Typesetting the LaTeX Way (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Typesetting the LaTeX Way (2013)

chriscummins.cc

54 pointstosh11 comments

(2013) shows here, and it’s about web pages, not typesetting printable documents.

Hyphenation is built into CSS now: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/hyphens (although I personally don’t think hyphenation is really useful on the Web).

Also, the sans versions of Computer Modern don’t really scream LaTeX at me like the classic serif version does…

I found that hyphenation doesn’t get the same quality of typesetting as latex did, also because there are no page breaks to take into account.

One exception though is documentation. I find justified and hyphenated pages of documentation much easier to ingest than without. Maybe that is because my mind has a trained response to go into learning mode because of reading so many papers.

For me the results are significant. Without hyphenation and justified alignment, my eyes “glide” off texts on screen as if they were islands. With, I can stay on it.

I also find LaTeX hyphenation noticeably better than anything else.

Actually, for even better hyphenation than stock LaTeX, the package microtype is wonderful.

It uses lots of small refinements such as adjusting kerning, spacing, and letting hyphens overhang at the end of lines to arrange text in a more aesthetic way.

Thank you. Is something like this even possible in web pages? Short of reimplementing it with canvas or SVG.

I imagine it would be possible, but a ton of work!

Maybe WebAssembly makes it doable.

Hyphenation is extremely useful for headings in languages with very long words. If you aim to maintain visual hierarchy between headings and paragraphs through font size, you will inevitably run into words that exceed screen width on mobile devices if the compound words in that language are formed without spaces.

Looking at https://checkmyworking.com/cm-web-fonts/ with firefox on macos, it doesn't look like the kerning is quite right. In "consectetur" there is too much space between the 't' and 'e'.

I don't know enough about font formats, but is something lost when translating from metafont to ttf? Is there something specific about how TeX kerns fonts that hasn't been copied ^W ported to web browsers?

The La- part of LaTeX, who is Leslie Lamport (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lamport), made a huge contribution to TeX, but Computer Modern, and the hyphenation algorithms, were already part of plain TeX. And, if you're going to refer to the typographic capabilities of TeX (or to LaTeX), it's a shame not to try to reproduce the distinctive styling of the word that Knuth says proudly in the TeXbook shows off precisely those typographic capabilities. I don't know how to do it here, but you can see it reproduced at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX. (Instead the author uses `<code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">LaTeX</code>`, which … I am not a webdev, and don't know what's providing this highlighting, but, whatever it is, it makes the word "LaTeX" look significantly worse to me than if it were just styled the same as every other word.)

I disagree. The spacing of the stylized TeX/LaTeX logo is very sensitive to the font used (especially the LA pair); most LaTeX users already don't adjust it when they use a font other than Computer Modern. Even when they can see the A halfway on top of the L, they don't change the spacing.

But with PDF you at least have the knowledge that the font will be the same no matter who sees it. Webpages have no such guarantees (and indeed some people disable web fonts completely for whatever reasons) and it will only end up looking ugly as hell.

On the web, the typographer's instructions are more of a suggestion, and we should lean into a more declarative style of layout, instead of trying to hack up something resembling precise position that will end up looking completely out of place anyways. I say this remembering in horror the many websites where people wanted the staggered look, and ended up producing a monstrocity.

> I disagree. The spacing of the stylized TeX/LaTeX logo is very sensitive to the font used (especially the LA pair); most LaTeX users already don't adjust it when they use a font other than Computer Modern. Even when they can see the A halfway on top of the L, they don't change the spacing.

I'm not sure with which part you disagree. If the sentence:

> And, if you're going to refer to the typographic capabilities of TeX (or to LaTeX), it's a shame not to try to reproduce the distinctive styling of the word that Knuth says proudly in the TeXbook shows off precisely those typographic capabilities.

… then, you're right, I overstated it by saying that you should try to reproduce the logo when just referring to the typographic capabilities of TeX. But I still think that, if you wish to write a post about how to make web pages look more like compiled (La)TeX documents, then it is a shame not even to try to reproduce the distinctive typographic marker in the name of the language itself. Of course there's space for disagreement even with that more mild claim—but can we at least agree that the solution implemented, that visually sets off the word "LaTeX" but in no way that resembles how it ideally should be styled, is worse than just leaving the word alone?

What a bait-and-switch Google Chrome has been...

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