
The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad - steeleduncan
http://vallettaventures.tumblr.com/post/13124883568/the-price-of-a-messy-codebase-no-latex-for-the-ipad
======
atakan_gurkan
The price of a LaTeX rewrite would be even higher: incompatibility. If one
tries to rewrite TeX, the problem gets much much worse, since TeX is, for all
intents and purposes, bug-free. A new implementation will certainly not be.
Joel Spolsky said it very well
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html>

I disagree that the current situation is LaTeX developers' fault. TeX and
LaTeX are complex pieces of software, that are developed over time. They were
extended as the capabilities of their platforms increased, to take advantage
of those capabilities. This requires full access to the OS utilities, and
naturally LaTeX environment does that. If anything, this is Apple's fault. For
whatever reason, they cannot allow applications to use the existing
capabilities of the underlying OS. This goes against the Unix mindset; of
course there will be unpleasant consequences, but one cannot hold Unix mindset
responsible for these.

~~~
pantaloons
I'm curious where you get the idea that LaTeX is bug free. In my experience it
is rare to find two packages that work together bug free, yet alone the
collections of them needed to form even a respectable document.

~~~
_delirium
I assume he meant that core TeX (the part written ages ago by Knuth) is in
effect bug-free. However you do have a good point that one effect of core TeX
being ancient and not really updated is that, in practice, what people
actually use is TeX plus giant macro packages whose size is bigger than TeX
itself, and _those_ are certainly not bug-free. It's at least plausible that a
rewrite wouldn't lead to more bugs total, if the rewrite made it easier to
write less-buggy macro packages that interacted more nicely (the TeX
macro/module situation is not great for that).

~~~
patrickg
Nobody uses (Knuth's) TeX anymore. They use PDFTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX. None of
these are as stable as TeX, but in practice a whole lot better than most other
software I use.

~~~
coliveira
All of these versions of TeX are just extensions of the original TeX. The core
Knuth's code is still used in each one of them. The stability comes from the
core, not just from the work of pdftex, xetex and luatex developers.

~~~
patrickg
The stability comes from the core, but the problems arise from the extensions.
I have pushed LuaTeX to some limits and seen lots of segfaults and other
errors.

------
patrickg
* First of all, the OP mixes up LaTeX and TeX. TeX is written in a very portable language and has been ported to more platforms than most other software, including PDP-10 and others.

* LaTeX is working on the iPad, see for example: [http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2010/talks/2010-09-14-arthu...](http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2010/talks/2010-09-14-arthur-keynote/Keynote-iPad.pdf)

* LuaTeX (<http://luatex.org>) is written in C, not WEB.

* You only need one binary to work with TeX. Either PDFTeX or LuaTeX. All other binaries are just glue code (for example to generate missing Metafont fonts, but who wants them these days anyway?

~~~
EdiX
> * You only need one binary to work with TeX. Either PDFTeX or LuaTeX. All
> other binaries are just glue code (for example to generate missing Metafont
> fonts, but who wants them these days anyway?

A lot of TeX uses Computer Modern to typeset the body (a metafont font) and I
don't think I have ever see a TeX document that doesn't use Computer Modern or
Euler (another metafont font) for equation typesetting.

I also wonder whether it's possible to achieve the excellent equation
typesetting capabilities of TeX without metafont.

~~~
gmac
Yep, it always surprises me how few people change off the default Computer
Modern -- which I find really spindly and ugly -- given that a single
\usepackage{...} will give you a beautiful Palatino, for example. I sometimes
suspect they're just wanting to hit me in the face with the fact that they're
LaTeX users...

~~~
pnathan
I personally love Computer Modern. I consider it beautiful and one of the most
pleasing fonts I have ever encountered.

~~~
coliveira
Computer modern is a nice font for documents that contain equations. I suspect
that it is because of the subtle changes in density. But for normal prose it
really doesn't work very well.

~~~
pnathan
I disagree. I think it looks quite nice for normal prose.

------
jen_h
One real issue is that most users' LaTeX environments are highly customized
and tweaked to our own liking. Even _if_ it weren't absolutely nuts to put
every-package-and-extension-known-to-man inside a iOS binary, it still
wouldn't be right. Like, what if I want LaTeX2HTML (I've never not had to
highly tweak this)? What about my snazzy custom fonts? That bibliography style
that only one journal accepts and requires these crufty old stys from 2.09?

If I needed LaTeX on a daily, here's what I would do:

1\. Install DropBox on my mobile device and a designated "build" box--maybe
just your home computer or an EC2 micro.

2\. Set up Jenkins on a box that's got your favorite LaTeX environment and
create a job that takes your LaTeX source files, builds and outputs your
desired formats and pops them into an output folder you created on DropBox.

3\. Set a build trigger that runs a build every time you touch a specific
"ready to build" file.

4\. Edit and write LaTeX source files on your mobile device using an app that
syncs with DropBox like PlainText.

5\. Increment something in your "build trigger" file.

6\. Et voila, check the DropBox app on your mobile device for output and log
files. :)

~~~
podperson
Sounds to me like a LaTeX App for iPad that offloaded page rendering to a
server which also handled configuration would be a nice product. I'm guessing
the market might not be large enough.

~~~
ajarmst
Main problem is that most people who would want it could write the short
script to implement it themselves. :-)

~~~
podperson
The integration is where the value is. Even LaTeX users value some kind of
ease of use or they wouldn't sully themselves with LaTeX, they'd use TeX or
just write PostScript directly like a true neckbeard.

------
rmc
I don't think this is a problem with LaTeX & "messy codebase", I think this is
a problem with restrictions on iOS from Apple.

The crux of the problems with porting it seem to be that everything has to be
in 1 executable, that there can be no scripts, and it must be in an approved
language. That's merely a problem from Apple.

A correct title would be "The price of restriction on apps: No LaTeX on iPad"

The author also thinks it's be easy to just switch licence to GPL. Unless
LaTex & TeX required copyright assignment, you cannot switch to GPL without
getting every contributor to agree. The author is also under the believe that
you cannot have commerical software that's GPL. It's DRM software you cannot
have with GPL, and that's why Apple doesn't allow it.

~~~
dextorious
"I don't think this is a problem with LaTeX & "messy codebase", I think this
is a problem with restrictions on iOS from Apple."

No. It's a problem with LaTeX & messy codebase.

Take Apple out of the picture, for a minute: the messy codebase remains a
problem with TeX/LaTeX.

It doesn't lead itself to easy extension, it doesn't lead itself to easy
incorporation of features such as full Unicode support, Open Type font special
capabilities, and much much more. There have been several attempts to fix
this, namely LaTeX3e, Omega et al, but none has been that successful. We're
stuck with a codebase that works, but is messy, too complicated (ever tried to
set up a LaTex/Tex distro from scratch), and obsolete in many parts.

~~~
coliveira
How can you say this when every item in your list is currently supported?
Unicode, open type, pdf, etc. are all currently supported by new
distributions.

~~~
dextorious
Maybe you misunderstood me? I wrote "it doesn't lead itself to ___easy_
__incorporation of features" (such as the above). I also acknowledge several
attempts to fix this. What I lament is that "We're stuck with a codebase that
works, but is messy, too complicated and obsolete in many parts".

I know a lot of the above are supported (I use LaTeX myself, and follow the
developments quite closely) in newer TeX implementations, but not in clean way
and not with first class support, to the legacy limitation.

I was asking for a clean implementation, no something like XeTex --that while
supports several modern features it inherits tons of design problems from the
original TeX.

------
ivan_ah
In this paper[1], they say that much of the latex running time is eaten up in
the startup and shutdown of the program and the actual typesetting time is in
the microseconds.

A long-running process (daemon) is therefore a much more efficient way to run
(La)TeX.

[1] www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb27-0/fine.pdf

""" On my current 800 MHz PC, the command

    
    
      $ tex story \\end

takes about 0.137 seconds, while

    
    
      $ tex \\end

takes 0.133 seconds. The first command typesets a small page of material; the
second does nothing but start TEX and then exit. Thus, typesetting the small
page takes about 0.004 seconds. """

~~~
wtallis
It strikes me that TeX ought to take a page from Lisp interpreters and dump
core after loading all the standard configuration files, so that future runs
won't need to waste so much time on initialization.

~~~
gchpaco
It does, that's how LaTeX starts up and why you have to run it as latex
instead of tex. Ditto texinfo, and probably ConTeXt. For a variety of reasons
the TeX engine still has to reload a lot of stuff because it might possibly
have changed, which is a suboptimal situation; but there is a concept of a
"dump" state that has most of the kernel initialized. I suspect people don't
care enough to work around it, and the people most likely to do the work (TeX
kernel hackers) are also the people who are most likely to be inconvenienced
by it not noticing the tweaking they're doing.

Which is not to say it's not a good idea here.

------
microtherion
Having ported a TeX distribution to MacOS classic some 15 years ago, I feel
that the author overstates some of the difficulties. In particular, it's not
all that hard to get kpathsea to work without callouts to bash scripts (it's
not like Mac OS classic supported system() or anything like it). Basically,
kpathsea is an API, and the implementation can be switched out (e.g. I
implemented a dbm based file name cache).

Admittedly, getting everything linked into a single binary might be fairly
hard.

------
jsilence
"iPad is the most beautiful platform out there"

Sorry, but I fail to understand, why any serious TeX-Head would say that. The
platform is crippled and your problem shows it. You are ranting in the wrong
direction.

-jsl

~~~
guywithabike
"Beautiful" has nothing to do with whether it's crippled or not. In any case,
how is a 4GB executable + several-second runtime for trivial documents Apple's
fault? Is the iPad crippled because it can't run a crappy cross-compiled
version of OpenOffice with a PS/2 mouse?

~~~
kleiba
I guess the argument is that it's apple's "fault" because the restrictions of
the platform require the whole package to be bundled as a single binary,
instead of allowing a more modular distribution mechanism. Most of the
contents in the 4G are extension packages.

But I am not sure if "fault" is an appropriate term here anyway, we're simply
observing two different approaches to software bundling that happen to be
incompatible.

~~~
jawaddeo
The restrictions are what they are, but TeX doesn't help at all by being large
with an internal (circular!) dependency tree that would (should) get you fired
in a flash from a commercial software house.

~~~
kleiba
Apart from the fact that trees cannot be circular ;-) LaTeX installations work
like a charm for other forms of distributions. I think it's really just a
clash of philosophies here.

------
Loic
I don't know, maybe the author is trying to do something with the iPad which
is simply not supposed to do. The iPad is beautiful, pleasant to use etc. but
writing a book on the iPad is maybe not the things one does.

I use my tablet to write — quite a lot — way slower than on my regular
keyboard, but with time to think. Everything is in text files, synced to my
desktop where the typesetting is really performed.

Writing publications or books is a long process where basically the final
rendering is taken care at the end because the quality of the wording is more
important.

So, just a text editor with hard work on the words, sentences, ideas are where
99% of the time is spent.

Maybe the author can provide an extremely pleasant way to write on the iPad
_and_ on the Mac with syncing of the work to have the feeling that the work is
never lost, that one can always update a bit of the manuscript and just run
"make" on the Mac some times to times. Everything in a smooth workflow.

~~~
cavilling_elite
I completely agree.

I understand that tablets are a wonderfully portable device but you can't
expect to get 100% desktop functionality. Sometimes you have to find the limit
of your software/hardware.

I don't own an iPad, but is there git or the like? If so syncing and keeping
track of changes would be simple.

~~~
rflrob
> Sometimes you have to find the limit of your software/hardware.

The point is that there does seem to be a software limit, but there shouldn't
_need_ to be a particular limit there. There's certainly not a hardware limit,
since an iPad can run circles around almost all of the computers of the era
when LaTeX was written. Unless you believe that the TeX system represents an
almost magical, once-in-a-lifetime, impossible to replicate achievement in
software engineering, there's shouldn't be a software limit either, but the
code base is so complicated that there does seem to be one.

~~~
william42
From what I can tell, the software limit is that everybody has a different set
of custom macros and styles that they use, and that distributing extra code is
a violation of Apple policy, one that can't be fixed unless you get rid of not
only the reality of LaTeX but the _idea_ of LaTeX as a macro system.

That, or Apple changes their policies.

------
gphil
Wouldn't it be possible to just write a front end for the iPad, and run a
LaTeX service in the cloud? I think this would be by far the easiest way to do
it, and I don't think it's really optimal to do all the LaTeX stuff client-
side on limited hardware and battery anyway.

~~~
omaranto
Of course it's possible and desirable so someone has already done it:
<http://itunes.apple.com/en/app/tex-touch/id377627321?mt=8>

------
gamble
I was agog when I downloaded the LaTeX binary install for my new Mac a few
years ago and discovered how massive it was. LaTeX is almost as big as the
entire operating system disk!

What on earth is in there?

~~~
Argorak
The full TexLive distribution contains all officially accepted packages ever
written (this includes fonts, iconography, compiled documentation and other
heavy stuff), most of the compilers, the LaTeX and Context (MK II and IV)
packages and a huge toolchain. For compatibility reasons, packages are
(almost) never removed. Also for compatibility reasons, the LPPL (Latex
Project Public License) discourages[1] the release of a modified package under
the same name, so there are copies within the distribution.

So, the TexLive distribution is the "fire-and-forget"-package in the LaTeX
world, thats why it is so big. I use it for around 10 years now and I never
had to install an additional package.

[1] It even prohibited that for a while, see Wikipedia.

------
jka
This article seems to advocate a huge amount of work to an existing, open, and
highly stable software product - all to allow it to work on a proprietary
device with heavy restrictions on software availability and installation.

Should we do all this work - mandated by business-driven 'app store
guidelines' - simply to allow known good software to continue to work?

------
magice
This article is a proof of the stupidity, ignorance, and general jerkiness of
an Apple user. It's like, the world must resolve around some standards set by
Apple because it fails to deliver a system that actually works. Oh, and never
mind that the stupid guy never understands the reason why the code base is set
up as it is.

All in all, here is my opinion: who ever upvote this should feel ashame of
yourself for wasting everyone's real-estate on this stupid rant.

~~~
fadzlan
Have you actually spent a little moment to at least really RTA?

The author states that even with the restriction lifted, it wouldn't make much
sense, as with all the extension that it requires to meet the author's need it
would take 4GB.

The situation would be pretty much the same in Android, despite it being
rooted in Linux. The article is not so much about Apple as it is about LaTeX.

If you would like to make a point, at least read the article.

------
ajarmst
Wait a sec. "No LaTeX on the iPad" conflates "editing a LaTeX document" and
"rendering and compiling LaTex to a final document.". Editing LaTeX on the
iPad is already perfectly easy and really quite pleasant, especially with a
bluetooth keyboard -- I do it most days (currently, Textastic is my preferred
platform, supports syntax higlighting, DropBox and MobileMe).

Rendering to DVI or PDF is something else entirely. While other comments here
indicate its doable, I have to ask why? I render my documents on another
machine (I actually have a script that monitors dropbox and periodically re-
pdflatex's if the timestamp changes -- redirecting error messages to a file is
trivial if you need to troubleshoot remotely). If you're attempting to do
LaTeX with a WYSIAYG interface or (worse) doing the edit-a-line-rerender-
repeat cycle, I'd have to say that you're doing it wrong. The assertion that
"doing LaTeX" (or, frankly, any platform that supports simple text editing)
requires the native presence of the entire LaTex codebase is just misinformed.

Finally, the author of the post apparently started his project without knowing
that the original TeX distribution was written using literate programming,
what kpathsea was, or that there were other implementations of LaTeX. Perhaps
they weren't quite prepared/qualified for the undertaking? This smells like a
classic case of "this isn't how I would do it/use the tool, so it must be
broken".

~~~
ajarmst
Ah - forgot to mention. If you (like me) occaisionally need to see AMSLaTeX
(math) rendered to make sure you got it right, Mathbot on the iPad is your
friend.

------
retrogradeorbit
This is a total 'Bed of Procrustes' argument. In order to deal with the
problem of this ONE device and in particular the App Store guidelines, you
want to cut off the legs of the source code.

------
bitcracker
Don't use an entertainment toy for TeX. iPad is a very nice piece of hardware
but it is only a consumer (gamer) device - not a full featured Computer. Its
good for games and ebooks but I would never use it as a developer engine.

Why do you want to hurt yourself typing TeX on a virtual keyboard? If you
consider to add a real keyboard to your ipad then you should better get
serious and use a Macbook, Linux or Windows.

------
nhoss2
how about making an app that just stores the .tex files, and to convert them
to pdf or something, the .tex file gets sent to a server

~~~
jorleif
This is an interesting solution, because the problem is that the original
codebase is messy and therefore not portable. It seems to happen to most
software as it ages.

Putting it on a server makes the architecture more robust against messy code
(and changes in programming languages and environments), because pieces can be
changed independently.

~~~
seabee
The problem isn't that the original codebase is messy (it's aged, but there
are still comparatively new projects working on it e.g. LuaTeX) or that it's
non-portable, as demonstrated by the multitude of platforms it's available
for.

The problem is roughly equivalent to producing a non-upgradable perl. It's not
very useful on its own, but it's completely impractical to include a copy of
the entire CPAN with it. And Apple's policies prevent you from downloading
additional packages. It's just not worth the effort.

------
mgualt
Hear, hear! This post provides a perfect example of the utter failure of
software engineering in the real world. I am reminded of it every time I try
to install software, with all the ridiculous dependencies and multiple
versions. Instead of addressing the serious foundational issues facing
software development and architecture, the geniuses are busy inventing the
latest, greatest programming language, creating _even more problems_.

Computer science and engineering departments should use these situations to
train their students.

~~~
gbog
> the geniuses are busy inventing the latest, greatest programming language,
> creating even more problems.

There is some truth in your microrant here. I would restate it like this:
Instead of getting excited with how expressive is a new sexy multi-injection
functional language when you write the nth Fibonacci sequence, I would think
it more realist and constructive to get excited with how a new language or a
new extension of an existing language allow to handle module and package
dependencies in a clean, safe and _explicit_ way.

It resonates also with my work today: I spend a few hours removing those evil
"import *" from our codebase... (Python's "we are grownups" mantra is nice,
but I think a piece of the quote is missing: "we are grownups, thus we run
pylint and comply to all the rules, except a few carefully chosen ones")

------
thefre
> This dream lasted a few days until we discovered that TeX, the typesetting
> engine underlying LaTeX, isn’t written in C. TeX is written in WEB, Donald
> Knuth’s “literate” programming language.

Seriously, they discovered that after starting the project???

------
einhverfr
LaTeX can't be 4GB. I think it is being confused with TexLive? You don't need
all of TexLive to make LaTeX documents....

~~~
kenjackson
There certainly must exist some reasonable snapshot that is less than 4GB as I
ran Tex on a computer with less than a 1GB HD in the distant past -- and it
didn't consume most of the HD at the time.

------
cullenking
I think the salient question here is why would you _want_ to work with LaTeX
on a tablet?

~~~
anghyflawn
Um, for about any other reason that you would want to use document editing
software on a tablet? For instance, I use LibreOffice and its ilk only for the
most throwaway documents (and open others' files). Having an iPad means I
don't need to lug my laptop around to work on my thesis (I run Emacs on a VPS
via SSH to do it, and while personally I don't particularly care about the
aesthetics, I'd say the use case is certainly there).

~~~
gizzlon
So, do you also lug around a keyboard for the ipad? Or do you actually type
using the touchscreen?

Maybe you just need a smaller laptop ..

Also, terminals are great, but writing anything serious without X is a pain.

~~~
anghyflawn
I use a ZaggMate which doubles as protection, weighs about the same as any
other case and is not bulky at all. It works quite well.

> Maybe you just need a smaller laptop ..

No, I don't want to have a small laptop as my main computer. I had an Eee
before the iPad, but the difference in the writing experience is not too
different in the end and the other advantages of the iPad are greater. In any
case, you can hardly call me a person who unreasonably hangs on to Apple
stuff: I'm writing this under Linux which I installed on the MBP my university
gave me. I hardly ever boot into OS X here.

> Also, terminals are great, but writing anything serious without X is a pain.

Why? Emacs doesn't really need X, and I don't need to re-typeset my work every
five minutes.

~~~
gizzlon
_"Why? Emacs doesn't really need X.."_

Guess this depends on how you work. I often find myself starting many
instances of the editor[1] which is a pain if you have to create a new ssh
connection for each (or use ctrl-z etc).

 _"the writing experience is not too different [..] the other advantages of
the iPad are greater."_

Guess the real difference between us is that you see something great in the
iPad, so you are willing to live with its obvious shortcomings[2] compared to
a laptop. I have yet to discover why it's so amazing, and only see a small,
but pretty much useless gadget. It could be used for reading I guess..

[1] yes, it has tabs.. still

[2] low resolution, can't run what I want to run, can't type on it without a
keyboard, and at that point you could just as easily carry a small laptop (not
an Eee ffs, a real laptop).

~~~
jmmcd
Starting many instances of emacs and using tabs, of all things, suggests a
certain "you're doing it wrong".

~~~
gizzlon
It's because I work on many things, and I like to group each "project" in its
own gvim window and/or virtual desktop.

------
duncan_bayne
This has nothing to do with a 'messy codebase'; a minimalist LaTeX
installation would run perfectly well on iOS if it wasn't for the arbitrary
rules that Apple imposes upon iOS.

If you want to use a 'walled garden' device like an iPad, you can't really
complain when you run into artificial limitations.

------
abrahamsen
Is there some problem with the MacOS port of (Live) TeX?

A two page LaTeX test document on my old Dell Optiplex (Q6700 cpu) with Ubuntu
10.4 takes 0.033s, two orders of magnitudes less than he experiences.

The 539 page reference manual for the project I'm working on takes 3 seconds
to format.

------
gst
"I can see no choice other than starting from scratch."

Then good luck! Please post again once you've finished the rewrite.

------
nnythm
the idea that LaTeX has a messy codebase is almost mindboggling to me--I had
assumed that TeX--practically the only code that's published as a book (see:
The TeX Book) would be clean. I guess the complaint is mostly about the Pascal
+ C that's code-generated by TANGLE.

~~~
_delirium
It's not so much core TeX that's a mess as the ecosystem; the set of font-
generation, path-management, shell scripts, PS/PDF/DVI code, and special-
purpose glue binaries gets pretty hairy.

------
tomrod
Does no one use ScribTeX? Check it out: <http://www.scribtex.com/>

~~~
robbles
Looks like a great idea. What's your experience with it?

Does it have a good selection of packages, or just the bare-bones?

~~~
TeMPOraL
[http://support.scribtex.com/entries/316451-frequently-
asked-...](http://support.scribtex.com/entries/316451-frequently-asked-
questions#packages)

------
lukeschlather
Has Apple started allowing non-trivial Turing complete languages into the App
store now? Unless I'm mistaken LaTeX would be rejected out of hand no matter
how much you clean it up because it is an interpreter.

~~~
Mon_Ouie
As there is an app[1] that allows to run Lua code typed by the user, the most
likely changed their policy about interpreting code.

[1] Codify: <http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/codify/id439571171?mt=8>

------
tibbon
I think we're going to see this as a more common problem as we move into the
future of non-desktop computing systems and the want for older tools on them.
Unfortunately, what LaTex has done is use much of the core unix philosophy
which I generally agree with (using small programs that you can pipe text in
and out of to make a larger program). When you find that you can't port 20
sub-apps due to each of them being written in various language, etc you'll hit
problems.

------
super_mario
I question the basic premise here. iPad is not meant for content creating or
document typesetting, it's meant for content consumption.

If you want to do anything that looks remotely like work you don't want to use
iDevice for it.

~~~
swombat
That's right - that's why Apple released stuff like GarageBand, Pages,
Keynote, Numbers and iMovie for the iPad - so that people would not use all
this content-creation software to create content.

Oh wait.

~~~
super_mario
Yeah I have all those app on my iPhone 4. iMove is useful if I'm out and about
and want to trim and upload a video to facebook etc (these apps should really
be shipped with the OS), but that's far cry from actual work or real video
editing.

The other applications pages, numbers, keynote are severely limited, and
really slow and difficult to use. They are OK for viewing documents created
elsewhere, but not so much for creating new one.

~~~
swombat
The Isaacson biography states explicitly that Apple released those apps to
counter the perception (which they disagreed with) that the iPad was for
"consuming content only"...

------
tehwalrus
has anyone thought of just having a bunch of cloud servers with LaTeX built
there, and then writing a front-end which uploads your docs, compiles them and
downloads the resulting PDF? with fast enough servers and good enough data
speeds, this might even rival the estimated 10 seconds for a fully ported
LaTeX app.

I'm assuming it's been ruled out for other reasons though.

EDIT: this would also make it trivial to use it on android/blackberry, without
any extra effort. apparently, also, <http://www.scribtex.com/>

~~~
jpallen
At ScribTeX we regularly get comments from users about how fast our compiling
is. Even with the round trip to the server, the PDF appears in the user's
browser quicker than if they compile it locally. This isn't due to anything
especially clever that we've done but instead stands as a testament to data
speeds, and the performance of the Linodes that we compile on. Particularly
with Linode, I think the high disk IO performance makes for a very quick LaTeX
compile.

------
praptak
I'd rather go with a rewrite that also redesigns the typesetting language. It
feels like C++ of typesetting to me, although of course maybe I'm just not
familiar enough with the language to see its key concepts clearly.

Maybe the Lout system will pick enough traction one day.

~~~
w1ntermute
Yeah, I'd like to see someone do a modern rewrite of the whole
TeX/LaTeX/XeTeX/XeLaTeX/etc. mess. Something that has modern syntax and
support for modern features (such as output to PDF, HTML, even OOXML).

It would be good to see UTF-8 natively supported, and for all the common
packages to be absorbed into the core libraries. Right now, you can sometimes
find 2 or 3 different packages that do the same thing, often with varying
benefits. Take the best package, add the missing features from the other
packages, and bundle it all into one distribution. For example, the absolutely
horrible table support, where merging cells is a nightmare.

~~~
antihero
Indeed, once you get set up with LaTeX it's okay, but if I were to go and make
a new essay I'd have a hard time remembering wtf packages I used for the last
one and what they actually did.

------
kickingvegas
2 cent take: While it may have been an epic build story to get LaTeX running
on an iPad, I guess I gotta ask why not just install an iPad ssh client (iSSH,
Prompt, etc.) and run LaTeX remotely? Or if you really insist on building a
native client, why not one that talks to daemon on a system with LaTeX
installed?

Viewing the output would be trivial: convert the output to PDF. For the ssh
client case, push the PDF to a cloud file service like Dropbox. In the native
client case, have the daemon push back the PDF for native client to render.

------
jff
If anyone is interested in a simple, no-nonsense version of TeX, check out
Thierry Laronde's KerTeX (<http://www.kergis.com/en/kertex.html>). The whole
thing comes in at a bit under 10 MB, and it can run on Linux, *BSD, and even
Plan 9! I compiled it on Plan 9, built LaTeX as per his instructions in the
README, and have been happily generating LaTeX documents since then :)

------
jallmann
The iPad is made for content consumption, not creation. Trying to write TeX
(or any kind of markup) with a virtual keyboard sounds horrific.

~~~
hollerith
one can use the ipad with a real keyboard.

~~~
jallmann
If you're mobile, carrying around a keyboard negates the value of the iPad. If
you're stationary, a real computer gives you far more flexibility. Then you
have the issue of unbearably long compiles, as the article stated. The iPad is
not the right tool for the job of TeX editing.

------
tzury
Perhaps LaTeX creation system should move to the cloud, think of a google-docs
like service which will offer a rich, reliable and simple set of tools to
create, publish and collaboratively work on documents.

~~~
viraptor
<http://www.scribtex.com/> did it.

------
john2x
How about a service to render the LaTeX files? i.e. an app where users just
write in LaTeX, there's a render button which sends the file to some server
which renders it and sends it back.

------
nixy
What about a LaTeX cloud service with a thin iPad client?

~~~
RBerenguel
TeXTouch offers somewhat close to this.

------
coliveira
The size of the distribution has nothing to do with TeX itself, but with the
huge amount of fonts, style files, and other configuration files used to
typeset modern documents on desktop systems. TeX itself is very self contained
and already runs on most architectures you can think of. The author's problem
is that he is trying to port to a mobile device a distribution that was
created for UNIX systems.

------
Rajiv_N
Maybe we should let LaTex be the way it is now and focus instead on generating
better HTML authoring tools. With eBooks becoming more popular, there is
certainly a need for such tools. While I understand HTML is no match for the
power of LaTex currently, we need to think ahead and maybe help to create a
platform for the future rather than getting bogged down by technologies of the
past.

~~~
AkThhhpppt
Um.... <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX2HTML>

------
_mrc
I don't think literate programming is obsolete, nor has it been superseded by
"modern source code documentation".

LP means treating a program as a piece of literature. A literate program is
free from the structure of conventional source code layout; this is different
to simply documenting source code.

I don't claim LP is a hot topic, but I think to say it's obsolete is to
misunderstand the concept.

------
radarsat1
I wonder how hard it would be to modify TeX (or kpathsea, whatever) to load
its libraries out of a single compressed tarball or fast database of some
kind. Seeing as TeX libraries are text files, I do find it surprising that
they don't compress better. Is it mostly the fonts and documentation taking up
all that space?

------
hollerith
The iPad way is probably to run the messy LaTex codebase on a server that
interacts with UI code on the ipad.

~~~
jawaddeo
On the go doesn't always mean on the go with a reasonable internet connection.
The underground trains are a good example where in a big city like London, a
journey may last an hour. A flight is another.

------
feralchimp
For the record, I have no interest in running a TeX rendering process on an
iPad.

What I _would_ like to run on the iPad, on the other hand, is a TeX-syntax-
aware, document-validating editor that knows how to consume a rendering web
service that runs on a Real Computer.

------
jakobe
Since I have just spent several hours unsuccessfully debugging a problem with
a Journal template, a missing font, and my TeX distribution, I understand why
the author thinks Latex is messy.

------
noahl
This rewrite has already been done. See <http://www.texmacs.org/>

~~~
umarmung
This is just an editor based on the ideas of TeX. You cannot use TeX or LaTeX
directly, other than trivial insertions. It can only export to LaTeX.

------
bootload
_"... A 4GB TeX distribution dependant on over 100 binaries is not acceptable
on the iPad. It is incapable of delivering the slick user experience that the
iOS platform’s adherents expect and love ..."_

Xterm (iSSH) to linux box? ~ <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=280730>

------
zerostar07
Why don't they setup a remote server and do the latex processing remotely.

------
bobowzki
Create an app that uses a web service to compile the latex..

------
texlion
Perhaps there is a market for a LaTeX rendering web service.

------
astrodust
I'm not sure LaTeX makes beautiful documents, that seems like a real stretch,
but it does make creating good documents very easy.

------
dfc
What about luatex?

------
gcb
ironically, it could work super easily on a $99 touchpad. since you have all
the UNIX stack to play with, and no corporate control-freak limiting what you
can do with your device.

------
101001010111
The price of using an iPad: No LaTex.

~~~
EdiX
... no emacs, no compilers, no interpreters, no shell, no browser other than
the company mandated one...

~~~
101001010111
No fun!

------
berntb
What am I missing?

Why have no one suggested to split LaTeX into two parts like the Emacs server,
or something?

With a client and a server to run on your desktop/laptop/etc.

~~~
kleiba
In fact, you could run a remote Emacs and edit LaTeX with it, using the
excellent AUCTeX package. Of course, that means you need to have a network
connection plus a server you can ssh into.

~~~
berntb
You'd also need to see the layout graphically? (Also, I assume every LaTeX
user has a few computers to use as servers..)

Edit: Clarity.

~~~
tikhonj
I don't know about running Emacs over ssh on an iPad, but locally using the X
front-end (e.g. not in a terminal), Emacs can display PDFs.

~~~
kleiba
It might get tricky though to issue the latex command on the remote server
from the Emacs that runs locally?!

~~~
tikhonj
I've never tried using auctex remotely, but in general if you have a file open
in Tramp, you can also run arbitrary shell commands with M-! and M-& remotely,
as well as opening shell buffers that let you run commands remotely as normal.

------
HnNoPassMailer
I thought Latex was dead? It's a system I see no one ever use. With right, as
it's as horrible as a doc system can get.

~~~
HnNoPassMailer
Can anyone explain the downvotes? Thanks.

~~~
patrickg
Only someone not related to typesetting can say that LaTeX is dead. Exactly
the opposite is true. Even though there are good alternatives these days such
as InDesign and (I hate to say that:) MS Word (which now has a much better
formula editor and OpenType Math fonts), great developments are taking place,
for example LuaTeX. Not directly LaTeX but TeX: I have built a high quality
database publishing system based on LuaTeX:
<http://speedata.github.com/publisher/>

~~~
Luyt
I think that page could benefit from some examples created by
speedataPublisher; now I only see a list of features and requirements, not
what I'm able to create with it.

~~~
patrickg
I am working on it. Thanks for pointing it out once more!

