I love the concept of Latex, but usability it pretty terrible. We really need a modernized approach. Something akin to HTML but specifically for printed documents.
The level of pain experienced by LaTeX users in my experience is more often poor choices made by the users who create unnecessary complexity. Avoid that, and it's a pretty reasonable model to work in.
For me, the ideal solution would be something WordPerfect but with ability to type LaTeX equations.
I want to be able to manipulate the "code" of the document but with a nice UI with real-time preview that helps me placing and formatting figures, text boxes for pseudo-code etc.
MS word is also perfectly usable, as long as you don't try to do anything weird (as the example in the article illustrates!).
Keep the same core design of compiled source code files, but there are many things that don't make any sense. As just one example having to use the `\makeatletter` / `\makeatother` hack to change the visibility of macros seems completely insane to me when we have had languages with fine-grained visibility control for decades. This is one of the many things that make using many packages together needlessly hard.
Back in 1984 I wrote a small WYSIWYG editor at PARC that outputted primitive LaTex. Fortunately LaTeX was quite early stage and that little project went nowhere. But one of the lessons was that semantic markup was much easier to do by just typing rather than trying to infer it context, while -driven changes meant people usually just changed font and size and erased the semantic anyway. This has been borne out by Word.
Edit: added bit starting “But one of...” to explain my comment
If you were to write something like HTML, how would you do so in a manner that didn't involve raw text? Sure it might be [emph shown] in a marked up way, but then doesn't your LaTeX editor do this?
And if your editor does this, how can you be sure that the new markup language for documents are not, in fact, superior in readability and expressiveness to LaTeX?
I mean, the made up formatting I tried to show in this comment is more readable and extendable than LaTeX (in my eyes, anyway), but it is still raw text.
Html wasn’t mentioned in the article but it is ok. I find latex easier and the result more attractive.
My editor doesn’t do any highlighting or anything like that. It does have syntax-dependent motion commands, which work better with LT than html.
More usable for you perhaps, but certainly not for me.
Edit: changed parent → grandparent
> One of the great things about Latex (or raw tex) is that you can simply type it into a buffer.
and pointing out it also applies to HTML.
\chapter{Animals}
instead of
== Animals
or should that be:
=== Animals
I think an xml or html like approach is better:
<chapter>Animals</chapter>
One of the big issue is modal states for structure or styling.
I've often found trouble in latex because you are in some state that you didn't expect and somehow have to get out of.
Nested XML would hopefully be more obvious about what your state is.
Docbook probably got this right, but it was too verbose for most.
But then surely the h1 document title should be above that, which would be "=" (1), so a chapter is below at "==" (2)?
\part apparently is -1 in latex, which would be seem to be odd.
But document title isn't part of the latex sectioning hierarchy...
Given that there is a document title, part and chapter, chapter could maybe "===" (3) or maybe "==" (2) if we're not using parts or we don't consider the document title.
I think anyway?
It's unfortunate that the creators of latex did not follow the HTML heading rules better. (despite latex pre-dating html of course)
:-)
- Can be opened on every device
- Content can be embedded in base64, so you only have to share one file
- Dynamic layout, so it looks nice even on phones
- Searchable, standardized XML structure
- Great customizability through CSS and optionally JS
- Can be written in markdown
- Basic support for page breaks, if you really must print the document (IA Writer already has some HTML-Templates meant for printing.)
The only downside I can think of, is that you can't lock the document to prevent edits.
However, conventions are what keeps PDF alive. Until the academic world realizes that they can do better than Latex, we're stuck.
However, this is a matter of personal opinion and I am certain that nobody knows how many people prefer PDF and how many prefer HTML.
I strongly prefer PDF for any non-ephemeral content that I might need to read twice or more times, so I hate anyone who forces me to read an HTML user manual or scientific paper, instead of providing PDF documents for them.
Even if HTML can be opened on every device, it also looks different on every device and it looks bad on those that are different from the one used by the developer (unless the HTML pages have been carefully designed to look good on various devices, which seldom happens).
Even on a small smartphone screen, I prefer a good PDF viewer with a good user interface that makes it easy to zoom & pan, instead of the feeble attempts of the Web browsers to reformat the text, which make very difficult the navigation through complex technical documents.
"Print" support is horrible for HTML. Modern Web pages, which use a lot of JS, are almost always mutilated when you use the "Print" command in both Chrome and Firefox, even if they display the pages correctly outside the "Print" mode.
- On any device as long as it runs a browser
- You can write TeX documents as a single file with ease
- Phones are not designed for reading, so dynamic layout or not, it will still be inferior to finely typeset document
- With care so can be TeX; carelessly written HTML docs will be just as bad as anything else
- CSS is a pretty poor layout tool; typographically speaking, CSS is very subpar to TeX's capabilities, using JS... well how much better is it than just using macros in TeX/LaTeX?
- markdown is fine for simple stuff but for highly complicated documents involving lots of generated tables, lists, and mathematics it is almost like having no tool at all;
- but many people DO like printed documents (I rarely can stand reading anything but basic technical stuff on screen, say language reference is fine but anything that requires thinking, has to be printed);
TeX is not locked to pdf in any way (it is not even it's native format). HTML's support for formulas is primitive (the only decent tools available are ... based on TeX). Academic world is not entirely uniform either but while I do think LaTeX is not ideal (TeX is though), I simply shudder when I think about Word or any MS or Adobe products.
Personally, I find my phone to be my favorite medium to read prose on, not inferior to anything – including printed paper, which I never use if I can help it. It works for books and most webpages, but PDFs are a disaster.
My second preference is my laptop. Its screen is big enough to make reading PDFs an acceptable experience, but not a great one. When viewing at an optimal zoom level for me, there's almost enough vertical space to fit an entire normally-sized page… but not quite. Which means I have to scroll. In the common case that the paper has two columns, I have to scroll down to read the bottom left of the page, then back up to read the top right, then back down to read the bottom right.
Oh, and it's always great hunting for the figures in a paper, because of course they have to be nicely lined up in a corner of a page, even if that leaves them far from the text that references them. It's a compromise that makes total sense in print, but feels silly on a screen.
So TeX's output is good in print but awkward on a screen. (It may not be limited to PDF, but I'm pretty sure all its output formats assume a fixed page size.) Meanwhile, HTML is good on a screen, but I agree that it's awkward in print.
What we need is a format that's good at both, and that doesn't currently exist.
If you are creating pdf's, you are not limited to portrait/a4/letter, you can specify landscape/size of your laptop screen and use newspaper columns.
I went so far as to write a script that downloads the Tex source of a paper from arxiv, changes up the paper size to match my phone screen, and recompiles the paper. It’s ok for text-heavy documents, but doesn’t work well for most figures. And most of my field does not post preprints (or use LaTeX at all).
For me the ideal solution would be something like org mode -> html output. I think the main gap that isn’t really addressed by any tool I’ve seen is reference management
> By recovering HTML's original parsing rules from HTML5's specification text, we conclude that HTML5's parsing rules are represented adequately, and more succinctly, since avoiding redundantly specifying p-terminating elements.
> This interpretation is also supported by the fact that for the HTML5.1 specification update (vs. HTML5), the new details, figcaption, figure and menu elements (which are flow-only elements) but not the new picture element (which can also be used in phrasing content) have been added to the set of p-terminating elements.
All in all, HTML doesn't appear to be a rational, recommendable authoring format for any non-trivial writing project. After more than 30 years, it's still SGML that has all the power needed: can handle markdown and other custom Wiki syntax, can deal with and produce any HTML, has stylesheets and type-safe text macro expansion and templating. For the LISP lovers on HN, there's even the OpenJade project (dormant since about 2008 or so) for using Scheme-based DSSSL with SGML.
A blast from the past. Waw, FOP is even still maintained: "Apache™ FOP version 2.5 was released on 13 May 2020." https://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/status.html