Tectonic: a modernized, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine

Re:Tectonic: a modernized, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine by criddell on Wednesday May 31, 2017 @09:48AM (#14452441)

That may be true, but the world of academic Physics and Computer Science people is still a relatively small one.

Anecdotally: in the 20+ years I've been out of school I've sat through hundreds of presentations. I don't think any of them were created with TeX (unless TeX is the underlying technology of PowerPoint, Keynote, Prezi, Impress, etc...).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Tectonic: a modernized, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine by pkgwilliams on Wednesday May 31, 2017 @11:50AM (#14453432)

TeX used to have numerous unique features: fairly good fonts; automatic hyphenation, which makes it feasible to lay out text with full justification; support for non-English Latin characters, etc. The rest of the world has caught up with these.

IMO the ways in which it is still special are: (1) good math typography; (2) integration with automated bibliography systems; (3) easily generatable by other tools. (Lots of things that eventually turn into HTML hit #3, but not lots of things that eventually turn into really good-looking PDFs do.)

These points certainly aren't important in all cases ... but for what it's worth, arxiv.org hosts more than a million scientific papers, the vast majority of which are written in TeX.

[ Parent | on HN ]