No LaTeX for the iPad
article by a courageous guy who was involved in a project to port LaTeX to the Ipad — excuse me, iPad. Once you get past the misspellings and awkward, run-on sentences, you find out that it didn’t work, because the LaTeX codebase is too huge and baroque, and the installation is 4 GB. I’m not sure why they thought this made sense, but you have to give them some respect for giving it a serious try. They are living in a world where they believe that LaTeX can be made “appealing to the majority of the iOS userbase.” But clearly the “majority of the iOS userbase” are playing Angry Birds and would never understand the point of a serious tool like LaTeX, if by some chance they became aware of its existence.The (anonymous) author is concerned that “TeX will most likely not make it into the tablet era.” But it’s already there. The only thing stopping me from buying a tablet computer and running TeX on it is the fact that I don’t want a tablet computer. If I did I could have done this in the ’90s. What he really means is that, after he and his team spent days trying to port LaTeX to the iPad, they finally realized that the iPad is not a computer but rather an elaborate browsing device. As many have pointed out before, it’s for consumption, not for creation (for the most part). LaTeX is a complex tool for grownups who are engaged in the serious work of creating elaborate technical documents. There is no substitute, and the iPad is not a substitute for a real computer.
