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.

Comments

TeX for Math

[rrhal]

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.

Re:TeX for Math

[K. S. Kyosuke]

There's always TeXLive.js, if you actually need full (La)TeX environment in your browser.

Re:TeX for Math

[semi-extrinsic]

Modern LaTeX is quite a bit better at giving good error messages, unless you try to do very complex things. Combining lots of packages for heavy customization is the prime example; I once spent half a day setting up custom chapter titles with a side-by-side miniature table-of-contents and epigraph below a title where the chapter number extruded into the margin, and drop caps at the start of the first paragraph. But the end result was beautiful.

Re:TeX for Math

[jd]

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.

Re:TeX for Math

[gweihir]

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.

Re:TeX for Math

[gtall]

I just gave a talk for management. One fellow remarked on the quality of my slides and didn't think they were done using PP. Yep, I said, they are Latex (Beamer), and I can cut and paste from my papers. Using PP for math will make you go blind.

Re:TeX for Math

[michael_cain]

...no distractions while edition (MS GUIs suck)...

At some point there was an internal study at Bell Labs after WYSIWYG word processors were beginning to be available that found most people spent 20% of their time futzing with how the document looked instead of writing. Most of that time was wasted because subsequent changes were going to wipe out whatever the little tweaks had been intended to accomplish.

Interesting that today you can buy programs whose primary purpose is to blank all of your display except for a green-on-black mono-spaced text window. Sold as an aid for professional writers who need to pound out umpteen pages of text per day, so need to avoid interruptions and distractions while composing.

Re:TeX for Math

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

TeX is a document typesetting language. HTML, regardless of its flavor, is a markup language that describes the document's contents but doesn't tell the browser how to lay it out.

There's no hope for TeX-as-HTML ever working because they're built on fundamentally incompatible document models.

-JS

P.S. If you want to see what math for HTML looks like, go look at MathML. Next, try actually writing a non-trivial equation in MathML, something like

$\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} e^{-x^2} dx = \sqrt{\pi}$

Then you'll understand why those of use who do this for a living still write our papers in TeX. Even if you don't know TeX, you can probably guess what my equation should look like; you wouldn't say that about the MathML.

Re:TeX for Math

[sFurbo]

When all your writing is text, the whole point of Tex is lost, and you might as well use word.

No it isn't. Apart from the ease of writing equations, one major point for LaTeX is that you can just write the damn text and you don't have to worry about how it looks. The final result is going to be beautiful. In Word, you can choose the font and size of all levels of headings, the line spacing and the margins, and even when you have spent time doing that, it still doesn't look as good as LaTeX does out of the box.

Re:Jimmy Carter was president of TeX?!

[fyngyrz]

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.

Wrong Font For Program Name

[Freshly Exhumed]

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?

so old it must be replaced...

[smoothnorman]

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.

What about pictures?

[TechyImmigrant]

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.

Re:TeX for Otherstuff

[xclr8r]

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/

Re:Old tech, and limited

[retchdog]

structure is one thing, output is another. show me some docbook-rendered math that doesn't suck.

mixed feelings

[ssam]

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.

Re:hah

[Genda]

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.