Whether you’re really passionate about RPC, MQTT, Matrix or wayland, tell us more about the protocols or open standards you have strong opinions on!

  • @[email protected]English
    3•2 months ago

    Learning LaTeX and working around its quirks seems like a much better time investment than sidegrading to something that lives on premises given by a proprietary commercial project. If someone saw LaTeX and said “I want to make some version of this that is better”, without alterior motives, they would probably just work on improving LaTeX (which a whole lot of people do).

    Fancy does not mean better, and often is in many ways worse than plain old boring.

    • @[email protected]
      -1•2 months ago

      You know Overleaf is a thing right?

      Many projects need to be rewritten from scratch I think. But I also think an easier markup language for LaTeX could be possible, keeping all the nice templates etc.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•2 months ago

        From the LaTeX project:

        The experience gained from the production and maintenance of LaTeX2e (the version you have been using for many years) had a major influence on our goals for future development and on new code which is now integrated into LaTeX.

        A while ago we made the decision to drop the idea of a separate LaTeX3 format that would exist in parallel to LaTeX2e, but instead decided to gradually modernize LaTeX to keep it competitive in today’s world while maintaining compatibility methods for older documents.

        I think this decision was pretty much a good one.

        Overleaf does not modernize LaTeX in meaningful ways. It only adds cloud functionality and glossy appearance that you can get on dedicated editors anyways.

        • @[email protected]
          2•2 months ago

          No, but Overleaf is just a proprietary fancy editor like the Typst one. Meanwhile typst is just as usable for building editor too.

          I dont see any arguments against typst really. I am using Markdown all time and find it best, but lacking. Then LaTeX, honestly I dont want to learn as it must be a pain to write.

          Now in typst, you can write academic papers etc just as well. All you need is free software, with good backing, modern tooling (rust, cargo), thus it runs everywhere. Its pretty cool!

          • @[email protected]English
            2•2 months ago

            Overleaf are not benefactors that develop LaTeX for economic gains, unlike the situation with Typst that rely on it (to my knowledge). LaTeX is also cross platform, supported in tons of editors and can easily be converted to other formats with pandoc. It is also somewhat supported in other formats using implementations such as KaTeX for Markdown and Mathjax in HTML due to being the defacto standard for math typesetting.

            Writing papers in LaTeX is a joy, not a pain. The end result is also a beautifully typeset document rivalled by none.