7 ms·

LaTeX needs to be updated. It’s slow, errors need to be better handled, packages need to be improved, language should be more expressive, etc. There is beamer

by aborsy 5y ago

LaTeX needs to be updated. It’s slow, errors need to be better handled, packages need to be improved, language should be more expressive, etc. There is beamer for presentation that is a pain to work with. Sometimes the most that I can understand from an error message is the slide in which the error has occurred. Sometimes I even have to incrementally delete the text and compile the remaining text to identify the slide location. Sometimes I can’t even abort the program with Carl+C or D or X after the error has occurred, and I have to close the terminal (maybe IDEs are better, but that’s another can of worms). It’s also super slow. I am really in pain working with it quite often. A lot of times, producing the intended behavior in latex requires complex hack of internals (see Stack Exchange answers) because the feature is not natively supported. It seems software engineers don’t care about LaTeX (and don’t use it to know about its problems). Academics are also not expert in software to fix it. The pace of development thus has been slow.

ratorx 5y ago
I can recommend Tectonic (https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/) as an alternative to directly invoking the LaTeX (or in this case XeTeX) compiler. The build experience is magnitudes better than LaTeX or latexmk.
knolan 5y ago
It’s mostly because LaTeX is deemed mature for its audience and features like these, while flashy, are not going to see much use day to day. Most academics want to take plots they make in Matlab or whatever and put them into the template supplied by a journal and get an elegant looking document with well typeset equations and a bibTeX bibliography.
- andi999 5y ago
  Tex support by conference and journals is declining though (engineering).
  - CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
    What else are they moving to then?
    - andi999 5y ago
      Word.
      - tombert 5y ago
        I've heard this before but I have not really seen any examples of this. It seems like virtually every paper I read has been rendered with LaTeX. I would totally be fine with LaTeX being replaced, but I hope to god that I'm not forced to us MS Word all the time.
  - blt 5y ago
    Really? Which venues dropped support?
  - srvmshr 5y ago
    I hope this comment was made in jest or sarcasm. No respectable conference has replaced LaTeX with Word. Word is just a nightmare with typesetting scientific documents, with requirements for precise/fixed table & figure alignments, gutters, margin delineation etc. Although a word template is provided, almost no one uses it for the aforementioned reason. Feel free to check this information's trustworthiness from any top-N engineering conference proceeding. Any year of your choice. It is easy to verify by looking at metadata for the PDF engine that made the document.
    - andi999 5y ago
      Maybe this was just a glitch in the matrix: https://web.archive.org/web/20210419133815/https://irmmw-thz2021.org/submission-registration/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210419133815/https://irmmw-thz... "We do not provide LaTeX templates as this generates technical issues with the IEEE process. If you nevertheless decide to use LaTeX,...", seems like a slight discouragement.
jimhefferon 5y ago
> LaTeX needs to be updated. If you would like to support the ongoing work happening with TeX, LaTeX, and friends, please consider joining a user group. You can join the TeX Users Group at https://tug.org/join.html https://tug.org/join.html, or there is a link to instead make a donation at the same page. TUG does a lot; see https://tug.org/activities.html https://tug.org/activities.html, including supporting the LaTeX3 project and the development of LuaTeX over the years, as well as work on accessibility. If you prefer, there are many other users groups centered on location and lanugage. See https://tug.org/usergroups.html https://tug.org/usergroups.html.
- coliveira 5y ago
  Excellent! This is a constructive suggestion, instead of the rants about LaTeX that amount really to nothing, because the whole community around LaTeX will not stop using it just because some outsider doesn't like the way it works.
amichail 5y ago
Have you tried the WYSIWYG TeXmacs? (It's not based on TeX nor emacs but is inspired by both.) See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H46ON2FB30U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H46ON2FB30U
- haunter 5y ago
  At that point just use LyX https://www.lyx.org/ https://www.lyx.org/
  - GiovanniP 5y ago
    TeXmacs is vastly superior to LyX, but, more importantly, it is a completely different thing, with a completely different concept. The following is my opinion, which I cannot motivate in a detailed and well-funded way, based on experience of a few years of TeXmacs use and more of LaTeX/LyX: given the difference between the two programs (TeXmacs is not based upon TeX!) LyX does not have the potential to reach the quality of TeXmacs.
andi999 5y ago
There is also context: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConTeXt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConTeXt It always gives me the impression of beiing better structured, and it doesnt have module architecture (so no conflicts). Unfortunately when a couple of years ago I tried to install it on windows the installation was extremely painful, and the documentation I found lacking (unfortunately).
- wott 5y ago
  I use ConTeXt. It is a perpetual moving target. If you want a document to keep compiling to the same result, you'd better pin a version :-/ They keep on adding things, experimenting things, sometimes removing things, changing engines. If they think of a feature or someone asks for it, they implement it right away as a fix. They are very nice and helpful, but the problem is that those small features and fixes are not sufficiently thought out to maintain consistency. They are just there to get things done on the moment. The documentation is mostly at introduction level, whether it is named that way or not. It is almost never exhaustive, it is often not up to date. Often, the options are not described, you just have their name: no idea about what they do, let alone how they interact. Because things interact there too, and as with LaTeX, it doesn't always interact well, despite the more integrated approach that ConTeXt proposes. It (more and more?) shares some of the problems of LaTeX. LaTeX has many different packages for the same thing (let's say tables) and none of those is complete? Same thing in ConTeXt nowadays, there are several table environments, and none of them is a pure improvement upon the others. So a package/environment adds a feature compared to an existing one, but it doesn't include all the features of existing ones. So you often end up with the same category of problem: -- I want to do A => use this package/environment! -- I want to do B => use that package/environment! -- I want to do A and B => you're out of luck! Yes, I am a bit, no, a lot pissed at the moment: a. by my constant or growing struggles to get some stuff done on ConTeXt and LaTeX, stuff which doesn't look from outerspace and seems it should be handled out of the box, without needing to get dirty with low-level macros just to get stuff to behave consistently (because often said stuff actually works in some cases); b. by the lack of robustness those tools are still showing, despite decades of massive time and energy investment by people who have a much better understanding of these shenanigans than I have. This is emphasised by my recent attempt to come back to LaTeX and the subsequent finding that I am hitting the same kind of exhausting inconsistencies I was hitting 10 years ago. I am so depressed about the situation that I think that it must be impossible to build something robust upon TeX as a programming language. TeX the composition algorithm is probably fine, but building something based on this fragile, clunky macro language is probably destined to end up being fragile and clunky, in spite of the original intent. The automation of composition is already a difficult subject with a great many moving, interacting pieces; having to deal with such a rough language on top of this...
nokcha 5y ago
>Sometimes I can’t even abort the program with Carl+C or D after the error has occurred, and I have to close the terminal In my experience, whenever Ctrl+C doesn't work, LaTeX can be terminated by pressing the X key and then Enter. (Look for the "Type X to quit or <RETURN> to proceed" in the error message.)
leephillips 5y ago
To quit when the error handler is asking for input, enter x and RETURN.
yesenadam 5y ago
Maybe it's you? I don't really have any of those problems. LaTeX works great for me (I use TexShop on a pretty old mac mini) You seem to be using it in the terminal. Why?! TexShop (I hear there are a few other, equally good GUIs) has been nothing like a "can of worms", but a delight to use - I can't think of any problems I've had with it, in 5+ years. Not having Command-Click to be able to instantly shift between somewhere in the LaTeX file and the corresponding place in the PDF and back would be a pain, I imagine. Or not being able to program your own macros. It's slow? Compared to what? It typesets 100 pages what seems like pretty fast to me. You know you can pre-compile all sections of a long text except the one you're working on, right? Why expect every one of the million features users might want be "natively supported"?! What you describe as "a complex hack of internals" is usually in practice a 30 second visit to Stack Exchange and a cut and paste. Although I haven't needed to do that in a long time. I was amazed when I started (it did take about 3 months of intense learning in the beginning) that every package I needed or wanted was already on my computer, and usually the author was on TeX stack exchange answering questions!
- aborsy 5y ago
  I don’t want to learn one specialized IDE for every application. I use Vim and Emacs for coding in general. There are of course plugins, but they didn’t notably change the experience for me. The speed problem is mentioned in the Beamer’s paragraph. It’s true to some extent for latex too, but becomes problematic with beamer (lots of figures with Tikz and pgfplots etc). And I have to use beamer, because the source documents are in latex. When you consider collaborative writing, Overleaf is slow even with base latex. If you use it heavily, you will see its issues. Part of the problem is that it’s not consistent. In Python, when I type print(“LaTeX”) the answer is always the same. In latex if I type, \hspace*{5mm} it depends on many things. This becomes specially problematic when the effect you are trying to produce is not covered by a common template; the language is not fully rule-based either so that you systematically produce it yourself. You have to try various things.
- CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
  >You seem to be using it in the terminal. Why?! Not OP, but having similar problems as OP. One of the reasons I use(d) it in the terminal is because I use make which also generates figures for me. I also don't like having to learn X different GUIs for Y different programming languages and prefer using vim and make if possible.
tomrod 5y ago
I spent several years as a LaTeX user during graduate school. I spend some time in LyX as well. Then pandoc was released, and markdown let me be more expressive with content than dithering with minutia of layout. In that vein, I feel LaTeX is awesome but requires a comprehensive understanding of all of it to be fully expressive. I just want to type my papers quickly, ya know? So Markdown gives me what I need, and if a coauthor needs LaTeX pandoc can suitably provide. I keep my resume in TeX, for what its worth. I suppose I keep my half-written data science book in it too :)
GiovanniP 5y ago
Like amichail said in another comment, you could give a try to TeXmacs (www.texmacs.org). It is a WYSIWYG document preparation system which is at the same time structured and can be completely programmed by the user. The name comes from the fact that it wants to reach the typographical quality of TeX (the author claims that it _surpasses_ it) and the flexibility of emacs. I am using it since a few years and I think the reason it is not more widespread is that - people do not immediately see its potential - LaTeX unfortunately cannot be exported reliably b/c of the Turing theorem (really!i I am taking this on the word of the developers but they are established mathematicians, so I assume they know), and so traps users A little bit of trying TeXmacs and you could like it!
coliveira 5y ago
The modern way to use this is through Overleaf. It is just a breeze. I had to create a new Beamer presentation from old material, and in a few minutes I was able to select a good looking theme, import my material, and add pictures to the slides. No need to bother setting up a LaTeX environment or dealing with error messages directly.
jahewson 5y ago
The problem with updating TeX is that everyone has a different idea as to how TeX should be updated, is it eTeX, pdftex, xetex, luatex?

by aborsy 5y ago

ratorx 5y ago

I can recommend Tectonic (https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/) as an alternative to directly invoking the LaTeX (or in this case XeTeX) compiler. The build experience is magnitudes better than LaTeX or latexmk.

knolan 5y ago

It’s mostly because LaTeX is deemed mature for its audience and features like these, while flashy, are not going to see much use day to day. Most academics want to take plots they make in Matlab or whatever and put them into the template supplied by a journal and get an elegant looking document with well typeset equations and a bibTeX bibliography.

andi999 5y ago
Tex support by conference and journals is declining though (engineering).
- CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
  What else are they moving to then?
  - andi999 5y ago
    Word.
    - tombert 5y ago
      I've heard this before but I have not really seen any examples of this. It seems like virtually every paper I read has been rendered with LaTeX. I would totally be fine with LaTeX being replaced, but I hope to god that I'm not forced to us MS Word all the time.
- blt 5y ago
  Really? Which venues dropped support?
- srvmshr 5y ago
  I hope this comment was made in jest or sarcasm. No respectable conference has replaced LaTeX with Word. Word is just a nightmare with typesetting scientific documents, with requirements for precise/fixed table & figure alignments, gutters, margin delineation etc. Although a word template is provided, almost no one uses it for the aforementioned reason. Feel free to check this information's trustworthiness from any top-N engineering conference proceeding. Any year of your choice. It is easy to verify by looking at metadata for the PDF engine that made the document.
  - andi999 5y ago
    Maybe this was just a glitch in the matrix: https://web.archive.org/web/20210419133815/https://irmmw-thz2021.org/submission-registration/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210419133815/https://irmmw-thz... "We do not provide LaTeX templates as this generates technical issues with the IEEE process. If you nevertheless decide to use LaTeX,...", seems like a slight discouragement.

jimhefferon 5y ago

> LaTeX needs to be updated. If you would like to support the ongoing work happening with TeX, LaTeX, and friends, please consider joining a user group. You can join the TeX Users Group at https://tug.org/join.html https://tug.org/join.html, or there is a link to instead make a donation at the same page. TUG does a lot; see https://tug.org/activities.html https://tug.org/activities.html, including supporting the LaTeX3 project and the development of LuaTeX over the years, as well as work on accessibility. If you prefer, there are many other users groups centered on location and lanugage. See https://tug.org/usergroups.html https://tug.org/usergroups.html.

coliveira 5y ago
Excellent! This is a constructive suggestion, instead of the rants about LaTeX that amount really to nothing, because the whole community around LaTeX will not stop using it just because some outsider doesn't like the way it works.

amichail 5y ago

Have you tried the WYSIWYG TeXmacs? (It's not based on TeX nor emacs but is inspired by both.) See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H46ON2FB30U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H46ON2FB30U

haunter 5y ago
At that point just use LyX https://www.lyx.org/ https://www.lyx.org/
- GiovanniP 5y ago
  TeXmacs is vastly superior to LyX, but, more importantly, it is a completely different thing, with a completely different concept. The following is my opinion, which I cannot motivate in a detailed and well-funded way, based on experience of a few years of TeXmacs use and more of LaTeX/LyX: given the difference between the two programs (TeXmacs is not based upon TeX!) LyX does not have the potential to reach the quality of TeXmacs.

andi999 5y ago

There is also context: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConTeXt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConTeXt It always gives me the impression of beiing better structured, and it doesnt have module architecture (so no conflicts). Unfortunately when a couple of years ago I tried to install it on windows the installation was extremely painful, and the documentation I found lacking (unfortunately).

wott 5y ago
I use ConTeXt. It is a perpetual moving target. If you want a document to keep compiling to the same result, you'd better pin a version :-/ They keep on adding things, experimenting things, sometimes removing things, changing engines. If they think of a feature or someone asks for it, they implement it right away as a fix. They are very nice and helpful, but the problem is that those small features and fixes are not sufficiently thought out to maintain consistency. They are just there to get things done on the moment. The documentation is mostly at introduction level, whether it is named that way or not. It is almost never exhaustive, it is often not up to date. Often, the options are not described, you just have their name: no idea about what they do, let alone how they interact. Because things interact there too, and as with LaTeX, it doesn't always interact well, despite the more integrated approach that ConTeXt proposes. It (more and more?) shares some of the problems of LaTeX. LaTeX has many different packages for the same thing (let's say tables) and none of those is complete? Same thing in ConTeXt nowadays, there are several table environments, and none of them is a pure improvement upon the others. So a package/environment adds a feature compared to an existing one, but it doesn't include all the features of existing ones. So you often end up with the same category of problem: -- I want to do A => use this package/environment! -- I want to do B => use that package/environment! -- I want to do A and B => you're out of luck! Yes, I am a bit, no, a lot pissed at the moment: a. by my constant or growing struggles to get some stuff done on ConTeXt and LaTeX, stuff which doesn't look from outerspace and seems it should be handled out of the box, without needing to get dirty with low-level macros just to get stuff to behave consistently (because often said stuff actually works in some cases); b. by the lack of robustness those tools are still showing, despite decades of massive time and energy investment by people who have a much better understanding of these shenanigans than I have. This is emphasised by my recent attempt to come back to LaTeX and the subsequent finding that I am hitting the same kind of exhausting inconsistencies I was hitting 10 years ago. I am so depressed about the situation that I think that it must be impossible to build something robust upon TeX as a programming language. TeX the composition algorithm is probably fine, but building something based on this fragile, clunky macro language is probably destined to end up being fragile and clunky, in spite of the original intent. The automation of composition is already a difficult subject with a great many moving, interacting pieces; having to deal with such a rough language on top of this...

nokcha 5y ago

>Sometimes I can’t even abort the program with Carl+C or D after the error has occurred, and I have to close the terminal In my experience, whenever Ctrl+C doesn't work, LaTeX can be terminated by pressing the X key and then Enter. (Look for the "Type X to quit or <RETURN> to proceed" in the error message.)

leephillips 5y ago

To quit when the error handler is asking for input, enter x and RETURN.

yesenadam 5y ago

Maybe it's you? I don't really have any of those problems. LaTeX works great for me (I use TexShop on a pretty old mac mini) You seem to be using it in the terminal. Why?! TexShop (I hear there are a few other, equally good GUIs) has been nothing like a "can of worms", but a delight to use - I can't think of any problems I've had with it, in 5+ years. Not having Command-Click to be able to instantly shift between somewhere in the LaTeX file and the corresponding place in the PDF and back would be a pain, I imagine. Or not being able to program your own macros. It's slow? Compared to what? It typesets 100 pages what seems like pretty fast to me. You know you can pre-compile all sections of a long text except the one you're working on, right? Why expect every one of the million features users might want be "natively supported"?! What you describe as "a complex hack of internals" is usually in practice a 30 second visit to Stack Exchange and a cut and paste. Although I haven't needed to do that in a long time. I was amazed when I started (it did take about 3 months of intense learning in the beginning) that every package I needed or wanted was already on my computer, and usually the author was on TeX stack exchange answering questions!

aborsy 5y ago
I don’t want to learn one specialized IDE for every application. I use Vim and Emacs for coding in general. There are of course plugins, but they didn’t notably change the experience for me. The speed problem is mentioned in the Beamer’s paragraph. It’s true to some extent for latex too, but becomes problematic with beamer (lots of figures with Tikz and pgfplots etc). And I have to use beamer, because the source documents are in latex. When you consider collaborative writing, Overleaf is slow even with base latex. If you use it heavily, you will see its issues. Part of the problem is that it’s not consistent. In Python, when I type print(“LaTeX”) the answer is always the same. In latex if I type, \hspace*{5mm} it depends on many things. This becomes specially problematic when the effect you are trying to produce is not covered by a common template; the language is not fully rule-based either so that you systematically produce it yourself. You have to try various things.
CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
>You seem to be using it in the terminal. Why?! Not OP, but having similar problems as OP. One of the reasons I use(d) it in the terminal is because I use make which also generates figures for me. I also don't like having to learn X different GUIs for Y different programming languages and prefer using vim and make if possible.

tomrod 5y ago

I spent several years as a LaTeX user during graduate school. I spend some time in LyX as well. Then pandoc was released, and markdown let me be more expressive with content than dithering with minutia of layout. In that vein, I feel LaTeX is awesome but requires a comprehensive understanding of all of it to be fully expressive. I just want to type my papers quickly, ya know? So Markdown gives me what I need, and if a coauthor needs LaTeX pandoc can suitably provide. I keep my resume in TeX, for what its worth. I suppose I keep my half-written data science book in it too :)

GiovanniP 5y ago

Like amichail said in another comment, you could give a try to TeXmacs (www.texmacs.org). It is a WYSIWYG document preparation system which is at the same time structured and can be completely programmed by the user. The name comes from the fact that it wants to reach the typographical quality of TeX (the author claims that it _surpasses_ it) and the flexibility of emacs. I am using it since a few years and I think the reason it is not more widespread is that - people do not immediately see its potential - LaTeX unfortunately cannot be exported reliably b/c of the Turing theorem (really!i I am taking this on the word of the developers but they are established mathematicians, so I assume they know), and so traps users A little bit of trying TeXmacs and you could like it!

coliveira 5y ago

The modern way to use this is through Overleaf. It is just a breeze. I had to create a new Beamer presentation from old material, and in a few minutes I was able to select a good looking theme, import my material, and add pictures to the slides. No need to bother setting up a LaTeX environment or dealing with error messages directly.

jahewson 5y ago

The problem with updating TeX is that everyone has a different idea as to how TeX should be updated, is it eTeX, pdftex, xetex, luatex?