Lout: An alternative to LaTeX? | Hacker News Reader

Lout: An alternative to LaTeX?

charlietanksley.net

85 pointsnaner46 comments

I love Latex but it (or more specifically TeX) is showing its age. It's perfect for writing a paper given a good template but writing and debugging these templates (.cls, .sty) is unnecessarily hard. For my job (in academia), I have to update such Latex templates on a monthly basis and always end up looking at the current improvements for Latex. This updating task involves not 'writing' in Latex but 'programming' in Latex. If you are used to modern programming languages then Tex is stubborn and hard, therefore, I always have the feeling there is improvement possible (I mean, Python, Javascript, C++, ... are all easier to debug). Although people are working hard on this and doing interesting work (i.e., LuaLatex, Latex3), I feel the underlying Tex language has had its time and a more drastic change might be necessary. Remember that Tex is designed for computers with an order of magnitude less resources.

An increasingly interesting Latex replacement is, maybe surprisingly, html in combination with css and javascript. With every update of our browser the inspection and debugging tools become more powerful and every time I can track layout and programming bugs a little bit faster. With the addition of more properties targeting paged media in css3 it now becomes possible to also create nicely looking pdfs starting from html. Prince (http://www.princexml.com/), for example, is ahead of the browsers for CSS paged media properties and outputs a pdf-file directly. But also typical features for which we praise Latex are becoming available:

- Mathematical formulae: http://www.mathjax.org/

- Bibliographies: http://citationstyles.org/

- Advanced hyphenation: http://code.google.com/p/hyphenator/

Most people only use the basic commands and don't care about the underlying engine. Therefore, Latex as a 'writing' language is not too attached to the Tex 'programming' language. Pandoc (http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) could be enough to translate such Latex code to another markup format and use another engine. (Academics tend to use advanced Latex macros only when in need of space ;-))

Due to its age, there is a massive codebase in TeX/LaTeX. There is literally a package for everything. It would be a massive undertaking to replace the TeX system by something that isn't downwards compatible. And since the vast majority of LaTeX users don't get to see much of the underlying mess the pressure to do so is rather small.

Not necessarily. New people in academia learn LaTeX all the time, and if more students start getting upset about having to learn it while there's an alternative that, while lacking a zillion of packages, is easy to use and just works right out of the box... then I don't see how professors would be able to hold back the tide. I've seen engineers write papers in Microsoft Word, though they're a minority. And then there's those English majors who just cajole a buddy with InDesign into typesetting their thesis for them.

Students have always been upset about learning Latex. However, after the first or second paper they realize how much trouble Latex is saving them and become fans for life. I don't see any other system offering the same advantages.

Around here I've seen a considerable drop-off in TeX fans over the past 4-5 years, with more students opting for Word. It didn't used to be a viable option, but now many conferences (outside a few very-math-heavy areas) offer both LaTeX and Word stylesheets and let you choose, and Word has improved in a few key areas, mainly citation support and auto-hyphenation. Zotero users also seem to like the Word integration. Figure placement still sucks, but figure placement isn't really TeX's strong suit either.

I personally still prefer TeX, but the gap is smaller than it was 10 years ago. The auto-hyphenation is probably the single biggest change, since the easy way to spot 2-column conference papers done in Word used to be the horrible whitespace in justified columns caused by its inability to break words. (This heuristic still words sometimes, because auto-hyphenation isn't on by default, and not all authors know about it or use it.)

I don't really mind TeX's age since the results of typesetting with it are very nice and there is practically no alternative at least in academia. I find it a bit hard to imagine that html can do the same job. The minor (or major) inconsistencies between html engines can lead to so many different renderings from the same source and I don't think that you want that for your texts. I agree though that typography in browsers has come a long way since the early 00s and is definitely in good track. The tools you are mentioning are nice but setting them up does not seem to be any less complicated than TeX and friends (not mentioning the fact that the hyphenated result [1] from Hyphenator looks so bad; it begs for margin protrusion, but that's a different issue)

In my opinion LuaTeX (and its LaTeX counterpart) is the future of TeX. It builds upon the strong base of TeX and combines it with Lua which is a fine language for this purpose.

[1] http://hyphenator.googlecode.com/svn/tags/Version%204.0.0/Wo...

I'm curious. Why do you need to update templates so frequently? I would have expected academia to have a fairly static, albeit perhaps large, set of templates. E.g., at most one for each journal in your field, one for each conference, one for each publisher, with any of these only changing rarely.

That is correct for the general style. However, then you have to hunt for packages for pseudocode, nicer tables, diagrams, pdf bookmarks and hyperlinks, subfigures, etc.

I tried [0]. Firefox does an ok page layout, if you print it. I did not try Prince.

One big TODO is the copyright notice in the bottom left column first page. Two column-wide figures are also an issue.

Thanks for citationstyles.org. When i have time, I'll try to integrate that.

[0] http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/acm_html/test.html

Prince already supports the new page floats attributes. A copyright notice in the ACM style works for me with "float: bottom;". The w3 css3 draft [1] has some more examples, also about two column-wide figures.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-gcpm/#page-floats

Why don't you link your articlecls [0] here? ;)

http://wannesm.be/articlecls/

\rant{I think it's funny that you say this, because I was just remarking to someone the other day that the primary way I've seen TeX and its little forest friends age is that it's become rather unwieldy IN SPITE OF the fact that the hardware it's running on now is far more than an order of magnitude faster.

In college, I was typesetting my work in PlainTeX (I never did like LaTeX, but obviously I had it available) on a 14.77MHz 68000-based Amiga 2000, and the TeX distro came on floppies. I had a whopping 40Mb hard drive, and all the heavy lifting lived there - Metafont, dvips, tex itself. But they fit comfortably on 800K low-density floppies and ran from them, if you needed to. The other floppies were all fonts, and since the prevailing format for fonts in the rest of the world was Type 3 Postscript (yucky bitmap) and comparable TrueType, my work looked rockin.

So to review, I had it running largely off floppies on a machine a couple of orders of magnitude slower (and a couple of orders of magnitude less memory and storage) than my iPhone. And I frequently taught freshman English majors who wouldn't own their own computer for another 3 years how to use it, down to font rendering and selecting an output format for the target printer which was rarely Postscript back then.

Riddle me this then: why are current TeX distros completely indecipherable to me now? I mean, kpathsea was always a bit of a beast, but I understood it pretty much at a glance. How is it that, although I've used the platform on and off for two decades now, in the last 5 years I've had to call the Psychic Friends Network every time I tried to call a package that I thought I had installed correctly? Oh, and why is a whole install now larger than the sum total of all the storage I had at my disposal - every floppy, hard drive, mainframe quota, and gettemp limit - when I last used the system on a daily basis?

As far as I can tell, the last update to the core product was in 2008, and everything that's been added to the main engine since 1992 has been incremental support for things like modern font formats. So it should have grown linearly, not exponentially. But there it is. Big as life and twice as ugly.

This is actually the second question in five days I've seen in two different fora about, "How is TeX holding on?" And to look at the sample output that was produced by Lout, obviously the answer is, "Because no one ever came up with a replacement that produced better output." You don't have to ask Don Knuth to figure that one out. It's not that Lout hasn't surpassed TeX yet. It's that it hasn't beaten troff yet. The 70s called, and they're looking for their DEC LP01, man.

But I don't think people are actually voicing the question in their heads. I think the question they're actually asking is, "Who let this godawful piece of Frankencode run through the village terrorizing the children, and why won't someone please scrape it all into a pile and teach it how to sing Puttin' on the Ritz like it did 20 years ago?" Or, "If you got this thing back into shape, why wouldn't it be the rendering engine for ebooks, because if it's setup right, it can render a whole book from source live on an iPad which is 100x more powerful than its original compile target?" I can think of 20 questions like this. All the questions ultimately boil down to a wonderment that one of the best pieces of software ever written for making readable output is cared for so shoddily. It's like some laboratory experiment gone amuck on how layering bad abstractions on things makes even awesome things awful. }

And now for my next trick, I'm going to go integrate XeTeX into my current product to generate custom typeset results for customers. No, seriously, I am. I see 20 more years of this platform in my future...

I haven't looked into why TeX distributions (looking at you TeX Live) are so big these days, because it mostly doesn't matter. I suspect that I could take almost everything I write today and typeset it on your Amiga without too many problems.

You don't know why TL is so big? Because it includes everything on CTAN that is compatible with DFSG. CTAN is an enormous archive containing numerous packages that do the same thing slightly different. How many packages are there like booktabs/tabulary/tabularyx/longtable etc? How many enumitem like packages are there?

What is so confusing?

"TL is big because it includes everything possible" isn't the confusing part, what's confusing is why it has doubled in size every couple of years. Is that all from CTAN? The other why could be: why do they include everything when they have a perfectly good package manager? I don't know if TL will do on-demand loading, but MikTeX on Windows did so years ago, so it should be possible.

The documentation for the different languages is huge. Plus all of the architectures. When I install I only install english/linux-x86-64 and its not that big. Plus fonts do not compress that well..

There are a lot of alternatives for the easy stuff. TeX makes the harder stuff like bibliographies, cross references, figure and equation numbering, indices and aligning equations relatively easy. As a mathematician, I would need to see the equivalent of "Math into LaTeX" before I would even consider switching.

I played around with Lout for a good while during my brief fling with alternative typesetters; this included tracking down some of the (quite scarce at the time and still not easy to find) troff macro documentation.

It's cute and I liked that the language was generally sane but ultimately the typesetting quality was noticeably inferior to TeX even for block text; for setting mathematics Lout manages to make almost every single decision subtly wrong. Lout text quality is about comparable to troff in this way. If I'd never seen TeX it would look probably fine, or at least acceptable, but I can't stand to look at it today.

Kingston has a successor language, called Nonpareil, which seems to have been in development for quite some time: http://sydney.edu.au/engineering/it/~jeff/nonpareil.

I love (La)TeX, but I'd also love to see viable alternatives in place. However, I've never heard a success story (for example, "I wrote a book in it and it was pleasant"—or even "… a paper … painless"!). In fact, this is the first story I've heard of anyone (other than Kingston & co. himself) even seriously trying it.

Is there a Lout / Nonpareil showcase out there somewhere?

Mark Summerfield is known to use lout for typesetting his books:

* http://www.qtrac.eu/pyqtbook.html

* http://www.qtrac.eu/gobook.html

In the world of "here's a preprocessor before LaTeX", pandoc tends to stand out as you can do Markdown or similar with inline LaTeX or HTML: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

"tends to stand out"?

Understatement of the year. The closest preprocessor to pandoc that I know of is org-mode and the output is not nearly as nice and its emacs specific.

I think inventing typesetting languages that compile to TeX might partially solve the problem and make the whole typesetting experience more pleasant, since TeX is already a capable typesetting system, and has a rich ecosystem, and TeX engines are already capable of producing high-quality documents, but the hard part is writing TeX documents. So what haml is to HTML, or say CoffeScript to javascript, a new language could be to TeX.

so inventing new, easier to use typesetting languages that use TeX as an underlying system might be a good solution..

I keep revisiting Lout every couple of years, and they keep not supporting UTF-8, which makes it unusable or me. It's a shame, because it looks really nice.

I have been using Lout occasionally. It is a perfectly capable typesetting systems, with both advantages and disadvantages over TeX/LaTeX/ConTeXt/etc. The average user will probably want to stick with TeX and friends, but there are situations where Lout is a good alternative.

The primary advantages are its very small size and its tight integration with PostScript. The small size means that is very easily deployed (such as when you need something to generate documents); the tight integration with PostScript means that it is relatively easy (assuming you know a bit of PostScript) to augment the output with graphics (I have even, for example, sometimes used Lout to generate EPS diagrams to embed in LaTeX documents). Much easier than using Metafun, for example.

The main disadvantages are that it cannot do everything that the TeX engine does and that it has relatively few contributors.

For example, there's no way (other than manually inserting column breaks) to automatically generate balanced columns. And while non-rectangular paragraphs are possible in principle (such as for drop capitals or flowing text around images), this generally requires sacrificing hyphenation (and can be non-trivial for the non-expert user).

Lout also has fewer people contributing to/using it, so it does not have the rich ecosystem of TeX and friends (e.g., while you can use it to generate slides, there are more and more powerful LaTeX styles available). Integration with bibliography tools and sites (that generally expect/produce BibTeX format) can be another matter.

With respect to typesetting quality, it uses the same line-breaking algorithm as standard TeX; it does not have the microtypography features of pdfTeX. For typesetting anything mathematics (beyond basic math), TeX is generally superior (which should not be surprising, given the effort Knuth put into getting that right).

Also, while modifying/creating LaTeX packages these days is not exactly child's play, Lout poses some challenges of its own; its functional typesetting language (used both to describe the content and how that content is laid out via so-called galleys) can be difficult to grasp for a novice.

Lout is around since the early 1990s. The fact that it didn't take off probably indicates that it's no viable alternative.

Do they really still require users to explicitly mark paragraphs?

Semi-unrelated: Does anyone recommend a good LaTeX tutorial/book?

One of my professors has a number of video tutorials which can be found here: http://castingoutnines.wordpress.com/2010/02/04/12-videos-fo...

The Not So Short Guide To LaTeX has always been a godsend to me, and it's free.

There is a very reasonable wikibook: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX

"The LaTeX Companion" proved very useful when I wrote my thesis. [http://www.amazon.com/LaTeX-Companion-Techniques-Computer-Ty...]

I loved More Math Into LaTeX. Don't worry about the "more" in the title, that just represents a new edition. I used it to learn LaTeX from scratch.

http://www.amazon.com/More-Math-Into-LaTeX-Edition/dp/038732...

I personally believe ConTeXt has more potential over this.

"its chief advantages seem to be speed and size: a download of the entire system is less than 1 MB, and takes around 5 MB when installed"

I have a 500GB hard drive.

...and I have a 64GB SSD drive. Everything counts, in large amounts ;-)

The equation builder looks downright painful to use.

yeah, i find lout pretty pleasant for non-scientific stuff, but when it comes to a bunch of equations and references you can't beat latex.

one thing the blog post didn't mention is that it is really easy to machine-generate lout (indeed, that was one of its design goals), so it provides a good option to quickly add ps and pdf output to a project.

Even if there aren't pre-made bibliography styles, is there a bibliography system at all, comparable to something like BibTeX?

These days I do most of my LaTeXing as an export from org-mode in emacs. Org-mode allows me to use convenient markup notation, and uses sensible defaults when exporting to LaTeX.

It keeps me happy, especially when exporting slides to Beamer, LaTeX based presentation tool.

Off-topic: Generating slides from an outliner like Org-mode produces those ugly bullet points en mass, doesn't it? The upside is of course, that they are easy and fast to generate. Why do you need that?

Why do you need what?

Also check out org-beamer if you want to stick with org-mode. If you want an alternative try pandoc. It supports 4 or 5 web presentation formats and beamer.

I wonder if Sphinx[1] or something like it could be a good replacement for LaTeX? It would need a better typesetting engine for PDFs, but the authoring experience with it is pretty nice.

[1] http://sphinx.pocoo.org/

Sphinx is cool for what it is but it is not even a zygote of a potential latex replacement...

I'd be curious to know if there any CSS/HTML experiments going on with typesetting academic papers. LaTeX may be beautiful and powerful but it may also be too hard.

And it really doesn't handle very good HTML output -- aren't we supposed to be on the internet already?

writing math in this has got to be hell...especially when 'sup' is a typesetting keyword

The output of Latex is so annoyingly good that I would use it to make me a cup of tea if I could ("there's a package for that", comes the faint cry). I use it for essays, reports, and even our Ukulele Society's songbook. Versatile it is.

But the problem is basically this:

You have to close your eyes, cover your ears and hum loudly when installing and compiling, because if you thought about the error messages, the distro size and all the binaries involved, you'd probably wish you were dead. Nothing, no quality output justifies a piece of software like this, it's like the elephant in the filesystem. I have nothing but admiration for the people who put this together, because I couldn't fit a mental model of the Tex system into two of my brains.

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