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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

I think the best alternative out there, honestly, is to just write simpler papers. Having finally started digging into the some of the core works of Knuth, I must say that the source and the results both read fairly well. There are macros, but they are judiciously used.

Probably doesn't hurt to adopt his style of reuse. Which is not necessarily to "link" to a full blown library of macros for purposes, but to pick and choose some that you wish to use. Possibly even just redefining them yourself.

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That's easier said than done. To make some of the mathematical equations work and be legible in several of my papers required a lot of subtle positioning; this was not helped by strict conference page limits or requirements for e.g. 2 column layout (which exposes a lot of weird issues with LaTeX's rendering, which then have to be dealt with). Knuth's original papers, lovely though they are, are much simpler. If you want an example, consider Figure 4 from http://sigwinch.org/Graham/papers/Interface%20Grammars%20for... which was really quite tricky to lay out. I don't have the source code with me right at the moment for some reason, but I recall it being very tricky to modify.

Perhaps this means we should be trying to do simpler stuff, but I'm pretty sure that's impossible in the conference driven world I found myself in.

Apologies, I did not mean to imply that "simpler papers" would be easier. Indeed, I suspect that depending on where you are wanting your paper submitted, it will not be possible. :(

My main thought is that as you bring in more and more libraries to accomplish things, you start bringing in more and more sets of assumptions about the underlying abstraction and these don't always hold. Somewhat ironically, I think of paper layout now as an optimization problem, akin to how TeX thinks of paragraph layout. That is, it will be somewhat iterative. No getting around that.

So, I sadly don't have any prescriptive advice. Just the observation that the simpler papers out there of Knuth's are quite a bit easier to read in source than many of the ones I have ever authored.

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