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[O] Leslie Lamport has a foot in the 21st century


From: Thierry Banel
Subject: [O] Leslie Lamport has a foot in the 21st century
Date: Sat, 08 Oct 2016 10:40:20 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.0

Last week I attended a lecture by Leslie Lamport, author of LaTex:
"How to Write a 21st Century Proof".
His answer: write in a structured, hierarchical way.
At the deepest level lie obvious assertions on which the proof is built.

The best medium, he said, is hypertext.
Hypertext gives the ability to fold or show low details.
But wait... I know a about a software that just do that.
How is it called? Yes I remember: Emacs Org Mode.

He went on:
we should get rid of our 17th century habit of writing on dead trees.
PDF was designed for printing, and cannot do hypertext.

If I follow him, Org Mode should probably focus more on
Html (hypertext) export than on PDF-LaTex (paper).
I tried  both.
IMO PDF-LaTex is an order of magnitude more difficult than Html.
And I have already written papers in Tex & LaTex in the past.

In Html we have CSS, which gives us tons of flexibility.
We have Firebug to understand CSS.
We have MathJax to write maths in Html with LaTex quality standard.

In Org Mode we have a CSS starting point:
  http://orgmode.org/org.cssorg.css.
We have org-info-js which is easy to set up and pleasant to use:
  http://orgmode.org/worg/code/org-info-js/

But... Is Leslie killing LaTex?





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