Hi, just my 2 cents... On 2015-11-30, at 12:55, jfbu <j...@free.fr> wrote:
> I never ever used \(...\) ... I use them all the time. > Recently I saw unanimous reproval on SE of a poor innocent bystander's > proposal to to use $$$ ... $$$ as shortcut for amsmath's align Horrible idea indeed, those triple dollars... So un-LaTeX-y. (To be fair, the same applies to single dollars.) > TeX, the language, authorizes this relatively easily, but LaTeX 's > proselytes viewed it as a terrible sin. The unanimity was as impressive > as it was non-convincing. > > If the point is to go farther than TeX/LaTeX in mark-up, then, isn't > it to best to switch to a real mark-up language like ReST ? I like to say that XML really, really fits here. (As opposed to config files/databases/everything else it is abused for.) > A great portion of TeX/LaTeX is about fine points of typography, but > if the goal to have a source which one can issue in dozens of formats, > then using TeX/LaTeX as primary mark-up appears illogical. 100% agreed. However, especially with the abundance of packages, and the low speed of adoption of anything new in math community (many, many of my colleauges still use LaTeX 2.09 constructs like {\em ...}, for instance), the situation is almost hopeless. I guess that not making \bf and friends issue a fatal error in LaTeX2e (and in general, making LaTeX2e as backwards-incompatible as possible) was a (psychological) design mistake on the part of the LaTeX team. Also, one of the main problems with LaTeX is that it is a terrible markup language tied to an excellent typesetting tool. BTW, for many people, Markdown seemed to take over (thanks to pandoc conversion); Markdown, however seems to have its own set of problems. IMHO, Org-mode is much better than md, though after some two decades of TeX experience (including some mild low-level hacking) I'm much more comfortable with TeX than Org. Also, with LaTeX it is much easier for me to fine-tune the visual aspects, which I find really important. Automatically producing dozen of formats is a myth; if you want the document to look good, expect serious hand-crafting (at least in (La)TeX, I would guess HTML is similar, though I'm not an expert and probably don't even /want/ to be one - CSS is a complete and thorough mess, comparable only to... (La)TeX, which has (for me) the advantage that I know it fairly well.) > Thus all the arguments about \(..\) always appeared moot to me. This is the killer feature of \(...\) for me: typeset this with mathic=false and mathic=true and compare the results. --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- \documentclass{article} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{mathtools} \mathtoolsset{mathic=false} \begin{document} \emph{If \(\mathbb{K}\) is a~field, then\dots} \end{document} --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- > Besides LaTeX is buggy with \[..\] which is only correct with amsmath loaded If that were the only/most prominent LaTeX bug... > Best, > > Jean-François Best, -- Marcin Borkowski http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science Adam Mickiewicz University _______________________________________________ auctex mailing list auctex@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/auctex