[pdftex] Ultra-fast recompilation for efficient authoring

[Jonathan Fine]

Hi

Last week Nelson Beebe and Reinhard Kotucha told me of Jamie Vicary's very
interesting post on technology for enabling "ultra-fast recompilation
during editing for efficient authoring of latex documents". As a result I
contacted Jamie off-list and had a very useful video conversation with him.
Thank you Nelson, Reinhard and Jamie.

I've now subscribed to the pdftex list, so that I can contribute to the
discussion. First a statement of interest. In the 1990s I realized that one
could create editable dvi files and thus provide a basis for dual view
(source and output) editing, as is provided by BaKoMa. And in the 2000s I
implemented a wrapper that allowed TeX to be used as a stateless
high-performance typesetting library (and built the mathtran web service
for formulas on top of it).

Here are two TUGboat articles on this:
Editing .dvi Files, or Visual TeX:
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb17-3/tb52finv.pdf
Instant Preview and the TeX daemon:
https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb22-4/tb72fine.pdf

By the way, if I recall correctly, in 1993
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect allowed users to switch between
text-based display (and editing) and the WYSIWYG display (and editing).
Jamie kindly showed me that BaKoMa has this feature.

A further statement of interest. I'm keen to contribute to
* building a community of interest around dual view and instant preview
typesetting
* advancing what in the 1990s I called editable dvi files
* advancing TeX as a stateless daemon (or callable function)

To further add to my statement of interest, it is my deeply held view that
the LaTeX internal architecture contains obstacles to the reliable creation
of editable dvi files, and to the running of TeX as a stateless daemon. In
support of this I refer to Frank Mittlebach's statement that the LaTeX
project has embarked on a "multi-year journey to gradually modernize LaTeX,
to resolve important problems in the production of tagged PDF.

LaTeX Tagged PDF (2020):
https://www.latex-project.org/publications/2020-FMi-TUB-tb129mitt-tagpdf.pdf
Taming the beast - advances in paragraph tagging: ttps://
www.latex-project.org/publications/indexbyyear/2021/

My own experience and software such as BaKoMa, Open Office and Microsoft
Word convince me that Jamie's goals can be achieved with TeX as the
typesetting engine and LaTeX as the markup language can be achieved,
provided constraints are imposed on the LaTeX input. This is in line with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_in,_garbage_out.

I have work in progress, at its very early stages, that suggests that LaTeX
can be "spoofed" so that at least in some circumstances the output PDF from
my "restricted LaTeX" can be identical to those produced by standard LaTeX.
(The spoofing is this. Use restricted LaTeX to produce paragraph boxes
identical to those produced by standard LaTeX. Now spoof standard LaTeX to
apply its output routine to these boxes.)

I'm presenting here quite a grand and ambitious view, which would be beyond
me even if I were many years younger. And I haven't even mentioned MathJax
and the web browser as a platform. I think it is important to work modestly
within a social and technical context that encourages sharing, cooperation
and shared distant goals.

I repeat that I'm keen to contribute to
* building a community of interest around dual view and instant preview
typesetting
* advancing what in the 1990s I called editable dvi files
* advancing TeX as a stateless daemon (or callable function)

This message is already a bit long, so I will conclude simply by strongly
agreeing with Jamie's statement in his original post: I believe very
strongly in the benefits of ultra-fast recompilation during editing for
efficient authoring of latex documents.

Happy TeXing (and rapid recompilation)

Jonathan
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