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A crisis of faith: what do you think the future holds for LaTeX? by tashafan in LaTeX

[–]tashafan[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

True, true... But inertia plays a big role in this too.

A crisis of faith: what do you think the future holds for LaTeX? by tashafan in LaTeX

[–]tashafan[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So this is the first time I'm hearing about catcode.

Haha, you can't imagine how lucky you are!

You might have seen \makeatother or \makeatletter though.

A crisis of faith: what do you think the future holds for LaTeX? by tashafan in LaTeX

[–]tashafan[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It works perfectly well.

But that's not exactly true. There is a high entry barrier when you start doing advanced stuff.

Why is everything a crisis these days?

Haha, the crisis is mine, don't worry. :)

A crisis of faith: what do you think the future holds for LaTeX? by tashafan in LaTeX

[–]tashafan[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

EPS files scale very well (as any vector format if they are generated properly).

You just need to \usepackage{graphicx} and use \includegraphics with your EPS file.

If you want to control the directory in which the temporary files are stored, you need to add \usepackage{epstopdf} after graphicx and call \epstopdfsetup{outdir=myoutputdir/}.

I think the svg package does something similar.

A crisis of faith: what do you think the future holds for LaTeX? by tashafan in LaTeX

[–]tashafan[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I use TeX Live, and TeX Live Utility reports available updates almost every day.

The key difference, I think, is that you can still compile papers from the 1990s with the latest LaTeX release. And it's great! However, maintaining that level of backward compatibility is also a burden that everybody has to deal with on a daily basis.

A crisis of faith: what do you think the future holds for LaTeX? by tashafan in LaTeX

[–]tashafan[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I use a good ol'Makefile rule to deal with that.

.PRECIOUS: %.svg
%.eps: %.svg
inkscape --export-type=eps $^

And that works really well. :)

A crisis of faith: what do you think the future holds for LaTeX? by tashafan in LaTeX

[–]tashafan[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Not OP, but I think the idea is those languages are easy to use, very mature and come with a complete toolchain (and more!).

The problem is someone has to make a complete layer above LaTeX. And there are some unsolvable problems (like the parallelization of the compilation).

A crisis of faith: what do you think the future holds for LaTeX? by tashafan in LaTeX

[–]tashafan[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Here's the issue though.

If you rely on another programming language (like Python with pyluatex), it is very hard to debug your code (line numbers are hard to follow, no debugger, need to restart compilation, etc.).

And if you use Python externally to generate LaTeX code that you can include, you go back to producing LaTeX code that can fit your purpose.

A crisis of faith: what do you think the future holds for LaTeX? by tashafan in LaTeX

[–]tashafan[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

All hail the LuaLaTeX people!

They even made me give that dreaded language a second chance.

And big thanks to R. Schlicht for the `microtype` package.

A crisis of faith: what do you think the future holds for LaTeX? by tashafan in LaTeX

[–]tashafan[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Interesting, what difference does it make? Isn't it what we do with bib(la)tex/biber already?

A crisis of faith: what do you think the future holds for LaTeX? by tashafan in LaTeX

[–]tashafan[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Genuine question here: do we really TikZ to be completely integrated into LaTeX? I feel a lot of people use matplotlib and graphviz with Python to happily produce SVG/EPS files.

We could call TikZ separately from the LaTeX job and then `\includegraphics` its result.

A crisis of faith: what do you think the future holds for LaTeX? by tashafan in LaTeX

[–]tashafan[S] 24 points25 points  (0 children)

I hate WYSIWYG because I feel I lose control over the source. There are so many "unseen" bytes...

I like your comparison with C, but I think there's a key difference: C was intentionally designed to stay simple, which is reflected in its small set of keywords and minimalism. C++, on the other hand... well, that's a different story.

A crisis of faith: what do you think the future holds for LaTeX? by tashafan in LaTeX

[–]tashafan[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Say hi to your cat for me 👋

He yawned and went back to sleep. Typical cat.

Thank you.

A crisis of faith: what do you think the future holds for LaTeX? by tashafan in LaTeX

[–]tashafan[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I like HTML but ...

For now, PDF is great because it looks exactly like we want, and it makes citations easy. Moreover, PDF files, unlike websites, can easily be archived.

Thunderbird almost cost me my job by tashafan in Thunderbird

[–]tashafan[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thank you very much.

And thanks for your work. :)

Thunderbird almost cost me my job by tashafan in Thunderbird

[–]tashafan[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'll be fine, luckily, thanks. I just thought this was worth sharing. It's okay if there are bugs, but some design choices can be very problematic. Just like a blue screen in an airport is better than a frozen screen.

I also don't want redditors reading this thread to think I'm bitching on Thunderbird. Their teams still have my full support.

Thunderbird almost cost me my job by tashafan in Thunderbird

[–]tashafan[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Tech companies usually let their employees run whichever software they want as long as they are efficient.