Re: [AUCTeX] LaTeX-fill-break-at-separators (11.88.9)

[Marcin Borkowski]

Hi, just my 2 cents...

On 2015-11-30, at 12:55, jfbu <address@hidden> wrote:

> I never ever used \(...\) ...

I use them all the time.

> Recently I saw unanimous reproval on SE of a poor innocent bystander's
> proposal to to use $$$ ... $$$ as shortcut for amsmath's align

Horrible idea indeed, those triple dollars...  So un-LaTeX-y.  (To be
fair, the same applies to single dollars.)

> TeX, the language, authorizes this relatively easily, but LaTeX 's
> proselytes viewed it as a terrible sin. The unanimity was as impressive
> as it was non-convincing.
>
> If the point is to go farther than TeX/LaTeX in mark-up, then, isn't
> it to best to switch to a real mark-up language like ReST ?

I like to say that XML really, really fits here.  (As opposed to config
files/databases/everything else it is abused for.)

> A great portion of TeX/LaTeX is about fine points of typography, but
> if the goal to have a source which one can issue in dozens of formats,
> then using TeX/LaTeX as primary mark-up appears illogical.

100% agreed.  However, especially with the abundance of packages, and
the low speed of adoption of anything new in math community (many, many
of my colleauges still use LaTeX 2.09 constructs like {\em ...}, for
instance), the situation is almost hopeless.  I guess that not making
\bf and friends issue a fatal error in LaTeX2e (and in general, making
LaTeX2e as backwards-incompatible as possible) was a (psychological)
design mistake on the part of the LaTeX team.

Also, one of the main problems with LaTeX is that it is a terrible
markup language tied to an excellent typesetting tool.

BTW, for many people, Markdown seemed to take over (thanks to pandoc
conversion); Markdown, however seems to have its own set of problems.
IMHO, Org-mode is much better than md, though after some two decades of
TeX experience (including some mild low-level hacking) I'm much more
comfortable with TeX than Org.

Also, with LaTeX it is much easier for me to fine-tune the visual
aspects, which I find really important.  Automatically producing dozen
of formats is a myth; if you want the document to look good, expect
serious hand-crafting (at least in (La)TeX, I would guess HTML is
similar, though I'm not an expert and probably don't even /want/ to be
one - CSS is a complete and thorough mess, comparable only
to... (La)TeX, which has (for me) the advantage that I know it fairly
well.)

> Thus all the arguments about \(..\) always appeared moot to me.

This is the killer feature of \(...\) for me: typeset this with
mathic=false and mathic=true and compare the results.

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{amssymb}
\usepackage{mathtools}
\mathtoolsset{mathic=false}

\begin{document}
\emph{If \(\mathbb{K}\) is a~field, then\dots}
\end{document}
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

> Besides LaTeX is buggy with \[..\] which is only correct with amsmath loaded

If that were the only/most prominent LaTeX bug...

> Best,
>
> Jean-François

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University