The simplest, modern route to using TEX is to download TeX Live, but it's such a huge mess. Even the lightest installation can be hundreds of megabytes, and there are so many files it needs its own package management system.
Why can't I just download pdftex and run pdftex foo.tex and get a PDF? Why is there so much cruft for what is supposed to be ``traditional'' UNIX software?
>>3
This is why ``Micro languages'' are bad.
Suppose you're looking to do something that's difficult with the standard Unix tools. You're not an expert in the subject, but you know enough about it to write a program. You finish it over a few days. It's full of bugs and security holes because you're the only one who uses it and you know what makes it crash. You use fixed-length buffers and bsearch an array of key-value pairs (instead of a search tree or hash table) because they're convenient to work with in C. You're making an interpreter, not an associative array library. The syntax is ugly but that doesn't matter because you designed it to be easy to parse, not to be easy to write. You never intended on it leaving your desk, so who cares? Then you see other people who want to do the same thing you did, so you give them a copy, then they give it to others, and eventually it gets included in a Unix distribution. Depending on your personality, you're either ashamed for releasing it on the world or you suddenly think you're some God-like EXPERT PROGRAMMER because your buggy code is popular. Now collect a couple hundred of these programs, even though many of them have overlapping functionality, and you have Unix.
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Anonymous2012-09-22 15:26
>>5 This is why ``Micro languages'' are bad.
I think its time we make a unified language for describing all graphical programming instead of having to learn a million different micro languages for doing such tasks. This applies to all areas of graphical interface programming such as web programming, GUI toolkits and text formatting in word processing programs. We should be using a unified hierarchical language like XML or such. We already see this happening, QT is switching to JSON, MS wants all its GUI programming done in HTML5/CSS.
formating on paper and formatting content for a resizable screen are two completely different things.
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Anonymous2012-09-22 15:36
>>7
actually its very similar, the markup language used in Tex is very similar to html, they both describe a static layout that can be rendered dynamically
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Anonymous2012-09-22 15:47
>>8
I guess I never thought about it that way because I use latex. The equivalence is less obvious but it is still there once you get past the macro and conditional evaluation stage.
>>11
Its also worth mentioning that Douglas Crockford who designed JSON hates how HTML/CSS has turned out, it would be nice to see him on a committee to reform HTML
TeX itself is actually relatively small, around 23K lines of Pascal for the basic .tex -> .dvi functionality. All the rest of the bloat is in crap that only a small subset of TeX users use or even know about, like extra fonts, packages, etc. Don't blame TeX, blame the idiots who shovel every-fucking-thing into their "TeX distro", like the same thing with Linux distros.
All you really need is TeX itself and a suitable DVI output converter. dvipdfm is relatively small and easy to use.
>>19 TeX itself is actually relatively small, around 23K lines of Pascal for the basic .tex -> .dvi functionality. All the rest of the bloat is in crap that only a small subset of TeX users use or even know about
nobody uses Tex, the La part of Latex was developed by Leslie Lamport is the actual markup syntax that everyone uses to make documents
>>22
What cruft? If you're talking about the compiler and sources, shut the fuck up and get the fuck out. I have invented a new kind of computer. It doesn't have a compiler. I call it ``television.''
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Anonymous2012-09-23 19:30
>>24
TeX is the language, nerd. LaTeX is just a set of macros for plebs who can't be bothered to read The TeXbook
>>22
TeX itself has no dependency on anything other than standard Pascal. Knuth explicitly designed it like that, which is why it has its own memory allocator, etc.
>>32
I used groff for all of my 2nd year assignments. Suck it!
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Anonymous2012-09-24 7:31
>>32 TeX itself has no dependency on anything other than standard Pascal.
which is the problem, Tex takes too long to compile so it cant be used in a wysiwyg editor. Tex should be incrementally compiled in an interpreted language. Anyone know what Open Office is programmed in?
Tex takes too long to compile
How old is the machine you're trying to use it on?
On a system from the 80s, it would've probably taken a few minutes. Today we've gotten around 3 orders of magnitude faster so less than a second is about right. It's only 23kLOC.
so less than a second is about right. It's only 23kLOC.
there is no way you are going to compile 23kLoC in less than a second on any computer. I have about 5 seconds for just a 100 lines
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Anonymous2012-09-25 6:36
You would think that TeX's idiosyncrasies makes it mostly a useless piece of shit that has no place in the modern world, but sadly there is no other markup language you can easily embed that matches it in its functionality. Yes, I'm looking at you microshaft, and your shitty ``Equation editor''. But, for anything else it's highly useless, so I wrote my thesis in goddamn Microsoft Word, and put in my overtly complex mathematical equations in by writing in TeX, saving the code separately and exporting them as images to the Word document. First class honours, by the way.
>>5
The trick with micro languages is knowing when you've hit the limits of what the language was designed to do. If you expect to hit that barrier early you probably should choose a different language.
>>6
We are nowhere near the point of being able to create a unified schema to represent every UI element and combination that someone could conceivably desire to use. You can blame the UI designers for that, I suppose.
>>53 We are nowhere near the point of being able to create a unified schema to represent every UI element and combination that someone could conceivably desire to use.
Why not? The various UI elements are fairly universal, well-defined and well-understood. Most large companies and interface developers put out documents on what should be used and how.