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Knuth wrote TeX as a labor of love. The surest way to kill everything good about it would be a few million dollars, and a team, and to turn it into fucking Goog

Knuth wrote TeX as a labor of love. The surest way to kill everything good about it would be a few million dollars, and a team, and to turn it into fucking Google Docs for science. Ask Knuth to name one person who has the clearest vision for the future of TeX, and give that person a stipend to work on it for the next ten years, or for life, and you might actually do some good.

nerdponx 6y ago
Leave TeX alone, just build better tools on top of it.
- derefr 6y ago
  I mean, that's what they were proposing; LaTeX is "on top of TeX", and LaTeX is what they were suggesting should be fixed.
  - nerdponx 6y ago
    Yes, but I was responding to a comment about TeX.
- jfk13 6y ago
  While it's possible to build a lot of things on top, maybe it'd be worth making some minor updates to the core TeX engine itself, to bring it into the world of Unicode and OpenType fonts... Oh, there are a couple of such candidates, actually, built with very different philosophies: there's XeTeX, intended to graft Unicode and OpenType support onto TeX with as little disruption as possible, such that it "just works" with minimal effort; and there's LuaTeX, which "deconstructs" TeX to give you an infinitely-flexible typesetting toolkit that can do just about anything, if you can figure out how to wield it.
  - nerdponx 6y ago
    Good points.
fermienrico 6y ago
I think the idea would be more like Jet Brain’s IDE for LateX. Ofcourse I have doubts if some team can pull this off well.
- brzozowski 6y ago
  Have you tried the TeXiFy IDEA plugin? It's well-maintained and has saved me a bunch of time. https://github.com/Hannah-Sten/TeXiFy-IDEA https://github.com/Hannah-Sten/TeXiFy-IDEA https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9473-texify-idea https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9473-texify-idea
  - michaelcampbell 6y ago
    That's...amazing. Didn't even think to look there. Will totally be checking that out.
scubbo 6y ago
Can you elaborate on what you think is bad about Google Docs? Aside from the data privacy concerns from the fact that it's owned and operated by Google (which I agree with), it seems like a fantastically usable, available, and powerful product. What do you fear would happen to LaTeX in this situation?
- btmiller 6y ago
  2 things, 1) Why do you consider Google Docs to be any different than Word? They both serve the same market, so you might as well be asking why not standardize around Word. And 2) given the intended uses of Google Docs/Word, the biggest reason not to use it for research are exactly the set of asides you mentioned.
  - scubbo 6y ago
    > you might as well be asking why not standardize around Word. The comment I was replying to specifically called out Google Docs as bad, so that was what I was referring to. I agree that they appear to have mostly-similar features (though, to me as someone who doesn't use either as a Power User, GD seems to be more focused on online collaboration, and MW on local editing, the output of which is then shared)
  - izzydata 6y ago
    That seems irrelevant in this context as both Microsoft Word or Google Docs would fit the analogy in the same way.
- inimino 6y ago
  It's a fantastic product for locking the organizational knowledge of countless teams in the data centres of the biggest (publicly traded) enemy to privacy the US has ever seen. This would be a disaster for science, would suck the life out of the TeX ecosystem, and would be a perfect acquisition target for evil science publishing parasites (you know the names) to further strangle the scholarly discourse in the name of convenience. If the files don't live in my hard drive and aren't published to my web server, I don't want it and will fight against it. And before someone asks, yes, I feel similarly about GitHub, and wasn't the least bit surprised when it sold itself to the self-declared enemy of open source of previous decades (now reformed, of course!). Yes, these things are convenient, they have great UX nudging you toward what serves the interests of whoever owns them. I'm not arguing against the usability of Google Docs but against transplanting that model to a community built on entirely different principles.
FinnG 6y ago
I do totally understand what you mean, but I don't think you should dismiss the idea this swiftly. This is effectively a dictatorship vs democracy argument. I tend to suspect that neither solution would provide exactly what you wanted unless you were the dictator! If you accept that premise, the decision has to be: which system would serve the most people the best? I'm inclined to think that a team with a budget of $20M would probably get the closest.
im3w1l 6y ago
If I had a few million dollars budget for improving latex, I'd spend 90% of it UX research. What are people using it for? What are the biggest pain points? Which easy wins are there? Then try to modify it as little as possible while improving things.
- epicureanideal 6y ago
  Or just improve HTML text rendering such that Latex isn't necessary to generate beautiful documents. And add better support for concepts like page numbers, page headers, page footers, which while theoretically supported by HTML and CSS, aren't well supported in practice. Given that many people use Python now for scientific purposes, and it's a straightforward language, to add extensibility to this Latex replacement, maybe just use Jinja templates and Python packages.
  - inimino 6y ago
    You are greatly underestimating (1) the effort it took (in committees, over decades) to get CSS where it is now (and DSSSL, XSL-FO, and all the related work in this area) and (2) the vastness of the gap between where the Web platform is after all these years vs. where TeX already was before the Web even existed.
jessriedel 6y ago
Obviously everything that can be built by an individual is better that way than if built by a team. But at some point the amount of work becomes too much for one person to finish in a reasonable amount of time (e.g., a lifetime, or before their project becomes out of date). What I'm describing is not do-able by one person, and the result of refusing to coordinate a team around the project (and instead having a hodge-podge of tools built by various people) is the current LaTeX ecosystem mess.
raverbashing 6y ago
People do dissertations, articles, etc using Word/Google Docs, etc Of course it's a work of love, but it's a tool from the 70s Clinging to the past might be interesting but in the end it's that, a tool
- Spivak 6y ago
  Yes, it is ostensibly a tool from the 70's but it is also the most complete, correct, and featureful typesetting engine that exists. TeX's downfall is the macro system. It makes it too easy for people to pile on poorly written abstractions that make working with any given document a nightmare because it has its own DSL. But because those packages and macros grew organically by researchers solving problems for themselves they are too practically useful to just drop them. So there are lots of annoying unintuitive quirks that you end up just having to put up with.
dragonwriter 6y ago
Yes. And, yes, there are better end user tools, for many use cases, for creating documents to be typeset than coding them directly in TeX, but (starting with LaTeX and moving up to many more modern solutions) a lot of them are built on top of TeX (and some even on LaTeX) rather than replacing it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

nerdponx 6y ago

Leave TeX alone, just build better tools on top of it.

derefr 6y ago
I mean, that's what they were proposing; LaTeX is "on top of TeX", and LaTeX is what they were suggesting should be fixed.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  Yes, but I was responding to a comment about TeX.
jfk13 6y ago
While it's possible to build a lot of things on top, maybe it'd be worth making some minor updates to the core TeX engine itself, to bring it into the world of Unicode and OpenType fonts... Oh, there are a couple of such candidates, actually, built with very different philosophies: there's XeTeX, intended to graft Unicode and OpenType support onto TeX with as little disruption as possible, such that it "just works" with minimal effort; and there's LuaTeX, which "deconstructs" TeX to give you an infinitely-flexible typesetting toolkit that can do just about anything, if you can figure out how to wield it.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  Good points.

fermienrico 6y ago

I think the idea would be more like Jet Brain’s IDE for LateX. Ofcourse I have doubts if some team can pull this off well.

brzozowski 6y ago
Have you tried the TeXiFy IDEA plugin? It's well-maintained and has saved me a bunch of time. https://github.com/Hannah-Sten/TeXiFy-IDEA https://github.com/Hannah-Sten/TeXiFy-IDEA https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9473-texify-idea https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/9473-texify-idea
- michaelcampbell 6y ago
  That's...amazing. Didn't even think to look there. Will totally be checking that out.

scubbo 6y ago

Can you elaborate on what you think is bad about Google Docs? Aside from the data privacy concerns from the fact that it's owned and operated by Google (which I agree with), it seems like a fantastically usable, available, and powerful product. What do you fear would happen to LaTeX in this situation?

btmiller 6y ago
2 things, 1) Why do you consider Google Docs to be any different than Word? They both serve the same market, so you might as well be asking why not standardize around Word. And 2) given the intended uses of Google Docs/Word, the biggest reason not to use it for research are exactly the set of asides you mentioned.
- scubbo 6y ago
  > you might as well be asking why not standardize around Word. The comment I was replying to specifically called out Google Docs as bad, so that was what I was referring to. I agree that they appear to have mostly-similar features (though, to me as someone who doesn't use either as a Power User, GD seems to be more focused on online collaboration, and MW on local editing, the output of which is then shared)
- izzydata 6y ago
  That seems irrelevant in this context as both Microsoft Word or Google Docs would fit the analogy in the same way.
inimino 6y ago
It's a fantastic product for locking the organizational knowledge of countless teams in the data centres of the biggest (publicly traded) enemy to privacy the US has ever seen. This would be a disaster for science, would suck the life out of the TeX ecosystem, and would be a perfect acquisition target for evil science publishing parasites (you know the names) to further strangle the scholarly discourse in the name of convenience. If the files don't live in my hard drive and aren't published to my web server, I don't want it and will fight against it. And before someone asks, yes, I feel similarly about GitHub, and wasn't the least bit surprised when it sold itself to the self-declared enemy of open source of previous decades (now reformed, of course!). Yes, these things are convenient, they have great UX nudging you toward what serves the interests of whoever owns them. I'm not arguing against the usability of Google Docs but against transplanting that model to a community built on entirely different principles.

FinnG 6y ago

I do totally understand what you mean, but I don't think you should dismiss the idea this swiftly. This is effectively a dictatorship vs democracy argument. I tend to suspect that neither solution would provide exactly what you wanted unless you were the dictator! If you accept that premise, the decision has to be: which system would serve the most people the best? I'm inclined to think that a team with a budget of $20M would probably get the closest.

im3w1l 6y ago

If I had a few million dollars budget for improving latex, I'd spend 90% of it UX research. What are people using it for? What are the biggest pain points? Which easy wins are there? Then try to modify it as little as possible while improving things.

epicureanideal 6y ago
Or just improve HTML text rendering such that Latex isn't necessary to generate beautiful documents. And add better support for concepts like page numbers, page headers, page footers, which while theoretically supported by HTML and CSS, aren't well supported in practice. Given that many people use Python now for scientific purposes, and it's a straightforward language, to add extensibility to this Latex replacement, maybe just use Jinja templates and Python packages.
- inimino 6y ago
  You are greatly underestimating (1) the effort it took (in committees, over decades) to get CSS where it is now (and DSSSL, XSL-FO, and all the related work in this area) and (2) the vastness of the gap between where the Web platform is after all these years vs. where TeX already was before the Web even existed.

jessriedel 6y ago

Obviously everything that can be built by an individual is better that way than if built by a team. But at some point the amount of work becomes too much for one person to finish in a reasonable amount of time (e.g., a lifetime, or before their project becomes out of date). What I'm describing is not do-able by one person, and the result of refusing to coordinate a team around the project (and instead having a hodge-podge of tools built by various people) is the current LaTeX ecosystem mess.

raverbashing 6y ago

People do dissertations, articles, etc using Word/Google Docs, etc Of course it's a work of love, but it's a tool from the 70s Clinging to the past might be interesting but in the end it's that, a tool

Spivak 6y ago
Yes, it is ostensibly a tool from the 70's but it is also the most complete, correct, and featureful typesetting engine that exists. TeX's downfall is the macro system. It makes it too easy for people to pile on poorly written abstractions that make working with any given document a nightmare because it has its own DSL. But because those packages and macros grew organically by researchers solving problems for themselves they are too practically useful to just drop them. So there are lots of annoying unintuitive quirks that you end up just having to put up with.

dragonwriter 6y ago

Yes. And, yes, there are better end user tools, for many use cases, for creating documents to be typeset than coding them directly in TeX, but (starting with LaTeX and moving up to many more modern solutions) a lot of them are built on top of TeX (and some even on LaTeX) rather than replacing it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.