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by wtbob 3888 days ago
The issue is that so many man-centuries (man-millennia?) are invested into TeX & LaTeX that sinking time into something else is very, very expensive (much like trying to build a better CPU than amd64 or arm64).

TeX is really, really amazingly powerful. It can do almost anything a typesetter could want to do, fairly easily, and it can do just about everything, one way or another. And its output is heart-achingly beautiful. Sadly, the code necessary to achieve that output ranges from…heart-achingly beautiful to heart-breakingly ugly.

There are other projects out there, of course. I do think that TeX & LaTeX are close to a local maximum, if not al the way there.

XML, in comparison, is a booger joke.
3 comments
dschep 3888 days ago
> I do think that TeX & LaTeX are close to a local maximum, if not al the way there.

Funny you say that since TeX's version scheme (in part) is that it approaches pi. And IIRC will be pi upon Knuth's death.

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jandrese 3888 days ago
XML isn't even really in the same field as TeX. TeX is for typesetting, that's all it does. XML is for encoding general data. It's like saying PDFs are way better than protocol buffers.

TeX is incredibly powerful, but it's also incredibly idiosyncratic. I also personally think Computer Modern is an ugly font.

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leephillips 3888 days ago
TeX has long ago gained the power to use any OpenType/TrueType font on your system, so dislike of CM is really not a reason to avoid using it. (I happen to like CM, but I know it's disliked by multitudes.)
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wtbob 3888 days ago
> XML is for encoding general data.

No, it's really not. XML is a markup language, not a data-encoding language. JSON, S-expressions, ASN.1 &c. are all data encodings; TeX, LaTeX, HTML and XML are markup languages.

> TeX is incredibly powerful, but it's also incredibly idiosyncratic.

Agreed.

> I also personally think Computer Modern is an ugly font.

Eh, it's not great on-screen, but it looks pretty good on paper. But TeX & LaTeX have supported multiple fonts since the beginning.

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goalieca 3888 days ago
> XML, in comparison, is a booger joke.

A dried up booger on the floor.

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