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Separation between presentation and content is a brilliant concept, but every time I write a document in LaTeX I end up having to do all kinds of fiddly things

Separation between presentation and content is a brilliant concept, but every time I write a document in LaTeX I end up having to do all kinds of fiddly things to make things look right. If your paper doesn't conform to certain constraints you end up dealing with the presentation domain anyway. A very simple example is line breaks in equations: you don't know how much you can fit on a line until you render it, and LaTeX will run your equations off the page instead of wrapping them intelligently. Don't get me wrong, LaTeX is still the best document processor I know of, and I use it all the time. I'm just saying that the "separation of domains" idea is a bit of a fantasy.

lomnakkus 12y ago
> If your paper doesn't conform to certain constraints you end up dealing with the presentation domain anyway. After having read some of Edward Tufte's material, this struck me. I think the main point is: "make it legible" and (Tufte) "as informative as possible". If its not maximally aesthetically pleasing, then so be it. EDIT: I apologize if this is trite, but I think that's really the whole philosophy of (La)TeX.
- titanomachy 12y ago
  There is truth to this -- I do sometimes get caught up in irrelevant presentation optimizations. But sometimes the default output is clearly "wrong", or even nearly illegible. In the ideal world I have someone else (i.e. a publisher) to think about this stuff for me, but unfortunately that's not usually the case.