
TeX Live 2014 - golem12
http://latex-community.org/home/news/46-news-latex-distributions/497-texlive-2014
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norswap
I'm a PhD student, so I use LaTeX on a daily basis, and it makes me very sad
that there's no viable alternative. LaTeX is a horrid mess of language design,
mostly due to not being a language, but rather a set of macros on top of TeX,
with all the problems you can imagine, esp. the error messages that makes a
C++ template error read like Shakespeare in comparison.

The core pain of LaTeX may be summarized in only two words: poor
composability. Anything (package) can break anything else. The environments
offered by many package cannot be composed.

To top it off, almost no-one has an understanding of the underlying semantics
of LaTeX. Few people even know how LaTeX macros work (and I'll include myself
in that). LaTeX lives off cut and paste more than PHP and Javascript ever did.
This is made more tragic by the fact that the people using LaTeX (in many
cases academics, not script kiddies) should know better.

I really think there is a market in providing a clean replacement to LaTeX by
the way. Seen the prevalence of LaTeX in large institutions, it wouldn't be
hard to get them to pay for a better solution if you could get the users on
your side.

~~~
wirrbel
For the reader who is not familiar with Tex/Latex: Tex is a typesetting system
designed by Knuth with the purpose of enabling him (Knuth) to typeset a math
paper in a way that a good classical typesetter would have done (with the
skils aquired in years of training).

Latex is a set of Tex macros that turns Tex into something more similar to a
Markup language where one does mark up headings for headings etc.

While Tex is exceptional in its quality, robustness and beauty (it is probably
one of the oldes software pieces still in wide use), Latex has a lot more dark
corners as user norswap points out.

Latex enables average users to use Tex without having to think about how to
lay out a document. Latex makes a lot of good choices in Layout (and a few bad
ones too).

Nevertheless -- and that continues to amaze me -- Latex and its
documentclasses continue to be the only viable choice for scientific
typesetting by PhD students who just don't have the time to learn plain Tex.

There are a few Tex-based alternatives (Context for example) that could be
considered equal, but Latex seems to offer a reasonable experience.

In the WYSIWYG realm, there is hardly viable competition. Word or
LibreOffice/OpenOffice, Docbook/XSLT/XML:FO, etc. Most of them produce
inferior results or provide an inferior user experience.

I have heard countless stories of people who opted to not use Latex for their
thesis/drafts, and the pain is unspeakable. A friend realized - when turning
in his thesis - that page numbering was off on odd pages in the copy he meant
to turn in last minute (was there on the draft printed out 3 hours before). A
lecturer had his PhD dissertation published by its subtitle because by
accident it vanished during the title. Countless How-to-write-your-thesis
guides of the early 2000s adviced to not write more than 20 pages within the
same document of a popular word processor since it was known to easily crash
then. And have I mentioned how much more painful handling citations is in most
word processors? Bibtex et. al is not comfortable, but I would prefer it to
most other solutions on the market. The manual for a product at a company
where I worked at had odd page numbers in serif fonts and even in sans serif
fonts. It was produced not with a consumer word processor but with a
"professional" tool. An XSL:FO based report generator that I once had to use
produced horrible typesetting (and made the machine swap while formatting that
textual output, 4GB of RAM were not enough). And changing things was
nightmarish.

I wonder what the future of Tex and Latex is, but I do not see serious
competition on the horizon, especially not in areas, where people have to get
things done.

My best bet is, that the haskell folks will be able to provide an alternative
in a few years, the diagrams library has already taken on Metafont and pandoc
has been proven to be great for parsing text markup. The meta language of the
diagrams library has shown that Haskell is actually suitable and expressive
for drawing and arranging items. Until then, Tex will rule the world of
outstanding scientific typesetting for the average scientist.

~~~
porker
> In the WYSIWYG realm, there is hardly viable competition

I used LyX as a student [http://www.lyx.org/](http://www.lyx.org/). It was a
great way to quickly generate a LaTeX document and then fiddle around with it
at the end. That was the 1.5 version, they're now on 2.1 which looks much more
polished.

~~~
igravious
Except that LyX is not a WYSIWYG environment, remember? LyX is a GUI
environment that hides TeX/LaTeX macros and commands but it's not WYSIWYG.
Remember that WYSIWYG means that what you see (on the screen) is what you get
(on the printed page) which LyX most certainly does not do. Not bashing LyX,
mind you, I use it myself and it's great.

~~~
daxelrod
The term Lyx uses for what it does is WYSIWM (What You See Is What You Mean)
to describe the fact the GUI lets users manipulate the _structure_ of the
document.

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jimhefferon
The TL team essentially do the impossible-- the software is large and _very_
complex and the people skills required are no less of a challenge-- and they
do it every year. Karl and the others are wizards.

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jahewson
> "Fake spaces" have been introduced. The original TeX does not insert space
> characters between words. Instead, words and punctuation characters are
> positioned for optimal full justification without an explicit space
> character inbetween.

This has been the cause of text extraction being a nightmare for TeX PDFs,
glad it's finally fixed, even if it took 16 years!

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soundsop
How to upgrade via the command line for Unix or Mac:
[https://www.tug.org/texlive/upgrade.html](https://www.tug.org/texlive/upgrade.html)

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raspas42
Does anyone know why TeX Live is so huge compared to other typesetting
programs & office suites?

It is even bigger than all of the Web browsers, which can perform all the
tasks as Tex and many other once.

~~~
taejo
Thousands of bibliography styles, document styles, fonts in multiple formats,
as well as basically every macro package ever written. And it's actually
several typesetting programs: TeX, LaTeX, PdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX...

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na85
Can't wait for 2018 when this might finally hit Debian stable.

