About the compatibility story... [LWN.net]

About the compatibility story...

Posted Sep 17, 2025 21:24 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
In reply to: About the compatibility story... by warrax
Parent article: Typst: a possible LaTeX replacement

Hmm... I have three manuals I started writing 20 years ago and continued writing through 2018; they total almost 600 pages and still build perfectly fine on whatever version of LaTeX ships with Debian 13.

I don't go crazy with untested or new packages, though... all of the packages I use have been around for a long time and are very stable.

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About the compatibility story...

Posted Sep 18, 2025 2:18 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

I have LaTeX files from university days (early 2000-s). I can't render them anymore. Ironically, MS Word documents that I wrote during that time are perfectly readable.

About the compatibility story...

Posted Sep 18, 2025 9:38 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

Whether the MS Word documents render the same as they did before, hell whether they render the same on one PC as another, is another question though. (And the answer is "often not"). So your "perfectly" very likely has a wide margin of error.

About the compatibility story...

Posted Sep 18, 2025 13:02 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Whether the MS Word documents render the same as they did before, hell whether they render the same on one PC as another, is another question though.

...Even on the *same* PC, with the *same* version of Word, "rendering the same" was not guaranteed.

(Back in the day, I recall that merely changing the printer driver was sufficient to cause the document to paginate differently..)

About the compatibility story...

Posted Sep 18, 2025 17:12 UTC (Thu) by hholzgra (subscriber, #11737) [Link]

My early 90s experience was different, I wrote my bachelors thesis with WinWord 2.0a originally, then after switching universities for my masters degree they made it clear that they would expect me to use LaTeX, so as a learning exercise I re-did the complete thesis using LaTeX (somewhere around the switch from 2.09 to 2ε).

WinWord could already no longer process it properly when WinWord 6.0; the version right after 2.0a, came out.

The LaTeX version worked all the way until late 1999, when due to a series of mishaps the source was lost and I was left with only the PDF result, which I still have. (Generating PDF from Word documents on the other hand was basically unheard of back in the 1990s ...)

I also still have a few smaller texts I've written after the 1999 backup disaster, and these I can still process using current LaTeX versions.