ddoc latex/formulas?

[bachmeier via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 16 September 2016 at 21:02:26 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Friday, 16 September 2016 at 20:25:33 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>> The advantage of ddoc is generating documentation from that 
>> file with a single call to dmd.
>
> dmd could just as well call executeShell as another program.
>
>> dependencies, you either have to include it with DMD or allow 
>> the documentation to break as soon as someone adds an equation.
>
> No, then it will just fallback to what it does today.
>
> That is what my program already does: if latex isn't available 
> (if the call to executeShell fails), it outputs the plain text, 
> which can still be processed by Javascript if you wish. You've 
> lost nothing by trying to produce the image and gained a lot of 
> convenience for the author and usability for the reader if it 
> does work. dmd can do exactly the same thing.
>
> Y'all are letting the nonexistent perfect be the enemy of the 
> easily implemented good.

But then you introduce other problems:

- Inconsistency in the output when you change machines or when 
you build someone else's program if only one has latex installed.
- Different latex configurations will give different output.
- All machines might have latex installed but not the right 
packages, or the package versions can be different.
- Not all of latex is supported by the Javascript implementations.

It would open a big can of worms to do this. I've run into so 
many problems trying to collaborate with coauthors using latex 
over the years. Rarely can you send a latex file to someone else 
and not run into issues. This is fine for a third-party tool but 
not for DMD.