Comment by btilly
4 years ago
Yes. You'll install a bunch of recent stuff around it.
But the heart of it, TeX, is still the same old version.
4 years ago
Yes. You'll install a bunch of recent stuff around it.
But the heart of it, TeX, is still the same old version.
I think that's playing with semantics. Most codebases have old parts, the old part of texlive just has a name. It's still being actively maintained and would be a lot less usable if it wasn't, there's just an imaginary line between the texlive part and the tex part.
Old version? You have to understand that some applications need innovation based on new ideas. TeX is only popular in the academic and publishing world, not like a web browser. Can we write a complex equation in TeX as easy as we write in popular word applications like MS Word?
Can we write a complex equation in TeX as easy as we write in popular word applications like MS Word?
Thank you for the most ludicrous comment that I've seen today. The popularity of TeX in academia is exactly because writing complex equations in popular word applications is painfully hard, and the typesetting is poor. By contrast writing them in TeX is easy and the typesetting defaults to excellent.
Talk to anyone who has to actually write many such equations. They will verify that it is not a question of "as easy". It is massively easier and better in TeX. Which is why academics working in math, physics and computer science overwhelmingly choose TeX.
> It is massively easier and better in TeX.
Obviously depends on where along the learning curve, and preformed command line literacy, which on a venue like HN is always assumed to be native.
As a hypothetical, consider a Rip Van Winkle situation in which a mathematician wakes from a coma he's been in since the 1970s. Now force him to typeset one of his monographs. He'll do it in MS Word.
4 replies →
I wrote one. My point is, we need a better way to write a complex equation as easy as we wrote some texts like in MS Word or LibreOffice. That's an innovation. At least some guys in Microsoft or LibreOffice guys already did. Hide the complexity. Maybe one day you could write a complex equation only by voice command. No one will touch TeX anymore.