XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour?
vallettaventures.com
vallettaventures.com
1. It is a local maximum. It produces great output and works now. Changing it requires a huge effort which will result in a system that is inferior, for many years to come. Only then another maximum could be achieved. This means there is resistance to change — it's easier to adapt to TeX's flaws than it is to write something completely new. Many systems suffer from similar fate (think Emacs).
2. It is a black hole, a programmer sink. People start using TeX and curse it, then they learn it, and by the time they know its limitations and are ready to take on a job of writing something better, they are proficient enough in TeX to stay within it. Many systems suffer from similar fate (think Emacs).
I wonder if something will eventually happen to budge the TeX community from where it is now.
LuaTeX - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuaTeX
ConTeXt - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConTeXt
I don't really see this. Tex requires a huge investment to learn, but so do most programming languages. That doesn't mean the languages are bad or need replacing. I think that the high cost of entry to tex programming is not necessarily a tex problem -- it's difficult to visualize a system with equal power being much easier to learn. (Though the rough edges could be smoother.)
More importantly, when you say "Take on the job of writing something better", I have to believe that there are very very few who are up for this task in the world, and it would probably require their combined efforts. It doesn't seem likely at this stage. Maybe eventually, though.
That happens so much in software there needs to be a word for it, a term of its own.
After a while, you get deep enough in the rabbit hole so that it seems your initial judgement of redundant complexity was wrong. Even though it's still true, you've adapted to it. You just can't see it from the viewpoint of someone new anymore. For this reason I tend to carefully write down my initial concerns with something.
More on-topic, I don't think what TeX needs is a complete, sudden break with the past. It would be better to deprecate old, flawed features, and later on disable them and provide and optional compatibility mode (which is a bigger download).
Some, like Springer-Verlag, also have an editorial process where you have to send your .tex files to them and they will merge all of the documents and run LaTeX on them. I don't even know how you could get xetex (or pdflatex) to work with that system.
MikTeX's install-on-first-use has its problems, but does help balance bloat and not removing older packages.
I'm glad there is a movement to do something. I used to use TeX but stopped a long time ago, because it was simply too much pain for too little gain. I still have to deal with it sometimes when helping my wife who publishes scientific papers. Whenever she mentions that she needs "a small modification in the BibTeX style", I get nightmares.
And I'm hesitant to complain about it too greatly; my father's PhD thesis cannot be reproduced without a specific type ball for a Selectric and I know of numerous people who have kept dragging their old text files off disk packs to magtape to 8" disks to 5 1/4" disks to 3 1/2" disks and finally to CD ROMs where they have to duplicate all the CDs every few years lest they become unreadable due to dye fade. I know several photographers who are downright paranoid about an almost literal bitrot—if you ever want to see someone spitting mad with rage, telling a photographer that his precious negative or RAW file cannot be located, or read, or even decoded (a nontrivial issue with RAWs and older image formats, and depending on language and system even with text files!) will get you there.
Saying "if you preserved the files, we will recreate your masterpiece exactly" might be an overreaction to this but it's not impossible to understand where people are coming from. Particularly the poor dears coming from Word where moving a document from 2002 to 2008 will change the typesetting subtly and sometimes not so subtly.
Well, I did have to deal with such documents, hence my comment. It was an informed rant.
For quite a long time, pstricks didn't work very well with pdflatex, until eventually pstricks added limited support for PDF.
Also, I do consider TikZ sufficiently better than pstricks to switch. The low-level PGF library alone wouldn't provide enough benefit, but the addition of the high-level TikZ makes it extraordinarily good.
Few arguments ever gain feasibility from hyperbole, this article is not an exception. The size of his texlive installation is purely circumstantial evidence, since that folder also includes backups of updated packages and all sorts of other "dynamic", i.e. user-specific data. Basing the argument on that seems...silly.
>> For those for whom adding the letters xe before typesetting is too much to bear, or for typesetting ancient documents
It isn't as easy as "just adding xe" before (La)TeX, since not all packages are integrated with it yet, and since the polyglossia package is still not fully stable, either (yes I know babel is old, but at least stable), so some packages have trouble dealing with polyglossia or have experimental interfaces in order to work with Xe(La)TeX. Csquotes is one of the packages that comes to mind. A further problem with XeTeX is that it still does not offer a proper version of the microtype package. And on top of everything, the hyperref-support for colours is spotty at times, at least for me.
For me, depending on situation, pdflatex and xelatex live happily next to each other and are both included in the same in my generic template via the ifxetex package and \ifxetex...\else...\fi, so depending on what I need in a given instance, running either binary on the same file produces either output.
Oh, you meant it sarcastically? Well, I didn't.
Belief that something is broken and attempts to fix it are a 20-year-old refrain at this point, e.g. ConTeXt is an attempt to make TeX more usable for book publishing, LuaTeX is an attempt to reduce reliance on TeX macros in favor of a less weird scripting language, XeTeX is a project to add Unicode, etc.
Really? What has it been replaced with?
They appear to still accept TeX manuscripts as a "not preferred" option, with their preferred approach to those being to convert them to Word+eXtyles ASAP, via some kind of processor they have. It looks like they still offer a full-TeX pipeline if authors insist, but it's deprecated and not done for most books anymore (and they won't produce ebook versions of your book if you choose this one).
More info on:
* The preferred pipeline: http://mitpress.mit.edu/authors/guidelines/monographs.asp#MS...
* The TeX options (I assume they put this information only in a Word .doc, when it's just plain text, out of a desire to taunt potential submitters of TeX manuscripts): http://mitpress.mit.edu/authors/guidelines/texscenarios.doc
My background is blinding me to the fact that books with equations is really a small niche market. That small niche is completely dominated by LaTeX.
Huh? In my research areas (evolutionary computation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, multiagent systems, robotics) this isn't remotely true. CS conferences of almost all stripes have always offered non-LaTeX submission routes. But LaTeX dominance is just as strong, if not stronger, than it used to be ten years ago.
Indeed, I think that the stigma surrounding Word submission in conference papers, journal articles, books, theses, even grant proposal submissions, is so strong that one must think twice before using it in the bulk of CS fields.
Personally, I can't stand Word as an editing environment, because it doesn't offer a way of writing without worrying about formatting at the same time (seriously, if it had a markup view, I'd probably switch), and citation support is still a huge pain in the ass. However, LaTeX has many, many more pains in the ass for most people.
AAAI, IJCAI, and AAMAS now provide both options, and my informal observation is that more Word papers are being submitted than used to be the case, especially but not exclusively when it comes to authors from industry. CHI recently officially deprecated LaTeX as a supported option, but still provides the old (no longer maintained) stylesheets as a courtesy. Several universities (e.g. Georgia Tech) have also stopped officially supporting LaTeX stylesheets for theses and moved to Word as the only official option, though they do distribute student-edited LaTeX stylesheets as a courtesy. I assume that one's because nobody in the IT department knows how to edit the stylesheets. The unofficial GT thesis stylesheet is a hilarious example of copy/paste cruft, too, with bits taken from 20-year old U. Texas stylesheets and various other places.
These venues have had Word options for well over a decade or more. I recall a higher rate of Word (and HTML!) submissions in Agent97 -- the predecessor of AAMAS -- than I see in AAMAS now. At any rate I think there are few significant changes in LaTeX usage in those conferences.
You're right that the big place where Word shows up in CS is in HCI, software engineering, and interdisciplinary areas. Is it possible that, given your mention of CHI, that you're from these areas and possibly experiencing a sample bias?
It seems like the whole article misses the point. pdftex doesn't need replacing, TeX needs replacing. Pandoc (with some better extension method) + CSS style sheets + TeX algorithm layout engine would be bliss.
Unfortunately, the engineering required for that would need some really committed people, and the people committed enough to typography seem to have put all their eggs in the TeX basket, because that's all they know.
If I had to predict, I would guess that something like HTML+CSS, or possibly a Markdown-ish input language with some kind of CSS-ish stylesheet, will eventually overtake TeX in significant areas, once the PDF renderers get good enough. Maybe someone will even find a way to pipe it into TeX as a renderer, as you suggest. A plus of that workflow is that it also makes it easy to produce good-looking HTML versions of articles, which is getting more important. And the "math in HTML" question is (finally) converging on a constellation of acceptable solutions. Advanced typography in HTML is slowly creeping forward as well.
It provides a nice default, fast editing, and an incredibly large and featureful set of libraries.
Any reviews here welcomed.
But at least for me a big part of the appeal to TeX is that it isn't a (%*#% GUI. It's text. I can edit in an efficient plain text editor, "refactor" styling, etc. I've even at times generated TeX code programmatically (It's often less painful for stuff like receipts than writing a PDF generator by hand, usually looks better too.)
So, I'd like a better input language, but I _don't_ want to fundamentally change the way it works. Just don't make me use a textual-replacement macro language.
... which is probably the real reason I don't use LyX either. Emacs + Latex are second nature to me.
Write a document, add some figures, use a custom OT font with it and save it as a PDF.
If you couldn't find at least 10 things that beg to be hugely improved in the whole process, don't ever try to work at QA.
Otherwise, has anyone used their app? How does it stack against Emacs+AucTex+RefTex+Skim?
My understanding is that this is what .fmt files are for. I'm not sure where the line is drawn between what goes in a .fmt file and what is packaged as ordinary TeX code; I imagine that, like much else about TeX (which I love), it reflects the machine constraints with which Knuth was faced while writing it (in the late '70's and early '80's).
Linux Libertine is my favorite font for XeLaTeX because it has better ligatures than any of the computer modern etc. fonts.
They want LaTeX on their iPads, I would like LaTeX on my iPad, and I have met other people who also want LaTeX on their iPads. When I'm taking notes, LaTeX works well for me (I'm not claiming for everyone) when I need to type up equations. I use my iPad with a bluetooth keyboard to take notes (the iPad's battery life (amongst other things) makes it very attractive for this application). I'd like to be able to render my equations to make sure I didn't make a transcription error.
Having used it for publications and during the university i really, i despise Tex. Simply the language sucks, the outcome is nice, but those slashes and parenthesis really sucked.
With a XML syntax we could easily create beautiful editors, make it easy to parse with schema validation, etc.
Problem is that this card castle grew, avoiding alternatives such as docbook, and is and will always be a mess, since it's foundations are not parseable.
The awesome editors and tools that are supposed to grow around any XML-based syntax (after the hard part -- parsing -- is taken care of), are like the modern version of the "sufficiently smart compiler".
TeX: Initially released 1978.
Plus, writing XML makes me puke, so even with the occasional grossness of TeX syntax I'm happy it's not XML.