[HN Gopher] I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
___________________________________________________________________
I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
Author : miguelmurca
Score : 180 points
Date : 2022-05-24 10:12 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (commutative.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (commutative.xyz)
| camel-cdr wrote:
| I'm always amazed how people could bootstrap something as feature
| rich and versatile as LaTeX from plain TeX.
|
| I'd really like to get to know plain TeX a bit better, but I've
| got no idea where to start.
| cruegge wrote:
| If found "TeX by Topic" a great introduction, it's less
| overwhelming than the TeX book. Also really helpful in wrapping
| your head around macro expansion is the `texdef` cli tool,
| which allows you to quickly evaluate a line of macro code.
| Finally, https://www.tug.org/utilities/plain/cseq.html is nice
| for reference.
| dhosek wrote:
| There are three books that are worth looking at to get plain
| TeX. I'd start with Viktor Eijkhout's _TeX by Topic_ (which I
| think is free in PDF on CTAN). Then the TeXbook to really get
| everything (the PDFs that float around the net are illegal.
| Please buy your copy. DEK donated his royalties to TUG so
| your purchase will help support the continuation of things
| like CTAN and the LaTeX project). And finally, if you really
| want to dig deep, Stephan v. Bechtolsheim's four-volume
| magnum opus, _TeX in Practice_ will tell you more than you
| ever wanted to know.
| jhallenworld wrote:
| I found The Advanced TeXbook by David Salomon to be helpful. It
| shows how to make your own format on top of plain TeX,
| including table of contents, page numbering, cross-references
| and insertions.
|
| I also found A Beginner's Book of TeX by Raymond Seroul and
| Silvio Levy helpful as a quick reference.
|
| Also I have an anti-recommendation for Knuth's TeXBook. I did
| not find this book helpful at all- too much information buried
| in exercises (which I don't think is appropriate for a
| reference), and not enough directly said on how to do useful
| things. Figure out how to make a table of contents using only
| the TeXBook..
| miguelmurca wrote:
| I can only hope to curse you with a TeX nerd-snipe :) I can
| recommend reading the first few chapters of The TeX Book (it's
| a genuinely fun read) followed by the links in the article's
| footnotes for more operational information.
| dash2 wrote:
| Jesus H Carnegie. I JUST WANT TO WRITE AN ACADEMIC ARTICLE.
|
| I mean, look at this abhorrence. And look at what you open up in
| a TeX file, which again _is meant to represent English prose_.
| % Options for packages loaded elsewhere
| \PassOptionsToPackage{unicode}{hyperref}
| \PassOptionsToPackage{hyphens}{url} %
| \documentclass[ ]{article}
| \usepackage{amsmath,amssymb} \usepackage{lmodern}
| \usepackage{iftex} \ifPDFTeX ... and more and
| more of this dross ...
|
| I want to get stuck into the article. At least show me my
| abstract. But no. It's just more and more backslashes.
|
| It's just vile. And the people who use it have Stockholm
| syndrome, and they pass it on to their PhD students who spend
| nights before their presentation at 2am, trying to align a table
| and crying. Then they have Stockholm syndrome too, and they tell
| you "it's pronounced LARTECH" and give themselves a little pat on
| the back.
|
| And here's an equation: \sigma
| _{I}^{2}=a^{2}s^{2}+\left( 1-a\right)^{2}S^{2}+2a\left(
| 1-a\right)\sigma.
|
| How are you supposed to manipulate that? I can open up a WYSIWYG
| editor and literally do maths by just copy-pasting parts from one
| side to another. But this, I can't even read, let alone intuit.
|
| TeX. It's the worst.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| Out of all the problems of TeX/LaTeX, the worst I found is that
| subscripts and superscripts visually dominate the line noise
| when they ought to be less visible than the main content. I
| think your example helps to illustrate that by the equations I
| tended to typeset where way worse for that problem. (But I only
| dipped my toe in properly programming it like OP, which I
| realise is even worse.)
|
| This is really solved by the graphical equation editor in LyX.
| I wrote my master's thesis and PhD thesis using it, having
| previously written an undergrad thesis in raw LaTeX. When I
| switched, I was part way through writing up notes for a masters
| course and ended up rewriting them in LyX (sadly its LaTeX
| import is terrible). I found that I was able to write notes
| faster _by a factor of 3_! And I honestly was no LaTeX novice,
| it just really is less efficient. I shudder to imagine how long
| I would 've spent on my PhD thesis without LyX.
|
| The mistake people make with LyX is assuming it is for
| beginners trying to avoid LaTeX (and it does partly market
| itself that way). I consider it the opposite: it's best suited
| to those who already fully understand LaTeX. You still need to
| dip into it occasionally to edit the preamble or stick in the
| odd little snippet of manual LaTeX (that's ERT in LyX
| terminology). And while typesetting errors are much rarer with
| LyX (it's much harder to forget a closing brace when you don't
| put them in in the first place), when they do occur it's
| because something has gone _really_ wrong so you better know
| what 's going on.
| funnym0nk3y wrote:
| Honestly, do you have any idea how to improve the math mess? I
| did use both Word and LaTeX fur equations, the latter is much
| faster for me. So WYSIWYM seems to have its usecase. But I
| agree, reading that equation is just awful. My idea would be
| tooling to partially render tha equation, e.g. rendering
| sections the cursor is not in.
| officehero wrote:
| I use word with embedded latex and I'd say it's almost as
| fast to write once you get the tweaks and hot keys going (eg.
| learn to never use the horrible "equation editor"). You make
| up in overall speed by readibility. Write an equation, render
| and its just there, write next equation, render, etc.
| camel-cdr wrote:
| > \sigma _{I}^{2}=a^{2}s^{2}+\left(
| 1-a\right)^{2}S^{2}+2a\left( 1-a\right)\sigma.
|
| I'd write the above expression as the following:
|
| \sigma_I^2 = a^2 s^2 + (1-a)^2 S^2 + 2a(1-a) \sigma
|
| The only thing you need to know to understand it conceptually
| is `_ -> move next character down`, `^ -> move next character
| up`.
| pacbard wrote:
| I agree that LaTeX has not the best syntax, but that is a
| better alternative?
|
| I mostly write in Word and I can tell you that it is not that
| much better than LaTeX. Sure, the editor is WYSIWYG so you can
| see right away the title, abstract, text, etc.
|
| The problems I have with Word are mostly solved in LaTeX. For
| example, references are automatically managed in LaTeX. In
| Word, that's mostly a manual process (I know there are
| integrations with Zotero/Mendeley/whatever, but those are a
| little wonky on a long paper---I have never used the built-in
| citation manager). I sometimes feel bad for the editors that
| have to check all my reference lists. They usually find 1-2
| papers that are either missing or included and no longer cited.
|
| Tables are also a problem in Word, especially if your
| collaborators use an older version that breaks the formatting
| (Moving between Google Docs -> Word -> Google Docs also breaks
| a lot of things). I can't tell you how many times I had to
| reformat tables that a collaborator broke. Making complex
| tables is also wack sometimes, like adding a simple sub-rule
| between cells requires some column hacks in Word.
|
| Table/figure numbering is also another thing that I loathe in
| Word. Manually renumbering is a pain and the automatic
| numbering always breaks for me in a way or another (maybe still
| thanks to my collaborators).
|
| All those things work pretty well in LaTeX with some backslash
| commands.
|
| What Word really shines is track changes and commenting. I
| don't know if there is a LaTeX editor where you can track
| changes and comments like in Word (I know that Overleaf has
| something that kind of works).
|
| Powerpoint vs. Beamer is a whole different ball of wax. Both
| have pros and cons. But with presentations with a lot of
| equations, beamer is definitely better but, as you point out,
| it doesn't play well when you want to put an equation in a
| specific spot in the slide. In powerpoint, you can just click
| and drag and you are done.
| foobarian wrote:
| I am with you for all* of it. The Stockholm syndrome bit is oh
| so true. But I take exception with the math, Latex math is its
| only redeeming quality (with Adobe FrameMaker coming in a
| distant second).
| bowsamic wrote:
| As a physics postdoc I have to say that is quite a simple
| equation
| [deleted]
| iflp wrote:
| The equation example is artificial. In practice there will be
| no curly brackets around these single-token sub/superscripts,
| nor should the \left / \right present in this example. With
| properly added whitespaces this equation becomes quite legible.
|
| For more complex equations people use line breaks and
| indentations, and/or macros.
| jasomill wrote:
| As an example taken at random from my undergrad days, see
|
| https://jasomill.at/metric.pdf
|
| produced with \begin{align*}
| f^*(dx& \otimes dx + dy \otimes dy + dz \otimes dz)\\
| =&\ f^*(dx \otimes dx) + f^*(dy \otimes dy) + f^*(dz \otimes
| dz)\\ =&\ d(f^*x) \otimes d(f^*x) + d(f^*y) \otimes
| d(f^*y) + d(f^*z) \otimes d(f^*z)\\ =&\ d(x \circ
| f) \otimes d(x \circ f) + d(y \circ f) \otimes d(y \circ f) +
| d(z \circ f) \otimes d(z \circ f)\\ =&\ df^1
| \otimes df^1 + df^2 \otimes df^2 + df^3 \otimes df^3\\
| =&\ \left(\pdFOneU du + \pdFOneV dv\right) \otimes
| \left(\pdFOneU du + \pdFOneV dv\right)\\ +&\
| \left(\pdFTwoU du + \pdFTwoV dv\right) \otimes \left(\pdFTwoU
| du + \pdFTwoV dv\right)\\ +&\ \left(\pdFThreeU du +
| \pdFThreeV dv\right) \otimes \left(\pdFThreeU du + \pdFThreeV
| dv\right)\\ =&\ \left(\gOneOne\right) du \otimes
| du\\ +&\ \left(\gOneTwo\right) \left(du \otimes dv
| + dv \otimes du\right)\\ +&\ \left(\gTwoTwo\right)
| dv \otimes dv. \end{align*}
|
| (note that, using my editor defaults, none of this equation's
| lines are truncated or wrapped)
|
| The \g... and \pdF... are trivial ad hoc macros defined in
| the document. Producing the same document by repeatedly
| copy/pasting the tensor components and partial derivatives
| would have been considerably more time-consuming and error-
| prone.
|
| Also notable is the _align_ environment: type \\\ for a
| manual line break and & at each point that is to be aligned.
|
| I just tried to reproduce this with the "WYSIWYG" equation
| editor in Word, and I can't figure out how to do it -- right-
| clicking on plus and equal signs gives an "Align at this
| Character" option, but this appears to be a special case, as
| the option doesn't appear when clicking on anything else in
| the example.
|
| In particular, had the first line involved (implied)
| multiplication instead of addition, there apparently wouldn't
| be _any_ acceptable point to declare alignment!?!
|
| I'm also not sure what it means to align "at" a character, as
| characters have width, and characters to be aligned aren't
| necessarily the same width. Does it align the left sides? The
| right sides? The center?
|
| Moreover, the default key bindings in the Word equation
| editor are counterintuitive: the usual binding for "manual
| line break" instead splits the equation in two and there
| doesn't appear to be any default binding for the "Insert
| Manual Break" equation editor command at all.
|
| Sure, LaTeX has a learning curve, but it's not _at all_
| obvious to me that Word is any better in this respect.
| blackhaz wrote:
| That equation is easily workable with the code as is, and that
| options block is also fine. My bigger concern is someone coming
| in without enough experience and trying to disrupt the whole
| academia. Yes, the learning curve is steep - can anyone even
| say they finally know TeX? Aligning stuff and other things may
| take time. But if you're writing papers, the output quality is
| amazing and, what is important, consistent - light years ahead
| of WYSIWYG editors. I'd rather edit my equations manually in
| TeX rather than, say, popular office suites. And why would
| anyone want to do presentations in TeX anyways? It's like using
| a spaceship to shop for groceries.
| kzrdude wrote:
| I want to use latex while using your attitude! It has to be
| simple and the syntax out of the way, almost like Markdown
| IshKebab wrote:
| I agree. LyX is a much better alternative to LaTeX. It's a
| _sort of_ GUI front-end to it, but it lets you do all the
| normal editing in normal WYSWYG way (but without the "is the
| space bold? why is the font of this blank line different?" you
| get with Word). Most importantly it has a really amazing
| equation editor.
| Pinus wrote:
| I agree that TeX sources are often damn near impossible to
| read. That stuff is... ugly. But at least it's there. You can
| see it. You can manipulate it. You can understand it (though it
| sometimes takes more time flipping through the TeXbook than any
| sane person is willing to spend). In comparison, WYSIWYGgery is
| like boxing with an invisible opponent. Where do I click, what
| magic check box three levels deep in dialogs do I need to
| check? Why does that word come out in a different font? How do
| I move the cursor across the italic/roman boundary? Why is
| there extra space here, but not there? How can I interact with
| things that I cannot see?
| FabHK wrote:
| Related: TeX sources can be put under source control, with
| meaningful diffs.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Word has version control built in and you can see diffs
| easily. (No git is not the only VCS)
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Oh I remember my CS years, when all the professors were raving to
| me about LaTeX, and I never understood why.
|
| Sure, it might be marginally better than just using Word,
| although - not that much; and it's horrible to debug, it's
| horrible to actually automate, it's horrible to actually
| "separate content from style"...
|
| I thought that maybe something is wrong with me and over time it
| will "click"... it never did.
|
| But, this article made it click. (but that's after I already got
| my degree...)
|
| http://www.danielallington.net/2016/09/the-latex-fetish/
|
| LaTeX is not actually good for writing papers.
|
| It's good for typesetting. And that's it. It's good as a type-
| setting program, that's what it is meant to be. It's definitely
| not good for separating content from style, or some kind of meta-
| automation or macros.
| wildzzz wrote:
| I learned about Latex in physics 2 in college and started
| taking my notes that way in class. I could quickly make quick
| notes for anything that would take me too long to input and
| then I'd go back and actually review my notes to fill in what I
| hadn't formatted yet. I think it helped a lot because I
| actually reviewed my notes after class. I had a discrete math
| professor that offered extra points if you did your homework in
| Latex. I have shitty handwriting so I was already doing my
| homework on the computer anyway so it was easy credit. I got to
| be the favorite in my intro to astrophysics class because I
| turned in my papers in Latex, professor went out of his way to
| find me after class and complimented me. Haven't touched it in
| years since college.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Why is it not good at separating content from style?
| nautilius wrote:
| An article about how word processors are superior to LaTeX by
| someone who has never written anything with LaTeX, not even
| finished a single paper.
|
| It's like writing an article about how walking is much faster
| than cycling, because 'I tried cycling once and fell over, so
| clearly all those fetishists are wrong, the suckers'.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| It's great for writing papers. I can crack open vim rattle off
| an essay throw in some \par s and some \cite{sho0ngle} s, and
| then let all the typesetting, citation management, and whatnot
| get handled by the compiler.
|
| For STEM classes, the LaTeX defaults are perfect, and I can
| insert tables and images and such that can be in flux over the
| course of writing the report, importing then from external
| scripts that part of my data analysis.
|
| LaTeX only gets hairy when you start trying to fight it. If you
| want some that looks exactly as you imagine it, you're going to
| be fighting an uphill battle trying to specify exactly what you
| want, and constantly re-compiling. If instead, you just care
| about a clean, consistent, and presentable end product, then
| LaTeX gets you there with minimal fuss.
| daptaq wrote:
| Why do you use \par?
| zuzun wrote:
| My rule of thumb is that once I start writing imperative LaTeX
| with loops and stuff, I'm almost always on the wrong path. Now, I
| might be missing some important corner cases, but by skimming
| through the blog post, I feel like the author's solution is too
| complicated. For example, I don't get why this requires auxiliary
| files.
|
| I would create a counter for the affiliations, let the
| \affiliation command define macros that contain the name of the
| affiliation and the value of the counter and then append the
| output to two different helper macros, one for authors and one
| for affiliations, whose contents I dump in \maketitle.
| yingbo wrote:
| I hate clickbait. I click clickbait
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Like bash, LaTeX is one of those languages where you immediately
| forget it after you're done with your current task.
| ahmadmijot wrote:
| I don't use LateX explicitly (my colleagues and supervisors
| didn't know LaTeX and exclusively use MS Word) but I like how I
| can write equation in MS Word using LateX notations.
| officehero wrote:
| Same. I'm a PhD student in CS and manage just fine with
| embedded latex in word documents and a reference plugin (I use
| zotero). There's definitely pros/cons. Imo biggest con is the
| absence of something like overleaf and biggest pro is ease of
| use.
| akavel wrote:
| Take a look at https://sile-typesetter.org/. IIRC it literally
| reuses some core C libraries from TeX/LaTeX, and glues them
| together in a different way using Lua, keeping Lua as the only
| language available. Notably, SILE recently achieved the long
| overdue milestone of math/equations support (https://sile-
| typesetter.org/2021/09/sile-0-12-0-is-released). Obviously, open-
| source.
|
| _edit:_ for some attempt at an explicit discussion of pros &
| cons & history vs. TeX, see: https://sile-typesetter.org/what-
| is/#sile-versus-tex
| graycat wrote:
| LaTeX? I just use TeX. The documentation for TeX is clear, very
| precise, and much shorter.
|
| LaTeX is just TeX but with a lot of new macros. The _intent_ is
| different: With TeX, you just say in detail what steps you want
| the software to do. With LaTeX you say what you want in general
| terms and f 'get about the details.
| miguelmurca wrote:
| Yes :) https://github.com/mikeevmm/nobeamer
| graycat wrote:
| Yup, for "doing slides", I wrote some TeX macros. It sets the
| sizes of the page and the fonts, draws a box around the
| content, etc.
| WolfOliver wrote:
| Check out https://www.monsterwriter.app/, It is something like
| LyX but even easier to use.
| porker wrote:
| Interesting, I hadn't seen this before. How does it differ from
| LyX?
|
| Is a Windows build planned?
| WolfOliver wrote:
| There is a Windows build available already.
|
| LyX is a LaTeX frontend, you still need to understand some
| notions of LaTeX. MonsterWriter is a WYSIWYM Word Processor,
| LaTeX is just used as internal tool to create PDF files.
| There are other exports available (e.g. HTML, Markdown, you
| also can publish to Ghost directly)
| funnym0nk3y wrote:
| In my opinion LaTeX fails to deliver when doing anything other
| than text based work. Tables, images, etc are always a hassle. It
| gets even worse when changing one page to landscape mode.
| Debugging is a pain and there aren't any tools to help with that.
| mhh__ wrote:
| LaTeX needs replacing with something faster and more program-y,
| and that isn't just a python script.
|
| LateX's successor should be opinionated, safe, easy to build in
| parallel, and also good at integrating with other tooling:
|
| Let a CAS generate the next equation for you, for example.
|
| Make sure that figure is never out of date (e.g. a build system
| rather than relying on a web of files and button clicks)
|
| Etc.
|
| This will likely never happen because latex is still very good at
| what people want it to do push comes to shove, but we could have
| a much better document format and publishing system around it.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > something faster
|
| I don't know that this is the major pain point. The thing is,
| writing complex-structure/programmed documents is not something
| which needs immediate re-rendering with every character - just
| like you don't recompile your program with every character you
| change.
|
| This would, however, be very useful for syntax and compiler-
| detectable error. You would have an effectively-immediate
| indication of warnings and errors per line in your document,
| like an IDE. So it would be Java-like compilation speed rather
| than C++-like compilation speed...
|
| > safe
|
| LaTeX programming is basically sandboxed, or at least you have
| to work _very_ hard to do dangerous things.
|
| > latex is still very good at what people want it to do
|
| That's not it. It is actually usually pretty bad in doing what
| we want it to do (e.g. tables. Oh, the pain!) ... but what it
| has going for it is that you can do almost anything you want?:
| It will take effort and the "source code" will be ugly, but
| it'll work.
| Smithalicious wrote:
| Please no. Stop replacing useful tools with "opinionated" ones.
| Nothing makes me nope out of using a tool faster than hearing
| it described as "opinionated".
| clircle wrote:
| What is LuaLaTeX?
| mhh__ wrote:
| Good idea. Doesn't go far enough / is only an incremental
| improvement.
|
| I've never truly immersed myself in it so maybe it's more
| powerfully elegant than I remember.
| dhosek wrote:
| LuaLaTeX is a lot slower than pdfLaTeX or XeLaTeX and default
| settings give different output than the other two, e.g.,
| around line breaks at - or --. I only recommend it if you
| need it. Most people don't.
| ska wrote:
| > Make sure that figure is never out of date
|
| For anyone with a software background, this is pretty
| straightforward - once you start thinking of the latex file(s)
| as source code rather than the document, it's a short jump to
| setting up a build environment...
| GiovanniP wrote:
| > we could have a much better document format and publishing
| system around it.
|
| TeXmacs (http://www.texmacs.org/ and http://forum.texmacs.cn/),
| and it happens right now!
| jasomill wrote:
| You _can_ embed CAS-generated equations and computations in
| LaTeX[1]. This came in handy for undergraduate linear algebra
| homework that combined proofs (where I could use my existing
| LaTeX macros) and computations (where we were expected to use a
| CAS). Mathematica or Jupyter notebooks would also work, but I
| prefer Emacs over the notebook UI (and Jupyter didn 't actually
| exist at the time).
|
| [1] See, e.g., https://github.com/tmolteno/SympyTeX/
| Tepix wrote:
| In the last three decades of having the opportunity to learn and
| use TeX, i have managed to avoid it. In the same time i've helped
| a friend with word processing for her dissertation. I'm still not
| sure how we managed to get it to work with all the horror stories
| about data loss and Microsoft Word at the time. But it did its
| job and I'm still in the WYSIWYG camp.
|
| Maybe in another life...
| ska wrote:
| People write dissertations in Word all the time. How painful it
| is depends a bit on how complicated the dissertation is as a
| document.
|
| This is of course only an anecdote, but I know many people who
| started in word, gave up on it and moved to Tex/Latex, but
| nobody who went the other way (that is to say, I know people
| who tried to give up on Tex, but eventually went back - not
| anyone who actually published with it). This might have quite a
| bit to do with subject matter - Word has always been an awkward
| fit for mathematics.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| I find Word is only tolerable when used like Latex. I.e.,
| extensive use of Styles. Define a Style for every object type
| in your doc. Also, carefully choose the Next Style option.
| Define Sections if columns or pagination vary across the
| document. With that in hand, it is now just a matter of
| plugging in text and images. If something isn't working quite
| right, edit the Style instead of macdinking the text on the
| screen.
|
| You are still left with formatting equations, but Word lets us
| use Latex-ish syntax for that now, so you can keep the fine
| control of Latex within the GUI context.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I hate Word, but it is required in many
| environments. Adopting a rational use strategy helps a bit.
|
| https://www.wordsense.eu/macdink/#English
| tomtomistaken wrote:
| I have the exact opposite story to tell. A friend of mine asked
| me to convert a 300 pages Word document to LaTeX, because Word
| couldn't handle it. It was text, mostly, so it worked out quite
| well.
| leephillips wrote:
| The solution presented in this anonymous, undated article is
| relevant if you're constrained to only using LaTeX. But you're
| not, and there are certainly easier ways to go about such things.
| We have Python and other higher level languages that we can use
| to pre-process source and extract metadata. This type of problem
| is made much easier if you write in Markdown, putting authors,
| affiliations, and other metadata in (say) YAML blocks, and use
| Pandoc to convert to LaTeX (or anything else). You can write a
| filter in Python, Lua, or Haskell to rearrange the metadata the
| way the author wants. This would be a far more pleasant
| experience, and easier to extend and generalize.
| miguelmurca wrote:
| This anonymous, undated article was written by me, yesterday.
| The strong backwards compatibility of LaTeX(2e) [0] make it so
| that the date is not especially relevant (since I'm using
| primitives); in any case my point was pedagogical, in the sense
| of diving into the operational mechanisms of (La)TeX to develop
| a better mental model of what's going on. And while Pandoc is
| very nice, if you're in academia none of your alternatives are
| viable, since LaTeX is a de facto standard for most journals.
|
| Fun fact: the article was written in Markdown, with some front
| matter for metadata!
|
| [0] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/247524/do-i-risk-
| bre...
| behnamoh wrote:
| How did you do emojis in pandoc? I've had a hard time writing
| them in md files and converting them to pdf using pandoc
| leephillips wrote:
| Pandoc uses LaTeX to make the PDF, so you have to set up
| LaTeX somehow to be able to handle the emoji. I use
| "normal" Unicode in md source all the time, but not emoji,
| so, sorry, I don't know what to do.
| leephillips wrote:
| I certainly appreciate the pedagogical purpose; what you did
| there goes beyond any pure TeX programming I've ever tried to
| do.
|
| My suggestion was to use Pandoc to create a LaTeX document.
| You can easily tell it to use RevTeX or any style required by
| a journal. The only friction with my approach is when you
| need to work with coauthors or editors on revisions.
|
| EDIT: I think I caused some confusion due to my sloppiness. I
| should have written "constrained to only writing in LaTeX".
| Schiphol wrote:
| I am in academia and I do all of my writing in pandoc. I
| simply submit the .tex file that pandoc outputs if and when
| the manuscript is accepted. (I liked and learned a lot from
| your post, just wanted to prevent a possible misunderstanding
| about the usefulness of pandoc for academic writing).
| [deleted]
| patrickg wrote:
| I have a related feeling about TeX. It has superb output quality
| but the programming is awful. When LuaTeX finally arrived a few
| years ago, it was possible to do almost everything you have done
| before in the TeX language (starting with \backslashes) in Lua.
|
| See http://wiki.luatex.org/index.php/TeX_without_TeX for an
| introduction.
|
| I have (shameless plug) created a database publishing software
| using this technique (https://github.com/speedata/publisher/).
| Once in a while I have to use LaTeX and it feels a bit old school
| to do the macro programming.
|
| My next project is to rewrite the TeX algorithms in Go - see
| https://github.com/speedata/boxesandglue. Already usable but not
| TeX like in any way (this is just a library, not a frontend
| software like TeX)
| GiovanniP wrote:
| > It has superb output quality but the programming is awful
|
| TeXmacs (http://www.texmacs.org/) has better output quality
| _and_ nicer programming (it is Scheme :-) ) _and_ it is easier
| to use.
| guidoism wrote:
| I feel the same way! I also feel like the LaTeX crap on top of
| Plain TeX is crap and it fills me with rage when I try to find
| info about TeX and always get back something assuming LaTeX.
|
| Your stuff looks cool, I will take a look!
| kkfx wrote:
| Not a TeXnicians nor a TeXpert but I've learnt it at a certain
| point in high school after a professor suggestion, than much used
| at the uni and now just used casually for letters, reports etc I
| do love the quality, that's is.
|
| As far as I do not find something with equivalent or better
| typesetting quality I'm stick with LaTeX :-)
|
| To those who hate it: try to learn some tangible "alternatives"
| like *roff or TeXinfo and than you'll see LaTeX syntax is not
| that horrid or difficult, then try to learn some modern
| typesetting tools like those from Adobe. LaTeX win easily, that's
| is. Said that IF someone can offer something equivalent with a
| far simpler/nicer markup as I said before my love is just to the
| quality of the output!
| Pinus wrote:
| You sometimes see people ask fairly simple Python questions on
| Stack Overflow, that could be solved by five lines of plain
| Python, and be answered with some Pandas magic incantation that
| happens to do what they want with one call. I always find this a
| bit sad, because it seems to take away the idea that programming
| is about assembling composable parts, replacing it by a search
| for the right magic thing from a box of ready-made magic things.
|
| (Plain)TeX always seems the opposite of this. There is never a
| keyword that does what you want, but you can always do it by
| using five different mechanisms in concert. You always feel like
| you are trying to trick the system into doing something it was
| not designed for.
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| My main issue with LaTex is that you can't take a perfectly
| correct piece of markup, insert it into a container like a
| table, and expect it to work.
|
| LaTeX makes it difficult to compose stuff. Even HTML did this
| better.
| dougmsmith wrote:
| moffkalast wrote:
| Not to mention that when it fails to compile, at least in
| Overleaf you get an error log that is hopelessly useless and
| the only thing you can do is just remove your changes until
| it works again.
|
| LaTeX is a cool idea, but the implementation? Absolutely
| horrid.
| dhosek wrote:
| There are two big challenges: One is that TeX, the
| underlying executable behind LaTeX, is pushed to its
| limits1 to run. The macro expansion paradigm behind LaTeX
| made sense in 1982 but there are a lot of decisions
| underlying the executable and TeX-the-language that were
| dictated by the computing technology of the 1970s (forget
| Unicode, standard ASCII wasn't universally available when
| Knuth wrote TeX).
|
| The other problem was the questionable decision by the
| LaTeX core team to, rather than release LaTeX3, they
| instead decided to evolve LaTeX2e which means that they are
| encumbered by backwards compatibility issues.
|
| The noisy output from LaTeX is also not so great. One of
| the things I'm doing with finl is (a) assuming that there
| won't be an attempt to fix errors mid-run (one of those
| 1982-era decisions that no longer makes sense) so a
| comprehensive list of errors can be presented to the user
| (or revealed programmatically) and (2) Adding indications
| in the output (which can be disabled) of errors in the
| input. I'm debating between errors being PDF annotations so
| users would click on an error or warning icon in the PDF to
| see the message and indication of where the issue was
| found, or just making it a big blot of overprinting (so
| many times on tex.stackexchange there are so many issues
| where a user--usually on Overleaf--ignored the error
| messages being output.
|
| [?]
|
| 1. Actually beyond its limits. LaTeX will no longer run on
| a Knuth TeX executable but requires eTeX extensions to run.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > errors being PDF annotations so users would click on an
| error or warning icon in the PDF to see the message and
| indication of where the issue was found
|
| This would be by far the best approach, no?
| leephillips wrote:
| I haven't seen any updates to your "finl is not LaTeX"
| page in a while. I'm glad to hear you're still working on
| the project.
| dhosek wrote:
| I should have an update when the next crate is ready for
| publication--I ended up writing some Unicode handling
| stuff because unicode-segmentation didn't offer the
| interface I needed while unicode_categories is outdated
| and has a flawed implementation (my replacement code is
| 10x faster by my benchmarks). I need to do some
| additional work to verify that my segmentation algorithm
| is at least comparable in speed to unicode-segmentation
| and fix that if it's not and I'll have a 1.0 release of
| finl_unicode ready probably in the next month.
| galoisgirl wrote:
| > There is never a keyword that does what you want
|
| Clearly you haven't seen https://github.com/mscroggs/realhats
| MrVandemar wrote:
| Yes! Plain python is almost always crystal clear and self
| explanatory. But "idiomatic python" which people seem to
| compete to be "more idiomatic than thou" is none of these
| things. It's actually a barrier to learning the language.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Idiomatic python is slow. Trying to convert everything into
| the mini-DSL that a C implemented library can understand is
| oftentimes considerably faster.
| kaba0 wrote:
| In case of most ordinary datasets it simply doesn't matter
| in practice. Even comenius logo would be adequately fast.
| pen2l wrote:
| Someone pointed out to me recently as you say, the idiomatic
| python sometimes seems like more of a barrier. It takes more
| time to parse and grok, for their human brain, a for loop
| with a zip having multiple interables vs nested for loops.
| I've been thinking about this. So take, a list comprehension,
| supposedly better than a for loop at times. The canted take
| would be that list comprehensions are said in a way of what a
| human wants, the for loop is more _how_ to do it, and the
| former is better ipso facto. And I think I 've come to
| appreciate this difference and preference.
|
| My conclusion is that I rather like the opinionated take of
| python. It might take a liiiiittle bit of a learning curve,
| but you do come to appreciate the zen of choices they've
| arrived at after a few decades of going at it.
| tga_d wrote:
| Worth pointing out that list comprehensions aren't just a
| stylistic preference or syntactic sugar, they're
| significantly better performance than the equivalent for
| loops.
| aulin wrote:
| > almost always crystal clear and self explanatory
|
| and slow. Most of the time the idiomatic pandas answer takes
| advantage of its vectorization capabilities while plain
| python would require nested loops.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| This is one of the advantages of languages with optimizing
| compilers. In Python, there's a tradeoff between clarity
| and performance. But in C++ for example, your for-loop is
| just as fast as any library's for-loop.
|
| Edit: My assumption is that many Python libraries are
| written in C for performance, but maybe that's not the
| case.
| andrepd wrote:
| >But in C++ for example, your for-loop is just as fast as
| any library's for-loop.
|
| This is most definitely not true. Even stuff like subtle
| aliasing guarantees can make code run an order of
| magnitude faster or slower.
| gus_massa wrote:
| Another example is the order in which you access memory.
| To multiply two matrices, in one you move by row and in
| the other you move by columns. One makes the cache happy
| and the other unhappy, so it's faster to transpose one of
| them (the correct one, I never remember) and them
| "multiply" them. We notice this in Fortran with -O2, but
| the difference disappears in Fortran with -O3, so the
| compiler is doing some magic.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Except that your C loop can be WRITTEN slower than some
| library's loop.
| kaba0 wrote:
| In case of these libraries it is mostly the case of
| painstaking optimizations in low level code. No common
| language has sufficiently smart auto-vectorization to
| reliably convert for loops in most cases to SIMD
| instructions - so no, your average C++ for loop wouldn't
| be that much faster, unless you spend a lot of time
| optimizing it for the specific task.
| pif wrote:
| > I always find this a bit sad, because it seems to take away
| the idea that programming is about assembling composable parts
|
| [OT] Concerning "programming is about assembling composable
| parts": I always find both sad and ridiculous when self-
| proclaimed software developers bash Unix because they are not
| able to appreciate its philosophy.
| kaba0 wrote:
| It would help Unix's case if the glue between the parts
| wouldn't be byte streams and some very crude int result code,
| signals, etc.
|
| A monolith can be just as composable if not more, with a much
| "stronger glue" in the form of language-mandated guarantees.
| Also, sometimes doing multiple things well is the better
| direction -- IPC is additional complexity and essential
| complexity can't be decomposed.
| TheDesolate0 wrote:
| In Unix space we use text, almost exclusively. This byte
| stream thing is a windows/java bs thing.
| tga_d wrote:
| When contributing to uutils (the coreutils written in
| Rust), one of the bigger pain points with cross platform
| support is the way that in Unix, everything, including
| arguments, is just bytes, while on Windows, arguments are
| semi-opaque text strings. E.g., the -t option in sort,
| join, etc. takes an arbitrary byte (other than null,
| which is supported via \0), so you can sort, join, etc.
| binary inputs. However, the -t option will _not_ let you
| use a multi-byte character, even valid Unicode characters
| like e, which, if Unix actually used text for everything,
| you would expect it to. Meanwhile, on Windows, uutils
| still doesn 't support non-ASCII byte values for -t,
| because Windows doesn't provide a way to represent those.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Unix has gotten pretty far using just text and return
| codes. But there's no need to be dogmatic about it I guess,
| it could be nice to pass objects around, rather than text,
| like Powershell does. Although, their implementation seems
| quite verbose.
|
| I think to really use something like that, I'd want a well-
| defined ordering for the fields and the ability to also do
| something like
|
| variable.1
|
| in addition to
|
| variable.someLongFieldName
|
| This could result in less than obvious scripts, but a shell
| language also needs to be compact, for interactive usage.
| enriquto wrote:
| > You always feel like you are trying to trick the system into
| doing something it was not designed for.
|
| This is one of the hallmarks of human civilization.
|
| Your hands were designed for throwing a stone at the eye of a
| mammoth. But you can play the violin with them! Yes; it is
| totally awkward and anti-natural for your hands, obviously not
| their intended purpose... but so beautiful!
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Your hands were designed for throwing a stone at the eye of
| a mammoth.
|
| No, they weren't designed at all.
|
| And utility in fine as well as gross manipulation of the type
| you describe is clearly part of what they were selected (not
| designed) for.
|
| > But you can play the violin with them
|
| Violins, unlike human hands, were designed, and specifically
| for people with human hands to use. They aren't just
| something existing outside of humans in nature that hands
| happen to work with.
|
| So, it's not at all surprising that they can be used with
| human hands.
| rland wrote:
| I see what you're saying, but the violin was designed for
| human hands.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| Nothing in nature was necessarily "designed"
| [deleted]
| cosmojg wrote:
| Sculpted like a riverbed.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| If you consider a "design" to result from a process where
| someone sketches out a plan, builds it, and it works first
| time. I've designed a lot of systems, and it is clearly an
| iterative process. Balancing tradeoffs, figuring out the
| essentials, build prototypes, test, etc. If you are patient
| and diligent a solution emerges. That sounds a lot like
| evolution, so in my mind everything in nature has been
| designed by the collective intelligence of an iterative
| process that rewards useful optimizations.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| I think that's a reasonable perspective to take, although
| I would argue that there is no clear goal in evolution
| besides survival and reproduction
| Jenk wrote:
| There is no plan in evolution. That's the point. It's a
| reactionary phenomenon. If it had a plan, it would be a
| proactive phenomenon. Evolution is happenstance.
| rocqua wrote:
| The nice thing about a goal, is that one goal begets
| other sub-goals.
|
| Or rather, a goal begets a strategy, and a strategy
| begets sub-goals. Beautifully at some point these sub-
| goals start being optimized for. A few steps of this is
| how I believe humans went from the sub goal "Survive,
| eat, reproduce" to "Make art, understand life, explore
| the world".
|
| The cool thing is that I think this extends beyond humans
| to tools. Because at some point humans had a sub-goal of
| "hit thing hard" they made a hammer. And this hammer has
| a goal (or a purpose) which is "hit things hard". This
| purpose can be traced back, through human sub-goals, to
| the final goal of evolution: "reproduce".
|
| Note that I am not saying that the point of a hammer is
| to produce more hammer. But the point of a hammer is
| (very indirectly) to allow a human to reproduce.
|
| Interestingly there is a weird game of telephone that can
| happen, where the sub-goals are imperfect for achieving
| the final goal. I would argue that this is (part of) why
| humans can be truly selfless. Take a soldier going to a
| battle he considers unwinnable but going out of a sense
| of duty / fear of ridicule. This will not help him
| reproduce, since the battle is unwinnable it will not
| help his progeny reproduce either. From the 'ultimate'
| goal, this is an irrational step. But there are sub-goals
| at play. Things like "be honorable", "do your duty".
|
| This idea that a sub-goal can subvert the 'ultimate' goal
| is very beautiful to me. It means that evolution is not
| some tyranny that sets our purpose in life. Instead
| evolution brought 'purpose' into the world. And then some
| stochastic process put you and me on into the universe
| with some, vaguely related, sense of purpose. But we have
| our own purpose. Sure our purpose was 'created by' the
| ultimate purpose of evolution. But our purpose is not
| subordinate to the ultimate purpose of evolution. A human
| life can have so much more value that just "continue the
| genetic line and have children". I find that freeing.
| croes wrote:
| Design has a goal, evolution has not.
| politician wrote:
| Proponents of the anthropic principal disagree.
| Nevertheless, it's irrelevant to this thread.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > Proponents of the anthropic principal disagree.
| Nevertheless, it's irrelevant to this thread.
|
| The anthropic principle does not imply designed, it
| implies suited for.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| No, its definitely relevant. Hands were not designed with
| _any_ specific function in mind. There was not
| evolutionary pressure to "throw rocks at the eye of a
| mammoth"
|
| Did orangutans evolve hands to throw rocks at mammoths?
| No, they did not
|
| The parent comment is making ridiculous claims without
| evidence
|
| https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-do-orangutans-
| eat.h...
| samatman wrote:
| You've smoothly shot right past solid ground (evolution
| doesn't design things) to a fairly wild claim (rock-
| throwing apes didn't experience evolutionary pressure to
| get better at throwing rocks).
|
| Orangutans aren't humans, so what are you saying, apes
| which don't throw rocks to kill their prey don't... throw
| rocks to kill their prey?
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| Perhaps my example is poor, but it shows that hands are
| not coupled to predation
|
| I'm specifically talking about the evolution of hands,
| humans are not the only organism with hands.
| ohwellhere wrote:
| This seems accurate to me.
|
| Like complex brains are evolutionarily fit because they
| can solve lots of disparate problems, hands are
| evolutionarily fit because they can do lots of disparate
| things.
|
| Of course, we do also then design violins for our
| specific dexterity.
| samatman wrote:
| The poster didn't say "hands", they said "your hands".
|
| Your human hands, which co-evolved with throwing things,
| we have abundant paleontological evidence of this and you
| may read as many papers on the subject as you would care
| to.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| Got links to any of those papers?
| samatman wrote:
| Are you vegan? Just curious.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| No, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the topic
| at hand
|
| Also unsure how that's an appropriate response to a
| request for citations?
| doliveira wrote:
| I think you're assigning too much weight to the word
| itself. In informal settings, or even quasi-formal ones,
| it's not uncommon to use "designed" when we don't mean
| "literally designed".
| tomrod wrote:
| I'd go so far to say that linguistically nature is the
| antithesis of artificial (made by hands).
|
| Avoiding silly theological tropes, evolution is often
| mistakenly referred to as a designer when it's just an
| emergent property of competing, replicating agents. People
| don't normally bother with precision though, so we are
| where we are.
| bernulli wrote:
| I always like to see it the other way around, it
| eliminates entities that are not a good fit, and the
| remainder is what drives adaptation. Of course, people
| could argue that's just like Michelangelo [1], and we're
| back at 'designed'.
|
| [1] "The sculpture is already complete within the marble
| block, before I start my work. It is already there, I
| just have to chisel away the superfluous material."
| ohwellhere wrote:
| > it eliminates entities
|
| But evolution doesn't eliminate entities. Low fitness
| entities are eliminated by hunger, or predators, or lower
| reproductive rates.
|
| The marble on the other hand is eliminated by
| Michelangelo.
|
| There's a linguistic confusion where because evolution is
| a noun, we think we can treat it as a subject. But in the
| person/place/thing/idea delineation, it is an idea.
|
| Not only does it not design, not only does it not
| eliminate: "it" doesn't do anything!
| nautilius wrote:
| Of course 'evolution' is not an actor, it's just the
| overall pattern we give a name to. And the pattern we
| observe is that low fitness entities are eliminated. That
| plus variation yields adaptation.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| The process of evolution is more than just the
| elimination of unfit specimens. That suggests that a
| tiger is just a tiger, and the only kind of evolution
| that can occur in the tiger is for it to become a better
| (faster, stronger) tiger. But in fact there was a time
| when carnivores didn't even exist, and then some random
| genetic flux produced an animal that was inclined to
| start eating other animals and a new ecological niche was
| discovered. Evolution is therefore a creative process of
| adaptation and specialization under constantly changing
| circumstances.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| In my interpretation entities != organisms
|
| Entities could be alleles, genes, or gene products
| nautilius wrote:
| > That suggests that a tiger is just a tiger,
|
| Not at all. Everything can come from variation (mutation,
| cross over) + elimination of the worst. It's just that
| 'worst' is not a global minimum. Are we as humans
| superior to animals in strength, agility, speed, etc? Not
| at all. But some distant ancestor had some bigger brain,
| and that gave it all the edge it needed compared to weak
| and dumber siblings that were eaten, while our ancestor
| hid on a tree.
|
| When some animal mutated to be able to eat meat in
| addition to plants, it had some advantage and was less
| likely to be eliminated when food got scarce. That's all
| you need to eventually arrive at something tiger-like.
|
| That said, some animals seem to have reached a local
| maximum: sharks haven't changed in millions of years,
| cockroaches seem pretty successful, too.
|
| But there's nothing 'creative' about it.
| croes wrote:
| Nope, we use stones because we can lift and throw it with our
| hands, not the other way around.
| izhak wrote:
| I would disagree. You can play the violin firstly because the
| violin was designed so that it could produce beautiful sounds
| under _human_hands_. This way, not another.
| falcor84 wrote:
| It seems you are actually in agreement with the underlying
| argument. Humans were able to use their body, originally
| developed for hunting large prey, to design, build and play
| violins.
| [deleted]
| toolsexist wrote:
| platz wrote:
| > This is one of the hallmarks of human civilization.
|
| This is one of the hallmarks of evolution.
|
| How do you think wings evolved? By repurposing an appendage
| that was already had a purpose other than flight.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| We didn't evolve to play instruments though, we adapted and
| created them to suit our existing physical form
| isitmadeofglass wrote:
| Our hands were not designed, and they have no "intended
| purpose". We have hands because throughout the extremely long
| line of evolutionary adaptations the individuals that had
| them ended up surviving and procreating, and so we ended up
| having them.
|
| This is not true of a violin, which is of cause the product
| of intelligent design and is designed to fit our hands, no
| Awkwardness intended. Though naturally there are constraints
| dictated by the physics of the sound generation.
| gus_massa wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's necessary to use auxiliary files.
|
| I made something implementing fake vectors using \csname . I
| think that a similar approach can be used for this problem, but I
| prefer to never see my old code again. IWIMM
| \newcommand{\defwithindex}[3]{% \expandafter\def\csname
| #1@#2\endcsname{#3}% }
| \newcommand{\getwithindex}[2]{% \csname #1@#2\endcsname%
| }
|
| (You probably need the two dimensional version.)
| miguelmurca wrote:
| Hi! Author here. This is a cool idea for a vector
| implementation, but you still need to work around the fact that
| the command definition can come after the \get
| gus_massa wrote:
| Perhaps you can use the main aux file, as other packages do.
| I think I never did that, so I'm not sure about how difficult
| it is. Or perhaps I used the aux file and I forgot about
| that. [ I should write an article titled " _I hate LaTeX. I
| hate MSWord._ " :) . ]
| zauguin wrote:
| Since your code doesn't write the authors to the file it
| already requires that the authors are given before
| `\maketitle`, so then it's also reasonable to require
| affiliations there. Then you get something like https://gist.
| github.com/zauguin/19bf1bc9128a8abaedfe3081717b... which
| doesn't need a file.
| jum1p wrote:
| I \usepackage{loveandhate} LaTeX
| singhrac wrote:
| I too love LaTeX but it's important to remember that the writing
| experience might be nice and elegant in LaTeX with the right stys
| and ShareLatex and whatnot, but the _editing_ experience is
| decidedly not. Everyone who has used it in any serious form with
| page limits knows the stress of slowly varying their figure sizes
| and hoping it will squish into the limits.
|
| Very honestly, part of the reason I don't bother with any new
| "LaTeX reimagined" projects is because either (a) they are
| written by LaTeX nonbelievers who don't understand the complexity
| of beautiful typesetting, or (b) I don't want to learn another
| markup+ language or mental model. The latter is increasingly
| annoying to me.
|
| Out of curiosity, is LaTeX compilation benchmarked on the M1
| processors? Is it better? Has anyone experimented with magic Raph
| Levien-style SIMD magic (a la stack monoid) compilation for
| LaTeX? I just want LaTeX but really _really_ fast.
| GiovanniP wrote:
| > Very honestly, part of the reason I don't bother with any new
| "LaTeX reimagined" projects is because either (a) they are
| written by LaTeX nonbelievers who don't understand the
| complexity of beautiful typesetting, or (b) I don't want to
| learn another markup+ language or mental model. The latter is
| increasingly annoying to me.
|
| Then you have to try TeXmacs http://www.texmacs.org/. It is
| _completely_ independent from LaTeX and TeX and has - beautiful
| typesetting (better than LaTeX) - it is fully WYSYWYG, so you
| don 't have to learn a new markup language - yet it affords
| better document control than LaTeX
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I only interact with tex and latex through pollen these days.
| https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/
|
| It doesn't shield you from much of the pain, initially at least.
| But you can separate it from the document and treat it as markup,
| and reuse bits more easily.
|
| Of course pollen itself is a thing to learn. But if you work with
| text a lot and like lisp it might be worth it. It's been good to
| me.
| sph wrote:
| I gave a cursory look at it and it's really too niche,
| complicated for its own good IMO.
|
| Your comment made me want a modern TeX, written in Racket/Lisp.
| #lang latex (documentclass "article")
| (document (section "Chapter 1") Welcome to
| (LaTeX). Here is some (textbf "bold") text.)
|
| How does this not exist yet??
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Yeah it is kind of surprising. Scribble supports latex output
| but I don't know the details and it's probably similar to
| pollen, since pollen is built on it.
|
| It doesn't seem that hard (famous last words tho) especially
| since turning arbitrary DSLs into xexprs is one of the things
| racket truly excels at.
| TheDesolate0 wrote:
| Fuck latex with every fiber of my being.
| jonpalmisc wrote:
| I also have a love & hate relationship with LaTeX. I think it
| really boils down to the following:
|
| LaTeX will work excellently for you, so long as your use case was
| envisioned by the original authors.
|
| I can't say that the original authors of LaTeX didn't envision
| using it for creating slideshows/presentations, but I can say
| that making a beamer theme is uniquely complicated. I wish that
| LaTeX had something as flexible as CSS for styling documents
| rather than the awkward commands, etc. used now--so much so that
| I attempted to replace LaTeX with a HTML & CSS -> PDF workflow in
| the past [0]. It is still an idea I want to revisit someday when
| I have more time.
|
| [0] https://github.com/jonpalmisc/pmt (no longer actively
| maintained)
| wollsmoth wrote:
| If you have a lot of time on your hands, nothing makes your
| math/cs hw look quite as slick. Was fun to play around with in
| undergrad for sure. I've forgotten all my LaTeX skills since
| though.
| jonpalmisc wrote:
| I used it avidly for years. It's still fun to see pretty
| LaTeX documents, but my patience for working with it--despite
| being rather fluent with it--has grown too slim.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't mind Beamer, there's some boilerplate but it is like a
| once-per-institution setup so it doesn't seem like too big of a
| pain. It was hopefully done by someone else, and if not, I only
| have to do it once for myself -- and then I can share it.
|
| However, drawing figures in TikZ seems to be the main way of
| getting figures into a beamer presentation. This is a total
| nightmare and not really worth the effort, IMO.
| ttul wrote:
| In 1999, I was editing a telecom industry standard as an intern
| and, of course, decided to use LaTeX instead of Word. The
| seasoned industry veterans on the technical committee were super
| impressed with my "Word" abilities and wondered if I could share
| my much-improved template with them.
|
| It suffices to say that I hastily hired a friend in school to
| work over the weekend converting the beautiful LaTeX into Word.
| dontbenebby wrote:
| LaTeX is mostly good for academics who need to manage citations,
| if you just want a clean, readable CV there's lots of WYSIWYG
| options.
|
| I actually used to use TexMaxer:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texmaker
|
| It's on my list of things I want to deploy a fuzzer on when I get
| around to learning that -- I've been focused more on data
| visualization lately.
| wesleywt wrote:
| Having written my thesis in LaTex, I can say it is wonderful and
| a wonderful waste of time.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Having written a report in Word that was about 1/4 of the size
| of my dissertation, but had some of the same content, and then
| the dissertation in LaTeX, I can say that as much as LaTeX
| wastes your time, it's by far the least wasteful option.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Strong agree. My fiance and I wrote our thesis
| simultaneously, she in Word, while I used LaTeX. The amount
| of stupid figure- and page- rearrangements she suffered
| because she removed half a sentence from the middle, while
| LaTeX generated sane output with basically any text seriously
| made me much more productive.
| plopilop wrote:
| Word has had automatic reference numbering for a while now
| (see for instance [0]). Not denying that it's not very
| known (nor pleasant to use), and I'm not even talking about
| bibliography.
|
| I made my partner switch to Latex thanks to the
| bibliography. Writing tables almost made her switch back to
| Word.
|
| [0]: https://www.sfu.ca/~ljilja/cnl/info/UseCrossReference/
| index....
| kergonath wrote:
| > Word has had automatic reference numbering for a while
| now
|
| It also breaks regularly. I know a student in the middle
| of a thesis writing up marathon, and the time he wastes
| with this is unbelievable. For example, there are the
| references that just end up garbled, with Word putting in
| an error message instead, the references that somehow
| don't get updated despite having been entered exactly
| like all the others that do. It adds at least two passes
| every time he wants to send a chapter to proofread.
|
| Tables in LaTeX are bad. References, notes, and
| bibliography in Word are _horrendous_.
| mafuy wrote:
| I've written two thesis in Latex and a small 100 page
| book in Word.
|
| Word 2000 performed wonderfully. I had no problems with
| references or images shifting around, no strange errors,
| nothing. Bibliography sucked, but in general it was a
| pleasure to work with.
|
| Word 365, on the other hand, is something I have to force
| to do what I want again and again. It is built in such a
| way that doing things cleanly and error-free is difficult
| and much less obvious than in Word 2000. Even standard
| tools like image anchors, which worked nicely in 2k, are
| not reliable anymore. I got the feeling that this is due
| to automatisms aimed at casual users.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I meant it more in terms of bad figure placement. LaTeX
| tries to place the figure relatively close to the source,
| it has a sane fallback policy, like grouping them
| together at the end of the section.
|
| With word one can get from a decently formatted text to
| multiple quarter-filled pages with a single additional
| sentence, because it has comparatively bad algorithm for
| text-block reflow.
| elmolino89 wrote:
| Among fellow students countless hours were lost playing
| with spaces, line breaks, font sizes just to get
| tables/figures stay or move to the next page. This did
| look like an endless task: adding few chars in a chapter
| could have messed up positioning of bunch of figs.
| elmolino89 wrote:
| I did typesetting in Lyx/LaTeX of two PhD theses: my own
| (eng) and my GF's (esp) a decade+ later. In both cases the
| adventure started with admitted a vanilla Word doc without
| all the bells and whistles (= no templates, no version
| control).
|
| Once you enter the area of strange formatting, chars typed by
| who knows either a cat walking on the keyboard or sleep
| deprived student typing madly, fixing these in a binary
| format is a real PITA. Lyx/LaTex text formats are trivial to
| grep, diff, etc.
|
| Today I would probably start and try to stay as long as
| possible in Markdown, then reformat it at the very end.
| sph wrote:
| Same, I just did my resume in LaTeX, it's such an obtuse and
| painful tool, yet nothing even comes close to the control it
| gives you.
|
| Hey btw, I'm looking for contract work!
| https://github.com/1player/resume/blob/master/resume.pdf
| jtbayly wrote:
| I always wonder with comments like this what LaTeX allows
| that Adobe Indesign is incapable of.
| andrepd wrote:
| * Free (as in freedom) and open source
|
| * Cross-platform
|
| * Industry standard in the sciences
| OJFord wrote:
| Plaintext source file; hence source control and
| portability. Also it's free in both senses.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Surely plain old html does?
| jdbernard wrote:
| For several years (a decade maybe?) I authored my resume in
| LaTeX. Then a few years ago I wanted to restructure it
| radically, and make an interactive version that showed off
| some simple subset of my full-stack skillset (from design
| to implementation). This goal led me to authoring it in
| HTML with CSS. I never actually got around to implementing
| my full vision because I had an unexpected opportunity land
| in my lap before I'd officially started looking. I had the
| design and static mockup completed, so I just exported that
| to PDF and used it. In hindsight, I spent a lot less time
| getting the look I wanted in HTML than I did in LaTeX.
|
| I still tend to use LaTeX for some long-form documentation,
| but I'll probably stick to HTML for my resume and I'm
| finding myself using HTML + Markdown a lot more for other
| authoring tasks too.
| sph wrote:
| It's not the right tool for the job, in this case perfectly
| laying out text on a A4 sheet of paper. HTML is made for
| variable-sized screens, and can be repurposed to be
| printed, but it's still trying to screw a nail in when all
| you need is a hammer.
| tunesmith wrote:
| I love LaTeX whole-heartedly. I never learned Word in college and
| wrote all my papers in LaTeX as an undergrad, just using its
| default styles. I write mathematical papers to myself, despite
| not being a mathematician. I found a LaTeX package that lays
| things out in the same style as old TSR D&D modules and I use
| that to write new dungeons. I wrote a book in markdown and used
| pandoc to output LaTeX and publish it through Amazon. I write
| silly scripts for my friends to do table reads from, using a
| LaTeX package. I write music scores of my composition in lilypond
| and one of my next projects is to combine it with LaTeX to print
| out books I can have on my piano.
|
| Ultimately, I think wrestling with LaTeX is kind of like
| wrestling with programming. Over time, you just have to develop
| that sense of radar that tells you when you are over-
| implementing. In programming, it's the choice of whether to write
| custom or hunt for a library, or at a higher level, the build-vs-
| buy question. For LaTeX, it's whether to wrestle with custom
| commands or just search its stack exchange or hunt for a package.
| It's still easy to go down the wrong rabbit hole - last time it
| happened to me it was because I got obsessed with wondering if I
| could create nomographs in LaTeX, but luckily I discovered pynomo
| instead.
| gibletsingravy wrote:
| Which LaTeX package are you using for old school D&D?
| tunesmith wrote:
| https://github.com/slithy/rpg_module - I'm not sure if it's
| published in CTAN but I've been active in its GitHub issues.
| teleforce wrote:
| Try TeXmacs, it's neither TeX nor it's Emacs clone.
|
| TeXmacs is WYSIWYG scientific editing platform. Documents created
| can be saved in TeXmacs, Xml, Scheme, PDF or Postscript.
| Converters exist for TeX/LaTeX and HTML/MathML. It can also be
| used as a graphical front-end for other computer algebra,
| numerical analysis, statistics software[1].
|
| [1]https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html
| jIyajbe wrote:
| Another good WYSIWYG front end is LyX: www.lyx.org . I've
| written a few hundred physics lecture notes with it, as well as
| a number of Beamer presentations. I find it much easier to use
| than TeXmacs (mainly because of keyboard shortcuts), and the
| output is excellent. And yes, it produces true TeX/LaTeX.
| noneeeed wrote:
| Finding Lyx when I was at university saved me an immense
| amount of frustration while producing beautiful output. My
| girlfriend used Word 95 and I spent many more hours helping
| her format and fix her projects than I ever spent dealing
| with issues in Lyx. Once I had it setup how I needed it it
| just works.
| GiovanniP wrote:
| TeXmacs is not a front-end for LaTeX, but a completely
| original system, superior to TeX and LaTeX under every point
| of view: typographic quality, ease of use, control over your
| document.
| wiz21c wrote:
| I concur. LyX makes things order of magnitude easier for a
| casual latex user like me.
| drstewart wrote:
| >Try TeXmacs, it's neither TeX nor it's Emacs clone.
|
| Seems to be about the worst name they could have chosen then
| kzrdude wrote:
| Any published papers that use this?
| GiovanniP wrote:
| You can check all of the papers of Joris van der Hoeven
| (https://www.texmacs.org/joris/main/publs.html) and of
| Massimiliano Gubinelli (https://www.hcm.uni-
| bonn.de/people/faculty/publications/?tx_...), and as well
| these lecture notes the link to which was recently posted on
| the TeXmacs forums
| https://www.jonmsterling.com/papers/sterling:2022:wg6.pdf
| (link to the forum post http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/sharing-
| some-lecture-notes-created...). The papers of vdH you find in
| his website are converted from the TeXmacs format into pdf
| (one can find the TeXmacs sources too by each paper) and the
| papers of Gubinelli as far as I know are written using
| TeXmacs but since he puts the links to the journals there you
| get a version converted from the TeXmacs format into LaTeX.
| rq1 wrote:
| There must be a solution similar to this:
| https://hackage.haskell.org/package/TeX-my-math
|
| I don't understand why they encode these expressions f^{(2)}(x)
| like so. They should be written like a regular function: f 2 x.
| Then you apply your styling depending on eg. the domain
| definitions. Eg. for f : N x R -> R, then the first argument is
| sub/super-scripted... etc.
|
| Another eg. In python, we would render this expression: sum([i*2
| for i in range(0, n)]) with sigma expression... etc.
| ProfXponent wrote:
| What is the intended use for LaTex these days?
|
| I'm not trying to flame, I just have no idea why anyone would
| choose to use it over html/css or just a word processor.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| Academia. At least, its widespread (almost universal) where I
| am studying. Mainly to manage citations, figures, and tables of
| contents automatically. Tools like Sharelatex are used for
| collaboration on papers.
| ProfXponent wrote:
| That's interesting.
|
| Is it really a problem that requires manually writing the
| code? Seems like there should be more elegant solutions by
| this point.
| aulin wrote:
| There really isn't much code to write for a typical
| scientific document, just sectioning and math. You usually
| include the same preamble in your own documents and a
| preamble from the editor if you're targeting a scientific
| journal, but most of the time you focus on the content.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| expanding on what others mentioned, usually each university
| has latex templates for their papers and reports which
| handle most of the complicated parts, the only real latex
| ive worked on for reports is for eqations and tables, and
| many people just use gui tools that generate the code for
| them.
|
| New students do occasionally complain about images/figures
| not being where they are relative to the text in the code,
| thats a solvable problem in latex by embedding it in a
| minipage but honestly people complain about images having a
| mind of their own in word too ;)
| kalenx wrote:
| For most usages, you don't need to write the code.
| Sometimes buff out rough edges for your specific
| application, but in my 12 years in academia, I think I've
| only really _written_ Latex twice.
| ProfXponent wrote:
| Ok that makes a bit more sense, thanks for taking the
| time to educate me :)
| red_trumpet wrote:
| How do you typeset your research then?
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| By just using the existing "code"/markup. Similarly, I
| would not count writing markdown as programming. Now if
| you need some new stuff, e.g. complicated tree diagrams,
| it starts to turn into programming.
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| You could do it through Pandoc. Pandoc can process
| multiple data sources (citations, chapters, yamls etc.)
| and output a pdf.
|
| You can turn on citation linking (in the text), you can
| apply a custom latex template.
|
| Once it is all setup, you just write text in Pandoc
| Markdown.
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| I thought Sharelatex was bought by Overleaf years ago? It is
| still alive I see.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| afaik yes it was, perhaps its a force of habit for me as
| sharelatex redirects to overleaf I just always click
| through to it.
| krinchan wrote:
| LaTeX is particularly suited to print (and by extension PDF).
| When you get into writing your own custom LaTeX
| macros/commands, yes it's difficult. However, the vast majority
| of users are simply consuming these sorts of custom commands in
| the article, not producing them. This leads into environments
| where people writing papers or articles just use what's handed
| to them.
|
| LaTeX works out amazingly for two very specific use cases: 1)
| Large, collaborative documents and 2) producing the exact same,
| highly structured print document over and over. I have pretty
| extensive experience with the second use case.
|
| When I was Secretary for a non-profit organization, I had an
| entire little personal library of macros that sat on top of the
| minutes[1] package. I could open an empty text file, type in
| \attendee{Name} as people arrived. Type in \maketitle and do a
| quick preview and the document would instantly build out a
| front page that included if we had quorum or not, etc. I typed
| the document exactly as the meeting happened while marking up
| things like tasks (and who they're assigned to), decisions made
| (with voting tallies and who motioned what), and so on.
|
| All that data would get duplicated to the end of the document
| in nice lists for quick reference. It had consistent
| formatting. The build system (a make file and latexmk iirc)
| would wrap my new file in the basic boilerplate and spit out
| the PDF for me to email. I consistently had the meeting minutes
| published an hour after every meeting whereas my predecessors
| often took 24 hours or more to publish meeting minutes due to
| Word being Word. Those documents also lacked a table of
| contents or the various appendices with summary data.
|
| That said, there were things that I tended to avoid doing, like
| complex tables or something. There's something to be said for
| staying inside the box of what comes built into LaTeX. I recall
| giving up with floating an image to the left of a table on our
| title page and just plopping the image inline in a horizontally
| centered paragraph and then putting the rest of the title
| content beneath it.
|
| Also, many documentation frameworks (sphinx comes to mind) use
| LaTeX under the covers to produce their PDF output. So you
| might think you're just using markdown or RST, but somewhere
| someone is converting that to LaTex or TeX in order to leverage
| a very good typesetting engine.
|
| [1]: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/minutes
| kzrdude wrote:
| Word processor does not work with git and group collaboration
| and versioning properly.
|
| HTML is not an authoring tool. Maybe pandoc or sphinx or other
| system would compete.
| tel wrote:
| Gold standard equation editing.
| xattt wrote:
| My use case was for getting easy marks for proper APA
| formatting, which Zotero/EndNote and Mendeley don't quite cover
| in one pass.
| flenserboy wrote:
| Laying out books. The fact that all of this can be done in a
| text file, without hidden codes and being tied to this file
| format or another, is extraordinary. Images are easily handled,
| fonts simply work (XeTeX & friends work well for me), and --
| with sufficient warnings -- these files can be handed over to
| an author and edited without messing much, if anything, up. The
| PDFs generated work well with all the PDF tools I've attempted
| to use on them, and there's none of the weirdness that too-
| often shows up in Word or other WPs. If all you want is good-
| looking text, generated from truly basic documents, it will
| give it to you without effort.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Another poster just finished saying images and tables are
| hard. Why the disconnect do you think?
| flenserboy wrote:
| Basic LaTeX is easy; ramping up has a significant learning
| curve, but once that mount has been scaled, things level
| off quickly. Doing tables in straight LaTeX is miserable --
| CTAN, however, is filled with fantastic packages that make
| them easy. XeLaTeX makes inserting images pretty easy
| without packages. I will say that what may cause difficulty
| with images for people new to LaTeX are floats -- tables,
| images, and the like may move page to page depending on how
| the document flows; if you're used to anchoring an image on
| a particular page in a WP, that may put one's mind a bit
| out of joint until it makes sense.
| leephillips wrote:
| The other poster was wrong.
| benoliver999 wrote:
| I use it for stuff more than a couple of pages long, because:
|
| - I can use my text editor of choice
|
| - I don't have to worry about messing with the formatting by
| accident
|
| - It goes through git easily
|
| Anything shorter and I just use a word processor, it's not
| worth the time messing with the boilerplate.
|
| I do use it for writing letters - I have a template I just fill
| out and it spits out a nicely formatted letter with an
| envelope.
|
| It's also handy for when I need documents in multiple languages
| - you can make one change to the formatting and it changes them
| all.
| billfruit wrote:
| Won't asciidoc together with tools like pandoc serve the same
| usecase.
| leephillips wrote:
| Anything where decent typography is desired. Also, of course,
| mathematics. Mathjax is very good, but we sometimes want a
| canonical version of a document that looks the same for every
| reader, and doesn't depend of the vagaries of constantly
| evolving browser engines. This means PDF.
| impendia wrote:
| I'm a professor and research mathematician, and I use LaTeX for
| nearly everything I write. In addition to what others wrote --
|
| - The way I conceptualize it, LaTeX _is_ a word processor. So,
| for example, if I 'm writing a rec letter and I choose LaTeX
| over Word, I'm thinking "I like this word processor better than
| that one."
|
| - LaTeX/PDF is often criticized for being static, but in my
| experience, this is a good thing in most cases. If I am
| discussing the contents of a file with someone else, it is
| useful if we are both looking at exactly the same thing.
|
| - I don't try to do any significant programming, or extensive
| customization of how my documents look. I agree that trying to
| do so would be annoying, but this is not part of my use case.
| If you look at a random selection of math papers, say here
|
| https://arxiv.org/list/math/new
|
| you'll notice that all of them look more or less identical.
| FabHK wrote:
| Master/PhD theses and papers in the sciences, particularly if
| formulas are involved.
| lurquer wrote:
| I use it for puzzle books. Things like suduko, cryptograms,
| criss-cross, etc.
|
| I have various custom C++ programs to generate the puzzles.
| But, getting the results to a formatted PDF was nearly
| impossible.
|
| I use LaTeX as I can have my C++ program output a text file
| which, when compiled with LaTeX, creates the pretty puzzle
| books.
|
| Essentially, I can press a button and "poof" I have a print-
| ready puzzle book ready to go up on Amazon.
| SebastianKra wrote:
| PDF is unfortunately still the preferred format for sharing
| research papers.
|
| And you're right, single file HTML with embedded images would
| be a much better format, but I assume publishers are preventing
| this.
| josefx wrote:
| > single file HTML with embedded images would be a much
| better format
|
| Or use epub, which lets you store the images as part of the
| zip archive without having to store binary files as bloated
| and text editor killing base64 text.
| SebastianKra wrote:
| Yes, you're right. Another benefit of epub is that existing
| reader apps already have good support for highlights,
| bookmarks and comments.
| aulin wrote:
| have you ever printed a webpage?
| SebastianKra wrote:
| Yep. A while ago, I used wkhtml2pdf to write a document in
| Markdown (Pandoc) and convert it to PDF.
|
| It worked fine. There where some minor issues around page
| breaks. But then again, most people don't use paper for
| reading anymore, so I'll happily accept these minor issues
| over the absolute inconsistent hell that is text-selection,
| searching and hyperlinks in most PDFs.
| WolfOliver wrote:
| For how long do we still need to print a paper?
| petschge wrote:
| For as long as I use time sitting on public transport and
| airplanes to review them. Nothing beats the ergonomics of
| a printout, a red pen and no internet.
| ProfXponent wrote:
| Or a decent paperback novel.
|
| Reading long form content on a screen gives me awful
| eyestrain.
|
| Plus I love the smell of a good book.
| WolfOliver wrote:
| I think the same way but I'm also pretty sure that the
| generation to come does not appreciate it anymore.
|
| I hope that e-inc displays will mature. Paired with the
| UX of a modern I Pad this will replace printed stuff.
| ProfXponent wrote:
| Paper is the best form of long term storage of data we
| have besides stone tablets.
| gus_massa wrote:
| We use a lot of LaTeX to make the midterms and final exams in
| the math department of my university. Everyone knows how to
| write in LaTeX, so if I make a internal helper package or a
| bunch of macros, then everyone can use it with minimal
| training.
|
| The problem with wysiwyg word processors is that people get
| creative and it's very difficult to enforce the same style for
| all the material.
| ProfXponent wrote:
| Ok, that makes perfect sense.
| ska wrote:
| > What is the intended use for LaTex these days?
|
| Writing anything with complicated mathematical typesetting, for
| one; their have been improvements in word processors and thinks
| like MathML/MathJax, but they are still behind.
|
| Works pretty well for autogenerated docs with more going on
| than is easy in Markdown, also - but that's often a bit of a
| wash.
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