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Modern LaTeX Replacement?
javierzinho writes "For many years I have been using LaTeX to compose scientific documents, but truly I am getting tired of its complexity. You have to install new packages for new features, compatibility issues are everywhere, you need to know commands for everything, table composition is torture, image insertion is an odyssey if you don't have the 'right' format, and you need to be a LaTeX Jedi master to create a new document class. I'm looking for a document processor (not a word processor) that is a viable replacement for LaTeX, possessing all of its advantages — consistency between text and math text, automated cross references, direct PDF creation, etc. — but that is not stuck in the 1980s with the compiler metaphor and weird font technology. An application with visual interface and so on. I've tried Scientific Word and Lyx but both are front-ends for LaTeX. Publicon only produces PDF files by exporting to LaTeX and subsequently using pdflatex. Add-ons for MS-Word are a joke, and webEq is intended for web publishing, not for PDF production. Does anybody know of a decent, scientific-structured document processor that is a modern application?"
You just made it abundantly obvious that you have no comprehension of the submitter's problem.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
And it's not happening. To beat latex at typesetting requires a lot of of work, and with latex basically perfect from a bug perspective any sort of realistic replacement is going to start with it as a base.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Remember, when you're doing highly technical writing like that, you're literally out at [or beyond] the top 1% of 1%.
The sad truth of the matter is that the servicing of highly technical writers just isn't a very big market [and, barring something like artificial manipulation of the genome, will NEVER amount to a very big market], and you're gonna be lucky if anyone bothers to release a product for it.
Heck, we mathies ought to count our lucky stars that Knuth ever took the time to design TeX in the first place.
I find this funny that I just learned LaTeX two weeks ago. I ported my entire thesis over to LaTeX and have had nothing but professional and consistent results.
What's the problem with it, again? It doesn't have a fancy GUI? It works great for me.
It would difficult to find a good replacement that would also be accepted by the scientific journals.
I use vi+latex to write my papers, it is still
the best, but I would welcome something more flexible.
Paulo
Any replacement for LaTeX that intends to do most of the same things is pretty much doomed to be markup language, even if you dump XML pixie dust on it. XML after all is just a horrible human unreadable markup language itself.
So once one accepts that the question simplifies to can LaTeX be replaced with something more usable by humans. First off the font system is purely a legacy thing, since Tex predates pretty much all other currently popular font tech. So could LaTeX be retrofitted to use TrueType for everything? Probably. In a 100% backwards compatible way? Only if a genius pulls a freaking miracle out of his butt.
If someone were to do a total rethink/rewrite, and if said person were a genius on the level with Knuth, then by making use of what we know today a new and better typesetting system could probably be created. Getting everyone to agree on anything else would be the biggest problem.
Democrat delenda est
Anyone weigh in?
Sure. That's not even close to what this guy is looking for. LaTeX is to printed publications (or PDFs) as HTML is to a webpage. He's not looking for a program for changing fonts in a GUI. He's looking for a modern way to typeset documents kind of like going from HTML table layouts to CSS layouts. Where is badanalogyguy when you need him?
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I totally disagree. In physical chemistry and chemistry, LaTeX has become more viable as a submission option in the last 10 years.
It's called typesetting and, unfortunately, LaTeX is still the freakin' best.
What do you mean by "unfortunately"?
Unfortunately no software since [LaTeX] has come close to the feature-set and quality of LaTeX.
You have no idea what you are talking about if you think OO is in the same class as LaTeX.
Really, as a coder, LaTeX is far friendlier than word. That's not to say it's good, or that a gui would necessarily be bad in all circumstances, but anything that couldn't be hotkeyed would be fairly worthless in writing a 50-page thesis.
And though Word has the capabilities of sectioning and the like, it does not provide a friendly interface. A friendly interface would not have bold, italic, paragraph, center, or any of that on the default toolbar. It would provide you with "new section" "header" "book title" "emphasis." Not only that, but it would be aggressively difficult to work in the word processor paradigm. You want this title to be italic, and this one bold? Deal with it. The program exists so you don't have to think about that, because you should be thinking about content, not style. And if the styling affects the content, you should figure out how you can express the idea without the styling. Just because Word contains document processing functionality does not mean it is in a friendly interface. The friendly interface does what most people have wanted for the past two decades, and it does that very well. What most people have wanted for the past few decades is not particularly useful to those who seriously write.
Sadly, I think I'll be sticking to Emacs for the forseeable future, and saving all of my documents as text. Though that second part I'm more glad of, since most of my writing is non-technical.
An other strength is its flexibility. Any replacement which dumbs things down makes things more rigid. LaTeX itself is already a "dumbed down" version of TeX which sacrifices some of the beauty of TeX but makes it more accessible. I myself use it primarily.
I could imagine a variant of LaTeX, which makes certain things easier, like positioning of pictures.
From the user prespective the problem of LaTeX is that it has a relative steep learning curve which once overcome saves enormous time. Processors like Word get you started immediately, adding more and more frustration once the user wants more control.
I use both Word (2007) and LaTeX. I think you're completely and utterly wrong, and I note the complete lack of specifics in your post. Just consider this entry from the Microsoft Office Team Blog. Create a 3 column table to number an equation! You've got to be kidding me.
Layer on top of this the fact that in Office 2007 Microsoft has created a totally new equation editor that isn't compatible with its old editor. How long will this one last? Maybe they're finally turning Word into a capable, consistent tool, but it will take several more versions to be sure.
Making complicated tables in LaTeX is a pain, I'll grant that. But why don't you tell us exactly what it is that makes the latest version of Word such a capable tool for creating lengthy, cross-referenced, equation-laden documents.
What is it about LaTeX that makes it so special? Can't scientific documents be laid out correctly in a word processor? I ask out of ignorance, not rhetoric.
Easy: try typing this into a word processor.
Maybe it has improved in the last couple of years, but last time I tried maths in OpenOffice I ran screaming. I pretty much couldn't figure out how to do anything, nor could I find any useful documentation. I now use LyX for anything mathematical.
While I'm panning software, avoid TeXmacs. I once spent two hours trolling through documentation trying to figure out how to do something simple (I think change the footer on a page) without success. (This was the experience that converted me to LyX.)
I have had a few issues with LyX, but mostly it works great. I few weeks ago, it mysteriously decided I needed a package I didn't have, and I ended up having to change to the root account* and loading the document there before the auto-package-download would work to fix the problem.
* Technically the admin account, as I'm on Windows these days, but I can call it root if I want to.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
It's not as bad as it seems.
Let me begin by explaining how I came to use LaTeX. One of my friends pointed me to LaTeX. I read the Not so short Guide to LaTeX and loved the thought behind it. I used it for everything. Biology, chemistry, physics, math, papers, letters, essays, type setting in other alphabets... The list goes on and on.
And I discovered something: while it has a steep learning curve, LaTeX is easy. The problem is that people don't grow up using it.
That said, there are some poorly designed packages... These can be difficult to use... Just search ctan and read documentation till you find one that you like...
LaTeX is an abomination of the original TeX by Donald Knuth. LaTeX requires 17 some passes for a document, while TeX will only need one. The LaTeX designers failed to understand TeX so they took it apart and rewrote it. When Knuth wrote it in the first place it was after he did Metafont. What better way to understand typesetting than after solving the vector font problem? Needless to say there is much less support for TeX than LaTeX, and images are still an issue. I think it's time for someone to step up and fill Knuth's shoes and write up some core mods for TeX (keeping with the 1 pass elegance).
I'd say its main problem is that it's the wrong paradigm. Documents are declarative, not imperative. Therefore, the computer language used to express the document ought to be declarative too.
Personally, I tend to use HTML+CSS for writing documents (although lately I've gotten lazy and just used OpenOffice). The trouble with that method, though, is that despite "media:print" it really wasn't designed to be used in anything but a web browser (it's hard to control pagination, for example).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Know what's harder than LaTex when you need math typeset correctly? Anything that's not LaTex.
The advice given in the above post may sound intuitive, but it lacks on certain details. The most important being tool selection, and the wrong type can be a real pain. If following the above, remember to ALWAYS use the right sort of pencil. A #1 is generally too soft and will not be effective. A #3 or above will definitely be too hard of a choice and can lead to severe problems. It is imperative that the right pencil be chosen: and for the task at hand, that of course would be a number two.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
A hypergenius that could not only exceed Knuth (Knuth, for Bob's sake!), but do it without resting on the established highest technology in the field (i.e. TeX and packages built around it)
I don't know about that. I think a more ordinary genius could do it, simply because they have the wisdom of Knuth plus others to build from, even if they reject the technical base of LaTeX, but incorporate the ideas and theories behind it.
Still, it would be quite an achievement, and I still agree with you that a full-on replacement is unlikely in the foreseeable future.
I can't help but question the complaints on the complexity.
I'm a hard-core TeX user. Not a LaTeX user (sorry, I disagree violently with Leslie Lamport's aesthetics, and the code just isn't solid enough), but a TeX user.
Although TeX may be at times frustrating, there are two things that I know to be true, and provide comfort:
1. Although there may be opacity in the system, logic and rationality pervades its design, so that, given sufficient time and effort, I can understand exactly what, how, and why something works or does not work the way it does. This is huge. I will never, ever, understand many of the operational choices in OpenOffice and Word because they are not based on a rational, logical framework, leading to the impression that they are both horribly idiosyncratic.
2. TeX is bug free. If text isn't laying out the way I want it to, it's because my code is not correct, not because there's some problem with TeX. In contrast, I've lost track of the number of bugs I've seen in OO and Word.
You can, and should, clamor that LaTeX is not bug free. It isn't, and very often the packages distributed for it are riddled with bugs. The IEEE Transactions class is one, embarrassing, example. But then, if you roll your own packages, like me, you have no one else to blame when they don't work correctly, and can take comfort that when they do, you've done a good job and your documents are beautiful.
The biggest problem with any of the WYSIWYG editors I've used (and, having typeset two conference proceedings that solicited contributions in LaTeX and Word, I've seen many and varied instances of this) is that the settings are not explicitly represented in the visible document, and so become hidden and often missed. If you aren't careful, it's very easy to have one paragraph appear in a slightly different font than the next, or to have one stretch of lines be ragged right and the rest be fully justified, or have the hyphenation settings change from one portion of the document to the next. It's horrible, and fixing this is a royal pain. Having explicit formatting within a compiler paradigm is the only way to go when producing professional quality documents.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Adobe abandons just about anything. They bought Pagemaker and abandoned it. They bought JRun and abandoned it. They almost seem to have abandoned Flash - They've been promising 64-bit support since XP x64 came out in 2002 or 2003. And now XP x64's been end-of-lifed and STILL no Flash x64 player.
A steak knife fits your criteria and can be quite user-friendly if you know what you're doing.
Agreed, Scribus (like InDesign etc.) is designed to let you place content like text and images exactly where you want on the page. In a sense it serves a complementary purpose to LaTeX - while LaTeX is meant to allow you to write without worrying about layout, Scribus lets you do layout without worrying about writing. I have several years of experience using both Scribus and LaTeX and I would NEVER use Scribus to create a technical or scientific document. It's completely the wrong sort of program. (For one thing, there's no equation editor - if you're going to use formulas you'd still have to create them as images with another tool i.e. LaTeX). If you're *really* set on not using TeX/LaTeX, then I would recommend OpenOffice or (gasp) even MS Word as its replacement, rather than Scribus/InDesign.
The best (only?) way to learn and write in LaTeX is to take another person's example file, and modify it with your own text.
When it comes to typesetting, never do anything yourself. Steal, steal, steal.
While it's not quite as flexible as CSS, LaTeX is flexible enough for most people's needs display wise. The exact same document can easily be turned into a presentation from an article or similar with few changes beyond the document class. In fact, this is one of the major benefits of LaTeX over any other document preparation system: you write the content, and the document class takes care of making it look like whatever it's supposed to look like.
http://www.donarmstrong.com
vi? ain't that an ed replacement?
Huh? Word is a non-starter out of the box because it is totally incapable of producing typography that doesn't look like ass. The kerning doesn't work, control over every sort of spacing and positioning is far too coarse. Every document that comes from Word can immediately be recognized as such, and even if you personally aren't observant enough to, there's still a subliminal effect that whispers to everyone "this is an amateur production".
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
This is the same like arguing over superiority of whatever XYZ language over powerful things like e.g. C, or C++. People always complain how difficult it is to learn, bla bla, not realizing that the complexity is there in place for a good reason: the problem we are solving is intricate. Any attempt to simplify the looks while maintaining the level of control will inevitably lead to the very same mess in the end, just with a different user-interface. I am not sure who said it, but it applies here very well:
We are also not giving chainsaw into hands of children.
You want a full 100% low level control over the resulting look of your document? You go and use the most powerful tool you get. And that it is not easy to learn and understand? Well, after all you are after a damn hard thing: the complete control over a document, right?
Although TeX has its issues here and there, problems with learning it is certainly not one of them. There are zillions of tutorials and books out there.
My advice:
1) try to learn the tool if you really need 100% control. Anything what will give such a level of control is going to look in the end very similar to TeX in the end (discounted for the markup - @ instead of \ perhaps?).
2) Read the Knuth's TeX book. That will show you that there's no magic in there and things are easy to control once you understand the philosophy underneath. In a way LaTeX did a bad service to TeX by trading a user-friendly markup for obviousness of functionality and philosophy.
I am using LaTeX for writing my documents, plain TeX to produce LaTeX document classes and styles and LyX for typesetting. For short stuff like letters I go to Open Office, or similar. LyX is doing a good job once you understand TeX, or you need just vanilla documents in the default styles (article, book, report). If not, I wouldn't go into fighting with LyX without an expert around...
Remember, covering the steering wheel with a colorful sheet for aesthetic reasons always leads to a difficulty with high speed driving on a highway.
> I don't know if this is the case for you, but I find most people who find LaTeX hard are using it wrongly.
Very true words. The whole idea of LaTeX is that it does all the formatting work for you. So complaining about "complexity" is really missing the issue: LaTeX is as complex as necessary for the task. Use it wisely, and it will go a long way.
If you do not want to deal with the complexity of different styles, then a front end like LyX can hide a lot of it. You still get high quality results, you can switch between styles, and you can use additional features manually if necessary. This does not mean that LyX is without fault, but I think it is a step in the right direction (very much unlike Word).
Concerning the OP's question about a document processor without the "compiler metaphor" (and it is a paradigm, not a metaphor)... there is no such thing. The whole idea of a document processor is that things are done right, and not fast. Doing this in real time is just asking for trouble. So you either end up with a draft view as in LyX, or with a sluggish real time preview (as you find in a few LaTeX editors). Anyway, with a document processor you are supposed to put down semantics, and not form, so looking at the exact final form is wasted precision. If you want to have certain things in certain places, LaTeX has commands and overrides to achieve that.
Imagine a beowulf of these.
I used it successfully after I gave up on LaTex. Hey guys, having to google to piece together the different parts of the installation by clicking on multiple (sometimes broken) links is tiresome.
That's a problem with Windows, not LaTeX.
That kind of installation might be fascinating for Linux hackers,
On Linux, this isn't a problem; getting a complete LaTeX installation requires only clicking on "install LaTeX" in the package manager.
but it isn't up to the standards that people are used to on the desktop.
The standards that Windows users are used to are to poor: you're using OOo instead of LaTeX simply because Windows package management sucks and makes you twiddle the guts of your system for hours. Linux users don't put up with that kind poor usability.
In different words, the problem is that Windows is a lousy, user-unfriendly desktop OS.
No one's (I think) mentioned longevity yet. This is a really important benefit to something like LaTeX, especially for academics.
I wrote my PhD thesis in LaTeX 20 years ago. I still have the source in my home area somewhere, and it still works perfectly. I needed a copy for my homepage and I was able to reformat it to make a double-sided, single-line-spaced, 10pt PDF in just a few minutes.
With LaTeX, papers aren't fire-and-forget. You can be pretty confident that if you come back to a subject again, maybe many years later, what you wrote last time will still be useful.
Perhaps the output doesn't look as nice, but entering them is vastly easier in OpenOffice. At least last time I did it, which was a few years ago. In OpenOffice, you could (but didn't have to) type in the entire equation with just the keyboard. This made entering equations very quick once you figured out all the keystrokes. In MS Office (2000 I think), there was no way I could find to just type everything in. Anything more complicated then 5+5 required you to make extensive use of the mouse. Which slowed things down a lot.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
And user-unfriendly? Windows? What a fucking joke. Go back to your terminal.
When it comes to software package management, Windows is indeed stuck in the 90s.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
Simply going to the OOo issue tracker and searching for issues with "pdf" in the summary would find you several examples. Try issue 43029 as a starting point: it dates from 2005, has 194 votes, and appears to have finally come onto the radar for the dev team more than three years and a few dozen comments later.
And no, it's not some specific thing with a printer driver. OOo PDF is export is simply broken, fundamentally and completely, if you want to use pro grade fonts in the most popular format available today.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.