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Fun fact: about 20 years ago, LaTeX developers were lamenting the stagnation of LaTeX and LaTeX being surpassed on a technical level by its new competitor (in t

• auggierose 6y ago
  Who is writing LaTeX? Mathematicians. They don't really care about the technical level of its implementation, and they surely don't care that you "don't necessarily write TeX anymore", actually, that's a negative for them.
  • nsajko 6y ago
    Scientists use TeX for writing papers that they can submit to journals. As I already said, the journals don't accept ConTeXt. So of course mathematicians will rarely use ConTeXt. > care about the technical level of its implementation It's not about the implementation, it's about the interface.
    • the_svd_doctor 6y ago
      Some journals accept Tex files? I’m surprised. SIAM (applied math) does not for instance. I don’t think IEEE does. Do Math journal accept tex files directly? Arxiv does of course, most notably. But it’s not a journal.
      • macintux 6y ago
        > Some journals accept Tex files? I’m surprised. SIAM (applied math) does not for instance. Each journal I've checked on their site (admittedly, only 4 or 5) seems to mandate TeX. E.g. https://www.siam.org/publications/journals/siam-journal-on-applied-algebra-and-geometry-siaga/instructions-for-authors https://www.siam.org/publications/journals/siam-journal-on-a... > Authors of accepted papers must submit TeX files to SIAM for typesetting. Authors are highly encouraged to prepare their papers using SIAM's multimedia LaTeX 2e macros. Note that the SIAM office will format Plain TeX and AMSTeX files to LaTeX 2e. The LaTeX 2e macro package and documentation are available here or by email request.
        • the_svd_doctor 6y ago
          They definitively don’t mandate it. I got 4 papers there, all uploaded in PDF directly.
      • diffeomorphism 6y ago
        > SIAM (applied math) does not for instance. What? I have papers there and they insisted on latex. https://www.siam.org/publications/journals/siam-journal-on-mathematical-analysis-sima/instructions-for-authors https://www.siam.org/publications/journals/siam-journal-on-m... > Authors of accepted papers must submit TeX files to SIAM for typesetting. Authors are highly encouraged to prepare their papers using SIAM's standard LaTeX 2e macros. Note that the SIAM office will format Plain TeX and AMSTeX files to LaTeX 2e. The LaTeX 2e macro package and documentation are available here or by email request.
        • the_svd_doctor 6y ago
          That’s weird. I always upload PDF. And the copy editing is done on their side by editing the PDF using some fancy Adobe pro tool. I never uploaded a *.tex to SIAM. Of course I use latex to prepare the PDF.
  • munk-a 6y ago
    I loved using LaTeX for note taking back in university for technical classes since the mathematics typsetting is quite developed and clear - that said the fields a bit more crowded now with some nice alternatives for mathematical markup.
    • spekcular 6y ago
      What are the alternatives?
      • munk-a 6y ago
        AsciiMath and MathML - MathML is probably not a good dialect to use as a hand written notation but AsciiMath is pretty approachable. TeX is still pretty darn good though.
        • spekcular 6y ago
          AsciiMath is great! Thanks for the pointer.
• dataflow 6y ago
  > How does that happen? Is it easy to convert LaTeX to ConTeXt?
  • TylerE 6y ago
    It's not a conversion. It's basically a separate language. (Well, technically, the same language, but imagine all the std. library functions are different). They're also very different philosophies. LaTeX tries to do do everything semantically, and hide the details. CoNTeXt otoh admits that concreteness matters, so you generally say what you want. Think "empahasis" vs "bold, underlined, 15pt text".
    • dataflow 6y ago
      Yeah, I'm guessing that's probably why people aren't migrating. When there's no easy upgrade path and not a compelling enough gain, people will want to stick with the previous technology.
      • TylerE 6y ago
        THe gain is very compelling, but that's sort of the point. This isn't like going from gif to png. It's more like going from bmp to svg.
    • teawrecks 6y ago
      So what you're saying is that LaTeX is ConTeXt free?
    • globular-toast 6y ago
      The LaTeX (declarative) approach is better. It's so much easier to write consistent, professional looking documents that way. The other (imperative) way is more like MS Word, and we all know how that turns out. Other declarative styles that are popular include markdown and html.
• bb1234 6y ago
  This is a good point. I think products like these have strong network externalities (more the number of people use it, more beneficial they become). For this reason, a new product may not replace an incumbent product even when the incumbent product is slightly inferior. I spent a lot of time learning and using ConTeXt. Wrote one of my articles using that. When the time came to send it to a journal, they wanted it either in Word, or formatted using their LaTeX style files. At that time I gave up on ConTeXt, since I did not want to keep learning and using two different systems.
• coliveira 6y ago
  ConTeXt is not targeted toward authors of scientific papers (although I'm sure this is possible). The community behind ConTeXt has always been involved with books and more complex material. So I guess they evolved into a niche of the TeX market, like music typesetting (MusiXTeX and friends). Regarding Lua, I think it is a strange idea from the point of view of the typical LaTeX package writer. Not only you need to learn Lua, but you also have to write packages that are accepted only by this implementation of LaTeX. This is a clear disadvantage if you want to have a widely used package.
  • JairoAdelRio 6y ago
    Lua is orders of magnitude easier to learn than TeX. No macros, no expansion trickery and no obscure tricks to do things as complex calculations (either for typesetting or drawing).
  • TylerE 6y ago
    > ConTeXt is not targeted toward authors of scientific papers Absolutely true. I would posit that most people writing LaTeX aren't writing up papers in it either (Most journals prefer or require Word these days). ConText isn't just for books though..it's great for any sort of thing with formatting...like, say, a resume.
    • anonymousDan 6y ago
      Huh? I know of precisely zero journals/conferences where Word is commonly used (in CS at least).
      • TylerE 6y ago
        How about Nature? https://www.nature.com/srep/author-instructions/submission-guidelines https://www.nature.com/srep/author-instructions/submission-g... "Whilst Microsoft Word is preferred we also accept LaTeX, or PDF format." In general Word has eaten up everything that isn't hard core math.
        • 6y ago
• ajarmst 6y ago
  "[I]t already broke backwards compatibility several times". There's your answer. I've got three decades worth of style files, personal macros, and workflow invested in the way I use LaTeX, numbering in the thousands of lines. In some communities, especially academia and most especially amongst mathematicians and engineers, that is a typical investment. Nothing that might require me to start overhauling that is going to get a moment's consideration until LaTeX stops working for me, and even then I'm probably going to try and maintain a bespoke TeX distro before I'd try to replace it. New and casual users of LaTeX should probably consider these alternatives (I've even considered moving over to LuaTeX because it would allow more automation, but I'd need a pretty longish period of reimplementation that I don't see becoming available soon.) But anyone who wants to move that community of long-time users, organizations and publications is going to need to address the problem of a significant user base that have been using effectively the same software for literally (and according to my students, unbelievably) decades. There's an analogous situation (or a continuation of this same situation, given the overlap in user base) for those who've invested decades in building a personal set of Emacs configuration files. Again, I've got thousands of lines of *.el files (many of them devoted to my idiosyncratic use of LaTeX) in my Emacs configuration. Of projects looking to replace the aged Elisp engine and create a modern implementation aren't going to get much consideration if it would mean replacing that (literally decades of) work in a different language. That's why I continue to be interested in Guile Emacs---less because of Guile (although I have no issues replacing Elisp with a modern Scheme), but because they've always made it clear that an ability to re-use Elisp configuration files was a primary design goal.
  • dkna 6y ago
    > (I've even considered moving over to LuaTeX because it would allow more automation, but I'd need a pretty longish period of reimplementation that I don't see becoming available soon.) Good thing you didn't bother, because it's absolutely not worth it. I chose LuaTeX initially precisely because it seemed more convenient to write commands in Lua than in plain LaTeX, but it turned into a total nightmare. Issues crop up as soon as you try to do something with text that embeds LaTeX macros, and the errors you get are even more byzantine than the ones you'd get by writing "normal" LaTeX code. IMHO the very idea of embedding an external language into LaTeX is pointless, for the simple reason that LaTeX isn't markup, but code, and that it's pretty much impossible to parse it into a representation that makes sense and could be manipulated like, say, the HTML DOM. The only sane way to automate things is to write your documents in some language or markup that can be compiled to LaTeX, or to use a template engine.
• young_unixer 6y ago
  Such awful names from a search engine perspective. Context returns the common English word, LMTX returns some Alzheimer's medication.
  • jimhefferon 6y ago
    For a while I helped run CTAN, the TeX archive site. So my name was all over the Interwebs associated with the word "LaTeX." I got some pretty wild mail.
  • JairoAdelRio 6y ago
    Most of "context tex" search results are relevant/useful.
  • hanche 6y ago
    The usual remedy for such ills is to add more search terms. Try "typesetting", for example.