I'm not a lawyer, but it certainly seems a reasonable argument to me.
All I'm saying in this thread is that unless you can point to a clear statute and/or relevant case law, as applicable in your particular jurisdiction, it might be unwise to assume that an argument will stand up in court just because it seems reasonable to you and me.
Consideration can be in a form of a promise, of value, to the other party.
Sure. But the point originally made here, when "Courageous" so casually dismissed the concern expressed by the AC, was that there isn't a whole lot of case law to demonstrate that courts will hold that the kind of promise that goes with the GPL is sufficient to constitute consideration. As far as I'm aware, that's still true, and no-one seems to be citing any lawsuits from any jurisdiction to show otherwise.
There is still debate about the validity of EULAs generally in some jurisdictions. Some places have laws specifically relating to copies of works made in normal use, that potentially nullify the entire legal argument of relying on copyright and the fact that just installing/using software necessarily requires making a copy. Even these waters aren't particularly well-tested yet, and they are far wider-reaching than anything specific to the GPL.
Please understand that I'm not somehow claiming that the GPL is unenforceable or anything like that. All I'm saying is that the legal system when it comes to copyright and licensing is a mess just about everywhere. Calling someone silly for pointing out that some of these arguments have never been tested in court is not constructive.
That's four posts you've made in this thread, and you haven't stated a single substantial point other than that I (and the other guy you first responded to) are wrong, because. You didn't even answer my direct question in the previous message. I think you're just a troll.
Because I guarantee there will never be a social revolution based on copyright.
There will be if they actually start cutting off substantial numbers of people from the Internet, particularly if a significant proportion of those people didn't actually commit the crimes they are accused of but got punished extra-judicially anyway.
What relevance does any of that have to the question at hand? We're considering under what (if any) circumstances the original creator of a work could revoke an existing licence. The original creator does not have to defend their rights to the code, because they have all the rights by default.
Also, no-one is "attacking the GPL", because the fundamental question is whether an earlier licence is still applicable at all. This game is over before you even start considering what the licence says, unless perhaps some post that I haven't noticed is making a case that in general a previous licence would remain in effect but that the GPL contains specific provision for termination that is relevant here.
Your continued ad hominem attacks and pseudo-legal arguments are getting tiresome. Perhaps instead of telling the rest of us how silly and wrong we all are, you'd care to share some actual, concrete facts of your own, for the first time in this entire thread? You could start by explaining exactly what, in your opinion, the legal status of a software licence agreement is.
It will be interesting to see how your version of the legal status of a software licence stacks up against what I've spent a substantial amount of time and money talking to actual lawyers about, over a few years now and in relation to quite a few different projects, before putting forward my "uninformed speculations".
If those graybeards you mentioned had spoken to a real lawyer, they would surely appreciate basic legal concepts like a contract requiring consideration in both directions, and a deed that can operate without such consideration usually having much more stringent requirements than a quick LICENCE file.
Given that merely taking a GPL'd work and using it or redistributing it yourself does not clearly offer any consideration back to the copyright holder, and that a quick LICENCE file is all you get with many projects, I think the concern here is much more than merely a "theoretical line of attack". There is a fundamental question of law as to whether there is any sort of binding agreement there at all.
That being the case, it is entirely fair for someone to question whether a GPL licence can subsequently be revoked in at least some cases, particularly if one is relying on something in that GPL licence and would otherwise be on the hook for breaking the law in some way.
That potentially depends on how you granted the licence, and probably on what jurisdiction you are in as well.
Asking these questions is not silly at all if you're going to be on the wrong end of any adverse legal consequences. It's clear from some of the comments here that some people automatically believe the FSF's interpretation, even though they have never personally talked to a lawyer to understand how copyright, licensing, contracts, deeds and so on actually work in law.
If Benjamin Franklin got this in 1775 - why don't people today?
Because most people in the West remember 9/11 and similar events in other countries close to home, but don't remember McCarthyism and the Holocaust.
Because we prefer to dwell on the successes of the Arab Spring and the liberation of Libya where our armed forces helped, rather than considering the brutal suppression of popular opposition to the state in places like Iran and Syria.
It's a case of "It would never happen to me!" when it comes to privacy, but "Fear the bogeyman!" when it comes to security. Unfortunately, with a political class full of so-called leaders who are themselves terrified that the next big one will happen on their watch, it suits their purposes to perpetuate this kind of mindset, hence all the security theatre and making terrorism the root password to the legal system.
Privacy and security are almost never a zero sum game. In this case, reducing privacy isn't going to help find more 'criminal/terrorist activity'; It will just cause them to use Freenet, TOR, steganography, for comunication etc. instead and result in making it even harder to track real criminal activity.
The trouble with this argument -- and I write this as someone who is a strong believer in privacy -- is that it assumes all bad guys are smart. Many bad guys don't come from the genius pool, as we can tell from the ways they eventually get caught and the number of times someone has slipped through all this security theatre but then failed to cause any real damage anyway. If anything, the fact that so many bad guys don't seem to be that smart has been doing more to protect us than anything else lately.
I don't like this particular idea because I think the cost to individual privacy and the risk of subsequent government abuse are too high a price to pay. But if we're going to have an intelligent debate about it, we should consider that high level government people have gone on the record in the UK (recent example) to say that the analogous phone contact information is widely used in tracking down the perpetrators of serious crimes and ultimately bringing them to justice. If we take them at their word, there is "a case to answer" here and a genuine debate to be had.
it slows their networks down to have to log everything
It would lag everything, gamers should complain LOUDLY
That is highly unlikely. They would probably be taking a copy of the data at some critical part of the network and then everything else would happen on some secondary out-of-band network. The kind of hardware they'd be using to do that is also used by, for example, high frequency traders, who literally win or lose millions by being milliseconds faster than the other guy.
It would, however, almost certainly cost a staggering amount of money to buy the hardware to implement all of this, and the people warning about inability to fully separate content technically even if the politicians/lawyers say that will happen do have a valid point.
But that's what the generic styles/classes are for.
But the generic styles/classes are bland, cookie-cutter implementations of about half a dozen basic document types. They were reportedly never even intended as more than examples, but they caught on and became ubiquitous because it's so damned hard to write better alternatives in LaTeX.
Where are the classes for magazines and three-fold brochures and concert posters and children's books?
And where are the classes that don't make documents that look so boring I want to put myself out of my own misery before I have to read more than the first two paragraphs?
One might say roughly the same thing about plain-text-based programming languages, yet people still use them.
Sorry, but I don't see your analogy at all here.
I disagree; it very much did (and does) allow control of logical design, whereas WYSIWYG systems generally don't.
How does it allow control of logical design? I mean, sure, you can define macros to do whatever you want if you can get your head around the eccentric programming language. But out of the box, LaTeX has only the most basic elements in its semantic repertoire: titles and subtitles, hierarchical sections, ordered and unordered lists, that sort of thing. And of course every major word processor also comes with basic document templates and default styles of a similar level.
In practice, LaTeX offers well-designed defaults that you can tweak with minimal effort.
Sorry, but I don't accept either of your premises there. As I've argued in various other posts in this discussion, I don't think LaTeX's defaults stack up particularly well by modern standards, and I certainly don't think tweaking them requires "minimal effort". On the contrary, simple things like setting up your own table or heading numbering or list styles in LaTeX are absurdly overcomplicated compared to using pretty much any modern word processor. And of course if you want to do anything more substantial than a bit of light tweaking, you are about to enter a world of hurt.
Arguably, someone who is willing to put that much effort into document design should be willing to face the effort involved with more detailed LaTeX customizations.
I think that would be a rather challenging argument to support. The effort involved is prohibitive for almost anyone.
The TeX family remains the preeminent tool for creating documents that look professional. [...] But what bothers me is how naïve word-processor users can be about the poor, unprofessional quality of the documents they produce with them.
You're really making two implications here: firstly that word processors necessarily or primarily produce poor quality results, and secondly that TeX is a good tool for producing good quality results.
I certainly agree that there is an education problem with word processing, because it's so easy to do things the quick and dirty way, but equally I think the people who run into that would struggle using TeX at least as much. On the other hand, for a moderately skilled user, someone who has at least learned to use their software with some proficiency and knows which options are off by default but really shouldn't be, it's not hard to produce reasonably professional-looking results in most modern word processors with only a very modest amount of work. Once again, this is something I've addressed in more detail elsewhere in the discussion, but today's word processors have significantly higher standards particularly in terms of typographical and layout control than those of a few years ago, and many of TeX's traditional advantages simply don't apply any more.
As for your more general comment that the TeX family remains the preeminent tool for creating documents that look professional, I couldn't disagree more. If you want to create a professi
Perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.
IME, quite a few businesses of all sizes do have a house style that uses something other than a standard Windows/Mac operating system font. This is not some niche idea that is only used by elite design studios with $1,000+/seat DTP software. That font will almost certainly come as OpenType, which will work out of the box in any major word processor.
Moreover, almost every major word processor does have support for at least basic OpenType features like automatic ligatures and different number styles these days. LibreOffice Writer is way behind the field on this one, and currently seems to be obsessed with some niche font technology and supporting international character sets to the extent of making the entire formatting UI incredibly cumbersome.
Just having the ability to use modern fonts without jumping through arcane hoops puts almost anything else ahead of TeX these days. And having the right font is going to matter far more to the overall appearance of a document than the fine-tuning of the Knuth-Plass H&J algorithm, which is pretty much the only rock solid win TeX has left.
I'm honestly astonished that you can argue that TeX is worse in this regard. The amount of messing around in a wordprocessor is vastly greater to get documents up to even remotely the same quality.
It really isn't. In fact, if you're not using full justification, simply choosing a good font and enabling a handful of basic settings in your word processor if they aren't on by default will get you better-looking results almost every time than using some TeX or LaTeX variant and enabling a handful of similarly routine settings such as the \raggedbottom that you mentioned.
I think you're still imagining how word processors and fonts worked ten years ago, instead of comparing the TeX family of today (which has barely changed in that time) with modern office software and font technology (which have evolved beyond recognition over the same period).
These posts are getting long now, so I'm going to condense my reply a bit.
TeX may make a "huge fuss" about long lines. Other software simply doesn't do the stupid thing that could never possibly be right.
TeX may be capable of using some other font formats, but as soon as you switch away from CM, all the subtle spacing corrections when typesetting equations tend to be slightly off, because they were fine-tuned for that specific family of fonts.
OpenType isn't just for "super-advanced typography". It's the industry standard format for supplying professional grade fonts, often the only format those fonts are available in these days, and it has been for many years now. And in any word processor or DTP software, the fonts installed on your system just work.
All the major word processors have options for widow/orphan control, for keeping all lines in a paragraph together in the same text block, and for keeping a paragraph together with the following line. This covers the basics as far as page breaking is concerned. None of the major word processors thinks it's a good idea to start adding an inch of extra space between each pair of adjacent paragraphs to pad out a page vertically just because some large block of content that doesn't fit has to move onto the next page.
If we're talking about comparing on an equal footing, I don't see how you can possibly argue that TeX-related tools are better than any modern word processor in any of these areas. At best, TeX allows daft results and requires the user to manually mess around and reprocess their document to fix something that no other software would have got wrong in the first place.
Go to a bookstore and open 20 books at random from various sections of the store and tell me that most of them were left-justified and not full justified with hyphenation.
The fact that a lot of books are typeset in that way does not imply that doing so makes the text easier to read.
Other things being equal, using hyphenation also fits more content into less space, which is typically a major concern when publishing books. Adding a scroll bar on a web page is free, but adding more pages to a book is not.
Obviously fully justified text also gives a more solid outline to the text block. This is important in applications such as newspaper printing, where often very narrow columns are used with limited whitespace available to set each article apart from the rest.
However, even in book publishing, full justification is not a universal practice. The most beautiful book I have immediately to hand — Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information — is typeset with its text left-justified.
In any case, this is all rather a straw man, because we weren't talking about books. The question was about HTML and CSS, and I was talking about typography for reading on-screen, which is both how HTML and CSS are used and increasingly how we read documents prepared using a word processor or similar tool as well. There has been proper research on the effect of justification on readability, as a few moments with Google would have told you if you'd bothered to search before you started insulting me, and the conclusion was that fully justified text can slow down reading speed significantly.
Yes, the microtype package certainly advanced the state of the art in some respects. It's one of the few bits of software I've ever seen that attempts to do optical margin alignment properly.
Alas, as you mentioned, its scope is rather limited. In particular, significant parts of microtype (including font expansion) don't work with the XeTeX family AFAIK, so you can't readily take advantage of it when using good quality OpenType fonts.
FWIW, before I posted that, I did the obligatory Google and checked out the first promising MathML-in-SVG demo I found (about halfway down the first page of results) to make sure my information was still relevant. That page rendered fine for me in both Firefox and Chrome on Windows.
The trouble is, mathematically perfect typesetting often doesn't look right to the human eye. If you want your document to look good, using high quality fonts and reasonable default spacing will go quite a long way, but in the end there's no substitute for a considered look from a real person.
HTML/CSS is meant to separate content from presentation, so why don't they do it by default?
Because hyphenation is, for the most part, a bad thing as far as readability goes. The only reason it's used as much as it is in the TeX world is because the TeX world defaults to full justification, which is also mostly a bad thing as far as readability goes. On the web, we typically default to left-justified text and natural horizontal spacing, because it's almost always easier to read.
Well, TeX looks decent by default, at least the basic typesetting does.
I respectfully disagree. The defaults include allowing the badness problem with overly long lines, absurd vertical spacing settings, and using Computer Modern. The latter is a brilliant piece of engineering, in terms of the legibility it maintains in the difficult field of mathematical typesetting potentially with poor quality reproduction of printed material, and an aesthetic horror by just about any other typographical standard.
Er, no, because they use word. And they take the time to make or comission custom styles. If they used LaTeX, they'd do the same there.
I don't think it's reasonable to compare the effort and cost likely to be involved in those cases. I suspect that there are only a relatively small number of people on the entire planet who could produce a good LaTeX class for a non-trivial document format, even assuming that the required formatting and layout would lend itself to the way LaTeX typesets pages at all. As evidence of this, I submit the fact that LaTeX3 was the next big thing somewhere around the Dark Ages and still is today.
XeLaTeX adds super-advanced extra typography.
You mean like using Unicode characters and OpenType fonts?
I think you're missing the entire point of this thread, which is about LaTeX versus wordprocessors. Very few people use DTP software.
And even fewer use LaTeX, I imagine. In any case, I think the point of this thread is that LaTeX is only of any real value to most people if someone else already wrote the class file and packages to do exactly what they want, which is usually not the case and never could be.
If you're ignoring [badness warnings] you're essentially ignoring TeX saying "I can't figure out how to not make this look like crap" and then complaining that the results look like crap. Sometimes, rarely, human intervention is needed.
And yet every other piece of software on the planet seems to at least manage to fit text within horizontal margins without a human to hold its hand. What the TeX engine does when it allows a line to simply overrun by a few characters is the worst possible solution to the problem that I can imagine. It really did take several years before I realised that it was actually doing so by design and not just a bug they hadn't fixed yet; the idea that anyone might consider that acceptable behaviour hadn't even occurred to me.
Though unless you're doing something really unusual, like very very long words or very narrow columns then it just works.
Well, in that case, all I can say is that a remarkably unlikely proportion of the documents I used to write using TeX-family software must have been doing something really unusual, because I seemed to run into both the overlong line problem and the vast vertical spaces problem several times in almost every non-trivial document I wrote. The sad thing is that I'd even see those problems make it into the production versions of published papers, conference proceedings and the like.
I used to expect that features from higher-end DTP packages would slowly filter down to word processors over time. However, these days, I tend to find irritating and absurdly simply limitations even in supposedly state-of-the-art DTP software instead, and word processors don't seem to be innovating at all.
Instead, I'm now coming round to the view that the combination of a mark-up language with reasonable semantics, a presentation language, and a scripting language are going to get there first. I don't think it will be HTML, CSS and JavaScript, at least not in anything close to their form today; all of these carry way too much historical baggage from a time when we hadn't yet realised how much potential the basic model had, and they are underpowered and inflexible as a result. But they've shown beyond any doubt firstly that the three-way separation of content, presentation and dynamic behaviour is effective, and secondly that a lot of people understand that model well enough both to write in those languages directly and to write tools for other people who need them.
I suspect someone is going to come along and render products like Word, Writer and even InDesign obsolete in the relatively near future, by creating a document writing and editing tool based on:
a moderately customisable mark-up language
a presentation language with the kind of power CSS has in its selectors but way more power in areas like layout and typographical control
a very accessible scripting language
a suite of front-end editors for each area and related tools that emphasizes ease of use, productivity, and actually helping people to write well, not just adding arbitrary shiny
powerful collaboration and back-office integration features for those who need them
flexible import/export including out-of-the-box support for a few common formats, not trying to be able to reproduce some other software's results perfectly, but enough that you can get your basic data into the new software and you can generate things like PDFs, and finally
a clean plug-in architecture to solve more advanced problems (such as typesetting math, for example) than the standard formatting engine and scripting language can sensibly handle.
One exception where you might be mixing presentation and content quite a bit is if you're designing a poster or a graphically complicated presentation - but then exact placement of figures/boxes/drawings/text usually matter a bit more than for the standard report or article.
The trouble is, something as simple as inserting a diagram becomes "graphically complicated" in TeX world. Typesetting a table, or a pull quote, or basically anything that isn't one of the handful of common typographical treatments in the standard toolbox becomes complicated. Then you get to "advanced" concepts like page layout or documents that contain more than one stream of text, and TeX is basically a non-starter.
TL;DR: If LaTeX is the model T, the rest are either horse-carts or trying to figure out the correct shape for the wheel.
Sorry, but I just don't see how that's true at all. TeX has a neat H&J algorithm, by far the most powerful and easy-to-use system of any tool I know for handling math, and a default font designed specifically to work well when setting that math. And that's about where its strengths end today, even against everyday word processors, never mind high-end DTP systems, unless you are working with an organisation that has invested far more effort into custom class and package design than most places ever do. And even then you're still losing to the high-end DTP software, even if you beat the word processors.
I'm one of those users who have been using Office since the 90s, and was very used to the old menu system. I adapted fine and prefer the ribbon, so it always makes me wonder whether these people who dislike the ribbon are numerous or simply very loud.
The trouble is, no one person's individual experience is even close to meaningful on the scale we're talking about. We could just as well observe that I, personally, don't much like most kinds of toolbars in most applications, and I don't much like the Ribbon either, as much because of the discoverable menu structure it simplifies (or over-simplifies, for someone like me) as because of the toolbars it more obviously replaces. I'm quite sure I'm not alone, but I honestly have no idea how widespread my opinion is, only of the pattern I see in comments from a still relatively small group of other posters on-line.
While office does allow for the quick and dirty document as you say, it has plenty of features for the advanced user.
It really doesn't. It has a handful of features that are useful for serious documents but most users don't know about. It's still somewhere around 2/10 on the professional document production scale.
Honestly, it's just a tool and if the majority of people find it easier to use, does that make it bad because they could have a "better" document if they typeset with LaTeX?
Please notice at this point that I didn't say anything about LaTeX being a better alternative. For the vast majority of users, I don't think it is, as I mentioned in another post.
No, and, unfortunately 99.997% of documents written today look like complete ass.
Sad, but probably true. It's not because they weren't written in TeX, though.
Good thing company's don't have house styles or anything.
And do you know a lot of companies who have taken the time to develop a custom LaTeX class to match that style?
Before you answer, keep in mind that LaTeX can't comply with many house styles without going as far as something like XeLaTeX, on typeface grounds alone.
If, by "modern standards" you mean documents looking like ass, then yes, LaTeX doesn't conform to modern standards. If TeX's typesetting is so antiquated, then how come it looks better than all but the best professional packages?
Because a lot of word processor-level software, including both packages we're talking about here, also doesn't support serious modern typography yet.
How come modern wordprocessors and web browsers don't do decent line breaking?
Some of them do, and certainly serious DTP software for producing professional work does.
Others don't, though sometimes for usability reasons. It's not as if no-one on the Word team has heard of Knuth-Plass or they don't have someone smart enough to implement it, but it does have a downside in terms of shifting text around. It doesn't bother me using it interactively, but I'm not a typical Word user, and I suspect Microsoft have long since done their homework on this one.
In any case, any credit TeX earns with its advances in H&J it immediately loses again by not knowing how to keep a line of text within the designated margins, a typographical absurdity far worse than anything Word or Writer has ever done to anyone. And then we start to talk about how TeX doesn't even pretend to support sensible vertical spacing, and it becomes a punchline.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a lawyer, but it certainly seems a reasonable argument to me.
All I'm saying in this thread is that unless you can point to a clear statute and/or relevant case law, as applicable in your particular jurisdiction, it might be unwise to assume that an argument will stand up in court just because it seems reasonable to you and me.
Consideration can be in a form of a promise, of value, to the other party.
Sure. But the point originally made here, when "Courageous" so casually dismissed the concern expressed by the AC, was that there isn't a whole lot of case law to demonstrate that courts will hold that the kind of promise that goes with the GPL is sufficient to constitute consideration. As far as I'm aware, that's still true, and no-one seems to be citing any lawsuits from any jurisdiction to show otherwise.
There is still debate about the validity of EULAs generally in some jurisdictions. Some places have laws specifically relating to copies of works made in normal use, that potentially nullify the entire legal argument of relying on copyright and the fact that just installing/using software necessarily requires making a copy. Even these waters aren't particularly well-tested yet, and they are far wider-reaching than anything specific to the GPL.
Please understand that I'm not somehow claiming that the GPL is unenforceable or anything like that. All I'm saying is that the legal system when it comes to copyright and licensing is a mess just about everywhere. Calling someone silly for pointing out that some of these arguments have never been tested in court is not constructive.
That's four posts you've made in this thread, and you haven't stated a single substantial point other than that I (and the other guy you first responded to) are wrong, because. You didn't even answer my direct question in the previous message. I think you're just a troll.
Because I guarantee there will never be a social revolution based on copyright.
There will be if they actually start cutting off substantial numbers of people from the Internet, particularly if a significant proportion of those people didn't actually commit the crimes they are accused of but got punished extra-judicially anyway.
What relevance does any of that have to the question at hand? We're considering under what (if any) circumstances the original creator of a work could revoke an existing licence. The original creator does not have to defend their rights to the code, because they have all the rights by default.
Also, no-one is "attacking the GPL", because the fundamental question is whether an earlier licence is still applicable at all. This game is over before you even start considering what the licence says, unless perhaps some post that I haven't noticed is making a case that in general a previous licence would remain in effect but that the GPL contains specific provision for termination that is relevant here.
Your continued ad hominem attacks and pseudo-legal arguments are getting tiresome. Perhaps instead of telling the rest of us how silly and wrong we all are, you'd care to share some actual, concrete facts of your own, for the first time in this entire thread? You could start by explaining exactly what, in your opinion, the legal status of a software licence agreement is.
It will be interesting to see how your version of the legal status of a software licence stacks up against what I've spent a substantial amount of time and money talking to actual lawyers about, over a few years now and in relation to quite a few different projects, before putting forward my "uninformed speculations".
If those graybeards you mentioned had spoken to a real lawyer, they would surely appreciate basic legal concepts like a contract requiring consideration in both directions, and a deed that can operate without such consideration usually having much more stringent requirements than a quick LICENCE file.
Given that merely taking a GPL'd work and using it or redistributing it yourself does not clearly offer any consideration back to the copyright holder, and that a quick LICENCE file is all you get with many projects, I think the concern here is much more than merely a "theoretical line of attack". There is a fundamental question of law as to whether there is any sort of binding agreement there at all.
That being the case, it is entirely fair for someone to question whether a GPL licence can subsequently be revoked in at least some cases, particularly if one is relying on something in that GPL licence and would otherwise be on the hook for breaking the law in some way.
That potentially depends on how you granted the licence, and probably on what jurisdiction you are in as well.
Asking these questions is not silly at all if you're going to be on the wrong end of any adverse legal consequences. It's clear from some of the comments here that some people automatically believe the FSF's interpretation, even though they have never personally talked to a lawyer to understand how copyright, licensing, contracts, deeds and so on actually work in law.
If Benjamin Franklin got this in 1775 - why don't people today?
Because most people in the West remember 9/11 and similar events in other countries close to home, but don't remember McCarthyism and the Holocaust.
Because we prefer to dwell on the successes of the Arab Spring and the liberation of Libya where our armed forces helped, rather than considering the brutal suppression of popular opposition to the state in places like Iran and Syria.
It's a case of "It would never happen to me!" when it comes to privacy, but "Fear the bogeyman!" when it comes to security. Unfortunately, with a political class full of so-called leaders who are themselves terrified that the next big one will happen on their watch, it suits their purposes to perpetuate this kind of mindset, hence all the security theatre and making terrorism the root password to the legal system.
Privacy and security are almost never a zero sum game. In this case, reducing privacy isn't going to help find more 'criminal/terrorist activity'; It will just cause them to use Freenet, TOR, steganography, for comunication etc. instead and result in making it even harder to track real criminal activity.
The trouble with this argument -- and I write this as someone who is a strong believer in privacy -- is that it assumes all bad guys are smart. Many bad guys don't come from the genius pool, as we can tell from the ways they eventually get caught and the number of times someone has slipped through all this security theatre but then failed to cause any real damage anyway. If anything, the fact that so many bad guys don't seem to be that smart has been doing more to protect us than anything else lately.
I don't like this particular idea because I think the cost to individual privacy and the risk of subsequent government abuse are too high a price to pay. But if we're going to have an intelligent debate about it, we should consider that high level government people have gone on the record in the UK (recent example) to say that the analogous phone contact information is widely used in tracking down the perpetrators of serious crimes and ultimately bringing them to justice. If we take them at their word, there is "a case to answer" here and a genuine debate to be had.
it slows their networks down to have to log everything
It would lag everything, gamers should complain LOUDLY
That is highly unlikely. They would probably be taking a copy of the data at some critical part of the network and then everything else would happen on some secondary out-of-band network. The kind of hardware they'd be using to do that is also used by, for example, high frequency traders, who literally win or lose millions by being milliseconds faster than the other guy.
It would, however, almost certainly cost a staggering amount of money to buy the hardware to implement all of this, and the people warning about inability to fully separate content technically even if the politicians/lawyers say that will happen do have a valid point.
But that's what the generic styles/classes are for.
But the generic styles/classes are bland, cookie-cutter implementations of about half a dozen basic document types. They were reportedly never even intended as more than examples, but they caught on and became ubiquitous because it's so damned hard to write better alternatives in LaTeX.
Where are the classes for magazines and three-fold brochures and concert posters and children's books?
And where are the classes that don't make documents that look so boring I want to put myself out of my own misery before I have to read more than the first two paragraphs?
One might say roughly the same thing about plain-text-based programming languages, yet people still use them.
Sorry, but I don't see your analogy at all here.
I disagree; it very much did (and does) allow control of logical design, whereas WYSIWYG systems generally don't.
How does it allow control of logical design? I mean, sure, you can define macros to do whatever you want if you can get your head around the eccentric programming language. But out of the box, LaTeX has only the most basic elements in its semantic repertoire: titles and subtitles, hierarchical sections, ordered and unordered lists, that sort of thing. And of course every major word processor also comes with basic document templates and default styles of a similar level.
In practice, LaTeX offers well-designed defaults that you can tweak with minimal effort.
Sorry, but I don't accept either of your premises there. As I've argued in various other posts in this discussion, I don't think LaTeX's defaults stack up particularly well by modern standards, and I certainly don't think tweaking them requires "minimal effort". On the contrary, simple things like setting up your own table or heading numbering or list styles in LaTeX are absurdly overcomplicated compared to using pretty much any modern word processor. And of course if you want to do anything more substantial than a bit of light tweaking, you are about to enter a world of hurt.
Arguably, someone who is willing to put that much effort into document design should be willing to face the effort involved with more detailed LaTeX customizations.
I think that would be a rather challenging argument to support. The effort involved is prohibitive for almost anyone.
The TeX family remains the preeminent tool for creating documents that look professional. [...] But what bothers me is how naïve word-processor users can be about the poor, unprofessional quality of the documents they produce with them.
You're really making two implications here: firstly that word processors necessarily or primarily produce poor quality results, and secondly that TeX is a good tool for producing good quality results.
I certainly agree that there is an education problem with word processing, because it's so easy to do things the quick and dirty way, but equally I think the people who run into that would struggle using TeX at least as much. On the other hand, for a moderately skilled user, someone who has at least learned to use their software with some proficiency and knows which options are off by default but really shouldn't be, it's not hard to produce reasonably professional-looking results in most modern word processors with only a very modest amount of work. Once again, this is something I've addressed in more detail elsewhere in the discussion, but today's word processors have significantly higher standards particularly in terms of typographical and layout control than those of a few years ago, and many of TeX's traditional advantages simply don't apply any more.
As for your more general comment that the TeX family remains the preeminent tool for creating documents that look professional, I couldn't disagree more. If you want to create a professi
Perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree on this one.
IME, quite a few businesses of all sizes do have a house style that uses something other than a standard Windows/Mac operating system font. This is not some niche idea that is only used by elite design studios with $1,000+/seat DTP software. That font will almost certainly come as OpenType, which will work out of the box in any major word processor.
Moreover, almost every major word processor does have support for at least basic OpenType features like automatic ligatures and different number styles these days. LibreOffice Writer is way behind the field on this one, and currently seems to be obsessed with some niche font technology and supporting international character sets to the extent of making the entire formatting UI incredibly cumbersome.
Just having the ability to use modern fonts without jumping through arcane hoops puts almost anything else ahead of TeX these days. And having the right font is going to matter far more to the overall appearance of a document than the fine-tuning of the Knuth-Plass H&J algorithm, which is pretty much the only rock solid win TeX has left.
I'm honestly astonished that you can argue that TeX is worse in this regard. The amount of messing around in a wordprocessor is vastly greater to get documents up to even remotely the same quality.
It really isn't. In fact, if you're not using full justification, simply choosing a good font and enabling a handful of basic settings in your word processor if they aren't on by default will get you better-looking results almost every time than using some TeX or LaTeX variant and enabling a handful of similarly routine settings such as the \raggedbottom that you mentioned.
I think you're still imagining how word processors and fonts worked ten years ago, instead of comparing the TeX family of today (which has barely changed in that time) with modern office software and font technology (which have evolved beyond recognition over the same period).
These posts are getting long now, so I'm going to condense my reply a bit.
TeX may make a "huge fuss" about long lines. Other software simply doesn't do the stupid thing that could never possibly be right.
TeX may be capable of using some other font formats, but as soon as you switch away from CM, all the subtle spacing corrections when typesetting equations tend to be slightly off, because they were fine-tuned for that specific family of fonts.
OpenType isn't just for "super-advanced typography". It's the industry standard format for supplying professional grade fonts, often the only format those fonts are available in these days, and it has been for many years now. And in any word processor or DTP software, the fonts installed on your system just work.
All the major word processors have options for widow/orphan control, for keeping all lines in a paragraph together in the same text block, and for keeping a paragraph together with the following line. This covers the basics as far as page breaking is concerned. None of the major word processors thinks it's a good idea to start adding an inch of extra space between each pair of adjacent paragraphs to pad out a page vertically just because some large block of content that doesn't fit has to move onto the next page.
If we're talking about comparing on an equal footing, I don't see how you can possibly argue that TeX-related tools are better than any modern word processor in any of these areas. At best, TeX allows daft results and requires the user to manually mess around and reprocess their document to fix something that no other software would have got wrong in the first place.
Go to a bookstore and open 20 books at random from various sections of the store and tell me that most of them were left-justified and not full justified with hyphenation.
The fact that a lot of books are typeset in that way does not imply that doing so makes the text easier to read.
Other things being equal, using hyphenation also fits more content into less space, which is typically a major concern when publishing books. Adding a scroll bar on a web page is free, but adding more pages to a book is not.
Obviously fully justified text also gives a more solid outline to the text block. This is important in applications such as newspaper printing, where often very narrow columns are used with limited whitespace available to set each article apart from the rest.
However, even in book publishing, full justification is not a universal practice. The most beautiful book I have immediately to hand — Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information — is typeset with its text left-justified.
In any case, this is all rather a straw man, because we weren't talking about books. The question was about HTML and CSS, and I was talking about typography for reading on-screen, which is both how HTML and CSS are used and increasingly how we read documents prepared using a word processor or similar tool as well. There has been proper research on the effect of justification on readability, as a few moments with Google would have told you if you'd bothered to search before you started insulting me, and the conclusion was that fully justified text can slow down reading speed significantly.
Yes, the microtype package certainly advanced the state of the art in some respects. It's one of the few bits of software I've ever seen that attempts to do optical margin alignment properly.
Alas, as you mentioned, its scope is rather limited. In particular, significant parts of microtype (including font expansion) don't work with the XeTeX family AFAIK, so you can't readily take advantage of it when using good quality OpenType fonts.
FWIW, before I posted that, I did the obligatory Google and checked out the first promising MathML-in-SVG demo I found (about halfway down the first page of results) to make sure my information was still relevant. That page rendered fine for me in both Firefox and Chrome on Windows.
The trouble is, mathematically perfect typesetting often doesn't look right to the human eye. If you want your document to look good, using high quality fonts and reasonable default spacing will go quite a long way, but in the end there's no substitute for a considered look from a real person.
HTML/CSS is meant to separate content from presentation, so why don't they do it by default?
Because hyphenation is, for the most part, a bad thing as far as readability goes. The only reason it's used as much as it is in the TeX world is because the TeX world defaults to full justification, which is also mostly a bad thing as far as readability goes. On the web, we typically default to left-justified text and natural horizontal spacing, because it's almost always easier to read.
How do I do PStricks in HTML/CSS?
Probably by using the HTML5 <canvas> element and some combination of the JavaScript libraries that have been written over the past few years.
How do I put math into SVG?
By embedding MathML, much the same way as you would include it in an XHTML document.
Well, TeX looks decent by default, at least the basic typesetting does.
I respectfully disagree. The defaults include allowing the badness problem with overly long lines, absurd vertical spacing settings, and using Computer Modern. The latter is a brilliant piece of engineering, in terms of the legibility it maintains in the difficult field of mathematical typesetting potentially with poor quality reproduction of printed material, and an aesthetic horror by just about any other typographical standard.
Er, no, because they use word. And they take the time to make or comission custom styles. If they used LaTeX, they'd do the same there.
I don't think it's reasonable to compare the effort and cost likely to be involved in those cases. I suspect that there are only a relatively small number of people on the entire planet who could produce a good LaTeX class for a non-trivial document format, even assuming that the required formatting and layout would lend itself to the way LaTeX typesets pages at all. As evidence of this, I submit the fact that LaTeX3 was the next big thing somewhere around the Dark Ages and still is today.
XeLaTeX adds super-advanced extra typography.
You mean like using Unicode characters and OpenType fonts?
I think you're missing the entire point of this thread, which is about LaTeX versus wordprocessors. Very few people use DTP software.
And even fewer use LaTeX, I imagine. In any case, I think the point of this thread is that LaTeX is only of any real value to most people if someone else already wrote the class file and packages to do exactly what they want, which is usually not the case and never could be.
If you're ignoring [badness warnings] you're essentially ignoring TeX saying "I can't figure out how to not make this look like crap" and then complaining that the results look like crap. Sometimes, rarely, human intervention is needed.
And yet every other piece of software on the planet seems to at least manage to fit text within horizontal margins without a human to hold its hand. What the TeX engine does when it allows a line to simply overrun by a few characters is the worst possible solution to the problem that I can imagine. It really did take several years before I realised that it was actually doing so by design and not just a bug they hadn't fixed yet; the idea that anyone might consider that acceptable behaviour hadn't even occurred to me.
Though unless you're doing something really unusual, like very very long words or very narrow columns then it just works.
Well, in that case, all I can say is that a remarkably unlikely proportion of the documents I used to write using TeX-family software must have been doing something really unusual, because I seemed to run into both the overlong line problem and the vast vertical spaces problem several times in almost every non-trivial document I wrote. The sad thing is that I'd even see those problems make it into the production versions of published papers, conference proceedings and the like.
Agreed on all counts.
I used to expect that features from higher-end DTP packages would slowly filter down to word processors over time. However, these days, I tend to find irritating and absurdly simply limitations even in supposedly state-of-the-art DTP software instead, and word processors don't seem to be innovating at all.
Instead, I'm now coming round to the view that the combination of a mark-up language with reasonable semantics, a presentation language, and a scripting language are going to get there first. I don't think it will be HTML, CSS and JavaScript, at least not in anything close to their form today; all of these carry way too much historical baggage from a time when we hadn't yet realised how much potential the basic model had, and they are underpowered and inflexible as a result. But they've shown beyond any doubt firstly that the three-way separation of content, presentation and dynamic behaviour is effective, and secondly that a lot of people understand that model well enough both to write in those languages directly and to write tools for other people who need them.
I suspect someone is going to come along and render products like Word, Writer and even InDesign obsolete in the relatively near future, by creating a document writing and editing tool based on:
One exception where you might be mixing presentation and content quite a bit is if you're designing a poster or a graphically complicated presentation - but then exact placement of figures/boxes/drawings/text usually matter a bit more than for the standard report or article.
The trouble is, something as simple as inserting a diagram becomes "graphically complicated" in TeX world. Typesetting a table, or a pull quote, or basically anything that isn't one of the handful of common typographical treatments in the standard toolbox becomes complicated. Then you get to "advanced" concepts like page layout or documents that contain more than one stream of text, and TeX is basically a non-starter.
TL;DR: If LaTeX is the model T, the rest are either horse-carts or trying to figure out the correct shape for the wheel.
Sorry, but I just don't see how that's true at all. TeX has a neat H&J algorithm, by far the most powerful and easy-to-use system of any tool I know for handling math, and a default font designed specifically to work well when setting that math. And that's about where its strengths end today, even against everyday word processors, never mind high-end DTP systems, unless you are working with an organisation that has invested far more effort into custom class and package design than most places ever do. And even then you're still losing to the high-end DTP software, even if you beat the word processors.
I'm one of those users who have been using Office since the 90s, and was very used to the old menu system. I adapted fine and prefer the ribbon, so it always makes me wonder whether these people who dislike the ribbon are numerous or simply very loud.
The trouble is, no one person's individual experience is even close to meaningful on the scale we're talking about. We could just as well observe that I, personally, don't much like most kinds of toolbars in most applications, and I don't much like the Ribbon either, as much because of the discoverable menu structure it simplifies (or over-simplifies, for someone like me) as because of the toolbars it more obviously replaces. I'm quite sure I'm not alone, but I honestly have no idea how widespread my opinion is, only of the pattern I see in comments from a still relatively small group of other posters on-line.
While office does allow for the quick and dirty document as you say, it has plenty of features for the advanced user.
It really doesn't. It has a handful of features that are useful for serious documents but most users don't know about. It's still somewhere around 2/10 on the professional document production scale.
Honestly, it's just a tool and if the majority of people find it easier to use, does that make it bad because they could have a "better" document if they typeset with LaTeX?
Please notice at this point that I didn't say anything about LaTeX being a better alternative. For the vast majority of users, I don't think it is, as I mentioned in another post.
No, and, unfortunately 99.997% of documents written today look like complete ass.
Sad, but probably true. It's not because they weren't written in TeX, though.
Good thing company's don't have house styles or anything.
And do you know a lot of companies who have taken the time to develop a custom LaTeX class to match that style?
Before you answer, keep in mind that LaTeX can't comply with many house styles without going as far as something like XeLaTeX, on typeface grounds alone.
If, by "modern standards" you mean documents looking like ass, then yes, LaTeX doesn't conform to modern standards. If TeX's typesetting is so antiquated, then how come it looks better than all but the best professional packages?
Because a lot of word processor-level software, including both packages we're talking about here, also doesn't support serious modern typography yet.
How come modern wordprocessors and web browsers don't do decent line breaking?
Some of them do, and certainly serious DTP software for producing professional work does.
Others don't, though sometimes for usability reasons. It's not as if no-one on the Word team has heard of Knuth-Plass or they don't have someone smart enough to implement it, but it does have a downside in terms of shifting text around. It doesn't bother me using it interactively, but I'm not a typical Word user, and I suspect Microsoft have long since done their homework on this one.
In any case, any credit TeX earns with its advances in H&J it immediately loses again by not knowing how to keep a line of text within the designated margins, a typographical absurdity far worse than anything Word or Writer has ever done to anyone. And then we start to talk about how TeX doesn't even pretend to support sensible vertical spacing, and it becomes a punchline.