Stop the Math Press's Presses — Knuth Announces iTex 284
After Donald Knuth's anticipated "earthshaking announcement," it's safe to say that the world is still here. yowlanku writes "Christoper Adams tweeted live from TUG 2010 Conference that 'Donald Knuth's TeX successor will be named iTeX.' " Knuth "also stated that this successor of TeX will have features like 3-D printing, animation, stereographic sound."
Not on the iPhone (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not on the iPhone (Score:5, Funny)
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And TeX is a language interpreter, which is explicitly banned
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That's not fair.
All 27 users of TeX will be quite excited about this.
Re:Perspective vs. Tunnel Vision (Score:5, Informative)
All 27 users of TeX will be quite excited about this.
Ah yes, the reliable old joke: all X people who care will be happy, where X is a humorously small number. Classic!
But kidding aside, TeX is in heavy use. Most TeX users use LaTeX [latex-project.org] or even LyX [lyx.org] to wrap TeX and make it easier, but TeX is in there doing the work.
My understanding is that TeX is standard in the academic world, because it can correctly typeset serious math equations. Also, Wikipedia uses TeX to process all <math> tags (see here [wikipedia.org] for details).
I have many times read discussion boards where people said something like "I started writing my thesis in Microsoft Word using its equation editor. After my fourth bout of heavy drinking and depression, my friend showed me LaTeX, and I was able to finish my thesis with just a few wine coolers and hardly any Prozac."
steveha
Re:Perspective vs. Tunnel Vision (Score:5, Interesting)
I did my thesis in LaTeX; in fact I learned LaTeX to do the thesis so I wouldn't have to use MS Word. I probably didn't save any time since I was starting from scratch with LaTeX and had to update the school's age-old LaTeX template to work with the newer versions, but man, when I saw everyone else struggling with Word and whatever awful math plugin they had to use, I was glad I took the extra time.
Now I use LaTeX whenever I can since the output is so beautiful and I can type lists and tables a lot faster than I can mouse them in in Word.
I highly recommend it.
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I went the opposite. I did my thesis in Word, even though LaTeX was the standard to use at my lab. I knew how to use LaTex (I did my MS thesis in it) but to me LaTeX was too clumsy.
I hated the way it laid out figures/tables. A slight change of the text (add a line or two, change a parameter) would result in widely different figure/table placement, sometimes even clumping them all at the end.
The default font the generated postscript files had was 1) ugly 2) always the same. Of course, the latter is a "good t
Re:Perspective vs. Tunnel Vision (Score:4, Insightful)
It's good to know that people in academics are concentrating on the essential.
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There are plenty o LaTeX editors that can show a live preview, which for me is the best of two worlds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_TeX_editors [wikipedia.org]
I tried both Gummi and Lyx, and I like them both, although I do prefer Gummi.
Re:Perspective vs. Tunnel Vision (Score:5, Insightful)
Now I use LaTeX whenever I can since the output is so beautiful and I can type lists and tables a lot faster than I can mouse them in in Word.
And, as a bonus, it's actually amenable to version control. Nothing like being able to throw a document into cvs/svn/git/what-have-you, and have real, sensible diffs to tell you how the document changed over time, without resorting to storing all that version info in the damn document format itself where it can't be accessed by anything but specialized software designed to work with that format.
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Re:Perspective vs. Tunnel Vision (Score:5, Interesting)
Lyx is cool, but I like LaTeX by hand because it's just faster. Anything repetitive I write my own definitions (i.e. macros) for, so it's a huge time saver.
I really dislike WYSIWYG. I want to type, never use a mouse, and have the program format it for me.
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It is not, sadly, the standard for the "soft" sciences nor for humanities. My friend in economics is using Word and has never written a line of TeX. When he tried to merge docs for his thesis in Word he ran into huge trouble.
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It is not, understandably, the standard for the soft sciences and humanities, for the simple reason that, if you don't need the ability to typeset complicated formulas (or don't need it badly enough), the cost/reward tradeoff for learning any kind of markup language is never going to look good enough to offset the initial outlay of effort.
Add that to the comparative rarity of technically inclined people in those fields, and I'm not sure the tradeoff is worth it in the end. These are not failproof, cookie-
Re:Perspective vs. Tunnel Vision (Score:5, Interesting)
I did my thesis in LaTeX - and I don't believe there was a single mathematical equation in it. I chose to use it so that I could focus on the structure of the document, rather than formatting. There's lots of good things about it beyond just math!
Of course, I may have been the only person in the Faculty of Education at my university ever to use LaTeX for their thesis - at least outside of the math education folks. I had to use a LaTeX style from our computer science department - only CS, physics, and math seem to have LaTeX thesis styles at my school.
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The social sciences, arts, humanities, etc have no need as they do not do massive equations.
Um... when was the last time the arts did ANY equations, let alone "massive" ones.
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Computer users who have come up using GUIs are wanting WYSIWYG programs like Word.
The GUI word processor (with WYSIWYG rendering) has been around for about 20 years in the home market, and 30 or more in the professional market.
TeX might be smaller than Word, but if you compare the number of people who use "Styles" such as "Heading 1" etc in MSWord versus TeX users, I imagine the numbers will be roughly comparable.
26, not 27 (Score:2)
26 users.
I don't do that stuff anymore.
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It's a hoax, but it it's a shame that something isn't being to speed up development on the successor to LaTeX2. LaTeX 3 development work has been underway since the early 1990s. One feature I'd like to see implemented is a reliable way of inserting an inline text box that the main text wraps around, for tip boxes. There is some third party support for images that take up less than a full column width, and it can be hijacked for text, but it doesn't work reliably. Basically, what I think will happen is that
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Re:Not on the iPhone (Score:5, Insightful)
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Flamebait? Really?! Are you suggesting that iPhone fans won't get noisy when Apple gets bashed in threads that have nothing to do with it?
Are you actually suggesting they'll actually STFU in threads that have nothing to do with Apple if nobody bashes it?
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Yes.
Re:Not on the iPhone (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not on the iPhone (Score:4, Funny)
Monkeys even.
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More like a library of congress.
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When someone sticks an 'i' in front of their application's name? Yes.
Re:Not on the iPhone (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you expect? Apple took the wind out of Slashdotters' fantasy of Linux on the desktop supplanting Windows, so there's some bitterness there.
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What do you expect? Apple took the wind out of Slashdotters' fantasy of Linux on the desktop supplanting Windows, so there's some bitterness there.
On the other hand, they have rather successfully put Unix on the desktop. That should count for something.
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Except that 80% of laptops sold over $1000 are Apple and most high end computers tend to be Macs. It's more entrenched than Linux on the desktop that's for sure.
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For poor bastards, most definitely.
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Except that 80% of laptops sold over $1000 are Apple and most high end computers tend to be Macs. It's more entrenched than Linux on the desktop that's for sure.
Very True.
I am a big Linux fan and personally use it everywhere, even on my macbook - however, to be honest, I am still appalled at non-resolution of issues that were glaring in the nineties and are still a gaping hole.
A Linux user is painted as not giving a rat's ass to anything as fancy as X with beautiful ornately decorated windows -- which is true to a large extent, but I guess a large set of core developers forgot that X is what a casual computer user sees.
I am not denying that there are some r
Re:Not on the iPhone (Score:4, Interesting)
Not true, historically the ratio was about:
90% Microsoft bashing
10% Intellectual property bashing
Then it turned into:
50% Microsoft bashing
50% Intellectual property bashing
Only recently did Apple fight their way into the mix, but they've gained market share quickly, eating primarily into Microsoft bashing. What's interesting, is it parallels the browser wars a bit, though the swings are more dramatic here. But:
Microsoft=IE (obviously)
Intellectual Property=Firefox (open source, makes sense)
Apple=Chrome (works in the both big brothery sense)
I'm not sure what Opera is, maybe SCO?
Re:Not on the iPhone (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple is the new Microsoft
Microsoft is the new IBM
IBM is just old
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It's the karmic company cycle.
One of these days IBM will die and then reincarnate as the new Google.
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Google is the new Apple
Apple is the new Microsoft
Microsoft is the new IBM
IBM is the new Xerox
Xerox is...
Re:Not on the iPhone (Score:5, Funny)
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Not sure why this is modded down. Inmates running the asylum, money and arrogance out their ass, projects with and for no reason going on forever, changes to long-time services for the sake of change... All they need is a PRISM or a couple Rainbows and we'll see Gmail [dcu.org] getting spun off before they die. People forget how quickly gods can fall.
Umm, no (Score:2)
As I posted moments ago [transforum.net] on my own site, Google is now exceeding M$/IBM/GE/GM/Standard Oil/The East India Co at their worst.
Apple remains Apple. Comparing the two is like calling atheism a religion ... a category error.
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Man I'm glad someone else realized that!
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I'm not sure what Opera is, maybe SCO?
Linux. It has a lot of great features, a lot of people have a lot of good things to say about it, and no one uses it. Except me. And sopssa.
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AAPL
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meh. My iPhone is neither here nor there.
Although it's good that I can jailbreak it and make a shell script to make
up for Apple's pisspoor design decisions with their SMS app.
I wonder if an Android phone would force that sort of shenanigan.
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Piss poor? I take it you never used SMS prior to the iPhone?
Lame. (Score:3, Funny)
What?
No Twitter integration?
Lame Indeed (Score:2, Insightful)
Knuth "also stated that this successor of TeX will have features like 3-D printing, animation, stereographic sound."
In other words, it will become a bloated mess.
Re:Lame Indeed (Score:5, Funny)
Is it a plane ? Is it a bird ? No, it's a Woosh !
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How does supporting those features make something a "bloated mess?"
Bummer. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Bummer. (Score:5, Funny)
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We were all hoping he'd announce proof that P = NP....
That's easy. Just let N=1 and you got it. :)
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We were all hoping he'd announce proof that P = NP....
He was going to, but he thought he'd need a better system to typeset a big announcement like that first.
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The crypto industry was probably hoping for a P != NP proof. ;)
Enough with the iNames already! (Score:5, Funny)
Name it after some other deliberately mispronounced form of fetish-wear. I'd happily write papers in buttplug (pronounced bootploog).
Re:Enough with the iNames already! (Score:5, Funny)
I'd happily write papers in buttplug (pronounced bootploog).
bootploog
Canadian, eh?
--
BMO - Happy Canada Day!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, it's only the diphthongs that raise in Canadian, and only (for most speakers who have it) before voiceless consonants. That's what Canadaian "out" sounds like General American "oat," but a word like "plug" is unaffected for two reasons: the final voiced consonant and the monophthong. ("Boot," too, since it's also only monophthong /u/.)
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You just gave me an idea for a USB enabled fork of Grub.
Re:Enough with the iNames already! (Score:5, Funny)
I'd happily write papers in buttplug (pronounced bootploog).
Needs more umlauts for that:
Büttplüg.
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There's a reason Will Crowther changed the name of the game from "Colossal Cave Adventure" to just "Adventure."
(Sadly, an entire line of Infocom fetish followups was never to be.)
3D Printing (Score:3, Interesting)
Come to think of it, I'm only familiar with the hardware side of 3D printing.
What is the state of the art in terms of 3D printing software and/or definition languages? Is there anything approaching a standard yet, that can take account of issues like number and type of available materials (conductive metal, plastic, etc.), material properties (tensile strength etc.), degrees of freedom (angles that can be accessed), resolution/step size, and other issues like that in a reasonable way?
I doubt it really, but I guess my question is more "how far are we from achieving it? What work's been done so far?"
Re:3D Printing (Score:5, Informative)
It's usually referred to as Rapid Prototyping [wikipedia.org], and properties are limited to whatever the particular technology you're using can support. The good news is some companies (disclaimer - previous employer) like Stratasys [stratasys.com] have evolved their FDM technology to the point of creating usable plastic parts.
Sadly, the venerable, verbose, and error-prone STL file format is still the standard input for most of these systems.
So, perhaps Tex will support STL output for 3D printing :)
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> What is the state of the art in terms of 3D printing software and/or definition languages
RTF Summary. Thanks to Knuth, now we can print animated audio stereographs in 3D.
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"...the world is still here." (Score:2)
He said earthshaking, not Earth-destroying. Sad to see that he is going to waste more time on typesetting, though.
Re:"...the world is still here." (Score:4, Funny)
Apparently, typesetting is one of those things that can grab hold of you and never let go. I know a couple of people who were trained in typesetting, and they can't seem to help but criticize the kerning and leading of... well, just about everything printed.
Re:"...the world is still here." (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps you meant "keming"?
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For the IIIrd time, I'll Hear No Ill Spoken of Problems with Fonts.
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Sad to see that he is going to waste more time on typesetting, though.
Don Knuth: It's an old habit. I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can afford to be careless, but not men.
Re:"...the world is still here." (Score:4, Insightful)
This version of iTex is junk. (Score:3, Funny)
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Some details from the conference (Score:5, Informative)
here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1702818&cid=32752126 [slashdot.org]
It was an hilarious presentation in the spirit of his first publication... http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/01/the-enduring-art-of-computer-programming.html [codinghorror.com] (scroll down to Potrzebie)
to repeat (w/o the geocoord)
a successor to TeX which he has been working on for some time
scratch tex78 and tex82
so making up for assumptions which don't fit the internet age
jokes about measuring and math in TeX .4pt == .3999pt
maxdimen too small, 1sp too large
tunnel vision caused by computers of the day
subset of XML uses Unicode automatic everything
all directions and all dimensions
hypertext
text audio video sensors GPScoords accelerometers haptics
midi input to score and back to music
no macros --- menu driven like Word but enhanced
spoken command and gestures
\i \TeX (wrapped on a sphere)
spoken name accompanied by (optional) ringing bell
not programmed directly
1289 bugs in TeX
571 bugs in metafont
Project Marianne
www.projectmarianne.com
Project Biturgical
written in Scheme using all buzzwords
pricing - monthly subscription on cloud
first year one month free
pricing based on internet speed
will change everyday
life is too short to reread anything
will benefit world's economy, user's can sell documents
network of certified consultants
online help
- for dummies
- for wizards
- personalized on-line
symbolic equations
graphics
maps
satellite photos
\i\TeX hyper document
math mode like mathml --- must evaluate
avatars
hyperbolic geometry
videoconferencing
world-class photo retouching
character, face, speech recignition
cognition
output format:
- lasercutters
- embroidering machines
- 3D printers
- plasma cutters
interactive cookbook
life as hypertext document
released next month
pending patent applications
Re:Some details from the conference (Score:4, Funny)
It seems we have no time to lose in bringing out a new typesetting engine!
So *that's* what Knuth was doing at Techshop ! (Score:4, Interesting)
Techshop [techshop.ws] is a shared-equipment workspace in Menlo Park CA, with a few other branches (they're opening in San Francisco this summer.) I was there welding a couple of weeks ago, and ran into a friend of mine who was doing a project in the laser cutter room, and the people working on the other laser cutter were Knuth and his wife. (I refrained from walking over and saying "Hi, I'm Joe Fanboi, I used your books 30 years ago!".) Techshop has laser cutters, embroidering machines, 3D printers, and plasma cutters, and here's Knuth's latest project supporting them. I wonder if he's got any plans for controlling CNC milling machines and routers?
Animations... hmm (Score:3, Funny)
Animations? So with a buildup like that we get... a blink tag?
Google search for "knuth announcement" produced... (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if this would surprise him: at 4AM Pacific today, I searched for "knuth announcement".
Google told me that was the 27th most common search over the preceding hour.
So... how long before.... (Score:2, Funny)
... Apple sues Knuth for infringing trademarks over the use of the "i" in iTex?
color me impressed... (Score:2)
Wow, your earthshattering announcement sure was earthshattering! You're going to name your next project iTex! Wow! I mean, holy shit, wow!
Knuthing to see here (Score:5, Funny)
I hope this is real (Score:3, Funny)
I hope this is real, because this would be very bad for a joke.
this was... (Score:2, Funny)
your one and only chance today to claim "1st iPost" but nooooo, you had to do something else instead...
Re:WTF (Score:5, Funny)
I know, WTF indeed. This iTEX is even going to have TrueType fonts! And he rewrote it in Java. Knuth has really gone soft in his old age.
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No, you're just misunderstanding the -graph suffix. It's more than just for images.
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The normal term is stereophonic....
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No, you're just misunderstanding the -graph suffix. It's more than just for images.
Actually, you seem to be the one misunderstanding the -graph suffix. Or missing the joke.
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If you cross your ears, you can hear a sailboat!
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Re:TFA is 22hrs stale tweet (Score:5, Informative)
according to google, his presentation was a hoax.
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according to google, his presentation was a hoax.
So, his presentation didn't actually happen? How does that work, people are reporting on it. Did he manage to convince people to hallucinate that he gave a presentation that he didn't?
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> I don't even use the damn thing...
If you did you would not have been so fast to "spot the hoax" (self-parody, actually).
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22hrs stale tweet
Less than a single day is stale??! Oh no, I found out about a news item about a product which won't come out for some more months or even years 22 hours after some other people! I'd rather come here and read some meaningful discussion (that's where the substance is and has been for years, not the summary) so I can understand the significance of this than get some minimal 140 character news feed one day in advance.
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Whoosh!
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Whoosh!
Look, I don't mind if iTex replaces Flash, but don't take Whoosh away from me! I'm rather fond of it.
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Ever hear of a Kindle?
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What do you expect them to typeset the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with?