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> What LaTeX truly shines at, is typography. I respectfully disagree. I think people use LaTeX to write scientific documents because there is no better alterna

> What LaTeX truly shines at, is typography. I respectfully disagree. I think people use LaTeX to write scientific documents because there is no better alternatives, not because LaTeX is good. I find the typesetting system in LaTeX is extremely verbose and over-complicated, as compared to something like HTML+CSS or Markdown. If someone comes up with a good enough typesetting system with some inspiration from Markdown, HTML and CSS, LaTeX will lose its popularity. HTML and CSS are more expressive than LaTeX, so it should be theoretically possible. One possible explanation for the lack of better alternatives is that the people who really need the alternatives and people who are capable of coming up with better alternatives are somewhat mutually exclusive. Former is more research-heavily and latter is more coding and user experience heavy.

nabla9 8y ago
pandoc -s markdown.txt -o latex-output.tex
kderbyma 8y ago
Latex is a fully Turing complete language as well as a typesetter. Only with JavaScript can you compare them.
- danShumway 8y ago
  I mean, CSS/HTML is technically a Turing complete language given enough caveats[0]. ;) But I'm obviously just being a pedantic jerk when I say that. I get what you're getting at and you're not wrong. The real question to ask is, "is a programming language a good place to put a typesetter?" Making things more powerful doesn't always make them better, if that extra power forces you to introduce extra complexity. [0]: https://my-codeworks.com/blog/2015/css3-proven-to-be-turing-complete https://my-codeworks.com/blog/2015/css3-proven-to-be-turing-...
  - taeric 8y ago
    Why is that the real question to ask? The dogmatic separation of view and control is probably among the chief reasons of code bloat and bad decisions I've ever been close to.
    - danShumway 8y ago
      An example of good separation of model/view/control is Markdown. Markdown is ubiquitous because it's easy to learn and does one thing well. It's a very Unix-y idea. Markdown is a document markup language, not a Model-View-Controller framework. It's not trying to be the front end for your SPA, it's trying to allow you to type Reddit comments and blog posts. That comes with advantages, the big one being that here's the entire documentation you need to look at if you want to start using Markdown[0] and here's one section of LaTeX's documentation[1]. I could have an entire office (programmers and non-programmers) using Markdown in about a week to a month, I couldn't do the same with LaTeX. Of course LaTeX is more powerful that Markdown. Markdown isn't really a tool for typesetting tbh. But the point is that because extra functionality nearly always comes at the cost of extra complexity, you always need to take a step back and ask how important that extra functionality is. If someone says, "Okay, but I really need to meta-program my blog post", even at that stage I'm not sure that I push them towards LaTeX or its equivalents, because maybe it's better at that point to just jump to a full featured language like Python or Javascript. That separation of concerns also means that I can have different people handling different things. If my office is all writing Markdown, maybe I only have one or two people who are handling the CSS for how it renders. Nobody else in the office needs to know about the CSS side of things. [0]: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax [1]: https://www.latex-project.org/help/documentation/fntguide.pdf https://www.latex-project.org/help/documentation/fntguide.pd...
      - taeric 8y ago
        And yet, I have grown to dislike markdown. Markdown it's essentially ASCII art for simple documents. Nothing wrong with that, but it is not seperation of concerns. Rather, it is simplicity of some concerns. And to make it hugely amusing, the rules in markdown for just content are not much different than TeX.
- roywiggins 8y ago
  The Turing completeness just doesn't matter at all when it comes to the actual typographical output or the experience of authoring LaTeX documents. If you removed completeness artificially you'd have substantially the same thing.
  - wahern 8y ago
    Sorta. LaTeX wouldn't exist at all if TeX weren't Turing complete, not to mention the huge universe of packages.
taeric 8y ago
The typograghy of TeX is hard to sneer at. Even more, it's stability. Knuth's insistence on stability of feature and focus on core requirements is definitely a lost art in the modern world. Could someone make something that was more aesthetically pleasing for the typist? Likely. Though, most of the added structures of LaTeX are often not needed for casual documents. Which is why it was oddly refreshing to read some of the core source of Knuth's books.
nerdponx 8y ago
You are conflating TeX the language with TeX the typesetting engine. GP is praising the latter. It's truly excellent.

nabla9 8y ago

pandoc -s markdown.txt -o latex-output.tex

kderbyma 8y ago

Latex is a fully Turing complete language as well as a typesetter. Only with JavaScript can you compare them.

danShumway 8y ago
I mean, CSS/HTML is technically a Turing complete language given enough caveats[0]. ;) But I'm obviously just being a pedantic jerk when I say that. I get what you're getting at and you're not wrong. The real question to ask is, "is a programming language a good place to put a typesetter?" Making things more powerful doesn't always make them better, if that extra power forces you to introduce extra complexity. [0]: https://my-codeworks.com/blog/2015/css3-proven-to-be-turing-complete https://my-codeworks.com/blog/2015/css3-proven-to-be-turing-...
- taeric 8y ago
  Why is that the real question to ask? The dogmatic separation of view and control is probably among the chief reasons of code bloat and bad decisions I've ever been close to.
  - danShumway 8y ago
    An example of good separation of model/view/control is Markdown. Markdown is ubiquitous because it's easy to learn and does one thing well. It's a very Unix-y idea. Markdown is a document markup language, not a Model-View-Controller framework. It's not trying to be the front end for your SPA, it's trying to allow you to type Reddit comments and blog posts. That comes with advantages, the big one being that here's the entire documentation you need to look at if you want to start using Markdown[0] and here's one section of LaTeX's documentation[1]. I could have an entire office (programmers and non-programmers) using Markdown in about a week to a month, I couldn't do the same with LaTeX. Of course LaTeX is more powerful that Markdown. Markdown isn't really a tool for typesetting tbh. But the point is that because extra functionality nearly always comes at the cost of extra complexity, you always need to take a step back and ask how important that extra functionality is. If someone says, "Okay, but I really need to meta-program my blog post", even at that stage I'm not sure that I push them towards LaTeX or its equivalents, because maybe it's better at that point to just jump to a full featured language like Python or Javascript. That separation of concerns also means that I can have different people handling different things. If my office is all writing Markdown, maybe I only have one or two people who are handling the CSS for how it renders. Nobody else in the office needs to know about the CSS side of things. [0]: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax [1]: https://www.latex-project.org/help/documentation/fntguide.pdf https://www.latex-project.org/help/documentation/fntguide.pd...
    - taeric 8y ago
      And yet, I have grown to dislike markdown. Markdown it's essentially ASCII art for simple documents. Nothing wrong with that, but it is not seperation of concerns. Rather, it is simplicity of some concerns. And to make it hugely amusing, the rules in markdown for just content are not much different than TeX.
roywiggins 8y ago
The Turing completeness just doesn't matter at all when it comes to the actual typographical output or the experience of authoring LaTeX documents. If you removed completeness artificially you'd have substantially the same thing.
- wahern 8y ago
  Sorta. LaTeX wouldn't exist at all if TeX weren't Turing complete, not to mention the huge universe of packages.

taeric 8y ago

The typograghy of TeX is hard to sneer at. Even more, it's stability. Knuth's insistence on stability of feature and focus on core requirements is definitely a lost art in the modern world. Could someone make something that was more aesthetically pleasing for the typist? Likely. Though, most of the added structures of LaTeX are often not needed for casual documents. Which is why it was oddly refreshing to read some of the core source of Knuth's books.

nerdponx 8y ago

You are conflating TeX the language with TeX the typesetting engine. GP is praising the latter. It's truly excellent.