take a long time. Besides documentation, another of TeX's weaknesses is its lack of debugging capabilities, which makes it really hard to figure out what goes on behind the scenes.

tehabe 9y ago

Wasn't there the idea of making TeX Live a rolling release? I guess the idea was there but it turned out it would be impossible w/o breaking thing from time to time.

lindbergh 9y ago

LaTeX is still one of my favourite piece of technology of all time. It is at time so alien, yet beautiful. I now get closer to 10+ years of programming experience, yet nothing comes close to debugging a faulty LaTeX custom command... it can quickly turn to an unreadable mess, but you have to admit that once everything is swept under a preamble.tex file, the rest of the code is very clean. Especially with auctex in emacs which displays most math symbols as their true unicode counterpart. Funny story: one of my first gig was working in a music instruments shop where I was basically the IT guy, from sysadmin to web dev. At some point the software that created the barcode labels stopped working. Now I had to find an automatic way to make those labels, so of course I turned to LaTeX. All I needed to do was to write a batch file calling `pdflatex` with a template tex file and a pdf file for the label was promptly sent to the printer! There is probably some python package for doing the same thing, but I was so proud of seeing Computer Modern font tagged to every instruments in the shop!

Tharre 9y ago
Does anyone know a similar plugin for vim?
- mscholz 9y ago
  If you set `conceallevel' to 2 and use syntax highlighting, you should get it in vim without any plugins needed (although I have only neovim installed). For example, \AA -> Å, $\pm$ -> ±, and {\'e} -> é. http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/syntax.html#tex-conceal http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/syntax.html#tex-concea...
  - Lxr 9y ago
    Does anyone else find this "feature" really annoying? I always set conceallevel to 0 but vim seems to constantly find a way to replace my code with unicode.
    - cormacrelf 9y ago
      It could be that you're using a font with OpenType ligatures, like Fira Code.

fithisux 9y ago

Congratulations guys for the hard work.

jimhefferon 9y ago
Yes, indeed. It is quite an accomplishment. If you find TeX, LaTeX, and friends useful, check out the TeX Users Group at http://www.tug.org http://www.tug.org. If you'd consider supporting the folks who bring you TeX Live, you can read the Aims and Benefits page at https://tug.org/aims_ben.html https://tug.org/aims_ben.html. Note that a membership is very reasonable-- if you choose an electronic copy of the journal then membership is $45 annually, or $15 annually if you are a student, senior, etc. The details are at https://tug.org/join.html https://tug.org/join.html.

svat 9y ago

It's amazing how many different and dissimilar components go into a TeX distribution like TeX Live: - At the base, there is Donald Knuth's program `tex`, itself written in a strange language (WEB) that is essentially an ad-hoc macro-expansion system (not used by many others, and not even by Knuth today, who prefers CWEB), and compiles (via `tangle`) to a dialect/version of Pascal (“Pascal-H”) for which a compiler hasn't existed for years. [It also "compiles" (via `weave`) to the printed book TeX: The Program] - Then there is LaTeX, an elaborate set of macros written originally by Leslie Lamport (another Turing award winner) and later by a team, to be interpreted by the TeX program, which was never designed by its original creator for such elaborate programming. - There are entire new programs (aka TeX engines) like pdfTeX and XeTeX, created by editing the original `tex.web` in different directions. - There are the binaries of all these programs, compiled using `web2c`, a program written solely for converting all these WEB programs written in (basically) Pascal into C code, which is neither an arbitrary Pascal-to-C converter nor even an arbitrary WEB-to-C converter. - There is LuaTeX, a manual rewrite of TeX in C, embedding a Lua interpreter and adding many hooks and extensions. - There are thousands of macro packages written by thousands of people of varying levels of skill and foresight, on top of TeX, LaTeX, and other macro packages themselves: essentially everything on CTAN (which was inspiration for Perl's CPAN, and ultimately many languages' package repositories like Python's PyPI etc.) And all this without even mentioning ConTEXt, Metafont, MetaPost, BibTeX, Kpathsea, various assorted utilities, graphics drivers…

mseri 9y ago
A now also the recently announced tectonic [0]. I also remember watching a talk about a clojure re-implementation but I think I never saw it released anywhere. [0]: https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/
ygaf 9y ago
Amazing is a friendly word for it.
styfle 9y ago
This reminds me of Markdown before the CommonMark standard was created. Actually...even with the standard, there are so many derivatives.

SwellJoe 9y ago

I wrote my first (well, only) book in SGML Docbook, which I processed through a LaTeX toolchain. Sebastian Rahtz answered so many of my questions back then (~15 years ago), despite them often being stupid questions (because I was entirely new to TeX/LaTeX). I just read that he passed away last year. TeX Live was originally his project, among many other document-related projects. I'm happy to see it continues without him.

shawnee_ 9y ago

Looks like it has added many of the enhancements from recent updates to luatex. LuaLaTeX has saved my hide more times than I care to mention... Because for reasons I do not understand, there are still some people from the dark ages who insist on shipping PDFs with documentation that does not belong in a PDF.

xvilka 9y ago

There is still no uniform way to insert animation in the slides/paper. Partly it's because a problems of PDF readers, but there are problems in TeX-parts too.

brians 9y ago

What's new: https://www.tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x1-840009.2 https://www.tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x...