17 ms·

Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

147 points by stared 6y ago

reddotX 6y ago
no
new_realist 6y ago
Research is done despite LaTeX.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
danbr 6y ago
Better title would have been: ‘How was research ever presented in a clean, pleasantly formatted document before LaTeX?’
- AceJohnny2 6y ago
  Indeed, but this this being on threadreaderapp means it started as a write-once Twitter thread, not a well-written blog post.
- meristem 6y ago
  Yup-- this helps collaboration and communication across teams, not research processes.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
the_svd_doctor 6y ago
I have such a love-hate relationship with Latex. I use it almost every day. I love how easy it is to write beautiful math, and how easy it is to organize well large documents. It's fast (in general). And, thank god, there are lots of information online. But boy do I hate the whole semi-broken macro-based system. The package management feels so outdated. Errors are hard to decipher. Package documentation is there but takes days and days if you actually want to read it. And then you use Tikz. Same result. Beautiful neat graphs. Horrible obscure macro based system with impossible-to-understand error messages.
- petschge 6y ago
  LaTeX is a bit like democracy. It is horrible, but all the alternatives I have tried a worse.
  - the_svd_doctor 6y ago
    Gosh yeah. Imagine writing a 150+ pages thesis in Word. Would give me nightmares. EDIT: To complement: I think it's obviously possible, lots of people do it. But I feel I would spend a lot of time on "keeping the structure right" as I edit it. Feels more straightforward with Latex. And then Math is kind of hard to write efficiently, but that's field specific.
    - ketzu 6y ago
      I wonder about that. I don't know word well enough at all to accomplish the same things I do in latex. But I know it can do a lot of those things. I assume it would be similar if I knew as much about word as I do about latex. But there's no way of knowing, as I am not going to learn word without a much better reason than "i wonder if it's actually terrible to write 150 pages when you know how to use it."
      - bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
        While Word has evolved to do many of the things that were exclusive to LaTeX at one point, the problem is that Word is not extensible. When you hit a wall in Word, that’s it — you have no options. In LaTeX you can pretty much always figure out how to do what you want to do, even if it takes learning a fair bit about the packages, and if you don’t want to spend that kind of time you can almost always find relevant info on stackoverflow.
        lostmsu 6y ago
        Either that changed, or you are technically incorrect. Word is heavily extensible through OLE. You can probably even embed a live ConvNet or a 3D physical simulation in a document. Hell, that was mentioned in Windows 95 book I read as a kid. They used to call it "multimedia".
omarhaneef 6y ago
Before LateX? Just do a rough cuneiform sketch on papyrus before you carve into the clay tablet for storage, right?
- contravariant 6y ago
  I think you've got your writing mediums swapped around.
jankotek 6y ago
I read some advanced physics czech book from 1991, just after velvet revolution. It was written on type writer, charts and formulas hand drawn. Xeroxed to final count of 500 copies. You work with what you got.
heisenbit 6y ago
Knuth did TeX, Lampert did LaTeX. As this is about typesetting most of the credit should got to Knuth. LaTeX is more about structure of the content.
jessriedel 6y ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy desktop IDE/wordprocessor that works seamlessly using a traditional interface or a LyX-like interface. Merge/buy/replace Overleaf with an online service that syncs reliably with the desktop IDE. And, most importantly and difficultly, create a standard way for generating beautiful web pages (including mobile) from the same LaTeX++ files that can be used to generate beautiful PDFs. The annual NSF physics budget is roughly a quarter billion dollars. This only needs to make NSF-funded physicists 1% more productive over a decade to justify spending $20M, and the entire world would benefit. EDIT: Lots of commenters worry that this will end up like various closed-source for-profit tools like Google Docs. But for a closer analogy they should look at some of the excellent free open-source science software being produced with philanthropic funding such as Zotero. Physicists will only adopt it if it makes their lives easier (and maybe not even then...). EDIT 2: There are some pretty strong parallels between the commenters suggesting this can already be achieved with homegrown tools and the infamous HN Dropbox comment.
- generationP 6y ago
  Yes for IDE. Yes for HTML+ output (though what exactly the "+" entails is a tricky thing; HTML+CSS won't suffice). Not sure about merging the 100 most popular packages. Most likely their conflicts cannot be resolved in a backwards-compatible way, and then you have the standard "101 standards" outcome and old tex files start rotting.
  - jessriedel 6y ago
    Yea, I really meant merging in the functionality of the most popular packages, and keeping as much of the syntax as possible without compatibility issues. I agree with you about those risks.
- angrais 6y ago
stared 6y ago
And speaking of typesetting after LaTeX, I recommend giving RMarkdown Distill, scientific and technical writing, native to the web (https://rstudio.github.io/distill/ https://rstudio.github.io/distill/) a try. There are references with a mouseover, possible to include an interactive chart D3.js, etc. Right now I use it for an internal report in deep learning.
pajeetLord666 6y ago
They were done faster
billfruit 6y ago
I feel like there is too much love/worship around here for LaTeX, despite concerns like it being not a good master format, and it mixing logical and physical formatting together. But I do think that Markdown/Asciidoc is a viable system for very many tasks.
iraphael 6y ago
Hey everyone! Thread author here. Happy to see so many people taking an interest in beautiful scientific communication! If anyone has other examples of beautiful typography or graphing/figures throughout history, I'd love to see them! I've been replying to the original thread on twitter with some favorites: https://twitter.com/iraphas13/status/1262489387767480322?s=20 https://twitter.com/iraphas13/status/1262489387767480322?s=2...
- mikhailfranco 6y ago
  I believe Roger Penrose draws all his own illustrations. For copius excellent examples, see his book Road to Reality. Here is one example: https://phys.org/news/2018-03-math-bridges-holography-twistor-theory.html https://phys.org/news/2018-03-math-bridges-holography-twisto... https://theportal.wiki/images/1/11/Penrose-Rindler-Clifford-parallels.jpg https://theportal.wiki/images/1/11/Penrose-Rindler-Clifford-... He also comes from the pre-ppt age of presenting with handwritten acetate transparencies - and still does afaik. Many of his slides have been captured for the infowebs. http://cgpg.gravity.psu.edu/online/Html/Seminars/Fall1998/Penrose/ http://cgpg.gravity.psu.edu/online/Html/Seminars/Fall1998/Pe... http://cgpg.gravity.psu.edu/online/Html/Seminars/Fall1998/Penrose/Slides/s19.html http://cgpg.gravity.psu.edu/online/Html/Seminars/Fall1998/Pe... Some of his original papers from the 1960s were not published at the time, but circulated as samizdat facsimiles of his handwritten notes, until later transcribed by professors or their students, then published in book collections: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/penrose/Penrose-TheoryOfQuantizedDirections.pdf http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/penrose/Penrose-TheoryOfQuanti... Penrose is famous for his visual imagination, which seems to ground many of his insights. Here is a paper where he invents a visual notation for tensors and operators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_graphical_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_graphical_notation http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Penrose.pdf http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Penrose.pdf This has inspired recent work by Bob Coecke, as captured in his beautiful book Picturing Quantum Processes. (arXiv example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1787.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1787.pdf)
oldsklgdfth 6y ago
A fun little fact from the wikipedia page[0]. > Since version 3, TeX has used an idiosyncratic version numbering system, where updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches π. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
macintux 6y ago
Reminded me of the recent piece: Crafting Crafting Interpreters, in which Nystrom describes his process for creating hand-drawn diagrams. http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2020/04/05/crafting-crafting-interpreters/ http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2020/04/05/crafting-crafti...
- mikhailfranco 6y ago
  This beautiful booklet my Tai-Danae Bradley also contains hand-drawn diagrams: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.05923.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.05923.pdf It is set using the Tufte LaTeX template: https://twitter.com/math3ma/status/1042569522056716289 https://twitter.com/math3ma/status/1042569522056716289 https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/tufte https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/tufte
LudwigNagasena 6y ago
What I don’t understand is why Latex so cumbersome, complicated, unintuitive, ugly and slow. Is it simply a technical debt of choices made in time when computers were different and when there were different constraints? Is it just a nature of the problem and every tool will feel the same? Is it a result of evolution with a lack of direction? Was literate programming a bad design decision?
- xamuel 6y ago
  If you're an actual mathematician writing pages and pages of equations, LaTeX is not complicated, unintuitive, ugly, or slow. It's actually extremely well designed for addressing what is a very difficult problem, the problem of translating mathematics into ASCII. For how difficult that problem is, LaTeX is quite genius. I think a lot of the would-be LaTeX-disruptors lack enough experience actually writing mathematics. LaTeX worked because Donald Knuth is both a great programmer AND a good mathematician. When LaTeX gets replaced, it'll need to replaced by a person (or team) with similar cross-disciplinary strengths.
  - ketzu 6y ago
    Are you specifically talking about the math syntax within latex, or actual latex commands in general? Because I would disagree on the latter one. (But I'm a computer scientist not a mathematician.) uglyness is porbably hard to discuss as it's just a matter of taste. I personally consider compile times that are measured in seconds for "simple" tasks slow (here's the question of it being an inherent problem of the space).
    - magicalhippo 6y ago
      As someone who did both math courses and programming courses, I found LaTeX to be awesome for writing equations. It felt so natural I would more often then not solve equations in LaTeX directly. However when writing stuff for my comp-sci courses, man what a chore. Pseudo-code was a PITA, as was getting decent tables of results where I wanted. So for a lot of those I threw my hands in the air and finished the paper using Word. It might have been me, I try to learn as I went along, but it certainly was not as easy as math.
jhallenworld 6y ago
In the late 80s I remember looking at many SIGARCH papers that were printed on crappy dot matrix printers. I thought this was kind of awesome- it's a combination of "who cares about the font when my paper has a good CPU architectural innovation" and "with my new microcomputer there is no need to pay for professional typesetting".
alphagrep12345 6y ago
Why is latex needed? If we use can integrate a good math renderer to docs, why can't people use that instead?
- BiteCode_dev 6y ago
  If you cram a lot of formulas, images and graphs into a world document, you'll have an instable slug to work with. Also, rendering a beautiful word document is quite chalenge. Rendered latex document looks stunningly clean and professional out of the box. They also are plain text, which mean they can be diffed, used with git indexed easily, etc. They play well with anything, being text. You can even read them without having to render them. And finally, latex check the structure of your doc. If you change it, it will crash, preventing you from commiting dead references.
munificent 6y ago
A couple years back, I read Niklaus Wirth's "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs", published by Prentice Hall in 1976. It is a truly beautiful book. Cover, typesetting, illustrations. It just feels compact, clean, and elegant in a way that marvelously reinforces Wirth's own aesthetic. They really don't make them like they used to.
supernova87a 6y ago
Does this story have to be linked to such a shitty ad-filled website? I mean, there are ads right smack in the middle of the figures and pictures of importance.
rjsw 6y ago
My mother worked as a typist for a research lab, the stuff to type up could be handwritten or spoken.
arminiusreturns 6y ago
I think org-mode is the best of all these worlds. I can breakout into latex where I need to, or can export to latex. I can export to html5 and css3 with custom templates, and can run code in blocks. I just wish other editors would work on org support because it feels like jupyter will eat a lot of the cake that org mode should be getting.
rory_h_r 6y ago
A lot of the classic papers by Maxwell, Newton, Faraday etc. are available online. They look great but you can only imagine what a pain typesetting these used to be. See, for example this paper by Maxwell from 1865: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rstl.1865.0008 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rstl.1865...
gnulinux 6y ago
In university I used to write literally everything in Latex. Papers, homeworks, notes, classnotes during class, personal stuff, everything and everything. All my math/CS professors gave us assignments/exams/everything in documents obviously written in Latex (some of my profs were even kind enough to give us .tex source). I was taking this Geography class as a social science elective. We had a paper assignment, and my professor was talking about how it's important to submit HW in this specific format and that they'll give sample .docx file. At the time I didn't have any word processor on my computer so I just quickly asked the professor if it's ok to submit PDF in the same format as I use latex to do my hws. She was like "what is latex"? I'm not a native speaker so I thought I just mispronounced it and described it to her, and she was like no I don't know that you should write your paper in Word. I was stunned. I asked her how do geographers submit their research papers, and she said we just use Word.
TrackerFF 6y ago
I used LaTeX a lot in college, but I'm gonna be honest - IF I could do the work in Microsoft word, I sure as hell would use word. Doing math in word with its built in math editor was incredibly fast, though at the expense of beauty, structure, flexibility.
BiteCode_dev 6y ago
I always wondered the opposite: how do researchers can get any work done when they have to formalize it using LateX? I've tried writting a book using LateX, and it's been nothing but a miserable experience. I'm been coding for 15 years, and tweaking my Linux machine for longer. I know what it means to face rought edges. But LaTeX is another level of shenanigans. I seem to understand that researchers use latex because of the seemingless formula integration and automation of references. Well, why not use asciidoc (https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#mathematical-expressions https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#mathematical-expre...) or myst (https://myst-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/using/syntax.html https://myst-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/using/syntax.ht...) then? They are an order of magnitude easier to use, they can generate websites and pdf, use markdown but allow extensions, they support references, and accept latex formulas. Is it a case of "everybody uses it so I have to"?
- ergl 6y ago
  Network effects have a lot to do with it. Conferences will give you style files that only work with Latex, and some require the .tex sources when you submit your article.
BlueTemplar 6y ago
LaTeX is great, but it's obsolete (bad Unicode support), and is output to a problematic format (pdf).
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Unicode support in LaTeX has not been an issue since XeTeX became mature technology, so over a decade already.
  - leephillips 6y ago
    Exactly. You can even markup math using Unicode. Here is Stokes' Theorem: \[ ∫_Σ ∇ ⨯ 𝐅 ⋅ dΣ = ∮_{∂Σ}𝐅⋅d𝐫 \] That will turn into a typeset version when run through LaTeX (using the unicode-math package). More details at https://lwn.net/Articles/657157/ https://lwn.net/Articles/657157/. Also, any format except PDF is problematic. PDF is the only (widely used) format that will preserve formatting.
leephillips 6y ago
I really enjoyed looking at the examples of old books and manuscripts. But Matplotlib is only the go-to tool for graphs if you are using Python (and some Python users prefer something else). It’s not a universal tool like [La]TeX. The closest thing to that in this sphere would be gnuplot. TeX appeared when I was in graduate school. Before it did, we were using troff, or whatever it was called, which produced hideous output. TeX was a revelation. That’s why everyone switched to it, despite the hardships endured when trying to get it to do what you wanted. The output looked like a beautiful, hand-set book. There was nothing else that came anywhere close. I wrote my thesis in plain TeX, using a Mac Plus ($1400 with a deep student discount). When LaTeX appeared, the selling point was not formatting, but automatic handling of labels and references. You could add a numbered equation in the middle of your document, without having to re-number, and track down references to, the hundred equations that came after it. Glorious. Before LaTeX? The previous generation, my professors, wrote things out in hand and gave the result to a secretary. Those with terrible handwriting might type the text, leaving spaces for the math, which they added with a pen. They didn’t waste time time formatting the paper; that was someone else’s job. TeX created a generation of typographical obsessives, including me. Whatever the secretary did wasn’t good enough.
utopcell 6y ago
OT. I am surprised that the LaTeX name didn't end up in a heated argument between Don Knuth and Leslie Lamport, like the infamous GNU/Linux vs Linux dispute between Stallman and Torvalds. Maybe scientists are more civilized, maybe it helped that LaTeX already has TeX embedded in its name. In retrospect, Lignux might not have been a bad name. The 'g' would be silent of course.
- leephillips 6y ago
  I can’t imagine either one of those guys giving a crap.
  - utopcell 6y ago
    Agreed.
svat 6y ago
(The link goes to a thread on beautiful scientific communication (especially figures/diagrams), so it would have been nice to discuss that rather than discuss LaTeX. But as the conversation here seems to be mostly about the latter…) What a lot of people don't realize about LaTeX is that much of its awkwardness comes from it being a product of two very strong personalities (both Turing Award winners for unrelated work!) pulling it in two opposing directions: • Donald Knuth, who designed TeX as a tool for typesetting primarily, allowing a meticulous author complete control over the appearance of his pages, and attempting to capture in a program (or at least making possible) the highest standards of typography developed over the centuries since the invention of printing.(†) • Leslie Lamport, who wrote LaTeX as a macro package running in TeX, trying to hide complexity from the author and making things as convenient as possible, out of a (probably correct) belief that authors should not care about the appearance and instead only focus on the content! (https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/document-production.pdf https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/document-production.p...) The result is that with LaTeX, things look “easy” superficially, but everything is implemented in TeX macros (never intended as a full-fledged programming language), so things break in mysterious ways. Not to mention the additional layers of complexity from zillions of users writing their own "packages" for everything. The error messages don't make sense to users because they often come from the bowels of TeX, and I suspect that many users even just ignore(!) warnings about overfull/underfull boxes. Conversely, if you look at one of Knuth's own documents written in plain TeX, everything is startlingly simple: for example there is no automatic equation numbering or cross-references; for Equation 5 you just write "5" in the equation and refer to it as "(5)" later, none of that stuff with "\eqref{eq:foo}" or whatever. If macros are used, they tend to be custom for the document, rather than elaborate general-purpose ones. Consider giving plain TeX a try (a great book is A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy); everything makes sense, you feel in power, all the error messages are clear (often the same error messages! but now they apply to something you actually wrote/intended), and if nothing else, you'll end up with an appreciation of what LaTeX is/does. This comment is turning into a repetition of my same tiresome comments on other sites (https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/a/40282 https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/a/40282, https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/398372 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/398372, https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/386592 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/386592, https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/384881 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/384881, https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/518802 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/518802 etc.) so I'll stop here I guess :-) ---- (†): good paragraphs, avoiding widows and orphans and hyphenation on consecutive lines and loose/tight lines adjacent to each other, all of that. By far the longest chapter in The TeXbook, the manual on how to use TeX, is called “Fine Points of Mathematics Typing” and teaches the careful reader about aspects of typography that TeX does not handle automatically — and this is not even counting such advice in other chapters such as ties for avoiding line breaks in “psychologically bad” places. See for example http://www.rtznet.nl/zink/comparison.pdf http://www.rtznet.nl/zink/comparison.pdf (linked from http://www.rtznet.nl/zink/latex.php?lang=en http://www.rtznet.nl/zink/latex.php?lang=en) comparing plain-text paragraphs in Word and InDesign and TeX. If you look at the “bad” typesetting that Knuth rejected as painful (https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/367133 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/367133), I think you get the idea :-)
jyriand 6y ago
It was an interesting read, as I never thought that this might be a problem in the first place. It seems that to really care/know about LaTex you have to be hard core scientist working on academia. I was wondering why it's being mentioned so often on HN. I think research specific typography can only be advanced by someone who is experiencing these problems firsthand.
b3n4kh 6y ago
I love that I can just read this handwrting, I usually can't even read my own...

147 points by stared 6y ago

reddotX 6y ago

new_realist 6y ago

Research is done despite LaTeX.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

danbr 6y ago

Better title would have been: ‘How was research ever presented in a clean, pleasantly formatted document before LaTeX?’

AceJohnny2 6y ago
Indeed, but this this being on threadreaderapp means it started as a write-once Twitter thread, not a well-written blog post.
meristem 6y ago
Yup-- this helps collaboration and communication across teams, not research processes.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

the_svd_doctor 6y ago

I have such a love-hate relationship with Latex. I use it almost every day. I love how easy it is to write beautiful math, and how easy it is to organize well large documents. It's fast (in general). And, thank god, there are lots of information online. But boy do I hate the whole semi-broken macro-based system. The package management feels so outdated. Errors are hard to decipher. Package documentation is there but takes days and days if you actually want to read it. And then you use Tikz. Same result. Beautiful neat graphs. Horrible obscure macro based system with impossible-to-understand error messages.

petschge 6y ago
LaTeX is a bit like democracy. It is horrible, but all the alternatives I have tried a worse.
- the_svd_doctor 6y ago
  Gosh yeah. Imagine writing a 150+ pages thesis in Word. Would give me nightmares. EDIT: To complement: I think it's obviously possible, lots of people do it. But I feel I would spend a lot of time on "keeping the structure right" as I edit it. Feels more straightforward with Latex. And then Math is kind of hard to write efficiently, but that's field specific.
  - ketzu 6y ago
    I wonder about that. I don't know word well enough at all to accomplish the same things I do in latex. But I know it can do a lot of those things. I assume it would be similar if I knew as much about word as I do about latex. But there's no way of knowing, as I am not going to learn word without a much better reason than "i wonder if it's actually terrible to write 150 pages when you know how to use it."
    - bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
      While Word has evolved to do many of the things that were exclusive to LaTeX at one point, the problem is that Word is not extensible. When you hit a wall in Word, that’s it — you have no options. In LaTeX you can pretty much always figure out how to do what you want to do, even if it takes learning a fair bit about the packages, and if you don’t want to spend that kind of time you can almost always find relevant info on stackoverflow.
      - lostmsu 6y ago
        Either that changed, or you are technically incorrect. Word is heavily extensible through OLE. You can probably even embed a live ConvNet or a 3D physical simulation in a document. Hell, that was mentioned in Windows 95 book I read as a kid. They used to call it "multimedia".

omarhaneef 6y ago

Before LateX? Just do a rough cuneiform sketch on papyrus before you carve into the clay tablet for storage, right?

contravariant 6y ago
I think you've got your writing mediums swapped around.

jankotek 6y ago

I read some advanced physics czech book from 1991, just after velvet revolution. It was written on type writer, charts and formulas hand drawn. Xeroxed to final count of 500 copies. You work with what you got.

heisenbit 6y ago

Knuth did TeX, Lampert did LaTeX. As this is about typesetting most of the credit should got to Knuth. LaTeX is more about structure of the content.

jessriedel 6y ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy desktop IDE/wordprocessor that works seamlessly using a traditional interface or a LyX-like interface. Merge/buy/replace Overleaf with an online service that syncs reliably with the desktop IDE. And, most importantly and difficultly, create a standard way for generating beautiful web pages (including mobile) from the same LaTeX++ files that can be used to generate beautiful PDFs. The annual NSF physics budget is roughly a quarter billion dollars. This only needs to make NSF-funded physicists 1% more productive over a decade to justify spending $20M, and the entire world would benefit. EDIT: Lots of commenters worry that this will end up like various closed-source for-profit tools like Google Docs. But for a closer analogy they should look at some of the excellent free open-source science software being produced with philanthropic funding such as Zotero. Physicists will only adopt it if it makes their lives easier (and maybe not even then...). EDIT 2: There are some pretty strong parallels between the commenters suggesting this can already be achieved with homegrown tools and the infamous HN Dropbox comment.

generationP 6y ago
Yes for IDE. Yes for HTML+ output (though what exactly the "+" entails is a tricky thing; HTML+CSS won't suffice). Not sure about merging the 100 most popular packages. Most likely their conflicts cannot be resolved in a backwards-compatible way, and then you have the standard "101 standards" outcome and old tex files start rotting.
- jessriedel 6y ago
  Yea, I really meant merging in the functionality of the most popular packages, and keeping as much of the syntax as possible without compatibility issues. I agree with you about those risks.
angrais 6y ago

stared 6y ago

And speaking of typesetting after LaTeX, I recommend giving RMarkdown Distill, scientific and technical writing, native to the web (https://rstudio.github.io/distill/ https://rstudio.github.io/distill/) a try. There are references with a mouseover, possible to include an interactive chart D3.js, etc. Right now I use it for an internal report in deep learning.

pajeetLord666 6y ago

They were done faster

billfruit 6y ago

I feel like there is too much love/worship around here for LaTeX, despite concerns like it being not a good master format, and it mixing logical and physical formatting together. But I do think that Markdown/Asciidoc is a viable system for very many tasks.

iraphael 6y ago

Hey everyone! Thread author here. Happy to see so many people taking an interest in beautiful scientific communication! If anyone has other examples of beautiful typography or graphing/figures throughout history, I'd love to see them! I've been replying to the original thread on twitter with some favorites: https://twitter.com/iraphas13/status/1262489387767480322?s=20 https://twitter.com/iraphas13/status/1262489387767480322?s=2...

mikhailfranco 6y ago
I believe Roger Penrose draws all his own illustrations. For copius excellent examples, see his book Road to Reality. Here is one example: https://phys.org/news/2018-03-math-bridges-holography-twistor-theory.html https://phys.org/news/2018-03-math-bridges-holography-twisto... https://theportal.wiki/images/1/11/Penrose-Rindler-Clifford-parallels.jpg https://theportal.wiki/images/1/11/Penrose-Rindler-Clifford-... He also comes from the pre-ppt age of presenting with handwritten acetate transparencies - and still does afaik. Many of his slides have been captured for the infowebs. http://cgpg.gravity.psu.edu/online/Html/Seminars/Fall1998/Penrose/ http://cgpg.gravity.psu.edu/online/Html/Seminars/Fall1998/Pe... http://cgpg.gravity.psu.edu/online/Html/Seminars/Fall1998/Penrose/Slides/s19.html http://cgpg.gravity.psu.edu/online/Html/Seminars/Fall1998/Pe... Some of his original papers from the 1960s were not published at the time, but circulated as samizdat facsimiles of his handwritten notes, until later transcribed by professors or their students, then published in book collections: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/penrose/Penrose-TheoryOfQuantizedDirections.pdf http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/penrose/Penrose-TheoryOfQuanti... Penrose is famous for his visual imagination, which seems to ground many of his insights. Here is a paper where he invents a visual notation for tensors and operators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_graphical_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_graphical_notation http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Penrose.pdf http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Penrose.pdf This has inspired recent work by Bob Coecke, as captured in his beautiful book Picturing Quantum Processes. (arXiv example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1787.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1787.pdf)

oldsklgdfth 6y ago

A fun little fact from the wikipedia page[0]. > Since version 3, TeX has used an idiosyncratic version numbering system, where updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches π. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX

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macintux 6y ago

Reminded me of the recent piece: Crafting Crafting Interpreters, in which Nystrom describes his process for creating hand-drawn diagrams. http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2020/04/05/crafting-crafting-interpreters/ http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2020/04/05/crafting-crafti...

mikhailfranco 6y ago
This beautiful booklet my Tai-Danae Bradley also contains hand-drawn diagrams: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.05923.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.05923.pdf It is set using the Tufte LaTeX template: https://twitter.com/math3ma/status/1042569522056716289 https://twitter.com/math3ma/status/1042569522056716289 https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/tufte https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/tufte

LudwigNagasena 6y ago

What I don’t understand is why Latex so cumbersome, complicated, unintuitive, ugly and slow. Is it simply a technical debt of choices made in time when computers were different and when there were different constraints? Is it just a nature of the problem and every tool will feel the same? Is it a result of evolution with a lack of direction? Was literate programming a bad design decision?

xamuel 6y ago
If you're an actual mathematician writing pages and pages of equations, LaTeX is not complicated, unintuitive, ugly, or slow. It's actually extremely well designed for addressing what is a very difficult problem, the problem of translating mathematics into ASCII. For how difficult that problem is, LaTeX is quite genius. I think a lot of the would-be LaTeX-disruptors lack enough experience actually writing mathematics. LaTeX worked because Donald Knuth is both a great programmer AND a good mathematician. When LaTeX gets replaced, it'll need to replaced by a person (or team) with similar cross-disciplinary strengths.
- ketzu 6y ago
  Are you specifically talking about the math syntax within latex, or actual latex commands in general? Because I would disagree on the latter one. (But I'm a computer scientist not a mathematician.) uglyness is porbably hard to discuss as it's just a matter of taste. I personally consider compile times that are measured in seconds for "simple" tasks slow (here's the question of it being an inherent problem of the space).
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    As someone who did both math courses and programming courses, I found LaTeX to be awesome for writing equations. It felt so natural I would more often then not solve equations in LaTeX directly. However when writing stuff for my comp-sci courses, man what a chore. Pseudo-code was a PITA, as was getting decent tables of results where I wanted. So for a lot of those I threw my hands in the air and finished the paper using Word. It might have been me, I try to learn as I went along, but it certainly was not as easy as math.

jhallenworld 6y ago

In the late 80s I remember looking at many SIGARCH papers that were printed on crappy dot matrix printers. I thought this was kind of awesome- it's a combination of "who cares about the font when my paper has a good CPU architectural innovation" and "with my new microcomputer there is no need to pay for professional typesetting".

alphagrep12345 6y ago

Why is latex needed? If we use can integrate a good math renderer to docs, why can't people use that instead?

BiteCode_dev 6y ago
If you cram a lot of formulas, images and graphs into a world document, you'll have an instable slug to work with. Also, rendering a beautiful word document is quite chalenge. Rendered latex document looks stunningly clean and professional out of the box. They also are plain text, which mean they can be diffed, used with git indexed easily, etc. They play well with anything, being text. You can even read them without having to render them. And finally, latex check the structure of your doc. If you change it, it will crash, preventing you from commiting dead references.

munificent 6y ago

A couple years back, I read Niklaus Wirth's "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs", published by Prentice Hall in 1976. It is a truly beautiful book. Cover, typesetting, illustrations. It just feels compact, clean, and elegant in a way that marvelously reinforces Wirth's own aesthetic. They really don't make them like they used to.

supernova87a 6y ago

Does this story have to be linked to such a shitty ad-filled website? I mean, there are ads right smack in the middle of the figures and pictures of importance.

rjsw 6y ago

My mother worked as a typist for a research lab, the stuff to type up could be handwritten or spoken.

arminiusreturns 6y ago

I think org-mode is the best of all these worlds. I can breakout into latex where I need to, or can export to latex. I can export to html5 and css3 with custom templates, and can run code in blocks. I just wish other editors would work on org support because it feels like jupyter will eat a lot of the cake that org mode should be getting.

rory_h_r 6y ago

A lot of the classic papers by Maxwell, Newton, Faraday etc. are available online. They look great but you can only imagine what a pain typesetting these used to be. See, for example this paper by Maxwell from 1865: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rstl.1865.0008 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rstl.1865...

gnulinux 6y ago

In university I used to write literally everything in Latex. Papers, homeworks, notes, classnotes during class, personal stuff, everything and everything. All my math/CS professors gave us assignments/exams/everything in documents obviously written in Latex (some of my profs were even kind enough to give us .tex source). I was taking this Geography class as a social science elective. We had a paper assignment, and my professor was talking about how it's important to submit HW in this specific format and that they'll give sample .docx file. At the time I didn't have any word processor on my computer so I just quickly asked the professor if it's ok to submit PDF in the same format as I use latex to do my hws. She was like "what is latex"? I'm not a native speaker so I thought I just mispronounced it and described it to her, and she was like no I don't know that you should write your paper in Word. I was stunned. I asked her how do geographers submit their research papers, and she said we just use Word.

TrackerFF 6y ago

I used LaTeX a lot in college, but I'm gonna be honest - IF I could do the work in Microsoft word, I sure as hell would use word. Doing math in word with its built in math editor was incredibly fast, though at the expense of beauty, structure, flexibility.

BiteCode_dev 6y ago

I always wondered the opposite: how do researchers can get any work done when they have to formalize it using LateX? I've tried writting a book using LateX, and it's been nothing but a miserable experience. I'm been coding for 15 years, and tweaking my Linux machine for longer. I know what it means to face rought edges. But LaTeX is another level of shenanigans. I seem to understand that researchers use latex because of the seemingless formula integration and automation of references. Well, why not use asciidoc (https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#mathematical-expressions https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#mathematical-expre...) or myst (https://myst-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/using/syntax.html https://myst-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/using/syntax.ht...) then? They are an order of magnitude easier to use, they can generate websites and pdf, use markdown but allow extensions, they support references, and accept latex formulas. Is it a case of "everybody uses it so I have to"?

ergl 6y ago
Network effects have a lot to do with it. Conferences will give you style files that only work with Latex, and some require the .tex sources when you submit your article.

BlueTemplar 6y ago

LaTeX is great, but it's obsolete (bad Unicode support), and is output to a problematic format (pdf).

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Unicode support in LaTeX has not been an issue since XeTeX became mature technology, so over a decade already.
- leephillips 6y ago
  Exactly. You can even markup math using Unicode. Here is Stokes' Theorem: \[ ∫_Σ ∇ ⨯ 𝐅 ⋅ dΣ = ∮_{∂Σ}𝐅⋅d𝐫 \] That will turn into a typeset version when run through LaTeX (using the unicode-math package). More details at https://lwn.net/Articles/657157/ https://lwn.net/Articles/657157/. Also, any format except PDF is problematic. PDF is the only (widely used) format that will preserve formatting.

leephillips 6y ago

I really enjoyed looking at the examples of old books and manuscripts. But Matplotlib is only the go-to tool for graphs if you are using Python (and some Python users prefer something else). It’s not a universal tool like [La]TeX. The closest thing to that in this sphere would be gnuplot. TeX appeared when I was in graduate school. Before it did, we were using troff, or whatever it was called, which produced hideous output. TeX was a revelation. That’s why everyone switched to it, despite the hardships endured when trying to get it to do what you wanted. The output looked like a beautiful, hand-set book. There was nothing else that came anywhere close. I wrote my thesis in plain TeX, using a Mac Plus ($1400 with a deep student discount). When LaTeX appeared, the selling point was not formatting, but automatic handling of labels and references. You could add a numbered equation in the middle of your document, without having to re-number, and track down references to, the hundred equations that came after it. Glorious. Before LaTeX? The previous generation, my professors, wrote things out in hand and gave the result to a secretary. Those with terrible handwriting might type the text, leaving spaces for the math, which they added with a pen. They didn’t waste time time formatting the paper; that was someone else’s job. TeX created a generation of typographical obsessives, including me. Whatever the secretary did wasn’t good enough.

utopcell 6y ago

OT. I am surprised that the LaTeX name didn't end up in a heated argument between Don Knuth and Leslie Lamport, like the infamous GNU/Linux vs Linux dispute between Stallman and Torvalds. Maybe scientists are more civilized, maybe it helped that LaTeX already has TeX embedded in its name. In retrospect, Lignux might not have been a bad name. The 'g' would be silent of course.

leephillips 6y ago
I can’t imagine either one of those guys giving a crap.
- utopcell 6y ago
  Agreed.

svat 6y ago

(The link goes to a thread on beautiful scientific communication (especially figures/diagrams), so it would have been nice to discuss that rather than discuss LaTeX. But as the conversation here seems to be mostly about the latter…) What a lot of people don't realize about LaTeX is that much of its awkwardness comes from it being a product of two very strong personalities (both Turing Award winners for unrelated work!) pulling it in two opposing directions: • Donald Knuth, who designed TeX as a tool for typesetting primarily, allowing a meticulous author complete control over the appearance of his pages, and attempting to capture in a program (or at least making possible) the highest standards of typography developed over the centuries since the invention of printing.(†) • Leslie Lamport, who wrote LaTeX as a macro package running in TeX, trying to hide complexity from the author and making things as convenient as possible, out of a (probably correct) belief that authors should not care about the appearance and instead only focus on the content! (https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/document-production.pdf https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/document-production.p...) The result is that with LaTeX, things look “easy” superficially, but everything is implemented in TeX macros (never intended as a full-fledged programming language), so things break in mysterious ways. Not to mention the additional layers of complexity from zillions of users writing their own "packages" for everything. The error messages don't make sense to users because they often come from the bowels of TeX, and I suspect that many users even just ignore(!) warnings about overfull/underfull boxes. Conversely, if you look at one of Knuth's own documents written in plain TeX, everything is startlingly simple: for example there is no automatic equation numbering or cross-references; for Equation 5 you just write "5" in the equation and refer to it as "(5)" later, none of that stuff with "\eqref{eq:foo}" or whatever. If macros are used, they tend to be custom for the document, rather than elaborate general-purpose ones. Consider giving plain TeX a try (a great book is A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy); everything makes sense, you feel in power, all the error messages are clear (often the same error messages! but now they apply to something you actually wrote/intended), and if nothing else, you'll end up with an appreciation of what LaTeX is/does. This comment is turning into a repetition of my same tiresome comments on other sites (https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/a/40282 https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/a/40282, https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/398372 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/398372, https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/386592 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/386592, https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/384881 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/384881, https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/518802 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/518802 etc.) so I'll stop here I guess :-) ---- (†): good paragraphs, avoiding widows and orphans and hyphenation on consecutive lines and loose/tight lines adjacent to each other, all of that. By far the longest chapter in The TeXbook, the manual on how to use TeX, is called “Fine Points of Mathematics Typing” and teaches the careful reader about aspects of typography that TeX does not handle automatically — and this is not even counting such advice in other chapters such as ties for avoiding line breaks in “psychologically bad” places. See for example http://www.rtznet.nl/zink/comparison.pdf http://www.rtznet.nl/zink/comparison.pdf (linked from http://www.rtznet.nl/zink/latex.php?lang=en http://www.rtznet.nl/zink/latex.php?lang=en) comparing plain-text paragraphs in Word and InDesign and TeX. If you look at the “bad” typesetting that Knuth rejected as painful (https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/367133 https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/367133), I think you get the idea :-)

jyriand 6y ago

It was an interesting read, as I never thought that this might be a problem in the first place. It seems that to really care/know about LaTex you have to be hard core scientist working on academia. I was wondering why it's being mentioned so often on HN. I think research specific typography can only be advanced by someone who is experiencing these problems firsthand.

b3n4kh 6y ago

I love that I can just read this handwrting, I usually can't even read my own...