Are there any statistics about the use of LaTeX in the world?
In which countries? In which journals/fields of research? Number of articles using LaTeX? etc.?
[Tex/LaTex] Statistics about LaTeX use in the world
latex-misc
Related Solutions
LaTeX makes it possible to do so much and so much that the simplest thing is to give examples of achievements:
- handouts of exercises on paper to distribute to the students;
- 2D and 3D geometrical shapes with
tikzorpstrickspackages, see by example http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/tag/3d/ - transparencies and PDF slideshow to be projected on screen with the
beamer classsee https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/presentation ; - 2D animations for my students with the
animatepackage; see http://texample.net/tikz/examples/tag/animations/ - 3D animations created with
asymptotethat can be manipulated with the mouse, see by example http://asymptote.sourceforge.net/gallery/truncatedIcosahedron.pdf to open with adobe reader to be able to manipulate the 3D object with the mouse; - videos or sounds thanks to the
media9package see http://www.overleaf.com/latex/examples/using-media9-to-include-videos-files/yvdwwvpknjkk ; - create clickable and interactive PDFs with the
OCGlayer (package ocgtools, ocg-p, ocgx, ocgx2) see: http://mirror.hmc.edu/ctan/macros/latex/contrib/ocgtools/examples/ocgtools-example-web.pdf http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/ocgx/demo-ocgx.pdf open with adobe reader or a pdf reader that manages the ocg layers. - tooltips with
fancytooltipspackage see http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/fancytooltips/examples/fancy-preview-demo.pdf open with adobe reader or a pdf reader that manages the ocg layers. - Allow people reading the PDF to add comments or annotations (teamwork, etc.) with the
pdfcommentpackage see http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/pdfcomment/doc/example.pdf - create PDF forms with
hyperreforeformspackage https://martin-thoma.com/creating-pdf-forms-with-latex/ - write books, theses to be printed on paper or digitised and viewable on PDF
I don't know whether these are open problems or not, but since you are looking for a capstone project, you might be interested to explore if the basic algorithmic aspects of TeX can be improved.
Line-breaking algorithm. The current line breaking algorithm is a gold standard that all line-breaking software emulate, but is it the best way to break lines? Knuth and Plass's algorithm made specific premature optimization choices (pun intended!) like separating page-break from line break, assigning badness based on the raggedness of line but not accounting for rivers, etc. The only real advance since then has been character protrusion, and from what I understand, it still follows the same basic line-breaking algorithm. Now don't get me wrong. I am not saying that these choices were wrong. But a lot of these choices were made because the computational resources of that time could not really handle anything more sophisticated. But now that we have computers that are 1000 times more powerful than those in the 70s, it should be possible to explore other options to see if the line breaking algorithm can be improved by taking into account more factors, especially page-breaking, footnotes, side-notes, and floats. What is better, perfect line breaks but huge vertical spaces to balance the page, or slightly underfull lines but no vertical spaces? There is no way to play around with these in the current framework (please correct me if I am wrong).
Automatic breaking of display equations. Currently the
breqnpackage implements the ideas of Michael J Downes, but AFAIK, the algorithmic aspects are not as well understood as that of line-breaking of text. Is it possible to case line-breaking of display equations as an optimization problem and determine a solution based on penalties and badness?Parsing natural math. There are recurring questions asking if it is possible to automatically translate
<=to\le,sin(x/y)to\sin\left(\frac{x}{y}\right), etc. Although it is possible to do so to a varying degree of success with TeX and LuaTeX (e.g., thecalcmathmodule in ConTeXt), I haven't seen any work that tries to understand how to parse math without markup. Given how sophisticated the current NLP techniques are, it should be possible to do better than simple heuristics for parsing natural math.
Best Answer
Brischoux and Legagneux (2009) surveyed the submission rate in LaTeX of ten randomly selected journals from each of 13 different scientic disciplines of the ISI Web of Knowledge database.