I have the same sentiment about TeX. The fact that the language has been stable for over 30 years is incredibly important to me. I also feel like I can do anything in TeX: I have written a C compiler in TeX as an academic exercise so I cannot take complaints about TeX's macros seriously.
You can not take complaints about TeX being a very bad programming language, based on the totally obsolete principle of macro expansion seriously, because you have written something complex in it?
That is totally absurd. TeX is an awful programming language and there is no changing that. Either you accept it and suffer through it or use something else. But it obviously the worst thing about typesetting in any TeX derived system.
There's all kinds of weird stuff that people do, like the other day I saw a guy with a wingsuit that was apparently crafted from a carpet jump into the abyss to ride the winds. "I can not take people seriously who do not just use a carpet and jump off cliffs". You do you I guess.
I am also doubting his claim that he had several students land without assistance on the first try. I have had a few students land with minimal assistance on the first try but I am quite sure that the airplane would be damaged had I refrained from making a couple of minor corrections. Some of those students were very talented (one soloed at 7 hours and went on to fly for Jet Blue eventually, of course this had little to do with my instruction) but they still needed a little bit of help the first time.
I understand this is a (good) attempt at humor but this might be an interesting idea to see if Bluetooth leaks from inside the microwave oven (or from the outside in). Of course, the microwave has to stay off, naturally :)
Police in the US do not have to have a license to operate anything, including aircraft. In this case, insurance requirements take over though. They may have a legal right to fly but no insurance company would approve operation by anyone but a commercial pilot. I got a few hours in a local police Bell 206 because they needed a commercial pilot to fly while their official pilot only had a private license. Fun!
I’d like to hear more about this, because I’m a pilot and I’ve never heard anywhere that the FAA waives their license requirements for local police? That doesn’t make any sense to me.
As I mentioned above it is not that the FAA waves their requirements as much as the FAA does not have jurisdiction over such operations (under appropriate circumctances).
Here is a quote from AC No: 00-1.1A (Public Aircraft Operations):
What Oversight of PAO Does the FAA Have? The FAA has limited oversight of PAO,
though such operations must continue to comply with the regulations applicable to all aircraft
operating in the NAS. The government entity conducting the PAO is responsible for oversight of
the operation, including aircraft airworthiness and any operational requirements imposed by the
government entity. The government agency contracting for the service assumes the responsibility
for oversight of a PAO.
The military is another entity that operates aircraft outside of FAA jurisdiction. Even military airman certificates have to be `converted' to civilian ones i a military pilot wants to become a civilian pilot.
True, though this may mean many things. The only part of CFR 14 that mentions that a certificate is required for operating aircraft is CFR 14 61.3 which states that an unexpired certificate is required to `exercise the privileges' of that certificate. So if the PAO does not require the certificate to begin with, this part does not apply and one only has to comply with part 91 rules. Again, feel free to disagree, the sheriff told me this so who knows:)
This is indeed a nice idea, unfortunately the university (mine) gets kick backs from the book store. At the beginning of every semester every faculty gets an email asking us to 'encourage' students to buy their materials at the book store. Every semester I do what I always do and tell the students that the ($250!) book will not be used in class (although mine is just one in a sequence and the book is chosen by the whole department for the whole sequence) and give a half a dozen references to (excellent) free online books. Even then some students for whom the class is the terminal one in a sequence buy their books. Must be human nature at play. On a different note, as a flight instructor, when a future student asks me what to bring to the intro flight, I usually say 'lunch', since I provide everything else, including headsets. Yet half of them bring $500 worth of useless gadgets and expensive books (not, strangely enough, headsets) to 'be prepared'.
Just wanted to say thanks as well. I host a private Jitsi server for my online teaching. It took a bit of effort to set up but worked well for me since.
> This would be impossible unless the reader have my LaTeX source code and compile it themselves. But it is super simple for epub, or html webpage (by modifying the css).
Well ..., wouldn't the html page be the source code in this case? Also, in most cases changing the look of a LaTeX document is as simple as changing the docuent class or switching to a different package. Also, modifying CSS is anything but simple in some cases, especially when the original style is not ideal.
What a great summary! Unfortunately, many discussions of TeX vs alternatives are somewhat thin on details and are instead trading on emotions. As you mentioned in your comment, the choices made by Knuth are far from random. He even made it possible for anyone to change them! Not many people using TeX know that the choice of the backslash as an 'escape' character may be easily changed. Even the necessity of curly braces may be avoided using carefully designed macros. LaTeX took a different path but it is only one possible choice. It is telling that no real alternatives have emerged during the 40+ years of TeX's existence.
The way I see it, this only proves my point. As you write: '...None of them have become the standard...' and this is at the center of the argument. TeX may not be ideal but it strikes the correct balance to become and stay standard for so many years. One can do pretty much anything in bare Postscript (and I am ashamed to admit, I have) or even 'handmade' PDF but it does not make it a good alternative to TeX. I have experimented with alternative syntaxes (apologies it this is not the correct plural of 'syntax') but had to give all of them up due to a number of flaws. These experiments gave me a new appreciation for Knuth's choices.
I disagree. I think Latex will soon become legacy like Cobol.
HTML and CSS basically do a lot more than Latex does - except for maths things - and are far more widely known, and far more forgiving. Also importantly, they support hyperlinks, animations, and inline interactive scripts. It seems that HTML and CSS with the appropriate CSS styles and shorthands (like Markdown) could eat up everything that Latex does and much more. I don't know if Latex can survive the onslaught.
I have heard HTML/CSS mentioned as an alternative and I pray every day this time will never come. Even taking all the complaints leveled at LaTeX at face value, using HTML/CSS looks like pure hell to me. Allow me to elaborate.
1. You mentioned forgiving. One may not like the style of TeX error messages but its tracing facilities are extensive and given enough time and perseverance one can track nearly any layout issue down an correct it. Compare this to CSS silently ignoring incorrect syntax, having different syntax across browsers, etc. I would take strict syntax checking over this mess any day.
2. Many complained that LaTeX has more than one way of achieving the same result. True but how many ways are there of centering a div on a page? I can list six off the top of my head and there are probably more.
3. You casually mentioned '...except for maths things...' but this is far from minor. I cringe when I read engineering papers not written in TeX: the formulas are so ugly that they border on unreadable.
4. CSS may be wider known but unlike TeX CSS is a moving target. Being designed by a committee it carries all the flaws, like kludgy design in the name of 'compatibility', poor choices of syntax to make it appeal to a wider audience, etc. The designers of CSS are so enamored with the 'cascade' but in practice it is rarely used as intended. The 'important!' kludge as a perfect testament to this.
5. LaTeX syntax may be unappealing to some but HTML takes it to a whole other level: whitespace that affects the layout yet no easy way of getting rid of it (HTML style comments are a torture device); too verbose... one may not like the backslash but what about <...> </...> ? Five extra symbols!
6. LaTeX engines produce full featured PDF so hyperlinks are not a problem (most LaTeX documents have them). Yes, CSS has so called 3D graphics but it is anything but programmer friendly. What good are 3D transforms if one cannot even use simple lighting effects programmatically; c'mon, at least give me Lambert reflection! Incidentally, inline JavaScript can be included in pdf documents produced by LateX as well (although ... why?)
Academia has got inertia. How long has it taken it to adopt Open Access? There's far more investment into web tech than into Latex. Browsers can do more than PDF readers.
The “except for math” part is doing a lot I think. There’s a huge amount of work needed to get rendered math to look as good as latex’s and I’m not sure CSS (as an example) is expressive enough to get this done
The LaTeX formula language is a separate thing from the rest of LaTeX: It's become the standard for formulas. There are some editors that can speed up writing those formulas. Asciidoc also offers an alternative formula language.
It tells me that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, i.e. what one may perceive as ugliness, countless others will view as beauty or, at least functionality. I personally think that the ugliest design in existence is Python but I admit my opinion is not common. Moreover, I use Python myself, since syntax is not the only important thing in a language (the ecosystem is Python's undisputable strength). It is also unclear to me what specific 'ugliness' in TeX is fixed by, say TeXmacs. Is TeXmacs internal language dramatically (or any) better than TeX? Does not seem so. The WYSIWYG option? There are WYSIWYG editors for TeX as well.
"here are WYSIWYG editors for TeX as well." not there are not. Apart from TeXmacs I know of no editor which give you on the screen the same result you get on the paper. LyX has not such a feature. If an approximation is ok, then fine, but I do not think you can call it WYSIWYG. Is something else. And it requires a lot of work to do it correctly. You should at least appreciate the technical merits, even if you prefer to use LaTeX for its ecosystem. But as a user of both I see the clear merits of TeXmacs in terms of quality of my work (mathematician), I can focus more on what I'm doing, instead on deciphering the mess of the LaTeX formulas and try to find where to put a correction. I can give online lectures with it, discuss on zoom while scribbling on a TeXmacs document, much of the work I was doing on paper I do now directly on the computer. To me there is a clear difference in the user experience between TeXmacs and LaTeX and I will never go back to write LaTeX if I can help it (I do it sometimes, if my coauthors are using it and do not want to try otherwise).
As a fellow mathematician you may then appreciate the fact that local and global maxima may differ dramatically which pretty much precludes true WYSIWYG (not just in TeX) in that you have to settle for one of the two: visual output with suboptimal aesthetics (TeXmacs, and, to some extent, LyX) or perfect results that you have to compile with some delay. It has nothing to do with the computational power available but rather with the occasional highly unstable line breaking. Even in MS Word it is annoying sometimes to see it resize a current line even though it uses a rather lame line breaking routine. TeX does have facilities for almost real time WYSIWYG (SyncTeX was added specifically for that purpose) although they take some effort to set up. As far as concentrating on the work at hand I have written whole papers without compiling the document once before everything was complete. I admit it takes some getting used to but I prefer something I can grep through to a mere pretty picture. I admit if my work was heavy on large commutative diagrams I might have had a different view. One thing I totally agree with you on is that TeXmacs is an outstanding piece of software. I would just prefer to keep my documents in TeX (which TeXmacs can export, kinda).
> visual output with suboptimal aesthetics (TeXmacs, and, to some extent, LyX)
Till now I took the developers word that the aesthetics of TeXmacs is better than the one of TeX and I would be curious to know where the opposite is true (and in case also why this cannot change)
From what I have seen in TeXmacs documentation, they have implemented pretty much every feature of TeX's linebreaking algorithm and more (microtypography, global page breaking, etc) so my claim above was not to say that the documents TeXmacs outputs have suboptimal aesthetics (to be fair, modern versions of TeX have all of these features, as well, although not the original TeX, alas). What I meant to say was there is no (even theoretically) possible way to have a perfect WYSIWYG editor if global paragraph/page breaking is desired. For example, due to global page breaking, one may be editing a line in the middle of the document and its position on the page (and the page number, left/right headers, etc) will be constantly changing---not good for the visual experience. I do not know how TeXmacs deals with these (extremely rare, admittedly) cases but the discussion was about the true WYSIWYG vs not so take it with a grain of salt. Let me say this again: TeXmacs is an outstanding piece of software. If in thirty years, a TeXmacs file format is still readable by the newest version (possibly with some easy tweaks), I will consider switching from TeX :). My other (minor) concern is that the LaTeX files that TeXmacs exports do not render at all as the pdf files TeXmacs produces itself. So as a WYSIWYG frontend to LaTeX, TeXmacs is ... not quite. Which they never claimed to be so I cannot fault them for this.
TeXmacs is a great project, no doubt, but you have mentioned WYSIWYG as one of the advantages. This is the main reason I do not use TeXmacs to create documents (I do use it to create online lectures). You may like or dislike LaTeX/TeX (and the discussion is usually too emotionally charged for my taste) but the fact that it is a text format (not as verbose as, say, XML, at that) which is more or less standard is a deciding factor for many people, including myself. On a personal level, while I slightly dislike LaTeX style macros, I absolutely adore TeX's design (yes, including syntax). It is a matter of taste, of course. I am aware that TeXmacs can export LaTeX, it is not quite the same. LyX is another (better in my view) WYSIWYG option, if one is desired.
A TexMacs file can be opened up in any text editor. It's readable -- XML-like without quite being XML. Presumably, this can be used to work around some limitations of the WYSIWYG editor.
I think LyX's file format is not as well-designed.
You may think so but this would be going against the facts. In reality, there are two major goals each US university has:
1. attracting funds (in the form of tuition, grants, etc)
2. improving educational statistics for the state
The second goal is related to the first and, in the case of a public school, dominates. The more diplomas the university awards, the more funding it usually gets (since it improves 'retention').
Universities certainly have great facilities for learning and if a student wants to learn, s*he certainly can but this is irrelevant from the point of view of the administration.
Lest you think this is another conspiracy theory, I have heard these two exact statements in every faculty meeting we had at the university level. How can I care about grade inflation (as a faculty) if I am penalized for the excessive number of withdrawals from my classes. Think about it: the students have realized that they were not ready for the class early, and decided to save themselves the headache and take a lower level class. This is counted against the faculty. Now what incentive do I have to give objective grades?
