TeXtalk: an interview with Joseph Wright

Hello there, welcome to the TeXtalk! We have a very special guest for today: our friend Joseph Wright, one of our TeX.sx moderators, 60k+ rep, 415 badges, member of the LaTeX3 team, member of the biblatex taskforce together with Philip Kime and Audrey Boruvka, author of the amazing siunitx package, and an avid blogger on TeX matters. Get ready for this awesome interview!

Paulo

Dear friends, welcome to the TeXtalk! Our interviewee today is Joseph Wright.

Could you tell us a bit about yourself? :)

Joseph Wright

I’m a chemist, and have spent the past ten or so years as a researcher. I’ve just been appointed as a lecturer: new challenges, new responsibilities!

Paulo

Any hobbies, besides of course being a very skilled clarinetist? :)

Joseph

I like cycling, but nothing too ‘serious’. As well as the clarinet, I also play recorder, although time for practice is always an issue.

Harish Kumar

I am a fan of the siunitx package. Good work you did there. I was just wondering! How do you manage to get time for all these activities?

Joseph

When I’m hard at work on packages, I devote a lot of my ‘spare time’ to them. siunitx version one was mainly written over a Christmas holiday and various wet weekends!

Harish

Story goes like Mathematics and TeX etc etc. Can you please tell us how and when did you come inside TeX world and wrote beautiful packages for chemistry as well as physics?

Joseph

I’d heard vaguely about LaTeX during my PhD (2000 or so). At the time, there was no ‘local expert’ and I never really took a look. Then in 2003 I moved to do a post-doc in another institution, and there was a LaTeX user about. I got started with some basics, and wrote my final project report for that job in LaTeX, much to the annoyance of my then-boss.

Harish

Are you British?

Joseph

Yes. Apart from a few months as a baby, I’ve never lived outside the UK. Two summers in Italy which I don’t remember at all. :-(

egreg

Yet you can read Italian. :)

Joseph

A little, based on an Open University course a couple of years ago.

egreg

You seem to have good memory.

Garbage Collector

Who influenced you to be a chemist? Why did you choose this major?

Joseph

I’ve always been keen on science, and loved chemistry from being at primary school. Chemistry ‘hero’ wise, I’m a big fan of Pasteur.

Paulo

de Broglie. :P

Joseph

More of a physicist. :-)

egreg

Version 1 of siunitx was released on 2008/06/15, while version 2 has date 2010/05/23. When did you decide to switch to expl3?

Joseph

It was not a simple ‘switch’. Will Robertson had asked me about my experience of expl3 about the time I decided to recode siunitx. At the time, I’d got basically no knowledge of expl3, but was interested to learn more.

I started the recode with the idea of using some ideas from expl3 but in a ‘stand alone’ form (I knew I needed better loops and data structures). However, when I tried that the effort was significant, and I was spending a lot of time basically copy-pasting code from expl3 into a ‘traditional’ TeX form.

Harish

Are you working on any new package at present?

Joseph

Nothing significant at the moment outside of LaTeX3 work. There are lots of ideas, of course, but time is an issue.

Paulo

you are in the “core team” of LaTeX3. How did you get involved? 🙂

Joseph

It’s all Will’s fault 🙂

Paulo

Oops. 🙂

Joseph

As I said earlier, Will asked me about my opinions on expl3. So I started using it, and developing siunitx v2 using it. I had a lot of questions, and found some big gaps (there was no support for keyval beyond some very basic stuff). I wrote some code as an ‘outsider’, for example keys3 (now l3keys), and asked lots of questions on the list.

After a while, I was asked to join the team, which I was happy to do. At that time, expl3 was still pretty experimental, so a lot of what both Will and I joined to do was get it working as an API you can actually use.

My biggest reason for wanting a ‘new’ LaTeX is as a user. LaTeX works, but for every real document you need to load too many packages which provide really basic things, like font loading or creating a new float type.

Paulo

Indeed.

Paul Stanley

It’s a bit of a journey from the “naughty boy” who uses LaTeX to write a report to the sort of contribution you are making now, which seems to go beyond just making the tools you need: what is it about TeX itself that is sufficiently interesting for you to devote so much spare time to it?

Joseph

I started wanting to make things work better for my own use: if you look at chemistry support in 2004, there were some significant gaps. Over time, I’ve learnt a lot about TeX, and LaTeX, and can see that if I want to be able to keep using it as a user then there is a need to help new users and old hands, by working with new challenges.

Harish

Is there any biblatex style for physicists in mind?

Joseph

biblatex-phys: A biblatex implementation of the AIP and APS bibliography style.

Harish

Oh. Sorry, totally missed that one! 🙂

Garbage Collector

When you learnt TeX several years ago, which topic did you feel the most difficult to grasp?

Joseph

I think the obvious ones: TeX as an expansion language, using macros as both functions and variables, \edef, \futurelet, …

JG

Do you see any advantages or disadvantages to more formal LaTeX an beamer instruction in the classroom?

Joseph

You mean teaching people LaTeX?

JG

Yes. I guess my question is what do you feel is the best way for people to learn (or teach) LaTeX?

Joseph

I run a beginner’s course, which works well. I think you do need some form of ‘local expert’ to get going, if only to explain that LaTeX is not an editor (an idea I had trouble with to begin with).

Henry De Young

I’d be interested in hearing about some of your ideas for new packages. Would you be willing to tell us briefly about some of them?

Joseph

There are still too many ‘partial solution’ packages on CTAN, where you have to choose one of several not-quite-right implementations to solve a task. A big one for me is tables. The question is how much time to spend on that, and how much to spend on LaTeX3. We’ll want to tackle the same problems there, and with the opportunity to jettison some historical ‘baggage’.

David Carlisle

So what is wrong with the current batch of table packages?

Joseph

:-)

David

Well I suppose my real question is that I have a long list of what is wrong (I wonder if yours is longer or different or…)

Joseph

You know a lot more about tables than I do. :-) I’d start with the long tables business: needing a separate environment for breakable tables seems wrong. Styling tables is hard, with too much of the style in the table itself, not in a stand alone header.

For example, there’s no good way to set up so that all tables have certain design features.

Then there’s the fact that there is no internal model for storing table data for manipulation, which then requires multiple passes for pretty simple things.

egreg

I don’t think that the dualism between solid tables and breakable ones is bad. Sure I wouldn’t that my table breaks if I don’t allow it to. 🙂

Joseph

I’m thinking in a keyval-like way: breakable = true|false.

David

It would be easy to make \begin{tabular}[breakable=true] do longtable stuff, but what people find harder than the different environment name is that the breakable version can’t be in a table or minipage or other non-breakable thing. Not sure how to fix that. (Well I have plans to allow longtable in those places, but it won’t break)

Joseph

That’s certainly a challenge: I guess you might look in a ‘new’ LaTeX to have a flag set in such cases by the environment so the tabular could then warn 'Breaking not available inside XXX'.

JG

Do you have an example within tables?

Joseph

Well, there are longtable, xtab, tabu, booktabs, spreadtab, …, each of which covers part of what you need to do, plus things like TaBlE (use by ConTeXt). None of them offer what I guess I feel is a complete solution: a single tabular environment which will break if the appropriate option is set, with customisable appearance, etc.

JG

Yes, that is a good point.

Håkon Malmedal

Is siunitx more or less feature-complete, or do you have something more in mind?

Joseph

From my point of view, pretty much feature complete.

JG

How much does a beginner’s course cover? What is your advice after the beginning stages? Perhaps I am still a beginner, but I find many of the manuals next to impossible to decipher, in part because I don’t know all of the terminology so I don’t know fully what to look up or how to find it.

Joseph

The course really is basic: Beginner’s course. Knowing what to look for is always tricky.

Paulo

You’ve been on TeX.sx from day zero. Could you tell us a bit about your “journey” in this community? :) (beta stage, pro tem mod, elected mod)

Joseph

I got a ‘tip off’ about the site: Will Robertson had already pointed me to the LaTeX questions on appearing on StackExchange.

Paulo

Ah yes, I’ve seen some answers of yours in the main SO site. :)

Joseph

I started off simply ‘taking an interest’, but must have done something right as I was asked to be a pro tem moderator. Since then, I’ve just tried to be helpful: that’s the point of working with TeX for me.

Paulo

:)

How do you feel about our community? :)

Joseph

In the main, it works well. From time to time there are issues, but for an internet site where we don’t actually meet in real life, we do OK.

Paulo

Wait for the next UK-TUG meeting. 🙂

Kannappan Sampath

Who are your favorite authors (TeXnical, Technical or otherwise, as you feel appropriate)?

Joseph

You mean of code?

Kannappan

Books, perhaps?

Joseph

Marc van Dongen’s book is very good, as is The LaTeX Companion.

Paulo

And with an epic guy writing the Foreword. :)

Any plans for writing a LaTeX book? :)

Joseph

We do need a Programming LaTeX3 book, but there are lots of other tasks. I suspect that needs to wait until we have more parts of LaTeX3 in place.

JG

Do you foresee LaTeX ever being widely used outside of academia to the point that it supplants Microsoft?

Joseph

LaTeX is a specialist tool, and it’s never likely to change. It’s code based, and about producing typeset material. Most people are not interested in that.

cmhughes

Hi there! How did you become involved with the beamer and answers packages? (I love them both btw) :)

Joseph

Both ‘lifeboat’ cases, more or less. answers has a license issue, so I stepped in so someone could take over and license as LPPL.

cmhughes

ah ok; beamer was a lifeboat case too?

Joseph

beamer was unmaintained, and there were bugs. Vedran and I stepped up at about the same time: I let him take the lead as far as I could.

cmhughes

what’s it like maintaining those packages? do you find it tricky navigating other people’s code? 🙂

Joseph

Yes. beamer is a great package for users, but is not very easy to maintain. In particular, there are very few code comments, and there are some ‘issues’ with the coding (for example treatment of robust commands). I’ve done very little with answers.

cmhughes

Are you ever tempted to re-write them both? :)

Joseph

I thought about it with answers, but don’t want to break existing documents. beamer is too complex to do this.

Paulo

How did you get involved in the biblatex project too? :)

Joseph

Once again, at least in part ‘lifeboat’ stuff. I’ve been using biblatex for a while, and have written a number of styles (all science related, and so pretty simple in biblatex terms). When Philipp Lehman went ‘off the radar’, I got a message from Karl Berry asking if I would be willing to get involved.

Andrew Stacey

What goals would you set for the TeX-SX site for the next year to ensure that it stays a benefit to the community?

Joseph

Focus on welcoming new users: don’t vote to close or downvote too early. Keep an eye on the unanswered: there are questions there that many of the ‘regulars’ can help with. For higher-rep people: let newer users have a change to answer, particularly for the ‘low hanging fruit’ questions.

JG

Do you envision that making a map in LaTeX will be a possibility?

Joseph

TikZ, PSTricks and MetaPost can all draw arbitrary material, but at a cost in terms of complexity. A good map is a complex thing, so I’d probably want to have the co-ordinates set up in something more specialist first, then just plot them.

Paulo

Do you have a “favorite” answer of yours? :)

Joseph

Possible CMYK ConTeXt colors in TikZ, or perhaps How do LaTeX3 and ConTeXt compare?. Both have a ConTeXt focus, at least in part, and I’d like to think I did a good job on covering something I’m not a regular user of.

cmhughes

what resource(s) would you recommend for someone eager to progress their knowledge of TeX? :)

Joseph

It depends on the level we are taking about. As you say ‘TeX’ not ‘LaTeX’, I’ll assume you mean programming TeX. There, TeX by Topic is probably the best guide available. The TeXbook is a good read, but usually if you are learning TeX programming you’ll get a more ‘self-contained’ answer in TbT.

cmhughes

ok, thanks! :) I mainly meant learning internal stuff to try and help me understand the trickier answers .

Joseph

For internals of LaTeX, you do need to program TeX, but also read things like the LaTeX sources or latex.ltx

cmhughes

I’ve always found TeX.sx to be very welcoming and friendly – thank you for what you’ve done to culture and nurture the environment. :)

Joseph

Thanks: the moderators (both now and pro tem) and the wider ‘regulars’ I think have all worked hard at this.

Paulo

How about venturing in the Lua-land? :)

Joseph

I’ve use Lua a little. At the moment, there is nothing I want to do that cannot be done without LuaTeX, and the idea of maintaining two code bases worries me. However, I’m also keen not to get ‘trapped’ into the idea we cannot use LuaTeX for ‘big ideas’. It’s a question of time!

Paulo

Indeed. :)

Can you name something you really like in TeX/LaTeX? And is there something you dislike?

Joseph

I like the output, when done properly, and the fact that well-written LaTeX documents do separate out input and output pretty well. As I’ve already indicated, I’m not a fan of the limited nature of the LaTeX2e kernel, and the trouble that you have to go to to make sometimes trivial changes.

JG

Do you use much R? Is there much relationship between R and LaTeX?

Joseph

I’ve never used R, as it’s not really my area. There’s certainly a group of people combining the two, but I know little about the detail.

JG

What is the difference between this forum and the LaTeX Community forum?

Joseph

There are fewer ‘regulars’ on the forum. It’s also more of a discussion site, as fits the structure. That can be a good thing, but can be repetitive. It’s also focussed almost entirely on LaTeX, and the questions tend to be mainly from less-experienced users.

cmhughes

could you tell us about your blog? :)

Joseph

I set up the blog primarily as I took over the UK-TUG website and wanted a ‘testbed’ for the back-end we use. So I’m on the same host as UK-TUG, and using the same software (WordPress). Over time, though, it’s been a great way to communicate with people. I also get the occasional ‘tip off’. :-)

Andrew

Would you ever consider writing the articles in LaTeX and having them converted to a suitable input format? (articles for your blog, that is)

Joseph

I’ve not really needed to do that. Most of what I write is quite easy to do in WordPress directly, particularly with the MarkDown plugin.

Andrew

Don’t you find yourself just itching to write \emph{hello world} instead of *hello world*?

Hendrik Vogt

Actually, when TeXing, I’m sometimes annoyed that I can’t simply do _hello world_ instead of \emph{hello world} 🙂

David

\catcode´\_\active\def_#1_{\emph{#1}}

Hendrik

:-)

egreg

An easy question for you: when will xor be officially released?

Joseph

:-)

egreg

A rough estimate, then. :)

Joseph

I need Frank and David to look at the code. I’m only part-way through a read through, but that’s only a first pass. At least another year, I fear, and that assumes I have time to do it. That said, the code does work, so partly what’s needed is to get it to a standard to go in l3experimental.

The OR is a complex thing!

David

So (since Frank isn’t here) How have you found working in the L3 project?

Joseph

Over all, it’s been pretty enjoyable. We’ve been delivering some results, which is what I’m interested in, and while I don’t always win the discussions I think my contributions are useful.

It’s been a learning experience for me: I know a lot more about software development now than I did when I joined.

David

You had some articles recently on the merits (or otherwise) of using graphical tools rather as opposed to markup for chemical structures. Other things (notably commutative diagrams) have similar issues. Are there any general guidelines where one should flip input methods?

Joseph

For me, it’s about whether I can read the input and see what is happening. My experience with chemical structures is that this fails with even the best TeX-based input. At the same time, it’s also about the output I can produce: some things really are best done graphically. After all, we use LaTeX because we’re interested in quality typesetting.

David

Ah that reason of course is why 99.9999% of the population prefer to write documents in Word rather than markup. So perhaps everyone just has their own break point…

Joseph

I guess so. As I said, for the case of chemical structures, I also have the quality of the output to consider, and I get the best results with a graphical tool.

David

ah my Word analogy breaks down then.:-)

Paulo

Will you attend next year’s TUG? :)

Joseph

I doubt it: Japan’s a long way, and so the cost is high both in cash terms and more importantly time.

JG

What features do you use most in LaTeX and beamer? (I’m a layman user so please nothing too technical)

Joseph

‘Day to day’ documents nothing special. I’m currently writing some lecture notes in beamer, and they have just text, lists, blocks and images.

Paulo

if you had to name one and only one major groundbreaking feature of LaTeX3, what would that be? 🙂

Joseph

xor

Paulo

Cool! 🙂

Hendrik

What is all this xor about?

Joseph

A new Output Routine (OR). The OR is what deals with complex things like floats. Frank’s xor is very much more sophisticated than the OR in LaTeX2e. See here for the current development code.

Hendrik

Oh my, and I thought of xor. OK, I know (very little) about the output routine, and I guess that trying to improve it will give you sleepless nights…

Joseph

It’s certainly enormous. It’s also been built up since the early 1990s, and needs a full overhaul.

Paulo

Any talks from you in the next UK-TUG meeting? :)

Joseph

Yes, probably on xcoffins.

Paulo

what would be a good way of learning expl3?

Joseph

I’ve written some things on my blog which are aimed at newer users: LaTeX3 programming. As I said, we lack a Programming in LaTeX3 book.

JG

What is LaTeX3? I am still learning LaTeX!

Joseph

Don’t worry: the basics will not change.

JG

What does that mean? I will download something new soon? Is it like iPhone3 versus iPhone 4?

Joseph

No: LaTeX2e was released in 1994, and it’s still the current release. :-)

JG

And LaTeX3e is underway?

Joseph

Work on LaTeX3 started before LaTeX2e was written! You might want to take a look at this paper, which covers some of this. There was a long period with not so much happening on LaTeX3 ‘proper’, but there is now a reasonable amount happening.

JG

You do a tremendous job, Joseph.

Paulo

Thanks a lot for this great interview! :)

Joseph

No problem.

Paulo

:)

Stay tuned for the next episode of TeXtalk!