To become success story [LWN.net]

To become success story

Posted Sep 17, 2025 18:38 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523)
In reply to: To become success story by wtarreau
Parent article: Typst: a possible LaTeX replacement

The problem is that some website push you to use the newest gimmick package that will break compatibility in two year instead of the tried and true solution. But how is it different from other software?

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To become success story

Posted Sep 17, 2025 20:23 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (3 responses)

If you are publishing something, you don't (usually) have a choice. Your publisher will hand you a LaTeX template, probably with a big stack of arbitrary packages, and tell you to use that. But then what is the benefit of LaTeX being stable, if we're just going to depend on random unstable stuff anyway?

To become success story

Posted Sep 18, 2025 12:35 UTC (Thu) by aragilar (subscriber, #122569) [Link]

My impression (from what packages I was required to use) was the journals didn't pick the unstable (or new or modern or even maintained) packages, but the oldest ones (along with old compilers)? I'm not sure that whatever system is used that the journals will support the latest (or recent) version anyway.

To become success story

Posted Sep 19, 2025 18:05 UTC (Fri) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, you get a class file, and a template with \usepackage invocations (or they are in the class file), and if you want to produce the exact same output, then yes, you may need to keep the old packages around. But in that scenario I can just keep the resulting output (e.g., a PDF) around.

If I want to revise the paper (e.g., submit a revision of a rejected paper to a different conference), the original appearance is not desired, and usually I need to produce a different format, so it does not matter much if the original class and template no longer works. What matters is that I can easily copy my text to the new template. That is mostly easy, but recently I have had to deal with templates that want all kinds of meta-data, and place standard elements such as \title and \author in a non-standard location, which makes things somewhat time-consuming. But the main part of the paper can be reused and revised, with a formatting pass at the end.

Concerning longevity, I have rarely had the need to process a really old work, but just to see how well it works, I have tried a thesis from 1990, and the main text works (graphics are separate, and I would have to invest more time to find out how they were built). I also tried papers from 1992 and 1993, and they compiled fine; the paper from 1992 contains Framemaker graphics, and I no longer have a way to convert that to Postscript, but fortunately I have the Postscript output; for one picture, the placement is slightly wrong, though. The 1993 paper looks fine.

Maybe the advantage with these old papers is that there were no style/class files coming from the publication venue, so I just used article (or, for the thesis, report), and not many packages, either.

To become success story

Posted Sep 20, 2025 22:11 UTC (Sat) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

It sounds to me as if you're arguing that stability is not required in the first place so long as the main text works. Which is fair enough, but it is also exactly the point I was trying to make. If stability does not exist in practice, then obviously it can't be a functional requirement of the software.