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I don't understand what is wrong with TeX. - As a syntax/language for mathematics, it's the actual standard. Do you think Terry Tao will bother learning some o

I don't understand what is wrong with TeX. - As a syntax/language for mathematics, it's the actual standard. Do you think Terry Tao will bother learning some other language for his blog? You might as well argue that English is poorly-specified and the web should switch to Lojban. - As a layout engine, it encodes all the damn typographical conventions that are in every single research article, academic journal and textbook. In the world. Trying to replace TeX is so quixotic it makes Urbit sound pragmatic and down-to-earth. It's this whole scorched earth tradition. There just isn't any mathematics out there that uses anything but TeX.

unkown-unknowns 9y ago
The problem with LaTeX is that it still mixes content and styling. For example, when I've got a final answer I have a macro that I've named "fa", which will insert double underline. This is an attempt on my part to give semantic meaning to the final answer. However, since that macro is mine and not standard it doesn't help much in the grander scheme of things. LaTeX should have had an absolute separation of style and content.
- revelation 9y ago
  Yes, this worked so great on the web /s I read this complaint on the old thread and I think we had 3.. 4 of those "semantic web" standards by now? But here we are, everything is a bunch of divs and extracting meaning from web sites is a task for deep learning neural networks.
  - lomnakkus 9y ago
    Well, at least in math there's a somewhat formal notation for most things at this point? Obviously, mathematicians don't all agree on the precise notation, but there's generalizable ideas like "grouping symbols" (parens, brackets) and "left-grouping symbols" (upper-sigma, upper-pi), etc. etc. that inform the layout? Am I hopelessly misinformed on this? This kind of thing should suffice for 95%+ of things, and if you are an exception then you get to play in "lay it out yourself" land. One issue that I had with LaTeX formulas was exactly the thing that parent poster was pointing out: You really had to describe the layout of the formula; not just its expression ("... and have at it, layout engine"). It is/was really just a kludge around the box model of TeX in the worst possible way. Yes, you could produce the most beautiful formulas of them all, but that's just because you spent a huge amount of time learning (La)TeX and tweaking the exact expression of each individual formula[1]. Don't get me wrong, it's was still miles better than the competition at the time if you cared about the quality of the output -- not to mention the severe resource constrains -- but surely we can do better these days? Surely?!? Btw, I don't think parent poster was talking "semantic web" at all, as I read it at least. [1] Same deal with pseudocode. Oh god, the amount of time I spent tweaking pseodocode in my university years.
    - unkown-unknowns 9y ago
      > Btw, I don't think parent poster was talking "semantic web" at all, as I read it at least. Correct.
ajarmst 9y ago
That's always the first thought that occurs to me. Any standard or tool that wants to render mathematical notation has to seamlessly interact with and accurately render AMS LaTeX. Without that, working mathematicians simply won't use it. And TeX in maths is absolutely not going anywhere. MathJax gets this, so MathJax has been successful.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
kxyvr 9y ago
Alright, so I work as a mathematician and I'll strongly agree that there's not good substitute for TeX at the moment for producing mathematical documents. That said, I do periodically look for something better because it's far from perfect. In large documents, I find it difficult to produce easily maintainable mathematical statements since the macro situation in LaTeX is a complete mess. Often times, I have a large formulation that I want to modify only a small part. Now, yes, we could just number all of the equations, change one of them, and then say that the result is the combination of (4), (27), (43), and (45). In fact, we can link them, so that everyone could flip back to these equations. That also makes really hateful to read documents. Really, I want to display all of the equations and I don't want to retype them since I may very well make a mistake and I want that correction propagated around the document. So, we can use macros to help with this, but the definitions have to occur before \begin{document}, which is not where I want to look for an equation. I want a local definition since it's next to what I'm looking at. We could use something like \newsavebox, which I often do, but I often want to just make a reference to part of an equation and this is not a good solution for that. Maybe there's a better macro or way to do that out there, and if anyone knows, I'd love to hear. I could write my own macros, but, really, I find TeX to be a difficult language to work with. I am curious to know if LuaTeX makes this much easier to do and I've been meaning to experiment to find out. So, yes, in a vacuum I think that math notation in LaTeX works really, really well. However, for a larger document, there's a lot of other features that would be nice to have and they're difficult to implement in TeX.
- phkahler 9y ago
  Sounds like you want the capabilities of a tool like Mathematica, MathCAD, or Maxima at hand in your document editor. This part I understand, you would actually DO the math and document the train of thought as you go. You also want to be able to define subexpressions and reuse them as needed. Is that correct? And you don't want to define those ahead of time? This sounds like the math equivalent of a lazy programmer that wants to use goto and highly unstructured coding practices. You want to write arbitrary expressions and then pull parts of them into other areas of the document without defining them individually. At least that's what I got from your comment. How about a nice math-document editor with a mode where expressions can be seen as an assembly of previously defined items. Then you could right-click on one and select "go to definition" from a popup menu. That's how the software people do things these days. But if you want to use non-math aware text editors for writing math papers I fear you're never going to get what you want. TL;DR my impression is that poster wants a very sophisticated math-aware document creating program that has a sort of development mode and display mode. I like it, but am not aware of such. I could also have totally misinterpreted the comment.
Avshalom 9y ago
The thing is that TeX math requires a lot of shit, it basically means implementing a full Tex parser and parsing a bunch of things that exist in libraries in the web browser as well as rendering support. MathML being an xml derivative only requires rendering support.
- comex 9y ago
  It would also mean another Turing complete language embedded in browsers, in addition to… JavaScript, XSLT, GLSL (WebGL), WebAssembly, CSS itself if you squint, fonts, WebSQL (TIL some browsers still support it)… probably more I’m not thinking of. I guess one more wouldn’t hurt.
  - dnautics 9y ago
    svg
    - comex 9y ago
      If you mean that SVG is Turing complete, I was thinking of it, but not having much experience with it, I'm not sure what exactly is Turing complete there (without XSLT, which I mentioned). If you mean something else, please elaborate :)
      - gsnedders 9y ago
        SVG animation using SMIL is likely Turing complete, without thinking too hard about this.
  - hzhou321 9y ago
    A Turing INcomplete TeX copy would be nice. I.e. no macro facility, with common escape sequence implemented in hard code. I do not encounter TeX users who write their own macros often.
    - jimhefferon 9y ago
johncolanduoni 9y ago
TeX is to typeset mathematics as a shell script is to a specific set of actions taken by a computer. Neither come close to precisely defining the desired output without a mountain of intermediate stuff that (a) needs to be present (b) can and does change and break things. This doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with TeX, it just means there are square pegs and round holes.
- contravariant 9y ago
  To expand on that, LaTeX is to TeX what Unix is to shells scripts. Oh and if you don't include at least some LaTeX then anyone used to LaTeX (which is pretty much everyone using TeX) will be annoyed.
contravariant 9y ago
To clarify, do you mean some subset of TeX, or the same but with some convenient methods from LaTeX, or full TeX, or the same but with some LaTeX, or just full blown LaTeX? Note that all of these were designed for stand-alone static documents.
- thanatropism 9y ago
  Me? I kind of have what I want, it's MathJax. MathJax is a TeX-lite without macros, in essence. And it's used EVERYWHERE. Just develop a standard based on MathJax, godamit.
nikdaheratik 9y ago
TeX is not a web standard. It's not even compatible with how markup languages work to put information on the web. Specific problems that are not addressed either by MathML or by TeX: 1. Accessibility, especially regarding screen readers. There are so many different ways to parse TeX and generate the "same" equation, that there would be no way for a screen reader to produce something understandable for those users that need one. Presentation MathML is just as bad, but the best way to solve this is to move closer to existing web content, not to rely on pre-HTML tech. 2. Text Styling that browsers rely on is incompatible with TeX. I'm not really big on CSS, but it's a standard that works, which can't be said for MathML or TeX. The solution we currently have is to basically implement a js or server side TeX parser that outputs span + css/svg to position the text into a readable equation. It would be much better to have a solution that is compatible with browsers natively. Especially one that would allow web developers to use a different font than Computer Modern. 3. Searchability. Because of the flexibility of TeX/LaTeX, you can have many different ways to render the same mathematical equation. This is okay if your goal is print/PDF, but it doesn't work as well for search on the web. Especially if that search engine is expecting something human native, rather than a string of curly bracers and backslashes.

unkown-unknowns 9y ago

The problem with LaTeX is that it still mixes content and styling. For example, when I've got a final answer I have a macro that I've named "fa", which will insert double underline. This is an attempt on my part to give semantic meaning to the final answer. However, since that macro is mine and not standard it doesn't help much in the grander scheme of things. LaTeX should have had an absolute separation of style and content.

revelation 9y ago
Yes, this worked so great on the web /s I read this complaint on the old thread and I think we had 3.. 4 of those "semantic web" standards by now? But here we are, everything is a bunch of divs and extracting meaning from web sites is a task for deep learning neural networks.
- lomnakkus 9y ago
  Well, at least in math there's a somewhat formal notation for most things at this point? Obviously, mathematicians don't all agree on the precise notation, but there's generalizable ideas like "grouping symbols" (parens, brackets) and "left-grouping symbols" (upper-sigma, upper-pi), etc. etc. that inform the layout? Am I hopelessly misinformed on this? This kind of thing should suffice for 95%+ of things, and if you are an exception then you get to play in "lay it out yourself" land. One issue that I had with LaTeX formulas was exactly the thing that parent poster was pointing out: You really had to describe the layout of the formula; not just its expression ("... and have at it, layout engine"). It is/was really just a kludge around the box model of TeX in the worst possible way. Yes, you could produce the most beautiful formulas of them all, but that's just because you spent a huge amount of time learning (La)TeX and tweaking the exact expression of each individual formula[1]. Don't get me wrong, it's was still miles better than the competition at the time if you cared about the quality of the output -- not to mention the severe resource constrains -- but surely we can do better these days? Surely?!? Btw, I don't think parent poster was talking "semantic web" at all, as I read it at least. [1] Same deal with pseudocode. Oh god, the amount of time I spent tweaking pseodocode in my university years.
  - unkown-unknowns 9y ago
    > Btw, I don't think parent poster was talking "semantic web" at all, as I read it at least. Correct.

ajarmst 9y ago

That's always the first thought that occurs to me. Any standard or tool that wants to render mathematical notation has to seamlessly interact with and accurately render AMS LaTeX. Without that, working mathematicians simply won't use it. And TeX in maths is absolutely not going anywhere. MathJax gets this, so MathJax has been successful.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

kxyvr 9y ago

Alright, so I work as a mathematician and I'll strongly agree that there's not good substitute for TeX at the moment for producing mathematical documents. That said, I do periodically look for something better because it's far from perfect. In large documents, I find it difficult to produce easily maintainable mathematical statements since the macro situation in LaTeX is a complete mess. Often times, I have a large formulation that I want to modify only a small part. Now, yes, we could just number all of the equations, change one of them, and then say that the result is the combination of (4), (27), (43), and (45). In fact, we can link them, so that everyone could flip back to these equations. That also makes really hateful to read documents. Really, I want to display all of the equations and I don't want to retype them since I may very well make a mistake and I want that correction propagated around the document. So, we can use macros to help with this, but the definitions have to occur before \begin{document}, which is not where I want to look for an equation. I want a local definition since it's next to what I'm looking at. We could use something like \newsavebox, which I often do, but I often want to just make a reference to part of an equation and this is not a good solution for that. Maybe there's a better macro or way to do that out there, and if anyone knows, I'd love to hear. I could write my own macros, but, really, I find TeX to be a difficult language to work with. I am curious to know if LuaTeX makes this much easier to do and I've been meaning to experiment to find out. So, yes, in a vacuum I think that math notation in LaTeX works really, really well. However, for a larger document, there's a lot of other features that would be nice to have and they're difficult to implement in TeX.

phkahler 9y ago
Sounds like you want the capabilities of a tool like Mathematica, MathCAD, or Maxima at hand in your document editor. This part I understand, you would actually DO the math and document the train of thought as you go. You also want to be able to define subexpressions and reuse them as needed. Is that correct? And you don't want to define those ahead of time? This sounds like the math equivalent of a lazy programmer that wants to use goto and highly unstructured coding practices. You want to write arbitrary expressions and then pull parts of them into other areas of the document without defining them individually. At least that's what I got from your comment. How about a nice math-document editor with a mode where expressions can be seen as an assembly of previously defined items. Then you could right-click on one and select "go to definition" from a popup menu. That's how the software people do things these days. But if you want to use non-math aware text editors for writing math papers I fear you're never going to get what you want. TL;DR my impression is that poster wants a very sophisticated math-aware document creating program that has a sort of development mode and display mode. I like it, but am not aware of such. I could also have totally misinterpreted the comment.

Avshalom 9y ago

The thing is that TeX math requires a lot of shit, it basically means implementing a full Tex parser and parsing a bunch of things that exist in libraries in the web browser as well as rendering support. MathML being an xml derivative only requires rendering support.

comex 9y ago
It would also mean another Turing complete language embedded in browsers, in addition to… JavaScript, XSLT, GLSL (WebGL), WebAssembly, CSS itself if you squint, fonts, WebSQL (TIL some browsers still support it)… probably more I’m not thinking of. I guess one more wouldn’t hurt.
- dnautics 9y ago
  svg
  - comex 9y ago
    If you mean that SVG is Turing complete, I was thinking of it, but not having much experience with it, I'm not sure what exactly is Turing complete there (without XSLT, which I mentioned). If you mean something else, please elaborate :)
    - gsnedders 9y ago
      SVG animation using SMIL is likely Turing complete, without thinking too hard about this.
- hzhou321 9y ago
  A Turing INcomplete TeX copy would be nice. I.e. no macro facility, with common escape sequence implemented in hard code. I do not encounter TeX users who write their own macros often.
  - jimhefferon 9y ago

johncolanduoni 9y ago

TeX is to typeset mathematics as a shell script is to a specific set of actions taken by a computer. Neither come close to precisely defining the desired output without a mountain of intermediate stuff that (a) needs to be present (b) can and does change and break things. This doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with TeX, it just means there are square pegs and round holes.

contravariant 9y ago
To expand on that, LaTeX is to TeX what Unix is to shells scripts. Oh and if you don't include at least some LaTeX then anyone used to LaTeX (which is pretty much everyone using TeX) will be annoyed.

contravariant 9y ago

To clarify, do you mean some subset of TeX, or the same but with some convenient methods from LaTeX, or full TeX, or the same but with some LaTeX, or just full blown LaTeX? Note that all of these were designed for stand-alone static documents.

thanatropism 9y ago
Me? I kind of have what I want, it's MathJax. MathJax is a TeX-lite without macros, in essence. And it's used EVERYWHERE. Just develop a standard based on MathJax, godamit.

nikdaheratik 9y ago

TeX is not a web standard. It's not even compatible with how markup languages work to put information on the web. Specific problems that are not addressed either by MathML or by TeX: 1. Accessibility, especially regarding screen readers. There are so many different ways to parse TeX and generate the "same" equation, that there would be no way for a screen reader to produce something understandable for those users that need one. Presentation MathML is just as bad, but the best way to solve this is to move closer to existing web content, not to rely on pre-HTML tech. 2. Text Styling that browsers rely on is incompatible with TeX. I'm not really big on CSS, but it's a standard that works, which can't be said for MathML or TeX. The solution we currently have is to basically implement a js or server side TeX parser that outputs span + css/svg to position the text into a readable equation. It would be much better to have a solution that is compatible with browsers natively. Especially one that would allow web developers to use a different font than Computer Modern. 3. Searchability. Because of the flexibility of TeX/LaTeX, you can have many different ways to render the same mathematical equation. This is okay if your goal is print/PDF, but it doesn't work as well for search on the web. Especially if that search engine is expecting something human native, rather than a string of curly bracers and backslashes.