It doesn't help that (sure, sound historical reasons...) none of the conventions are in any way related to the rest of the tech world. OK, I need a math symbol here -- what's the unicode for that? WTF do you mean it doesn't use Unicode? 1/
-
-
Replying to @handleym99 @Meaningness
It swaps in racks of 256-long arrays of characters, like a cave-man DOS overlay? You can NOT be serious? And it's all built on top of that??? //
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @handleym99
It’s pretty strange that there hasn’t been a replacement.
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @Meaningness
Yeah, a long chain of augmentations, from pdftex through luatex and xetex, but no-one said "to heck with this; let's reimplement the DDL and algorithms on top of a much easier to use basis". If nothing else, seems like a more useful geek project than creating yet another language
2 replies 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @handleym99
This is one attempt. Right idea; seems to lack momentum. http://sile-typesetter.org/what-is/
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @Meaningness
Interesting! But it's hardly a promising start that their samples show "look, we're prettier than Word for pure text" rather than "look, here's a page of complicated math including Feynman and category diagrams"... It's like they're missing the concerns of 99% of TeX users!
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @handleym99
Well, the people who use TeX use it because (1) there’s nothing else they can use and (2) they are geeks who can somehow sort of use it. An *easily* programmable typesetting system that doesn’t do math at all potentially has a much larger user base.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @Meaningness
Perhaps. But if THAT is what you want, why not use LyX right out the box? LyX is not a GREAT UI, but it's really not that bad. (I'd prefer to give it to a naive user rather than Word.)
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @handleym99 @Meaningness
The only people who care how horrible it is to fiddle with TeX are people doing serious typesetting, which is MOSTLY math/physics/chemistry people (though you get the occasional unusual languages folks, or musicians, or chess heads and suchlike).
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @handleym99
I’m a bit of a typography geek, and want ordinary English text output to look “good,” which LaTeX output doesn’t. Frustrating because obviously the underlying engine can in principle be made to produce “good” output, but the layers on top get in the way.
2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
I’m somewhat more hopeful about bullying ConTeXt into doing what I want, but that’s not easy either.
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.