KeenType VS latex-snippets

> 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.

Though I'm not the same commenter, I personally got over the curve by learning from the LaTeX-tutorial.com website recommended by my professor of a math course, and then by learning how to use the Vim text editor with LaTeX. I also took a math course that happened to required weekly problem sets to be submitted in LaTeX.

The first stage of learning was to learn LaTeX with from the website LaTeX-Tutorial.com, which includes a tutorial with no paywall [1]. I paid the closest attention to tutorials 00 to 05 for the core functionality, then skimmed the rest of the tutorial, as I would only rarely use the remaining features. (For tables, even after gaining a general familiarity with how the tabular environment work, I still found it faster to use the Tables Generator website [3], which was also recommended by my instructor).

I then gained practice using TeXstudio as I preferred an offline program, though my professor and most of my fellow students used Overleaf as an online editor. However, I found that I spent a lot of time transcribing handwritten problem sets into LaTeX documents on TeXstudio and Overleaf, and searched for a faster and more pleasant method (in particular, I found that there was a significant delay in my experience when compiling LaTeX code to a PDF with TeXstudio and Overleaf).

That was the source of my motivation for learning how to use Vim with LaTeX, though you should have enough knowledge for effectively writing LaTeX documents with just the information from the LaTeX tutorial website. I was also motivated due to my curiosity about Vim in general, from past discussions on the text editor in an xkcd comic and various forum discussions.

To begin the learning process for Vim, I completed the default-installed Vim tutorial (also motivated because I was curious about Vim in general, from past discussions on the text editor in an xkcd comic and various forum discussions) over a weekend day. Crucially, I followed most of the advice from a Hacker Noon article [4] about more efficient ways to scroll up and down. I then edited the .vimrc config file to allow for using the cursor to keep things simple, using most of the default configurations for Neovim.

Then, I roughly followed E.J. Mastnak's guide at [1] to get set up, over the course of another weekend day. After some troubleshooting with the configuration, I finally got the setup to work, and I’ve happily been using Vim with LaTeX since then. Since the process reduced the friction to compile LaTeX code to a PDF, I compiled my document more often, so I could catch errors early and often (I rarely spend time troubleshooting and debugging LaTeX code now, since I now fix errors shortly very after they appear, as I compile the document every few lines of code or so).

The main major drawback of using Vim and LaTeX was that I followed the advice to enable autocompletion with snippets (e.g. typing “AA” automatically types in “\forall”) via the the UltiSnips software, which would make substitutions without an audible notification (in contrast to other software that I use to make snippets outside of Vim, that would make an audible ping before a substitution). That led to some significant typos in an early assignment I submitted, and I since learned from my mistake to be far more careful when using Vim with LaTeX for enabling snippets. However, snippets also functioned as a nice learning tool, as I would learn through practice what some basic commands would be, through the auto-substitution (for example, I’ve now easily remembered through exposure that <= is written as `\leq`) in LaTeX.

To conclude, you can use free tutorials to learn the basics of LaTeX, and use Overleaf and TeXstudio to practice. For additional speed and pleasantness, you can spend a couple focused weekend days (or possibly more) to learn how to use Vim with LaTeX following another free guide. Then, you can reinforce your learning through regular practice (in my experience, my regular practice was necessary due to requirements of a math course—if your work or education similarly requires LaTeX, a real-life necessity is a great motivator for practicing document production with LaTeX).

[1] https://latex-tutorial.com/tutorials/

[2] https://www.ejmastnak.com/tutorials/vim-latex/intro/

[3] https://www.tablesgenerator.com

[4] https://hackernoon.com/learning-vim-what-i-wish-i-knew-b5dca...

[5] https://github.com/gillescastel/latex-snippets/blob/master/t...

My ~/.vimrc configuration is just copied from this website https://github.com/gillescastel/latex-snippets

I was trying to use some of Gilles Castel's LaTeX snippets for my own notetaking, which I do on nvim with markdown, using pandoc to convert to pdf. The problem with this is that the tex snippets are designed to be activated only when in LaTeX math, but there's no function to directly check this in the plugin I'm using for pandoc markdown.

1) There's a different plugin based approach for LaTeX if you don't grow to like latex-suite (as I did): vimtex can be used to do the compiling, syntax highlighting, completion, navigating to the right spot in the code or pdf ect, and you can take care of the snippets yourself, either by simply not doing anything and typing everything out (completion aided), using :h :ab or using a snippet plugin (in the case of UltiSnips, a careful review of this would be a boost) 2) "just installing" vim plugins without reading about their features doesn't really add to anything other than the learning curve, because many vim plugins change the way vim works and can only be made useful by knowing about their features. If you just let them sit, many of them won't do anything other than slowing down the program. This might very well be different than in VSC

tex.snippet file i use