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Extended TeX: Past, Present, and Future
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.
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
Yes, but there was that helicopter crash; the typesetting community always blamed TeX for that, and ever since then, TeX has been relegated to doing font work in the third world, charity undertakings and the like. And really, who wanted to be limited to 55 fonts per document? Some of us type in the fast lane, buddy.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Oh dear oh dear, I hope Donald Knuth doesn't see that Slashdot doesn't seem to allow the correct METAFONT for displaying the program name! Pissing off Donald Knuth would be like kicking the Dalai Lama.
Is it possible to represent it in it's proper format via this version of Slashcode?
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
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.
nothing that old can possibly be relevant anymore (cf "trust no one over 30"). it should be replaced with something more responsive to a one-hand touch interface abbrev friendly imho. math, a central theme in TeX, no longer has any relevance to the modern world (just ask any millionaire agile scrum extreme php programmer). any remaining bits of math are done entirely by app; the vestigial remnants of the usefulness of "math" can only be found in the interjections of animated characters. only a tiny ancient dying breed of tenured academics (and i suspect *europeans*) would ever seek typography beyond the standards of MSWord. page layout was forever perfected by expensive per seat layout software around 1996 and requires no more changes. markup languages are too hard to learn. anything that requires a compiling phase has gone the way of C++. the world is better now as everything old and outmoded quickly recedes. sine-die.
TFA doesn't address the extreme crapitude of embedding pictures in Tex. I could drive myself to drink converting everything to EPS, or poorly scalable bitmaps before embedding them, but I don't want to.
The issues of imperfect typesetting are not the barrier to entry for potential TeX users. Picture embedding is.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Couple of good reads regarding LaTeX. 50 Shades of LaTeX: The Pain the Pleasure http://airminded.org/2005/11/18/latex-the-pain-the-pleasure/ http://crookedtimber.org/2005/04/27/fetishizing-the-text/
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
If you're trying to learn LaTeX, the biggest barrier is that you'll do a search and find tutorials that recommend using old, broken modules. Then you'll change something and wonder "WTF does LaTeX not ever work?!"
It's a great idea, if LaTeX is behaving mysteriously, to use nag and l2tabu, and especially ChkLatex to flag typos and mistakes \macro word. (The macro will eat the whitespace before word, either \macro{} word or \macro\ word is what you meant.) It's also best to stick with only packages in TeXLive.
But always, always before you use a package, find it on CTAN and make sure you've got the latest and greatest, and check the docs that there's not some disclaimer like, "by the way, this package is only here for compatibility, please use package X."
It's sort of like C where you have a preprocessor ("mouth") which does macro expansion and text replacement and then the actual compiler ("stomach").
Quoting this paper:
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).
I use LaTeX for almost everything from articles to memos, and have been doing so since the late 1980s. Last year I needed to print part of my dissertation, which is from 1990. With my current system, using a modern version of LaTeX, but including the special macros I used for the dissertation, it formatted the same in 2012 as it did in 1990. Try that with MSWord. :)
In addition, having text files with macros certainly makes storage/searching/organizing much easier. The files compress well, and searches, etc., can be done using standard tools such as grep.
Best wishes,
Bob
while i have written a thesis in latex, and could not imagine using anything else for papers, i still get frustrated by it.
* any problem is solvable with enough searching online, but the solutions are often like magic. for example i often have figure filenames like "x2.3_y3.4.pdf" latex gives a weird message, search around and eventually you find a forum thread that tells you to put some extra arguments in the includegraphics call, or if you are lucky you might find a mention of the grffile package. in all the years of using it I have never built up an intuition for solving these issue (by comparison programming and linux pretty much make sense to me).
* multiple ways of doing things. should i use \begin{center} or {\centering text text tex}. probably they both work fine, but each of them breaks something else in some obscure case.
* why are some things \command{text text text}, some {\command text text text} and some \begin{command}. compare with XML/SGML where everything is achieved with nesting tags.
* can the output be cleaned up? when i run pdflatex i get several screen-fulls of messages. really it should be showing me errors and optionally warnings.
* the interactive mode when it hits an error. i am sure there is nothing productive i can do in that shell. why is it so hard to get out of. why is -halt-on-error not default?
* why do i have to run pdflatex twice? why can't it figure out if a reference has changed? latexmk (or a good makefile) helps, but it took me years to find it.
"TeX still had a compile-run-debug workflow, and without a graphic display, you had to run a hard copy on something like an electrostatic printer or a daisy wheel printer to check the results."
When TeX was new, "a graphic display" was common and there were many previewers available pre-1.0. The idea that anyone previewed work on a daisy wheel printer is absolutely ludicrous. Never happened and would be useless.
"Then you could go to the phototypesetting machine."
No, you would go to screen previewer, then a laser printer, and then only to a phototypesetter if you were publishing. You sound like someone who didn't use TeX in those days.
"Once everybody got an interactive display good enough to view the output of TeX..."
You mean like a PC in 1985? Seriously, you pretend to be a historian but you aren't one. I, on the other hand, cowrote one of the first PC TeX previewers, in...1985. I am actually familiar with how these tools were used then, and it's clear you weren't a TeX user. As an Interleaf user, it seems you were the type privileged by limitless company money. Not many even had access to a machine capable of running Interleaf in those days. In my next job I worked with someone who was an Interleaf fan and who had the clout to get the company to buy him, and only him, a seat. He liked it, no one else used it or really even got to see its output, and TeX worked well at zero cost.
Many consider "compile-run-debug" to be an advantage but perhaps not since it became trendy to call that a "workflow". What-You-See-Is-All-You-Get.
Fun to see just how many of the people that jump on a discussion like this one have 4- and 5-digit user numbers :^)
One should understand the tools for his or her work, more or less, depending on the expectation of the result. MS Office was made easier, but I wouldn't expect as good results and there's not as much control over the document. But home and office users often don't need it, so choosing the easier one is ok.
Pretty much just incidental. Reagan's interest in "High Tech" was mostly limited to military applications (like Star Wars) which turned out to be huge financial boondoggles. He killed financial support for solar and other alternative energy technologies and put James Watt in charge of the environment (a man who believed we should use up the environment as soon as possible to hasten the second coming.)
By comparison, Eisenhower set the economic stage for Bell Labs, IBM, Dupont and DOW Chemicals and a brand new government space program named NASA. The JFK expanded all of these things dramatically including the mandate for a man on the moon. Clinton was the seminal power behind America's global advance in internet technologies and in 2000 we were leading the world. With Bush's cutting of support of the internet and redirecting economic focus on fossil fuel, war and housing, America has fallen behind Asia and even Europe. So Ronny may have presided over the 1980s expansion of high tech it would be very hard to claim he was a friend to advancing technology.