4 ms·
I don't really believe this. Fund some open access initiatives or something and your money will go a lot further. The vast majority just don't have a use case
by markgall 6y ago
I don't really believe this. Fund some open access initiatives or something and your money will go a lot further.
The vast majority just don't have a use case where "LaTeX-2030" is going to help, and this wouldn't make much difference to them. I'm a mathematician and I write papers in LaTeX every day. Sure I could benefit from programability occasionally, but it's just not a serious problem. If I need to automatically generate a table or something, I have a Python script output LaTeX, it takes me 30 seconds.
Obviously there are some uses cases where it would make a big difference, but there just aren't very many in the grand scheme. We already have LaTeX3 which lets you do scripting, and lualatex. The fact that basically nobody uses either gives you a sense of how much the general community wants this.
- y7 6y agoLaTeX indeed mostly works. But, I do think it could be a lot better. For example, today while writing a paper, I ran into a compilation issue that gave me the following error message: ! Undefined control sequence. <write> ...\protect \numberline {\plist@algorithm 1}{\ignorespaces $\protect... l.350 \end{theorem} None of these commands (except \end{theorem}) were in my paper, they were all in an included package. I later found out the issue was nowhere near line 350 or inside of the theorem environment. There just doesn't seem to be a good way to debug LaTeX errors. The best method I found was to use some sort of binary search, removing parts of the document to see if the error persists — which is ridiculously time consuming. https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/309010/teach-me-to-debug https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/309010/teach-me-to-d...
- mhh__ 6y agoAn initiative doesn't fit the "one thing" criteria of my comment