Ouch ouch ouch. My sympathies :)

Sounds like they could benefit from the R (language) build model that checks library changes against registered consumers of that library before merging.

https://jtibs.substack.com/p/if-all-the-world-were-a-monorep...

> Maybe I don't know where or what, but some kind of clean LaTeX "distribution" is needed.

Unfortunately it’s a bit like asking for a “clean” Python distribution or a “safe” subset of C++. All the baroque mess is necessary to get working the many legacy packages that many people depend upon. And not just depend upon, but depend upon with all their concomitant foibles, bugs, and learned work-arounds.

Universities can be infamously nitpicking when it comes to thesis formatting and their house style, for some reason.

Isn't that everyone's experience? TeX is a nightmare. It predates all standards for sensible software.

That's also been my own personal experience, and I have a CS background and have written several papers and a PhD thesis in LaTeX. I have done many detailed figures in TikZ and done countless presentations using Beamer.

I have no idea how to implement anything in TeX on my own besides rudimentary macros. I did once try to implement a simple typesetting package for typesetting some particularly gnarly natural deduction trees, and I thought it worked fine for a few examples, but then it broke down in ways that was completely non-obvious to me.

The computational model of TeX is really, really opaque to me.

Yep, I'm a CS researcher in a top-3 department. (Hate to be all credentialist like that, but I'm guessing it does mean something to this audience.)

I think a lot of the reason is that, ok, LaTeX is extremely complicated. We all know this. Its partisans tend to believe that this is because typesetting is a hard problem. Typesetting is a hard problem! We know this, too. But I think that a substantial fraction of the complexity of LaTeX is accidental complexity stemming, ultimately, from the inherently loosey-goosey nature of the system.

See, there is no real abstraction in TeX. There are no real mechanisms for encapsulation/information hiding/whatever. It's all just characters that eat characters and turn into other characters. Anything can do anything. Anything can be anything. As a result, the whole "theory" of what a TeX program "is" (like in the sense that Peter Naur used that word?) is conventional.

This means that even to reuse other people's code, you have to imbibe decades of convention that's maybe semi-documented, maybe folkloric, or maybe perfectly sound but requires you to read a 230-page manual. I can only speak for myself, but for me, it's no way to live.

Now, again, TeX-lovers tend to claim that its high degree of loosey-gooseyness is necessary, that it's what makes TeX "powerful." I don't know, that sounds to me like the same old "you can't handle writing assembly" story. Sure I can. I'd just rather not if I can help it.

Maybe it's the PL person in me.

From experience, you don’t need to not have a CS background to find TeX/LaTeX difficult or obscure to customize or extend.

Here’s a challenge to try (I hacked together something similar that only works in specific cases): write an environment where you get N columns in portrait page mode, with a vertical ruler, say, 12pt to the left of each column; respecting different paper sizes.

The amount of \makeatother, and what does that even mean??, will blow your mind

I used to use LaTeX pretty frequently and although I was reasonably productive I also never felt that I "knew" it. It was a whole lot of googling "how to do x in latex" and pasting in something that was too arcane for me to remember for next time (and/or copy pasting from my own prior documents)

In all honesty, I only ever did it to achieve the "LaTeX look". These days I write in markdown or (gasp) wysiwyg editors like google docs.

Pandoc can do this [0], and there's also the "markdown" LaTeX package [1].

[0]: https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#specifying-formats

[1]: https://ctan.org/pkg/markdown

I don't think syntax is the problem here. Using some tool that transpiles to LaTeX, you'll still have to fight your TeX engine sometimes, but now you also add friction and gotchas of your tool that does transpiling.

I've tried writing Org and compiling it to LaTeX, but gave up this idea because ultimately I had to figure out idiosyncrasies of both LaTeX and Org-mode engines.

There are already good html to pdf solutions, people using latex generally would not be satisfied with those

In my experience, formatting is just about the only thing that a department/university cares about (outside of the folks on the committee), and they will send back a thesis until they're satisfied with the formatting, and that means lost time. Perhaps throwaway_7274's department has a reputation for particular attention to (meaningless) detail.

If you don’t understand what they mean and are hunting for pedantic discoveries in explanations of a problem, then please try to dig deeper and contribute more meaningfully, as per the HN guidelines.