As someone who has written a few of LaTeX documents over the years, I'd like to point out that rendering TeX math does not constitute a TeX document at all.
What LaTeX truly shines at, is typography. Yet a bunch of people seem to think that it's only a way to write math.
This is an interesting project. It just bums me out because I thought it was a TeX distribution for the web. I'd remove "TeX" from the name to avoid confusion.
It’s based on LaTeXML, which does the heavy lifting of converting LaTeX to HTML. I’m more interested in the CSS applied on top of that. I want to make web output of the same calibre as the PDF output. (Or, near to it at least. :)
> I want to make web output of the same calibre as the PDF output.
This to me is the unsolved problem. Interpreting a LaTeX file on the web is probably not a crazy problem -- heck, worst case scenario recompile the entire LaTeX compiler into WASM or something.
But, typesetting on the web is really hard and browser capabilities that I know of are just not up to snuff, to the point that conventional wisdom is you pretty much never justify text on the web, ever, because it won't ever look good. So generic solutions to that problem are something I'd be interested in.
The secondary problem past that is to make justified text look good while still being responsive :) But even just for fixed column widths it's something that I'd love to see.
I respectfully disagree. I think people use LaTeX to write scientific documents because there is no better alternatives, not because LaTeX is good.
I find the typesetting system in LaTeX is extremely verbose and over-complicated, as compared to something like HTML+CSS or Markdown.
If someone comes up with a good enough typesetting system with some inspiration from Markdown, HTML and CSS, LaTeX will lose its popularity. HTML and CSS are more expressive than LaTeX, so it should be theoretically possible.
One possible explanation for the lack of better alternatives is that the people who really need the alternatives and people who are capable of coming up with better alternatives are somewhat mutually exclusive. Former is more research-heavily and latter is more coding and user experience heavy.
The typograghy of TeX is hard to sneer at. Even more, it's stability. Knuth's insistence on stability of feature and focus on core requirements is definitely a lost art in the modern world.
Could someone make something that was more aesthetically pleasing for the typist? Likely. Though, most of the added structures of LaTeX are often not needed for casual documents. Which is why it was oddly refreshing to read some of the core source of Knuth's books.
I mean, CSS/HTML is technically a Turing complete language given enough caveats[0]. ;)
But I'm obviously just being a pedantic jerk when I say that. I get what you're getting at and you're not wrong. The real question to ask is, "is a programming language a good place to put a typesetter?"
Making things more powerful doesn't always make them better, if that extra power forces you to introduce extra complexity.
Why is that the real question to ask? The dogmatic separation of view and control is probably among the chief reasons of code bloat and bad decisions I've ever been close to.
An example of good separation of model/view/control is Markdown.
Markdown is ubiquitous because it's easy to learn and does one thing well. It's a very Unix-y idea. Markdown is a document markup language, not a Model-View-Controller framework. It's not trying to be the front end for your SPA, it's trying to allow you to type Reddit comments and blog posts.
That comes with advantages, the big one being that here's the entire documentation you need to look at if you want to start using Markdown[0] and here's one section of LaTeX's documentation[1]. I could have an entire office (programmers and non-programmers) using Markdown in about a week to a month, I couldn't do the same with LaTeX.
Of course LaTeX is more powerful that Markdown. Markdown isn't really a tool for typesetting tbh. But the point is that because extra functionality nearly always comes at the cost of extra complexity, you always need to take a step back and ask how important that extra functionality is. If someone says, "Okay, but I really need to meta-program my blog post", even at that stage I'm not sure that I push them towards LaTeX or its equivalents, because maybe it's better at that point to just jump to a full featured language like Python or Javascript.
That separation of concerns also means that I can have different people handling different things. If my office is all writing Markdown, maybe I only have one or two people who are handling the CSS for how it renders. Nobody else in the office needs to know about the CSS side of things.
Markdown it's essentially ASCII art for simple documents. Nothing wrong with that, but it is not seperation of concerns. Rather, it is simplicity of some concerns.
And to make it hugely amusing, the rules in markdown for just content are not much different than TeX.
I think Markdown is a good argument for potentially being too simple. It's good for what it's meant for, but it stumbles for stuff like blog authoring.
I am somewhat happy with AsciiDoctor[0], although I honestly feel like AsciiDoctor goes farther in the other direction than it needs to and ends up overcomplicating itself. I spend more time reading the AsciiDoctor documentation than I want to.
Would you be willing to expand more on what you mean about a separation of concerns vs a simplicity of concerns? I was using the term in the sense that Markdown not only doesn't embed logic, it also doesn't embed style. It's literally just content, and you use other technologies to get at the other parts.
In contrast, LaTeX embeds logic, style, and content. When I work with Markdown I don't stop thinking about style -- I just use other tools for that. That separation allows me to then give other people content access without asking them to worry about CSS.
I guess I could see that it's a flat-out dropping of meta-programming from my document generation (although Markdown is a very easy compilation target for templates). But that just kind of gets back to my original point -- do you really need to meta-program blog posts and books, given that it greatly increases the complexity of LaTeX? Would it be better to have a simpler version of LaTeX that got rid of that functionality and said, "I'm just gonna do text layout really well, and nothing else"?
I meant "simplification of concerns." Basically, if you simplify what concerns the content author can have, it is easier to encode them. In the case of markdown, you are very limited in what you can define.
And I am not at all against the ideas. I'm very partial to org-mode. For example, I wrote http://taeric.github.io/Sudoku.html using an org-mode buffer. And I've been very happy with the markup it supports. However, there is a lot of markup around some things it can do. And, I've found that the constant churn as folks improve it has been tiring. I think it has stabilized recently, which is good.
The Turing completeness just doesn't matter at all when it comes to the actual typographical output or the experience of authoring LaTeX documents. If you removed completeness artificially you'd have substantially the same thing.
I write a lot of LaTeX documents and use the TeX Live distribution to typeset them, so I understand why the name TeXMe could cause some confusion.
This project only cares about protecting the LaTeX content (the MathJax supported LaTeX, not the "real" LaTeX) by hiding it from the Markdown processor, so that the Markdown processor cannot mangle the LaTeX code before it is fed to MathJax.
I could have named it MathMe, JaxMe, or something similar that would have eliminated this confusion between MathJax supported TeX/LaTeX[1] and the "real" TeX/LaTeX. However, unfortunately I did not spend sufficient time thinking about a good name for this project, thus the name TeXMe.
If a bunch of people use LaTeX only to write math and this contains that functionality, why wouldn't the author want to advertise it? Is there a specific short-hand name for the LaTeX math functionality?
That's 552 pages worth of typography that only considers page layouting. It doesn't deal with fonts or kerning at all. It's actually a fun read even if just for the author's occasional frustration with how often laymen confidently ignore centuries-old typography rules that exists for a reason.
The context for the discussion is browser rendering for variable sized screens and user interaction in mind. Centuries-old typography rules can't be applied directly for screens.
For paper documents you can already do Markup -> LatTeX -> pdf for good quality documents.
> Centuries-old typography rules can't be applied directly for screens.
Some of it, certainly not.
A (larger IMHO) part of typography wisdom has really been distilled from experience making text easier and prettier to read over generations, and should not be thrown away lightheartedly because "screen is different from paper". Yes it is, but human eyes and brain are the same ;-)
Does it say anywhere in that manual why the right margin is supposed to be so narrow? I find it very uncomfortable to read texts with very narrow margins.
A) LaTeX is a library for laying out papers and common text memes. It’s not actually necessary at all. You would want to use TeX, which refers to the actual rendering engine.
B) converting layout with css to Tex sounds like an absolute nightmare compared to just implementing proper word, line, paragraph, and page flowing/breaking in the browser. In fact, HTML is pretty opposed to page breaking at all, which is arguably a forte of TeX.
Funnily enough, the Closure web browser, implemented in Common Lisp, had (it's no longer actively developed) a TeX-like paragraph formatting algorithm. The results were great.
It’s opposite from what i feel. On one hand hand I suffer from seeing all the PDFs or papers with poor MS Office type set.
But when it comes to the web I feel like people spend too much time (and waste my resources) to arrive at a perfect layout. There I would prefer a simple robust layout that renders well on all devices and resolutions.
What LaTeX truly shines at, is typography. Yet a bunch of people seem to think that it's only a way to write math.
This is an interesting project. It just bums me out because I thought it was a TeX distribution for the web. I'd remove "TeX" from the name to avoid confusion.