1

In short: how accurate is TH.'s claim here?

Say I want all my written works to be archived so that people are able to access it 10, 50, 100 years from now. If I have a finished LaTeX project right now, which compiles without any errors, will I be able to compile it in 100 years? On the other hand, if I had written the whole project in (plain) TeX, will I be able to compile it in 100 years? Is using plain TeX better than using LaTeX in this regard?

I know that 100 years is too long of a time interval for any accurate speculation, but I am still curious about what the professionals think about this; surely TeX will not disappear from the planet and remain in one form or another. My understanding suggests that TeX (plain TeX, not (La/Xe/Lua/Mickey Mouse)Tex) is mostly 'finished' in the sense that any updates to it will be mostly minor bug fixes, unlike many other programming languages which have high aims for the future and might even be willing to give up backwards-compatibility; of course, I could sorely be mistaken here.

(I write primarily in LaTeX but have started to find plain TeX very intriguing and am eager to begin learning it.)

defunct-user
  • 168
  • 1
    I can compile my 1993 PhD thesis (plain tex with a personal developed format) now (tested a couple of years ago, really). I think that if you store all the inputted files (.sty etc, recursively; there should be a way to do that) along with your doc you should be quite safe. – Rmano Jun 16 '21 at 08:44
  • I would put no bet on it that you can use it without maintenance. A current plain document uses type1 fonts or bitmap fonts, and I doubt that in 100 years you will find a viewer that support this. That means tex will have to adapt, and changes typically mean that documents need adaption too. – Ulrike Fischer Jun 16 '21 at 09:59
  • I would expect your latex documents to run with no changes if you also archive the used packages or with at most slight changes if not. People regularly run 40 year old latex documents now, so 100 years in future isn't so much of a jump. – David Carlisle Jun 16 '21 at 10:00
  • Is there a way to set up a local installation of texlive, sort of like the virtualenvs in Python? – defunct-user Jun 16 '21 at 10:09
  • @ArchitChoudhary I have texlives of many years installed you just run installer also it is sent out on dvd every year to TUG members and you can get the iso disk image. Of course whether you can read the dvd in 100 years is another question. I have a backup of a previous life stored in sunos DAT tapes, but I have no idea how to find a dat tape reader, and that was less than 100 years ago. – David Carlisle Jun 16 '21 at 10:33
  • @DavidCarlisle My MacBook already does not have a DVD reader :P Are you saying that I can run the texlive installer and install+run a version of texlive entirely contained in a custom directory? – defunct-user Jun 16 '21 at 10:38
  • 1
    texlive always installs that way, if you have texlive2020 and install texlive 2021 then the 2020 installation is not affected in any way you just need to put the 2020/bin or 2021/bin directory at the front of your path to use whichever system you want. I used to have them all going back to 2012 installed but I got a new laptop and haven't put the old ones back but I have 2020 and 2021 installed – David Carlisle Jun 16 '21 at 10:47
  • 1
    In case you need an old version and you don't have it (anymore), then you can find all of the historic TeX Live releases at https://tug.org/historic/ to download and install. – Marijn Jun 16 '21 at 12:19

0 Answers0