List your suite of desktop apps!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Deleted member 67862
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hruodr said:
I cannot confirm that.

TeX live is gigant, but it contains, as far as I know, only TeX and TeX package.
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If you need to use templates provided by different publications and conferences, these tend to over-consume every package out there. You need the full distribution of texlive or you will be wasting your time (unless you dripfeed dependencies from the internet? I avoid that kind of thing like the plague)

Plus, pdflatex alone is absolutely necessary but drags in a heap of mess.

hruodr said:
TeX is a very small, well written program.
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This does truely seem to be the case but I just don't see it personally. My experience of Tex is that it is a mess in practice, full of side effects. I have been using it for decades and there really is nothing better to replace it but... ugh.

So Donald Knuth through TeX has increased my productivity but also damaged my soul ;)
 
kpedersen said:
My experience of Tex is that it is a mess in practice, full of side effects. I have been using it for decades and there really is nothing better to replace it but... ugh.
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Here I have the same experience and almost the same opinion. The small difference
in opinion is just a little recognition: the side effects are not side effects,
but strict compliance with the rule for people with the intelligence of Donald Knuth.

As far as I know, pdflatex, and since a while latex self, is only a format for
pdftex, and pdftex is not far away from TeX.
 
hruodr said:
The small difference in opinion is just a little recognition: the side effects are not side effects, but strict compliance with the rule for people with the intelligence of Donald Knuth.
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Haha. To be fair, you could be very right. Though nothing more frustrating than using a standard conference template, only to be asked to "use a package" to highlight any citations in the review submission, only for the TOC page to suddenly (and seemingly randomly) glow in every color imaginable because the template happened to use some special "fancy TOC links" package which happens to "interact" with that additional highlight package. (all 1 day before the call for papers submission deadline!) XD

Very likely I am not as smart as Donald Knuth, that part is quite clear to me. But annoyingly neither is the poor guy that was tasked with creating the conference template and all the bizarre requirements it seems. I can almost feel his pain trying to make the template work well with all common packages any author might use.

tuxador said:
I've ditched LaTeX years ago for a monolithic, consistent and elegant alternative wich is ConTeXT
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It looks promising, but isn't this just a revived LuaTeX? I am not convinced that adding Lua into the mix is a good idea if you want portable .tex files. Does it not also have compatibility issues with conference templates because they test exclusively on texlive? I could be wrong.
 
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