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Editing the C Standard
- raister 6y agoLaTeX is a perfect software, zero defects for YEARS now. Which tool could claim that?
- Tomte 6y agoThat's obviously wrong. You're probably thinking of TeX which is bug-free, due to a combination of (a) Donald Knuth being a genius, (b) extreme scrutiny of the code base (in part because of the reward cheques) and (c) Knuth having defined it as bug-free years ago.
- hzhou321 6y agoI agree and I think (c) plays the bigger part for its perfection.
- jcranmer 6y ago> (c) Knuth having defined it as bug-free years ago. IIRC, TeX only becomes defined bug-free on Knuth's death. However, it is feature-complete, in the sense that there are no more features to be added, even if such functionality is desperately needed. (Most notably, TeX does have issues with i18n and especially right-to-left text support)
- syntheticnature 6y agoYou might be thinking of TeX (and even there it requires special definition), LaTeX's issue list is a bit more active: https://github.com/latex3/latex2e/issues https://github.com/latex3/latex2e/issues
- mhh__ 6y agoIt's also decades old and positively crap if you try and treat it like you would a modern programming language. It's way too difficult a problem to do on a whim but quite a lot of time in academia is just thrown down the pit of LaTeX (be that due to incompetence or the design being older than various principles e.g. DRY) LaTeX is certainly the best LaTeX, but it doesn't really have that many competitors.
- brundolf 6y agoWhat's the reason it doesn't have many competitors? Is it intrinsically too hard of a problem, or is it a matter of network effects (extensions, existing knowledge, existing bodies of work, etc)? Or is there just a lack of motivation?
- mhh__ 6y agoTypesetting is hard
- brundolf 6y agoIt's something I'm (probably foolishly) tempted to take a swing at. I have a lot of experience with doing layout in HTML/CSS (of which printable typesetting feels like a subset, superficially at least), and I've been getting into writing parsers/doing language design recently. The only problem is I don't know a ton about LaTeX or how people use it other than "it lets you very precisely format documents via special markup, including things like mathematical formulas and diagrams (?), and it's used by lots of academics".
- zzless 6y agoI respect your courage but I have to disagree with your assessment of CSS vs real typography. Layout capabilities of CSS are orders of magnitude less extensive compared to those of TeX. For example it is nearly impossible to say, put a box 2/3 of the width of a container of unknown width. Just the simple task of centering an element has pages dedicated to it and to my knowledge, only CSS3 has a reasonably workable solution. As far as LaTeX's abilities as a programming language go, I have an interpreter for a reasonable subset of C written in TeX (it was an academic exercise but this is just to show what is possible). So it is much more than a mere markup language.
- brundolf 6y ago> For example it is nearly impossible to say, put a box 2/3 of the width of a container of unknown width. Just the simple task of centering an element has pages dedicated to it and to my knowledge, only CSS3 has a reasonably workable solution. It's been a few years since you used CSS :) Both of these things are trivial to do now But to be clear: while I think my CSS experience would give me a grasp of what needs to be expressed and some ideas for how to express it, there is a whole other layer of actually applying that, and reconciling it with the content, which would be a challenge (and is done for you by the browser in CSS' case) > As far as LaTeX's abilities as a programming language go, I have an interpreter for a reasonable subset of C written in TeX (it was an academic exercise but this is just to show what is possible). So it is much more than a mere markup language. I believe you, but I also question whether that level of power is actually being used by people making documents with it, or whether it just adds complexity. I genuinely don't know. But those are the kinds of places one might find improvements to be made.
- CJefferson 6y agoIt's full of defects, they'll just never be fixed. Most languges would define the error messages of LaTeX as defects, and once you start including packages, many don't work together. I never realised how awful LaTeX was until I started working with a co-author who is blind, if you just "write LaTeX" you end up with equations, algorithms and tables constantly half-off the page.
- johnday 6y agoLaTeX does report this as a problem, of course - the refrain of "overfull hbox" is near universal (and ignoring the warning is just as universal). Where it fails is in reporting the problem in a meaningful way. This is, of course, very difficult to accomplish, since there is no nice mapping from line-of-TeX to visual error. What's more, any tool which could provide such an error would be so constrained as to be useless for typesetting.
- mhh__ 6y agoI don't think LaTeX is that bad but... As a community (programming, engineering, science - whatever) we should probably be louder that the one thing any man or woman with the raw cash can do to help the scientific community is funding LaTeX-2030. The problem is oh-so-difficult but having a modern statically typed (for reflection mainly) well-designed programming language for typesetting could save huge amounts of time for researchers and the like. That and the real agenda which is to kill word. The degrees of separation from the HN readers stereotype of a HN reader to a billionaire can't be that high, right?
- pklausler 6y ago"LaTeX-2030" is shadowed in search engine results by hits for rubber gloves. Can you share a project link, if there is one?
- dboreham 6y agoPerhaps: https://www.latex-project.org/latex3/ https://www.latex-project.org/latex3/ ?
- Firerouge 6y agoProbably not, that project seems to have been started in 1999, based on the date from the pdf linked in the second sentence
- 0xffff2 6y agoI've never heard of "LaTeX-2030", and even adding terms like "typesetting" and "language" to filter out the gloves (and other less SFW results...), I still don't find anything relevant. Whatever it is, I guess they must really need the funding if they can't even make it onto the front page of Google.
- quietbritishjim 6y agoI think they meant a hypothetical replacement for LaTeX that would come into existence as a result of that funding and would be ready by 2030, rather than a project that actually exists now.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kickingvegas 6y agoFWIW, I used but never liked LaTeX and only because I needed a good way to deal with expressing mathematics. However, using org-mode and exporting to LaTeX is a winning combo for me. With org-mode, I can focus on writing and not typesetting.
- phaemon 6y agoYou know, for over a decade I've basically lived in vim & the shell. But I continually hear good things about org-mode and magit. Should I just embrace my destiny turn to the dark side?
- masklinn 6y agoSure. You can even use evil if you can't bear chording.
- kickingvegas 6y agoWould not frame it as “destiny” or “dark”, but using org-mode has been spectacularly transforming and guiding for how I plan/design software today. Definitely worth trying out https://orgmode.org/features.html https://orgmode.org/features.html
- ChickeNES 6y agoI still don't really understand what the value proposition of org-mode is. What is your personal workflow like?
- kickingvegas 6y agoOkay, here's a typical day with org-mode for me. Start out the day entering a daily journal, listing out all the TODO items and scheduling them so I can see them in org-agenda. A subset of those TODOs are meetings, of which I'll use the folding outline editor to write an agenda and notes. Given that I work remotely now near 100% of the time, I typically share my screen to go over the agenda. Frequently, I'll need to diagram something to share with the team. For that I use org-babel to write plantuml or graphviz and render the output (like a sequence or class diagram or flow chart) and use that to drive design discussion with the team. Note that all of this is still within GUI emacs in single buffer (text and images). At my work we use Confluence and Jira, so I use org-export to publish the above work to Jira markup (tables, headings, lists, typeface styles). Other TODO items are the tasks I do during the day; there I use org-mode to capture my notes/thoughts. Most times, I'll use org tables to help organize tabular data (which happens a lot) and org-babel to run both python and bash commands. In addition I'll use source blocks to capture code snippets (typically Swift nowawdays) and random commands. I'll also store links that I run across through the course of day. Note again, I'm still working out of that same buffer. With emacs-client, I remote from my iPad into that same buffer and edit away. End of the day, I commit my org-mode file into my notes repo using magit. Occasionally, I'll use org-mode to write a presentation using reveal.js or typeset documentatation to push through LaTeX. Nearly all my documentation starts out as an org file. YMMV, but org-mode has completely transformed how I work now.
- olivierestsage 6y agoI understand that the author wants to make a provocative statement/get a reaction, but I have to say I find the general tone of this post, and especially the claim "LaTeX is horseshit", extremely off-putting (not to mention clueless as to both the historic and continued significance of LaTeX). It makes me not even want to bother trying to discern whatever point the author might be attempting to make.
- Tyr42 6y agoTo be fair, I've written my math papers in LaTeX, and I agree. Well, perhaps with the modification: "LaTeX errors are complete horseshit". Or perhaps blame the compiler. Do you remember what gcc errors were like just as clang got popular? They were pretty bad before the c compilers started competing to have nice ones. Those are wonderful in comparison to the errors in LaTeX. Fucking extra newline breaking equation* and causing nonsense.
- zzless 6y agoI would also point out that most of his troubles stem from the somewhat amateurish approach to using LaTeX. Overfull boxes can be handled by relaxing the typographic requirements. If one desires the typesetting quality of MS Word and quicker builds, this can be easily arranged by manipulating \emergencystretch and such. LaTeX is not an editor, and the use of a carefully designed style would go a long way to eliminate most of his concerns. But proclaiming 'do not write documents in LaTeX, use Word instead' is just subjective garbage, to use his own terminology. Disclaimer: I do not particularly like LaTeX and prefer plain TeX myself.
- ylyn 6y agoI really don't understand why people are so sensitive to tone when it is not even directed at anyone in particular.
- chrisseaton 6y agoLaTeX is the work of real people with feelings. You can criticise work without resorting to abuse. Also if you resort to abuse it makes me suspicious that you don’t have a strong enough argument without the theatrics.
- bovermyer 6y agoI use LaTeX because I can define both layout and content in text files. I can store those files in git, and generate a quick PDF from them. I used to use pandoc (with pandoc-flavored Markdown) for this, but it just couldn't handle layout properly, even with mixed LaTeX and Markdown in the same files. I'm not overly fond of LaTeX, but it is the only tool that does what I want.
- LEARAX 6y agoIt's really unfortunate that LaTeX and friends seem to be the only options for document typesetting with anything vaguely complicated. There are just so many quirks and oddities; many times I feel like error messages might as well be written in another language, and the syntax becomes ugly fast. Personally I haven't had much luck getting into LuaLateX or XeLaTeX, but I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has found those to be worthy alternatives. Having looked into LuaLaTeX a bit, it seems there are a lot of odd quirks there as well.
- wahern 6y agoLaTeX and its TeX cousins are the worst document typesetting options except for all the others. What's fascinating is that this situation has existed for decades. Alternatives have risen and [mostly] fallen, but LaTeX persists. For that reason an alternative would not only have to be better, but significantly better, for me to question someone's choice of LaTeX.
- Tainnor 6y agoThis. It's also hilarious how bad LaTeX actually is at maths despite it being overwhelmingly used for exactly that purpose. Instead of worrying about mathematical semantics, you constantly have to make typesetting decisions. There are workarounds (use your own custom, semantic commands), but still. And yet, everything else seems to be even worse. Disclaimer: I have been using LaTeX (mostly XeLaTeX) for over a decade for most of my writing, mathematical and non-mathematical, although nowadays I often do so via Markdown+pandoc. Also, at my last company we had to parse mathematical formulas typeset in LaTeX and understand their structure... it was a nightmare.
- rnhmjoj 6y agoSo, what are the LaTeX alternatives that I can use to create high quality documents with source I can check into a CVS, great tooling and documentation?
- vehemenz 6y agoHTML/MathML/CSS and PrinceXML works very well.
- kzrdude 6y agoSure uh, cough.. cvs?
- rnhmjoj 6y agoOops, I meant a VCS.
- pjmlp 6y agoFrom enterprise point of view, DITA and Docbook. For me great tooling means Word/Framemaker like, with ability to generate whatever document format I feel like.
- hprotagonist 6y ago"young person yells at cloud" is a new one on me!
- sien 6y agoThere is a paper "An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development" that is will worth a look. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115069 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... Big quote from the abstract : "On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users." However, it is worth noting that anyone who has ever dealt with a Word document that is a collation from other people usually winds up with similar to hassles to what the writer finds in the article.
- markgall 6y agoThis paper has been criticized in many places, because the way it's set up of course Word will win. People had to do things like very specific figure placement that is difficult in LaTeX. But in reality, most people just accept how LaTeX handles the figure placement by default (which is usually quite good), and doesn't waste time fighting it. So it's not really a real-life comparison of the two. If the challenge had been "Write a document formatted according to the norms of your field", which is what people are actually doing most of the time, LaTeX would win easily. For scientific papers the journal is going to redo all the formatting anyway (using their own custom LaTeX set-ups), so there's no reason to waste time on this.
- zzless 6y agoIndeed, one look at the comments would unveil a whole lot of shortcomings to their methodology. One of which was an entirely opaque way in which they defined 'errors in typesetting'.
- jcranmer 6y ago> But in reality, most people just accept how LaTeX handles the figure placement by default (which is usually quite good), and doesn't waste time fighting it. In my experience, LaTeX's default figure placement is actually quite bad, and you have to spend some time trying to paste it in different places to get it to place the figure in the place you want it.
- hpoe 6y ago
- dang 6y agoPlease don't editorialize the title (submitted title was "Editing the C standard / “LaTeX is horseshit”"). This breaks the site guidelines: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) I realize there was a subheading saying that, but the article has other subheadings, and cherry-picking is the essence of editorializing. Titles have by far the biggest influence on discussion, so this is a big deal.
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- Dylan16807 6y agoSo what are you supposed to do, if you want to submit a document that is stuck inside a larger document? Any method I can think of would fail the "original source" rule.
- dang 6y agoSpeaking of the C Standard, if you missed this AMA with standards committee members back in April, I thought it was pretty cool: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22865357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22865357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22865357&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22865357&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22865357&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22865357&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22865357&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22865357&p=4