
Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?” - stared
https://twitter.com/iraphas13/status/1262489387767480322
======
jessriedel
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way
to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a
few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the
21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main
code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three
columns!). Create a non-buggy desktop IDE/wordprocessor that works seamlessly
using a traditional interface or a LyX-like interface. Merge/buy/replace
Overleaf with an online service that syncs reliably with the desktop IDE. And,
most importantly and difficultly, create a standard way for generating
beautiful web pages (including mobile) from the same LaTeX++ files that can be
used to generate beautiful PDFs.

The annual NSF physics budget is roughly a quarter billion dollars. This only
needs to make NSF-funded physicists 1% more productive over a decade to
justify spending $20M, and the entire world would benefit.

EDIT: Lots of commenters worry that this will end up like various closed-
source for-profit tools like Google Docs. But for a closer analogy they should
look at some of the excellent free open-source science software being produced
with philanthropic funding such as Zotero. Physicists will only adopt it if it
makes their lives easier (and maybe not even then...).

EDIT 2: There are some pretty strong parallels between the commenters
suggesting this can already be achieved with homegrown tools and the infamous
HN Dropbox comment.

~~~
inimino
Knuth wrote TeX as a labor of love. The surest way to kill everything good
about it would be a few million dollars, and a team, and to turn it into
fucking Google Docs for science.

Ask Knuth to name one person who has the clearest vision for the future of
TeX, and give that person a stipend to work on it for the next ten years, or
for life, and you might actually do some good.

~~~
scubbo
Can you elaborate on what you think is bad about Google Docs? Aside from the
data privacy concerns from the fact that it's owned and operated by Google
(which I agree with), it seems like a fantastically usable, available, and
powerful product. What do you fear would happen to LaTeX in this situation?

~~~
btmiller
2 things, 1) Why do you consider Google Docs to be any different than Word?
They both serve the same market, so you might as well be asking why not
standardize around Word. And 2) given the intended uses of Google Docs/Word,
the biggest reason not to use it for research are exactly the set of asides
you mentioned.

~~~
izzydata
That seems irrelevant in this context as both Microsoft Word or Google Docs
would fit the analogy in the same way.

------
svat
( _The link goes to a thread on beautiful scientific communication (especially
figures /diagrams), so it would have been nice to discuss that rather than
discuss LaTeX. But as the conversation here seems to be mostly about the
latter…_)

What a lot of people don't realize about LaTeX is that much of its awkwardness
comes from it being a product of two very strong personalities (both Turing
Award winners for unrelated work!) pulling it in two opposing directions:

• Donald Knuth, who designed TeX as a tool for _typesetting_ primarily,
allowing a meticulous author complete control over the appearance of his
pages, and attempting to capture in a program (or at least making possible)
the highest standards of typography developed over the centuries since the
invention of printing.(†)

• Leslie Lamport, who wrote LaTeX as a macro package running in TeX, trying to
hide complexity from the author and making things as convenient as possible,
out of a (probably correct) belief that authors should _not_ care about the
appearance and instead only focus on the content!
([https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/document-
production.p...](https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/document-
production.pdf))

The result is that with LaTeX, things look “easy” superficially, but
everything is implemented in TeX macros (never intended as a full-fledged
programming language), so things break in mysterious ways. Not to mention the
additional layers of complexity from zillions of users writing their own
"packages" for everything. The error messages don't make sense to users
because they often come from the bowels of TeX, and I suspect that many users
even just ignore(!) warnings about overfull/underfull boxes.

Conversely, if you look at one of Knuth's own documents written in plain TeX,
everything is startlingly simple: for example there is no automatic equation
numbering or cross-references; for Equation 5 you just write "5" in the
equation and refer to it as "(5)" later, none of that stuff with
"\eqref{eq:foo}" or whatever. If macros are used, they tend to be custom for
the document, rather than elaborate general-purpose ones. Consider giving
plain TeX a try (a great book is _A Beginner 's Book of TeX_ by Seroul and
Levy); everything makes sense, you feel in power, all the error messages are
clear (often the same error messages! but now they apply to something you
actually wrote/intended), and if nothing else, you'll end up with an
appreciation of what LaTeX is/does.

This comment is turning into a repetition of my same tiresome comments on
other sites
([https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/a/40282](https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/a/40282),
[https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/398372](https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/398372),
[https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/386592](https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/386592),
[https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/384881](https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/384881),
[https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/518802](https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/518802)
etc.) so I'll stop here I guess :-)

\----

(†): good paragraphs, avoiding widows and orphans and hyphenation on
consecutive lines and loose/tight lines adjacent to each other, all of that.
By far the longest chapter in _The TeXbook_ , the manual on how to use TeX, is
called “Fine Points of Mathematics Typing” and teaches the careful reader
about aspects of typography that TeX does _not_ handle automatically — and
this is not even counting such advice in other chapters such as ties for
avoiding line breaks in “psychologically bad” places. See for example
[http://www.rtznet.nl/zink/comparison.pdf](http://www.rtznet.nl/zink/comparison.pdf)
(linked from
[http://www.rtznet.nl/zink/latex.php?lang=en](http://www.rtznet.nl/zink/latex.php?lang=en))
comparing plain-text paragraphs in Word and InDesign and TeX. If you look at
the “bad” typesetting that Knuth rejected as painful
([https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/367133](https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/367133)),
I think you get the idea :-)

~~~
leephillips
Many good points. I would just point out that plain TeX itself is a format, a
set of macros on top of TeX—just not a elaborate as LaTeX. So I’m not sure
there is that much conflict between the two visions.

~~~
svat
Oh yes definitely: some of the “sins” of LaTeX (doing too much with TeX
macros, etc) do start with Knuth himself (though he seems to have been doing
it for fun rather than prescribing it for general use), and some are in plain
TeX too. But though I wouldn't call it conflict, I think there _is_ a
difference (of focus at least), which comes across in the way they are used:
Knuth does all his writing, editing, and polishing with pencil on paper, and
only uses the computer to finally type it up for typesetting and fine-tuning
the appearance. (Also, he tends to use not plain TeX necessarily but take
ideas from it and create a separate “format” for other documents.)

On the other hand, LaTeX is clearly designed with the vision of being a
complete “document preparation system” for authors from the moment they first
turn their thoughts into words. The former approach I guess is feasible today
if you do most of your “document” stuff in another place (if not pencil and
paper, then maybe a plain text editor or Markdown or…) and use TeX only at the
end, for typesetting.

~~~
leephillips
Ahh, now that you put it that way, yes, I think you are exactly right. For me,
the real reason I started to use LaTeX had nothing to do with document
formatting, which I had already figured out how to do with plain TeX (writing
a 200-page thesis in it). It was the automatic handling of equation numbers
and other labels.

------
the_svd_doctor
I have such a love-hate relationship with Latex. I use it almost every day. I
love how easy it is to write beautiful math, and how easy it is to organize
well large documents. It's fast (in general). And, thank god, there are lots
of information online.

But boy do I hate the whole semi-broken macro-based system. The package
management feels so outdated. Errors are hard to decipher. Package
documentation is there but takes days and days if you actually want to read
it.

And then you use Tikz. Same result. Beautiful neat graphs. Horrible obscure
macro based system with impossible-to-understand error messages.

~~~
zzo38computer
There is also Plain TeX. Many scientists use LaTeX; a few people (including
myself) use Plain TeX. (At least, I find Plain TeX less confusing.)

~~~
thechao
Right!? I feel like TeX is good, but most of the problems are actually
outdated _La_ TeX issues.

------
leephillips
I really enjoyed looking at the examples of old books and manuscripts. But
Matplotlib is only the go-to tool for graphs if you are using Python (and some
Python users prefer something else). It’s not a universal tool like [La]TeX.
The closest thing to that in this sphere would be gnuplot.

TeX appeared when I was in graduate school. Before it did, we were using
troff, or whatever it was called, which produced hideous output. TeX was a
revelation. That’s why everyone switched to it, despite the hardships endured
when trying to get it to do what you wanted. The output looked like a
beautiful, hand-set book. There was nothing else that came anywhere close. I
wrote my thesis in plain TeX, using a Mac Plus ($1400 with a deep student
discount). When LaTeX appeared, the selling point was not formatting, but
automatic handling of labels and references. You could add a numbered equation
in the middle of your document, without having to re-number, and track down
references to, the hundred equations that came after it. Glorious.

Before LaTeX? The previous generation, my professors, wrote things out in hand
and gave the result to a secretary. Those with terrible handwriting might type
the text, leaving spaces for the math, which they added with a pen. They
didn’t waste time time formatting the paper; that was someone else’s job. TeX
created a generation of typographical obsessives, including me. Whatever the
secretary did wasn’t _good enough_.

------
BiteCode_dev
I always wondered the opposite: how do researchers can get any work done when
they have to formalize it using LateX?

I've tried writting a book using LateX, and it's been nothing but a miserable
experience. I'm been coding for 15 years, and tweaking my Linux machine for
longer. I know what it means to face rought edges.

But LaTeX is another level of shenanigans.

I seem to understand that researchers use latex because of the seemingless
formula integration and automation of references.

Well, why not use asciidoc ([https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-
manual/#mathematical-expre...](https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-
manual/#mathematical-expressions)) or myst ([https://myst-
parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/using/syntax.ht...](https://myst-
parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/using/syntax.html)) then? They are an order of
magnitude easier to use, they can generate websites and pdf, use markdown but
allow extensions, they support references, and accept latex formulas.

Is it a case of "everybody uses it so I have to"?

~~~
ergl
Network effects have a lot to do with it. Conferences will give you style
files that only work with Latex, and some require the .tex sources when you
submit your article.

------
LudwigNagasena
What I don’t understand is why Latex so cumbersome, complicated, unintuitive,
ugly and slow. Is it simply a technical debt of choices made in time when
computers were different and when there were different constraints? Is it just
a nature of the problem and every tool will feel the same? Is it a result of
evolution with a lack of direction? Was literate programming a bad design
decision?

~~~
xamuel
If you're an actual mathematician writing pages and pages of equations, LaTeX
is not complicated, unintuitive, ugly, or slow. It's actually extremely well
designed for addressing what is a very difficult problem, the problem of
translating mathematics into ASCII. For how difficult that problem is, LaTeX
is quite genius.

I think a lot of the would-be LaTeX-disruptors lack enough experience actually
writing mathematics. LaTeX worked because Donald Knuth is both a great
programmer AND a good mathematician. When LaTeX gets replaced, it'll need to
replaced by a person (or team) with similar cross-disciplinary strengths.

~~~
ketzu
Are you specifically talking about the math syntax within latex, or actual
latex commands in general? Because I would disagree on the latter one. (But
I'm a computer scientist not a mathematician.) uglyness is porbably hard to
discuss as it's just a matter of taste.

I personally consider compile times that are measured in seconds for "simple"
tasks slow (here's the question of it being an inherent problem of the space).

~~~
magicalhippo
As someone who did both math courses and programming courses, I found LaTeX to
be awesome for writing equations. It felt so natural I would more often then
not solve equations in LaTeX directly.

However when writing stuff for my comp-sci courses, man what a chore. Pseudo-
code was a PITA, as was getting decent tables of results where I wanted. So
for a lot of those I threw my hands in the air and finished the paper using
Word.

It might have been me, I try to learn as I went along, but it certainly was
not as easy as math.

~~~
danielscrubs
Markdown (via Pandoc) with the tex_math_dollars extension for math is the bees
knees.

------
heisenbit
Knuth did TeX, Lampert did LaTeX. As this is about typesetting most of the
credit should got to Knuth. LaTeX is more about structure of the content.

------
iraphael
Hey everyone! Thread author here. Happy to see so many people taking an
interest in beautiful scientific communication!

If anyone has other examples of beautiful typography or graphing/figures
throughout history, I'd love to see them! I've been replying to the original
thread on twitter with some favorites:
[https://twitter.com/iraphas13/status/1262489387767480322?s=2...](https://twitter.com/iraphas13/status/1262489387767480322?s=20)

~~~
mikhailfranco
I believe Roger Penrose draws all his own illustrations. For copius excellent
examples, see his book _Road to Reality_. Here is one example:

[https://phys.org/news/2018-03-math-bridges-holography-
twisto...](https://phys.org/news/2018-03-math-bridges-holography-twistor-
theory.html)

[https://theportal.wiki/images/1/11/Penrose-Rindler-
Clifford-...](https://theportal.wiki/images/1/11/Penrose-Rindler-Clifford-
parallels.jpg)

He also comes from the pre-ppt age of presenting with handwritten acetate
transparencies - and still does afaik. Many of his slides have been captured
for the infowebs.

[http://cgpg.gravity.psu.edu/online/Html/Seminars/Fall1998/Pe...](http://cgpg.gravity.psu.edu/online/Html/Seminars/Fall1998/Penrose/)

[http://cgpg.gravity.psu.edu/online/Html/Seminars/Fall1998/Pe...](http://cgpg.gravity.psu.edu/online/Html/Seminars/Fall1998/Penrose/Slides/s19.html)

Some of his original papers from the 1960s were not published at the time, but
circulated as _samizdat_ facsimiles of his handwritten notes, until later
transcribed by professors or their students, then published in book
collections:

[http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/penrose/Penrose-
TheoryOfQuanti...](http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/penrose/Penrose-
TheoryOfQuantizedDirections.pdf)

Penrose is famous for his visual imagination, which seems to ground many of
his insights. Here is a paper where he invents a visual notation for tensors
and operators:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_graphical_notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_graphical_notation)

[http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Penrose.pdf](http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Penrose.pdf)

This has inspired recent work by Bob Coecke, as captured in his beautiful book
_Picturing Quantum Processes_.

(arXiv example:
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1787.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/0908.1787.pdf))

------
danbr
Better title would have been: ‘How was research ever presented in a clean,
pleasantly formatted document before LaTeX?’

~~~
meristem
Yup-- this helps collaboration and communication across teams, not research
processes.

------
macintux
Reminded me of the recent piece: Crafting Crafting Interpreters, in which
Nystrom describes his process for creating hand-drawn diagrams.

[http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2020/04/05/crafting-
crafti...](http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2020/04/05/crafting-crafting-
interpreters/)

~~~
mikhailfranco
This beautiful booklet my Tai-Danae Bradley also contains hand-drawn diagrams:

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.05923.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.05923.pdf)

It is set using the _Tufte_ LaTeX template:

[https://twitter.com/math3ma/status/1042569522056716289](https://twitter.com/math3ma/status/1042569522056716289)

[https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/tufte](https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/tufte)

------
billfruit
I feel like there is too much love/worship around here for LaTeX, despite
concerns like it being not a good master format, and it mixing logical and
physical formatting together.

But I do think that Markdown/Asciidoc is a viable system for very many tasks.

------
jankotek
I read some advanced physics czech book from 1991, just after velvet
revolution. It was written on type writer, charts and formulas hand drawn.
Xeroxed to final count of 500 copies. You work with what you got.

------
new_realist
Research is done despite LaTeX.

------
gnulinux
In university I used to write literally everything in Latex. Papers,
homeworks, notes, classnotes during class, personal stuff, everything and
everything. All my math/CS professors gave us assignments/exams/everything in
documents obviously written in Latex (some of my profs were even kind enough
to give us .tex source).

I was taking this Geography class as a social science elective. We had a paper
assignment, and my professor was talking about how it's important to submit HW
in this specific format and that they'll give sample .docx file. At the time I
didn't have any word processor on my computer so I just quickly asked the
professor if it's ok to submit PDF in the same format as I use latex to do my
hws. She was like "what is latex"? I'm not a native speaker so I thought I
just mispronounced it and described it to her, and she was like no I don't
know that you should write your paper in Word. I was stunned. I asked her how
do geographers submit their research papers, and she said we just use Word.

------
oldsklgdfth
A fun little fact from the wikipedia page[0].

> Since version 3, TeX has used an idiosyncratic version numbering system,
> where updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the
> decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches π. This is a
> reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates
> are anticipated.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX)

------
supernova87a
Does this story have to be linked to such a shitty ad-filled website? I mean,
there are ads right smack in the middle of the figures and pictures of
importance.

------
stared
And speaking of typesetting _after_ LaTeX, I recommend giving RMarkdown
Distill, scientific and technical writing, native to the web
([https://rstudio.github.io/distill/](https://rstudio.github.io/distill/)) a
try.

There are references with a mouseover, possible to include an interactive
chart D3.js, etc. Right now I use it for an internal report in deep learning.

------
rory_h_r
A lot of the classic papers by Maxwell, Newton, Faraday etc. are available
online. They look great but you can only imagine what a pain typesetting these
used to be.

See, for example this paper by Maxwell from 1865:
[https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rstl.1865...](https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rstl.1865.0008)

------
jhallenworld
In the late 80s I remember looking at many SIGARCH papers that were printed on
crappy dot matrix printers. I thought this was kind of awesome- it's a
combination of "who cares about the font when my paper has a good CPU
architectural innovation" and "with my new microcomputer there is no need to
pay for professional typesetting".

------
utopcell
OT.

I am surprised that the LaTeX name didn't end up in a heated argument between
Don Knuth and Leslie Lamport, like the infamous GNU/Linux vs Linux dispute
between Stallman and Torvalds.

Maybe scientists are more civilized, maybe it helped that LaTeX already has
TeX embedded in its name.

In retrospect, Lignux might not have been a bad name. The 'g' would be silent
of course.

~~~
leephillips
I can’t imagine either one of those guys giving a crap.

~~~
utopcell
Agreed.

------
munificent
A couple years back, I read Niklaus Wirth's "Algorithms + Data Structures =
Programs", published by Prentice Hall in 1976.

It is a truly beautiful book. Cover, typesetting, illustrations. It just feels
compact, clean, and elegant in a way that marvelously reinforces Wirth's own
aesthetic. They really don't make them like they used to.

------
arminiusreturns
I think org-mode is the best of all these worlds. I can breakout into latex
where I need to, or can export to latex. I can export to html5 and css3 with
custom templates, and can run code in blocks. I just wish other editors would
work on org support because it feels like jupyter will eat a lot of the cake
that org mode should be getting.

------
jyriand
It was an interesting read, as I never thought that this might be a problem in
the first place. It seems that to really care/know about LaTex you have to be
hard core scientist working on academia. I was wondering why it's being
mentioned so often on HN. I think research specific typography can only be
advanced by someone who is experiencing these problems firsthand.

------
TrackerFF
I used LaTeX a lot in college, but I'm gonna be honest - _IF_ I could do the
work in Microsoft word, I sure as hell would use word. Doing math in word with
its built in math editor was incredibly fast, though at the expense of beauty,
structure, flexibility.

------
omarhaneef
Before LateX?

Just do a rough cuneiform sketch on papyrus before you carve into the clay
tablet for storage, right?

~~~
contravariant
I think you've got your writing mediums swapped around.

------
alphagrep12345
Why is latex needed? If we use can integrate a good math renderer to docs, why
can't people use that instead?

~~~
BiteCode_dev
If you cram a lot of formulas, images and graphs into a world document, you'll
have an instable slug to work with.

Also, rendering a beautiful word document is quite chalenge.

Rendered latex document looks stunningly clean and professional out of the
box.

They also are plain text, which mean they can be diffed, used with git indexed
easily, etc. They play well with anything, being text.

You can even read them without having to render them.

And finally, latex check the structure of your doc. If you change it, it will
crash, preventing you from commiting dead references.

------
rjsw
My mother worked as a typist for a research lab, the stuff to type up could be
handwritten or spoken.

------
b3n4kh
I love that I can just read this handwrting, I usually can't even read my
own...

------
BlueTemplar
LaTeX is great, but it's obsolete (bad Unicode support), and is output to a
problematic format (pdf).

~~~
Mediterraneo10
Unicode support in LaTeX has not been an issue since XeTeX became mature
technology, so over a decade already.

~~~
leephillips
Exactly. You can even markup math using Unicode. Here is Stokes' Theorem:

\\[ ∫_Σ ∇ ⨯ 𝐅 ⋅ dΣ = ∮_{∂Σ}𝐅⋅d𝐫 \\]

That will turn into a typeset version when run through LaTeX (using the
unicode-math package). More details at
[https://lwn.net/Articles/657157/](https://lwn.net/Articles/657157/).

Also, any format _except_ PDF is problematic. PDF is the only (widely used)
format that will preserve formatting.

