TeX Live 2019

by Tomte • 7 years ago

188 79 7 years ago

fxfan4• 7 years ago

EDIT: Release notes: https://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#

One technology that has stood the test of time- amazingly well designed TeX by Donald Knuth and LaTeX by Leslie Lamport.

Plain TeX can be a bit beginner unfriendly because most beginners use LaTeX and experienced people have their own 'coding style' but it's amazingly powerful.

I only wish somebody would add the minimum required primitives to plain TeX to render reflowable text in browsers and ebook readers

TeX was designed for "beautiful" typesetting but it gives you much more control than that IMHO. I'd urge everyone to try it out once, I use it offline but I think overleaf.com allows for plain TeX too. (XeTeX may work best for unicode, it's plain tex + minimal additions for Unicode)

On that note- I am not fond of PDFs because of their awfully poor unicode search support- does anybody knowledgeable know of a good target format I should use (and the appropriate drivers?)

_emacsomancer_• 7 years ago

Doesn't Xe(La)TeX/Lua(La)TeX produce PDFs with decent unicode search support? What issues do you have?

fxfan4• 7 years ago

XeTeX in particular does but my problem is with the uncertainty around the whole process and the frustration when a search fails on a 300 page document

bfirsh• 7 years ago

You might like this LaTeX to HTML converter I'm working on: https://github.com/arxiv-vanity/engrafo

What primitives do you think need adding to TeX? LaTeXML, which powers Engrafo, does a pretty good job of converting plain TeX, as well as LaTeX.

fxfan4• 7 years ago

This is super cool, thank you for sharing!

tadfisher• 7 years ago

Ironically, Computer Modern is terrible to read on computer displays. It was designed for ink and toner bleed, and looks great when printed on 1970s-era Xerox printers [1], but it's far too thin for digital rendering.

I might suggest Bitstream Charter for a well-designed and readable analogue to CMR for digital use.

[1] https://www.typografie.info/3/topic/22238-ist-die-computer-m... (German language)

nanna9• 7 years ago

Out of interest, what are the advantages of LaTeXML over Pandoc's LaTeX to XML/HTML conversion? Why did you choose LaTeXML?

JulianMorrison2• 7 years ago

TeX is fundamentally not compatible with reflowable text because it's at the lowest level about putting glyphs in positions.

sytelus• 7 years ago

I fail to see any fundamental incompatibility. Every text renderer of any kind is about putting glyphs in positions. The layout would declare few things not moveable and algorithms needs to decide how to fit text around those constraints. The algorithms for TeX are computationally expensive but I don't see why with faster computers, you can't reflow the text. About 15 years ago it used to take dozen second to compile my typical PDF, now overleaf.com does that in just a second in browser.

mwfunk• 7 years ago

Unicode search in PDF works fine, there are just a few issues that can cripple it for specific files, or specific files using specific PDF implementations. The following is advice for anyone working with the format, it should not be construed as making excuses for how PDF does things. It's a ginormous format with a ginormous spec that's been around for a very long time and has accumulated a lot of baroque qualities over the years. So I don't mean to condemn it, but I'm not exonerating it either. It is what it is, and if you have to work with it this might be useful. Anyhoo:

Regardless of what one thinks of their other qualities, if a PDF can be searched in Adobe Reader or Acrobat, then the file is probably OK but the PDF reader that you were trying to search it with has a bug on its end (or more likely, some unimplemented dark corner of the PDF spec).

On the other hand, if the file isn't searchable via Reader/Acrobat, then the problem is most likely with the authoring of the file itself. The most common thing that breaks searching is when instead of embedding all fonts used, a PDF refers to fonts by name from the local system. This can cause unpredictable issues when reading the PDF from another OS that can't resolve those font names.

Another common breaker of search that seems to be much more common with TeX are workflows which somehow produce PDFs that have embedded Type 3 fonts. Type 3 fonts represent glyphs using PDF drawing instructions. It's less a file format than something that only exists as an embedded font within a PDF, but I've only seen them in the wild when authored by pdflatex or similar. It seems like TrueType or OpenType are the most reliable formats to embed across the most commonly used PDF implementations, but that's an educated guess. Type 3 font support is spotty in non-Adobe implementations.

Finally, font subsetting might screw up search. Most software that knows how to produce PDFs can produce PDFs with embedded but subsetted fonts. This means the software that created the file embedded TrueType fonts (for example), but created a special version of the font for embedding that only contained the glyphs used in the PDF. Depending on the quality of the software used to do the font subsetting, the output PDF might not retain the mapping of glyphs back to Unicode characters. If that happens, text using that font in the PDF becomes unsearchable, but the PDF remains renderable.

None of this is meant to excuse the shortcomings of the format, it's clearly overcomplicated and fragile. But when I've seen problems with searchability of PDFs, it's most often been with the software that was used to create the files, or how that software was configured by the author. And when it is a problem with the authored file itself, it's almost always because of fonts. Either the fonts aren't embedded, or they're embedded in a slightly oddball format that's in spec for PDF but not perfectly, universally supported by all of the various non-Adobe PDF implementations.

fxfan4• 7 years ago

I hit the comment limit earlier but thank you for writing in detail about what's actually going on behind the scenes so I can take care to not let the problem affect me much.

That said, and despite your yourself having mentioned that there is no excuse for the shortcomings, I feel like this decision in particular is just plain inexcusable anyway because if you're going to write portable document, at least use some form of UTF encoding rather than indexing into glyphs (or on top of !)

Liskni_si• 7 years ago

I haven't tried this myself but I think ConTeXt can output PDFs with embedded XML markup and even epub files. You need to use \startsection and \stopsection instead of just \section, and maybe there are other limitations, but it's a small price to pay, isn't it?

https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Epub

https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Export

Veen3• 7 years ago

The problem is that browsers choose not to implement high-quality justification algorithms like the Knuth-Plass algorithm that Tex uses because it is computationally intensive. That’s why justified text looks like garbage on the web.

There are some experimental JavaScript implementations, but without browser support reflowing high-quality justified text is a non-starter on the web.

benschulz2• 7 years ago

My assumption was also that performance is the reason we aren't getting more esthetically pleasing line breaking. Until I read a comment[1] by Philip Walton, who works on WebRender at Mozilla, that is.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19473277

epse• 7 years ago

It's not (just) about the computation power, it's also incompatible with the standard. The only compatible algorithm is a naive greedy one.

drfuchs2• 7 years ago

TeX’s line-breaking algorithm is certainly not computationally intensive. On my 7-year-old MacBook Pro, it takes 0.34 seconds to run the entire 495 page The TeXbook on a single thread. That includes parsing, macro expansion, page-breaking, lots of (slower) math layout, and dvi output, which means that the line-breaking takes at most a few hundred microseconds per page.

Remember, TeX was written to be usable on a 1 megabyte, 10 megahertz machine, where it ran about a page a second. One of my contributions at the time was to modify the Pascal compiler on the Sail PDP10 to count cycles for every machine instruction executed by TeX over all users over a number of months, and Knuth fine-tuned the inner-loops of TeX here and there based on the results (the code that automatically inserts kerns and ligatures got the most attention, IIRC).

pjmlp2• 7 years ago

Kind of.

I was deep into LaTeX during the 90's while at the university, my Lamport's book copy state reflects how much I used to refer back to it.

Nowadays I rather prefer the convenience of something like FrameMaker.

jimjimjim• 7 years ago

? PDF works fine for searching.

It depends on the document, a pdf page could be:

1) Text

2) An image of text

3) Lines/Curves that happen to be in the shape of letters/text

If it's text it perfectly searchable. If it's one of the others the creator has to also OCR it and add the text behind the image or in front but invisible (no stroke or fill).

syockit• 7 years ago

It could also be mostly text, but mixed with ligatures having their own codepoints (sometimes non-Unicode).

gammarator• 7 years ago

Thought about updating, but the actual changelog is pretty underwhelming for a 5+GB download... https://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#news

dang• 7 years ago

2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14479200

2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7912465

2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4217525

timClicks3• 7 years ago

OT but readers of this comment section are likely to know.. why is a LaTeX distribution 5.8GB in size[0]? That feels far too large for a tool that's been around for decades and primarily deals with text.

[0] https://tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-en.html#x1-18...

tspiteri• 7 years ago

I think it's in large part due to documentation and fonts. For example in my Fedora, I only have part of texlive installed. My /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist is 1.3G, of which 428M are inside the doc subdirectory and 639M are in the fonts subdirectory.

Then there are many packages that contain pictures or logos. As a single random example, texmf-dist/tex/latex/fithesis is 2.4M, of which 2.1M are in fithesis/logo.

Isn0gud• 7 years ago

For macOS, there is a small BasicTex package: https://tug.org/mactex/morepackages.html

It is missing most packages though, but only ~76M.

_pmf_• 7 years ago

It's been in the GB range when I used it in the early 2000s. Always wondered that myself.

mkl• 7 years ago

By default it includes pretty much everything anyone uses. Imagine installing the most popular 90% of PyPI or CPAN, and that probably gets the idea across. Without documentation (online is usually easier) and support for umpteen languages, it's less than half that amount of space. Even better, most of it is platform independent, so can be shared between operating systems; I use the Linux installer in WSL and tell it to install the Windows binaries, and it takes barely any more space but can be used transparently from either OS.

nanna9• 7 years ago

It's 5GB because it includes every single extendable package too, as well as their documentation (in PDF format, of course). There's a healthy TeX package ecosystem [0]

Windows users have the option of installing via MiKTeX instead of TeXLive, the benefit being that MiKTeX has a package management system which installs the base packages at start and then automatically downloads the others as and when they are needed. [1]

Not sure if that's possible in other OS'?

[0] https://www.ctan.org/

[1] https://miktex.org/

sjamaan• 7 years ago

There used to be teTeX (https://www.tug.org/tetex/) which allowed installing packages separately, but that's no longer maintained.

I think KerTeX (http://www.kergis.com/en/kertex.html) now allows a similar style of pick-and-choose package installation, but it doesn't support a lot of packages (yet?).

pletnes3• 7 years ago

Both texlive and miktex allow selectively installing some packages only. AFAIK the difference is that miktex will show a popup saying «do you want to install foopackage?» when you try to compile a document which uses foopackage, and you don’t have foopackage on your system. Kinda like on ubuntu, you get «you can install this command by running apt-get install foopackage».

mehrdadn• 7 years ago

Do NOT install MiKTeX unless you enjoy finding new ways to literally waste your time. Yes, it's a tad bit more user friendly, but it's also literally ~twice as slow as TeXLive. I really wish people gave this heads up when mentioning it... it should be a criminal offense not to! I wasted so much of my life just waiting for it to compile and I only found out TeXLive was so much faster when it was years too late.

bruce_one• 7 years ago

https://yihui.name/tinytex/ is a pretty cool minimal tex distro with nice utilities for finding dependencies, if of interest :-)

timClicks3• 7 years ago

Thanks for the link, looks very useful!

cd318• 7 years ago

It's interesting to know that you can install partial packages. I personally roll with texlive-science.

mraison• 7 years ago

If you just want to compile a TeX document without drowning your hard drive, I heavily recommend Tectonic (https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/), which behaves more like a typical development tool.

On macOS:

    brew install tectonic
    tectonic mypaper.tex

This will automatically download the exact set of packages needed to compile the paper, and cleanup any intermediary files generated during compilation. And it's trivial to upgrade and uninstall.

nanna9• 7 years ago

Very cool, thanks for sharing.

svat2• 7 years ago

Note though that this Tectonic is based on a fork of the tangled XeTeX sources (i.e. not the actual WEB source code but the machine-generated C translation) as of some past date. This is a very weird choice probably due to the author (understandably) not being able to make sense of the mess of TeX sources to figure out what's the actual source code. As a consequence, already it has begun to diverge; for instance it does not contain the \expanded primitive that was added to XeTeX last year. Overall, Tectonic seems to have many good ideas, but suffers from being not too familiar with TeX itself and the TeX ecosystem.

evgeniysharapov• 7 years ago

There's also [ConTeXt](https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page) which is around 0.4 Gb. I have found it better in many respects and so could you.

pfortuny2• 7 years ago

I should know (have been using LaTeX for nearly 30 years) but... what does ConTeXt give that LaTeX does not? I have never made heads or tails of it.

Thanks.

khaled2• 7 years ago

Most of that is documentation (PDF files) and fonts (often in multiple formats for the same font). I skip the documentation and read them online on texdoc.net, and it trimmed down my installation size to 2.9GB (2.1GB of which are fonts).

nanna9• 7 years ago

40 years of TeX! At this point it's worth emphasising that if you're a regular user of LaTeX - even and especially via Overleaf - and have a bit of spare change, please consider supporting the development of the project and the community by joining the TeX Users Group (TUG).

https://www.tug.org/

Or a local group:

https://tug.org/usergroups.html

One of the perks of TUG membership is that you get free TeXLive install DVDs sent to your door every year (as many as you need, in my experience).

You also get a subscription to TugBoat, the TeX Users Group Magazine, which is full of curios for the TeX aficionado.

[Edited to replace UK TUG group link with link to global TUG directory]

arianvanp• 7 years ago

What do I do with a DVD though? Can just download the tarball from online

nanna9• 7 years ago

Sure you can, if that's more convenient for you. Personally I find it much faster to install from the DVD, and I imagine I'm not alone.

analognoise• 7 years ago

I don't even think I have anything to play DVDs anymore.

DangerousPie• 7 years ago

Does anybody still use DVDs? I haven't had a machine with a DVD drive in at least 5 years.

anonu• 7 years ago

Have you ever installed a complete Tex platform? It's about 1GB of packages. I find the DVD thing a bit funny - but I can imagine it makes installs go quite a bit faster. And considering its a 40-year old technology - its not like you really need the latest commit.

pjmlp2• 7 years ago

Plenty of them.

bayareanative• 7 years ago

MacTeX 2019 doesn't appear to be available yet and Homebrew isn't sufficiently wise to work with pre-releases in-advance to get formulas working sooner rather than later.

m000• 7 years ago

What are you talking about? MacTeX is already available [1]. MacTex is cask-only on Homebrew, so there's really not much to test in the formula. You should be able to bump up the version in the old cask formula and it should work. Having said that, installing from a cask doesn't make much sense for a program that releases a new version once per year.

[1] http://www.tug.org/mactex/

deg4uss3r• 7 years ago

Current release: TeX Live 2019 is available over the Internet and on DVD. It was released on 29 April 2018 ...

Wait was this released yesterday or a year ago yesterday?

TeX Live 2019

Related Stories