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Comment by cup-of-tea | Hacker News Reader

So I guess I can expect to see more low quality mathematical typesetting. The technology is great, but I don't see how it will help with high quality typesetting.

I can type an equation into LaTeX more quickly that I can photograph it and then go in and manually correct all the spacing issues. And there are spacing issues. The examples PDF has things that just look horrible. No small spacing or negative spacing to space out things like matrices and integrals etc. If I'm going to manually tweak it anyway I might as well do it manually from the start. Typing it up is something that gets quicker with practice like everything else.

But what I can actually see happening is people not tweaking the output manually. Either train yourself to use TeX properly, or let someone do it for you.

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You may be correct, but your comment comes off sounding a bit elitist.

Typesetting does not always need to be absolutely perfect, sometimes it just needs to work.

For someone who isn't 100% fluent in TeX, making small edits is much easier than having to look up all the syntax and symbol names required.

It's not elitist at all. Anyone can learn TeX.

> Either train yourself to use TeX properly, or let someone do it for you

I will let you do it for me. I usually work late at night just before the deadline. What’s your phone number?

Is that a serious offer? I charge 50GBP per hour. Still interested?

If you can match $0.005 per request, I'll hire you.

I think the point is that for 50 GBP you will get a much higher quality typesetting than spending 1 GBP on the API.

As.usual, it depends on the use case. If you are producing a textbook or something that requires high quality typesetting, you will probably pay for it.

If not, you can use a tool like this one but you will have to accept certain margin of error.

"Either train yourself to use TeX properly, or let someone do it for you."

The same complaint could be raised about using a biro (vs calligraphy), using a printing press (vs handwriting) or using a wysiwyg editor (vs the old word processing paradigm).

In my view, this sort of accessibility is a great advance.

I disagree. Technology should either make things easier or better. Making things easier but worse is not progress. Your analogies are incorrect.

Calligraphy is not handwriting. It's an art form and very slow to execute.

The printing press isn't just an "easier handwriting". It's actually harder to use. But it's better. It's closer to calligraphy than handwriting, in fact.

I'm not sure what your argument about WYSIWYG text editors is. In my experience they produce absolutely horrible results because, ironically, they require the user to know more about typesetting than TeX does if high quality output is desired.

thanks for your comments, can you share what you want your Latex to look like? how do you want to space out matrices and integrals? we're working on the Latex formatting so we can improve this

I would have put a small space (\,) between the upright "det" and the matrix. An integral sign is usually followed by a negative small space (\!) and the "dx" is separated by a small space (\,).

Trouble is I'm not sure if these are absolute rules. I'm sure you can find pathological cases where the spacing will be wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to allow the user to modify the spacing easily after the automatic version is made.

I trust you guys have read the TeXBook? Knuth dedicates two chapters to subtleties of mathematical typesetting.

Do you have a guide that you can point to for the correct typesetting in LaTeX?

The best treatment is in the original manual for TeX: The TeXBook by Donald Knuth.

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