Back to Latex

Latex page layout for the Ringstadt city

A long time ago, I was quite involved into Roleplaying. I played a lot with one game a friend wrote, Tigres Volants and created some material for that setting. I recently decided to gather the material related to one city, named Ringstadt, and make a page layout and publish it as a PDF.

Maybe because this was old material and I was feeling geeky, I decided to use Latex again. I used that tool a lot during my academic years, and I felt this would be more convenient to make a simple layout with some old text-files. This would also let me use a versioning system for the source. The source text is in RTF format that I recovered from Word for Macintosh 5 format, by running the whole thing in an emulator.

Converting from RTF to Latex sounded like a simple thing in theory, in practice the two first command-line tools I used crashed with a segfault, the third (unrtf) worked, but converted all non-ASCII characters to Latex escape sequences, I had to fuzz around with the configuration to get something readable. The text is in French, which means many accents, so I really wanted a source-code I can proof-read.

The good news is, Latex did not change much in the ten years since I left academia, the bad news is, Latex did not change much. There are many things I stopped worrying about when using computers: text-encodings, font management, image-formats. Latex is pretty much stuck in the 90’s, just to handle an input file in utf-8 format, you need the following packages:

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

Do you know what the T1 code means? This is the encoding of the font, it also means that while you can input your text in UTF-8 format, Latex will not support Unicode, if your input contains a character that is not part of the T1 table, like say a double ended arrow, compilation will fail with an obscure error message. If I want to use cyrillic characters, I’ll need to load another codepage. I don’t think there is a way to tell Latex to just handle Unicode.

Error handling is another aspect where Latex stayed in the 90’s, I remember the error messages from GCC at that time, they were not helpful either. Nowadays there is clang which gives you helpful error messages in colour, with hints.

I just wanted to do an page-layout with the Helvetica font, french text, images, and floating boxes. I ended up with a header that includes 20 packages. Things kind of work (see the image), but floats are basically broken in Latex: you need to do everything manually, and they crash at the first difficulty: page breaks, foot-notes. Latex manages the impressive feat of having floats which are more broken that HTML (I use the wrapfigure package).

We are not talking about an exotic feature: just boxes with text flowing around, you see that in any magazine, and many web-pages. I was able to implement this in Word 5.1, more than 20 years ago, and it worked more reliably than what I get with Latex. Apple’s Pages software which I usually use for light word-processing can even handle non-rectangular floats, using the alpha channel of the image as a guide. You can also overlay floats over each other.

The main argument in favour of using Latex is that it does the right thing by default, but for French, even with the babel package, this is not really true. Latex will insert a space before double punctuation, but this is ugly, the proper thing to do would be to add a half-space. I could probably hack one package or other to get that result.

What stuck me is how much Latex is isolated from other systems: it does not use any operating system services for text processing, font-management, image-processing, rendering, so you end up with a very big system (2GB install), that is its own, old thing. Most of the things I complain in this post were already mentioned in a wish-list post, 10 years ago.

I basically did one chapter of the document, and I’m faced with a simple choice, go on fighting with Latex, with the knowledge that the final layout will be pretty mediocre, or swallow my pride, and just redo everything in Apple Pages…

6 thoughts on “Back to Latex”

  1. Have you tried XƎTEX (http://xetex.sourceforge.net/)? It makes Unicode in LaTeX a non-issue. I agree with most of what you’re saying, though. I guess LaTeX is just the least sucky of all the typesetting engines we have available.

  2. Have you tried Plain TeX? It is what I use. Unicode is terrible anyways, but to demonstrate I have made a macro package that will parse UTF-8 text; you can also make macros to parse other encodings (although I use ASCII). Since the included drivers for printing used PostScript, I wrote my own driver that rasterized DVI directly to PBM; another program included with the printer driver can then convert PBM to the ZjStream format used by the printer.

    • No, and going even more level that LaTeX is not something that would solve my problems.
      Apple Pages does the job fine.

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