Re:Word processors are ditching equation editors in favour o...
by jillesvangurp on Sunday June 16, 2019 @06:38AM
(#20194857)
I think Latex is awesome for what it is: a system designed to enable engineers and (beta) scientists to produce printable documents without having to think a lot about making it look good; which is something they tend to be not good at. From having worked with skilled designers, I know I suck at this at least. As soon as you broaden the scope of writing to include e.g. ebooks, websites, and search engines as first class citizens, latex stops being an appropriate solution.
I rarely produce text for the purpose of printing these days but I used to do this a lot when still working as an academic. These days, I read a lot of books in ebook form and I read a lot of articles, blogs, and news in HTML form. Likewise my output seems to be online documentation, social media comments, the occasional blog article, etc.
Pdfs (and their printed output) are a second class citizen in that kind of world. They are harder to machine read, which results in issues with SEO, accessibility, or even simply re-flowing to deal with different screens or output formats. Pdfs are actually only appropriate for sending to a printer. On screen PDF reading is tedious and the UX for that tends to be not great. The whole page metaphor is simply not appropriate because it means setting the size of the output window to some fixed dimensions and hard-coding assumptions about the medium on which it is going to be consumed. It only makes sense if your medium is paper.
My printer is rarely used these days. I've had it for 12 years and I'm only on the second toner cartridge. The awesome thing with laser printers is that they don't dry out. Most of the output is exclusively limited to bureaucratic stuff. Thankfully that's very limited these days. I used to print stuff like boarding passes but these days you just wave the QR code around with your phone.
Engineers have tried to fix latex to produce things other than .ps and later .pdf documents. The results were never that popular. You can do e.g. presentations in latex and people have probably produced websites from latex as well. But lets just say that it's not a great fit for that kind of thing and also not that commonly used that way.
Additionally, the results are typically kind of bland and boring because the people most eager to produce stuff this way tend to have very little interest in e.g. design quality or making things visually interesting. It sort of self selects to people who have neither the skills nor the patience for that kind of thing. I.e. engineers. The same is actually true for the paper output. Yes you can do nice typography with it and some people do, but most people just stick with the bland defaults, which results in a kind of yawn inducing and bland look that instantly jumps out from a page.
What I've learned over the years is that engineers are obsessed with their tools and that mostly the tools don't actually matter. This article makes the simple observation that for mathematical formulas, Latex provides a pretty awesome DSL and that when it comes to doing math in systems other than latex, that DSL is increasingly what people fall back to rather than whichever formula editor comes with word, open office, etc. or alternatives like mathml, matlab, or hand scribbled things in bitmap form, etc. I think it makes sense. I'd probably use it all the time if writing math formulas was a thing in my life. This happens to be not the case for me, so I have had zero exposure to Latex in most of this century. I do a lot of my writing in relatively dumb editors or even an HTML Text area. I seem to use markdown a lot as it is good enough and doesn't lock me in to taking any decisions for the output.
Funny story: when I was in university we had secretaries that knew how to use latex. Reason: several of the elderly math professors had no clue how to use a computer and were used to handing their papers in handwritten form to the secretaries for further processing. It's easy to forget that computers and word-processors are relatively new tools and that people have been publishing scientific work for centuries. Even Latex is not that old. Ultimately it's about the content, not the tools.
I rarely produce text for the purpose of printing these days but I used to do this a lot when still working as an academic. These days, I read a lot of books in ebook form and I read a lot of articles, blogs, and news in HTML form. Likewise my output seems to be online documentation, social media comments, the occasional blog article, etc.
Pdfs (and their printed output) are a second class citizen in that kind of world. They are harder to machine read, which results in issues with SEO, accessibility, or even simply re-flowing to deal with different screens or output formats. Pdfs are actually only appropriate for sending to a printer. On screen PDF reading is tedious and the UX for that tends to be not great. The whole page metaphor is simply not appropriate because it means setting the size of the output window to some fixed dimensions and hard-coding assumptions about the medium on which it is going to be consumed. It only makes sense if your medium is paper.
My printer is rarely used these days. I've had it for 12 years and I'm only on the second toner cartridge. The awesome thing with laser printers is that they don't dry out. Most of the output is exclusively limited to bureaucratic stuff. Thankfully that's very limited these days. I used to print stuff like boarding passes but these days you just wave the QR code around with your phone.
Engineers have tried to fix latex to produce things other than .ps and later .pdf documents. The results were never that popular. You can do e.g. presentations in latex and people have probably produced websites from latex as well. But lets just say that it's not a great fit for that kind of thing and also not that commonly used that way.
Additionally, the results are typically kind of bland and boring because the people most eager to produce stuff this way tend to have very little interest in e.g. design quality or making things visually interesting. It sort of self selects to people who have neither the skills nor the patience for that kind of thing. I.e. engineers. The same is actually true for the paper output. Yes you can do nice typography with it and some people do, but most people just stick with the bland defaults, which results in a kind of yawn inducing and bland look that instantly jumps out from a page.
What I've learned over the years is that engineers are obsessed with their tools and that mostly the tools don't actually matter. This article makes the simple observation that for mathematical formulas, Latex provides a pretty awesome DSL and that when it comes to doing math in systems other than latex, that DSL is increasingly what people fall back to rather than whichever formula editor comes with word, open office, etc. or alternatives like mathml, matlab, or hand scribbled things in bitmap form, etc. I think it makes sense. I'd probably use it all the time if writing math formulas was a thing in my life. This happens to be not the case for me, so I have had zero exposure to Latex in most of this century. I do a lot of my writing in relatively dumb editors or even an HTML Text area. I seem to use markdown a lot as it is good enough and doesn't lock me in to taking any decisions for the output.
Funny story: when I was in university we had secretaries that knew how to use latex. Reason: several of the elderly math professors had no clue how to use a computer and were used to handing their papers in handwritten form to the secretaries for further processing. It's easy to forget that computers and word-processors are relatively new tools and that people have been publishing scientific work for centuries. Even Latex is not that old. Ultimately it's about the content, not the tools.