KeenType VS KmCaster

> modern languages like Markdown

Markdown was created in 2004. From the creator:

> ... the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

Email goes back to 1965, though I suspect Markdown's influence stems from the more widely adopted email usage from the 1990s.

> Part of LaTeX's success was the absolutely beautiful documents it can make with nothing but a personal computer.

I'd say that was TeX's success, with LaTeX bolted on later to greatly improve TeX's extensibility. Keep in mind, there are a number of TeX-centric implementations beyond LaTeX. For example, my fork of NTS, called KeenType, is a pure Java version of TeX that can typeset beautifully and has at its core Knuth's original TeX files.

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType/tree/main/tex/src/mai...

My port of the New Typesetting System (NTS), called KeenType, whittles down the Java-based implementation to a few of Knuth's files. Namely, "plain.tex" and "hyphen.tex":

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType/tree/main/tex/src/mai...

Getting familiar with the fonts required understanding the difference between font metrics (TFM files) and the fonts themselves. To make matters a little less straightforward, Knuth created a special character mapping for indexes into the fonts. It was not easy to find a font that mapped those glyphs exactly. The closest font was BaKoMa:

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType/tree/main/tex/src/mai...

This required hard-coding a mapping between Knuth's code points and the actual code points in the target font:

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType/blob/989dbe26f68eda75...

A while ago I optimized KeenType, which although not JavaScript-based, generates SVG images, which can be embedded into web pages.

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keentype

The following tutorial shows the real-time rendering speed of KeenType within my text editor, KeenWrite:

https://youtu.be/vgyYXwwF_lc?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9KWzP...

In Java, many number-to-string implementations use NumberFormat. This is abysmally slow if the problem domain doesn't require internationalization, which is the case for machine-readable file formats, such as SVG. When I performance tested JMathTeX for rendering TeX, the bottleneck for converting TeX into SVG elements was JFreeSVG's use of NumberFormat[0]. Replacing NumberFormat with RyuDouble doubled the throughput[1]. (Reusing a StringBuilder for to concatenate strings yielded another doubling.)

For KeenType[2], a fork of the New Typesetting System (and more complete TeX implementation than JMathTeX), I added an SVG generator that converts numbers to string using a StackOverflow answer[3], instead of using Ryu[4]. The performance was even better and the algorithm vastly simpler.

Knuth was right: measure, then optimize.

[0]: https://github.com/jfree/jfreesvg

[1]: https://github.com/jfree/jfreesvg/pull/30

[2]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType

[3]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/10554128/59087

[4]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType/blob/fef005579021f394...

KeenType, a modernized and optimized NTS fork, replaces KeenTeX.

Although not interactive, I've created a video series that shows advanced usage of Markdown. Namely R, external variables, diagrams, math, annotations, and a different approach to metadata:

* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9...

Tutorial 4 shows basic Markdown:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNbGSiRzx-0

The top-right of each video shows keyboard and mouse clicks to help follow along.[1] My desktop text editor, KeenWrite[2], is used in the tutorials.

[1]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/kmcaster

[2]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite

Aside, the on-screen keyboard/mouse monitor was a yak-shaving project, KmCaster.

KmCaster is my free, open-source, cross-platform software to display keyboard and mouse events on-screen. Use it as follows: