Latex joy of man's desiring

dankblog! 2023-09-24, 1628 EDT, at the danktower

i've been deep in the LaTeX shit of it all for the past three months while working on my novel. i think LaTeX was the right tool, and love the quality of the output and the workflow. with that said, some real annoyances have emerged.

• for the highest quality output, the microtype package must be used. i'd never used this before, and now i'm all pissed off that twenty years' of documents looked shittier than they ought have. in my experience, microtype eliminates all but the most flamboyant overfull hboxen and underfull vboxen. normally one either has to turn off these warnings and accept line overruns, or fix them by hand as they come up. eliminating all overfull hboxen on a large document that hasn't paid attention to the warnings is a hellish task. microtype improves on lots of other things, too. the problem is: microtype only supports explicitly supports pdflatex. its support of my preferred XeTeX is particularly bad; support of LuaTeX seems pretty decent. this means i might switch from XeTeX to LuaTeX, which sucks, as the latter is hella slower. switching to LuaTeX eliminated all but two of my remaining overfulls (out of twenty or so).

• CircuiTikZ and TikZ in general are pretty atrocious. it seems easy to come up with an objectively superior DSL. of course, i haven't explored the space as completely as the authors, i don't know the details of implementing such systems as TeX macros, and i'm certainly not planning to start, so what do i know? still, it feels like you ought need far fewer absolute coordinates and fine-tuning.

previously: "fstab is a nightmare from which i am trying to awake" 2023-06-07