Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python

Show HN: RinohType – A modern LaTeX in 6500 lines of Python(mos6581.org)

153 points by brechtm 12 years ago | 99 comments

gjm11 12 years ago |

So, the situations in which I would use LaTeX rather than something cruder but friendlier are these: (1) I am typesetting something with nontrivial mathematical formulae in it. (2) I want the excellent typographical quality that comes from, e.g., the very nice Knuth-Plass dynamic-programming algorithm for line breaks. (3) I want to use some clever thing someone has implemented in LaTeX (say, to add Feynman diagrams to what I write). (4) I want to interoperate with other people who are using LaTeX. (5) I want to typeset something big and complicated that triggers misbehaviour in things like Word.

This system, at least so far, (1) doesn't do formulae, (2) doesn't have Knuth-Plass line breaking, (3) isn't compatible with LaTeX, (4) isn't compatible with LaTeX, and (5) takes almost 1s/page to do its thing.

It may very well be an excellent system, and deserve to take over the world of typesetting -- but at the moment it surely shouldn't be called "a modern LaTeX".

p4bl0 12 years ago | |

I would add that the original title "Introducing RinohType the Python document processor", is way better than the one of the HN submission. It is not a "modern LaTeX", let alone a "LaTeX rewrite" (which is implied by the "in 6500 lines of Python").

brechtm 12 years ago | | |

Yes, I plead guilty to tweaking the title a little for marketing purposes. I'm sorry if that got some people overexcited.

RinohType should eventually be able to replace LaTeX though, so it is not that far-fetched either. Also, the first paragraph of the article should help temper that excitement.

qznc 12 years ago | |

You want a drop-in LaTeX replacement. Use LuaTeX.

iXce 12 years ago | | |

Well, I think we all expected a "modern LaTeX" based on the title, not something that's much closer to a PDF producer than a LaTeX equivalent. The title is the issue.

phaemon 12 years ago | | |

I might want to use LuaTex, if I knew what it was. It seems they can't be bothered to actually say what it is in their website, in any of their links, or in the introduction chapter of their manual.

I therefore take it that no-one who actually writes ever uses it.

stevepike 12 years ago | |

If you're curious, I wrote implementations of the Knuth-Plass line breaking algorithm in ruby [1] and clojure [2]. Nothing you'd want to use in production but it was a fun experiment.

1. https://github.com/scpike/word-wrapping/blob/master/ruby/lib...

2. https://github.com/scpike/word-wrapping/blob/master/clojure/...

GuiA 12 years ago | |

What are the "cruder but friendlier" alternatives that you use?

gjm11 12 years ago | | |

Microsoft Word (alas) or one of its generally even worse competitors. For business documents that need sharing with other people who have to use Microsoft Word so they can share them with other people who, etc.

TeXmacs, a more-or-less-WYSIWYG document editor with approximately TeX-compatible formulae and suchlike. I actually use this much more often than TeX or LaTeX.

Plain text :-).

HTML (either edited by hand -- horrible but in some contexts less horrible than (La)TeX -- or using a WYSIWYGish tool like BlueGriffon).

Someone mentioned Markdown. I've somehow managed to avoid ever using Markdown (not counting things like Stack Overflow and occasional blog comments) but it certainly belongs in the list.

eru 12 years ago | | |

I guess markdown is in the list?

abritishguy 12 years ago | |

So much this! I hate latex but this is not a replacement in any way.

JasonFruit 12 years ago |

    While I understand you generally shouldn’t rewrite 
    software from scratch, maybe TeX should be one of 
    the few exceptions to this rule?

I think the rule is better stated as, "It should be a long time before you choose to rewrite usable software from scratch. But after 35 years, you can maybe consider it." TeX is great, but it is definitely showing its age, and it shows a lot of the inconsistencies many (other) programming languages of its age also exhibit. Besides, it's not really a rewrite; this is a new piece of software that does something similar.

dragonwriter 12 years ago | |

Time is pretty much irrelevant, at least directly. The time to rewrite software is when one of the following is true (which are really the same thing from different viewpoints): 1) It has critical defects in serving its intended usage domain that can be resolved by incremental updates because they are caused by fundamental architectural features, or 2) You need something to be used in a similar-but-not-identical domain to the originally intended domain of the software, to which it cannot be incrementally adapted due its fundamental architecture.

And, really, if the software is designed well for maintainability, either of these should be rare, since if its is loosely coupled, you can change either the low-level implementation details that need to change without touching the high-level organization, or change the high-level organization while preserving the low-level implementation details that are staying the same, in an incremental change.

Argorak 12 years ago | |

That's a double-edged sword. On the other hand, TeX isn't changing much which, given it's space, is necessary: (La)TeX can still typeset documents written in the 90s. If you would start shaking those foundations, you are in a world of pain, probably.

scott_s 12 years ago |

XML format is a non-starter for me. It adds too much cruft to the text; it requires putting everything inside of open and close tags, including paragraphs.

x3ro 12 years ago | |

Thats what I thought too. However, there's a plethora of tools that can generate (and parse!) XML for you, e.g. HAML or Markdown. I write all my TeX docs in Markdown and then convert it to TeX, but stuff like figure placement has to be done in weird comments containing TeX, which'd be easier with RhinoType.

HAML for content: http://chriseppstein.github.io/blog/2010/02/08/haml-sucks-fo... (its not so bad :P)

javert 12 years ago | | |

> I write all my TeX docs in Markdown and then convert it to TeX

Is there some program that converts Markdown into TeX? Or are you saying that you do this manually?

sitharus 12 years ago | |

Plus it's already been done to death in XML with XSL:FO, which does the job quite nicely. I don't think it'd be too tricky to rig up an XSL:T for the XML format here to produce FO and run that through Apache FOP.

LaTeX is much nicer to hand edit, and if you're not hand editing you may as well use Word or something.

prawks 12 years ago | |

As much as I agree to your dislike of XML as very unwieldy, LaTeX does have \begin and \end directives for environments.

Definitely agree that at a per-paragraph level that's way too much markup.

scott_s 12 years ago | | |

That's the thing, though: environments are not the norm.

I'm writing a document. I want the default text entry to be that document. There's already a lot of noise in my Latex sources; I want less, not more. (And I recognize that we actually agree on this.)

aralib 12 years ago | |

It supports a reStructuredText format as well, which is explained in the last paragraph of the "Example Documents and Input Formats" section <http://www.mos6581.org/introducing-rinohtype#example-documen....

houshuang 12 years ago |

This looks great - hopefully wouldn't be too hard to implement Markdown as well. I really want to be writing my academic papers in Markdown or some other simple markup (my papers usually have a surprisingly simple structure), and still have them look nice. Making it _much_ easier to create nice-looking templates would be great (maybe even a GUI editor for templates).

However, I would also love to see more movement towards more flexible, semantic document formats for for example academic papers... I want to be able to read papers in my preferred style, whether on my iPad, Kindle or Mac. But still good support for citations, highlighting etc. Maybe epub is the way to go, not sure.

Anyway very exciting project, and good luck!

jmct 12 years ago | |

Pandoc does almost exactly what you want. Much of my academic writing is written in markdown and then pandoc converts that to LaTeX. For conference papers it doesn't work as well (due to the conferences having specific style requirements) but for notes and presentations it works wonderfully.

hebz0rl 12 years ago | | |

You can always define a template via `--template=MyTemplate`. You just have to place the template in `.pandoc/templates/MyTemplate.[latex|html|...]`.

yannis 12 years ago | |

Markdown is very limited and you will soon hit a wall, when you get down to writing a thesis rather than a paper. For example if you want to write something to the Table of Contents which is not the section title itself.

       \section[short]{Long Title}

It is also possible within pdfLaTeX or LuaLaTeX to write shorter commands.

A GUI will eventually slow you down and is impossible to cater for the hundreds of commands including commonly used packages.

Frozenlock 12 years ago | |

You could look at Org Mode. You can write your document in a similar fashion you would with Markdown, but then you can export in many other formats (including exporting to LaTeX and PdfTeX).

srik 12 years ago | | |

Isn't Org Mode tied to one editor.

fusiongyro 12 years ago | |

I think Markdown and semantic markup are nearly incompatible, unless you want some kind of highly hacked version of Markdown. You might look into Textile though, which looks similar to Markdown but has built-in support for annotating with HTML classes and IDs and whatnot.

rhythmvs 12 years ago | |

A Call for Scholarly Markdown — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6615717

maaarghk 12 years ago |

Ah nice! I considered something like this when writing my honours project, but ultimately moved on to other things. I really hope you see this through - but I'd recommend implementing Knuth-Plass basically straight away, I reckon it's what makes the difference!

sanskritabelt 12 years ago |

I looked at the sample output (http://www.mos6581.org/files/intro_template.pdf) and is it just me or does the vertical spacing seem off? (for example, look at the tables and how the text goes right up to kiss the horizontal bars).

sanskritabelt 12 years ago |

"There is no strict separation of content and style. This is mostly an issue for publishers that want to ensure a consistent style across articles in a journal. With LaTeX, academic authors can always reduce the margins or change the interline spacing to be able to squeeze in more half-truths."

Does this ever happen?

arnsholt 12 years ago | |

In my research group, there's a story that one of their collaborators once tweaked the interline spacing to get under the page limit. Apparently the end result was that you could riffle through the printed proceeding and tell where his article was, just because the pages were darker.

So yeah, it probably happens. If it's half an hour before the submission deadline and there are four lines left on the page you have to cut, you'll do what you have to to get the job done. =)

qznc 12 years ago | |

What I do to save space in papers: Squeeze figures, shorten pseudo code, remove paragraph breaks, and finally decrease font size of bibliography.

jimhefferon 12 years ago | |

People I know who work in the math publishing area say that one of the main problems they have is un-tweaking authors's sources. So, yes.

jmmcd 12 years ago | |

I know lots of people who do it with conference papers (including those published and nominally typeset and printed by Springer), and it's easy to spot. I haven't seen anyone get away with obvious tweaks in journal papers.

When my papers get too long, I take it as an opportunity to obsess over superfluous words and sentences.

koralatov 12 years ago | |

And more to the point, shouldn't this be caught by a sub-editor prior to publishing? I find it incredibly hard to believe that publishers would blindly publish what they're sent without first checking it...

sanskritabelt 12 years ago | | |

My thoughts exactly. Someone at the publisher is looking at a lot of similarly formatted documents, any deviation should stand out.

And isn't separating content from style what a .sty file is supposed to do anyway?

gammarator 12 years ago | |

People do it, although there are more elegant (and honest) means of squeezing space. I summarized some of them after having to do a drastic cut of a proposal at the last minute: http://bellm.org/blog/2013/02/24/making-space-in-latex-docum...

chalst 12 years ago |

> It is worth pointing out the other gripes I have with (La)TeX at this point. I will probably regret this later (I have the impression TeXies can be quite fanatical)

Probably. I applaud efforts to try to rethink typesetting, and this is clearly a substantial accomplishment. Tex is, however, an outstanding design, both in a number of of its aspects and as an overall design, and a lot of later effort has gone into remedying its limitations.

> TeX is not transparent. It is a huge, complex system ... With hundreds of megabytes and seemingly millions of files for a typical TeX installation, I have no idea what is going on when TeX processes a document.

Knuth's contribution is, in fact, quite small in terms of Mb. This covers just the Computer Modern Roman fonts and the eufrak maths fonts, and Plain Tex. Most of a system such as a full Texlive install is made up of fonts. It covers a huge number of specialist journal styles, and support for the needs of specialist fields (linguistic glosses, setting code, chemical notations, Feynman diagrams, etc.). The complexity is that of a library, and kpathsea is its index system.

I have the idea that maybe you think a package whose value you don't see is fluff: there is fluff in Texlive, but probably much less than you think.

> The arcane TeX macro language is not accessible to a broad audience. I believe this is why most LaTeX-generated documents you come across have exactly the same (retro) look; very few people are capable of creating new document styles.

There is a point here, but I think the reason is that most people don't want to fuss about with style. CSS makes it easy to experiment with page styles, and still most web pages either follow a standard formula or look very ugly. Understanding markup conventions is not usually going to be the biggest obstacle to achieving good design.

> TeX is not very modern

There is not a real problem outlined here: you could equally say that the basic layout engine has proven itself by being capable of accommodating all these later technologies. The Office 2007 team even rewrote its formula layout engine so that it would conform to that described in the Tex book, and employed Knuth as a consultant.

I'd put it this way: Knuth's code combines a very deep insight into the nature of the requirements of computer typesetting with outstanding implementation skills. The basic design has not really been surpassed.

> TeX’s warnings/errors are often very cryptic. It can sometimes take a long time to figure out what’s wrong.

Yes, very much so. This is probably the best reason to consider alternative document description languages. But note that Tex is very successful at allowing "code" invocation to be mixed with text - I'd like to see rivals that challenge Tex on this point.

> But why do I even need to mess around with all these extension packages when all I’m doing is writing a simple article? Doesn’t this mean that LaTeX should include at least some of the most commonly used packages by default?

The Latex3 team concede this. Context, a rival Tex-based system, does not have this problem.

> This might largely be a solved problem by now, but I remember often running into input and font encoding issues with LaTeX in the past.

Use Xetex or Luatex, and standardise everything on Unicode; these problems go away.

> There is no strict separation of content and style.

I'd put it this way: the system offers the possibility of such a separation, but does not enforce it. This is bad if you often have to work with other people's Latex, although in practice, you learn how to deal with it.

Addressing some of the problems raised in http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/128454/are-there-any-... could be helpful for showing off your design and the advantages of a fresh start.

siscia 12 years ago |

Very nice project, however for everybody listening:

I believe that in such project, but in every project, you should post some kind of document online explaining what is the big design of the project, the biggest problem you have encountered and how you fixed, the limitation of your design choice and why you made those choice.

Why that ?

1) Because if I want to code something similar I don't have to read all your code to understand what is going on, I just need to read a simple(r) English document where you explain it.

2) Because if someone else what to get involved in your project will have a way easier/happier time to understand the whole project and won't spend days just hacking around, s/he understand the project in the first couple of hours and at the 3rd hour is ready to start code some useful feature or refactor the code.

At the end, such document will make easier to everybody to be involved.

rhythmvs 12 years ago | |

   I originally planned to release RinohType into wild only after I had finished a full review, refactoring and documenting of the code. I also wanted to write some API documentation and a small tutorial, all in the spirit of making a good first impression. Turns out all this takes a huge amount of time! So I’ve decided to dump the code in its current state onto GitHub, write a blog article about it and await some valuable feedback while I resume my refactoring and documenting chore.

   If you decide to play around with the code, please bear in mind that this is just a preview; your experience might not be as smooth as I intend it to be eventually.

fusiongyro 12 years ago |

The rendering of the test document is very strange in FF on RHEL 6 on Linux. Acrobat also gave me garbage for a few seconds and then somehow spontaneously figured it out.

I'm skeptical of these sorts of enterprises, but I'm glad the author took the challenge and I look forward to seeing where it goes.

1_player 12 years ago | |

Yes, it's all wrong on Evince too.

Chrome PDF reader displays it correctly, though.

chrismorgan 12 years ago | | |

I'm finding in evince the parts using character substitution and a custom font are not rendering at all.

brechtm 12 years ago | |

I've noticed these problems on Linux too... On Windows, The PDFs render correctly on SumatraPDF, Adobe Reader, PDF-XChange Reader and IIRC also Foxit PDF Reader.

But I'm sure there's still a bug in my PDF font handing code :)

rhythmvs 12 years ago | | |

That’s probably due to a known issue in pdf engines improperly handling fonts. Even Adobe’s own InDesign 4’s built-in pdf engine was plagued with that bug. [1]

In the sample pdf, only the regular font gets messed up by affected pdf renderers (pdf.js in FF, …). That font is TeXGyreTermes-Regular, and it’s the only CID (composite) font. In the source, that font was an OpenType font (.otf), which, during pdf-creation, got converted into a CID double-byte font, resulting in messed-up Identity-H encoding. (CID double-byte fonts are really meant for huge Asian charset fonts, only.) Likely, the pdf engine used, wrongly assumes that all Unicode encoded fonts (.otf) contain huge Asian charsets, and thus converts them into CID.

I guess most newer pdf renderers know to handle the issue, while the renderer used in FF e.a. doesn’t. The quick fix, at pdf creation, is to avoid fonts being converted into CID at all.

[1] http://forums.adobe.com/message/1289456

viraptor 12 years ago | | |

It's also almost completely broken in pdf.js (firefox's new default viewer) - I guess that one should be the same between linux and windows at least.

StevenXC 12 years ago |

LaTeX does a lot of stuff - it'd take a long time to replicate all that functionality.

However, on my todo list is to write some sort of "TeX-down" wrapper for LaTeX - I want to write my dissertation in a modified form of Markdown, with inline LaTeX equations and sectioning of "theorem" and "proof"-type environments, and then run a make to generate the TeX and PDF based off of a type of TeX template. I'm familiar with Pandoc but haven't delved into it far enough to know if it's robust enough to do what I want.

shocks 12 years ago | |

You might like Pandoc[1].

1: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

rwl 12 years ago | | |

Indeed! Or Org Mode[1].

1: http://orgmode.org/

StevenXC 12 years ago | | |

> I'm familiar with Pandoc but haven't delved into it far enough to know if it's robust enough to do what I want.

:-) But thanks!

riffraff 12 years ago | |

RMarkdown in R Studio does markdown with embedded R code and LaTeX/MathML equations, both inline and display.

It's a surprisingly pleasant environment, though it won't probably be enough for your needs (i.e. no "theorem" env).

rhythmvs 12 years ago |

Great project! Congratulations! I hope you will see this through and make it into a usable typesetting solution in real-world production environments.

Likely a clean, general public friendly GUI (web app) can leverage RinohType’s back-end power, and thus it’s adoption. Maybe monetize that as a hosted service.

A set of professionally designed stylesheets/document templates would give wider adoption a head start.

From your roadmap, I’d be glad to help you achieve some goals (if you would want me to be of any assistance):

   - Provide a number of standard document/page/font styles

   - Include font definitions for freely available fonts

I’d be happily designing/creating those stylesheets. Selecting high-quality fonts, and extend them with missing glyphs and OpenType features, for high quality typography. However, speaking as a typographer, don’t do this, ever:

     Fake small capitals for fonts that do not provide any

   - Advanced typesetting features such as Knuth-Plass … and microtypography

P.S. Ik woon in Leuven.

mrottenkolber 12 years ago |

Very interesting and great effort you put into it! I know exactly what you mean by cleaning up taking time. I am in the same stage (making it look good) of a document processing toolchain I am working on, which supports HTML, (La)TeX and plain text output backends. I thought I could be done this year, but I will probably take longer. I have started working and thinking on this problem about three years ago and am very careful about it's design (it's focus is on developer friendliness and extensibility, while keeping it dead simple and modular). It's not even that I expect others to jump on it, after all people seem to happy with Org mode and Markdown, but I want to solve my own documentation toolchain needs once and for all.

I am looking forward to see how your project turns out, choosing TeX as the print backend wasn't an easy choice and I would definitely consider another print media backend, if there was one. :)

Big ups!

hebz0rl 12 years ago |

About the I want to put a float where I define it problem maybe look at: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Floats,_Figures_and_Capti...

tony_landis 12 years ago |

Very nice work and a worthwhile project!

JohnDoe365 12 years ago |

> One aspect that I’m not so enthusiastic about is RinohType’s performance. On my modest Celeron T3000 1.8 GHz laptop, the average rendering time for a page in the RFIC example is a disappointing 0.8 seconds.

Such a project should have not been started using Python as all current implementations have performance issues, as long you are not gluing C wrapper invocations together.

gizmogwai 12 years ago |

So, as I see it, it is again another one on the list of the half-backed competitors to DocBook, rather than a LaTex alternative.

Demiurge 12 years ago |

Since I'm working right now on a report generator using LaTeX, I was all excited until I hit this: "Because of the Unicode requirement, I opted to skip Python 2 and go with Python 3 which uses Unicode for all text strings."

Really? Python2 is still extremely common, it's too bad I can't this now, if it's not backwards compatible.

zokier 12 years ago | |

> Python2 is still extremely common

So is Python3. They are not mutually exclusive. Python3 is in Debian oldstable (released in 2011), Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Fedora since version 13 (from 2010), and in openSuse since 11.2 (from 2009).

Demiurge 12 years ago | | |

I didn't say they are mutually exclusive. I said I don't care about Python 3, I need Python 2 version :)

Rippalka 12 years ago |

Great initiative, great work! Please keep this project alive. I will be looking forward for your progress :)

andrewcooke 12 years ago |

good stack exchange answer explaining various other tex/latex options - http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/36/differences-betwee...

joshwd 12 years ago |

This looks very promising! Definitely going to give it a test run. Thanks for sharing.

zem 12 years ago |

i would have been more interested in seeing why he felt lout was not an acceptable alternative

brechtm 12 years ago | |

See the linked ML post: http://www.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-context/2008/037150.html (search for Lout)

zem 12 years ago | | |

ah, fair enough. i used lout briefly and had a pretty good experience (went back to latex due to better equation support); from what i recall one of its design goals was being easy to machine-generate, so it was at least plausible that "compiling to lout" would be a better option than doing it from scratch. you're right about the lack of momentum and community for the project, though.

afsina 12 years ago |

I respect Latex users, but I believe it should die. However I see no actual replacement now or in near future :/ I wish one of the big guys eliminate it once and for all. But there is little value in developing a replacement for academic paper publishing.

taeric 12 years ago | |

Amusingly, I feel the same for html. :) I would much rather write something using LaTeX than I would any of the xml based document systems.

What, for the curious, is the reason you wish it would die?

TylerE 12 years ago | |

The value of (La)Tex has very little to do with academia. There is no other (end-user) accessible system that produces typesetting anywhere CLOSE to quality of TeX.

merusame 12 years ago |

The figure placement was solved with \usepackage{float} or not?

todd8 12 years ago |

RinohType is interesting to me because I too am frustrated by TeX/LaTeX. I agree with others that RinohType isn't (yet) a "modern LaTeX". But we need more efforts like this (see for example the excellent Lout by Jeffrey H. Kingston).

First, let me make it clear that I'm a big big fan of Knuth and Lamport and I respect the amazing impact that TeX/LaTeX have had in the Math/Science/Engineering communities. They are clearly a lot smarter than I am, and I owe them a debt for their contributions to CS. I've read Knuth's original papers on Alpha-Beta search, LR-parsing, etc., I own almost all of his books, and I've studied the Art of Computer Programming in depth since the first editions.

TeX is an amazing feat of programming. I had a friend that was in the same fraternity as Knuth as a student. This friend was a great programmer and even he was in awe of Knuth's abilities as a programmer. Look at the history of TeX, the decisions and approaches that Knuth considered and undertook. It's absolutely amazing, and then he essentially gave it away, one of the first and most important Open Source projects!

But, please, can't we come up with a new replacement for LaTeX? By now, it should be obvious that there are only about 7 people in the world that really understand LaTeX/TeX (and I'm not one of them). Hang out on http://tex.stackexchange.com and see what I mean. I've used LaTeX for almost 30 years; it's the first tool I reach for when preparing a document. Thirty years of it is enough.

Now, I write my own styles (.sty files) and complex macros, but the experience isn't pleasant. I think it's here that something needs to be done. I've never been able to convince more than ten percent of the software engineers that have worked for me to use LaTeX. It's not that they don't like markup or programming. It's the mess caused by TeX's macro based extension language. This leads to less than helpful error messages, cryptic behavior, and is a barrier to anyone wishing to take advantage of the underlying power of TeX.

I don't think anyone will try to argue that the TeX macro system is so elegant and powerful or that I simply haven't spent enough time with it, but let me say this, I've programmed for 45 years and I've used macros plenty. I've written packages of macros running on IBM (big machine) assemblers, did assembly language real-time programming for years, implemented macro programming systems like Calvin Mooers Reactive Typewriter [1] and concatenative programming languages like FORTH. Nothing, to me, is more frustrating than trying to write a sophisticated LaTeX package. I've patched boot loaders from the front panel switches of mainframes that wouldn't boot, debugged real time programs containing thousands of lines of assembler, used C++ templates and Haskell types. All of this is easier than writing a fancy new TeX macro. I don't like writing as much as programming, why do the tools have to make it even harder?

Fundamentally, I think that using macros is the wrong way to write extensions and customizations in LaTeX/TeX, the abstractions used to construct anything complex leak too many implementation details. For some of my projects I've found it easier to write custom filters in Python that preprocess input files into plain LaTeX. This observation isn't unique to Latex [2].

LaTeX3 and LuaTeX kept me interested in TeX; I hoped that they would make programming TeX packages and customization easier. Unfortunately, I don't have enough time left to wait for them; they move at a glacial pace and are essentially indistinguishable from abandon-ware. As those 7 guys that understand TeX move on to get real jobs, these projects falter and don't go anywhere. The LuaTeX web-site has been stuck on version 0.6 for thirty months.

Please, can't the community come up with something? Or point me towards a project with a license that I could contribute to.

[1] TRAC (the reactive typewriter system) is a macro based programming system, described in Computer Lib/Dream Machines a 1974 book by Ted Nelson and by its inventor Mooers in the CACM, Volume 9 Issue 3, March 1966 Pages 215-219.

[2] http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/12/17/macros-why-theyr...

jlebrech 12 years ago |

relevant: http://xkcd.com/927/

mserdarsanli 12 years ago | |

Nope, not relevant.