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In particular, tables are a total mess. Paginated tables with correct handling of subheaders and automatic column widths are non-existent. I've seen people resorting to manual size tweaking all too often. You certainly can do whatever you want with absolute sizes, but that kinda negates the purpose of a markup language.

> And guess what these tools do when publication-quality output is desired? Right. They generate input for TeX.
No they don't. People simply make HTML and use something like InDesign.

> It seems to be a pattern with you to conclude that if you can't do something, nobody else can do it either.
I consider that a I'm at least as advanced as an average user. And if I can't get something to work within a reasonable timeframe then most users probably won't be able to do it as well.

And that's a not a mark of a good tool.

>Consider that years ago TeX made it possible to hyphenate Greek text inside (right-to-left) Hebrew text inside English text correctly. Now that we have things like Unicode and OpenType fonts, things are only getting easier.
Yeah. Except that TeX still has only recently gained full UTF support (with tons of packages still not rendering text correctly sometimes). Back then it was the bibliography entries with references that gave me tons of problems.

Actually, the VNC *protocol* are fully capable of efficient scrolling, but most VNC server *implementations* work by doing screen scraping and don't have any heuristics to detect scrolling, thus resulting in terrible performance. The Wayland reference implementation is a lot better in this regard, and performs much better than what is typical for VNC, even though it uses the same design principles.

Also worth noting is that the Weston reference implementation actually uses the RDP protocol, which btw also uses the same design principles as VNC.

So if you compare a typical VNC implementation and the Windows RDP implementation, the Weston implementation should be closer to the later, as the server sits at the same position in the graphics stack *and* uses the same wire protocol (though implementation differences will of course make some impact).

What irritates me most is that many people seem to be going into paranoia mode immediately, or sending out press releases/blog posts to say how evil Oracle is, instead of verifying with Oracle if it was intentional.

And the lack of a good replacement shows. We now have Markdown, reStructuredText and other similar attempts to do something that TeX should have made easy but haven't.

And about hyphenation, I remember spending DAYS trying to find out how to make TeX to correctly hyphenate German text blocks (with all those nice long compound words) inside a mostly-Russian paper (and Russian has its own hyphenation rules, of course). Microsoft Word handled it out of the box.

Debs can be found at: http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/main/libc/libc++/

Why else would they even have versions with the "wrong" copyright?

I'd assume that for now they didn't want this to be out, but they're still internally preparing for such a change.

Certainly, running KDE and GNOME things together was routine by the time Bluecurve came around in Red Hat Linux 8.0 back in 2002. Before then, maybe stuff didn't look much like each other in terms of styling, but you run that risk today as well.

True, applications aren't requesting that the windowing system draw a line segment from A to B, and so on, but in practice X11 applications aren't doing that either.

There is a middle ground in between basic line-drawing primitives and bitmap scraping. RDP does typically work at a higher level than screen scraping, which is why nix's example of scrolling a text editor sounds highly suspect - I've just tried connecting to a Windows desktop (via whatever mechanism Remmina uses for rdp; I guess it wraps rdesktop), opening a large-ish file in gVim, and scrolling both casually line-by-line and madly by mashing page down. It's just as fast and responsive as running vim in an xterm over the same link[0] (ping ~45ms), and in fact seems to have slightly less input lag. Notably, looking at the data transferred, RDP is using a fair bit *less* bandwidth.

The point is that VNC is not comparable to this. It very clearly has to resend large amounts of data for even single line scrolls; it doesn't work in the same way at all.

With any luck Wayland's remoting will sit at a similar point to RDP on the primitives<->scraping spectrum, and everything will be rainbows and unicorns.

[0] That is, 'ssh -X <host> xterm vim'. For a more direct comparison, I did try 'ssh -X <host> gvim', but that really wasn't a fair comparison since X is useless over WAN links. The bandwidth requirement was higher still, and the input latency was so high that nobody could seriously consider it usable in any but the most desperate of circumstances. If you are only ever moving line-by-line, then it would win over VNC, but if you ever want to scroll a whole screenful it takes a similar amount of time.

The issue is not with GPL3 per-se. It is with the combination of GPL and the ability of a commercial entity to relicense the code under a proprietary license.

So no, there is no real movement to make a TeX replacement.