Re:TeX Live 2014
by s9w on Wednesday June 18, 2014 @05:37PM
(#7913018)
It's mindblowing that there's no modern LaTeX replacement. I've seen talks about it at https://hackpad.com/New-scientific-markup-language-utAjFcYuv..., but nothing came out of it.
Something with a saner syntax (think markdown), a modern interface for nontrivial tasks (maybe pythonic), better extensibility, cleaner codebase, better error msgs.... There would be millions of users instantly, but it's probably a gigantic task. Someone do it, please
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Re:TeX Live 2014
by jessriedel on Wednesday June 18, 2014 @10:56PM
(#7914160)
I have long maintained that the single best use of a million dollars to advance math and science would be to hire a small team of developers to make a LaTeX that doesn't suck. The amount of grad student, postdoc, and professor time wasted on dealing with it is staggering.
Can anyone give me an order-of-magnitude estimate for how much it would cost to make an "enterprise-quality" version of LaTeX? Something with the same powers, but say, the ability to use columns without reading web forums, with packages that don't conflict, and with human-readable errors.
Re:TeX Live 2014
by robinhoodexe on Wednesday June 18, 2014 @05:46PM
(#7913073)
A dream in the distant future:
(La)TeX gets the same treatment as Vim is getting right now with Neovim [1]. A full refractoring to make code from the 80s readable by a larger group, make it faster (some kind of JIT compiler would be nice) and just cleaner in every way.
Pdflatex is a rewrite that compiles directly to PDF.
Xetex is a rewrite that supports Unicode and TTF/OTF fonts.
Luatex is a rewrite that supports Unicode and TTF/OTF fonts and is scriptable in Lua.
Oh, I forgot: LuaJitTex is a descendant of LuaTex that uses LuaJit to compile.
It would be fantastic, yes. I guess the difficulty with LaTeX are that typography and pdf/ps output are more difficult than other projects.
Err, I'm not sure why but I just opened your link at work, and it is a page full of Goatse images... I thought I'd seen the last of that 10 years ago.