

Hey Latex users, I have an idea for you - petar
http://www.maymounkov.org/hey-latex

======
sedev
What I get from this article is "hey, what if we use HTML instead of LaTeX?"
Unfortunately the answer to this is, "HTML is insufficient to specify all the
things you need to make a paper publishable." LaTeX is a full-strength gnarly
language _because it had to be._ If you were targeting digital distribution
only, HTML (and the author really means "HTML plus CSS plus probably a small
subset of JavaScript") would be maybe-kinda-sorta-plausible, but you can
already go from LaTeX to HTML --- so why not write your original in the more
powerful language and simplify it down to HTML when you need that? HTML+CSS+JS
is actually not an improvement on PDFs, because you've got executable code in
there and you'll go right down the same security-problems rabbit hole that PDF
did.

To oversimplify: LaTeX is not perfect but is much smarter than the author is
giving it credit for. This is that stereotypical Unix learning experience
("feature X is enormously frustrating, why can't we do something simpler" ->
time passes -> "oh, feature X is actually spectacularly useful when viewed
through the right lens") going on.

~~~
songgao
> "HTML is insufficient to specify all the things you need to make a paper
> publishable."

Actually I've been wondering why we have to make academic papers
"publishable". Majority of researchers read papers on computer. Even they read
on paper, it's printed out from a downloaded PDF. If everything is transferred
as electronic format, I'm not sure traditional typesetting is still necessary.

HTML based articles have option to be interactive and visually better. This
enables better communication, which is the purpose of publishing papers. HTML
is also more structured than close sourced PDF, and structured data is more
machine friendly. I'm not only talking about SEO, but also
citations/indexing/etc.. HTML is also easier to be embedded into other
content. This makes, e.g. peer-review, easier.

If any, I think the main obstacle of HTML formatted technical papers is
traditional publishers. They make a lot of money out of publishing and this
would potentially squeeze their profit.

~~~
ams6110
While anecdotal, every researcher I know prints papers for reading or
reviewing. High-quality typesetting makes printed papers much easier to read.

~~~
songgao
I might be biased on "majority of researchers read papers on computer". As to
"high-quality typesetting", I think that depends on your standard of "high-
quality". If the goal is "easier to read", then it doesn't have to be
traditional typesetting. LaTex is not the only way to make authentic
typesetting (and don't get me wrong; I use LaTex a lot myself). You can do
that in HTML/CSS too. Actually HTML is more flexible on this because you can
provide different views (e.g. Sans-Serif vs Serif fonts) for your reader for
on-display reading and printed-out reading.

EDIT: typo

~~~
DennisP
If there were a browser plugin that applied Knuth's linebreaking algorithm for
printouts, this would be more appealing.

------
gordaco
I wouldn't like to sound too harsh, but honestly, it seems like the author
doesn't have any idea about what LaTeX can do, or what is it used for. Many of
us would prefer LaTeX over HTML for almost any kind of document, without
hesitation. It has many more functions both at lower and higher level, it's
easily extendable (tired about \left( and \right)? Just define a \paren{}
function! And that's just a tiny example), it has guaranteed support for
certain characters (in HTML+CSS+Js, the browser can affect the font and
possibly the encoding), etc., etc., etc. Well, yeah, it probably can't be used
to create a web app, but, you know, most documents don't have the slightest
need to behave like a web app.

It reminds me of the people who want to "fix email", without realizing that
the only problem is that email doesn't cover certain use case that affects
them, but it's fine for a lot of purposes.

~~~
srl
I actually prefer making ( and ) be active characters that expand, in math
mode, to \left( and \right) -- as long as I never need them for anything else,
I'm happy.

------
smithzvk
Does anybody else see really weird vertical kerning on this page. It seems
like the line drops by a few pixels every few words... interesting, since this
is a page about how we should switch to something more like HTML for
typesetting...

~~~
shawnz
For some reason, the entire page has a random rotation and skew applied to it
with CSS.

------
jwise0
> The strongest force, it seems, that keeps academia in Latex is that it is
> required, literally, by the publisher, as the scientist's end result.

I think that's false. The author's claim is that "inertia is why we still use
LaTeX"; I think the strongest force that keeps the publishing community in
LaTeX is that it does a hell of a lot more than HTML.

For people who are reading papers all day, _typesetting matters_. If I need to
digest a difficult concept, I don't want to spend any brain cycles _at all_ on
bad formatting, because I want to spend all of them on the content. The HTML
experience today isn't capable of producing something readable when I'm at
full capacity with the paper's content, and I suspect that reviewers feel the
same way.

So, no, "a simple alternative" doesn't exist, sadly.

------
avn2109
TeX, especially with the MicroType package, still produces the highest-quality
machine typesetting available to mortal man (eg. people who are not employed
by Random House or something). Any effort to replace TeX with some other tech
stack probably ought to replicate this typesetting quality, which is going to
be _really hard_. Smart people spent a long time getting TeX output where it
is today, and replicating that won't happen overnight with a switch to HTML.
Those (few) of us who care about this sort of thing are consequently unlikely
to take the bait of the new system.

~~~
qznc
Well, you have to use LuaTeX, though. Knuths TeX has various shortcomings like
"cannot use ttf fonts" and "poor Unicode support". However, some packages
might not be adapted to LuaTeX, yet.

------
zdw
Ever used Pandoc?
[http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/)

You can embed LaTeX into your Markdown, and still have it render to many
targets (HTML, PDF, etc.) with full linking and fidelity.

~~~
aristus
++pandoc. I write all my books in Latex (despite the looks of horror from
everyone I mention it to). I compile to PDF for printing and use pandoc to
build every other format. It just works. I spent less than 3 or 4 hours,
total, integrating it into my "book build".

------
fekberg
I used LaTeX when writing my programming book (C# Smorgasbord) and I am really
glad I didn't use HTML for it. There was just so much out there to make the
whole process good and I could really focus on the content with minimal
markup. Except all the stuff you need in your preamble that is.

When I had written the book, I just used tex4ht and it spit out HTML that was
decent, I could just apply a minimal amount of work and apply some CSS and
then I had the epub and mobi.

I'm happy with LaTeX but I'm probably never writing another book (or I
might..)!

~~~
marcosdumay
That. Plus the hability to break your document over several files, the several
kinds of automatic numbering, and the completely logical structure of the
markup (your book is divided on sections and chapters, not in divs).

Add to that that TeX is the only user friendly portable markup of math
available.

------
beloch
Here are a couple of itches for academics that Latex scratches:

1\. _Templates, so you don 't have to control how everything looks:_ If you're
writing a paper, you usually target a specific journal (and retarget later if
rejected). If you download that journal's templates you can work on a version
of the paper that looks very close to how it will be published. You can also
submit a preprint to arxiv so it will be available to others in a close-to-
final form while it goes through the (sometimes lengthy) peer-review process.

2\. _Fine control when you need it:_ While templates allow latex users to
primarily worry about content rather than fiddling with appearances, there are
still very fine controls in Latex for sweating the fine-details, and believe
me, there are plenty of those that academics sweat over. There are a lot of
little things that make your text robust against the tyrannies of the
template. For example, say you write "For blah blah blah, see Figure 1." in
your text. Latex might decide to start a new line after "Figure", leaving "1."
starting the next line. Awkward! Rewrite this as "Figure~1" and Latex will not
insert a newline there. If you get into the habit of doing that all the time,
and many other things, you will spend a lot less time playing whack-a-mole
with things that wind up looking funny. When you get good, you truly only have
to worry about content.

This war between not having to control appearance and controlling it utterly
when it matters makes Latex both very powerful and very frustrating to
newcomers. Proficiency delivers freedom to worry only about content, which is
what academics _really_ want.

If HTML+etc is to be an alternative to latex, those templates need to be out
there. Otherwise it's a chicken and the egg problem. Nobody has time to use
HTML because it would mean developing a new template to meet their target
journal's spec's and convincing them to accept that format, so nobody ever
develops a template. Journals won't waste time developing templates or
altering their system to accept HTML documents unless submitters are
interested in submitting via that route. If you truly think you've found a
superior alternative to Latex, it is up to you to pick a journal, develop
templates that match their format, and get them out there so people can try
them.

------
c0g
What would be great is if LaTeX compilers could output to HTML or other more
portable backends. I've grown to love LaTeX since my undergrad- I don't have
to worry about how things will display like I do with markdown, html and
MathJax, it just works. I don't know how possible that will be to replicate in
a browser.

~~~
chewxy
Try Heavea: [http://hevea.inria.fr/](http://hevea.inria.fr/).

For my current book project, I've decided to go with LyX as my editor instead,
and it comes with Elyxir, which converts LaTeX to HTML

------
jlbribeiro
Everyone I know with minimal HTML skills that has ever struggled with LaTeX
has eventually thought about it.

A HTML-like templating language, provided with an ACM-style CSS stylesheet and
math/graphic/wtv Javascript libraries does seem appealing but simple problems
arise from this.

Different browsers render different results, and that's not even remotely
acceptable for a to-be-published paper; this lack of consistency is, to me,
the greatest obstacle to that reality. Even considering _very_ similar results
on every browser, PDF export would still be incoherent, resulting in mis-
pagination (empty pages), "read-while-selected" text and the usual PDF-export-
from-format-X bugs.

Using Javascript libraries to provide extensability is a clever design, but
the same problems apply. I often find textual bugs (hidden text, text
above/bellow flow) on websites that rely too much on web fonts, and that
shouldn't happen by now (as some are reporting, even on the author's website).

Too many factors come to play for this to go wrong, but it all comes down to
different browser implementations of __every single technology in this HTML
/CSS/JS stack __(and that 's a lot to go wrong).

So while it does seem appealing (give the form and I'll sign it!), I don't
think HTML+CSS+JS is even near of getting that experience consistency that
typesetting-heavy documents need.

------
bra-ket
I'm happy with sharelatex (i'm not involved with the company, just a happy
user)

They have a few glitches here and there but convenient enough to draft some
papers in the browser

------
dfbrown
I do think a project website is a great complement to an academic paper for
collecting all relevant information into one place (author info, supplementary
material, citation information). I know most Computer Graphics authors have
web pages for their papers that include the paper, accompanying video,
reference information and very occasionally a demo. I don't think it is a good
replacement for academic papers however.

Academic papers are intended to be static, finalized content so I don't see
the need for anything more than hyperlinks, and even hyperlinks are
problematic because the content they link to disappears so often. Because of
this PDF makes a great export format because it is nearly as old as HTML,
standardized and you know your paper will always look the same. And for
generating academic paper PDFs there is nothing that produces better looking
papers than LaTeX.

As for standardization, TeX is older (1978), more standard (a single
definitive reference implementation), and more stable (no feature changes
since 1989). LaTeX is not quite as stable (last release was in 1994 with a new
version planned for some time in the future) but I would argue it is still
more stable than HTML.

------
tiger10guy
Eventually, academic papers should be interactive because taking advantage of
electronic media can communicate so much more.

See this talk on "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable" by Brett Victor:
[http://vimeo.com/67076984](http://vimeo.com/67076984)

There still have to be a bunch of changes before we get there.

~~~
daureg
What about the other way around: making LaTeX documents more interactive. One
can fill forms in pdf or embed javascript, see for instance this motor
animation made with tikz: [http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/wankel-
motor/](http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/wankel-motor/)

------
johnchristopher
>But Latex comes with a lot of liability too. > > It produces “dead”
documents, whose faint attempt at modernity are clickable links.

That's because Latex is supposed to be used for printed documents. Printed
documents don't care about clickable links.

> It is incompatible with almost all but the most advanced information
> crawling and organizing technologies, for its lack of meaningful meta
> information.

So is my C code, word documents and those macos stickies. PDF document
generated from a latex file can fullfill all your meta information needs
though.

> It is grossly non-interoperable with other modern scientific tools, and
> mainly it is unable to embed interactive (i.e. “non-dead”) content generated
> by other tools.

I'll try to remember that next time I am embedding lua and R code to generate
lab reports.

------
GlennS
A couple of alternatives you might enjoy:

[http://www.stat.uni-muenchen.de/~leisch/Sweave/](http://www.stat.uni-
muenchen.de/~leisch/Sweave/)

[http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/babel/](http://orgmode.org/worg/org-
contrib/babel/)

These don't fix all the problems mentioned, but they definitely fix this one
"It is grossly non-interoperable with other modern scientific tools, and
mainly it is unable to embed interactive (i.e. “non-dead”) content generated
by other tools.".

But why prefer Latex to HTML? Latex makes a beautiful, well-structured
document every time. I don't think I've ever made something beautiful in HTML.

------
neumann
A great solution already exists: pandoc.

It allows people to generate the required markup from their favourite
mark(down)up.

Focusing on scientific academia, the workflow of data to paper is already
solved with ipython+pandoc (ipython notebook).

We have started using ipython notebook 2 months ago, and never looked back.
The ipython notebook allows us to do our postprocessing with report write up,
making beautiful graphs in matplotlib export it to single file HTML to share
with supervisors and collaborators, and then save the entire thing as latex as
a starting point for a high quality latex article. When the images are being
overhauled we go back to the notebook, save as pdf/svg/png.

------
3rd3
Slightly ironic that due to the lack of sub-pixel positioning in HTML my
browser (FF 26) has trouble rendering that blog’s (weird?) random rotation and
skew transform on the main DIV elements.

------
Boldewyn
Been there, done that:
[http://www.svgopen.org/2010/papers/68-Scientific_Publishing_...](http://www.svgopen.org/2010/papers/68-Scientific_Publishing_with_XHTML_MathML_and_SVG/index.html)

Not only hasn’t there any advance since 2010, no! It even worsened: With Opera
switching to Blink, Chrome dragged it with it into the dark “We need no
MathML” hole. Huge step backwards.

------
johnlbevan2
I'm not familiar with LaTeX beyond seeing it mentioned occasionally, but based
on the discussion it sounds like XML would be the best way to hold the
document, then use XSLT and XSL-FO technologies to convert this data/content
to LaTeX and/or HTML* documents as required.

*and related technologies such as CSS

------
sinkasapa
It looks like LaTeX mechanisms for embedding metadata are improving. XMP looks
like a reasonable way to do what needs to be done.

[http://www.ctan.org/tex-
archive/macros/latex/contrib/hyperxm...](http://www.ctan.org/tex-
archive/macros/latex/contrib/hyperxmp/)

------
bernatfp
I guess HTML is a good substitute for LaTeX in cases where it is too much
overkill.

What I do when I have to produce documents: Markdown if it doesn't require
much formatting, otherwise move to LaTeX to have more customization power
(without having to pull my hair off).

------
Argorak
The author ignores several advantages of LaTeX, one being: a commitment to
forward-compatibility. On any recent version of LaTeX, I can still compile
documents from decades ago with a reasonable chance that they still render the
same.

------
tunnuz
Interesting point of view, I posted something similar in a HN discussion
months ago
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4136034](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4136034)

------
Paul12345534
Ever tried tbook?
[http://tbookdtd.sourceforge.net/](http://tbookdtd.sourceforge.net/)

I've had some luck with ConTeXt personally

------
adamwong246
I don't use LaTeX simply because LaTeX outputs pdfs. Pdfs stink in their own
right but furthermore, pdfs are for printed documents and I don't use paper
anymore.

~~~
c0g
PDFs stink, but I've yet to find something that stinks less!

What I need:

* High quality fonts and images

* Single file

* Cross platform

* Simple to create using LaTeX

* Excellent support for math

* LaTeX style readability considerations

* Massive user base

* Many extensions

~~~
IvarTJ
HTML?

~~~
c0g
Specifically for writing math heavy papers (what I use LaTeX for) HTML offers:

1\. (kinda.. if I want to use Google's font API and the browser renders it
well)

2\. Not a single file.

3\. Not cross-platform - it will render differently on my linux desktop and
mac laptop.

4\. I don't know how to convert all of my LaTeX macros and workflows to HTML
so I'd need something like htmltex (doesn't exist, I want it).

5\. MathJax is good, but it ain't great. Too many compromises.

6\. No typesetting and words per lining heuristics like LaTeX - again, need
htmltex.

7\. and 8. were a bit unclear, sorry. I mean in writing mathematical papers.
HTML has a huge community but signal to noise for writing readable papers is
pretty high. Mapping what I do in LaTeX to HTML requires many more lines of
code.

~~~
mbq
There is htmltex (i.e. almost full stack emitting HTML), it is called latexml.
There is also a lot converters, most notably Pandoc.

Still I 100% agree that even HTML is too primitive and too inconsistently
implemented for scientific writing.

~~~
c0g
Thanks for the pointer, I shall play with latexml!

------
Demiurge
I tried to find a library to take HTML and output a PDF report, but the only
thing that's worked for me is LaTeX...

------
greyfade
Is it just me, or does this page skew down to the right? It bugged me and made
the page harder to read.

------
wbsun
No, thanks.

