5 ms·

I'm the author, and I'd be happy to answer any questions or take part in a discussion about this.

by leephillips 9y ago

PeachPlum 9y ago
I know Lua I process text (not in Lua). I do a bit of Troff, html, stuff like that. Where to start learning ?
- leephillips 9y ago
  First you need to learn a bit about how to use LaTeX. I learned this decades ago and am not sure what is the best introduction now, but this is sometimes recommended: http://ctan.mirrors.hoobly.com/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf http://ctan.mirrors.hoobly.com/info/lshort/english/lshort.pd... Then, look at the links in my article, and you should be able to start doing something interesting.
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
    I also wonder where to start, but with TeX and luaTex, and not LaTeX. Is that a distinction worth making?
    - leephillips 9y ago
      Sure, if you want to use plain TeX, and not LaTeX. To get a really thorough grounding, you can read Donald Knuth's TexBook. I'm sure there are also briefer guides online.
      - 0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
        I'm just wondering, and I don't really have an opinion.
        mturmon 9y ago
        If you are an ordinary producer of documents (plain text, articles,tech reports, letters, mathematical documents, etc.) you should start with LaTeX, not TeX. It is uncommon to write in plain TeX and this has been so for many years. In practice, you will use mostly LaTeX constructs, and the simplest TeX ones, which the LaTeX guide would include.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - svat 9y ago
      If you want to start with TeX, I highly recommend the book A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy. One of the developers behind LuaTeX also strongly recommends it (in the preface to the ConTeXt manual), and calls it "the book that turns every beginner into an expert". This one is more readable than the TeXbook, and builds up your intuition nicely. Learning LuaTeX is relatively easier after you understand the basic design of TeX.
- neomindryan 9y ago
  FWIW, I started with LaTeX a few years ago, and Overleaf.com really helped. Even though I prefer local development and generally work that way, Overleaf has Git integration, sharing features, and works when I've messed up my development environment.
  - JohnHammersley 9y ago
    Co-founder of Overleaf passing through and I just wanted to say thanks for the mention - glad you found it (and the git integration [1]) useful :) [1] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/195 https://www.overleaf.com/blog/195
- JohnHammersley 9y ago
  You might find this introduction to the different flavors of TeX useful: https://www.overleaf.com/blog/500-whats-in-a-name-a-guide-to-the-many-flavours-of-tex https://www.overleaf.com/blog/500-whats-in-a-name-a-guide-to...
Derbasti 9y ago
How is performance? Last time I checked LuaLaTeX was significantly slower than XeLaTeX was significantly slower than pdfLaTeX (on the order of 5s > 1s > 0.1s for the same document).
- slaymaker1907 9y ago
  As if LaTex wasn't slow enough already. I'm always amazed at how long it takes to generate a PDF vs how quickly a browser can render a seemingly arbitrary HTML document.
  - Finnucane 9y ago
    The browser doesn't care if the output looks good.
    - leephillips 9y ago
      Indeed. You should be aware of the extensive computation that the TeX engine is doing in order to produce a typographically pleasing result - browsers do none of this.
  - svat 9y ago
    The book A Gentle Introduction to TeX is 97 pages long (number of pages in the output). To produce the typeset output from `gentle.tex`, on my laptop, - tex takes 0.15 seconds - pdftex takes 0.37 seconds - luatex (1.0.4) takes 0.46 seconds All of these are reasonably fast, and I think getting a full book in less than half a second is acceptable. (My browser takes longer than that to render most things.) What's the catch? This book is written in plain TeX. The slowness comes when you use LaTeX: it's not unusual to have even single-page documents that take longer for LaTeX to generate. The whole LaTeX approach is to have a package for everything, load everything you may want, providing all the features, etc — and all of this implemented in TeX macro expansion in painful and hard-to-refactor ways. This is something LuaTeX will help with actually: LuaTeX makes TeX less monolithic by providing hooks (callbacks), and many things can now be implemented in easier-to-read Lua code as hooks into the right parts of TeX's execution, rather than setting everything up at the start so that after macros are expanded the right thing happens. If there's less use of LaTeX and elaborate macros, things should get faster.

I'm the author, and I'd be happy to answer any questions or take part in a discussion about this.

PeachPlum 9y ago

I know Lua I process text (not in Lua). I do a bit of Troff, html, stuff like that. Where to start learning ?

leephillips 9y ago
First you need to learn a bit about how to use LaTeX. I learned this decades ago and am not sure what is the best introduction now, but this is sometimes recommended: http://ctan.mirrors.hoobly.com/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf http://ctan.mirrors.hoobly.com/info/lshort/english/lshort.pd... Then, look at the links in my article, and you should be able to start doing something interesting.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
  I also wonder where to start, but with TeX and luaTex, and not LaTeX. Is that a distinction worth making?
  - leephillips 9y ago
    Sure, if you want to use plain TeX, and not LaTeX. To get a really thorough grounding, you can read Donald Knuth's TexBook. I'm sure there are also briefer guides online.
    - 0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
      I'm just wondering, and I don't really have an opinion.
      - mturmon 9y ago
        If you are an ordinary producer of documents (plain text, articles,tech reports, letters, mathematical documents, etc.) you should start with LaTeX, not TeX. It is uncommon to write in plain TeX and this has been so for many years. In practice, you will use mostly LaTeX constructs, and the simplest TeX ones, which the LaTeX guide would include.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - svat 9y ago
    If you want to start with TeX, I highly recommend the book A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy. One of the developers behind LuaTeX also strongly recommends it (in the preface to the ConTeXt manual), and calls it "the book that turns every beginner into an expert". This one is more readable than the TeXbook, and builds up your intuition nicely. Learning LuaTeX is relatively easier after you understand the basic design of TeX.
neomindryan 9y ago
FWIW, I started with LaTeX a few years ago, and Overleaf.com really helped. Even though I prefer local development and generally work that way, Overleaf has Git integration, sharing features, and works when I've messed up my development environment.
- JohnHammersley 9y ago
  Co-founder of Overleaf passing through and I just wanted to say thanks for the mention - glad you found it (and the git integration [1]) useful :) [1] https://www.overleaf.com/blog/195 https://www.overleaf.com/blog/195
JohnHammersley 9y ago
You might find this introduction to the different flavors of TeX useful: https://www.overleaf.com/blog/500-whats-in-a-name-a-guide-to-the-many-flavours-of-tex https://www.overleaf.com/blog/500-whats-in-a-name-a-guide-to...

Derbasti 9y ago

How is performance? Last time I checked LuaLaTeX was significantly slower than XeLaTeX was significantly slower than pdfLaTeX (on the order of 5s > 1s > 0.1s for the same document).

slaymaker1907 9y ago
As if LaTex wasn't slow enough already. I'm always amazed at how long it takes to generate a PDF vs how quickly a browser can render a seemingly arbitrary HTML document.
- Finnucane 9y ago
  The browser doesn't care if the output looks good.
  - leephillips 9y ago
    Indeed. You should be aware of the extensive computation that the TeX engine is doing in order to produce a typographically pleasing result - browsers do none of this.
- svat 9y ago
  The book A Gentle Introduction to TeX is 97 pages long (number of pages in the output). To produce the typeset output from `gentle.tex`, on my laptop, - tex takes 0.15 seconds - pdftex takes 0.37 seconds - luatex (1.0.4) takes 0.46 seconds All of these are reasonably fast, and I think getting a full book in less than half a second is acceptable. (My browser takes longer than that to render most things.) What's the catch? This book is written in plain TeX. The slowness comes when you use LaTeX: it's not unusual to have even single-page documents that take longer for LaTeX to generate. The whole LaTeX approach is to have a package for everything, load everything you may want, providing all the features, etc — and all of this implemented in TeX macro expansion in painful and hard-to-refactor ways. This is something LuaTeX will help with actually: LuaTeX makes TeX less monolithic by providing hooks (callbacks), and many things can now be implemented in easier-to-read Lua code as hooks into the right parts of TeX's execution, rather than setting everything up at the start so that after macros are expanded the right thing happens. If there's less use of LaTeX and elaborate macros, things should get faster.