
TeX Live 2017 released - l2dy
https://www.tug.org/texlive/
======
svat
It's amazing how many different and dissimilar components go into a TeX
distribution like TeX Live:

\- At the base, there is Donald Knuth's program `tex`, itself written in a
strange language (WEB) that is essentially an ad-hoc macro-expansion system
(not used by many others, and not even by Knuth today, who prefers CWEB), and
compiles (via `tangle`) to a dialect/version of Pascal (“Pascal-H”) for which
a compiler hasn't existed for years. [It also "compiles" (via `weave`) to the
printed book _TeX: The Program_ ]

\- Then there is LaTeX, an elaborate set of macros written originally by
Leslie Lamport (another Turing award winner) and later by a team, to be
interpreted by the TeX program, which was never designed by its original
creator for such elaborate programming.

\- There are entire new programs (aka TeX engines) like pdfTeX and XeTeX,
created by editing the original `tex.web` in different directions.

\- There are the binaries of all these programs, compiled using `web2c`, a
program written solely for converting all these WEB programs written in
(basically) Pascal into _C_ code, which is neither an arbitrary Pascal-to-C
converter nor even an arbitrary WEB-to-C converter.

\- There is LuaTeX, a manual _rewrite_ of TeX in C, embedding a Lua
interpreter and adding many hooks and extensions.

\- There are thousands of macro packages written by thousands of people of
varying levels of skill and foresight, on top of TeX, LaTeX, and other macro
packages themselves: essentially everything on CTAN (which was inspiration for
Perl's CPAN, and ultimately many languages' package repositories like Python's
PyPI etc.)

And all this without even mentioning ConTEXt, Metafont, MetaPost, BibTeX,
Kpathsea, various assorted utilities, graphics drivers…

~~~
mseri
A now also the recently announced tectonic [0]. I also remember watching a
talk about a clojure re-implementation but I think I never saw it released
anywhere.

[0]: [https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/](https://tectonic-
typesetting.github.io/en-US/)

------
lindbergh
LaTeX is still one of my favourite piece of technology of all time. It is at
time so alien, yet beautiful.

I now get closer to 10+ years of programming experience, yet nothing comes
close to debugging a faulty LaTeX custom command... it can quickly turn to an
unreadable mess, but you have to admit that once everything is swept under a
preamble.tex file, the rest of the code is very clean. Especially with auctex
in emacs which displays most math symbols as their true unicode counterpart.

Funny story: one of my first gig was working in a music instruments shop where
I was basically the IT guy, from sysadmin to web dev. At some point the
software that created the barcode labels stopped working. Now I had to find an
automatic way to make those labels, so of course I turned to LaTeX. All I
needed to do was to write a batch file calling `pdflatex` with a template tex
file and a pdf file for the label was promptly sent to the printer! There is
probably some python package for doing the same thing, but I was so proud of
seeing Computer Modern font tagged to every instruments in the shop!

~~~
jon_richards
I once heard a professor talk about writing a book 30 or so years ago. He
looked at all the available options and decided latex wasn't perfect, but was
the best available. 20 years later he decided to look at everything again and
was appalled that latex was still the best option he had.

Have you ever tried to color a latex table? If you color a cell, most readers
will cover ~1 pixel of the upper and left table borders with the cell color,
regardless of the zoom level. This is especially a problem on zoom levels
where the border is only 1 or 2 pixels, but makes you feel insane when you
zoom in so it's 10 or more. You know what the most common advice for fixing
this is? "Get rid of your table borders. It will make your table look better."

Latex is full of little problems like this, but it's still the best.

~~~
mkl
You have much more control if you make your table in TikZ using a matrix of
nodes. If you want borders, the key thing is setting "row sep=-\pgflinewidth,
column sep=-\pgflinewidth" so the border doesn't get doubled up (see e.g.
[1]).

Latex is far from ideal, but it's still the best because it hasn't stood still
- many people are constantly contributing improvements and new packages, and
it's very hard for a new replacement system to compete with that.

[1] [https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/18521/tikz-matrix-
as...](https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/18521/tikz-matrix-as-a-
replacement-for-tabular)

~~~
vog
The takeaway is: If you are to judge LaTeX, judge its whole ecosystem.

Otherwise, this is like saying Python is not suitable as HTTP client because
"urllib" has too many quirk - ignoring the fact everyone else uses the
excellent "requests" libraray.

Although there are interesting developments at its code (XeLaTex, LuaTex), it
is the packages which are ever evolving at a rapid pace. Have trouble with the
"graphics" package? Use "graphicx" instead. Don't like the old "letter" class?
Use "scrlttr2". And of course, use TikZ, it is one of the most well-designed,
best-documented and comprehensive packages out there.

Compared to most programming languages, what I really like about LaTeX is
their almost almost merciless take on backwards compatibility. This means that
your old "article" document almost certainly works with later LaTeX versions.
There will never be a breaking new version of "article" that forces you to
adapt your LaTeX code, like we see with so many libraries in other languages.
But this also means that you are stuck in your "old world" if you don't keep
your eye open for new packages, and are willing to learn them. There are quite
a lot of StackExchange questions that are essentially like this:

"Q: How do I fix my issue with package X? A: Use the newer package Y instead
(or in addition)."

------
kstenerud
I've given up on tex. I'm typesetting a book right now, and getting the epub
going was a piece of cake. Then I tried using LibreOffice for the print
version and it was a nightmare to control via the API and buggy as hell. So I
decided now would be a good time to try tex. After 2 solid days of yak
shaving, I threw in the towel. It's too fragmented, the documentation is
terrible (complete - all 600 pages worth, but terrible for discovery or
learning). It's basically rabbit hole after rabbit hole, with most, if not
all, tutorials directed towards typesetting your homework assignments.

All of the CSS/HTML based solutions cost thousands per license, so that's out.

I'm now on to SILE, which fixes a lot of problems with tex. I can only hope
that it's advanced enough to properly typeset a novel.

~~~
radarsat1
I ask this as a totally naive person regarding novels and publishing, but who
is fairly happy with writing papers in Latex: what is difficult about
typesetting a novel? I ask because I would think that novels would be on the
easier end of typesetting situations, but clearly your experience is
different.. I just can't imagine what you are struggling with. I've "typeset"
many novels by converting them from text formats to latex for the purpose of
reading on my e-reader and haven't had many difficulties other than dealing
with unsupported character encodings. Of course I can imagine that the
professional situation is quite difficult, but I'm surprised it's _so_
different. Care to share details of the trouble you had?

~~~
kstenerud
Getting otf fonts working, getting images working and properly positioned,
getting alternating left-right headers to behave themselves, especially at a
chapter start. Every new thing involved going back to ctan (I had high hopes
for memoir) or searching online in the hopes that _someone_ took the time to
write down how they did it. Most of the time you'd just find "how to make your
math formulas look pretty" or "how to typeset your thesis"

You'd think that typesetting a novel would be a gimme, but in the current
ecosystem (tex or otherwise) it's a shambles.

~~~
stephen_g
OTF is dead easy if you use XeTeX (specifically the xelatex command). The
fancyhdr should give enough control over headers. Yeah, floating images can be
annoying.

I use it mainly for technical documentation (product manuals, etc.), so I've
never tried the memoir class. But what I find myself doing mostly these days
is makinng my own classes, usually based on article because it seems to me to
have the most 'neutral' defaults.

It's a very steep learning curve, but I've found it an extremely valuable
technology to be able to use.

Asking questions on the TeX stack overflow is a pretty good way to get help
also.

~~~
marvy
I agree with the last point: asking questions on tex.stackexchange is a GREAT
way to get help. Sometimes you run into an "impossible" problem and some
wizard will show up and fix it in minutes.

------
SwellJoe
I wrote my first (well, only) book in SGML Docbook, which I processed through
a LaTeX toolchain. Sebastian Rahtz answered so many of my questions back then
(~15 years ago), despite them often being stupid questions (because I was
entirely new to TeX/LaTeX). I just read that he passed away last year. TeX
Live was originally his project, among _many_ other document-related projects.
I'm happy to see it continues without him.

------
tehabe
Wasn't there the idea of making TeX Live a rolling release? I guess the idea
was there but it turned out it would be impossible w/o breaking thing from
time to time.

------
shawnee_
Looks like it has added many of the enhancements from recent updates to
luatex. LuaLaTeX has saved my hide more times than I care to mention...
Because for reasons I do not understand, there are still some people from the
dark ages who insist on shipping PDFs with documentation that _does not belong
in a PDF_.

------
brians
What's new: [https://www.tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-
en.html#x...](https://www.tug.org/texlive/doc/texlive-en/texlive-
en.html#x1-840009.2)

------
fithisux
Congratulations guys for the hard work.

~~~
jimhefferon
Yes, indeed. It is quite an accomplishment.

If you find TeX, LaTeX, and friends useful, check out the TeX Users Group at
[http://www.tug.org](http://www.tug.org). If you'd consider supporting the
folks who bring you TeX Live, you can read the Aims and Benefits page at
[https://tug.org/aims_ben.html](https://tug.org/aims_ben.html).

Note that a membership is very reasonable-- if you choose an electronic copy
of the journal then membership is $45 annually, or $15 annually if you are a
student, senior, etc. The details are at
[https://tug.org/join.html](https://tug.org/join.html).

------
xvilka
There is still no uniform way to insert animation in the slides/paper. Partly
it's because a problems of PDF readers, but there are problems in TeX-parts
too.

