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phf[asciilifeform]: aww yeah, congratulations signpost
asciilifeform meanwhile tried to embed a simple utf8ism in 'data types' section to illustrate 'UString'; thought '2min job', ended up in astonishing hell of 'latex w/ other than latin? lol. and here are over9000 piles of kludge which dunwork'
asciilifeform: latest loldiscovery is that the macros '\begin{htmlonly}'/'\end{htmlonly}' in hevea (to fence off a kludge that only needed for html output from proper latex) dun actually work ~at all~ (at least on asciilifeform's install).
asciilifeform: ( on actual latex apparently ~can~ insert orcograms with a lolkludge using ancient ibm encodings -- but hevea in fact eats utf. )
phf[asciilifeform]: asciilifeform, tex can't utf, so any language extension like latex requires cludges. there's over9000 of those, but if you "just want to"™ then you can easily use any of the alternative tex engines, built with latex extension. probably out of the box you'll have xelatex or lualatex. both talk utf native
phf[asciilifeform]: xetex and luatex pass triptest and are tex for all practical purposes (hence legally have "tex" in name), but are otherwise built with gigabytes of liquishit required to support "modern" environment
phf[asciilifeform]: (and in before "it dun work!11", both of the engines, like all tex, use computer modern by default, so your extra unicode characters won't appear, since they are not in comuter modern. you can select whatever alternative font, including your system fonts, using https://ctan.org/pkg/fontspec)
phf[asciilifeform]: (and in before "i'm asciilifeform and everything is shit" here's the minimal latex document that compiles with xelatex on my system http://paste.deedbot.org/?id=k7Y8 )
phf[asciilifeform]: also, i don't know what you're smoking, but this works for me, re htmlonly, http://paste.deedbot.org/?id=dtpv
asciilifeform after posting earlier, turned up some of the items phf mentioned, still fiddling; likely botched sumthing in own setup
asciilifeform: tried 'luatex' (on asciilifeform's box, 0.76.0-2013... tried to upgrade -- and earlier, to inst. xelatex -- but sank in dep hell) and phf's example chokes w/ 'File `luaotfload.sty' not found.'
asciilifeform: phf: re: heveaism in particular -- does this work as described in manual on your box ?
asciilifeform: ( on asciilifeform's -- nope )
asciilifeform: ( and neither does e.g. this, tho fails differently -- under hevea, neither block executes, while under standard latex, ~both~ appear to )
asciilifeform: in the former example, neither executes
asciilifeform: ftr the latextron asciilifeform had been using, was: 'pdfTeX 3.1415926-2.5-1.40.14 (TeX Live 2013)'.
asciilifeform evidently doomed to 'upgrade' the thing, i.e. to blow a multiweek vacation on manually emplacing the deps or alt. to bake a toilet box for subj (ugh)
dulapbot: (asciilifeform) 2022-07-28 asciilifeform: billymg: sadly asciilifeform never properly wrote recipe for xorg -- will say that it 1) muchly depends on the gpu backend yer using ( asciilifeform -- amd ) ; and 2) consisted of ~month of trial&error, manually emerging package by package with --no-deps and walking the barf tree
asciilifeform: ^ will prolly have to be finessed via makefile kludge. puzzling that the knob described in manual dunwork tho
asciilifeform: ( the 'htmlonly' thing )
jonsykkel[asciilifeform]: is being able to emerge xorg with 0problems on dulap the exeptional case?
bitbot[asciilifeform]: Logged on 2022-09-30 22:20:45 asciilifeform[jonsykkel]: apropos of nuffin -- baking illustrations for rewritten pest spec
jonsykkel[asciilifeform]: loking 4ward to spec
asciilifeform: lolty jonsykkel
asciilifeform: http://logs.bitdash.io/pest/2022-10-02#1013607 << wasn't xorg per se, but the gpuism cruft ( 'mesa' + the board-specific liquishit for same )
dulapbot: (asciilifeform) 2021-11-07 asciilifeform: http://logs.nosuchlabs.com/log/asciilifeform/2021-11-07#1063729 << i got 1 of those amd cad card things that doesn't 3d ~at all. but worx with 100% blobless driver, and pushes 3 x '4k', which was all i needed.
bitbot[asciilifeform]: Logged on 2022-10-02 18:43:43 jonsykkel: is being able to emerge xorg with 0problems on dulap the exeptional case?
asciilifeform: fwiw this method worx (but not if the '\newcommand' is given where 'foo' and 'bar'...) . suffices for asciilifeform's purposes
asciilifeform: the complete horrid kludge ftr; worx w/ ye olde pdftex if 'OT2' encoding installed.
asciilifeform: what a timesink.
phf[asciilifeform]: http://logs.bitdash.io/pest/2022-10-02#1013598 << my intuition for this approach is that it wouldn't work, because tex is not a real programming language, and latex is its ungodly spawn. if i were to write from scratch i'd go straight for your second solution, with ifthenelse
bitbot[asciilifeform]: Logged on 2022-10-02 17:51:16 asciilifeform[5]: phf: re: heveaism in particular -- does this work as described in manual on your box ?
asciilifeform: phf: yea apparently \newcommand is prohibited in conditional blocks (and this doc'd nowhere)
phf[asciilifeform]: it's more of a consequence of the way latex does things. those begin\end blocks are "special" in the sense of "retarded", and i wouldn't really put anything in them beyond rendering and rendering related commands
phf[asciilifeform]: i don't really know latex, but if you know tex and try and do things the tex way it's pretty much guaranteed to go all kinds of wonky in a latex document
phf[asciilifeform]: we've had #t threads about it…
asciilifeform recalls several
asciilifeform lulzily, had been latexing on/off for ~20y and still feels rather clueless justabout errytime, 'wtf, this oughta work'
asciilifeform: is indeed a 'from hell' atrocity, 'which errybody stuck with cuz 0 substitutes'(tm)
phf[asciilifeform]: i'm particularly surprised that not a single project outside of core knuth's tex even attempted to use cweb or whatever. i mean, you'd think with a fanclub of that size, the inner tex sanctum would at least larp a project or two. nope. zero.
asciilifeform not used cweb
phf[asciilifeform]: it's the C version of knuth's WEB toolkit, for literate programming
phf[asciilifeform]: knuth regularly puts out little hacks that he wrote in cweb, while exploring some idea or other
phf[asciilifeform]: and nobody else of course
phf[asciilifeform]: but my question is why are even old school tex companion programs, like dvi2ps, not written in cweb
phf[asciilifeform]: but of course you can't use hevea (out of the box) to render random-dfs-a.tex as html, because it's not latex, but rather tex
asciilifeform at one pt took a look at subj when in a fever dream of 'wainot deadtree ffa' but not got far
phf[asciilifeform]: i still sometimes dream of "1000 year documents" or someshit
phf[asciilifeform]: but if you've ever tried building minimal tex, realize very fast that there's no such thing as minimal tex
asciilifeform: perhaps moar achievable than '1000y reichs' but only by a notch
asciilifeform: and indeed sadly no such animal as 'compact tex' afaik
asciilifeform: iirc tex predates (or at any rate conceived of in parallel with) even postscript, and hence support for the latter already bloats the kit and poorly impedance-matched
asciilifeform: (whereas the native 'dvi' output format is eaten by ~nuffin afaik)
asciilifeform: ... other than the various converters, that is
asciilifeform often wonders what sorta proprietary lolware exists for mathematical typesetting; or rather, whether any of it ever advanced beyond microshit ordeal where 'pluck a symbol from this-here multipage box with mouse errytime'
asciilifeform: afaik today even schoolbooks baked w/ latex ( with megatonne of custom styling so that 'not obv latex' )
asciilifeform seen a few that were obv baked w/ 'mathematica' tho
phf[asciilifeform]: asciilifeform, the problem as far as bloat is not just that "postscript is big", it's the fact that there's constant ongoing vertical integration, so most tools exist as a subdirecotry of texlive multi-gb distribution
asciilifeform: ^ afaik the only real competition
asciilifeform: phf: yea
phf[asciilifeform]: so for example dvips existed as its own tool in the early 2000s, was maybe couple of thousand lines of code. then "integrated with kpathsea", which is a monster of a library to do path searches
asciilifeform: asciilifeform's orig. ancient makefile for latex in fact invoked 'dvips', found that it chokes on tikzisms
asciilifeform: good % of latexism has this 'witchcraft' flavour, hence asciilifeform's reluctance to 'upgrade' any of the pieces, his install is from '13 in fact
phf[asciilifeform]: latex is further of a mess
asciilifeform: the 'original sin' of that mess imho
phf[asciilifeform]: probably back when lamport wrote it in 89 or whatever, was nice and elegant, but now it's a monster
asciilifeform: reminiscent of cpp , which also started as 'elegant preprocessor for c'
phf[asciilifeform]: it's a quentessential "hack". sort of like if somebody were to write DERIVE in brainfuck, because reasons
asciilifeform: ^, and that nobody ever attempted to rewrite because 'aint nobody got the time'
asciilifeform: indeed phakt that no one will ever get tenure or promotion to lieutenant-general etc from 'write sane typesetter', given as 'hey there's latex'
asciilifeform recalls bolix's document system, tho. 100% parallel universe, and imho notbad
phf[asciilifeform]: moon technology
asciilifeform: it'd take a bolix-style effort (and sane bedrock) to dislodge tex, asciilifeform suspects
asciilifeform: i.e. aint aboutta happen
bitbot[asciilifeform]: Logged on 2022-10-02 21:55:38 phf[awt]: so for example dvips existed as its own tool in the early 2000s, was maybe couple of thousand lines of code. then "integrated with kpathsea", which is a monster of a library to do path searches
phf[asciilifeform]: "We present two extensions to dvips. One allows flexible inclusion of bitmap images and was imple- mented on top of the FreeImage library. The second extension solves quite a long-standing task: adding OpenType font support to dvips. Our extended dvips, xdvipsk, goes the “LuaTEX way” in Open- Type font management: it w
phf[asciilifeform]: orks on DVI files com- piled by LuaTEX and expects to find the necessary Unicode map files, obtained as by-products of the compilation. The providing of these map files is en- sured by a special LATEX package."
phf[asciilifeform]: that's also the version of dvips that lives in tex-live distribution, and the one that you have on your system
asciilifeform still not grasps why fonts gotta exist in completely diff vector-graphical format from the lines an' graphs etc., other than 'historical reasons'(tm)
asciilifeform: far as asciilifeform concerned, whole shebang oughta've been a henderson-style tower of sexpr from day1
asciilifeform: then not even would matter if rendering to vga or printer etc. ( incidentally sony made this go entirely reasonably in '80s w/ their 'display postscript' x11 replacement fwiw )
asciilifeform: as it is, for fonts alone we've postscript, truetype, opentype, and wtf else
asciilifeform: ( iirc traceable to a early '80s patent wank featuring crapple against adobe . )
phf[asciilifeform]: possibly because computers were a mistake
phf[asciilifeform]: i mean t1 postscript fonts were basically tiny postscript programs for each letter to render a letter glyph, but even then they managed to fuck it up: the actual per-letter postscript is obfuscated through some very very simple cypher, because adobe was being adobe
asciilifeform: [insert oblig link to locklin's 'planes before cad actually flew in ~6mo from chalkboard] (tho too lazy to unearth link)
asciilifeform: phf: iirc they also introduced some kinda 'unprincipled exception' kludge to enable kerning/ligatures where reqs state
phf[asciilifeform]: of course somebody (i forgot who, it's in the lores, either unix room people, or smalltalk people) reversed the t1 format and "cracked" their scheme in a weekend, but the artifact stayed
phf[asciilifeform]: asciilifeform, tex is actually font agnostic by design, it lays out boxes of boxes, and it's the "printer" that fills out the smallest glyph boxes with their corresponding glyphs. so like .dvi doesn't have letters in it, but instead says something like "font1-glyph10" and it's e.g. xdvi or dvips that puts the glyphs in pla
asciilifeform: 'softwarization' of phototypesetter (previously the things had actual wheels w/ projection film per glyph) prolly made adobe-style copyrastage inevitable
asciilifeform: iirc tex actually briefly pre-dates the bitmapization of photosetter, hence ^
asciilifeform: (i.e. had to work with the film wheels kind)
asciilifeform: and, as is typical, the birth defect perma-baked-in
phf[asciilifeform]: yeah but how solve. "the whole spitoon" basically mandates fits in head, that is rewritable in its entirety on demand. was looking at oberon again, and was kind of amused that to this day the output of Project Oberon is a handful of source files, without a compiler or anything. you're supposed to bootstrap it by whatever m
phf[asciilifeform]: eans necessary :>
phf[asciilifeform]: and then fits in head becomes monster once you want "my dissertation is on influence of 16th century japanese poetry on 17th century arabic sufi writing"
asciilifeform after reading wirth's b00k, tried one time 'can actually run oberon?', promptly and unsurprisingly broke teeth
bitbot[asciilifeform]: Logged on 2022-10-02 23:12:22 asciilifeform[jonsykkel|deedbot|awt]: [insert oblig link to locklin's 'planes before cad actually flew in ~6mo from chalkboard] (tho too lazy to unearth link)
phf[asciilifeform]: asciilifeform, i've ran it, by using somebody's emulator. see you're not supposed to "just run it". you're supposed to have understood the machine from the documentation, and then spent couple of months implemting the vm and the compiler on your host system, until you can bootstrap it from textual sources :D
asciilifeform: well asciilifeform in fact succeeded in pulling this off w/ (much simpler!) mips
asciilifeform: for anyffin heavier, rapidly devolves to 'lock me in a pyramid for 500yrs' bolix ressurrection
asciilifeform also did not, must point out, have to bake c compiler for that mips from empty space, either..
asciilifeform: if had to -- and were enuff of a nut to insist -- would likely still be at it today
dulapbot: (asciilifeform) 2022-05-16 asciilifeform: Opcode Semantics
phf[asciilifeform]: afaiu oberon is singificantly simpler than c. the exercise seems to be an equivalent of "implement this subset of pascal, PL/0" but maybe 10x of that
phf[asciilifeform]: there's a lot of this 1000yr machine, that's distinctly not a c-machine in the wirth's world. those guys seem to have a common methadology, of how to .e.g write a vm or a parser or a whatever in a couple of hours.
phf[asciilifeform]: so a student of wirth method could probably get an oberon going on any random metal in a matter of hours or days
asciilifeform: imho the 'scheme-83' folx, or even chuck moore et al, better example of '1000y' fwiw
asciilifeform: and prolly yes
phf[asciilifeform]: i think wirth people are roughly equivalent. i mean they had p-machine, and the whole PL/0, PL/1, ... bootstrapping strategy decades and decades ago
phf[asciilifeform]: pl/0 was a small pascal introduced in wirth's 1976 algorithms+data structures=programs, which was elsewhere refined to make it a bit more pragmatic. of course there's like 5 people who understand this stack at this point, because, like lisp, it's singificantly lore and groking of specific philosophy, and if i had another l
phf[asciilifeform]: ifetime, i would…
asciilifeform: asciilifeform's favoured ada subset is justabout ~pascal. but not esp. fond of it from aesthetic pov
asciilifeform: thing is, just about anyffin ~consistent~ would beat livingshit outta the extant horrors.
asciilifeform: even 'pascal machine'
asciilifeform has (or had? maybe threw) buncha '80s crapple 'developer' lit, where ~all examples pascalistic. at one time was the party line there
phf[asciilifeform]: too late! you need to 13GB of disk, and as much ram, to boot the winner of machine wars: THE JAVASCRIPT MACHINE
asciilifeform nostalgiates on 'SWAG'
dulapbot: (trilema) 2015-08-17 asciilifeform: http://www.retroarchive.org/swag << proper archive.
phf[asciilifeform]: isn't your favorite DERIVE written in turbopascal? :>
asciilifeform: phf: afaik the frontend was! (the engine was 'mulisp' + a compiled bytecode turd for same)
asciilifeform: frontend 'typeset' (in ascii graphic) the maffs
phf[asciilifeform]: everything else is of the devil
asciilifeform to this day impressed w/ ye olde 'derive', did ~95% of what 'macsyma' did, and not needed multiyear grant at lulministry
asciilifeform: ( still 'state of art' in opensores symbolicmaffs afaik )
dulapbot: (trilema) 2017-01-04 asciilifeform: (state of the art in open sores world is still macsyma, circa 1975)
asciilifeform at one time dug up what was left of macsyma and put to use in anger in a saltmine
phf[asciilifeform]: maxima is still being actively updated, but i've not had a chance to see what manner of code that is
phf[asciilifeform]: it doesn't look like purely maggot code, because it'll be meaty updates to like (defun back-propagate-bernoulli-m4 ...) and shit like that
asciilifeform: the 1 asciilifeform unearthed was iirc circa ~1980 but commonlispized
asciilifeform: no 'skins' or anyffin
phf[asciilifeform]: ah, yeah, the last mit release, before symbolics claimed the whole thing
asciilifeform at the time was doin' time in a darpa-powered lulzmine where orders were to 'canhaz auto-determinator of algo complexity when algo given in such-such format'
asciilifeform: ^ no prizes for pointing out 'bbut halting problem'
phf[asciilifeform]: halting problem is overrated :>
asciilifeform: the thing, in turn, was outgrowth of a brain-melting pile of 'meta' bureaucracy, where 'ministry of lulz is swamped with claims of homomorphic cryptosystem; how to help evaluators evaluate'em'
phf[asciilifeform]: one can still make some kind of useful claims even if you have "there be dragons" states
phf[asciilifeform]: ahaha, that's beautiful
asciilifeform did the obv thing and redefined the 'problem' into a 'solvable' one, then 'solved', fin
asciilifeform ended up even sitting on committee, which was experience straight outta film 'brazil'
asciilifeform: ( for the stars of the show -- perhaps from kafka )
phf[asciilifeform]: http://logs.bitdash.io/trilema/2017-12-27#1759220 there is in fact a convergence point of the last few threads
bitbot[asciilifeform]: (trilema) 2017-12-27 phf: early tex papers knuth talks about putting this or that formula into macsyma, but then from some point he fully switches to mathematica. breaks me heart
asciilifeform: hm vol4 looks , fwiw, entirely texy
asciilifeform: then again whoknows just with what baked
phf[asciilifeform]: he's definitely using tex for taocp, but not macsyma anymore
phf[asciilifeform]: in fact his "famous" fvwm screenshot got cli mathematica on it :(
asciilifeform unsurprised tho
asciilifeform: lol a very vintage mathematica
phf[asciilifeform]: probaly about as vintage as that screenshot ;)
asciilifeform: ( was expecting it'd be at least of last ~decade, which nominally shits tex )
asciilifeform would also not be surprised if were ~current~ screenshit
asciilifeform: 'openstep' & all
phf[asciilifeform]: we've had a conversation where guy has been using a mac since forever
asciilifeform must bbl.
phf[asciilifeform]: that later 2018 one looks identical to the late 90s screenshot. and now we know
phf[asciilifeform]: asciilifeform, laters!
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