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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Ok. Most STEM students find themselves at one point diving deeper into LaTeX than the actual report subject they are writing.

But developing your own replacement to LaTeX is whole new level.

Nice one :-)

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Do note[1] that TeX itself was written as a result of Knuth being unsatisfied with the typesetting of then-newly reissued volume 2 of TAoCP. I don’t know if Lamport encountered the same yak with LaTeX, but I do know he’s a distributed systems researcher, not a programmer in a relevant area :)

[1] https://yakshav.es/the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/

LaTeX was and is just a collection of macros on top of TeX.

Few people have every used TeX itself, compared to the massive amounts who have used LaTeX; but if you haven't used raw TeX you should try it sometime; it's surprisingly how simple and powerful it is.

I agree. However, it can be tough finding documentation how to use plain TeX. I find that increasingly I'm using OpTeX, which is a much smaller set of macros than LaTeX, simpler this use, understand, and reason about.

https://petr.olsak.net/optex/

> However, it can be tough finding documentation how to use plain TeX.

I hate to be that guy, but... the TeXbook works and recently (finally!) had an official ebook release, illustrations and all. It’s a peculiar value of “works”—personally, I had to be stuck home sick for a couple of weeks with no reading material to get through it from beginning to end, it doesn’t really start to get rewarding unless you get through at least half of it or so, and I went away from it thinking that I like neither Knuth’s way of writing nor his approach to programming language design (“computers follow rules”). But it still has a lot of helpful stuff.

When it comes to more systematic descriptions and connections with more conventional programming-language ideas (it took me some time to recognize that TeX uses what is essentially dynamic scope throughout), I like TeX by Topic[1].

[1] https://www.eijkhout.net/tex/tex-by-topic.html

The TeXbook works well - but many people don't really know what they really want to make it look like, and want guidance - which is what LaTeX provides.

TeX itself is quite powerful, but you end up finding you're reinventing a macro package.

But you can use it basically as markdown and it formats things quite well.

I ended up using plain TeX because I learned from Spivak's The Joy of TeX. It teaches AMS-TeX which is just a thin veneer on top of plain. Before I stopped shaving the yak, I'd setteled on eplain which was just enough to make plain really practical.

i wonder if gpt4 eases that pain a bit

i suspect it does for basic usecases but will still be ultra painful for advanced ones

GPT-4 probably makes it much easier to write, but modifying latex will still be a pain. Unless you want to copy it into another window, tell ChatGPT what modification you want, and then copy it back.

.tex files work fine in VSCode with the Copilot AI integration. Haven’t tried actually writing LaTeX with it but some cursory investigation shows that it seems to be working well. I suspect it’ll perform decently for basic modifications!

(Side note: it’s always impressed me how Copilot works well in even the more obscure languages)

> Unless you want to copy it into another window, tell ChatGPT what modification you want, and then copy it back.

There will be no copying. Plug-ins exist or will exist, such that you will be able to ask GPT-4 directly from within your editor and the plug-in will pass the contents of the document or selection alongside your prompt. Conversely the plug-in for your editor will replace the contents of your document or selection with the output of GPT-4.

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