A guide to LATEX

What Hacker News says

1. hsmyersFeb 2011
   Secret to understanding/using LaTeX is to have at hand two books: Guide to LaTeX by Kopka and Daly, and The LaTeX Companion by Mittelbach and Goossens. That plus a project to publish (similar to have a task you want to program) should be enough to get you going. The real problem with LaTeX seems to be retention over time without continued use--- if you don't use it more or less all the time, you tend to forget a lot of the basics...
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2. HilbertSpaceDec 2011
   The article has several issues of 'drama' regarding TeX. All of these issues are just contrived to have drama for the sake of drama; none of these issues is a serious comment about TeX.

   I discuss six such issues:

   Issue 1.

   The article has:

   "It’s comforting to think that all the TeX documents I’ve written over the years will still be readable a century hence. But Mind Two reminds me that in practice I have trouble maintaining TeX documents even for a few months, much less decades or centuries. What about those presentations done with the foils class that stopped working after an upgrade and that I’ve never bothered to fix? Or the articles using the pstricks package that won’t compile under pdflatex? TeX itself may be a fixed point in the software universe, but everything else spins dizzily around it."

   So, here the author seems to have a 'dramatic issue' to grab the reader by the heart and/or the gut. Yes, 'writers' tend to do that.

   Of course, strictly this "issue" is 100% total nonsense: The problems he listed are all about LaTeX which strictly just is NOT the same as TeX, that is, as in:

   Donald E. Knuth, 'The TeX book', ISBN 0-201-13448-9, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 1990.

   with the macros there called Plain.

   Or LaTeX is as in, say,

   Helmut Kopka and Patrick W. Daly, 'Guide to LaTeX, Fourth Edition', ISBN 0-321-17385-6, Addison-Wesley, Boston, 2004.

   and

   Frank Mittlebach and Michel Goosens with Johannes Braams, David Carlisle, and Chris Rowley, with contributions by Christine Detig and Joachim Schrod, 'The LaTeX Companion, Second Edition', ISBN 0-201-36299-6, Pearson Education, Boston, 2004.

   and in these two books we do not see Knuth's name.

   So, can't blane the problems of LaTeX on Knuth or TeX.

   So, his:

   "It’s comforting to think that all the TeX documents I’ve written over the years will still be readable a century hence."

   Good. So, with TeX, just TeX, that is, just Knuth's TeX itself and not LaTeX, FakeTeX, JunkTeX, or NotTeX, the author of the article of this thread can remain comforted.

   Issue 2.

   Yes, the 'writer' seems to like drama more than rationality since he also has:

   "The skeptical Mind Two has another argument as well: Under Knuth’s edict it’s not just the TeX markup language that can’t change; it’s also the architecture of the system. Knuth created his flawless soufflés and dæmon diarrhœa at an ASCII terminal wired to a PDP-10, and the only way he could see the product of his labors was to walk down the hall and retrieve hard copy from the AlphaType machine."

   But the "architecture of the system" has nothing to do with "walk down the hall and retrieve hard copy from the AlphaType machine". Instead, part of the "architecture" is the guarantee:

   "His intent in freezing TeX is to ensure that the same input should always yield the same output."

   and that guarantee continues to hold without a "hall" or "AlphaType" machine. How? Because the guarantee was about the output of TeX which was just a file of type DVI (which abbreviates 'device-independent file'). The TeX I continue to use as my most important word whacking software continues to put out a DVI file and appears still to meet the guarantee.

   Issue 3.

   The author goes on with

   "But the core programs still run in batch mode, as they did in the Dark Ages. To make even the smallest change in a document, you still need to throw away all the existing output and run a whole file (or set of files) through the compiler tool chain."

   Of course. He should expect something else? I have two responses:

   First, what's wrong with "batch mode"? What else is to be done? As any Web site designer knows, due heavily to the 'sessionless' model of the Web, the server code for a Web page in HTML and CSS (but not necessarily Ajax) runs essentially in 'batch mode'.

   Second, even a little reading of Knuth's book above shows that it would not be easy to be given a change in the input and then to get significant computational savings by determining what fraction of the output can be saved and not calculated again. So, we calculate all the output again.

   Issue 4.

   Next, the author has:

   "Sometimes you have to do it twice."

   Not due just to using TeX! However, TeX does permit writing to a file and reading from a file. So if want to use such file writing/reading to generate, say, cross references, then will need to run TeX more than once. But the effects of such writing/reading are due to the user and not to TeX. In particular, we can notice that in Knuth's book, there are no cross references that would require running TeX more than once.

   Or, as we can see from reading Knuth's book, it is not easy to know exactly where will be the break betwoen one page and the next. Then it will not be easy to do cross references accurate to the page number. So, in Knuth's book, he didn't.

   Sure, in my usage of TeX, I have some macros for cross references to the page number, but my macros can occasionally make a mistake and, thus, are not up to the quality of TeX.

   I am sure Knuth saw this issue but wanted the high quality page breaking more than some automated cross references.

   Issue 5.

   The article has:

   "By then we’ll just throw Moore’s Law at it: Automatically rerun TeX n times for every keystroke in the editor."

   Here the author is implicitly assuming that, of course, a word whacking system SHOULD be based on an 'interactive interface' with 'what you see is what you get', one keystroke at a time. That's a very specific assumption that would be quite questionable at any time and otherwise would tend to 'date' TeX.

   For me, I would reject that assumption. That is, absolutely, positively I do NOT want TeX to have an 'interactive interface', to be 'what you see is what you get', or to do word whacking for each of my keystrokes. I do NOT want such things.

   In particular, I want to be able to run TeX in a 'batch script' with, "Look, Ma, no hands.". That is, I want TeX to remain something that can do its work without my being there, that is, part of the future where computers do work without a human giving full attention at each keystroke.

   In particular, a good response to 'what you see is what you get' (WYSIWYG) is that with such an 'interactive interface' 'what you see is all you've got' and that's not very much.

   What can there be that is not seen? Sure, can have a 'conception' for the document and parts of it and have some macros that contribute to this conception. Or, the macros automate parts of the conception. E.g., want a macro for the page headers. Then all the page headers look as in the conception for the page headers. Strictly with WYSIWYG, would have to type in the header for each page individually and, then, struggle to get them all as in the conception. Similarly for how to number sections, subsections, figures, tables, and equations and much, much more.

   Issue 6.

   I would agree with the author that TeX does not bake bread, drive a car, vacuum the carpet, recognize human speech, do the calculations for computer generated scenes in movies, etc.

   Instead, TeX was mostly just for what Knuth said it was for, "beautiful books", especially ones with quite a lot of mathematics. Moreover, implicit was that tbe books would be essentially in English. E.g., the hyphenation was for English, and no fonts were provided for text in Cryllic, Fraktur, Arabic, etc. In particular, the characters were to be from 7 bit ASCII and not 8 bit whatever or Unicode.

   Consider his "books": TeX was looking backwards in time, that is, was intended to be a computer version of traditional, beautiful typesetting for BOOKS, just such BOOKS, and not something different, better, for the future, etc.

   Knuth didn't say 'beautiful PDF files', 'beautiful Web pages', or 'striking foils with voice over, background music, and multi-touch gesture recognition', etc.

   So, there is a lot that TeX is not. Right.

   There's no 'drama' in saying that TeX won't sweep floors, and the article has nothing that says that TeX fails in any of its promises or guarantees.

   In particular, the article's 'failures' of TeX are for, say, LaTeX or something contrived about some printer down the hall.

   There is more on what TeX is and is not in

   http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2327490

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