Hi Bill, The idea of a profiled, or constrained, use of LaTeX has revealed itself to be self-defeating during the last decade in a somewhat amusing way.
The moment one decides on a fixed set of declarative markup constructs, as to establish a "profile", there are instantly better tools to use in 2022 than the TeX engine itself. The standard example: If we are restricted to sectioning, lists and basic images and tables, then basic markdown is smaller, simpler to write, and easier to map into any target format. Which also makes it straightforward to be supported by developers for all kinds of modern applications. As the document complexity grows, larger markdown dialects keep appearing - Github-Flavored Markdown, Scholarly Markdown, Madoko, Markua ... I'm sure there will be more. The XML publishing world has its own small ecosystem of such experiments. But the moment the first \def sneaks in, and we become Turing-complete, a pandora's box opens that can not be closed afterwards. As long as the expectation is to have a TeX engine "proper", one will always be able to escape an artificially imposed profile. Advanced users of LaTeX will always have that expectation - and dodge discipline - especially judging by recent arXiv submissions. In the same breath, I also have to state: The fully open, highest-difficulty, LaTeX problem needs to be tackled today. At least on a software development level, if not on a Computer Science one. You may be familiar with the statistic that arXiv submissions continue to increase: https://arxiv.org/stats/monthly_submissions As long as the general trend continues, projects like tex4ht and latexml will have work left to do, as well as communities that need them. Documents written in LaTeX today are valuable and need a path beyond PDF. Greetings, Deyan On Tue, Mar 8, 2022 at 2:44 PM William F Hammond <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Sun, Feb 27, 2022 at 2:16 PM Michal Hoftich replied to Nasser Abbasi: > > [snip] > > Are their technical reasons for this choice? What can LaTeXML do > > which tex4ht can not? > > > I think LaTeXML uses a different approach than TeX4ht for the > conversion, so while we can easily support custom commands and > packages, or translate chunks of the document to pictures, we are also > more likely to get fatal errors because of package clashes. So just > using a package in your document (for example, recently I had to fix > the PDFX package), can lead to a fatal error. This can be difficult to > debug for a lot of users, and even more problematic if you have > thousands of documents from various users, all of them using random > packages. You will just get a big number of documents that fail. > > > Thousands of documents from various users using random packages with no > umbrella of discipline is the reason for my suggestion that the LaTeX > community should begin to use LaTeX profiles as outlined in my talk in San > Francisco at TUG 2010. > > The author of a document using a LaTeX profile that is supported by both > LaTeXML and TeX4ht would be able to have confidence that their [sic] document > would pass correctly through both systems as well as through the system of > any publisher supporting the profile. > > -- Bill > > William F Hammond > Email: [email protected] > https://www.facebook.com/william.f.hammond > http://www.albany.edu/~hammond/ > > πΊπππππππππ πππππππππππ ππππππ πππ πππ ππππππ ππππππ > >
