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* First of all, the OP mixes up LaTeX and TeX. TeX is written in a very portable language and has been ported to more platforms than most other software, includ
by patrickg 15y ago
* First of all, the OP mixes up LaTeX and TeX. TeX is written in a very portable language and has been ported to more platforms than most other software, including PDP-10 and others.
* LaTeX is working on the iPad, see for example: http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2010/talks/2010-09-14-arthur-keynote/Keynote-iPad.pdf http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2010/talks/2010-09-14-arthu...
* LuaTeX (http://luatex.org http://luatex.org) is written in C, not WEB.
* You only need one binary to work with TeX. Either PDFTeX or LuaTeX. All other binaries are just glue code (for example to generate missing Metafont fonts, but who wants them these days anyway?
- EdiX 15y ago> * You only need one binary to work with TeX. Either PDFTeX or LuaTeX. All other binaries are just glue code (for example to generate missing Metafont fonts, but who wants them these days anyway? A lot of TeX uses Computer Modern to typeset the body (a metafont font) and I don't think I have ever see a TeX document that doesn't use Computer Modern or Euler (another metafont font) for equation typesetting. I also wonder whether it's possible to achieve the excellent equation typesetting capabilities of TeX without metafont.
- taejo 15y agoThe pxfonts package provides Palatino/Palladio for use in equations. Those are vector fonts, not MetaFont programs.
- patrickg 15y agoMetafont is hardly used these days. All TeX distributions use either a Type1 font of Computer Modern or Latin Modern. And the equation typesetting has nothing(!) to do with Metafont. Everything is set into the TeX binary (and its formats). You just need a good math font (and that is not trivial, but not related to Metafont)
- chalst 15y agoLatin Modern, which is in the larger part an extension of Computer Modern to provide better multilingual support, is supported as OTF. I can think of no reason to prefer CM to LM for typesetting purposes.
- gmac 15y agoYep, it always surprises me how few people change off the default Computer Modern -- which I find really spindly and ugly -- given that a single \usepackage{...} will give you a beautiful Palatino, for example. I sometimes suspect they're just wanting to hit me in the face with the fact that they're LaTeX users...
- omaranto 15y agoPalatino for text is fine, but what math fonts go well with it? I think them main reason I use Computer Modern is that the math and text fonts look so good together.
- stan_rogers 15y agoHow about mathpazo? That's the \usepackage{} I use to get Palatino in the first place, and it includes Palatino-styled math elements.
- omaranto 15y agoOh! Wow! I just tried on some of my notes, it's definitely pretty. I didn't know there was a good companion math font, thanks for enlightening me.
- pnathan 15y agoI personally love Computer Modern. I consider it beautiful and one of the most pleasing fonts I have ever encountered.
- JoachimSchipper 15y ago"One binary" is a bit optimistic; even if you never do anything fancy with fonts, you'll want bibtex. And makeindex, if you're writing a large work. PSTricks does not work with PDFLaTeX (Tikz is arguably better than PSTricks, but PSTricks won't be dead anytime soon). XeLaTeX is required to use system fonts easily. And that's before getting into anything truly gross.
- patrickg 15y agoI am running a TeX distribution with only one binary. And with bibliography and index: these could be done with the Lua part of LuaTeX. True about the others.
- chalst 15y agoIndeed, Norman Ramsey essentially reimplemented Bibtex in Lua: look at bibtex.lua.in in his Nbibtex; tarball avilable from http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/nbibtex/ http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/nbibtex/
- antihero 15y agoI may be being dumb, but is there a good tutorial for LuaTeX?
- patrickg 15y agoNo, there isn't. I am working on a book, but it will take a while when this is translated to english.