Comment by Copyrightest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Copyrightest | Hacker News Reader

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I imagine making a buggy and unmaintainable version could be done quickly, sure, if you don't mind your documents being killed by a thousand small typesetting cuts. TeX is incredibly complicated for good reasons, people should read Knuth's book.

The reason TeX is written in a 1984 dialect of Pascal is that the typesetting bugs have been solved in a completely specified language; it is much easier to write a transpiler for Pascal->C than to rewrite TeX. Asking an LLM to rewrite it in the language-du-jour is a huge cost for very little benefit.

BTW it has been so depressing in the last few months to see LLM-generated projects make claims about performance/accuracy, but there is no benchmarking code on Github and the "thousands of tests" are all useless happy paths. I am sure we will see some grifter claim that Claude rewrote TeX and I am sure dozens of credulous HN users will take it seriously. But we won't see a useful rewrite. It'll be resume-oriented slop like that dishonest Mathematica-in-Rust project we saw last week.

> it is much easier to write a transpiler for Pascal->C than to rewrite TeX. Asking an LLM to rewrite it in the language-du-jour ...

I thought that the combination of the Pascal and Java versions[1] of TeX would be sufficient guidance to produce another language/implementation.

> is a huge cost for very little benefit

A greenfield Java implementation with an MIT license would have been useful[2] for rendering TeX inside of my desktop Markdown editor[3]. Instead, I had to rename all the Java source files to abide by the NTSPL license terms (or GPLv2, which is viral).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Typesetting_System

[2]: https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType/-/blob/main/LICENSE.t...

[3]: https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html

> A greenfield Java implementation with an MIT license would have been useful[2] for rendering TeX inside of my desktop Markdown editor[3]. Instead, I had to rename all the Java source files to abide by the NTSPL license terms (or GPLv2, which is viral).

The source files make it look like DANTE owns the copyright, so you could try asking them to relicence it. Both Philip Taylor and Hans Hagen were involved in the leadership of NTS, and both are still active, so if they are okay with it, then DANTE would hopefully agree to relicence it.

> then DANTE would hopefully agree to relicence it.

In Feb 2023, when I emailed Hans about changing licenses, he wrote back:

> We decided to stick with the GNU (GLP) license. It's not like anyone is going to check in detail what happens with NTS after all these years. We just wanted to add the option for GPLv2. We're not going into endless debates about licences, which are always a sensitive topic in the tex community.

I guess it's not terribly surprising that Hans wanted to avoid talking about licenses :)

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