[HN Gopher] The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typ...
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The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
Author : fanpu
Score : 207 points
Date : 2023-01-08 14:22 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fanpu.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (fanpu.io)
| gnull wrote:
| One bit I would add: don't use xspace package. If you defined a
| macro with 0 argumemts like
| \newcommand\kek[0]{kak}
|
| You must always put {} after it's invocation like "\kek{}". If
| you do "\kek", that may eat the following space in some cases.
| Doing "\kek\ " or "\kek\xspace" is bad and harmful.
| jakobov wrote:
| Anyone know of any good typesetters who I can hire to typeset an
| ebook?
| grecy wrote:
| I've written my books in Latex - the pdf output goes to Amazon
| for the print copy, and then I run it through pandoc to get a
| perfectly formatted epub that I upload to amazon and apple and
| anywhere else.
|
| It takes a bit to get setup, but now I have the template going
| it makes a perfectly formatted book a breeze.
|
| I wrote about it here: http://theroadchoseme.com/how-i-self-
| published-a-professiona...
| carterschonwald wrote:
| Great cheat sheet, not enough folks know about \mid and friends.
|
| Once you're in nyc let's grab coffee sometime!
| fanpu wrote:
| Thank you! :) and sure!
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| I have a question: if what you have to write in order to create
| your beautiful and aesthetically pleasing proof, and thereby
| "establish your ethos and character" (presumably as a righteous
| and good), is an ugly and fragile instance of a poorly designed,
| inherently unreadable, archaic language that embodies none of the
| characteristics you are after, can the result really be "a work
| of art that combines both the precision and creativity of your
| logical thinking, as well as the elegance of a beautifully
| typeset writing?"
| generationP wrote:
| TeX is not unreadable. It's hard to automatically parse, but it
| is easy to read by a human, unless the authors have been piling
| hacks and too-smart-by-half constructs. The latter case happens
| every once in a while but is generally pretty rare.
| ivan_ah wrote:
| > RE: ugly and fragile instance of a poorly designed,
| inherently unreadable, archaic language
|
| That's a lot of hate for LaTeX, and some of it is warranted,
| but you have to think of the results, not the source... It's
| not the source code that people are in love with, but the
| result (rendered PDF or via MathJax/KaTeX on the web). The
| "ugly" markup syntax allows you to produce beautiful,
| versatile, well designed, readable, and modern math equations.
|
| As for the latex source code, I think it's redeeming qualities
| are the fact that it is a _standard_ (with over 40+ years track
| record). It 's definitely not readable, or user-friendly (try
| adding or forgetting a single }), but people seem to get used
| to it after a while.
|
| Another thing I could say in defence of tex syntax, is that it
| is necessary complexity. If it wasn't the backslash-macros and
| curly braces, we would need some other way to express structure
| in equations, so the same complexity would be present in a new
| look.
| zzless wrote:
| What a great summary! Unfortunately, many discussions of TeX
| vs alternatives are somewhat thin on details and are instead
| trading on emotions. As you mentioned in your comment, the
| choices made by Knuth are far from random. He even made it
| possible for anyone to change them! Not many people using TeX
| know that the choice of the backslash as an 'escape'
| character may be easily changed. Even the necessity of curly
| braces may be avoided using carefully designed macros. LaTeX
| took a different path but it is only one possible choice. It
| is telling that no real alternatives have emerged during the
| 40+ years of TeX's existence.
| ogogmad wrote:
| Asciidoc, TexMacs, LyX, reStructuredText, Markdown
| (admittedly, only ish).
|
| None of them have become the standard. But some of the ones
| above - though excluding Markdown - are a complete
| replacement.
|
| Actually, even Markdown stands a chance if supplemented
| with enough HTML and CSS. HTML and CSS have practically
| replaced most non-maths uses of Latex.
| catiopatio wrote:
| None of those are a complete replacement, except _maybe_
| Lyx, and it's based on LaTeX.
|
| > HTML and CSS have practically replaced most non-maths
| uses of Latex.
|
| Huh? You must be totally ignorant of the uses of LaTeX.
| ogogmad wrote:
| This comment makes me see red.
|
| First of all, this:
|
| > None of those are a complete replacement, except maybe
| Lyx, and it's based on LaTeX.
|
| Source: Your [censored].
|
| > Huh? You must be totally ignorant of the uses of LaTeX.
|
| Outside of academic papers and books, what?
| [deleted]
| cratermoon wrote:
| How many of those rely on LaTeX syntax extensions to
| render equations?
| TchoBeer wrote:
| I can't speak for most of them because I haven't used
| them, but I know that TexMacs doesn't use LaTeX under the
| hood.
| ogogmad wrote:
| The LaTeX formula language is a separate thing from the
| rest of LaTeX: It's become the standard for formulas.
| There are some editors that can speed up writing those
| formulas. Asciidoc also offers an alternative formula
| language.
| zzless wrote:
| The way I see it, this only proves my point. As you
| write: '...None of them have become the standard...' and
| this is at the center of the argument. TeX may not be
| ideal but it strikes the correct balance to become and
| stay standard for so many years. One can do pretty much
| anything in bare Postscript (and I am ashamed to admit, I
| have) or even 'handmade' PDF but it does not make it a
| good alternative to TeX. I have experimented with
| alternative syntaxes (apologies it this is not the
| correct plural of 'syntax') but had to give all of them
| up due to a number of flaws. These experiments gave me a
| new appreciation for Knuth's choices.
| ogogmad wrote:
| I disagree. I think Latex will soon become legacy like
| Cobol.
|
| HTML and CSS basically do a lot more than Latex does -
| except for maths things - and are far more widely known,
| and far more forgiving. Also importantly, they support
| hyperlinks, animations, and inline interactive scripts.
| It seems that HTML and CSS with the appropriate CSS
| styles and shorthands (like Markdown) could eat up
| everything that Latex does and much more. I don't know if
| Latex can survive the onslaught.
| catiopatio wrote:
| > I think Latex will soon become legacy like Cobol.
|
| LaTeX's usage has only increased with the creation and
| growth of the web. What makes you think it's going
| anywhere?
| ogogmad wrote:
| Academia has got inertia. How long has it taken it to
| adopt Open Access? There's far more investment into web
| tech than into Latex. Browsers can do more than PDF
| readers.
| zodiac wrote:
| The "except for math" part is doing a lot I think.
| There's a huge amount of work needed to get rendered math
| to look as good as latex's and I'm not sure CSS (as an
| example) is expressive enough to get this done
| zzless wrote:
| I have heard HTML/CSS mentioned as an alternative and I
| pray every day this time will never come. Even taking all
| the complaints leveled at LaTeX at face value, using
| HTML/CSS looks like pure hell to me. Allow me to
| elaborate.
|
| 1. You mentioned forgiving. One may not like the style of
| TeX error messages but its tracing facilities are
| extensive and given enough time and perseverance one can
| track nearly any layout issue down an correct it. Compare
| this to CSS silently ignoring incorrect syntax, having
| different syntax across browsers, etc. I would take
| strict syntax checking over this mess any day.
|
| 2. Many complained that LaTeX has more than one way of
| achieving the same result. True but how many ways are
| there of centering a div on a page? I can list six off
| the top of my head and there are probably more.
|
| 3. You casually mentioned '...except for maths things...'
| but this is far from minor. I cringe when I read
| engineering papers not written in TeX: the formulas are
| so ugly that they border on unreadable.
|
| 4. CSS may be wider known but unlike TeX CSS is a moving
| target. Being designed by a committee it carries all the
| flaws, like kludgy design in the name of 'compatibility',
| poor choices of syntax to make it appeal to a wider
| audience, etc. The designers of CSS are so enamored with
| the 'cascade' but in practice it is rarely used as
| intended. The 'important!' kludge as a perfect testament
| to this.
|
| 5. LaTeX syntax may be unappealing to some but HTML takes
| it to a whole other level: whitespace that affects the
| layout yet no easy way of getting rid of it (HTML style
| comments are a torture device); too verbose... one may
| not like the backslash but what about <...> </...> ? Five
| extra symbols!
|
| 6. LaTeX engines produce full featured PDF so hyperlinks
| are not a problem (most LaTeX documents have them). Yes,
| CSS has so called 3D graphics but it is anything but
| programmer friendly. What good are 3D transforms if one
| cannot even use simple lighting effects programmatically;
| c'mon, at least give me Lambert reflection! Incidentally,
| inline JavaScript can be included in pdf documents
| produced by LateX as well (although ... why?)
| eviks wrote:
| > It is telling that no real alternatives have emerged
| during the 40+ years of TeX's existence.
|
| But what does it tell you that such an ugliness remains and
| the way to fix it is relatively unknown? It surely can't be
| a pro-TeX tell!
| zzless wrote:
| It tells me that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder,
| i.e. what one may perceive as ugliness, countless others
| will view as beauty or, at least functionality. I
| personally think that the ugliest design in existence is
| Python but I admit my opinion is not common. Moreover, I
| use Python myself, since syntax is not the only important
| thing in a language (the ecosystem is Python's
| undisputable strength). It is also unclear to me what
| specific 'ugliness' in TeX is fixed by, say TeXmacs. Is
| TeXmacs internal language dramatically (or any) better
| than TeX? Does not seem so. The WYSIWYG option? There are
| WYSIWYG editors for TeX as well.
| mgubi wrote:
| "here are WYSIWYG editors for TeX as well." not there are
| not. Apart from TeXmacs I know of no editor which give
| you on the screen the same result you get on the paper.
| LyX has not such a feature. If an approximation is ok,
| then fine, but I do not think you can call it WYSIWYG. Is
| something else. And it requires a lot of work to do it
| correctly. You should at least appreciate the technical
| merits, even if you prefer to use LaTeX for its
| ecosystem. But as a user of both I see the clear merits
| of TeXmacs in terms of quality of my work
| (mathematician), I can focus more on _what_ I 'm doing,
| instead on deciphering the mess of the LaTeX formulas and
| try to find where to put a correction. I can give online
| lectures with it, discuss on zoom while scribbling on a
| TeXmacs document, much of the work I was doing on paper I
| do now directly on the computer. To me there is a clear
| difference in the user experience between TeXmacs and
| LaTeX and I will never go back to write LaTeX if I can
| help it (I do it sometimes, if my coauthors are using it
| and do not want to try otherwise).
| zzless wrote:
| As a fellow mathematician you may then appreciate the
| fact that local and global maxima may differ dramatically
| which pretty much precludes true WYSIWYG (not just in
| TeX) in that you have to settle for one of the two:
| visual output with suboptimal aesthetics (TeXmacs, and,
| to some extent, LyX) or perfect results that you have to
| compile with some delay. It has nothing to do with the
| computational power available but rather with the
| occasional highly unstable line breaking. Even in MS Word
| it is annoying sometimes to see it resize a current line
| even though it uses a rather lame line breaking routine.
| TeX does have facilities for almost real time WYSIWYG
| (SyncTeX was added specifically for that purpose)
| although they take some effort to set up. As far as
| concentrating on the work at hand I have written whole
| papers without compiling the document once before
| everything was complete. I admit it takes some getting
| used to but I prefer something I can grep through to a
| mere pretty picture. I admit if my work was heavy on
| large commutative diagrams I might have had a different
| view. One thing I totally agree with you on is that
| TeXmacs is an outstanding piece of software. I would just
| prefer to keep my documents in TeX (which TeXmacs can
| export, kinda).
| Skeime wrote:
| In my experience, that's not entirely true. Some of my
| mathematician friends claim that they (and other people they
| know) often rather read the source code than the type-set
| result. I'm inclined to believe it because the biggest
| problem with LaTeX (to me) is jumping between the source and
| the result while editing, especially when formulas are
| involved. (Syncing tools help, but they're far from perfect.)
| So it is often more convenient to just work with the source
| but this leads to problems where mis-typeset formulas don't
| get recognized because too little time is spend with the
| result and they look fine in the source. And then people
| start reading the source code of other people's papers
| because it's more understandable, making the whole thing
| absurd.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| but the source is the problem. When you work with 100+ latex
| files and it is so difficult to reuse the code and every
| variable is in a giant global scope, you would waste so much
| time just to trying to figuring out how it works.
| Shorel wrote:
| As ugly as it may appear to you, it is so much more readable
| than MathML Core.
|
| TeX is, in fact, still better than all the alternatives to
| represent mathematical equations in plain text created so far.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| MathML is not a writing format, it is an output format that
| is designed to be machine readable.
|
| And I think most people complain about the non-equation parts
| of LaTeX.
| contravariant wrote:
| Well no, but LaTeX should be backwards compatible with TeX so
| there's always that option.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| LaTeX is robust enough and has a consistent enough interface
| that with some macros and snippets you can take real-time notes
| of people giving graduate level math lectures on a blackboard.
| If LaTeX is ugly, it's in the same sense as APL is "ugly".
| rsfern wrote:
| Generally agreed, writing should be a tool that supports clear
| thinking, and a giant mess of unreadable markup is not amenable
| for thinking.
|
| I'm still reading through this post, but it seems to have some
| great advice for making that situation at least a little
| better, like the trick with mathtools to make paired braces
| more readable
|
| I collaborate with some academics that strongly prefer to do
| all writing and editing in MS Word, but I've personally found
| that to be a lot worse for supporting clear thinking,
| especially if any math is involved
| fanpu wrote:
| Great question! Is there a specific domain/example that you
| have in mind? I don't think people intentionally use archaic
| language if their goal is to educate and enlighten, but in
| papers it is quite common for unnecessary jargon to be peppered
| in, which while probably obvious to the author, makes it hard
| for people new to the field to break in.
| fanpu wrote:
| Realized I misunderstood your question. IMO the main design
| problem with LaTeX from a usage-standpoint is that there are
| too many ways of achieving the same thing, and oftentimes
| none of them is a clear winner. It's still the best option
| for a usable, programmable typesetting language that we have
| (i.e writing for-loops to draw structured graphs in TikZ...)
| titzer wrote:
| My personal beef with LaTeX, other than the utterly
| atrocious syntax, is that it a.) endlessly barfs on your
| terminal during its normal operation and b.) does not
| respond to normal terminal interaction upon an error (wth
| is it expecting? I interactively edit and correct
| mistakes!?). So it's scroll blindness and flailing all the
| way, a kludgy, rickety mess. Not to mention its utter mess
| of a package management system.
| tephra wrote:
| It should be noted that TeX wa s of course designed to
| actually be interactive and stop letting you fix errors.
|
| I went through the texbook by Knuth last year and my eyes
| were opened (also note that I am an incurable (La)TeX fan
| so my opinion is biased)
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| For the terminal output issue, consider latexrun
| https://github.com/aclements/latexrun
| DocTomoe wrote:
| I am still looking for a text markup system that gives me good
| PDFs with DTP-grade text setting and and is plain-text, so I
| can work with standard version control programs. Right now,
| only TeX/LaTeX comes close. AsciiDoctor is not doing citations
| well, Markdown is basically a mess which differs in
| implementation, also footnotes and citations.
|
| Do you have something better?
| chaoxu wrote:
| How is Quarto? It uses Pandoc Markdown.
| elashri wrote:
| There was a discussion about that last year [1]
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30042831
| gglitch wrote:
| I don't have an opinion about whether they're better or
| worse, but have you tried groff or heirloom troff?
| hanche wrote:
| I think (though I can't find a reference) that Knuth hoped
| that some of the algorithms developed for TeX, such as the
| hyphenation and line breaking algorithms, would catch on and
| be used by other, non-TeX typesetting software. If that has
| ever happened, I a unaware of any examples. That's a pity.
| atlintots wrote:
| In this case, of course. The final product (the document), once
| produced, is much more independent of the underlying code than
| "normal" software. Once the document has been produced, it
| doesn't really matter whether you used Word or LaTeX or ConTeXt
| or whatever.
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| Until you have to change, quote, or re-use parts of it, in
| another document.
| fanpu wrote:
| There are tools (i.e https://mathpix.com/) that actually
| does a pretty great job at LaTeX OCR, although you'll need
| to re-create labels and the like. I was pleasantly
| surprised that it replicated alignments & chose the right
| font faces while using it.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| I find writing LaTex is like painting a beautiful sunset using
| pig's blood. The results are beautiful, but don't look behind
| the canvas or too deeply into the artist's mental health
| following that.
| carapace wrote:
| You're crapping on a thing that Knuth and friends made and gave
| you for free.
|
| Are you about to go write something better?
| daly wrote:
| Latex and Tex, my goto language for beautiful documents.
|
| Try rewriting Knuth's books with markdown.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| LaTeX is great, but God forbid you want to move a figure up a
| centimeter on the page.
|
| That'll cost you an hour of reading through StackExchange
| threads, and you'll probably come up empty.
| mattkrause wrote:
| It is not exactly a picnic in Word either though....
| generationP wrote:
| Just don't use figure when you don't want them to float, but
| just use \includegraphics or whatever environment you're using?
| Floating figures are a pain in the ass in any system, as their
| positioning relies on the rest of the text already being
| formatted but simultaneously mess with that same formatting.
| billfruit wrote:
| Is there a reasonable assessment of where LaTeX's capabilities
| are falling short? One of these may be laying out tables without
| need for manual intervention/adjustment. Another could be easier
| ways to customise look and feel of documents.For example the
| "letter" document class is too bare-bones.
| generationP wrote:
| There are lots of things that are worth improving.
|
| The lack of accessibility features (structured PDF, alt-text),
| or more precisely the glacial pace at which they are getting
| developed, is grating. In truth, a well-written TeX file is
| itself accessible in most reasonable senses, but not everyone
| posts TeX sources of their work. It reminds me of the early
| 2000s when making PDFs was considered high wizardry and
| everyone was dealing with half-broken PS and DVI.
|
| Better tables would be nice, but it's not clear what a perfect
| support for tables would even be. Unlike HTML, TeX has deal
| with page size limitations, and it's far from clear how tables
| should adapt to those.
| eterevsky wrote:
| Maybe I'm nitpicking, but the very first section of this
| document, entitled "Typesetting as a Form of Art" contains in the
| first two lines an incorrect opening quotation mark (`` instead
| of ") and a hyphen (-) instead of an em-dash (-).
| fanpu wrote:
| Ah, I guess that's what happens when you do both Markdown and
| LaTeX in the same document! Thanks for pointing it out, I've
| also been pretty sloppy with hyphen and em-dash in normal
| writing. Maybe someone could write a similar post for online
| HTML content in the future?
| dfan wrote:
| If this article gets even one author to stop using < and > when
| they mean \langle and \rangle, it will be worth it.
| chaoxu wrote:
| Many LaTeX tricks only get passed down from advisors to students,
| or from collaborators to collaborators. Rarely someone would look
| for how to improve their typesetting when all they want is to
| quickly communicate content.
|
| It be nice if content and typesetting can be completely
| separated, where I just write content, and something (LaTeX, AI,
| some manual typesetter) does all the typesetting.
|
| Also, should I be the one controlling how the reader consume my
| content? Maybe the reader prefers another font? Or the reader is
| viewing in a kindle so pdf page size should be different?
|
| This would be impossible unless the reader have my LaTeX source
| code and compile it themselves. But it is super simple for epub,
| or html webpage (by modifying the css).
| pinewurst wrote:
| To a certain degree, the LaTeX environment is already like
| that. I designed my custom resume style years ago and rarely
| touch it. I often tweak the actual content which gets poured
| into the style to produce the final document. The few changes
| I've made to the style have never affected the (separate)
| content either.
| zzless wrote:
| > This would be impossible unless the reader have my LaTeX
| source code and compile it themselves. But it is super simple
| for epub, or html webpage (by modifying the css).
|
| Well ..., wouldn't the html page be the source code in this
| case? Also, in most cases changing the look of a LaTeX document
| is as simple as changing the docuent class or switching to a
| different package. Also, modifying CSS is anything but simple
| in some cases, especially when the original style is not ideal.
| fanpu wrote:
| > Many LaTeX tricks only get passed down from advisors to
| students, or from collaborators to collaborators.
|
| Which is a great point on why the average quality of LaTeX
| homework submissions by undergraduates without any research
| experience usually makes for a less-than-ideal grading
| experience. And this is not about the nit-picky mistakes, but
| the visually glaring ones.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Several of the images are broken links. Perhaps an example of
| Muphry's Law?
| fanpu wrote:
| Should be fixed now. First time hearing about Muphry's Law,
| definitely gave me a chuckle!
| hanche wrote:
| > First time hearing about Muphry's Law
|
| It was probably a mipsrint.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Nope.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Works now. I do very little writing that requires math,
| although I did have occasion to present Muller's Recurrence
| for a discussion on floating point arithmetic. The tip
| "Expressions Should Be Punctuated Like Sentences" is a good
| one, and generalizes somewhat to inline code or any inline
| figure or table in writing.
| fanpu wrote:
| Refreshing might help (my guess is it might be due to img
| fallback issue), thanks for flagging this and I'll be
| investigating!
| generationP wrote:
| Most of this is good advice, but I don't see the \mathbbm vs.
| \mathbb distinction as anything other than subjective taste.
|
| Also, I use things like
| \newcommand{\abs}[1]{\left| #1 \right|}
|
| in the preamble. This way, I can use \abs{...} without any
| asterisks, and it automatically adjusts its size. In the 1%
| situations where I don't want it to adjust the size, I write the
| delimiters manually.
|
| Making maths look good in LaTeX is pretty well-understood these
| days; authors who don't are usually just being lazy. The big
| undocumented mess with LaTeX is making bibliographies work
| correctly. The "standard" bibtex workflow is broken in many ways,
| and I have never seen a tutorial on how to fix it. With
| bibliographies being such a minuscule part of a mathematical
| paper, I'm not surprised that no one cares, but the result is
| lots of references that are imprecise, missing important info or
| plain wrong.
| enriquto wrote:
| Both mathbbm and mathbb are wrong for number sets. These fonts
| look like the blackboard hack that you use to simulate boldface
| using chalk. On a computer you don't have this problem and you
| can simply use mathbf (actual boldface).
| generationP wrote:
| It might have originated as a hack, but now it's a font in
| its own right. Why not use it?
|
| It's quite common to see \mathbb{R} used for the actual set
| of reals, while \mathbf{R} means a totally ordered field
| (i.e., an abstract object behaving somewhat like \mathbb{R}).
| The distinction is deliberate and the notation is good.
| enriquto wrote:
| > Why not use it?
|
| Better question: why use it, when you can use the real
| thing?
|
| Mathematicians concerned by typography universally use real
| boldface. For example: Terrence Tao's blog, Donald Knuth,
| Paul Halmos (author of "how to write mathematics"), and the
| famous journal "Publications Mathematiques de l'IHES" which
| is the undisputed gold standard in mathematical typography.
| They use real boldface for the number sets N, Z, Q, T, R,
| C.
|
| I've never seen a boldface R to mean a set different than
| the real numbers. Maybe this is some fringe custom in model
| theory, but in mainstream mathematics it has a clear and
| standard meaning. Can you point me to a paper where they
| use a boldface R with such a meaning (i.e., different than
| the reals). I'm sure that this usage would always be
| accompanied by a clarification to avoid any confusion.
| generationP wrote:
| Huh, it appears a lot less frequent than I thought. I had
| misremembered some \mathrm{R}'s as \mathbf{R}'s.
|
| That said, I still feel that I've seen every \mathbf
| letter used for something other than a standard number
| set somewhere. But probably not in the mainstream.
| danbruc wrote:
| In his papers Terence Tao is inconsistent [1][2][3],
| maybe because of formatting requirements? But boy is real
| boldface ugly [3] and sticks out like some tomato ketchup
| on a white wedding dress.
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1611.07441.pdf
|
| [2] https://annals.math.princeton.edu/wp-
| content/uploads/annals-...
|
| [3] https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0512114.pdf
| orlp wrote:
| Who is Terrence Tao? Do you mean Terence Tao?
|
| (if we are nitpicking about typography...)
| enriquto wrote:
| Heh.
|
| Sorry about that. A common typo. The keys are like right
| next to each other.
| Skeime wrote:
| True boldface has a much darker type color than
| blackboard bold, thus drawing your eyes to it. But
| usually, the occurrences of, say, the real numbers are
| not the most interesting or important part on the page
| and they thus don't deserve that emphasis.
|
| (Also, admittedly, I like the look of these letters.)
| fanpu wrote:
| Interesting explanation on how it developed historically.
| I've seen mathbf used in some books, but I guess old
| conventions are hard to change.
| gnull wrote:
| \DeclarePairedDelimiter\abs{\lvert}{\rvert}
|
| Isn't this better than newcommand? This makes both \abs{x} and
| \abs*{x} valid.
| BrandonS113 wrote:
| This is the first time I have seen such a complaint against
| bibtex. Yes bib files are finicky to write correctly, and
| bibtex can be a pain to use. But bibliographies are never
| "imprecise, missing important info or plain wrong." I've
| written 100s of pieces with latex+bibtex, papers, websites,
| reports, books. bibtex always makes citations and bib entries
| look like what I or the publisher need. If something is
| missing, then one is using the wrong style.
| generationP wrote:
| I have seen very few fully correct bibliographies written
| with bibtex in the wild. Not everything wrong with bibtex is
| a bug; the big problem is that bibtex is not adapted to its
| modern usage. A non-comprehensive list of problems:
|
| 1. Does anyone run bibtex directly from the command line? No,
| it's an extra step and the syntax is hard to memorize (should
| it run on the tex or the bib, and with or without the
| extension?). Instead, everyone eventually uses some form of
| script that does "pdflatex; bibtex; pdflatex; pdflatex" or
| something like this. Nice and slick; unfortunately it means
| that all warnings get hidden from view. A common mistake
| (particularly when copypasting) is accidentally having two
| AUTHOR fields in a bibitem, which causes the second to be
| ignored. No way you'll notice until you look carefully at the
| bibliography or read the bibtex log. It doesn't help that
| many of the warnings are false alarms.
|
| 2. Writing bibitems is probably as painless as it could be,
| but still painful enough that most people have "wandering"
| bib files that move from project to project. Unfortunately,
| this creates lots of problems:
|
| 2A. A book gets a reedition, or an arXiv preprint gets
| updated. You just update the reference, right? Wrong, of
| course, because your old references now lead to the wrong
| pages, sections, theorems.
|
| 2B. There are bibliography styles that print DOI fields but
| not URLs. There are ones that print URLs but not DOIs. There
| are some that print both, which is redundant. With a
| wandering bib file, which ones do you cater to? No way to do
| right by them all.
|
| 2C. With grey literature, a URL is often necessary, but many
| bibliography styles don't print URLs. So you end up including
| it in a NOTE field, which of course gets it duplicated in
| those styles that do print URLs.
|
| 3. Too many foot-guns.
|
| 3A. Bibtex (or most styles) automatically removes
| capitalization in titles ("Generalizations of dyck words").
| Why? Why??? Yes, you can fix it by putting the {C}apital
| letters in braces. But why should you?
|
| 3B. You cannot use the packages or macros from your tex file
| in your bib file, as it's a separate file. Of course... but
| that makes you wonder why it should be a separate file to
| begin with.
|
| 3C. Yes, you heard it right: no package, in particular no
| unicode support.
|
| 3D. Basically every bibtex tutorial tells you to not trust
| bibitem-generating services, even the most official ones
| (IEEE, ACM). But no one has the time to do this on their own,
| and it stands to reason that there should be a common source
| at least for everything that is published and indexed. We got
| ORCID and DOI; is this that much harder?
| bee_rider wrote:
| If they make it into the wild, who cares if they are fully
| correct? The rules for a "fully correct" bibliography are
| too strict anyway. DOI or URL? Who cares? The reader is
| just going to search for the title anyway. As long as it
| doesn't bounce off the publisher it is fine (which, it must
| not be bouncing off the publishers if it makes it into the
| wild).
| generationP wrote:
| Googling the title works for reasonably new papers. Not
| so good for textbooks, old papers (titles used to be a
| lot less expressive 50 years ago), conference proceedings
| (often not indexed by article anywhere, and the name of
| the volume can be ambiguous), grey literature like
| lecture notes (a URL would allow you to use the Wayback
| Machine).
|
| Also, don't count on authors to get the title right.
| mattkrause wrote:
| By these standards, are any citation managers adapted to
| modern use?
|
| I'm definitely open to the idea that we should change how
| we refer to other findings, but EndNote, Zotero, and the
| like also can't save you from new editions, overly-strict
| rules about reference formatting, and bad publisher-
| provided information.
|
| If you _can_ deviate slightly from a particular reference
| format, it's fairly easy to emit either a DOI or a URL (but
| not both):
| https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/154864/biblatex-
| use-... One of the linked answers even suppresses DOI-like
| URLs.
| BrandonS113 wrote:
| I agree with much of what you say. I certainly find bibtex
| frustrating. On your specific points
|
| 1. I might be the only one, but I do sometimes, for the
| reasons you say. To debug it. But yes, debugging bibtex
| files is a a real pain.
|
| 2. yes, but that is hardly bibtex's fault, would be the
| same with any system.
|
| 2A. (same response as 2)
|
| 2B Yes, and so have both fields in the bibtex files. Its
| the publisher who decided what they want, DOI, ULR or both
| or neither. Not bibtex's fault
|
| 2C dont know what "gray literature" is, sorry.
|
| 3. YES!
|
| 3A, Think you always will need something like that
| regardless of bibliography system. The publisher dictates
| only first word in title is capitalised, how then do you
| tell it to capitalize USA or Mary? {} is as good as any
| alternative.
|
| 3B. yes. I never had any need for that. do you mean
| \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
|
| 3C. yes, to be safe, one needs these weird latex formatting
| for foreign characters.
|
| 3D. Yes. Well I have the time. When I get a bibtex entry
| from some external source, It usually needs tweaking. And
| usually fastest is just to write it manually. But its a a
| trivial amount of effort
| vcxy wrote:
| For 1, I just use latexmk. I honestly assumed that was
| standard but I guess not? It comes with TeXLive anyway. For
| the rest, I use Zotero with betterbibtex and with both that
| and LaTeX in general I use the more recent biblatex instead
| of bibtex.
|
| This won't fix everything you've mentioned, but I feel like
| I generally have a lot fewer issues than what your comment
| would suggest.
| ilayn wrote:
| Use `DeclarePairedDelimiter` from `mathtools`.
|
| The rule of TeX is that anything that is written in TeX is
| instantly old. Because people don't read what Knuth had in
| mind. TeX was the prototype not the production grade product.
| Still people refuse to get the message.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Well, Knuth still writes all his stuff using "plain" TeX. For
| example, the source of the TeXbook and the METAFONTbook are
| both TeX, not LaTeX or whatnot. Granted, he did _create_ TeX,
| so he 's probably more comfortable with it.
| asymmetric wrote:
| Does anyone know of similar lists of best practices, but for
| humanities? E.g. for writing papers, study notes, presentation
| slides, etc.
|
| I use org-mode to produce Latex, and find myself always needing
| to remove the TOC, for example. The borders are always too wide,
| etc.
|
| This is one that has some nice tips, wondering if there are
| others: https://www.colinmclear.net/posts/teaching-notes/
| garrison wrote:
| The final point, involving labels and references, could be
| improved by mentioning cleveref:
| https://ctan.org/pkg/cleveref?lang=en
| quijoteuniv wrote:
| I understand that some people do not want to use Latex, but i do
| not get the hate. Not for you? Move on, do you own thing
| yodsanklai wrote:
| One thing I don't miss about my research years is latex. It does
| produce beautiful documents and kudos to Knuth/Lamport for
| producing a system that stood the test of time. But what a pain
| to use.
| ipunchghosts wrote:
| It only lives on through cut and paste previous latex files and
| stack overflow lol
| Tainnor wrote:
| Some of the images don't appear to render for me.
|
| Also, the author includes an example of _\int xyzdx_ and makes a
| note of using appropriate spacing. It is my impression that
| commonly the differential operator is typeset differently, that
| is: _\mathrm{d}x_.
|
| Otherwise, great tips.
| ogogmad wrote:
| In physics, it's \mathrm dx. In mathematics, it's dx.
| Tainnor wrote:
| It would appear that it is even more complicated than that
| and so depends on nationality, the field in question etc.:
| https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/88961/31889
|
| TIL
| thanatropism wrote:
| ?
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| Historically, by which I mean professional typeset documents
| in early 20th century, it was upright d in both. It's often
| italic dx in maths now probably just because doing it right
| is tricky (at least non-zero effort) in LaTeX.
|
| In many articles, there isn't even spacing around
| differentials. That doesn't mean that is correct too. It just
| means that, like upright d, the author has more pressing
| issues than small details of typesetting.
|
| It similar to how vectors (in physics / applied maths) are
| represented by upright bold letter. Historically, these were
| bold-italic - the same as how most variables are italic. But
| early versions of TeX only supported fonts in regular, italic
| and bold - no bold italic variants existed (even now, bold
| italics are not universally available for Greek characters).
| So people used upright bold for vectors, and now it's assumed
| that it was deliberate.
| zeur0aoV wrote:
| Not really. It has nothing to do with LaTeX. Most of them
| are italic in mathematics . For example, in Hermite's
| textbook (1882) (https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k979
| 81084/f31.item.tex...), page 13, the do is italic. In
| Klein's Lectures on Mathematics (1894) (https://www.mathuni
| on.org/fileadmin/ICM/Proceedings/ICM1893....) page 20, the
| dx is italic. In Goursat's textbook (1933)
| (https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k9454797/f107.item),
| the dx is also italic.
| mgubi wrote:
| In my mathematics is \d x .
| soegaard wrote:
| FWIW there is an ISO Standard:
|
| > ISO 80000-2:2009 > Quantities and units -- Part 2:
| Mathematical signs and symbols to be used in the natural
| sciences and technology
|
| https://nhigham.com/2016/01/28/typesetting-mathematics-accor...
| fanpu wrote:
| Thanks for flagging the image issue, I think there's an issue
| with the responsive image serving code that doesn't work
| consistently across browser. Temporarily disabling that for now
| & pushing a new update.
|
| Also, you are right about using \mathrm{d}x. Another friend
| also just flagged it to me as well, I will update the post
| regarding this!
| [deleted]
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| It also doesn't mention the spacing after the dx. You need
| spacing afterwards, but also not unconditionally if the thing
| afterwards also has a space before (that sounds obvious but I
| can imagine a macro that has \,\mathrm{d}#1\,).
|
| There is a better way to do this, which is to use LaTeX's built
| in spacing adjustment, which is different around different
| types of object (e.g. notice how ab+cd already looks right). To
| do that, use: \mathop{\mathrm{d}#1}
|
| Even if you carefully do the "right thing", the spacing in
| LaTeX is by no means perfect. E.g. just look at
| f(x)g\left(\frac{x}{y}\right) - it looks like g is more
| associated with f's arguments than its own.
| litographic wrote:
| Slightly off-topic question: any suggestions for modern
| presentation LaTeX themes (besides Metropolis,
| https://github.com/matze/mtheme)?
| sampo wrote:
| > Macros can also take arguments to be substituted within the
| definition.
|
| Some journals ask you to submit your manuscript in plain LaTeX,
| without defining your own macros.
| gdprrrr wrote:
| Usw autoref instead of ref and it will add the "Figure ", "
| Chapter " etc automatically. And for Differentials, dwfine a
| semantic macro like \dd from the physics package. I find quotes
| are besr left to csquotes, which lets you define the type of
| quotes and show they nest in the preamble.
| fanpu wrote:
| Wish I knew about autoref earlier, it also increases the area
| spanned by the hyperlink generated to the entirety of "Figure
| 1" instead of just "1" in the case of ref.
| John23832 wrote:
| I really wish there was a way to have shared editing on a doc,
| similar to google docs, that used LaTex.
|
| I often have to share docs for work (in google docs) and the lack
| of a clear way to format as eloquently as LaTex makes me not even
| try.
| everydayentropy wrote:
| Have you tried overleaf?
| fanpu wrote:
| Overleaf (https://overleaf.com/) is pretty popular for this,
| and also tracks things like edit history
| orthonormel wrote:
| Something like overleaf.com ?
| amichail wrote:
| TeXmacs allows you to typeset beautiful proofs via a WYSIWYG
| editor without the pain of TeX/LaTeX.
|
| Note that its name is doubly misleading since it is not based on
| TeX nor Emacs. It is however inspired by both.
|
| TeXmacs produces documents of similar quality to TeX/LaTeX.
| fanpu wrote:
| I was initially dreading that it would be something inefficient
| like the equation symbol selector in Word, but after viewing
| the video demo on their website and seeing the speed of typing
| aided by heavy use of shortcuts, I'm intrigued. I'll try it out
| someday!
| zzless wrote:
| TeXmacs is a great project, no doubt, but you have mentioned
| WYSIWYG as one of the advantages. This is the main reason I do
| not use TeXmacs to create documents (I do use it to create
| online lectures). You may like or dislike LaTeX/TeX (and the
| discussion is usually too emotionally charged for my taste) but
| the fact that it is a text format (not as verbose as, say, XML,
| at that) which is more or less standard is a deciding factor
| for many people, including myself. On a personal level, while I
| slightly dislike LaTeX style macros, I absolutely adore TeX's
| design (yes, including syntax). It is a matter of taste, of
| course. I am aware that TeXmacs can export LaTeX, it is not
| quite the same. LyX is another (better in my view) WYSIWYG
| option, if one is desired.
| ogogmad wrote:
| A TexMacs file can be opened up in any text editor. It's
| readable -- XML-like without quite being XML. Presumably,
| this can be used to work around some limitations of the
| WYSIWYG editor.
|
| I think LyX's file format is not as well-designed.
| ogogmad wrote:
| Is there an equivalent of \NewCommand in TexMacs? I can't find
| anything by Googling.
| zeur0aoV wrote:
| There is a good introduction in Chapter 12 of The Jolly
| Writer: https://www.scypress.com/book_info.html
| mgubi wrote:
| TeXmacs has its own macro language. The equivalent of
| \newcommand is \assign together with \macro (yes, TeXmacs has
| proper first class macros, like any respectable language,
| e.g. Lisp). And macros arguments can be edited visually,
| here's an example:
| https://twitter.com/gnu_texmacs/status/1251554336842407938
| mgubi wrote:
| you can check also the manual which comes with the program,
| in the menu Help->Manuals.
| hello2023 wrote:
| In the spacing section, the author's suggestion to use absolute
| spacing operator (e.g \;) is actually not recommended. a better
| way is to make `dx` a math operator (`d` is an operator isn't
| it?).
|
| Some other suggestion is not actually recommended in the official
| documentation of amsmath as I recall.
|
| Hope this helps.
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