<story><title>Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”</title><url>https://twitter.com/iraphas13/status/1262489387767480322</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>inimino</author><text>Knuth wrote TeX as a labor of love. The surest way to kill everything good about it would be a few million dollars, and a team, and to turn it into fucking Google Docs for science.&lt;p&gt;Ask Knuth to name one person who has the clearest vision for the future of TeX, and give that person a stipend to work on it for the next ten years, or for life, and you might actually do some good.</text></item><item><author>jessriedel</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve said it before and I&amp;#x27;ll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century:  Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don&amp;#x27;t need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!).  Create a non-buggy desktop IDE&amp;#x2F;wordprocessor that works seamlessly using a traditional interface or a LyX-like interface.  Merge&amp;#x2F;buy&amp;#x2F;replace Overleaf with an online service that syncs reliably with the desktop IDE.  And, most importantly and difficultly, create a standard way for generating beautiful web pages (including mobile) from the same LaTeX++ files that can be used to generate beautiful PDFs.&lt;p&gt;The annual NSF physics budget is roughly a quarter billion dollars.  This only needs to make NSF-funded physicists 1% more productive over a decade to justify spending $20M, and the entire world would benefit.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Lots of commenters worry that this will end up like various closed-source for-profit tools like Google Docs.  But for a closer analogy they should look at some of the excellent free open-source science software being produced with philanthropic funding such as Zotero.  Physicists will only adopt it if it makes their lives easier (and maybe not even then...).&lt;p&gt;EDIT 2: There are some pretty strong parallels between the commenters suggesting this can already be achieved with homegrown tools and the infamous HN Dropbox comment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scubbo</author><text>Can you elaborate on what you think is bad about Google Docs? Aside from the data privacy concerns from the fact that it&amp;#x27;s owned and operated by Google (which I agree with), it seems like a fantastically usable, available, and powerful product. What do you fear would happen to LaTeX in this situation?</text></comment>
<story><title>Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”</title><url>https://twitter.com/iraphas13/status/1262489387767480322</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>inimino</author><text>Knuth wrote TeX as a labor of love. The surest way to kill everything good about it would be a few million dollars, and a team, and to turn it into fucking Google Docs for science.&lt;p&gt;Ask Knuth to name one person who has the clearest vision for the future of TeX, and give that person a stipend to work on it for the next ten years, or for life, and you might actually do some good.</text></item><item><author>jessriedel</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve said it before and I&amp;#x27;ll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century:  Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don&amp;#x27;t need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!).  Create a non-buggy desktop IDE&amp;#x2F;wordprocessor that works seamlessly using a traditional interface or a LyX-like interface.  Merge&amp;#x2F;buy&amp;#x2F;replace Overleaf with an online service that syncs reliably with the desktop IDE.  And, most importantly and difficultly, create a standard way for generating beautiful web pages (including mobile) from the same LaTeX++ files that can be used to generate beautiful PDFs.&lt;p&gt;The annual NSF physics budget is roughly a quarter billion dollars.  This only needs to make NSF-funded physicists 1% more productive over a decade to justify spending $20M, and the entire world would benefit.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Lots of commenters worry that this will end up like various closed-source for-profit tools like Google Docs.  But for a closer analogy they should look at some of the excellent free open-source science software being produced with philanthropic funding such as Zotero.  Physicists will only adopt it if it makes their lives easier (and maybe not even then...).&lt;p&gt;EDIT 2: There are some pretty strong parallels between the commenters suggesting this can already be achieved with homegrown tools and the infamous HN Dropbox comment.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jessriedel</author><text>Obviously everything that can be built by an individual is better that way than if built by a team.  But at some point the amount of work becomes too much for one person to finish in a reasonable amount of time (e.g., a lifetime, or before their project becomes out of date).&lt;p&gt;What I&amp;#x27;m describing is not do-able by one person, and the result of refusing to coordinate a team around the project (and instead having a hodge-podge of tools built by various people) is the current LaTeX ecosystem mess.</text></comment>