The LaTeX cargo cult

http://www.joshparsons.net/latex/

by reledi • 12 years ago

111 129 12 years ago

andridk• 12 years ago

I don't disagree with his arguments. But, it's still the best typesetting tool that I know of.

I too agree with all of his points... but what's a realistic alternative stack that satisfies those points without drastically cutting down on the available rendering tools and packages for specialized tasks?

brodney• 12 years ago

If .rtf/.doc is in such high demand, can't we output to those formats using LaTeX? I think of it as just another output alongside dvi/pdf/etc, but I know very little of the internals that would generate those additional formats.

tonfa• 12 years ago

Though he points out this mostly applies to philosophy papers. Many of the points do not really apply in some other scientific fields (I usually had no trouble submit LaTeX papers for CS journals/conferences).

TTPrograms• 12 years ago

The primary strength of using LaTeX is math typesetting. If you're not writing equations the argument gets to be very subjective. If you are writing equations there's nearly no alternative (at least one nearly as well proven).

robinhoodexe• 12 years ago

While (La)Tex could be better/faster/easier to use, it's still the best typesetting system there is.

jmount• 12 years ago

I like Latex (Math/CS background), but I would definitely like to try some alternatives (like Asciidoc discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8509062 ). The problem is I never can tell which Markdown/Docbook inspired systems actually have working implementations and which ones are hot air. I don't want to end up with a big SGML mess that I can't do anything with or have to edit CSS just to render a book in a standard format.

Any recommendations/tutorials?

My ideal system would allow something like literate-programming/sweave/knitr. The notation could be any of markdownish/xml/ascii. I would have to be able to do call-outs/annotations on listings with tags (not insane/fragile region specifications). I need figures and charts. And I would have to be able to produce at least HTML5, PDF, epub, mobi. And I need support for footnotes, endnotes, tables of contents, indexes, and bibliographies. Flexibility in back-ends (like being able to render to Latex) would also be good.

Edit: the sweave/knitr thing I can live without (could probably arranged a pre-process to do this).

masklinn• 12 years ago

Sphinx has most of these, though not all (it doesn't have the literate programming part, it could probably be done though; and the standard builders are html4). And I'll acknowledge that ReST is hard to love.

amouat• 12 years ago

asciidoc is quite nice. It can output DocBook which I think is pretty well supported.

I'm currently writing a book in asciidoc which produces output in all your mentioned formats and includes footnotes, endnotes, call-outs, code listings, index etc. However, whilst I write almost exclusively in asciidoc, a lot of the styling etc is done by the publisher's docbook workflow.

ultimape2• 12 years ago

I've had good luck using tools like Pandoc as part of a workflow to translate between various messes.

siscia2• 12 years ago

LaTeX input files are proprietary to LaTeX, just as .doc is Word. The only definition of LaTeX as a language is “whatever LaTeX does”.

I am sorry but I don't see this point... Everybody is free to write a parser for .tex files and use it for whatever reason they want...

You are not free to do so with .doc or other proprietary format...

lamby• 12 years ago

You are not free to do so with .doc or other proprietary format...

Eh?

namtrac• 12 years ago

doc format is not documented, obviously.

tokai• 12 years ago

His trouble seems to be not with LaTeX, but with materialism. No matter what medium he put his texts down in, will he find that the text is somewhat bound to that medium now and it'll take work to modify and/or transfer it. Pen and paper is "proprietary" in this line of thinking.

mikeash• 12 years ago

The multitude of third-party .doc readers would seem to disprove that assertion.

In any case, it's clear from the text that he uses "proprietary" to mean "specified only by the canonical implementation". In this respect, .tex qualifies but .doc no longer does, although .doc is so bizarre and complex that writing another parser from the spec is... challenging.

xorcist2• 12 years ago

Libraries such as wv has been built by reverse engineering the format, not from official specifications. The latter turned out to be pretty much useless as they didn't contain enough information to actually parse .doc in the wild.

ealloc2• 12 years ago

I don't think he understands what the word "proprietary" means. It means that the file format is secret or there are legal constraints on its use. Until recently Word documents clearly counted as prorietary, but now that microsoft has been forced to document its format to some degree .doc is listed as "controversially" proprietary on wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_format

Even today you will need to buy Microsoft Word to "properly" read .doc files. There are other readers (libreoffice) but they only do the basics, and in my experience they usually mangle the file.

LaTeX has never been proprietary because it has always been publicly documented.

habitue3• 12 years ago

The point is, are there any other applications that will render a LaTeX document correctly that aren't LaTeX itself? It's open source, but in practice the code is so complicated and large no one has ever duplicated it. It's not proprietary in the traditional sense, but if you want your LaTeX file to not be mangled, you must use LaTeX itself.

lmm3• 12 years ago

I am sorry but I don't see this point... Everybody is free to write a parser for .tex files and use it for whatever reason they want...

It's great that you have the freedom to do that in theory. But it doesn't work in practice. The .tex format doesn't have a spec or independent implementations; it's complex and idiosyncratic, and there are no good general-purpose conversions from .tex to other formats (e.g. markdown, html). The only program you can really use .tex with is latex.

thesteamboat• 12 years ago

You might want to try checking out Pandoc: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

dctoedt• 12 years ago

FTA: > LaTeX input files are proprietary to LaTeX, just as .doc is Word.

I must be missing something --- LaTex .tex documents are written in plain ASCII text files with pseudo-English tags indicating generally how text is to be processed (italics, bold, etc.).

FTC: > Everybody is free to write a parser for .tex files and use it for whatever reason they want...

Exactly. Pandoc supposedly converts from LaTex into many other formats (although I haven't personally tried any of those particular conversions).

habitue3• 12 years ago

He means "de-facto proprietary" in that there is no standard for the output of LaTeX, except whatever LaTeX outputs. That means anyone who wants to build anither version has a huge amount of work to do endlessly duplicating the quirks of the original implementation. Imagine HTML being defined as "whatever Firefox does". You're chasing a very complicated moving target and you'll always be behind if you aren't just copying the source wholesale.

As to your second point, he mentions LaTeX converters in the article, saying you must write in a very restricted subset of LaTeX for it to convert properly. Obviously, pandoc doesn't have any way to turn everything LaTeX does into a markdown file.

That being said, I personally like LaTeX a lot. But I wanted to clarify the points the author was making.

praseodym• 12 years ago

Personally, I could just as well use Word for most of my work, but I like not having to use shortcuts or plough through menus to format my text. Markdown is a nice alternative, but doesn't support referencing figures and tables nor does it support citations.

chimeracoder• 12 years ago

LaTeX input files are a proprietary format.

This is a really misleading statement, especially since it comes after him stating that "LaTeX is free in both senses".

LaTeX input files apparently lack a standard specification, which is admittedly bad, but then again, so do the input files of many programming languages that some people on HN are writing on a daily basis[0].

This is not the same thing as them being proprietary; anyone can write a new LaTeX parser and there is nothing stopping them legally or technically from doing so.

[0] I may be wrong, but I believe PHP and Ruby both fall under this category. Markdown is another example (everyone parses it in a slightly different way, and while it's generally consistent, there are definitely warts around the edge cases where it's clear that Markdown would benefit from having a standard).

revelation• 12 years ago

By his definition, every document ever written in any DSL is in a propietary format.

Personally, I'm perfectly happy if I can open a document in a text editor and get the content that way. That obviously works perfectly fine with LaTeX, it doesn't work at all with doc.

lmm3• 12 years ago

By his definition, every document ever written in any DSL is in a propietary format.

I think that's basically true. The good formats are formats that have a) a standard but more importantly b) multiple independent implementations.

Personally, I'm perfectly happy if I can open a document in a text editor and get the content that way. That obviously works perfectly fine with LaTeX, it doesn't work at all with doc.

You can get the content, but not the formatting, which was presumably important if you were using latex. It's pretty trivial to extract the plain text from a word doc too.

htns• 12 years ago

LaTeX will never be able to effectively render a LaTeX document to a web browser’s finite view of an infinitely tall document or read it aloud, because its output primitives are oriented around print media, and its apparently declarative constructs are defined in terms of them.

That is somewhat untrue. You can lay out content in a box of fixed width, and then set the page size to that plus margins. Now perhaps the performance isn't good enough for real time rendering, but setting up custom schemes is very possible and not as difficult as people might fear.

And LaTeX already supports PDF search, so I don't see why it could not support accessibility features like speaking the text.

Rhapso• 12 years ago

I use latex daily and tolerate it. If you can offer me a tool that does a similar job (conforms to ieee journal style specifications and deals with citations well) then I would love to hear about it.

The biggest reason I do like latex, is that it allows me to put 1 sentence per line and has a text based format that git handles well. This makes collaborative editing and writing much more manageable.

graycat4• 12 years ago

Good news for the OP: The OP seems to want more output options than just paper or PDF. It appears that the OP also wants HTML output. Okay.

TeX and LaTeX say next to nothing about the final physical form of the document and, instead, leave all that to an appropriate device driver. Or, TeX (and likely LaTeX) puts out a file called device independent with three letter file name extension DVI.

Basically a DVI file says, put this character here on the page, then put the next character there on the page, etc. Then move to a new page.

Well, then, it would appear that there could be a device driver that would convert a DVI file to HTML. And there should be a way to have the HTML file make use of suitable fonts and the special math symbols. Besides, now Unicode has a lot of characters and symbols.

It appears that the OP feels that typing a paper into TeX or LaTeX somehow locks him into TeX in a bad way. But, TeX is fully open source with some of the best and most beautiful software documentation ever written.

andreasvc• 12 years ago

There are latex to HTML converters and they only work for a subset of latex functionality. It is not as simple as defining a driver that outputs HTML.

Latex and HTML work in fundamentally different ways: latex typesets for a fixed paper size, and specifies its coordinates in physical dimensions. HTML is free flowing; if the user resizes the window the layout should adapt, they layout has to work on mobile devices, etc. The HTML way asks for a completely different way of designing layout, and Latex is simply not the right tool for that job.

Incidentally I believe that the Latex way of typesetting for a specific paper size is superior, because it allows the typesetter to manually arrange everything until it looks just right, whereas with HTML there are x number of browsers, with y number of screen sizes, and you have much less control over the final look.

DanBC• 12 years ago

HTML is free flowing; if the user resizes the window the layout should adapt, they layout has to work on mobile devices, etc. The HTML way asks for a completely different way of designing layout, and Latex is simply not the right tool for that job.

I agree that HTML should re-flow. Let's try with the OP article.

<http://imgur.com/LWrS6pn>

graycat4• 12 years ago

Let me be more clear: Long ago a friend kept suggesting that I write a converter from TeX (maybe also LaTeX) to HTML. I kept telling him that that was essentially impossible because TeX is a programming language, likely Turing machine equivalent, complete with if-then-else, allocate-free, file read-write, while HTML is just a text markup language. No doubt JavaScript is Turning machine equivalent, but I'd have a tough time believing that HTML is.

So, my suggestion here was not to convert TeX input to HTML.

Instead my suggestion was just to convert TeX output, that is, a DVI file, to HTML. Why? Because a DVI file is essentially just text, or, as I outlined, it specifies put this character at these coordinates on the page, put that character there on the page, go to a new page, etc.

To be more clear, say, about the file reading-writing, that happens when the TeX program reads the user's TeX input and before the DVI file is generated. Given only the DVI file and displaying it, there is no file reading-writing.

So, it looks like could convert TeX DVI output to HTML.

You pointed out that maybe HTML with a browser has more flexibility than TeX output. Okay, maybe. But I didn't claim that, given an HTML file, there would be a TeX input file and a corresponding TeX DVI output file that my envisioned converter would convert to the given HTML file. Instead, I just claimed that for a given TeX and DVI file, the converter would generate an HTML file.

Or the converter would be a function from the set of all TeX DVI files to the set of all HTML files. That is, for each TeX DVI file there would be a corresponding HTML file from the converter. But the function would not be onto the set of HTML files, that is, not all HTML files would be a value of the converter; not all HTML files could be obtained by using TeX input, the TeX program, the DVI file and the envisioned converter.

You also mentioned some ways in which HTML, say, with <div>, is more flexible than TeX. Fine. But I was discussing just converting TeX DVI to HTML.

And, again, I see no way to convert TeX input, which is a programming language, to HTML, which is not a programming language.

Whew!

More clear now?

brians• 12 years ago

It's funny to hear this compared to Markdown. The reference implementation of Markdown uses regexes applied in order---an operationally defined language. Only niche implementations like the beautiful Pandoc---also by a philosopher---use a real parser to provide a less leaky declarative semantics.

mhandley3• 12 years ago

The biggest advantage of latex is that by (mostly) separating content from presentation, you can use revision control systems like git or svn to collaborate on papers. You can be in that final hour before the paper submission deadline, on a skype call with four authors scattered around the world, all simultaneously editing the paper (each using whatever tools they prefer), and be reasonably confident it won't all end in tears. That's when you really understand the advantage of this latex-style markup. Don't get me wrong - there are lots of things I hate about latex, but I'll almost certainly keep using it because of the workflow it enables.

pinko• 12 years ago

Isn't this also a feature of ASCII-based markup languages, which the author suggests as the right alternative to LaTeX?

mhandley3• 12 years ago

I'm old enough to have collaborated on papers using troff (strictly speaking psroff) and sccs as a revision control system, long before latex became popular and PDF didn't yet exist. So, yes, the primary requirement is, as you say, for an ASCII-based markup system to enable this workflow.

However, latex is extremely good at flowing text while applying good style guidelines. Most of the time you know that extending a paragraph by a line won't make anything bad happen - no titles left at the bottom of a page, acceptable stretch of line spacing, and things like that. Of course you can only push this so far before you have to fiddle about moving figures to the right page, etc. This is probably unavoidable, although it would be better to have a bit more direct control over where floats end up. The key thing is that latex does mostly get the small stuff right, so you're not constantly yelling at your collaborators for breaking anything.

pavanred• 12 years ago

I agree with this, my thesis committee wanted my thesis as a research paper (irrespective of whether my work was going to be published or not) but in the final stages the graduate college declined to approve it in spite of my committee's approval because they require a predefined format of the thesis. The change of format took me a few minutes, thanks to latex. I can't begin to imagine how much work and anxiety it would have taken to change the entire format at the last minute otherwise.

Agathos• 12 years ago

My school publishes a LaTeX template for theses. After I downloaded that, I spent very little time thinking about formatting.

Unfortunately my advisor doesn't do LaTeX so it kind of sucked for collaboration.

lmm3• 12 years ago

I always see this claim that latex separates content from presentation, but I don't see how it's true. As the article says, \emph{hello} is implemented in terms of font commands; it entangles the semantics (emphasis) and the presentation (italicisation), and there is no way to extract the semantics of a latex document and render it in a different format the way you can with e.g. Markdown.

tincholio2• 12 years ago

\emph does not always render as italics, it actually depends on the document class you're using, and you're free to redefine it as you see fit. It just indicates that the argument should be emphasized, not how.

lottin• 12 years ago

Bad example, because \emph means emphasis, not italics, and you can represent the emphasis in any way you want — the italics is just the default. So there is separation of format and content.

Though it's true that it's not enforced.

dzsekijo• 12 years ago

There is a big difference between the web (HTML + CSS) and LaTeX (LaTex + styles) worlds in terms of culture, and that defeats the idea of "separating content from presentation".

On the web, that content and presentation are separate, that's a technically a possibility, and culturally an actuality. That is, while you have the technical tools to apply such a separation, the toolkit does not force it on you; you can choose to write html with in-place defined colors and font sizes and other style elements. That the standards are higher than that and one is expected to write clean structural HTML and specify style separately with CSS is just a cultural phenomenon.

In the LaTeX world (scientific community), separation of content and presentation is also technically feasible, but the culture that maintains it as standard is missing. Most LaTeX documents are written by scientists who just want the damn thing look as they prefer, and apply all nasty tricks that the system can offer to get at there. The more computer savvy ones engage macro writing to save them a few keystrokes, but that's far from a way of document authoring that keeps content and presentation separate.

mhandley3• 12 years ago

Over the years I've written nearly 200 papers with about 70 co-authors, probably 75% of them done in latex (most of the rest in some nroff/troff variant). The process of latex authoring usually involves iteration, with different authors contributing different sections, then a certain amount of rewriting of each other's content. Papers typically have a page limit - often 12 pages. But you ignore all that while coming up with the first few drafts. A couple of days out from the submission deadline, someone (often me) starts to panic that the paper is 16 pages and needs to be 12. That's when you start going through and copy-editing, trimming non-essential content and rephrasing for conciseness. Only during the last 48 hours do you start to worry about tuning the layout, because you know from experience that it will likely all change in the last day. In the last day you're doing fine tuning, panicking that the paper is still 13 paqes and needs to be 12. Now you do a layout tuning pass, and it's now that authors tend to get into all the nasty tricks like negative vspace, tuning caption distances, and so forth. Even then, your co-authors are probably still modifying content without paying too much about the effects on layout. Finally, two hours before the deadline, you've got it down to 12 pages. Now you have to stop changing text without regards to layout.

Anyway, my point is that in the weeks/months of writing a paper, the messy mixup of content and presentation really only becomes relevant in the last two hours before the submission deadline. Up until that point, everyone is mostly using the same subset of latex, not worrying too much about the presentation part, because the coarse-grain paper layout is usually handled by the style sheet you get from the conference.

JulianMorrison• 12 years ago

You want to separate content from presentation? Use pandoc flavored Markdown. LaTeX is a render target. So, for that matter, is Word.

mangecoeur2• 12 years ago

LaTeX is a good idea with a terrible implementation. The popularity of markdown (+variants) is a testament to the usefulness of plain text writing. However, LaTeX syntax is a clunky and the ecosystem is a scrapheap-challenge amalgamation of packages with assorted cross-incompatibilities. Latex to PDF converters are also shockingly slow for this day and age, a simple document can take several seconds to compile compared to browsers which can re-flow complex HTML documents in milliseconds.

IMHO this is because of the ad-hoc nature of people using Latex, its been cobbled together by researchers based on their needs at the time while HTML+browsers have been carefully designed and optimized by people who know the intricacies of document rendering. Researchers just aren't very good software engineers as a rule so perhaps its not surprising that they produce something that more or less works but is not very well designed

joemi• 12 years ago

To be fair, LaTeX has a more complicated method of processing text since it considers a lot of typographic issues that browsers do not, so it has to be slower than a browser when rendering text. That said, I don't know enough to say whether the amount it's slower is proportional or not.

deong3• 12 years ago

There are a couple of issues here. First, Markdown and HTML simply punt on the vast majority of the issues that TeX solves. Just as the author rightly comments that TeX is not geared toward online publication, HTML is geared toward only that model. If you want to paginate HTML or Markdown, you do it yourself. Widows and orphans are (obviously) your problem to deal with. Compared to the work that TeX is doing, Markdown is, to a first order approximation, just catting the file. HTML can reflow a document in real-time because it's doing a really poor job of reflowing the document. Even when they work, they're just putting line breaks in whenever the width would otherwise be too wide. TeX is running a dynamic programming algorithm to minimize the "badness" of the line breaks across multiple lines and even paragraphs. And quite a lot of the time, the browser just throws its hands up and says, "fuck it, you can just scroll horizontally to read the rest of this line". You can't do that on paper. So of course it's faster. You might as well be complaining that Preview is faster than Photoshop.

HTML and Markdown don't do automatic hyphenation (across multiple languages). They don't do ligatures. They don't do proper text justification (neither does Microsoft Word or Libre Office for that matter). They don't do cross reference tracking (i.e., having automatically numbered sections, tables, figures, etc. with automatically updated references). They have no logic at all for automated float placement. Font handling is specified by a human instead of relying on algorithmic font selection and substitution when necessary. I could go on for pages of this.

I think the idea that web browser vendors are better at this sort of thing than TeX and LaTeX is so wrong I don't know where to start. The author complains that some of his 20 year old LaTeX articles rely on outdated files to render properly. While this is true, and very occasionally a problem, it's only very recently that you had even the vaguest hope that your HTML document would render the same way on two different computers owned by the same person today! Arguably, the biggest slice of the software industry is now devoted to making things render on browsers. And for Markdown, we quite recently saw that even the simplest text rendered in no fewer than 17 different ways depending on which software (and version) you processed it with. If my goal is to be able to reproduce the output of today 15 or 20 years from now, HTML would be the absolute worst choice I could think of, unless again, you stick with <b> tags and the like, and the subset of LaTeX you can reliably assume will always work gives you much broader coverage of the space of typesetting issues than the subset of HTML that doesn't change monthly does. Not to mention, I can still more easily go get an old LaTeX implementation to rebuild a document that doesn't compile anymore (but in 15 years, I've never had to). It's quite a lot harder to get Netscape Navigator 3 up and running to attempt to faithfully render a document I wrote in 1997.

Also, web browsers have historically been just about the buggiest, most insecure, and transient pieces of software we've ever written as a field, and TeX is famously maybe the highest quality piece of software ever written. It's more or less fine that the web changes every 18 months. It's a problem for archivists, but the web isn't really intended for that. Academic publications are though, and the impedance mismatch is, in my opinion, brutal.

The interface (by which I mean the programming language) of TeX and LaTeX is indeed pretty dreadful, but this is a really minor issue compared to the rest of it. There are a lot of things I dislike about LaTeX, but I don't see how HTML or Markdown is an improvement. You'd need a completely new thing that supported everything that LaTeX supports, and while you could certainly do so with a nicer language, you couldn't do it with something as clean and simple as Markdown -- there are just too many things you need to be able to tell it you want it to do.

Derbasti3• 12 years ago

CSS3 actually supports pagination, automatic numbering and referencing, hyphenation, justified text, and footnotes. At least that's what the spec says...

mangecoeur2• 12 years ago

I disagree that browsers (and I do mean modern browsers, i recognize it hasn't always been this way) are somehow solving an easier problem than tex or doing it in a half-arsed way - on the contrary they solve the very hard problem of correctly rendering content that might be badly formed or underdefined. I don't think there's anything in tex that you can't do in html5 and CSS - including ligatures, auto numbering, and so on.

As for, markdown that's just an example of how there is a demand for text-based writing (I could also give Restructured Text which has a much stricter spec than markdown). I think markdown could evolve to fill the Latex niche.

For a better implementation look at pandoc, which very cleanly parses documents to an internal data structure and convert that to a range of outputs, I think that's a much better basis for a document system. At the moment it has to go via Latex to produce PDF - in fairness latex still has the most mature pdf rendering system. I for one would like to see that change, I think we can do better.

WallWextra• 12 years ago

The typesetting quality of web browsers doesn't even compare to that of TeX, which uses a dynamic programming algorithm to minimize the "badness" caused by line breaks in various places. This is aside from TeX's ability to typeset math.

jessriedel• 12 years ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most effective use of ~$1 million for advancing math and physics research (two disciples for which no non-LaTeX solutions exist) would be to hire some developers for a couple of years and make an enterprise-quality successor to TeX. Keep the math syntax, make it handle infinite pages for the Web, and fix all the awful bits that waste hundreds of thousands of grad-student-man-hours each year.

This isn't fantasy. Zotero is evidence that custom built academic software funded by charitable foundations can be a tremendously positive service to the academic community.

https://www.zotero.org/about/

Also, everyone should read deong's comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8511509

gcv2• 12 years ago

HTML+browsers have been carefully designed and optimized by people who know the intricacies of document rendering.

You're joking, right? HTML+CSS requires heaps of workarounds to achieve the most trivial layouts. The people behind these standards have no understanding of documents and no taste in software: they deem the absence of variables in CSS a feature, and the result is Less, scss, and similar preprocessors.

Had the CSS committee at least the sense to copy the boxes-and-glue model from TeX, things might not be so grim. As is, we seem to be stuck with their clumsiness for a long time.

Shorel• 12 years ago

HTML+browsers have been carefully designed and optimized by people who know the intricacies of document rendering

I think HTML+browsers is something that has been cobbled together as well. Many times. With the added joy of useful features killed by political or profit driven reasons.

siscia2• 12 years ago

a. It’s an operational rather than a declarative language.

If TeX was declarative you should wait for somebody to implement in the engine any features...

moomin• 12 years ago

latex2e is 20 years old. I appreciate that's not the same as permanence, but in terms of stability in computer science, it's far from shoddy.

gcv2• 12 years ago

I wish the meme about the supposed superiority of "declarative" languages would go away. They have tradeoffs, like everything else. "Make" is also declarative — and horrific.

TeX has plenty of warts by modern standards (and the LaTeX macro package even more so), but the suggestion that HTML+CSS work better for general layout use is ridiculous (the standards committee only heard that multi-column layouts are impossible without major hackery what, last year?). I tried docbook for a document a while ago, and it was horrible. SGML might be acceptable for machine generation, but not for human writing. The toolchain is even worse than TeX's, hard as that may be to believe.

A replacement for TeX would be fantastic, but its absence over the last 30 years suggests that it's difficult to get right and achieve critical mass.

new2992• 12 years ago

There are a few nice things about Latex for scientific publications:

1. It's style driven. I'm not sure how well you can do this is Word now. But in Latex it's pretty easy to reformat your document to match a journal or thesis style.

2. It's scriptable. I don't mean that it's Turing complete. But you can drive it with a Makefile. This is great for scientific publications I've found. You can script it such that Make will re-build you tools, re-run analysis, generate new figures, and then regenerate the article. This save a lot of time when you're iterating over a publication.

3. Well integrated reference management. Bibtex itself is a mess, but if you don't need to alter the reference format, it works well.

4. Equations!

I think it's probably overkill for what he's doing. Sounds like Markdown + a reference manager would be fine for him. But for a lot of scientific publications it has handy features. I too would like to find something else, but I've not seen anything.

I guess you could write everything in HTML! But it's obviously not well suited to this application.

auntienomen• 12 years ago

A footnote to your 2nd point: LaTeX actually is Turing complete. (You can find a Turing machine implemented in LaTeX at http://en.literateprograms.org/Turing_machine_simulator_%28L... .) As far as I know, this feature is more amusing than useful.

new2992• 12 years ago

Oh sure. It's programmability gets used quite a lot I think e.g.:

http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/tag/fractals/

There are also some really nice graph drawing libraries etc. which I would guess rely on this.

ygra• 12 years ago

1. has been possible in Word for ages (according to an article recently on the front page, it's been the main difference between Word and WordPerfect), and it's pretty much how you write documents of any size without going insane. I'm actually astonished how many people think that using Word means using direct formatting and eschewing styles.

ultimape2• 12 years ago

I really wish people would use word's features - having the entire document marked up with appropriate headings makes its a breeze to go through and restyle a document.

I find that while collaborating on things, I have to make a pass that involves purely going through and marking up heading text appropriately.

----

I've found the best compromise is to have a sort of technical prologue that discusses how to edit the document, or forcing people to work in something like markdown where the lack of font sizes force the use of a heading class notation.

I prefer https://stackedit.io/editor because it includes mathjax support which means you get access to a large swath of LaTeX style math tools.

joosters• 12 years ago

LaTeX: great for those compsci students who don't want to stop programming, even when they come to write up their projects :)

monochr• 12 years ago

I don't think I've ever seen a physics paper not typeset in Latex.

CrLf• 12 years ago

As much as I like LaTeX, I think it has outlived its usefulness. Let me elaborate a bit...

LaTeX is pretty good for typesetting lots of text, like novels, if you want to output something that looks professional without much effort. It's also good for typesetting lots of mathematical formulas, as the GUI alternatives are pretty tedious to use and the result doesn't look as good.

It's also interesting as a template language, to produce documents from applications, but here's where it starts to become obsolete: there are a lot of alternatives to do this that don't force the person creating the templates to be technically-inclined and having to learn LaTeX.

Also, LaTeX becomes downright irritating when trying to make complex documents. The rules say you let LaTeX choose the looks of your document, while you focus on content, but it's impossible not to spend hours fighting it because it's not breaking pages or placing figures where we want it to (and iterating over this endlessly as the document is modified). You just cannot force yourself to let LaTeX do everything by itself.

So, it's useful for novels (which might as well be written in plain text and let the publisher do the typesetting) or documents with a lot of maths (which are nowadays most likely also complex documents that cannot go without human intervention to look good.)

I like LaTeX for the technical aspect of it, but in the end it's just a tool do accomplish some goal and, sorry, but Word doesn't consume that much resources anymore on a modern machine...

avian• 12 years ago

LaTeX becomes downright irritating when trying to make complex documents.

Sorry, but this is simply not true. Maybe I could agree with a general "it is irritating to make complex documents", though.

After many bitter fights with WYSIWYG software and 300+ page technical documents, I firmly believe that LaTeX is by far the least irritating way of making them.

tehabe2• 12 years ago

I think LaTeX has one disadvantage and it is not mentioned in the linked article. It has nothing to do with this "Cargo cult" thing, which I'm not sure it used correctly in this text but nevermind that.

The disadvantage is, that while LaTeX has an excellent support for PDF or PS its support for e.g. EPUB is awful.

Otherwise there is nothing better to write longer text than LaTeX.

roel_v• 12 years ago

The whole article is exactly about that point. Epub is just a packaged set of html pages, for which tex is horrible, because it's page-centric.

dragonwriter• 12 years ago

The disadvantage is, that while LaTeX has an excellent support for PDF or PS its support for e.g. EPUB is awful.

Well, yeah, but ePub is just a packaging format for HTML as input to a system that does its own layout and pagination, LaTeX is a layout/pagination system. Using it to generate ePub makes about as much sense as using ePub reading system to generate LaTeX.

It'd be better to just have end-user device-side apps that compiled LaTeX to PS/PDF/etc. after plugging in a device-appropriate page size, using LaTex as the distribution format and the rendered format as the viewing format than to use LaTeX to generate ePub

tehabe2• 12 years ago

LaTeX is but the code of a LaTeX isn't. You should be able to create whatever you want out of it. The commands in the file (just) have to be interpret differently and yes, this "just" thing is the big point, because it is not easy, especially for a language which is as old as LaTeX.

For me it is odd, I currently rely on LaTeX for my workflow. Creating documents which includes other PDF files and a certain pre defined layout is (for me) very easy to do in LaTeX. Especially if the ground work (layout) is done.

indubitably• 12 years ago

We should be writing papers in HTML.

lelf• 12 years ago

I don't know why many people, including the author skips (or don't even see?) the important point: we are not just miles and miles far away, we are in the entirely different reality from where automatic typography is any good. So the more it's “declarative” (whatever this means) the worse it will look. This is out ugly reality. And the document in LaTeX made by someone without a clue (≈ how we want it, simple and declarative) is f*cking MSWord-level ugly.

przemoc• 12 years ago

All hard (but honest) LaTeX fans may enjoy reading my old post about LaTeX, which is somehow loosely related (I hope I'm not overstretching it :>).

Getting things done in LaTeX (or not)

http://abyss.przemoc.net/post/28208254393/getting-things-don...

Surely any modern complete (La)TeX replacement would be a good thing to have, but I haven't found out any yet, so LaTeX IMHO still remains one of the best choices when it comes to writing/publishing stuff.

I think that reStructuredText could be a nice foundation for some more generic writing/publishing solution, where TeX notation could be still uded for math environments (as I don't know any better one for that). Markdown is too vague, imprecise and inflexible, and CommonMark - a strongly specified, highly compatible implementation of Markdown - is not much better, mostly due to Markdown compatibility.

EDIT: AsciiDoc could be also used instead of reST.

cvsintellect• 12 years ago

May be specialized applications giving a WYSIWYG editor while using LaTeX in the background be useful? Like the one we have built: www.cvsintellect.com. Its a CV / Résumé builder built on LaTeX but the user does not need to know LaTeX.

impendia• 12 years ago

Philosophy journals won't accept manuscripts typeset in LaTeX?!

Journal publishers charge thousands of dollars for subscriptions to individual journals. It seems reasonable to occasionally expect publishers to, you know, do the work for which they are being paid. (And to do it competently.)

Sharlin2• 12 years ago

As the author mentions, it's a seller's market: the publishers are in a position of both charging thousands of dollars for subscriptions and making their life as convenient as possible at the expense of others'.

Anyway, surely it's no wonder many philosophy journals don't accept LaTeX documents? As far as I know, LaTeX isn't really a thing outside hard sciences.

zwiteof• 12 years ago

So LaTeX sucks, but there's not a good alternative?

I'm in the midst of creating a document from scratch with LaTeX for the first time (as opposed to using a template provided to me) and while some things have been annoying, it's mostly been the learning curve of figuring how to do what I wanted. Tables are a mess though. It seems like I need to stitch 3 different packages together to do what I want with my tables.

Xcelerate• 12 years ago

When I started grad school, I initially used LaTeX to prepare my articles. But then my advisor tried to open one of my documents on his machine (Windows, I'm using a Mac) and some kind of weird error came up. So we spent one whole advising session with him searching for MiKTeX and installing it, whereupon my document still wouldn't load for whatever reason.

Then once BibTeX got in the mix, it became even messier. Well, I finally finished the article and submitted it to a journal, but they had so many requirements for LaTeX submissions that it took a while to change everything for it. Once I finally submitted it -- surprise! -- their online LaTeX compiler came back with another weird error. It took me about 8 more submission attempts to isolate the "bug" (which was some kind of issue due to differences in versions and default packages installed on their machine vs mine), and I finally got a PDF generated. Except it still didn't look the same as mine for whatever reason.

Well, the article got rejected from that journal, and so as I'm applying for another journal, I read "Word documents only".

So I gave up on LaTeX. Too much of a hassle for me. Maybe it's a smooth process for everyone else, but I don't have any problems just typing a Word document and sending it off. (Although I do miss LaTeX's equation typesetting system.)

qznc3• 12 years ago

TeX sources are only for co-authors. Everybody else gets the generated pdf. Advisors et al can annotate the pdf or print-and-scribble. All my publishing venues only gave templates and required a pdf.

evanb• 12 years ago

The preferred format for arXiv submissions is source.

http://arxiv.org/help/submit#text

cheez2• 12 years ago

So the alternative is to use Word? That's messed up.

marcosdumay• 12 years ago

It's argumentation from "my journal requires Word".

Somebody should add that to the Wikipedia list.

cheez2• 12 years ago

I can see requiring org mode files, but not word.

tincholio2• 12 years ago

For someone who works in philosophy, his argumentation is extremely weak...

sktrdie2• 12 years ago

I understand some of the negative things about LaTeX but it generates outstanding documents that no other processing system can match so far. Specifically the typography:

http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beau...

http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/85904/showcase-of-bea...

Also the graphs are outstanding:

http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/158668/nice-scientifi...

hdevalence• 12 years ago

I don't see anything on that page that couldn't be done with, say, InDesign.

sktrdie2• 12 years ago

Probably but I don't think most people can afford InDesign.

dendory• 12 years ago

I use LaTeX for anything complex or long form, and Markdown for anything else. I have yet to find something that can beat it.

qznc3• 12 years ago

What is the alternative? The author does not propose any.

Office documents do not play well with version control systems.

HTML for printing is quite poor and buggy on features (e.g. column layout, page-relative positioning).

titanomachy• 12 years ago

The article mentions markdown, HTML. I think markdown is more practical for actually writing in, and combined with pandoc it can be very powerful. Both of these formats should work well with version control. Personally, I find that markdown's minimalism goes very nicely with git. As long as you use suitable line wrapping it generates very concise and helpful diffs.

Bonus: if you're using pandoc you get native use of LaTeX's math mode.

xorcist2• 12 years ago

Even if you're using pandoc + markdown you're still dependent on LaTeX, so the question to ask is really why not write in LaTeX directly to begin with? If you already know it, and you do if you are in certain parts of academia, it's probably the easiest route. Or put differently: nobody has even gotten rejected for typing in LaTeX, if you pardon the expression.

sampo• 12 years ago

What is the alternative? The author does not propose any.

The author is an academic. He is concerned about writing papers. His solution is to write papers in Word, submit to journals, and let the publisher worry about the final layout.

mxfh• 12 years ago

Wrote my thesis in IDML, worked surprisingly well, yet Adobe InDesign is a beast of its own. And once you run into more problems you're pretty much on your own.

muyuu• 12 years ago

I had no idea that LaTeX was popular among philosophers.

Yetanfou• 12 years ago

LaTeX has one large advantage over lesser text processors which this article does not touch upon:

    Quidquid LaTeX dictum sit, altum videtur

Put two documents in front of someone used to quickly scanning scientific articles. One of them is formatted using LaTeX, the other using whatever document template Word happened to be launched with. In my experience the LaTeX-formatted article will be seen as a more reliable source than the Word-formatted one, even if the contents are similar.

sjtrny2• 12 years ago

In my experience this is something that I do subconsciously but it's often justified. People who write in word do so because they are unaware of LaTeX or because they don't know how. The first means they are usually not familiar enough with the field to understand that LaTeX is the default. This lack of understanding is then also present in the content. The second reason is usually indicitive of someone who is lazy or is writing junk. If they can't write LaTeX then it is unlikely that they can write other code.

Sharlin2• 12 years ago

This, of course, only applies in the fields where LaTeX is in fact a de facto standard.

etrautmann• 12 years ago

Markdown is a great idea, but are there markdown based solutions for 1) figure numbering and caption handling, 2) references, 3) automatically updating an index?

Anyone in academia needs to worry about all of these, and solutions in Word are sufficiently worse than LaTeX, which automatically updates all references, heading numbers, regenerates figures that have changed, and tracks your index for longer documents like theses.

Animats• 12 years ago

LaTeX, and TeX, are the last gasp of a long line of development. That line starts with MIT's RUNOFF, which begat roff, nroff ("New ROFF"), troff, ditroff, psroff, and finally TeX. It's the last of the programming-language like word processing systems.

TeX assumes your final output is paper. That's an obsolete assumption. The math features are concerned with presentation. You can't cut a formula from TeX and paste it into Mathematica or MathCAD and have it understood. TeX doesn't understand mathematical notation; it just format it for printing.

We need to get past that.

sjtrny2• 12 years ago

I think wolfram alpha has some support for tex notation.

Cheatboy2• 12 years ago

I don't get the point about declarative vs operational paradigms. LaTeX does a great job separating the data and the processes (it is declarative in this sense), although it allows to mess with both inside the document for flexibility.

I can't see the fundamental difference with HTML: it indeed lacks "operational" commands, but is massively used with javascript that implements the dirty stuff.

The LaTeX cargo cult

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