from Hacker News

LaTeX3 Automatic Labels for Fun and No Profit

by miguelmurca on 3/18/24, 7:14 PM with 85 comments

  • by cbolton on 3/19/24, 2:09 PM

    > Yes, we are aware of typst. I think it’s cool, but C++ hasn’t replaced C, Rust hasn’t replaced C++, Typst is unlikely to replace LaTeX. Likewise, many are aware of LuaTeX, but, again, the entrenching of a 40-odd year system is not to be underestimated. I am rooting for typst, anyway, and hope it finds its place.

    Well here's the process I went through in the last few years:

    I found out about LuaTeX, saw it was supposed to replace pdfTeX and thought the future of TeX was bright.

    Then I saw the continued efforts in LaTeX3 and thought that was weird and wasteful: code now looks even worse with all \ExplSyntaxOn ... \ExplSyntaxOff sections and the new command syntax like \exp_args:Ne. If you're going to have a mix of two languages anyway, it makes much more sense for the second language to be a a minimal but real programming language like Lua.

    Then the LuaTeX devs moved their efforts to LuaMetaTeX and I found myself scratching my head.

    Then I spent some time with typst. Now I don't care what happens in TeX land... The experience with typst is incomparably better, and the pace of development is high in both the core language and the ecosystem. Features that took a decade to be fleshed out in LaTeX are sprouting like mushrooms in typst. It's not a fair fight.

    The author is a PhD student that has been using LaTeX heavily for 10 years. But what should a new student use, and why? When the only reason to choose LaTeX is old colleagues and gatekeeping publishers, I know it's a matter of time.

  • by michaelmior on 3/19/24, 3:12 PM

    > Yes, it’s $YEAR and we’re still producing PDFs. Again, historical reasons plus the fact that most people doing maths are not necessarily very interested in computers.

    I generally find PDFs to be a very agreeable way to read the sort of content LaTeX is typically used to write. And in writing it myself I don't need to think about what weird layout issues someone else might encounter when viewing my content. There are certainly accessibility issues with PDFs, but also ways to mitigate that[0].

    [0] https://libguides.lib.msu.edu/c.php?g=995742&p=8207771

  • by wdroz on 3/19/24, 2:10 PM

    > Yes, we are aware of typst. I think it’s cool, but C++ hasn’t replaced C, Rust hasn’t replaced C++, Typst is unlikely to replace LaTeX. Likewise, many are aware of LuaTeX, but, again, the entrenching of a 40-odd year system is not to be underestimated. I am rooting for typst, anyway, and hope it finds its place. A good place to start would be to provide a compilation toolchain from typst to TeX, if they really want to replace TeX.

    Pandoc[0] can convert Typst to LaTeX.

    IMO If you are able to write in Typst, write in Typst, it's so much better and readable. Your final LaTeX3 macro are hard to read and difficult to parse with the eyes... Also Typst is easier to learn.

    [0] -- https://pandoc.org/try/

  • by larsrc on 3/19/24, 2:16 PM

    A nice intro to making macros, which is one of the most powerful parts of LaTeX indeed.

    Autoref itself seems a fine way of messing up your references and making your source code less readable. The beauty of naming is that you have the context at hand. Moving around blocks of text, or adding and removing text, happens throughout the process. With autoref, you now have to remember to _sometimes_ update the refs or get subtly different references. I wouldn't trust myself to get that right.

  • by thangalin on 3/19/24, 3:50 PM

    Markdown does not specify how to add labels and cross-references for figures, equations, tables, etc. Many moons ago, I asked about them on the CommonMark forum[1] and described a syntax that was general and internationalizable. Given that CommonMark has frozen the Markdown specification, I implemented a consistent label and cross-reference syntax for my editor[2], KeenWrite[3]. These labels and cross-references are translated to XHTML, then transformed from XHTML into ConTeXt macros that are subsequently typeset.

    [1]: https://talk.commonmark.org/t/cross-references-and-citations...

    [2]: https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/-/blob/main/docs/ref...

    [3]: https://keenwrite.com/

  • by rrgok on 3/19/24, 2:11 PM

    I still wonder why anyone would create such awful grammar for a programming language. Considering LaTeX's initial release was 40 years ago, there were certainly other programming languages from which to draw inspiration.

    And I certainly don't believe that LaTeX DSL was the most suitable solution for solving typesetting problems.

  • by nabla9 on 3/19/24, 3:46 PM

    The reason for LaTeX is the output quality, not the input.

    Real LaTeX users don't use LaTeX to write documents.

      whatever -> pandoc -> LaTeX -> perfect document
                          ^
                          |
      LaTeX template  ----+

  • by blt on 3/19/24, 3:56 PM

    Am i missing something, or is this useless when you want to refer to an equation from "the past"? I find myself doing that often. For example a methods section might pose an optimization problem, then the experiments section a page or two later says "we solve the optimization `\eqref{main-problem}` using Solver X".

  • by YWall39 on 3/19/24, 1:55 PM

    Nice piece, and his comment on typst is spot on. I would love for typst to displace LaTex, I hate LaTex and use it every day, and deep inside know it will never go away, unless a much better programmer than I writes a LaTex -> typst converter that covers all the corner cases. One can always hope.

  • by kunley on 3/19/24, 2:54 PM

    The Post-Scriptum is hilarious:)

  • by mmplxx on 3/19/24, 7:38 PM

    > but C++ hasn’t replaced C, Rust hasn’t replaced C++, Typst is unlikely to replace LaTeX.

    Weird conclusion, because LaTeX has mostly replaced TeX.

    There is a nice symmetry here:

    C -> C++ -> Rust ~ Typst <- LaTeX <- TeX

  • by bmacho on 3/19/24, 1:38 PM

    > It’s weird I even have to say this, but don’t stalk me and email me at my personal address.

    I am not sure of what happened, and it must have been unpleasant, but someone going up on your website hierarchy, they reach https://commutative.xyz/~miguelmurca/, they click the only link, and you personally list your profiles there, including email, github and insta. It is OK if someone contacts you for whatever reason on addresses and profiles that you explicitly shared.

    > If you email me anywhere else, I will not respond. I also cannot force you to follow basic etiquette if you do write, but it would be appreciated.

    This is rude, it looks bad in the article, and you are the one who doesn't follow basic netiquette.