Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by chaoxu 1265 days ago
Many LaTeX tricks only get passed down from advisors to students, or from collaborators to collaborators. Rarely someone would look for how to improve their typesetting when all they want is to quickly communicate content.

It be nice if content and typesetting can be completely separated, where I just write content, and something (LaTeX, AI, some manual typesetter) does all the typesetting.

Also, should I be the one controlling how the reader consume my content? Maybe the reader prefers another font? Or the reader is viewing in a kindle so pdf page size should be different?

This would be impossible unless the reader have my LaTeX source code and compile it themselves. But it is super simple for epub, or html webpage (by modifying the css).
4 comments
pinewurst 1265 days ago
To a certain degree, the LaTeX environment is already like that. I designed my custom resume style years ago and rarely touch it. I often tweak the actual content which gets poured into the style to produce the final document. The few changes I’ve made to the style have never affected the (separate) content either.
link
fanpu 1265 days ago
> Many LaTeX tricks only get passed down from advisors to students, or from collaborators to collaborators.

Which is a great point on why the average quality of LaTeX homework submissions by undergraduates without any research experience usually makes for a less-than-ideal grading experience. And this is not about the nit-picky mistakes, but the visually glaring ones.

link
zzless 1265 days ago
> This would be impossible unless the reader have my LaTeX source code and compile it themselves. But it is super simple for epub, or html webpage (by modifying the css).

Well ..., wouldn't the html page be the source code in this case? Also, in most cases changing the look of a LaTeX document is as simple as changing the docuent class or switching to a different package. Also, modifying CSS is anything but simple in some cases, especially when the original style is not ideal.

link
WolfOliver 1264 days ago
check out MonsterWriter
link
chaoxu 1264 days ago
Just tried it. Does it support theorem environments?
link