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Stop the Math Press's Presses — Knuth Announces iTex
After Donald Knuth's anticipated "earthshaking announcement," it's safe to say that the world is still here. yowlanku writes "Christoper Adams tweeted live from TUG 2010 Conference that 'Donald Knuth's TeX successor will be named iTeX.' " Knuth "also stated that this successor of TeX will have features like 3-D printing, animation, stereographic sound."
I hear it's already been rejected from the App store.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
What?
No Twitter integration?
We were all hoping he'd announce proof that P = NP....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Name it after some other deliberately mispronounced form of fetish-wear. I'd happily write papers in buttplug (pronounced bootploog).
Come to think of it, I'm only familiar with the hardware side of 3D printing.
What is the state of the art in terms of 3D printing software and/or definition languages? Is there anything approaching a standard yet, that can take account of issues like number and type of available materials (conductive metal, plastic, etc.), material properties (tensile strength etc.), degrees of freedom (angles that can be accessed), resolution/step size, and other issues like that in a reasonable way?
I doubt it really, but I guess my question is more "how far are we from achieving it? What work's been done so far?"
Wait for build 1729.
here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1702818&cid=32752126
It was an hilarious presentation in the spirit of his first publication... http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/01/the-enduring-art-of-computer-programming.html (scroll down to Potrzebie)
to repeat (w/o the geocoord)
a successor to TeX which he has been working on for some time
scratch tex78 and tex82
so making up for assumptions which don't fit the internet age
jokes about measuring and math in TeX .4pt == .3999pt
maxdimen too small, 1sp too large
tunnel vision caused by computers of the day
subset of XML uses Unicode automatic everything
all directions and all dimensions
hypertext
text audio video sensors GPScoords accelerometers haptics
midi input to score and back to music
no macros --- menu driven like Word but enhanced
spoken command and gestures
\i \TeX (wrapped on a sphere)
spoken name accompanied by (optional) ringing bell
not programmed directly
1289 bugs in TeX
571 bugs in metafont
Project Marianne
www.projectmarianne.com
Project Biturgical
written in Scheme using all buzzwords
pricing - monthly subscription on cloud
first year one month free
pricing based on internet speed
will change everyday
life is too short to reread anything
will benefit world's economy, user's can sell documents
network of certified consultants
online help
- for dummies
- for wizards
- personalized on-line
symbolic equations
graphics
maps
satellite photos
\i\TeX hyper document
math mode like mathml --- must evaluate
avatars
hyperbolic geometry
videoconferencing
world-class photo retouching
character, face, speech recignition
cognition
output format:
- lasercutters
- embroidering machines
- 3D printers
- plasma cutters
interactive cookbook
life as hypertext document
released next month
pending patent applications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Apparently, typesetting is one of those things that can grab hold of you and never let go. I know a couple of people who were trained in typesetting, and they can't seem to help but criticize the kerning and leading of... well, just about everything printed.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
your one and only chance today to claim "1st iPost" but nooooo, you had to do something else instead...
according to google, his presentation was a hoax.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
That's not fair.
All 27 users of TeX will be quite excited about this.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Is it a plane ? Is it a bird ? No, it's a Woosh !
Perhaps you meant "keming"?
How does supporting those features make something a "bloated mess?"
Animations? So with a buildup like that we get... a blink tag?
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
I wonder if this would surprise him: at 4AM Pacific today, I searched for "knuth announcement".
Google told me that was the 27th most common search over the preceding hour.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
What do you expect them to typeset the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with?
... Apple sues Knuth for infringing trademarks over the use of the "i" in iTex?
Techshop is a shared-equipment workspace in Menlo Park CA, with a few other branches (they're opening in San Francisco this summer.) I was there welding a couple of weeks ago, and ran into a friend of mine who was doing a project in the laser cutter room, and the people working on the other laser cutter were Knuth and his wife. (I refrained from walking over and saying "Hi, I'm Joe Fanboi, I used your books 30 years ago!".) Techshop has laser cutters, embroidering machines, 3D printers, and plasma cutters, and here's Knuth's latest project supporting them. I wonder if he's got any plans for controlling CNC milling machines and routers?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
All 27 users of TeX will be quite excited about this.
Ah yes, the reliable old joke: all X people who care will be happy, where X is a humorously small number. Classic!
But kidding aside, TeX is in heavy use. Most TeX users use LaTeX or even LyX to wrap TeX and make it easier, but TeX is in there doing the work.
My understanding is that TeX is standard in the academic world, because it can correctly typeset serious math equations. Also, Wikipedia uses TeX to process all <math> tags (see here for details).
I have many times read discussion boards where people said something like "I started writing my thesis in Microsoft Word using its equation editor. After my fourth bout of heavy drinking and depression, my friend showed me LaTeX, and I was able to finish my thesis with just a few wine coolers and hardly any Prozac."
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I know, WTF indeed. This iTEX is even going to have TrueType fonts! And he rewrote it in Java. Knuth has really gone soft in his old age.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I did my thesis in LaTeX; in fact I learned LaTeX to do the thesis so I wouldn't have to use MS Word. I probably didn't save any time since I was starting from scratch with LaTeX and had to update the school's age-old LaTeX template to work with the newer versions, but man, when I saw everyone else struggling with Word and whatever awful math plugin they had to use, I was glad I took the extra time.
Now I use LaTeX whenever I can since the output is so beautiful and I can type lists and tables a lot faster than I can mouse them in in Word.
I highly recommend it.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
It is the standard for mathematics, and computer science, and maybe some other sciences, but I'm not familiar with those.
It is not, sadly, the standard for the "soft" sciences nor for humanities. My friend in economics is using Word and has never written a line of TeX. When he tried to merge docs for his thesis in Word he ran into huge trouble.
I'm pretty sure this is a joke. All the twitter posts have a parody flag, and Knuth is renowned for his odd sense of humor.
please move along
God spoke to me.
Lyx is cool, but I like LaTeX by hand because it's just faster. Anything repetitive I write my own definitions (i.e. macros) for, so it's a huge time saver.
I really dislike WYSIWYG. I want to type, never use a mouse, and have the program format it for me.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
I went the opposite. I did my thesis in Word, even though LaTeX was the standard to use at my lab. I knew how to use LaTex (I did my MS thesis in it) but to me LaTeX was too clumsy.
I hated the way it laid out figures/tables. A slight change of the text (add a line or two, change a parameter) would result in widely different figure/table placement, sometimes even clumping them all at the end.
The default font the generated postscript files had was 1) ugly 2) always the same. Of course, the latter is a "good thing", but you can easily tell someone's thesis was done in Tex/LaTeX, while in Word you can choose slightly different fonts from the same family that made it look at least a little different from every other thesis.
Viewing figures/graphs is a pain, if you add a new figure you have to "compile" the latex, call up the ps viewer, then scroll to the figure to see if it looks right, not to mention figure out where LaTeX decided to place them.
All in all, Word has its faults but WYSIWYG was a godsend and I never regretted using it for my thesis.
As for tables, I make them in Excel then link them into Word. That is (to me) a heck of a lot easier than typing extra syntactic markup to get tables.
I did my thesis in LaTeX - and I don't believe there was a single mathematical equation in it. I chose to use it so that I could focus on the structure of the document, rather than formatting. There's lots of good things about it beyond just math!
Of course, I may have been the only person in the Faculty of Education at my university ever to use LaTeX for their thesis - at least outside of the math education folks. I had to use a LaTeX style from our computer science department - only CS, physics, and math seem to have LaTeX thesis styles at my school.
You must not be very familiar with academic publishing in CS, Math, and Physics. LaTeX is used extensively.
Now I use LaTeX whenever I can since the output is so beautiful and I can type lists and tables a lot faster than I can mouse them in in Word.
And, as a bonus, it's actually amenable to version control. Nothing like being able to throw a document into cvs/svn/git/what-have-you, and have real, sensible diffs to tell you how the document changed over time, without resorting to storing all that version info in the damn document format itself where it can't be accessed by anything but specialized software designed to work with that format.
It is not, understandably, the standard for the soft sciences and humanities, for the simple reason that, if you don't need the ability to typeset complicated formulas (or don't need it badly enough), the cost/reward tradeoff for learning any kind of markup language is never going to look good enough to offset the initial outlay of effort.
Add that to the comparative rarity of technically inclined people in those fields, and I'm not sure the tradeoff is worth it in the end. These are not failproof, cookie-cutter solutions, and if you add becoming familiar with the concept of markup-based styling to the effort of learning TeX specifically...
Most soft sciences and humanities students don't have the time or background to come to grips with LaTeX, and most faculty can afford to leave formatting up to the publisher; after all, English grammar is handled reasonably well by Word.
Actually, the implementation of macros in modern versions of Lyx is just great. You define a macro in two parts : the latex part, that will appear in the .tex file produced and its graphical counterpart in Lyx. I use many macros in my thesis this way and it works just superb.
I hope this is real, because this would be very bad for a joke.
The default font the generated postscript files had was 1) ugly 2) always the same.
Funny argument. In Word the default font (Times New Roman) is 1) not truly a good option for printing documents and 2) always the same. With LaTeX you can change the standard fonts as easily as you change them in Word, plus with many fonts you get modified math fonts so your math equations fit the normal text.
[...] you can easily tell someone's thesis was done in Tex/LaTeX, while in Word you can choose slightly different fonts from the same family that made it look at least a little different from every other thesis.
You can easily tell someone's thesis was done in Word, because the typesetting is broken and formulas look disgusting, unless the author spent hours changing things like the size of exponents. Also, when writing for a journal/conference proceedings etc., articles are meant to look the same (since they'll appear in the same book). With LaTeX you get that for free, with Word, even when using the official publisher's stylesheet, there are always minor errors in the layout.
It's good to know that people in academics are concentrating on the essential.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
There are plenty o LaTeX editors that can show a live preview, which for me is the best of two worlds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_TeX_editors
I tried both Gummi and Lyx, and I like them both, although I do prefer Gummi.
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Also, for theses, the integration with BiBTeX makes LaTeX a godsend. I know of no citation management system that is as comprehensive (and works as well) as BiBTeX. I couldn't live without it (coupled with reftex-mode for emacs).
Stefan Axelsson
For the IIIrd time, I'll Hear No Ill Spoken of Problems with Fonts.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
> I don't even use the damn thing...
If you did you would not have been so fast to "spot the hoax" (self-parody, actually).
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.