2026-10-28 12:24 UTC
@slava@mathstodon.xyz (La)TeX is perfect for creating mathematical papers in English, meant to be printed out on PostScript printers. If that’s not exactly what you want, it may be a good solution or not.
I guess nowadays there is OKish support for Unicode and proper PDFs with proper fonts, but it gets more and more hackish the more modern features you add, doesn’t it?
And if you want dynamic layout not tied to a specific paper size, TeX really wasn’t designed for that.
Replies (1)
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@mxk@hachyderm.io 2026-10-29 05:03
@zenfin@mementomori.social @slava@mathstodon.xyz PDF and Unicode support are pretty good with lualatex, but what you can't fix is, that latex is a language based on textual replacement and not on a parsed AST and as such never will have good error messages, since the TeX engine lacks the necessary context. That's the unfixable issue with everything TeX related. Also: the reproducibility is a strong claim, that only holds true, if you find the correct engine and compatible packages. Chances are, a maths paper from 1990 will not build with lualatex without modifications and even then certainly not match pixel perfect.