For people caring about typography there is nothing that reaches the output quality of TeX / LaTeX.

And that is not limited to math type setting, it holds for normal text.

Also, automatic tocs, I ist, bibliography with biblatex/biber.

Error messages are improving using modern packages.

The biggest problem ist the complete absence of dependency management. TeX distributions break regularly and the require workarounds because some package introduced a breaking change.

This is platform-dependent. On Windows, MikTeX is the standard way to work with LaTeX and it bundles a package manager for you.

It is because TeX provides the only acceptable output quality right now; also, TeX is like the C of math type setting. So whatever your improved solution is, it will have to include TeX at least partially, like MathJax or KaTeX.

It is what you get when you have a genius like Knuth taking math typesetting seriously. To get something better, you need somebody similar sitting down and take another serious stab at it.

Well, the complaint is mostly surface-level; I'm not sure if there's anything really stopping obe from treating tex as an engine/compile-target, and entirely changing the language that way

Afaik other *tex systems do it in the form of suites of tex macros, but no one really attempts to deviate from tex altogether

Adding to this, LaTeX is entirely incapable of producing even remotely accessible PDFs. If you're extremely lucky, you might be able to copy a single word or even multiple, but line breaks, inline equations and basically anything else breaks it entirely, which is not only incredibly annoying for citing things, but makes it entirely unusable for visually-impaired people.

Additionally, if equations are the the main appeal of it, how have we not made anything better? Why can't I plug the same code that renders my paper into a solver or convert it into Julia and run it? Like, properly, not just by guessing. I get that *tex is a typesetting language, but we're not typesetters!

If publishers provided the TeX source, you could do this.

I don't really see this as an issue. TeX is just a language that can be translated into PDFs for visual consumption well, but it could similarly be translated into audio or code (in the case of equations), we just can't do that because publishing TeX isn't something we do for some reason.

The problem is that you really can't. Tex isn't semantic, it's visual. Even matrix transposition, one of the most basic things in linear algebra, is written differently by different people. I've seen plenty of people just write ^T, which requires an amount of contextual awareness a parser just cannot have to differentiate from just raising something to the power of "T".

Mathematical notation is context-dependent and denser than code, you can't map directly from one to the other.

The main appeal isn't merely equations. The appeal is that it produces the best typesetting for prose and equations both.

Genuine question, what is the alternative in your view. All visual editors that I've ever used are much more cumbersome unless they take latex syntax.

Sure one could come up with some markup language that would have an easier syntax for relatively simple cases (see e.g. the post a bit further down), but to actually support the complex formulas that latex supports we would quickly end up with something very similar to latex.

I should clarify (I'm aware that you said you don't have an alternative). My question is of what type/form the alternative should take.

I think that a new paradigm should try to achieve the following: 1) Be based on code that can be machine interpreted and used afterwards in computations. Maybe this will require a more standardized way of writing math (like the apl that was suggested). 2) Be based on source code that is not cluttered and can be read easily by a human (maybe like markdown) 3) Most important of all: Formatting should be a completely independent layer. My original equations should have nothing more than math, it should be the renderer's business of how to present it to the consumer (webpage, pdf or whatever). It should be very easy for example to change the alignment of your equations a-posteriori without messing with the equations themselves.

1 feels too restrictive. I'm not sure how easily it would allow for writing math that isn't yet amenable to machine computation. Just as a random example, what if I'm doing some Étale cohomology stuff, maybe throw in some stacks and whatever else. How impressive would this code have to be?

We can have multiple "interpretation modules" and for some fields these will produce more useful output than for others. Currently, you cannot even attempt at doing so since the tex equations are typically polluted with formatting related code.

The problem is that mathematical notation itself is insanely complex and very nuanced, so any attempt to replicate it digitally will also be insanely complex.

A better solution IMO is an alternate mathematical notation which can be simple and unambiguous not only for humans, but also computers. Something like apl - https://www.jsoftware.com/papers/tot.htm

You should look into GNU TeXMacs [^0]. Its formulas (and document structure) are composed of S-Expressions that the user can edit directly. But it has a "TeX"-like UI (typing '\int' renders an integral symbol). Producing documents is an order of magnitude faster than LaTeX. And the quality is comparable.

[^0] https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html

What a terrible name! You have to read the documentation to discover the typesetting is not based on TeX, and the editor isn't Emacs.

The TeXmacs book is just out: https://www.scypress.com/book_info.html

Yes, it's a pain to write math related manuscripts.

Normal texts are a simple character list, so they are easy to input. Math equations are much more complex, with more symbols, 2D placement. So we need to 'mark up' the normal texts to provide enough information for a proper math equation.

Current machine learning can help translate hand-written equations into the one computer can understand, I think this can help a lot. However, if we want to use keyboard only, it still seems very hard to design a system that can input math as smooth as texts without 'mark up' or GUI.

I gave this problem a stab a few years ago. I wrote an ascii-math derived language (but more powerful, and a little easier) called MathUp. I planed for it to be quick to write and easy to read (kind of like markdown for math). However it is not nearly as powerful as latex (and I don’t plan for it to be). Target are people that are writing quick math-notes (e.g. in class), or on forums where participants don’t necessarily know latex but might need to write a non-trivial equation or two.

https://runarberg.github.io/mathup/

I agree that the LaTeX toolchain is bad, although there are some tools that make it better:

- latexmk knows how often it will need to compile a document in order to get all references right etc.

- pandoc lets you write markdown and converts it to LaTeX (although, if you have to write a lot if math you'll have to use LaTeX mode so often that it's worth considering whether that buys you anything... it's great for short, more textual documents that you want to format nicely though)

- XeTeX removes all the unicode and font problems and lets you actually include fonts on your system

- verbosity can be reduced somewhat by macros

But it's true. LaTeX kind of sucks (which is not really Knuth's "fault", since he only invented TeX and not LaTeX), the syntax errors can be very annoying (trying to hunt for that one missing paren or $...), packages constantly break other packages and totally absurd ways, and worst of all, the maths commands are entirely non-semantic (I've tried parsing maths expressions from LaTeX, it's not pretty), etc.

It's just that there is nothing better for maths right now, and even if there were, good luck fighting all the institutional inertia.

I don't really agree with you being downvoted; I love LaTeX, I use it for basically any kind of mathey stuff that I need, but it is an objectively irritating language, especially for beginners.

That said, the fact is that for mathematical equation editing, for better or worse, TeX-based systems have a near-monopoly on high-quality typesetting; KaTeX giving us a fast, easy-to-use implementation of it is still a net good.

There are plenty of alternatives. People don't use them.