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No, I am not. TeX, by itself, really shows its age, and how it was built as a "a faster horse" rather than hypertext's automobile: - despite the window dressi

No, I am not. TeX, by itself, really shows its age, and how it was built as a "a faster horse" rather than hypertext's automobile: - despite the window dressing of LaTeX, it is ultimately presentation-oriented instead of structure-oriented; many widely-used forms of formatting markup rely on precise character dimensions and positioning; changing page dimensions may sometimes require fixes throughout the whole document - bad character set support: things like \mathcal{3} displays the wrong character WITH ZERO WARNING: see https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/84041/ https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/84041/ and duplicates - parsing is undecidable; the parser can be arbitrarily reconfigured at runtime, and can perform Turing-complete computations, which means processing arbitrary TeX code in any other way than to execute it as written is next to impossible; even a 100% correct syntax highlighter is unachievable MathJax fixes or ameliorates some of these flaws, but in trying to be compatible with TeX, it cannot avoid all of them; and in the meantime, it imposes its own syntax quirks and burdens the client with running bloated JavaScript, incurs significant pop-in latency, and leaves indecipherable mess of TeX code to clients which do not run JS. TeX is just PDF that's easier to edit, and MathJax is the Cufon of math markup. (Remember Cufon? Be thankful if you don't. Good riddance!)

pests 3y ago
What is the relevance for the stack exchange post? User was using \cal, they told him to use \mathcal. Or is it an issue still or?
- pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
  The point is not in the mistake the user made, but how that error manifests. Subsequent punctuation characters that were not intended to be displayed in a different font are not kept as-is, nor do they trigger warnings like "character not present in font", but are instead substituted by random other characters. This is 1970s' "you're holding it wrong" error-handling philosophy, same one as C's. And yet Knuth seems to regard Unicode not as a basic building block of interoperability, but as useless bells-and-whistles, judging by his satirical "iTeX" presentation.

pests 3y ago

What is the relevance for the stack exchange post? User was using \cal, they told him to use \mathcal. Or is it an issue still or?

pwdisswordfishc 3y ago
The point is not in the mistake the user made, but how that error manifests. Subsequent punctuation characters that were not intended to be displayed in a different font are not kept as-is, nor do they trigger warnings like "character not present in font", but are instead substituted by random other characters. This is 1970s' "you're holding it wrong" error-handling philosophy, same one as C's. And yet Knuth seems to regard Unicode not as a basic building block of interoperability, but as useless bells-and-whistles, judging by his satirical "iTeX" presentation.