Ideas for extending the user base #41
Replies: 11 comments 10 replies
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Here are some of my ideas. User forumA mailing-list/forum could be useful. IMO both Google Groups or the new Pandoc/Markdown supportPeople often don't write TeX directly but rather use a tool like Currently Gap analysisI'm currently in the process of looking at various documents I've created with LaTeX to see OverleafOverleaf seems to be quite popular with some people. I'm currently experimenting how |
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Ad: User forumIt is good idea. It cannot be Google forum because I have no Google account. I didn't accept the user agreement suggested by Google, so I cannot have such account (http://petr.olsak.net/zkusenost-gog.html). It should be at GitHub. But I don't know if it is a limitation for another possible users. The question and answers can be realized at tex.stackexchange. The tag "optex" is here but not many questions. The reason shoud be: A) OpTeX users knows everything they need (because using OpTeX is simple) or B) the set of OpTeX users is almost empty :). Ad: pandoc convertorsThis is great suggestion. I was thinking about it too, see my document OMLS (http://petr.olsak.net/ftp/olsak/optex/omls.pdf). IMHO, authors should use Markdown (or something similar) and convert their documents to LaTeX/ConTeXt/OpTeX. If they need to use it only as "to PDF convertor" (a blackbox) then it does not matter what TeX format is used. But if Markdown is used only as a tool to pre-processing a document by authors, then the conversion to a .tex file is done, then a typesetter can add more information about conversion to PDF in the .tex file. He/she can control the processing to PDF in more detail, using macros. So, .tex file (and additional macro files) is the main source of the document where the superset of information needed for all processing of the document is present (processing to various formats, not only PDF). The .tex file should be archived for latter use and it is a "center or heard of the document". What TeX format is used does matter in this second case. Ad: gap analysisI am ready to help OpTeX users if they need any additional feature. Typically, such a requirement can be solved by a few macro lines, so I add the result to the OpTeX tricks page (http://petr.olsak.net/optex/optex-tricks.html). I do this continuously, so I didn't think about a special gap analysis. Maybe, some requirements needs more than few lines of the code, then the package .opm should be created. For example, one student at our faculty will prepare an OpTeX tool for advanced PDF features (annotations, sounds, etc.). This is his bachelor's thesis topic.I hope that his result will be a .opm package. Ad: OverleafOverleaf is LaTeX oriented. One can use OpTeX here but with more effort before starting it. It is described in OpTeX trick 0022 (the last one on the www page). If it is possible to add a module which makes the Overleaf text Editor more OpTeX friendly, then this will be nice. I don't know about such possibility. |
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Comparison questions like this TeXStackExchange may help get users interested. Or maybe not :) Regarding features that could be implemented in OpTeX, one that I see nowhere mentioned in OpTeX (it is mentioned in tex-nutshell) is an analogous to the LaTeX microtype package. Of course there are the primitive luatex commands for this purpose, which I also successfully managed to use without much knowledge on what I was doing, but an easier interface would be nice. Regarding packages, when I have time I could try and write some styles for the slides, more or less copying some of the beamer styles, if it may be useful. Let me know. |
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I think another obstruction why not to use optex might be that arXiv does not support it. Actually, arXiv does not support neither pdfTEX nor LuaTEX? Do you know, why? I mean, they support pdflatex and plain tex, but not pdftex. What is the technical issue when they run texlive anyway? I've been googling how context users do it since context is quite popular tex format I guess and I found this page. But this means that also in this case you have to go through postscript and then convert into pdf. That's kind of annoying especially because you cannot use the PDF features such as simply changing the size of the paper. You can draw and use colours I guess, but you cannot do it the way opmac/optex does it... To be honest, I think that as for scientific articles, latex is probably the best choice anyway. The unified structure and macros are a great advantage here I think. My experience with the "professional" typographers in the journals (especially with Springer) is that you need to send them basically ready to use source code, otherwise they are going to spoil everything they touch. Nevertheless, there are many other scientific texts (lecture notes, surveys, books...), which you may want to upload to arXiv although they are not scientific articles. Here, it would be convenient to be able to use some other format. |
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This is similar to the problem "which came first: the hen or the egg". It doesn't pay to do big projects without more users and there will be no more users without such projects.
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My idea to extending the userbase is to keep the LaTeXisms away. Usually when somebody learns about LaTeX, they need to:
The ecosystem is really complicated due to historical baggage. Most people don't care about that, and preferably even shouldn't care about that. While OpTeX solves a lot of the previous points, I think it can go even further. Used to Linux, I would expect from all software to just tell me install package I created mmtex to accomodate that. It strives to the whole package -- the full OpTeX format including the goodies is there, except the fonts, which for now have to come from the system. To be fully usable I expect, that following is needed:
Anyways the areas where I think OpTeX has to improve in order to solve the usual (La)TeX pain points listed above:
Two examples of the second point are:
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OK. Maybe, it would be better to create such a prospectus by somebody else than me. The OPmac prospectus should be only an inspiration. |
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I've run install-tl (for unix) from TeXlive just now and I've found that there is a menu item "set installation scheme" and there are subitems (among others): "full", "basic" (plain and latex), "minimal" (plain only), "ConTeXt", ... It would be great if there is a subitem "optex". It means optex, plainTeX?, minim, tikz, OTF fonts. First question: is it possible from technical point of view? Second question (more serious): will be accepted such idea by TeXlive developers? Is it reasonable? |
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While I am aware that it is so hard, it would be marvelous if we could typeset documents written in Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages. There are luatexja for Japanese and luatexko for Korean, though the both do not support OpTeX but plain TeX and LaTeX for now. They, unsurprisingly, load luaotfload directly or indirectly so an adjustment for OpTeX's font selection mechanism is at least necessary. |
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Adding OpTeX support to TeX4ht would be cool. |
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I realize this is a huge amount of work, but I've always been very jealous that your books are only written in Czech. I enjoy using OpTeX so much more than LaTeX because of the shallower level of abstracting away TeX details. I think an English version of TeXbook Naruby would probably draw a lot of people toward OpTeX. Do you have any plans at all for that? |
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I'm creating this ticket as a follow-up to this discussion, so that we can collect ideas here.
EDIT: Converted the ticket to a Forum discussion
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