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Extended TeX: Past, Present, and Future

Posted by timothy on from the 30-years-of-chugging-away dept.

First time accepted submitter Hamburg writes "Frank Mittelbach, member of the LaTeX Project and LaTeX3 developer, reviews significant issues of TeX raised already 20 years ago. Today he evaluates which issues are solved, and which still remain open and why. Examples of issues are managing consecutive hyphens, rivers of vertical spaces and identical words across lines, grid-based design, weighed hyphenation points, and overcoming the the mouth/stomach separation. Modern engines such as pdfTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX are considered with regard to solutions of important problems in typesetting." Note: When TeX was first released, Jimmy Carter was president.

8 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. TeX for Math by rrhal · · Score: 5, Interesting

    When TeX was new people were not accustomed to seeing well type set documents unless they came from a legitimate publisher. I wrote several college papers in TeX and I think the presentation let me get a few mistakes past my teachers. I've not seen anything better for formulas - even today TeX documents have a more polished feel to them.

    --
    All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
    1. Re:TeX for Math by ModernGeek · · Score: 3, Interesting

      HTML 5.1 needs a TeX tag... I'd do anything to see it. What's stopping it from happening? Someone should fork WebKit and do it.

      --
      Sig: I stole this sig.
    2. Re:TeX for Math by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Presumably imply the existence of a feature-complete TeX implementation in the browser, that would render and display whatever TeX snippet was included within the tag...

      I'm pretty sure that there are some server-side convenience plugins for at least a few of the major OSS CMS packages that will let you use TeX or LaTeX and then digest the results into images that get plunked into the actual HTML that gets shoveled out to clients; but the odds of coaxing browser makers to include a completely separate, extremely powerful, and highly mature(if baroque) rendering engine alongside the one they already have, just to support a TeX tag seem slim...

    3. Re:TeX for Math by jd · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Well, with WebKit up the proverbial creek these days, a new rendering engine would make sense.

      The question would be whether you could create a TeX-alike engine that supports the additional functions required in HTML and can convert any well-formed SGML document into a TeX-alike document. If you could, you can have one rendering engine and subsume HTML and XML entirely within it.

      The benefits of doing this? The big drawback of style sheets is that no two browsers agree on units. TeX has very well-defined units that are already widely used. These also happen to be the units industry likes using. Eliminating browser-specific style sheets would be an incredible benefit.

      The big drawback of the Semantic Web is that everyone, their brother, cat and goldfish have designed their own ontologies, none of which interoperate and few of which are any good for searching with SPARQL. LaTeX has a good collection of very standard, very clean methods for binding information together. Because it's standard, you can have a pre-existing ontology libraries which can be auto-populated. And because LaTeX is mostly maintained by uber-minds, rather than Facebook interns during their coffee break, those ontologies are likely to be very, very good. Also, microformats will DIE!!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

      The big drawback with HTML 5 is that the W3C can't even decide if the standard is fixed, rolling or a pink pony. TeX is a very solid standard that actually exists.

      Ok, what's the downside of TeX? There's no real namespace support, so conflicts between libraries are commonplace. I'm also not keen on having a mixture of tag logic, where some tags have content embedded and others have the content enclosed with an end tag. It's messy. Cleanliness is next to Linuxliness.

      Parsing client-side is a mild irritant, but let's face it. AJAX is also parsing client-side, as is Flash, as are cascading style sheets, etc, etc. The client is already doing a lot (one reason nobody has a fast browser any more), so changing from one set of massive overheads to another really wouldn't be that much of a pain.

      Ok, so if we consider TeX the underlying system, do we need a TeX tag? No. We would rather assume all parts of a document not enclosed by an SGML tag are TeX. This would be a transitory state, since you could then write SGML-to-TeX modules for Apache, IIS and other popularish web servers. The world would then become wholly TeXified, as it should be.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    4. Re:TeX for Math by gweihir · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Indeed. We just decided to move to LaTeX again for all documents that customers do not have the right to edit (most of them). The alternative was Word 2010.

      Reasons are far better look, far better to edit, no distractions while edition (MS GUIs suck), can be edited on any OS, .eps capability, svn compatible, easy separation of documents into separate files, etc. Took me 3 days of LaTeX hacking to make the style file and templates match the Word Template, but well worth it, as now it is done and will not surprise us all the time like the toy-level MS Word does.

      For stuff that customers do edit, we are stuck with MS trash, unfortunately. But even there we are thinking of writing it in LaTeX first and then move it over with latex2rtf for the final version. Far more efficient.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    5. Re:TeX for Math by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      "And because LaTeX is mostly maintained by uber-minds, rather than Facebook interns during their coffee break, those ontologies are likely to be very, very good."

      Put TeX into HTML and that moderately true statement will quickly become absolutely false.

      Stack Overflow has been keeping many of the degenerates away from Usenet. I really don't want to go through the same decade-long cycle of idiocy in TeX-land.

      Anyhow, TeX is just too difficult. There's something about a virtual machine based on recursive macros which can drive any uber-hacker to tears. There's no hope for the HTML crowd. You may as well shoot them all in the knee caps, send them home, and tell them to thank you.

  2. Old tech, and limited by Okian+Warrior · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I just recently reviewed the landscape of document writing systems for a client.

    TeX (and LaTeX, and such) are a fine choice for specific purposes. There's a lot of functionality, it's robust and widely used. If you're writing a journal submission paper, it's a good choice.

    The publishing landscape has changed. There are now many more types of document (help files, web pages, books, articles, owner's manuals, laws, contracts) that people want to write, and the TeX family is inconvenient for many of them.

    XML is a more comprehensive document content specification. It easily covers all of the common document types (including those for which the TeX family is useful) and is extensible in a straightforward manner.

    As a specific example, DocBook (a specific XML scheme) covers all cases where TeX is useful, and many more. An XML processing system can convert to any presentation format (HTML, XHTML, PDF, Microsoft Help, Text), and it's straightforward to build converters for new formats.

    (There are also other XML schemas.)

    The drawback of DocBook and XML in general is that installation is a nightmare. So far, there's no "one package install" that gets the author up and running. XML processing is a series of steps, with each step served by one of several open source packages. The author must choose and install software for each step, usually without any indication which is best for his purposes. This only needs to be done once, though. (For open source - paid software packages have this sorted out.)

    (For example, see how long it takes you to install DocBook 5.x on a windows system.)

    The TeX family is a good choice, but if you're not already using it consider learning a more recent solution.

  3. Re:The last command-line word processor by PhamNguyen · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I agree, the need to compile is a big time sink. Hunting for a missing brace or dollar is just horrible. I and many people I know (all long time users of LaTeX) switched to using LyX and only exporting to LaTeX for the final formatting (e.g. using a journal's style guide). Unfortunately there is no quick fix for LaTeX: the power of the language means that gui's like LyX can only deal with a subset of the language, and yet this power is necessary in order to allow for all the packages that LaTeX supports (and especially to support existing packages).