5 ms·

I'm not sure rewriting Latex in XYZ is a good idea. The whole thing is a mess and a pain to use (and I use it multiple times a week). Sure the documents often l

I'm not sure rewriting Latex in XYZ is a good idea. The whole thing is a mess and a pain to use (and I use it multiple times a week). Sure the documents often look good, but when they don't or there is an error, fixing it just becomes a nightmare. I wish somebody would design a modern typesetting system that would accept say latex equations but without 50 years of cruft and levels of macroses upon macroses.

Veen 6y ago
Matthew Butterick is working on the Quad document processor, which is intended to "modernize the good ideas in LaTeX," but I'm unsure what its equation typesetting is like. It's written in Racket. https://docs.racket-lang.org/quad/ https://docs.racket-lang.org/quad/
- earthscienceman 6y ago
  The final note in the documentation on this software is a quote very fitting of a project re-thinking digital typesetting: “A way of doing something original is by trying something so painstaking that nobody else has ever bothered with it.” — Brian Eno
peteretep 6y ago
Sile appears to still be under active development: https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile
marmaduke 6y ago
I don’t like Word but it does accept Latex math and is easy to use.
- gspr 6y ago
  Word does not use plain text input, and its output looks objectively terrible compared to LaTeX. These two things make it completely inadequate as a competitor.
  - ModernMech 6y ago
    You've been able to use plain text input for equations since Word 2007 at least: https://www.wikihow.com/Insert-Equations-in-Microsoft-Word https://www.wikihow.com/Insert-Equations-in-Microsoft-Word
    - gspr 6y ago
      That's kinda like saying that anything typed on a keyboard is plain text. I'm referring to the document source code.
Upvoter33 6y ago
People have tried. I knew someone who did a term paper on typesetting systems - wish I could find it - and the conclusion was basically "TeX sucks in a lot of ways, but the attempted replacements have always been worse." Knuth actually got a lot of things right and hence TeX's staying power.
- secondcoming 6y ago
  So it's the academic scholar's equivalent of CMake?
returningfory2 6y ago
> I wish somebody would design a modern typesetting system... In theory yes, but I think the problem is that it will never be adopted. Too much of academia is built on the deep assumption that LaTeX is the only possible format that people write documents in. I think one possible way out is to start a new from-scratch TeX engine that is built in such a way that a new typesetting language (or "front end" if you like) can be added to it. This may lead to some reasonable slow migration strategies.
- Silhouette 6y ago
  In theory yes, but I think the problem is that it will never be adopted. Too much of academia is built on the deep assumption that LaTeX is the only possible format that people write documents in. You're not wrong, but then again, this is not the biggest thing wrong with a lot of academic publishing, and it wouldn't be the biggest tower that a lot of academics are trying to topple. Indeed, breaking away from TeX and breaking away from the traditional journals and the toxic model around publishing in them might be happy partners.

Veen 6y ago

Matthew Butterick is working on the Quad document processor, which is intended to "modernize the good ideas in LaTeX," but I'm unsure what its equation typesetting is like. It's written in Racket. https://docs.racket-lang.org/quad/ https://docs.racket-lang.org/quad/

earthscienceman 6y ago
The final note in the documentation on this software is a quote very fitting of a project re-thinking digital typesetting: “A way of doing something original is by trying something so painstaking that nobody else has ever bothered with it.” — Brian Eno

peteretep 6y ago

Sile appears to still be under active development: https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile https://github.com/sile-typesetter/sile

marmaduke 6y ago

I don’t like Word but it does accept Latex math and is easy to use.

gspr 6y ago
Word does not use plain text input, and its output looks objectively terrible compared to LaTeX. These two things make it completely inadequate as a competitor.
- ModernMech 6y ago
  You've been able to use plain text input for equations since Word 2007 at least: https://www.wikihow.com/Insert-Equations-in-Microsoft-Word https://www.wikihow.com/Insert-Equations-in-Microsoft-Word
  - gspr 6y ago
    That's kinda like saying that anything typed on a keyboard is plain text. I'm referring to the document source code.

Upvoter33 6y ago

People have tried. I knew someone who did a term paper on typesetting systems - wish I could find it - and the conclusion was basically "TeX sucks in a lot of ways, but the attempted replacements have always been worse." Knuth actually got a lot of things right and hence TeX's staying power.

secondcoming 6y ago
So it's the academic scholar's equivalent of CMake?

returningfory2 6y ago

> I wish somebody would design a modern typesetting system... In theory yes, but I think the problem is that it will never be adopted. Too much of academia is built on the deep assumption that LaTeX is the only possible format that people write documents in. I think one possible way out is to start a new from-scratch TeX engine that is built in such a way that a new typesetting language (or "front end" if you like) can be added to it. This may lead to some reasonable slow migration strategies.

Silhouette 6y ago
In theory yes, but I think the problem is that it will never be adopted. Too much of academia is built on the deep assumption that LaTeX is the only possible format that people write documents in. You're not wrong, but then again, this is not the biggest thing wrong with a lot of academic publishing, and it wouldn't be the biggest tower that a lot of academics are trying to topple. Indeed, breaking away from TeX and breaking away from the traditional journals and the toxic model around publishing in them might be happy partners.