
XeTeX: could it be TeX's saviour? - steeleduncan
http://vallettaventures.com/post/20061046069/xetex-could-it-be-texs-saviour
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jwr
There are two problems with TeX (in general):

1\. It is a _local_ maximum. It produces great output and works now. Changing
it requires a huge effort which will result in a system that is inferior, for
many years to come. Only then another maximum could be achieved. This means
there is resistance to change — it's easier to adapt to TeX's flaws than it is
to write something completely new. Many systems suffer from similar fate
(think Emacs).

2\. It is a black hole, a programmer sink. People start using TeX and curse
it, then they learn it, and by the time they know its limitations and are
ready to take on a job of writing something better, they are proficient enough
in TeX to stay within it. Many systems suffer from similar fate (think Emacs).

I wonder if something will eventually happen to budge the TeX community from
where it is now.

~~~
wladimir
_Many systems suffer from similar fate (think Emacs)_

That happens so much in software there needs to be a word for it, a term of
its own.

After a while, you get deep enough in the rabbit hole so that it seems your
initial judgement of redundant complexity was wrong. Even though it's still
true, you've adapted to it. You just can't see it from the viewpoint of
someone new anymore. For this reason I tend to carefully write down my initial
concerns with something.

More on-topic, I don't think what TeX needs is a complete, sudden break with
the past. It would be better to deprecate old, flawed features, and later on
disable them and provide and optional compatibility mode (which is a bigger
download).

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larsberg
XeTeX-generated PDFs are not compatible with the toolchains of some academic
publishers (Cambridge University Press, which publishes the Journal of
Functional Programming comes to mind, but I seem to recall Springer-Verlag
having issues as well). Without full support for academic publishers, I
believe that majority of TeX users could not upgrade.

~~~
JoshTriplett
What about XeTeX-generated PDFs makes them incompatible?

~~~
larsberg
Great question; I have no idea. We just get mail back from the editors that
says things like, "your PDF breaks our scripts; regenerate it directly with
LaTeX."

Some, like Springer-Verlag, also have an editorial process where you have to
send your .tex files to them and they will merge all of the documents and run
LaTeX on them. I don't even know how you could get xetex (or pdflatex) to work
with that system.

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JoachimSchipper
Umm, have these people ever _heard_ of backward compatibility? Admittedly,
many TeX package authors haven't either, but just dropping pstricks is going
to make a ridiculous number of documents that have a figure in them impossible
to compile. Not to mention the fact that TikZ, while better, is not better
_enough_ that everyone will want to invest time learning it...

MikTeX's install-on-first-use has its problems, but does help balance bloat
and not removing older packages.

~~~
jvm
Can't they just maintain both a bloated legacy version and a stripped down
version that they focus on?

~~~
gchpaco
The TeX community in general has a philosophy that anything written since 1983
(TeX'83) or so should a) compile and b) produce precisely the same typeset
document if it is recompiled today. This has obnoxious issues and is one of
the reasons for the profusion of packages--the norm is to change the name for
incompatible changes so that old users can continue on.

~~~
jwr
Which is a ridiculous goal, because, in general, most documents found in the
wild are portable if transported together with the author's computer system.
Chances of successfully producing typeset output from a .tex file (+ a bunch
of external files) that you get from someone else are slim to none.

I'm glad there is a movement to do something. I used to use TeX but stopped a
long time ago, because it was simply too much pain for too little gain. I
still have to deal with it sometimes when helping my wife who publishes
scientific papers. Whenever she mentions that she needs "a small modification
in the BibTeX style", I get nightmares.

~~~
gchpaco
Actually anything that's gotten as far as journal publication should be
exactly reproducible; I remember having to include the packages I was using
and everything else in one archive for my couple of journal publications.
Conceded that folks are not quite so careful for off the cuff work; same thing
as having file:/// URIs in web pages.

And I'm hesitant to complain about it too greatly; my father's PhD thesis
cannot be reproduced without a specific type ball for a Selectric and I know
of numerous people who have kept dragging their old text files off disk packs
to magtape to 8" disks to 5 1/4" disks to 3 1/2" disks and finally to CD ROMs
where they have to duplicate all the CDs every few years lest they become
unreadable due to dye fade. I know several photographers who are downright
paranoid about an almost literal bitrot—if you ever want to see someone
spitting mad with rage, telling a photographer that his precious negative or
RAW file cannot be located, or read, or even decoded (a nontrivial issue with
RAWs and older image formats, and depending on language and system even with
text files!) will get you there.

Saying "if you preserved the files, we will recreate your masterpiece exactly"
might be an overreaction to this but it's not impossible to understand where
people are coming from. Particularly the poor dears coming from Word where
moving a document from 2002 to 2008 will change the typesetting subtly and
sometimes not so subtly.

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rmk2
>> Undoubtably a change this severe will be painful for some, but it will be
less less painful than heading out to the computer shop in 3 years time to
purchase the 2TB harddrive that will be required for the exponentially
expanding tex updates.

Few arguments ever gain feasibility from hyperbole, this article is not an
exception. The size of his texlive installation is purely circumstantial
evidence, since that folder also includes backups of updated packages and all
sorts of other "dynamic", i.e. user-specific data. Basing the argument on that
seems...silly.

>> For those for whom adding the letters xe before typesetting is too much to
bear, or for typesetting ancient documents

It isn't as easy as "just adding xe" before (La)TeX, since not all packages
are integrated with it yet, and since the polyglossia package is _still_ not
fully stable, either (yes I know babel is old, but at least stable), so some
packages have trouble dealing with polyglossia or have experimental interfaces
in order to work with Xe(La)TeX. Csquotes is one of the packages that comes to
mind. A further problem with XeTeX is that it _still_ does not offer a
_proper_ version of the microtype package. And on top of everything, the
hyperref-support for colours is spotty at times, at least for me.

For me, depending on situation, pdflatex and xelatex live happily next to each
other and are both included in the same in my generic template via the
_ifxetex_ package and \ifxetex...\else...\fi, so depending on what I need in a
given instance, running either binary on the same file produces either output.

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siphr
In all honesty I did not realise LaTeX needed saving.

~~~
_delirium
Outside of mathematics and physics conference/journal publishing, there's a
widespread perception that it's losing ground. In CS some conferences are
slowly switching to Word, or offering an option to authors (who are slowly
switching to Word, especially outside of theory-heavy areas). In book
publishing it's shrunk to a very small niche, even in technical areas. Part of
the problem is cruftiness of tools, and part is the bizzareness of the
underlying languages. As far as I can tell, few people who've written
significant chunks of LaTeX stylesheet code or TeX macros/packages think the
language is good, and it's complex/weird enough that even the vast majority of
people who've written dozens of papers in LaTeX have no idea how to make
nontrivial changes to its stylesheets. Also, many of the base tools _still_
don't have Unicode support.

Belief that something is broken and attempts to fix it are a 20-year-old
refrain at this point, e.g. ConTeXt is an attempt to make TeX more usable for
book publishing, LuaTeX is an attempt to reduce reliance on TeX macros in
favor of a less weird scripting language, XeTeX is a project to add Unicode,
etc.

~~~
SeanLuke
> In CS some conferences are slowly switching to Word, or offering an option
> to authors (who are slowly switching to Word, especially outside of theory-
> heavy areas).

Huh? In my research areas (evolutionary computation, machine learning,
artificial intelligence, multiagent systems, robotics) this isn't remotely
true. CS conferences of almost all stripes have _always_ offered non-LaTeX
submission routes. But LaTeX dominance is just as strong, if not stronger,
than it used to be ten years ago.

Indeed, I think that the stigma surrounding Word submission in conference
papers, journal articles, books, theses, even grant proposal submissions, is
so strong that one must think twice before using it in the bulk of CS fields.

~~~
_delirium
It varies by sub-area, but artificial intelligence is also my area, and I
don't see that dominance anymore, especially in the more interdisciplinary
areas (anything that overlaps with HCI, psychology, cognitive science, etc.).
I also don't see the stigma anymore among younger researchers; I detect that
attitude from older people mostly, and some of the "harder core than thou"
people in math-heavy sub-areas, but there's a bigger mix of preferences among
people under 35 who work in less math-y areas. I use TeX myself when it's my
choice, but I've collaborated on Word papers as well, if I wasn't the primary
author/instigator, and it seems common/expected these days. Especially if
someone from industry has been the instigator (e.g. on DARPA-contract type
research), or if it's interdisciplinary with someone not from CS/math, they've
preferred Word.

AAAI, IJCAI, and AAMAS now provide both options, and my informal observation
is that more Word papers are being submitted than used to be the case,
especially but not exclusively when it comes to authors from industry. CHI
recently officially deprecated LaTeX as a supported option, but still provides
the old (no longer maintained) stylesheets as a courtesy. Several universities
(e.g. Georgia Tech) have also stopped officially supporting LaTeX stylesheets
for theses and moved to Word as the only official option, though they do
distribute student-edited LaTeX stylesheets as a courtesy. I assume that one's
because nobody in the IT department knows how to edit the stylesheets. The
unofficial GT thesis stylesheet is a hilarious example of copy/paste cruft,
too, with bits taken from 20-year old U. Texas stylesheets and various other
places.

~~~
SeanLuke
> AAAI, IJCAI, and AAMAS

These venues have had Word options for well over a decade or more. I recall a
higher rate of Word (and HTML!) submissions in Agent97 -- the predecessor of
AAMAS -- than I see in AAMAS now. At any rate I think there are few
significant changes in LaTeX usage in those conferences.

You're right that the big place where Word shows up in CS is in HCI, software
engineering, and interdisciplinary areas. Is it possible that, given your
mention of CHI, that you're from these areas and possibly experiencing a
sample bias?

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beza1e1
The mission of TeXLive is to include everything and the kitchen sink. However,
why should their TeXpad support everything? They could go the XeTeX+biber+TikZ
route and educate their users how to switch from pdflatex,bibtex,pstricks,etc.

~~~
tincholio
Precisely, there are other people out there who use TeX in different ways.
They should just target their preferred compilation chain and just handle that
in their app (they are not wrong in thinking that _most_ people out there just
wan LaTeX to spit out PDFs and use "normal" graphics).

Otherwise, has anyone used their app? How does it stack against
Emacs+AucTex+RefTex+Skim?

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antihero
I think one of the best moves to get this in the works would be updated
tutorials and documentation "Using LaTeX in 2012" or whatever, because a huge
amount of the resources out there will promote use of outdated or old packages
that would hinder moving forward.

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radarsat1
Why is it necessary for TeX to keep all the libraries in source form on disk?
Why not use compression, or package some pre-compiled form of the library
code, or both?

~~~
Avshalom
From what I understand everything above TeX is one giant text manipulation
macro, which means it all has to be available to the programs in text form,
you could compress it but that would me decompressing hundreds (thousands?) of
files every time you compile.

~~~
radarsat1
I understand, but I'm not convinced that the macros couldn't be somehow
compiled down to some more compressed binary representation. Regardless, I
still think keeping them on disk in a tarball or something would be more
economical. Decompression can be quite fast if the right compressor is used.

~~~
JadeNB
> I understand, but I'm not convinced that the macros couldn't be somehow
> compiled down to some more compressed binary representation.

My understanding is that this is what .fmt files are for. I'm not sure where
the line is drawn between what goes in a .fmt file and what is packaged as
ordinary TeX code; I imagine that, like much else about TeX (which I love), it
reflects the machine constraints with which Knuth was faced while writing it
(in the late '70's and early '80's).

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ajray
I just use XeTeX so I can get proper kerning and ligatures. Oddly enough, as a
typography nerd LaTeX just doesn't cut it.

~~~
leephillips
I understand that XeTeX allows some fancy ligatures and access to other
opentype features, but what's lacking in [La]TeX's kerning, and basic ligature
support?

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MrKurtHaeusler
I have used XeLaTeX for a while because of the support for freetype fonts and
better support for unicode.

Linux Libertine is my favorite font for XeLaTeX because it has better
ligatures than any of the computer modern etc. fonts.

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leephillips
I didn't understand why they wanted to port LaTeX to the iPad when they first
wrote about it:

<http://lee-phillips.org/latexipad/>

~~~
jacobwil
I'm sorry, but your logic here is just terrible. Your argument is that "I
don't want an iPad" and "The iPad isn't a full computer" implies that "Nobody
needs/wants LaTeX on an iPad". This doesn't logically follow and is instead a
self-centered presumption that because you don't want something, nobody else
does.

They want LaTeX on their iPads, I would like LaTeX on my iPad, and I have met
other people who also want LaTeX on their iPads. When I'm taking notes, LaTeX
works well _for me_ (I'm not claiming for everyone) when I need to type up
equations. I use my iPad with a bluetooth keyboard to take notes (the iPad's
battery life (amongst other things) makes it very attractive for this
application). I'd like to be able to render my equations to make sure I didn't
make a transcription error.

~~~
leephillips
That would indeed be a bad argument. I'm glad I didn't try to make it. The
iPad is a superb browsing/reading device. But sometimes people insist on using
the wrong tool for the job. You want LaTeX on your iPad. But you don't have it
and won't get it, because it's not a computer. That was my point. You want to
take notes and use LaTeX? Why didn't you buy a used Thinkpad for $100 from
ebay and install linux? That's what I did. I don't have the excellent iPad
screen (or the battery life - I certainly see your point there), but I don't
have to say "I wish this could run LaTeX / Gimp / gcc / python / ....".

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killa_bee
I use xelatex in my work and it's still embarassingly fragmented and outdated.
We need to start over on a new TeX-like project (also so that it can be ported
to mobile).

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dfc
I thought that luatex was going to be the savior?

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gnosis
The lack of microtype support in XeTeX is a deal breaker. That's the main
reason why I continue to use pdflatex.

~~~
rmk2
Microtype is partially supported (read: half of what it mainly does), i.e.
protrusion sort of works, but expansion does not. Protrusion is already
_something_ , though I agree that this is one of the biggest things holding me
back from switching completely.

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jhnewhall
Tex, because it's author didn't care to reuse XML.

Having used it for publications and during the university i really, i despise
Tex. Simply the language sucks, the outcome is nice, but those slashes and
parenthesis really sucked.

With a XML syntax we could easily create beautiful editors, make it easy to
parse with schema validation, etc.

Problem is that this card castle grew, avoiding alternatives such as docbook,
and is and will always be a mess, since it's foundations are not parseable.

~~~
jff
XML: published 1996.

TeX: Initially released 1978.

Plus, writing XML makes me puke, so even with the occasional grossness of TeX
syntax I'm happy it's not XML.

