4 ms·

part of the challenge is the inherent irreducible complexity of the domain. "Make text look good on page" leaves lots of details unspecified. another part is m

part of the challenge is the inherent irreducible complexity of the domain. "Make text look good on page" leaves lots of details unspecified. another part is many people built their own solution to their own corner of this domain, and not all of them had the deep appreciation for how the rest of the TeX system works. I hear similar complaints about "Make web page look good", which is popular but also a huge mess of a system.

dnautics 5mo ago
> "Make text look good on page" leaves lots of details unspecified. Even just a sane layout renderer is incredibly hard. A decade ago I wrote a bespoke DNA sequence typesetter (in svg) and I had claude build an extension, for whatever reason it chose to build it from scratch instead of using the components I had built, and it did everything wrong.