Apple and LaTeX | Hacker News Reader

Apple and LaTeX

leancrew.com

119 pointsokket57 comments

But what about LaTeX in any Microsoft software? As far as I know, they don't even know how to say LaTeX over there...

I knew it was in the iWork suite (has been since 2009? not sure...), but having it and using it are two different things I guess ;-) It's not supported in Grapher, however, so that's somewhat strange (but also not totally unbelievable, one could argue that LaTeX is more of a markup language than anything else).

There may be no LaTeX in Microsoft Word, but people working on its equation editor seem to be very much aware of LaTeX. Take a look at Murray Sargent's blog: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/

Word does its own mathematical typesetting with a GUI, but it also lets you use some LaTeX-like formatting if you want. 5\cdot2=10 will give you exactly what you typed, but if you hit space after the cdot, you'll get the centered dot symbol. Notably, it uses parens instead of braces, so you'll want to do \sqrt(2x+1).

Most annoyingly to me, \frac and other commands not directly associated with a symbol do not seem to be supported. That said, it's still extremely useful for my narrow use case (high school teacher semifluent in TeX with colleagues who are not).

edit: Also, it supports more symbols than its GUI provides; the only way to get the arc symbol that Geometry teachers like is to use \overparen.

I suspect someone does.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/lamport/

Even if you are not a mathematician this slide is clearly very ugly. A better title would be: "Apple does not send their slides to design revision."

Except that's not the case, all WWDC slides from all sessions go through design review. I've presented there several times when I was at Apple.

So the more correct statement is that Apple design review does not know or does not care about math typesetting.

Or maybe it should be "Apple is not a mathematician society"

I'm a programmer and I noticed that this slide was looking ugly. But well, I write my documentation with pandoc/latex and tikz so I guess I'm biased.

Other post from this author providing some background on mathematical typesetting is interesting:

http://leancrew.com/all-this/2017/07/math-without-latex/

He's right that the formatting is bad and Latex's is better. The italicized parens are just bizarre. But math stuff rendered by Latex also usually looks "ugly" to me, I'm not sure why. Maybe the typeface or something.

The default typeface is called Computer Modern but if you do not like it there are plenty of options:

http://www.tug.org/pracjourn/2006-1/hartke/hartke.pdf

It's easy to spot resumes typeset with TeX; they always make me smile.

On the contrary, I think it's really difficult to distinguish TeX and InDesign on a resume. Using Computer Modern is a giveaway, though.

Computer Modern is pretty obvious. The superior kerning of TeX is more subtle. I mostly see the really shitty kerning of Microsoft Word, which has no excuse, it's had plenty of time to imitate TeX.

You can get decent kerning in Word, but you have to enable it manually in every style along with automatic hyphenation. The result looks good as long as the paragraphs are not justified. Justification is terrible because of the awful line-breaking algorithm Word uses.

InDesign, on the other hand, basically copied TeX's line-breaking algorithm but they tweaked it so that it could be applied in real time.

Doesn't using Latexit mean that each of your equations potentially has a different size?

No. Using Latexit, your equations will use the same (configurable) font size. If you wanted them to have the same width for some reason, you could resize them once they're in the document.

Better title: Dr. Drang Notices Some Crappy Formatting in a Slide and Also Programmers Aren’t Mathematicians

Woah there, some programmers are mathematicians.

All programmers who have heard of the Curry-Howard correspondence are mathematicians.

By that logic, everyone reading this thread is now a mathematician. :)

Jobs would fire 5 people for something like this. Nowadays nobody at Apple cares anymore.

I think both of those sentences are untrue.

Jeez, even after the wealthy man died from curable cancer, his cult of personality persists. (or should I say "reality distortion field") This isn't the main keynote at WWDC, but rather is just a panel, so I don't see why Jobs would have cared or had the resourced to care about each presentation. Additionally, while Jobs did take a calligraphy course and was in tune with typography, I doubt he was especially knowledgable about mathematical typesetting as this author is. Lastly, which 5 people would be fired due to shoddy typesetting? The author likely just made their own slides and the WWDC coordinates obviously can't work on each and every presentation.

>Lastly, which 5 people would be fired due to shoddy typesetting?

Or you know, it might just be no persons fired, but just the team/presenter scolded.

It's not like the parent made an absolute statement. Rather they wanted to make what we call "a point".

Meh, saying "five people would have been fired!" is too hyperbolic for my tastes. If you click through to this other HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14671047), you'll notice they don't use proper typographic emdashes (typewriter dashes `--` instead of `—`) and they have a black diamond where their asterism [0] or some other mark would have gone. However, you don't see me commenting there to derail the discussion away from the fascinating topic of these creatures' breathing. In the same way, this is just a minor aspect of the WWDC presentation and isn't such a big deal necessitating people to have been fired for.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterism_(typography)

>However, you don't see me commenting there to derail the discussion away from the fascinating topic of these creatures' breathing.

Only in this post's case, the quality of the typography WAS the topic under discussion.

My point is that it's such a minor aspect of an otherwise edifying talk on photography. Certainly not something to demand firings for.

Source, please, that pancreatic cancer is "curable".

Sure, take it from the chief of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's integrative medicine department: "Jobs's faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life.... He had the only kind of pancreatic cancer that is treatable and curable.... He essentially committed suicide." https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/06/18/book-r...

Source that that person directly treated Jobs specifically and had every detail of his case? Sounds like they're working from rumour like everyone else.

Two words: iPod socks.

No, he would not have. He would happily have gotten on stage in front of this slide.

While he might not have cared for a slide from a technical presentation, he would not have "happily gotten on stage in front of this slide".

This is all contexture of course, but even if he didn't know the nuances of minus vs dash etc, he wouldn't have left the extra space on the "e" and the misaligned equals signs to slip by.

Having tagged along with Knuth when Jobs invited him over for a personal demonstration of a pre-production Macintosh, I can attest that Jobs was knowledgable about, and cared strongly about, typography. And having been in the room when Jobs pitched the NeXT cube and printer to Frame, to convince us to do a port of FrameMaker, this was again clearly the case. So, no way he would have allowed this slide in any stage appearance of his.

For further evidence, remember that what (once) saved Apple was the the Jobs-driven pair of Macintosh and Apple LaserWriter (the first PostScript printer). This combination sparked the desktop publishing revolution, as it allowed the masses to get typographically reasonable output semi-affordably. He made both of these devices happen, and good typography was a core goal.

Yes. Jobs famously took a calligraphy class at Reed college, and mentioned frequently how it influenced him and e.g. the design of the Macintosh.

http://www.leemunroe.com/steve-jobs-calligraphy/

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-tribute-to-a-gr...

You worked for Frame? I used to love FrameMaker. To this day I haven't forgiven Adobe for killing the Mac version.

Me neither. And, yes, I was the first employee after the 4 founders of Frame. I did the PostScript output, all the Book functionality, conditional text, and the whole API; but even after 10 years and the Adobe acquisition, not the equation editor I was hired to do.

I'm aware of his appreciation for typography.

But:

1. He's gotten up on stage in front of typographical faux-pas in the past.

2. Appreciation for typography doesn't translate to taste in mathematical typography. Math reads differently.

Yes, a man obsessed with typography (fonts, kerning, pixel perfection), man who often mentioned how calligraphy class changed his life would stand in front of this crooked abomination.

With the "positive anymore," [O] you can say:

"Anymore, nobody at Apple cares"

[O] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_anymore

I remember when I moved from the northeast and heard the positive anymore for the first time. I assumed the speaker was just somewhat dim, or maybe suffering from a minor stroke.

It turns out this is an established construction if you venture away from the west and best coasts...

Weird, I've never heard this either and I grew up in Michigan (not quite "positive anymore" territory according to Wikipedia, but certainly in the neighborhood).

I believe it, I'm just always pleasantly surprised to learn about common things that everyone but me seems to have known about.

> if you venture away from the west and best coasts...

Typo, editorialising, or both?

Whoa, why is this downvoted so heavily? It's obviously a joke, and it's funny because Jobs really cared about typography, so he probably would have objected to this.

Except that Apple has been pushing better support for math in their office suite. It's just that the people handling these slides didn't use it.

Our company's software is very "math intensive". We never hire CS Majors. Only Math or EE majors, who have a working knowledge of the Calculus.

We rarely need to use anything that you wouldn't learn in Calc 101, other than practical application of FFT, but still, CS Majors are all stumped.

As a counterpoint: I once had to work on a codebase solely of EE majors. There were no comments except commented out code (~1/5 of the codebase), no uniform formatting, horrible variable names and nothing really worked. I wouldn't expect anything like that from someone at the end of the first semester of CS.

Still, I don't generalize this to all EE majors.

Arrogance of the post coupled with labeling of "Dr. Drang" suggests to me this guy has some insecurity issues.

Thanks for the detailed psychological profile of the Dr.

Why wouldn't he use the "Dr." preffix if he's a doctor?

It's a bit in vogue these days for PhD non-MD to forgo the title in informal settings. Refusing to do so can appear egotistical.

Whilst this veers off-topic, I don't use the formal title, even though I have earned the right to do so. It's actually not just a matter if humility. I find that, when introduced with the title, people ask me for medical advice.

I am a mathematician, not a physician.

I think the opposite. It's unfair for medics without a PhD to be called doctor. If you have a PhD you've earned all the rights to be called doctor and to use the preffix whenever you feel like. I would if I had a PhD.

"Dr Drang" is a pseudonym. He doesn't use his real name to blog, and goes to some effort to obscure it (for professional reasons).

Edit: I was wondering why Dr Drang, and found the answer here[0]

> When I started blogging, I thought I’d do more political posts, and it seemed like a good idea to keep my online and real life personas separated. I didn’t want potential clients Googling my real name and having all the hits come from my personal blog.

> I do have a Ph.D. in engineering, with an emphasis in stress and structural analysis.

> “Drang” is the German word for stress and is part of the name of a famous engineering textbook, Drang und Zwang, written by the father and son team of August and Ludwig Föppl. The father, August, also wrote an even more famous textbook, Vorlesungen über technische Mechanik, but “Dr. Vorlesungen” just didn’t have the right ring to it.

[0]: https://512pixels.net/2012/06/writers-i-read-dr-drang/

You are drawing all sorts of mean and nasty conclusions about someone's character (and feel so confident about them that you went ahead and voiced them to the world) based on few if any data points. Surely you wouldn't want other people to jump to conclusions about you based on an equally small data set (for example, the fact that your account is named after something that's the college freshman equivalent of sniffing glue).

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