Patoline: A modern digital typesetting system

by ulrikrasmussen • 12 years ago

192 80 12 years ago

amirmc• 12 years ago

It's great to see this here. I meant to try out patoline over a year ago but it wasn't quite ready. This prompts me to take another look. I do remember the devs being very approachable and helpful (which is big plus for me).

I'd encourage the devs to put this in OPAM proper though. Having to add a remote seems like unnecessary friction. Having said that, it's not clear from the site what the current release is.

pestaa• 12 years ago

Hm. The rendered patobook.pdf documentation wouldn't display in the browser; after downloading and opening it in Acrobat Reader, it said some embedded font couldn't be loaded completely, I guess all monospace formatted text was lost: see screenshot at http://i.imgur.com/MhkPqRR.png

I'm very glad to see this project happen but this wasn't a good first impression.

cdash• 12 years ago

Seemed to work fine for me in Chrome on Windows.

Al-Khwarizmi• 12 years ago

Same problem here. Windows 7 64-bit, Opera 12.17.

apepe• 12 years ago

It'd be nice to see this working in Authorea as well: https://www.authorea.com/ Have you had any luck rendering Patoline to HTML5? Via Pandoc?

robinhoodexe• 12 years ago

Interesting, it'd be nice if it was available on homebrew and not just macports though.

mikevm• 12 years ago

The new typesetting algorithms of Patoline places your figures at an optimal position decided by the author, not by the system. It can optimize your document in several ways, including reducing its size to fit the standards of a conference paper.

I guess this means you could use this to force a résumé to fit on one page!

ShellfishMeme• 12 years ago

I'd recommend adding some more information on the index page. When I arrived I tried to scroll down hoping to find out what this is about, but instead I had to go to the 'about' page myself.

Then I tried to read the 'about' page but the text is very small and the lines very long, so it's hard to scan for relevant information. The bullet points make a couple of claims about what Patoline excels at, but still no code examples can be seen that could give me a feel for how Patoline actually works.

I had to go to 'documentation' and click a small insignificant looking link to actually get to see an explanation of Patoline and some code examples... in a PDF file.

I understand that it's cool to write the tool's manual using the tool itself, but if I come to the website and want to evaluate quickly whether this is interesting and could replace LaTeX for me, I need a quick overview directly on the index page, together with some examples similar to the one on the wikipedia LaTeX page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX#Examples).

Argorak8• 12 years ago

It's not only cool, the documentation is the primary test case for many of those projects.

jwr2• 12 years ago

I'm very glad people are doing this. The local maximum created by TeX (and its surroundings), while producing impressive output, has kept many people from developing any typesetting software. It was usually easier to learn how to trick TeX into doing what you wanted, or build yet another overlay on top of it.

A similar local maximum exists with Emacs (you might also call it a local energy minimum, as it requires less energy to hack Emacs into doing what you want than to write a whole new system). This has also held back editor development for years (if not decades), but recently we started seeing attempts at breaking out (LightTable is one example).

This is an interesting phenomenon: neither TeX nor Emacs are bad, in fact they are both impressive pieces of software. But we could do better now, and yet we usually don't even start, because it is such a daunting task, and it is easier to extend existing solutions.

Best of luck to authors and contributors to this project!

mtdewcmu• 12 years ago

Your emacs analogy has issues -- vim is another programmable editor alongside emacs. And IDEs, especially ones like Eclipse, have similar complexity behind a graphical interface. Should languages be replaced, or is it better that they just grow and adapt? Look at the scale of the energy minimum around English.

lloeki• 12 years ago

Vim is merely another local maximum, complete with its own faults.

seanmcdirmid3• 12 years ago

The communities that back vim and emacs would never allow for evolution in the direction of light table or any of the other reinvent IDE projects; heck, they can't break out of their terminal/ASCII mindset for the most part. Technologically they could, but the community has bought into a certain set of principles that work well but don't allow for much deviation. So new projects come along and deviate from entrenched principles, sometimes in successful ways.

English is quite different, it changes with time and even place.

cevn• 12 years ago

I was ready to like this, but I ran into a lot of problems installing camlimages on os x. Anyone else? I'll keep working on it later.

tinco• 12 years ago

It uses the same archaic syntax as TeX :( I was hoping they would come up with something nice and modern like Markdown.

It seems like a cool project, OCaml is probably a fine choice although I've never used it. But there are a few smells. The first to me was him mentioning the project had 100.000 lines already. Now if this was C I could see why. But this is a modern functional language. There's no 10.000 line rolled out parsers, no hundreds of specialised general libraries.

Why is the project 100k lines? Is it an unmaintainable behemoth already?

pling3• 12 years ago

a) markdown isn't expressive enough. In fact it's pretty horrendous to edit and separate content and layout IMHO. I'd go as far to say I prefer docbook over markdown. It's fine for github readme's but not typesetting.

b) the problem is complicated. Complicated problems need lots of lines of code. 100kloc isn't much. The thing I'm working on has 5.2Mloc and took 25 people 20 years to write. To the layman it probably looks like it does less than this typesetter meaning it's a bad metric to use.

My MacTeX installation is about 1300Mb if that's any gauge.

cm32• 12 years ago

a) markdown isn't expressive enough. In fact it's pretty horrendous to edit and separate content and layout IMHO. I'd go as far to say I prefer docbook over markdown. It's fine for github readme's but not typesetting.

More people should understand this before suggesting Markdown as a solution. For a better experience on github or bitbucket you can use reStructuredText and Org-mode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language#Co...

andor• 12 years ago

AsciiDoc is just as readable as Markdown, but semantically equivalent to DocBook

mangecoeur3• 12 years ago

Or, it could be that TeX has been cobbled together over decades with little design guidance or vision, resulting in a mishmash of approaches and inefficient code.

To me almost everything in TeX feels like a hack, even if the fundamental idea is good and the sum of all hacks ends up looking pretty good. The fact that it's a huge hack that takes 1.3GBs to install is not a gauge of quality.

igravious• 12 years ago

Anecdotally lots of people are using Markdown and Pandoc to get from lightweight files to decent PDF or HTML.

Ok, you're not going to use it if you need actual typesetting, for that just use TeX and be done with it. What we're seeing I think is the same type of backlash that spawned YAML from XML.

Funny thing is, the actual space for .docx or .odt could be shrinking, is it?

Derbasti2• 12 years ago

I was immediately put off by the syntax, too.

We don't have to do strict Markdown, but even Markdown is transparently extensible in HTML. It is entirely feasible to write publishing quality documents in HTML/CSS3, and thus, Markdown.

I would love to see something like Markdown, but well-suited for typesetting, but with a transparent backend scripting language for more in-depth tasks. Scribble looks like a good start: http://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/index.html

Currently, I use org-mode and LaTeX-export for this. It works well enough, but a native integrated environment would open this to a much wider audience.

girvo• 12 years ago

Reading about macro typesetting systems made me wonder about whether someone had done it in Lisp, and then I saw your post! Scribble looks really interesting, I might have to have a play with it for my book that I'm working on.

oftenwrong• 12 years ago

Is "line" in this pronounced as in "gasoline" (lin) or "waistline" (laɪn) or "adrenaline" (lɪn)?

edit: Like gasoline. "Its name is to be pronounced like Pa-toe-leen, and it is the frenchifcation of the translation in portuguese of a joke in english"

copperx2• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure the pronunciation comes from Count Duckula's translation to Spanish.

Listen to the first 5 seconds of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AR58I40_Os

That's how you pronounce it.

adrusi• 12 years ago

I find it ironic that a website for a typesetting tool requires me to zoom in to be able to comfortably read it.

It looks like it could be an improvement over TeX. I like that modularity is a focus, because that's where TeX really suffers. Hopefully the typographical elements will actually be composable and extendable rather than having the loose facade of such functionality found in TeX.

seanmcdirmid3• 12 years ago

I think if someone was to redo TeX, that it would be really nice to see an incremental type setting system. That means modularity not just at the code level, but also with respect to how the run-time data structures are dependent on each other, and the ability to "reflow" text on a change in a way that required minimal changes to the previous flow of the text. Then we could have something that was Wysiwyg, interactive, and produced output that looked fairly decent.

Argorak8• 12 years ago

"Fairly decent" is a fairly low bar for a typesetting system.

seanmcdirmid3• 12 years ago

Ok, at least as good as TeX then, something much better than Word. I mean, we are getting good with doing incremental computation (e.g. FRP, SAC, etc...), why not apply these techs to the problem of typesetting.

Argorak8• 12 years ago

The about page gives me no idea of what it is, especially as someone who knows TeX quite well. It starts with the single mistake all of those pages do: "It's like A, but with B!" On top of that, B is already in A. Typesetting with scripting? LuaTex (actually quite easy, if you know the typesetting surroundings). More layout control? ConTeXt.

The biggest hurdle in all those systems is understanding what typesetting actually is (in contrast to content editing or especially programming). It comes with a completely different vocabulary. What's a strut?[1] What's a quad?[2] What are the standard elements of typography and page layout? How are fonts measured?

Finally: how does the system manage forward compatibility (can I still compile my document from 5 years ago?) - scripting and modularity are features that have to be evaluated under all those regards.

Also, I am very surprised that code examples in the reference documentation look horrible. Isn't that what the system is there for?

That said: I love that there is competition in that space. TeX is great and will be around for a few decades, but that doesn't mean there can't be others.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strut_%28typesetting%29 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quad_%28typography%29

tekacs• 12 years ago

Can I still compile my document from 5 years ago?

Well on the About page it does have the FAQ:

Can I use Patoline for a huge, ten years long project that I'm starting now?
Although one of the authors has written his PhD. thesis (120 pages, in computer science) with it, we don't recommend it now. The reason for this is that small adjustements and bugfixes are being made all the time, and working on such an unstable system can be frustrating. However, for documents that are not meant to last forever in time, we would be happy to help you with it: feel free to contact us for help.
Stay tuned: we do plan to release a long term supported version of Patoline soon.

Argorak8• 12 years ago

This was an example question.

The problem is wide, that's why I was asking about _forward compatibility_. Even if I have long term support, what happens if that runs out? How does that work in the presence of scripting and extensions?

TeX has a whole culture around that - even if there are no long term releases, it is _very stable_.

For example, the LPPL even prohibited releasing changed files under the same name for a long time!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX_Project_Public_License

mangecoeur3• 12 years ago

It's about time someone gave this a bash - though to some extent this covers the same ground a Pandoc.

However, some of the technological choices seem... unwise if the aim is a lively community project. Version control for instance - whatever technical advantages Darcs may have are heavily outweighed by it's much smaller user base (having to learn a new VCS just to contribute to a project is a massive pain!)

Signez• 12 years ago

Using OCaml and darcs won't help this project to find contributors outside French academic world. It's unfortunate, IMHO.

yannis• 12 years ago

To quote Knuth [1] describing TeX “Think thrice before extending,” because that may save a lot of work, and it will also keep incompatible extensions of TeX from proliferating.

Personally, I am of the opinion that the original TeX was well 'modularized' in 'Pascal Procedures' [1], being Turing complete, extensions such as the LaTeX format and the countless of packages after that helped it survive and prosper. Think of a macro that you define as an easier way than programming a module in JavaScript and it doesn't need a half a dozen tools to set it up.

    \def\#1{\TeX\ is alive says #1.}

Nevertheless, provided the lessons learned are incorporated I applaud any new initiatives in more modern languages. Whatever is produced will however, need to be able to parse TeX, otherwise it will not be easily adopted by the community.

[1] http://www.tug.org/texlive//devsrc/Master/texmf-dist/doc/gen...

StephenFalken• 12 years ago

There is this precious little gem on page 16, paragraph 31.:

last <-- first; { cf. Matthew 19:30 }

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth#Religious_beliefs...

http://www.webofstories.com/play/donald.knuth/1

JadeNB• 12 years ago

Whatever is produced will however, need to be able to parse TeX, otherwise it will not be easily adopted by the community.

This is a huge barrier to raise, since parsing TeX is the same as typesetting TeX—the meaning of a macro later on can be affected by a macro now. You can't even just execute the macros in a vacuum, since the meaning of a macro can depend on things like the current page number.

deskamess• 12 years ago

I am still not clear what the output format is - is it a set of html pages that can be hosted on a server? A compiler produces a binary and the binary generates document(s)?

I am looking for an authoring tool where I can create the text of a tutorial but have Bret Victor like sections of interactiveness that illustrate the details of the text. The end format would be a set of web pages. I could code it all up with html+javascript+backend but I am wondering if there is an existing tool to do all this (some sort of task specific editor).

taeric3• 12 years ago

I know it gets said a lot, but have you considered emacs and org-mode. Because, it goes a very long way for this. See this great talk showing its use with python. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-dUkyn_fZA

fmoralesc• 12 years ago

There's R Markdown: http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/authoring_shiny.html

(Found about this today because someone requested R Markdown support in [vim-pandoc](https://github.com/vim-pandoc/vim-pandoc/), which I manage. The result was [vim-rmarkdown](https://github.com/vim-pandoc/vim-rmarkdown/))

Tepix• 12 years ago

What's wrong with their web page? The font they picked looks terrible on both Chrome and Firefox, even when zoomed.

theon144• 12 years ago

It's Alegreya, and I find it quite beautiful.

Quoting Google fonts[0]: 'Alegreya was chosen as one of 53 "Fonts of the Decade" at the ATypI Letter2 competition in September 2011, and one of the top 14 text type systems. It was also selected in the 2nd Bienal Iberoamericana de Diseño, competition held in Madrid in 2010."'

Maybe your font rendering is broken somehow?

[0] http://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Alegreya

mintone• 12 years ago

I haven't any input on the actual product - it's not something I have a need for but spell check the site! The about page is full of mistakes.

...powerful tools that have been developped to process languages...

I assume the author is French from the mistakes, just run it through an english spellcheck platform.

ajarmst2• 12 years ago

Folks, stop trying to solve problems that have already been solved. Especially if it was Don Knuth who solved it. When that guy solves something, it stays solved.

In this case, you're up against something Don Knuth solved and then Leslie Lamport made more useable. You really want to compete with those two?

sdp• 12 years ago

It's a mistake to think we can't improve on something because someone smart built it. In my academic community, everyone fights with LaTeX and I can only say with confidence that one person I know has mastered it. Everyone else just hacks at their document until it's close enough.

bithive123• 12 years ago

That could also describe the process by which the majority of computer code is written when you consider everything that involves coding these days. The situation is not likely to change with new tools.

ajarmst2• 12 years ago

Fair point. I hack LaTeX because I like to, but it's a perishable skill and requires fairly regular use. But that's not really the way (in my opinion) you should be using it. When I designed the layout for my lecture notes, that was a couple of months of on-again off-again tweaking and building a style document and macros. Now, I have a trivial to use template that any of my colleagues could use. After a few years, it's pretty stable, but I still tweak it from time to time and note (pleasantly, given how rare this sort of thing is with code) that my decade old documents still compile just fine with the tweaked version.

When I wrote my thesis, I didn't hack LaTeX - I downloaded the style file and template and just started writing. Someone else maintains those files, and hundreds of Masters' and Doctoral candidates use them without major issues (other than those who've never used anything by Word, but who the hell wants to design for them?)

That person who mastered it? Get them to spend a few dozen hours putting together a bullet proof style. That's how you do it.

Final note: I don't think something built by someone smart can't be improved on. But I do think you need to have a pretty solid understanding of why they did it the way they did before you get to call what you're doing an improvement. And an awful lot of critiques of TeX/LaTeX seem to come from a place of ignorance (frequently the "why isn't it like Word?" ignorance that tend to end the conversation for me).

waynecochran• 12 years ago

It's going to take da Vinci like talent and a herculean effort and to build anything 10% as good a TeX. Knuth, the pre-eminent computer scientist, devoted 10 years of his life to type setting to create MetaFont and TeX. Being able to "write scripts" for it ain't enough. Anyway... prove me wrong.

rst• 12 years ago

A lot of that time went into the development of not the code per se, but algorithms that newer code could reimplement. Perhaps in simpler forms on newer machines. Conventional TeX has a hard time optimizing placement of page breaks because its data structures hold only one page at a time, and discard its contents before starting the next, due to memory limitations of computers from the 1980s. Those limits no longer apply, which could make it a lot easier to code strategies for eliminating "widows" and "orphans" -- situetions in which only one line of a paragraph is stuck at the top or bottom of a page.

jeffreyrogers• 12 years ago

What are the advantages of this over TeX/LaTeX? I already know LaTeX quite well as will most people who are looking for a typesetting system.

a-nikolaev• 12 years ago

It seems, Patoline's syntax resembles LaTeX syntax a lot, but it lets you embed code more easily. And you can use OCaml or some it's subset instead of TeX's \if, \loop, etc [1], which is probably a good thing.

   \begin{genumerate}(AlphaLower, fun s -> [tT (s^". ")])
     \item First item
     \item Second item
   \end{genumerate}

Which produces:

   a. First item
   b. Second item

[1] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Plain_TeX#Conditionals

silentvoice• 12 years ago

Will it work sanely with Make, handle modular documents better than TeX, etc? The biggest frustration with me and TeX isn't the quality of its output or its extendability, it's simply difficult for me to work it into a reproducible workflow without a lot of effort on my part.

With all of my tools that I use that somehow depend on each other I can always glue together the results of my work with one tool to the input of another tool via Make, minimizing human error in translating results over myself, but LaTeX (combined with tools like BibTeX) somehow always breaks this model, which can be very frustrating since LaTeX is such an important component of mathematics research.

funkaster• 12 years ago

Interesting approach. Even though as for a replacement for TeX, I always expected Lout[1] to gain popularity. I haven't used it in years, but I remember being really easy to learn and way lighter than TeX.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_%28software%29

todd8• 12 years ago

The insight (made here by jwr) that TeX and Emacs and Vim are local maximums is a great observation that explains why we are stuck with these three programs. I've used these programs for over a quarter of a century and often wished for shiny, new replacements. Younger HN readers may not realize just how old these programs are.

How in the world did Bill Joy come up with Vi in 1976? It lives on today as the velociraptor of editors, Bram Moolenaar's Vim. I use the T. Rex of editors, Stallman's Gnu Emacs, another dinosaur of software, yet unsurpassed in scope and capability. These are great at what they do and so flexible and extensible that it's difficult for any new project to catch up.

TeX is different. Knuth, one of the greatest computer scientists of all time, created TeX. His choices for development tools were meager, but with the help of /literate programming/, essentially invented by Knuth to write TeX, he wrote TeX using the Pascal programming language in the late 1970s.

TeX, like Emacs and Vi/Vim, has an extension language. TeX has a powerful macro system that allows it to be extended. LaTeX is a set of TeX macros that most users use to create documents. The number of macro packages written for TeX to support every imaginable kind of typesetting (chess notation and boards, music, etc.) is staggering. This accounts for the large size of TeX installations. One can easily download and install every package ever available and be ready to typeset anything. The core TeX program, however, is composed of 1376 extremely well documented paragraphs (small code fragments). It is a pleasure to read through Knuth's literate code, all available as a beautiful book (naturally typeset in TeX).

The features of TeX were effectively frozen in 1985. Knuth kept track of every error in TeX during its development. Since 1985 there have been less than 100 errors found in TeX [1].

The open-source communities around TeX (and Emacs and Vim) make it is difficult for any new project to develop the features that make it worth switching. This is the uphill climb that is facing Patoline. Will it succeed? I'm not sure because many others have tried and failed. Lout was a really good attempt [2], but it seems to have lost steam [3].

[1] http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/generic/knuth/errata/errorl... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software) [3] https://www.ohloh.net/p/lout

taeric3• 12 years ago

Is it a great observation, or just a good hypothesis? Even as a hypothesis, seems difficult to test.

taeric3• 12 years ago

I hate to be one of those that harps on "why the downvotes," but I really would appreciate tips on how folks would plan on testing these claims. Just imagining that we could do better than some good pieces of software doesn't really do much to say that we can.

For example, people have been imagining faster than light travel for a long time. I realize these don't compare directly, as we have reasons to believe upper bounds on speed.

So, I am curious if we have reasons to believe that the upper bounds on editors and such is really that much higher. For inspiration, consider [1].

Same for typesetting. Take a look at most of the papers at [2] and tell me whether translating these to new languages is really necessary. (Though, note that I am not arguing against this. Just asking how we plan to know that "things are better now.")

[1] http://youtu.be/1-dUkyn_fZA

[2] http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/preprints.html

hyperbovine• 12 years ago

I would argue it's not so much the community (I'll bet there are maybe a dozen people who understand the source well enough to improve it) so much as the fact that TeX is feature complete, essentially bug free, and written by a genius. It really is an amazing piece of software which has no equal, even if you wanted to spend thousands of dollars. Why are we intent on replacing it again? I understand the gripes about the language, the error messages, and so forth. So design something that compiles down to TeX, not unlike what the Java(Script) people have done. Reinventing TeX just seems like an exercise in futility. (Nice duck logo though.)

thinkalone• 12 years ago

The duck is a (mistaken) interpretation of an early French automaton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digesting_Duck

pmeunier4• 12 years ago

Thanks for your interest in our project, that hasn't released any version 0.1 in three years, and yet manages to concentrate a lot of (maybe necessary) love and hate.

First, about the technical points:

- Ocaml has been backward compatible for the last 20 years, which is why we rely on it for backward/forward compatibility. After some time, we obviously hope to release a forward compatible version of Patoline. As a side note, I've got several papers written in LaTeX on my hard drive, that don't compile anymore after only eight years.

I imagine that debugging and improving packages written in TeX is hard enough that authors who manage to do it do not bother about compatibility. With the exception, of course of those "who know TeX and LaTeX pretty well" (at least until the day they write their first package, like I did shortly before beginning Patoline).

Moreover, there is something called "a type system" that OCaml uses, that makes your code more likely that any other non-functional language to remain stable through time. I know there are people who do not acknowledge the existence of this, and confuse it with older systems such as type checking in C, or who believe functional programming is a parenthesis writing competition. I would like not to use the kind of authority arguments I've seen in this page to convince you. Trying ocaml or haskell is a good way, but you need to be willing to be convinced, which is usually not the case in this kind of discussions. At least it makes sure that the program cannot run into an "undefined behavior" without the author being aware of it, something that my own daily experience with programs such as svg2tex does not do.

- In our first project meeting about Patoline, it was decided to not choose a definitive language. This is probably the only design choice. Of course there is a default one (intended to be forward compatible, if you are still following), but you can change it. Like markdown? Write a compiler to Ocaml, it should not take more than a couple of hours, and you won't have to rewrite 20000 lines of code to handle the crappy font formats that Microsoft, Apple and Adobe have designed for you, nor 3000 to output reasonably portable PDF documents that most printers can print (maybe this is an explanation of the size).

- Knowing quads, struts, \expandafter and \futurelet is cool knowledge. Did you also known that TeX uses its own fixed-point algebra? While these are certainly "inventions of a genius", using 21st century numerical methods to adjust spaces is efficient use of science and technology, and that's what we do. By the way, have you heard of IEEE-754? It doesn't begin with a slash, I've seen it used at Caltech, probably Stanford knows about it too.

Now about other points:

- What is "feature-completeness"? I know "Turing-completeness", which is the ability to simulate any Turing machine. On the operating systems we have today, "Turing^OS-completeness" (the ability to simulate any Turing machine with the OS as an oracle) is probably a great feature too. This is something Patoline has, that TeX doesn't. Querying online bibliographic databases in Patoline is a matter of writing a few lines of OCaml. In TeX, it means writing pascal code, for a variant of pascal that can talk to the OS (web2c probably can, I'm sure, although it was not written by a genius).

- We also seek to provide a development platform for new typesetting algorithm. While Knuth may be regarded as "the man who invented dynamic programming", he was ten years old when Bellman discovered it. Today, we have other methods, such as approximation algorithms. We could even imagine learning good typographic choice using methods from machine learning. There is space for innovation on this planet, and although I use emacs and vim, and even pdflatex on a daily basis, I do not consider them a full stop to software.

gone352• 12 years ago

To go along with the Gospel of Matthew references [1], "No one can serve two masters" (Matt 6:29).

This is a lesson your arguably most relevant predecessor, the NTS project from the early 2000s [3,4], learned too well --they too found TeX82 hopelessly quaint and monolithic, frozen in time for the sake of backward compatibility [2]:

"The stated aims of the project are very simple: to continue the tradition of Donald Knuth's TeX by providing first-class typesetting software which is both portable and available free of charge. But whereas TeX is now frozen (Knuth no longer has either the time or the inclination to extend it), NTS is intended to remain flexible and extensible. Indeed, its very raison d'être is to provide a portable platform on which experiments and extensions can be easily layered."

And how could anyone find fault in their reasoning? It felt right after all: in the dawn of the 21st century, with modern programming paradigms and all that computing power, why get stuck with Pascal and outdated space concerns? And so they did [2]:

"NTS is written in Java; the group debated for some time which language was the ideal language for a complete re-implementation, and although the original desiderata stressed that it should be a modern, rapid-prototyping language, further introspection suggested that a modern, object-oriented, truly portable language was even more important. On that basis, Sun's Java was chosen, and experience during the first year has suggested that that decision was justified. Even though Java lacks something in terms of type declarations and static polymorphism, its genuinely portable nature ("compile once, run anywhere" is Sun's justifiable claim for this language), combined with its network-awareness and widespread availability, make it an ideal language for the task."

Suffice to say their efforts didn't pan out as they hoped. It turns out, efficiency is a thing --even with modern hardware [5,6]-- and, as it happens, high extensibility/modularity and efficiency are very, very hard to achieve in the general case.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8026671

[2] http://nts.tug.org/

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Typesetting_System

[4] Or their immediate successors, the ExTeX project - http://www.extex.org/

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

pmeunier4• 12 years ago

Thank you for this pertinent observation.

I must confess that after examining all the failed attempts at "writing modern TeX" when I got upset with the TeX packages I wanted to write, I got despaired that so many people had tried and failed before. NTS is probably the worst example, since "rewriting software X using language Y" is something I do not really understand nor support (especially when language Y is only "felt" superior to the original language, using only non-theoretically-backed dogmas such as "object coolness" to support these assertions). Lout is certainly a more pertinent example, but there are also others, including Microsoft Word.

After examining the possibilities of doing something usable, and reading great books (most importantly Bringhurt's Elements of Typograhic Style) we felt that we could do something different, and that the world really needed a different tool.

And right now, Patoline is already different, because we are not serving any master. The idea is the following: imagine you have two users, God and Baal. God wants a forward-compatible tool that he can write stable rules for the universe with. Baal wants bleeding-edge experimental features to be added all the time, and compile his documents to web pages for ever-changing standards.

When we are ready to release Patoline 1.0, both will be able to combine the modules into their favorite tool: God will be able to write something that will work in saecula, and Baal will have his fancy stuff.

Argorak8• 12 years ago

While this is half an answer to my post, I am incredibly put off by the tone and will not take a second look at your project.

Yes, I know what a modern type system is and what merits it has. I also know that TeX has it's own fixed point math. But I am not convinced by your product either and this is certainly not helping. I do also now know that one of the authors is incredibly snobbish about his product, which I have a strong aversion against. And this is where I'll stop.

pmeunier4• 12 years ago

You're right, but then if your point was to start a discussion, maybe the best way to do it was not to start looking down at our project and assume that we are total ignorants who worked five years on something without any idea of what we were doing or what others did before.

Your first comments were really offensive, but I recognize that the tone of my post also reflected the 95% of negativity in the comments I've heard since we started it, the vast majority of them without even looking at what we're trying to do (we've even had comments like "stop using your favorite text editor / version control system / operating system and use mine instead"!).

What was your point in trying to destroy an embryo project? Didn't you expect such a reaction from their parents?

Patoline: A modern digital typesetting system

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