Hacker News Reader

Comment by secure | Hacker News Reader

I don’t want to sound overly negative, but latexmk already supports this workflow with its -pvc option (i.e. watching files for modifications and updating the preview). The ramdisk is nice, but with an SSD it’s roughly as fast.

Also, there’s http://cristal.inria.fr/whizzytex/whizzytex.html

Since I decided to use LuaLaTeX for my documents, I can’t use whizzytex (but I’d love to!) and compilation time is insanely high with LuaLaTeX.

My main point of criticism is that this is _not_ what Bret Victor describes. Sure, quick feedback is nice, but that’s not the point of his videos. In the videos, you can actually modify the program using the interface. For our example, you should be able to edit in the xpdf viewer, but you can’t.

View on HN

I don't think his main point is modifying the program using the interface. The important thing is the quick feedback loop. In his examples in Learnable Programing, you technically are editing in the same interface, but, really, you're just editing the code on the left and seeing the result on the right.

Additionally, I think that's actually the right way to do it. The result should be optimized for viewing, not for editing, and the editing environment should be optimized for editing, not for viewing. If the two can be merged into a tight feedback loop, then maybe we can get something of the best of both worlds.

Okay, let’s assume that you are right, and we don’t need the same interface.

I still maintain that the feedback loop demonstrated in Bret Victor’s videos is _significantly_ quicker than anything you can achieve with any TeX engine in its current form.

Think of the part where he draws the fish. Or where he drags a slider. You need update rates of a few miliseconds, tops.

What we can achieve with TeX is in the order of seconds, at best — for simple documents.

I am definitely not convinced this lives up to Bret’s standards :-).

You're right -- this isn't, and won't ever be (as long as it stays with this technology) up to Bret's standards.

However, Bret's stuff doesn't exist, and there's a reason for that: it's really hard. What these guys are doing is trying to make something that actually works, and it looks like they're doing a pretty decent job of it. The fact that it integrates with all the normal tools (in particular, LaTeX) makes me inclined to overlook it's imperfections.

I didn't know about whizzytex, it's very interesting. The ability to modify placement with the mouse looks quite neat. I'll look into it, thanks.

To add on pcmonk's answer, this program has two advantages over latexmk : it does not require the user to save the file (in the video, you can see the double stars in the status bar of emacs : the file is not yet saved) and it works with any text file-(compile)->result loop, not just LaTeX. You could use it to edit executable code (see the python example) or HTML for example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com