hyperswarm VS gpresent

It took me a minute to realize this, but HyperShell seems to be (or can be thought of as) a demo app for the (previously unknown to me) "hyper ecosystem"---Hyperswarm, Hypercore, Hyperdrive, etc: https://docs.holepunch.to/ . Perhaps an even tighter example than HyperShell is hyperbeam [1]: look at the usage section and API, and then note that it's all implemented in like 200 lines of code.

I'm no expert in this field, but this stuff looks like legos for cutting-edge P2P solutions. I think this is the coolest thing I've seen since Tailscale.

[1]: https://github.com/mafintosh/hyperbeam

- https://github.com/hyperswarm/hyperswarm

Thanks for all of your great questions!   We're using Hypercore protocol which uses something called Hyperswarm to connect peers over DHT/Kademlia. What's really neat about a Hyperswarm version that was released is you can create a firewall and whitelist specific public keys of peers that are allowed to connect to you. If a peer is not whitelisted then no exchanging of IPs happens.   We've also thought about eventually adding a mix net like I2P over the network for added anonymity.

With things like Hyperswarm [0], building things like that is easier than it used to be

[0]: https://github.com/hyperswarm/hyperswarm

It's funny, I looked at the "Typesetting Mathematics -- User's Guide (Second Edition)" postscript document, and - at least with macOS' Preview - some big brackets are segmented (Neatroff brackets don't seem to do this, although I've seen it in other troff generated documents), and they even say this:

> Warning — square roots of tall quantities look lousy, because a root-sign big enough to cover the quantity is too dark and heavy

The solution is naturally to rewrite big roots as powers.

pic does seem close to Tikz, although I had to look in the GNU pic doco to figure out how to do colors. Even then, transparency didn't seem to be supported?

Heirloom actually looks the most useful/mature. At least the output looks pretty/someone cared enough to make the example files pretty, there's actual documentation. Limitations are still there (having to convert bitmaps to EPS?). I will say I'm at least slightly impressed by `gpresent`, which is like beamer (so for making presentations), and built-in hyphenation support.

I still don't get Neatroff. It's compatible with/implements a lot that Heirloom does, but then the font support is worse again? It's an impressive project though, the source is very readable, and RTL/LTR support. Less impressive is the lack of a license - I think it's ISC, based on a single comment, but who knows?

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A repository and a makefile are distinctly different than an installer. Random macro packages that may or may not be on GitHub are different than `tlmgr`. Piping stuff around and having to convert images is different than just one command. GUI editors. Example documents (like https://texample.net/). That is what I mean by ecosystem.

XeTeX outputs PDFs by default (granted, via xdvipdfmx), and can also include bitmaps directly (again, granted it needs graphicx or something). All TeX stuff isn't without it's warts, and seems overly complex (pdfTeX/XeTeX/XeLaTex/LuaTeX/ConTeXt, etc). But in practice, it kinda somehow just works (until it doesn't).

[0] https://github.com/rhaberkorn/gpresent