
Apple and LaTeX - okket
http://leancrew.com/all-this/2017/06/apple-and-latex/
======
oneplane
But what about LaTeX in any Microsoft software? As far as I know, they don't
even know how to say LaTeX over there...

I knew it was in the iWork suite (has been since 2009? not sure...), but
having it and using it are two different things I guess ;-) It's not supported
in Grapher, however, so that's somewhat strange (but also not totally
unbelievable, one could argue that LaTeX is more of a markup language than
anything else).

~~~
yomritoyj
There may be no LaTeX in Microsoft Word, but people working on its equation
editor seem to be very much aware of LaTeX. Take a look at Murray Sargent's
blog:
[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/)

~~~
pflats
Word does its own mathematical typesetting with a GUI, but it also lets you
use some LaTeX-like formatting if you want. 5\cdot2=10 will give you exactly
what you typed, but if you hit space after the cdot, you'll get the centered
dot symbol. Notably, it uses parens instead of braces, so you'll want to do
\sqrt(2x+1).

Most annoyingly to me, \frac and other commands not directly associated with a
symbol do not seem to be supported. That said, it's still extremely useful for
my narrow use case (high school teacher semifluent in TeX with colleagues who
are not).

edit: Also, it supports more symbols than its GUI provides; the only way to
get the arc symbol that Geometry teachers like is to use \overparen.

------
aviggiano
Even if you are not a mathematician this slide is clearly very ugly. A better
title would be: "Apple does not send their slides to design revision."

~~~
objclxt
Except that's not the case, all WWDC slides from all sessions go through
design review. I've presented there several times when I was at Apple.

~~~
sooheon
So the more correct statement is that Apple design review does not know or
does not care about math typesetting.

~~~
oneplane
Or maybe it should be "Apple is not a mathematician society"

------
kuon
I'm a programmer and I noticed that this slide was looking ugly. But well, I
write my documentation with pandoc/latex and tikz so I guess I'm biased.

------
comstock
Other post from this author providing some background on mathematical
typesetting is interesting:

[http://leancrew.com/all-this/2017/07/math-without-
latex/](http://leancrew.com/all-this/2017/07/math-without-latex/)

------
draw_down
He's right that the formatting is bad and Latex's is better. The italicized
parens are just bizarre. But math stuff rendered by Latex also usually looks
"ugly" to me, I'm not sure why. Maybe the typeface or something.

~~~
greglindahl
It's easy to spot resumes typeset with TeX; they always make me smile.

~~~
copperx
On the contrary, I think it's really difficult to distinguish TeX and InDesign
on a resume. Using Computer Modern is a giveaway, though.

~~~
greglindahl
Computer Modern is pretty obvious. The superior kerning of TeX is more subtle.
I mostly see the really shitty kerning of Microsoft Word, which has no excuse,
it's had plenty of time to imitate TeX.

~~~
copperx
You can get decent kerning in Word, but you have to enable it manually in
every style along with automatic hyphenation. The result looks good as long as
the paragraphs are not justified. Justification is terrible because of the
awful line-breaking algorithm Word uses.

InDesign, on the other hand, basically copied TeX's line-breaking algorithm
but they tweaked it so that it could be applied in real time.

------
KKKKkkkk1
Doesn't using Latexit mean that each of your equations potentially has a
different size?

~~~
rustole
No. Using Latexit, your equations will use the same (configurable) font size.
If you wanted them to have the same width for some reason, you could resize
them once they're in the document.

------
webwielder2
Better title: Dr. Drang Notices Some Crappy Formatting in a Slide and Also
Programmers Aren’t Mathematicians

~~~
rasz
Jobs would fire 5 people for something like this. Nowadays nobody at Apple
cares anymore.

~~~
tptacek
No, he would not have. He would happily have gotten on stage in front of this
slide.

~~~
drfuchs
Having tagged along with Knuth when Jobs invited him over for a personal
demonstration of a pre-production Macintosh, I can attest that Jobs was
knowledgable about, and cared strongly about, typography. And having been in
the room when Jobs pitched the NeXT cube and printer to Frame, to convince us
to do a port of FrameMaker, this was again clearly the case. So, no way he
would have allowed this slide in any stage appearance of his.

For further evidence, remember that what (once) saved Apple was the the Jobs-
driven pair of Macintosh and Apple LaserWriter (the first PostScript printer).
This combination sparked the desktop publishing revolution, as it allowed the
masses to get typographically reasonable output semi-affordably. He made both
of these devices happen, and good typography was a core goal.

~~~
Finnucane
You worked for Frame? I used to love FrameMaker. To this day I haven't
forgiven Adobe for killing the Mac version.

~~~
drfuchs
Me neither. And, yes, I was the first employee after the 4 founders of Frame.
I did the PostScript output, all the Book functionality, conditional text, and
the whole API; but even after 10 years and the Adobe acquisition, not the
equation editor I was hired to do.

------
80211
Our company's software is very "math intensive". We never hire CS Majors. Only
Math or EE majors, who have a working knowledge of the Calculus.

We rarely need to use anything that you wouldn't learn in Calc 101, other than
practical application of FFT, but still, CS Majors are all stumped.

~~~
legulere
As a counterpoint: I once had to work on a codebase solely of EE majors. There
were no comments except commented out code (~1/5 of the codebase), no uniform
formatting, horrible variable names and nothing really worked. I wouldn't
expect anything like that from someone at the end of the first semester of CS.

Still, I don't generalize this to all EE majors.

------
et2o
Arrogance of the post coupled with labeling of "Dr. Drang" suggests to me this
guy has some insecurity issues.

~~~
omegote
Why wouldn't he use the "Dr." preffix if he's a doctor?

~~~
thebooktocome
It's a bit in vogue these days for PhD non-MD to forgo the title in informal
settings. Refusing to do so can appear egotistical.

~~~
KGIII
Whilst this veers off-topic, I don't use the formal title, even though I have
earned the right to do so. It's actually not just a matter if humility. I find
that, when introduced with the title, people ask me for medical advice.

I am a mathematician, not a physician.

