[HN Gopher] Modern LaTeX
___________________________________________________________________
Modern LaTeX
Author : signa11
Score : 202 points
Date : 2025-05-05 05:18 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| Trivia: the correct capitalization is LaTeX and it's pronounced
| "lay-tek".
|
| Knuth & friends were on a roll naming things - the 80s must've
| been quite a time.
|
| As always wiki knows all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX
| seanhunter wrote:
| Another fun trivia:
|
| The "La" in latex is Leslie Lamport.
| https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| The special naming convention is mostly used as a form of
| elitist gatekeeping; it's a tribal shibboleth. You should be
| able to figure out whether someone is talking about latex
| (polymer) or latex (markup) from context, so having a special
| naming convention is rather pretentious and superfluous. If
| calling it lay-tek was important, they should've called it
| laytek. Historically, as I understand it, distinctions between
| the written and spoken forms of words were used as a form of
| gatekeeping between elites and commoners. Same goes for arXiv.
|
| The great thing about language is that you can just change
| things if enough people play along. Call it gif or jif, arxiv
| or archive, latex or laytek.
| josephg wrote:
| Eh - the name is a bit of fun. Its fun to form communities
| with in-jokes and tribal knowledge and silly names. It
| doesn't hurt anyone. Lets not sacrifice everything joyous at
| the altar of being friendly to noobs.
| mariusor wrote:
| They did call it Latek, the X in the name is the Greek letter
| kh (Chi) and in my opinion, it's not an elitist shibboleth
| but a way to showcase the advantages of their typesetting
| system over existing, at the time, methods that didn't invest
| a lot in rendering non ASCII character sets.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| So it's not actually LaTaX, it's LaTekh. Make sure you type
| it properly i guess.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Is arXiv not pronounced the same as "archive"? I agree with
| you about LaTeX but arXiv seems like an obvious allusion to
| "archive"?
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| Well it does lack that final -e of archive, and--fun fact!
| --like LaTeX which I know as ['la:tec], arXiv could
| plausibly be pronounced [ar'ci:f] in German although I've
| never heard anyone pronounce that name. So why is it arXiv
| not at least arXive with an -e?
| IshKebab wrote:
| Because they're trying to be quirky I guess, but it is
| still unmistakably a weird spelling of "archive"
| (especially given the context).
| n2h4 wrote:
| in both arXiv and LaTeX, X is greek(chi).
| kashunstva wrote:
| > it's pronounced "lay-tek"
|
| Or "lah-tek", the Wikipedia article doesn't seem to address
| which, if either is preferred. And I think Leslie Lamport said
| that he didn't want to impose any particular pronunciation.
| mcv wrote:
| I've always pronounced it lah-tech, with the guttural ch from
| the Greek chi, which is what the X represents.
| mturmon wrote:
| This is accurate.
| mturmon wrote:
| This is incorrect. In his book on LaTeX, Leslie Lamport
| specifically says that he does not care how you pronounce it.
| (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX#Pronouncing_and_
| writing_...)
|
| Knuth, on the other hand, has a whole rationale on why it's
| pronounced "tech". ("Your keyboard should become slightly
| moist", iirc).
| kaoD wrote:
| Voiceless velar fricative X or you're doing it wrong.
| foldr wrote:
| From a linguist's point of view this is a perfect example of
| the chaos that ensues when people try to say how things are
| pronounced without describing the speech sounds using standard
| vocabulary.
|
| Here are the inept pronunciation instructions on the LaTeX
| project website:
|
| > <<Lah-tech>> or <<Lay-tech>> (to rhyme with <<blech>> or
| <<Bertolt Brecht>>)
|
| The pronunciation of the 'ch' in 'blech' isn't really
| standardized, so that's not much help. If we go by the German
| pronunciation of Brecht then the sound should be [c], i.e. a
| voiceless palatal fricative. But this seems to be a mistake, as
| Knuth intended the X in TeX to be [x], i.e. a voiceless velar
| fricative. In German, [c] is an allophone of /x/ (conditioned
| by the preceding vowel), but they are distinct sounds, and
| Knuth's directions for the pronunciation of TeX unambiguously
| specify [x]. It seems unlikely that this difference between the
| X in LaTeX and the X in TeX is intentional, so maybe this was a
| confused attempt to identify the [x] sound.
|
| Really then, it's anyone's guess how LaTeX is supposed to be
| pronounced, since no-one with authority to specify has bothered
| to look up the IPA symbols for the relevant speech sounds. But
| IMO while [leItek] is a perfectly common and acceptable
| pronunciation, it can only really be understood as an
| anglicization of [leItex] rather than the canonical
| pronunciation.
| dochtman wrote:
| Typst is the modern LaTeX.
|
| https://typst.app/
| fsiefken wrote:
| Typst is more minimal and faster in compiling documents, I
| prefer using it. But it's not in all cases a LaTex replacement.
| The ecosystem is also larger. I have LaTex documents I struggle
| to convert.
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| Typst sure has a lot of good marketeers. LaTeX never needed
| that.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| I remember tons of latex zealots 20 years ago. The internet
| must be full of latex vs word flamewars.
|
| Also, typst is just really good.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| I do remember that too. In fact it was one of my physics
| teacher who got me into LaTeX - he used to complain about
| Word while praising LaTeX and its WYSIWYM.
|
| Though I ended being a graphic designer so LaTeX felt
| rather limiting very quickly, but fortunately found
| ConTeXt.
|
| Hoped Typst was going to be great for my use case but alas
| it's got the same "problem" as LaTeX - modularity. Still it
| seems to be a great alternative for people doing standard
| documents.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Twenty years ago you say. So that's when it had already
| been in existence for 20+ years and had been ubiquitous in
| academia (at least in the sciences) for 10 or more.
|
| I'm sure you remember that quite clearly.
| josephg wrote:
| > Also, typst is just really good.
|
| Yeah - typst has a bunch of features that I really want for
| blog posts and rich documentation, where markdown isn't a
| powerful enough tool. For example:
|
| - Boxes & named figures
|
| - Footnotes
|
| - Variables, functions (incl populated from nearby files)
|
| - Comments
|
| - Chapter / Section headings (& auto generated table of
| contents)
|
| - Custom formatting rules (For example, typst lets you
| define your own "warning box". Stuff like that.)
|
| I don't know of a better tool to write my blog posts today.
| Markdown doesn't have enough features. And I'm obviously
| not writing blog posts in latex or a rich text editor. I
| could use actual javascript / JSX or something - but those
| tools aren't designed well for long form text content. (I
| don't want to manually add <p> tags around my paragraphs
| like a savage.)
|
| Pity the html output is still a work in progress. I'm
| eagerly awaiting it being ready for use!
| mzl wrote:
| MDX as a middle ground with most of the text standard
| markdown and the escape hatch of custom React JSX when
| needed has worked well for me.
| josephg wrote:
| MDX advertises itself as "markdown + components", but its
| not commonmark compatible. I tried using it a few years
| ago. In the process, I migrated over some regular
| markdown documents and they render incorrectly using MDX.
|
| I filed a bug (this was a few years ago) and I was told
| commonmark compatibility was an explicit non goal for the
| project. Meh.
| godelski wrote:
| You can do footnotes in markdown [^0]
|
| [^0]: it doesn't matter where this is placed, just that
| this one has a colon.
|
| The table of contents thing is annoying but it's not hard
| to write a little bash script. Sed and regex are all you
| need. > Markdown doesn't have enough
| features
|
| Markdown has _too many_ features
|
| The issue is you're using the wrong tool. Markdown is not
| intended for making fancy documents or blogs, it's meant
| to be a deadass simple format that can be read in
| anything. Hell, its goal is to be readable in a text
| editor so its more about styling. If you really want to
| use it and have occasional fanciness, you can use html.
|
| But don't turn a tool that is explicitly meant to be
| simple into something complicated just because it doesn't
| have enough features. The lack of features is the point.
| josephg wrote:
| > The issue is you're using the wrong tool.
|
| Yes, I think we're in violent agreement that markdown is
| the wrong tool for the job. That's why I find it baffling
| how so many blogging & documentation tools lock you in to
| using markdown, with its anaemic feature set (eg mdbook).
|
| Even markdown + inline HTML is wildly inadequate. For
| example, you can't make automatically numbered sections.
| Or figures with links in the text. Or a ToC. And so on.
| Try and attach a caption to an image and you're basically
| hand authoring your document in crappy HTML.
|
| So I agree with you. I don't think the answer is
| "markdown++" with comments, templating and scripting
| support. I think the answer is something else. Something
| which has considered the needs of authoring documents
| from the start. Something like typst.
| godelski wrote:
| > That's why I find it baffling how so many blogging &
| documentation tools lock you in to using
|
| I feel this about so many things and it boggles my mind
| why people often choose to do things the hardest way
| possible.
|
| Honestly, I think a good portion of it of the
| unwillingness to toss something aside and write something
| new. If it's just a hack on a hack on a hack on a hack
| then no wonder it's shit. It's funny that often it's
| quicker to rewrite than force your way through.
|
| I'm worried that with LLMs and vibe coding on the rise
| we're just going to get more. Because people will be
| asking "how do I make X do Y" when in reality you
| shouldn't ever make X do Y, you need to find a different
| tool.
| josephg wrote:
| > I'm worried that with LLMs and vibe coding on the rise
| we're just going to get more.
|
| I'm hoping the opposite, at least eventually. I think
| before long it'll be easy to get chatgpt to build your
| own version of whatever you want, from scratch.
|
| Eg, "Hey, I want something kinda like markdown but with
| these other features. Write me the spec. Implement a
| renderer for documents in Go - and write a vs code
| extension + language server for it."
|
| But if that happens, we'll get way more fragmentation of
| the computing ecosystem. Maybe to the point that you
| really need the memory of a LLM to even know what's out
| there - let alone understand how to glue everything
| together.
| godelski wrote:
| You missed my concern. Even if LLMs get much but it
| doesn't mean the users will ask the right questions. Even
| now many don't ask the right questions, why would it be
| any better when we just scale the issue?
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Word 20 years ago was a very different beast compared to
| word today. For starters, it still had a closed, binary
| (read: not friendly to source control) format. It also had
| more bugs than Klendathu.
|
| When you are losing your semester's 25-page seminal work an
| hour before deadline because Word had that weird little bug
| about long documents and random CJK characters (and whether
| or not the moon was currently in the House of Aquarius
| supposedly), you develop a ... healthy dislike for it.
|
| LaTeX back in the day didn't need zealots - Word did all
| the heavy lifting in demolishing itself for anything more
| involved than 'Secretary writes a letter', 'grandma Jones
| writes down her secret butterball recipe' or 'suits need a
| text, and only text, on paper, quickly".
|
| (Yes, that was snarky. I am still bitter about that
| document being eaten.)
| einpoklum wrote:
| > For starters, it still had a closed, binary (read: not
| friendly to source control) format
|
| Word still has a closed format. It supposedly
| standardized OOXML, but - it doesn't follow that
| standard; Microsoft apparently managed to warp the XML
| standard to accommodate its weirdness; and all sorts of
| details encoded by MSO in that format are not actually
| documented.
|
| There also used to be the problem of different renderings
| on different machines (even if you had all the relevant
| fonts installed): You opened a document on another
| person's computer and things were out-of-place, styling
| and spacing a bit different, page transitions not at same
| point etc. I don't know if that's the case today.
|
| Granted, though, hangs and crashes and weird gibberish on
| opening a document are rare today.
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| > You opened a document on another person's computer and
| things were out-of-place, styling and spacing a bit
| different, page transitions not at same point etc.
|
| When this happened to me on my job in the late 90s we
| were able to locate that problem in the printer driver
| that was visible in the Word print dialog. I don't
| remember the details but it looked like Word was
| adjusting font metrics to the metrics of the specific
| printer, and all the shifted pixels quickly added up to
| destroy the finely balanced lines of our print
| publication (yes, an official public health periodical by
| a European government was typeset with MS Word, and there
| was a lot of manual typographical work in each print).
| Given the technology at the time, it's not clear to me
| whether Word's behavior was a feature (in the sense of:
| automatically adjusts to your output device for best
| results) or a bug (automatically destroys your work
| without asking or telling you when not in its accustomed
| environment).
| pjmlp wrote:
| Case in point, by the time I got at CERN in 2003, most
| researchers were writing their papers in Word or
| FrameMaker, with LaTeX lookalike templates.
|
| In two years I hardly met anyone still doing pure LaTeX
| publications, unless the publishing body only accepted
| LaTeX as submission format.
| elashri wrote:
| Currently you will find that LaTeX is the de facto
| standard at CERN. Maybe only management would not use it.
| But CERN gives overleaf professional licence to each
| member. And all templates I have seen for everything I
| interacted with that is going into publications are
| LaTeX.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Well, naturally 20 something years make a difference,
| although for some others, it looks pretty much the same,
| as I have visited a few times since then as Alumni.
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| Latex is not a company's product. That's a substantial
| difference.
| goku12 wrote:
| How so? Only their web app seems to be closed source. And
| the company was created by the two project founders. They
| also don't seem to be doing a lot more than a community
| project.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Obviously there are differences, but that wasn't the
| point of my comment. I replied to the claim that latex
| never needed "marketers". Or did you mean to reply to a
| different comment?
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| I meant if there is no company financially benefiting
| from that activity it is hard to call that marketing. But
| if there is a company especially if it is backed by VC
| that is a completely different story.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| There is no VC with typst, they're bootstrapped. And I
| think by "marketeers" the original commenter did not mean
| actual marketing people, but enthusiastic fans. Unless it
| was a hidden accusation of astroturfing that I didn't
| get.
| js8 wrote:
| IMHO, good marketeers for LaTeX were people who wanted to
| typeset (write nicely) math but were scared of TeX.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| When you are the only option marketing doesn't matter.
|
| I would suspect (based on my own experience) is that the
| reason folks shout "typst!" anytime they hear latex is that
| the user experience is 1000x better than latex.
| croemer wrote:
| Typst doesn't (yet) have one of the features that make LaTex
| stand out: microtypography. See
| https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/4693
| IshKebab wrote:
| That's not why people use LaTeX. I doubt most users even know
| about it. The standout feature is fantastic support for
| equations and figures.
|
| That and Computer Modern. I bet a significant number of users
| use it because of that!
|
| Personally I would just use LyX. Its equation editor is
| actually fantastic.
| croemer wrote:
| TFA dedicated one of the book's 11 chapters to it. Doesn't
| matter whether most users know about it or not.
| IshKebab wrote:
| A feature can only make LaTeX stand out if people
| actually know it exists.
| croemer wrote:
| Nope, people don't need to know that something is done to
| appreciate the outcome. You might not know that modern
| MacBooks use ARM processors, but you might still
| appreciate that they have a long battery life.
| billfruit wrote:
| But latex support for tables are very unergonomic.
| creata wrote:
| > That's not why people use LaTeX.
|
| Many people say that they use LaTeX because it produces
| more beautiful output. Microtypography is one of the
| reasons for that. It's especially noticeable when microtype
| pushes hyphens or quotes at the end of a line slightly into
| the margin. (A nearby comment mentions that Typst has this
| feature, too.)
| naikrovek wrote:
| Computer Modern is the very last thing I will ever want in
| a document and is the first thing I change in every LaTeX
| document I create. It is easily one of the ugliest fonts
| ever created.
|
| It has a lot of good things going for it, but it is the
| least attractive font that I think I have ever seen.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I think it's quite attractive, but its attractiveness
| isn't really why it's desirable; it's because people know
| it is the font used by proper fancy scientific papers.
| It's like the opposite of Comic Sans.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Typst has some of the microtypography features already built-
| in and enabled by default, like overhang (character
| protrusion).
|
| And there's another microtype PR open, by the reporter of the
| linked issue (nice!)
| croemer wrote:
| This might be one of the areas where it takes a lot of
| effort to catch up with LaTex.
|
| The microtype user manual shows how much thought has gone
| into it: https://mirror.foobar.to/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib
| /microtype...
| phanimahesh wrote:
| How is that pdf made interactive? It has options to
| toggle the behaviour, which work even in an in browser
| pdf viewer. I did not think PDFs could do that.
| naikrovek wrote:
| PDFs can do a lot more than show static content. There
| was one time where Adobe strongly advocated for PDF to be
| the page format of what would come to be called "The
| World Wide Web". Where we have HTML now, Adobe wanted
| PDF. Thankfully that did not happen. But I suspect it
| would have made more sense technically than [whatever
| this mess is that we have now.]
|
| A lot of things are possible in PDF.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Good question. The github url is printed on the first
| page.
|
| I find some stuff like this.. is it raw pdf directives?
| Literally an example of something typst can't do right
| now. I also can't read this.
|
| ``` \def\mt@toggle@sample#1{% \pdfstartlink
| user{/Subtype/Link /BS << /Type/Border/W 1 /S/D /D[4 1]
| >> /H/O /C[0.65 0.04 0.07] /Contents(Click to Toggle #1!)
| %/OC << /Type/OCMD /VE[/Not \csname
| mt@_compatibility@\endcsname] >> % not honoured by older
| viewers anyway /A << /S/SetOCGState /State[/Toggle
| \csname mt@#1@true\endcsname \csname
| mt@#1@false\endcsname] >>} #1 \hfill\pdfendlink &
| \mt@layer{#1true}{\rlap{on}}\mt@layer{#1false}{off}} ```
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Didn't work with Unicode the last time I checked... Would
| much rather have Unicode support than microtype.
| maxnoe wrote:
| I've been using microtype with lualatex, fontspec and
| Opentype fonts for years.
|
| What doesn't work?
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Had to use xelatex (don't remember why currently).
| misnome wrote:
| "Pricing", "Sign Up"
|
| Ah yes, this definitely is the "Modern" approach.
|
| There does seem to be an open source, non-SAAS part, but
| information about it looks pretty deliberately buried.
| oytis wrote:
| To be fair - there is a big "View on Github" button on the
| very first page
| kzrdude wrote:
| They are a very small team and this is a known issue - there
| is a website refresh coming up that will fix it
|
| They developed the main face of the product first - the
| online webapp which has live collaboration - which sounds
| like a sane choice for a new company.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| > sounds like a sane choice for a new company.
|
| It does, but this is actually part of the critique. Typst
| is developed by a company, while LaTeX is not.
| oytis wrote:
| Yeah, today's open source combines the worst from
| corporate jobs and social media. Typst looks nice though,
| but is indeed developed in a logic of a business
| kaoD wrote:
| Well everyone likes free software (as in freedom and beer)
| but 0 of you pay, while on a 6 figure salary. Meanwhile no
| hesitation to pay AWS, Netflix, Amazon, etc. all of them net
| negative contributors to free software.
|
| So... yeah.
| pietro72ohboy wrote:
| Absolutely agree! Money only becomes an issue when someone
| asks for it politely. And then people ask why such efforts
| and projects die in the shadows.
| pbasista wrote:
| > 0 of you pay
|
| That is an overly broad generalization.
|
| > no hesitation to pay AWS, Netflix, Amazon, etc.
|
| Again, an overly broad generalization.
|
| I am unsure what kind of conclusion you can objectively
| make out of such generic statements.
| goku12 wrote:
| Almost all of typst, except their web app, is available on
| crates.io and from many Linux distribution repositories. And
| you can skip the web app if you don't prefer it. There's no
| loss of functionality.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| I find today much easier to contribute to (in the open source
| sense) than latex. Go to the GitHub and interact with the
| developers. Who happen to be very responsive.
|
| I used latex for 20+ years and don't know how to file a bug
| for latex. Do I do it for xelatex, latex? Where? How do I
| update things? Download 4 gigs? Where's to documentation?
| Where's a book that explains how to contribute to latex?
| These are some of the issues I've dealt with and am happy to
| never have to again.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| For all the well-deserved complaints about TeX's and LaTeX's
| syntax, Typst only makes this _worse_ , by repurposing even
| _more_ characters as markup.
| blueflow wrote:
| I'll put my finger on the perceived weak point: _Which
| characters_? Are they listed somewhere?
| cjs_ac wrote:
| Sure: the Typst syntax is detailed here:
| https://typst.app/docs/reference/syntax/
|
| The non-control characters of ASCII are largely characters
| you might actually want to put in a document. TeX uses some
| of these as markup, e.g., the dollar sign to bracket maths
| mode and the ampersand as a column separator in tables.
| Typst takes this much further, using plus and minus signs
| to introduce list items, at signs for references, and so
| on.
|
| Ideally, all visible characters should produce themselves
| in the printed output, except for the backslash introducing
| control sequences that represent all of the markup and
| braces for delimiting the extent of parameters to those
| control sequences. This would produce a very predictable
| and easily-parsed syntax.
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| I don't think this was ever my issue with Latex, which
| instead are mostly:
|
| - the cryptic error messages and infinite logs
|
| - the unintuitive ways to do stuff like store a value for
| later use or sum two lengths
|
| - the very long compile times
|
| - the amount of reliance on global state from various
| packages, which contributes to even more cryptic errors or
| weird behavior when something goes wrong
|
| - various other quirks, e.g. the fact you often need to end a
| line with a comment or the newline will skrew up your
| content.
| creata wrote:
| I could deal with all of the other issues if it weren't for
| the absurdly long compile times. I wonder where most of
| that time is spent.
| leephillips wrote:
| Some is spent on optimizing the results on the paragraph,
| page, and multi-page level: river elimination, color
| balance, widow and orphan elimination, etc. I don't know
| how much of this Typst does; certainly HTML + CSS does
| none of it.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| You forgot the of syntax that is latex. Very hard to read.
| (Worked with it for 20 years)
|
| Typst on the other hand is inherently readable.
| billfruit wrote:
| Asciidoc is also a good alternative.
|
| Are people looking seriously at shortcomings of latex and moved
| towards modern replacements?
|
| Major problems include:
|
| - Tables are a huge pain.
|
| - Customized formatting like chapter headings, footers, etc is
| painful.
|
| - Latex as a language somehow felt like it was having issues
| with composability of functions, the details of the problem
| eludes me now, but it was something like if you have a function
| to make text bold, and if you have another function to make it
| italic, then if apply one to the output of another, it should
| give you bold and italic, but such composability was not
| happening for a some functions.
|
| -Mixing of physical and logical formatting.
|
| -Lot of fine tuning require to get passable final output.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Asciidoc is decent for things like technical specifications,
| but there's no way I'd use it for scientific or mathematical
| papers.
| wewxjfq wrote:
| It seems to have a bus factor of 1.
| billfruit wrote:
| Does it have better/easier tables. Does it support complex
| tables like with images in it, with alternating horizontal or
| vertical text in cells, tables inside tables, tables with
| alternative row/column shading, etc while still supporting
| automatic wrapping to contents, etc?
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Yes
|
| https://typst.app/docs/reference/model/table/
|
| https://typst.app/docs/guides/table-guide/
| Arrowmaster wrote:
| I recall a recent criticism of Typst being that it doesn't
| strip unused glyphs from fonts when making PDFs so they end up
| excessively large compared to other solutions. Has there been
| any change to that?
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| I live in fear that one of the major typesetting services like
| Overleaf will convince people to move away from a very durable
| standard and adopt something that's much more change-oriented.
| Then we'll all have to learn not one, but _two_ standards.
| Rinse repeat.
| iNic wrote:
| I recommend people check out typst: https://typst.app/
| qiu3344 wrote:
| LaTeX is quite underrated these days. Even though alternatives
| like Typst are popping up, LaTeX is also pretty convenient and
| powerful if you get past the crude syntax and obscure compilation
| errors. I sill remember my disbelieve when I found out that I can
| change my article into a presentation just by changing the
| document class to "beamer".
|
| These days I usually default to pandoc's markdown, mostly because
| the raw text is very readable.
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| I wouldn't say underrated. Literally every single research
| article in maths and cs, every PhD dissertation and master
| thesis in these fields too, are written in LaTeX.
|
| Most students, and many researchers use Overleaf nowadays,
| though.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| > I wouldn't say underrated. Literally every single research
| article in maths and cs, every PhD dissertation and master
| thesis in these fields too, are written in LaTeX.
|
| Usage level is not correlated to "rate". Sometimes people use
| stuff because they have to, not only because they like it.
| See the Microsoft Word case.
|
| I'd agree that LaTeX has fell a bit in popularity this days
| against Typst - but not much in its usage. It is still the
| _de facto_ standard of scientific and technical document
| typesetting.
| JohnKemeny wrote:
| I've never met anyone who's used Typst, I've only ever
| heard it on HN. And I meet a lot of researchers, teachers,
| and students.
|
| Perhaps it's a programmer thing.
| goku12 wrote:
| One reason is that many journals supply LaTeX templates.
| And I find them easier to apply compared to their Word
| templates. I wonder how much support Typst has from these
| publishers, considering its relatively young age.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| > I can change my article into a presentation just by changing
| the document class to "beamer".
|
| Don't you need to insert tons of `frame` environments to get
| anything worth looking at?
| fsh wrote:
| Please nobody actually do this. Good presentation slides have
| almost zero overlap with the corresponding article since they
| serve completely different purposes. In my field, seeing beamer
| slides is a huge red flag for an imminent terrible
| presentation. Slides are an extremely visual medium, and
| WYSIWYM is a huge hindrance for designing appealing slides.
| jraph wrote:
| > WYSIWYM is a huge hindrance for designing appealing slides.
|
| I don't know, if your slides are just a few keywords in a few
| bullet points and the occasional picture / diagram, WYSIWYM
| is great.
|
| I agree that you shouldn't turn an actual article into a
| presentation though.
| mgaunard wrote:
| Good slides is about good diagrams.
|
| LaTeX has all the tooling to write high-quality ones.
| fsh wrote:
| I disagree. LaTeX is very good at layouting test, and can
| also (reluctantly) put figures into the text. Anything else
| is a huge hack (like TikZ), and one constantly runs into
| crazy limitations such as the fixed-point math and the lack
| of a decent visual editor. Slides should never have
| paragraphs of text on them, so the layouting is not very
| useful, but the other limitations are very annoying.
| goku12 wrote:
| TikZ and Asymptote are more or less the only general-
| purpose modular illustration markup languages we have
| around. Anything better is welcome, but graphical editors
| are not an alternative in some cases.
| thangalin wrote:
| > LaTeX is also pretty convenient and powerful ... pandoc's
| markdown
|
| Have you considered writing pandoc-style Markdown that's
| converted to TeX for typesetting? If not, have a peek at my
| text editor:
|
| * https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-
| WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9... (see tutorials 4 and 9)
|
| KeenWrite basically transforms Markdown -> X(HT)ML -> TeX ->
| PDF, although it uses ConTeXt instead of LaTeX for typesetting
| because ConTeXt makes separating content from presentation a
| lot easier.
| aquafox wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, I love LaTeX, having written my PhD thesis in
| it. But with the current tools, I would use Quarto instead. It's
| much easier, you can still "inject" LaTeX and it's quicker for
| less technical collaborators to adapt.
| enriquto wrote:
| $ sudo apt install quarto E: Unable to locate package
| quarto
|
| yeah, hard pass
| goku12 wrote:
| I don't know anything about quarto, but you're missing a lot
| of useful software if you're limiting yourself to the distro
| repo - especially Debian stable.
| enriquto wrote:
| As a matter of principle, i prefer to use really stable
| software that does not change wantonly, and whose authors
| took the care to put it into debian.
|
| My 20 year-old .tex documents still compile today. Will the
| same happen with quarto? (or typst, for that matter?) The
| fact that they offer no packages in the debian standard
| distribution signals they have likely succumbed to the
| awful trend of version churning, where you _need_ to use
| the last version of the software or else. Thus, probably,
| in 20 years my documents will be un-compilable. For legacy
| things like typeset documents, it 's reasonable to prefer
| legacy solutions like latex.
|
| Once quarto and typst have stabilized enough to appear in
| debian stable, I'll consider them as viable alternatives.
| immibis wrote:
| FWIW software gets in Debian because of Debian, not
| because of the authors of the software.
| tecleandor wrote:
| They have a deb package (if you really wanted to install it)
|
| https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/releases/tag/v1.8.1
| BlackFly wrote:
| I always wonder why people compare Latex with word and not with
| the single most popular document markup (especially here): HTML +
| css + javascript.
|
| The problems are quite similar, "How do I center a div?" vs "How
| do I keep this float on this page?" Has latex really modernized?
| I don't hear a lot about new layouts or style mechanisms.
|
| Most people are probably reading articles online these days,
| although there is a lot to be said about printing an article to
| read. It seems to me that adding responsiveness to journal
| articles instead of using a fixed paper layout regardless of
| media might be a good improvement for many readers in many
| situations.
| JackeJR wrote:
| There are many reasons this comparison is not made. I will just
| touch on one. The target medium is different. For html, you
| have monitors of different sizes as well as windows that can be
| resized. For latex, you choose your target at the start: A4
| paper? Screen presentation? A0 poster?
|
| With a fixed medium in mind, you can be extremely particular on
| where on this canvas you want a piece of text/graphic or
| whatever.
|
| Without a fixed medium, you have to have logic to address the
| different mediums and compromises have to be made.
| karencarits wrote:
| > For latex, you choose your target at the start
|
| Yes, sometimes, but I would say that one of the benefits of
| latex is how easy you can switch to another layout. But I
| guess the point is that you typically render to a set of
| outputs with fixed dimensions (pdf)
| chabska wrote:
| HTML+CSS has facilities to target a page format (CSS @page
| rule, cm and in dimension units). Not to say that it's on the
| same level as LaTeX, but it's pretty impressive by its own
| right.
| maegul wrote:
| Are there good deep dives on how far you can practically
| this? Especially in combination with headless browser pdf
| generation?
|
| Last time I looked into it, a while ago, my impression was
| that it would get rickety too soon. It'd be a good place to
| be, I think, if web and "document" tech stacks could have
| nice and practical convergence.
| p4bl0 wrote:
| I'd say it's already there. See for example the
| https://pagedjs.org/ project which allows advanced
| typesetting (including for printing) using web
| technologies. It is already used in production by at
| least one book publisher (C&F editions)
| throwanem wrote:
| I've used it for my own such production, perfect binding
| with a hand guillotine and screw clamps in my attic -
| nothing remotely professional, but you still have to
| start by making a book block, and Paged.js is a solid
| call there. Unless beauty of typography (more than
| TTF/OTF hinting can handle) is of particular merit, it's
| usually my preferred first typesetting option.
|
| As an old hand with PDF-in-browser production, I expected
| _much_ worse of Paged.js than I found. It 's powerful and
| mostly enjoyable to use! Oh, you end up with a large set
| of CSS rules, and it is not without bugs and gotchas
| (failing to specify a bleed rule somewhere at least once
| in every @page context subtly breaks layout; footnote
| layout is functional but automatic call numbering isn't
| always perfect, etc.)
|
| You should definitely not expect to take Paged.js out of
| the box, slap a theme on it, and go; it comes as a box of
| parts with a _mostly_ complete machine inside, and if it
| breaks you get to keep all the pieces. I imagine the
| publisher who uses it must have some prior interest in
| web technologies, for example.
|
| Nor is Paged.js remotely as capable or flexible as
| InDesign or a comparable tool, especially for the deeply
| rudimentary condition of web typography overall -
| something even as elaborate a tool as this can't really
| approach fixing.
|
| But Paged.js is also unlike InDesign in having a _much_
| shallower (days vs months) learning curve for folks like
| us with prior web experience, and however equivocal a
| review I may now be giving of its technical merits, I do
| actually like working with Paged.js quite a lot.
| jsmith99 wrote:
| I've also used pagedjs for a relatively complex booklet
| with bidirectional text in different languages, images
| and long footnotes. The result was great but there were
| some annoying bugs, some of them seeming to be possible
| underlying bugs in chrome and Firefox. Still, latex would
| have been even more frustrating.
| throwanem wrote:
| Oh, I certainly don't doubt _that._ And as I said, I
| haven 't really found Paged.js all that frustrating! I
| have extensive though not recent Pagemaker experience; I
| expected InDesign to be _easier,_ and now I rue the day
| when that 's where I'm forced to resort.
|
| In my experience Paged.js is at its best when building to
| PDF, but then that's always my intermediate format when
| working to paper, because that's where PDF's
| inflexibility shines. The source of a book block,
| everything that builds to that PDF, partakes of all the
| infelicities of the JS ecosystem. But to remake the book
| itself again, all I need do to start is print the PDF.
| minifyre wrote:
| Coincidentally, I've also used pagedjs for a project
| recently (125K novel) and encountered some bugs/minor
| issues. Overall though, I would say I had an immensely
| positive experience (because even when stuff broke, it
| was still just HTML, CSS, and JS--so I, like any other
| web developer, could fix it).
|
| That said, it's a shame that the relevant W3C specs (see
| https://pagedjs.org/about/) still aren't fully supported
| by browsers (but perhaps such is the fate of niche
| features), but with that being the case, I'm infinitely
| thankful that pagedjs exists as a polyfill.
| Semaphor wrote:
| We use CSS paged media to create e-books and invoices
| (using weasyprint [0]). One of the most helpful resources
| for me was print-css.rocks [1], they cover a lot of
| what's possible and include which tools support which
| parts of it (tools targeting paged media, browser support
| is essentially non-existent and outside using JS to fake
| it with paged.js, not relevant). The expensive tools tend
| to support more features, but thanks to some
| donations/sponsorships, weasyprint has really caught up
| and now supports a very large part of the spec.
|
| > Especially in combination with headless browser pdf
| generation
|
| I have no idea why you'd want to do that. Browsers are
| bad at it, dedicated tools are great at it.
|
| [0]: https://weasyprint.org/
|
| [1]: https://print-css.rocks/
|
| [2]: https://pagedjs.org/
| maegul wrote:
| > I have no idea why you'd want to do that. Browsers are
| bad at it, dedicated tools are great at it.
|
| Fair! I was just aspiring to a place where web pages and
| documents converge more.
|
| Thanks for the recommendations!
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| Note that this won't prevent the page from being displayed
| in other sizes, where it will most likely have a broken
| layout instead.
| eru wrote:
| > For latex, you choose your target at the start: A4 paper?
| Screen presentation? A0 poster?
|
| You can change that as you go along.
| naikrovek wrote:
| > You can change that as you go along.
|
| that's not the point they were trying to make. you may need
| to change the display target _for every viewer_.
| SebastianKra wrote:
| That seems contradictory, when Latex is rather famously
| imprecise at placing figures and such. Weren't both languages
| (at least at some point) intended to take layouting control
| away from the writer?
|
| But regardless, I think that, in addition to moving away from
| Latex we should also reconsider the primary output format.
| Documents are rarely printed anymore, and inaccessible,
| fixed-size A4 pdfs are annoying to read on anything but an
| iPad Pro.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Because HTML is not an option. For academic papers you usually
| have to submit pdfs conforming to either a latex or word
| template.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| Academic publishing standards are about as much of a joke as
| academia itself.
| josephg wrote:
| Its the same reason that Markdown became popular. I want my
| document to primarily contain content. Not a sea of handwritten
| tags.
|
| I don't want to manually type (or read past) HTML tags littered
| around the place. I don't want to manually put <p> tags on my
| text, or worry about how indentation will affect my rendered
| output. (For example, <p>foo</p> and <p> foo </p> render
| differently).
|
| If I'm writing a blog post, I also don't want my post's text to
| get mixed up with site specific stuff, like meta tags and
| layout elements.
|
| Are there any good "literate HTML" type tools which first and
| foremost let me type text, but still let me break into HTML?
| That I could get behind.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| SGML (ISO 8879) has basically all these things: it infers
| tags (such as for opening paragraphs as in your example, but
| also infers missing html, head, and body tags, and also
| infers end-element tags for paragraphs, etc etc), has a
| built-in mechanism for recognizing custom tokens and turn
| those into tags to implement markdown and custom syntaxes,
| provides text macros, and many, many more things (including
| stylesheets, transformations for things such as table of
| content generation and search result views).
|
| In other words, SGML is complementing the HTML vocabulary
| with authoring affordances, as originally intended (HTML is
| based on it).
| einpoklum wrote:
| > I always wonder why people compare Latex with word and not
| with... HTML...
|
| At the very least, because those are the two popular software
| systems used for creating documents. HTML+CSS isn't; and
| Javascript is irrelevant for print.
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| There was an article on this semirecently that compared among
| other things HTML and Latex for typesetting.
| https://blog.ppresume.com/posts/on-typesetting-engines
| kzrdude wrote:
| Is there a microtype (latex package) for the web?
| anta40 wrote:
| I used LaTeX for writing my undergraduate thesis (> 1 decade
| ago). Nowadays, unless I write anything involving complicated
| math expressions or something fancy like Karnaugh map, chessboard
| diagram etc etc, most likely LaTeX is overkill. Markdown is more
| than enough.
| iveqy wrote:
| I'm looking for something that you can embedd in your own
| application. LaTeX would be great but it's not really nice to
| have WEB code in your C application. It's also has a bit
| troublesome license.
| so-rose wrote:
| `typst` might meet your needs. No, really.
|
| It embeds almost anywhere, including via client-side WASM, and
| someone even made a nice TypeScript lib [0]. If you dislike
| `typst`, it even has a package that transpiles LaTeX strings
| into native typst, which somehow doesn't seem to make `typst`
| any less fast [1]. WASM plugin magic will do that!
|
| The curious consequence is that the fastest and most portable
| way to render lightwight LaTeX code might actually be... To
| transpile LaTeX to embedded `typst`? Sure, sure, not all of
| LaTeX will map. But from an 80/20 mindset it might just be
| enough.
|
| - [0] https://github.com/Myriad-Dreamin/typst.ts - [1]
| https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex/
| WolfOliver wrote:
| I would love to read some feedback on MonsterWriter. It is my
| side-project made to make LaTeX accessible for everybody.
| herewulf wrote:
| I'm finally updating my CV after years of neglect. I'm keen on
| switching to the route of Org mode -> LaTeX -> PDF.
|
| It's partly because I love the simplicity/power of Org and I do
| all my writing in it nowadays, the other part is to separate the
| content from the presentation so I can have the content in two
| different languages but still end up with the same formatted
| document for both.
|
| Anyone have experience with this or have favorite LaTeX templates
| for CVs?
|
| I'm currently experimenting with this:
|
| https://titan-c.gitlab.io/org-cv/
| boerseth wrote:
| My own experiment involved writing my CV in YAML, and using a
| Pandoc template to generate .tex and .pdf. I think I may have
| overcooked the thing a little, but it was good fun.
|
| I never got into emacs. Is Org worth it?
|
| https://github.com/boerseth/cv
| signa11 wrote:
| it's not too shabby.
| goku12 wrote:
| Org mode is the swiss army knife of content markup languages.
| It does a lot more than just content markup. But keep in mind
| that org-mode, markdown, asciidoc, etc don't afford much
| control on final layout. They're like plain HTML in function.
| LaTeX and Typst include more layout control - sort of like
| HTML with a little bit of CSS. This may not matter if you're
| preparing something like an article or document. But you may
| want more layout control for something like a CV.
| ykonstant wrote:
| My go-to template collection is from Overleaf:
| https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/cv
|
| My cv is an adaptation of one of the templates there:
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1woxVNcJ4AmT7dD2WEnYr9BHEEY7...
|
| EDIT: ahahahahaha I just came across this cv:
| https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/resume-slash-cv-tem...
| IshKebab wrote:
| Nice CV. Way too much text but I absolutely love the included
| diagrams. I think interviewers are probably going to glaze
| over the text but the diagrams are interesting and they
| practically beg for questions.
|
| I'm totally stealing that.
| subidit wrote:
| Take a look at these templates I made a while back
| https://github.com/subidit/rover-resume
|
| I tried to avoid custom commands and environments to keep it
| simple. Your content in org text should fit nicely with this.
|
| It also has a template where the preamble is stored in
| different file such that you can try a different look by just
| un/commenting a different preamble file.
| n2h4 wrote:
| i've used rover resume before. thank you!
| watusername wrote:
| Check out Tectonic which is an all-in-one LaTeX toolchain (single
| executable w/ engine + build system) that lazily downloads TeX
| Live (no upfront multi-gig downloads). It's a breath of fresh air
| in the chaotic LaTeX landscape. Bit of a shame that they opted
| for XeTeX rather than LuaTeX though.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic
| fryktelig wrote:
| Honest question: why do you prefer lualatex to xetex?
| nanna wrote:
| You mean XeTeX for LuaLaTeX, I think.
| arthur-st wrote:
| No, the parent clearly indicates that they consider XeTeX a
| worse choice than LuaTeX.
| nanna wrote:
| My mistake, apologies!
| watusername wrote:
| LuaTeX is the de facto successor of pdfTeX and is basically a
| more maintained pdfTeX with Unicode support and Lua
| scripting, whereas XeTeX has its own engine. In practice, it
| means that LuaTeX "just works" with most documents while with
| XeTeX you run into all sorts of weird incompatibilities.
| Fancy packages that make use of Lua scripting (e.g.,
| graphdrawing) will only work with LuaTeX.
|
| Edit: Looks like it's not de facto anymore, and LuaTeX is now
| recommended for all documents and XeTeX is being recommended
| _against_ (https://www.texdev.net/2024/11/05/engine-news-
| from-the-latex...)
| fryktelig wrote:
| Thanks! I vaguely remembered getting a bit of mixed
| messages with regards to the two last year when I was
| looking into Tectonic. I just read a bit into the github
| issues and it seems like the Tectonic devs happened to fork
| Xelatex and not Lualatex. https://github.com/tectonic-
| typesetting/tectonic/issues/158#...
|
| Anyway, what they made works perfectly for me, I luckily
| don't use any of the fancy graphics packages that use Lua.
| I use Latex a few times a year at most, and Tectonic just
| works for me. With my previous Lualatex workflow I had to
| deal with Tlmgr and that whole ant's nest, figuring out one
| by one which packages I was missing each recompile.
|
| Seems like the main argument against Xetex in the article
| you linked is that it is unmaintainted, so it doesn't
| really apply to Tectonic, but it's a bit frustrating that
| an opportunity for ecosystem convergence potentially has
| been missed.
| agubelu wrote:
| LaTeX is great. It also sucks. I'm happy to have learned it and
| I'm happy to never have to use it again.
| goku12 wrote:
| What's your alternative?
| agubelu wrote:
| For personal use, maybe Markdown + pandoc, or Typst for more
| complex stuff. For academical use I don't think there are
| any, because everything still revolves around LaTeX. But the
| lack of alternatives doesn't mean LaTeX is pleasant to use.
| cess11 wrote:
| It's easier and good enough to just use LyX, a graphical document
| editor with a bunch of backends and templates, and if you really
| need to do something special you can still drop down to LaTeX and
| do your own templating.
|
| https://www.lyx.org/
|
| It's published under GPL so relatively protected from corporate
| nuisances. Takes five minutes to teach someone how to mark
| headlines, add content listing and change document type, then a
| little more to teach how to add tables and images.
| wiz21c wrote:
| and maths shortcuts are really easy
| agoose77 wrote:
| A shameless plug for the MyST Engine https://mystmd.org/
|
| It's a document engine that ingests Markdown (particularly the
| MyST superset) and builds upon "structured data" for sharing.
|
| E.g. SciPy's proceedings:
| https://proceedings.scipy.org/articles/XHDR4700
| pbowyer wrote:
| Just a note on MyST's citations feature as I was researching it
| this morning: until this ticket [1] is worked on there's one
| bibliography style and that's it.
|
| 1. https://github.com/jupyter-book/mystmd/issues/1462
| rochak wrote:
| I remember having to learn LaTeX to write my research papers.
| Probably the worst time I've had learning something. As someone
| who has OCD for making everything consistent, trying to achieve
| the same in LaTeX made me wanna give up research itself. In fact,
| now that I think about it, I did give up research due to it.
| goku12 wrote:
| Wow! Consistency is the reason I took up LaTeX, after suffering
| a disaster with Word. LaTeX feels dated and isn't flawless, but
| inconsistency is one complaint that I've never heard about it
| before.
| rochak wrote:
| I'd say it is more about how esoteric LaTeX
| extensions/plugins felt like when I picked it up (I was just
| getting into the field back then). I am sure that now, after
| years of experience, I would be more open to give it a shot
| again. Unfortunately, I am no longer into research anymore. I
| did have fun converting my LaTeX resume to Typst though.
| goku12 wrote:
| Using extensions these days is more like searching a
| software registry (CTAN in this case) for packages and
| looking up its API documentation. But your last sentence
| says a lot. The reason why Typst feels so much more
| ergonomic is that it resembles modern programming and
| markup languages. They have the advantage of hindsight.
| LaTeX markup does indeed feel esoteric, no matter how many
| times you use it. Perhaps it made more sense in its days.
| mgaunard wrote:
| Why LuaLaTex and not XeLaTex?
| red_trumpet wrote:
| Latest stable release of xetex was in 2020[1], whereas luatex
| is actively developed[2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XeTeX
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuaTeX
| kzrdude wrote:
| The first document compile example in the posted link (the PDF,
| the actual document) uses `xelatex`, so why the question?
|
| > Feel free to try lualatex instead--there are a few
| differences between the two that we will discuss later, but
| either is fine for now
| WillAdams wrote:
| One notable reason to prefer lualatex is mplib which allow
| inclusion of METAPOST graphics directly which is _very_
| convenient if one uses that tool.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Use typst.
|
| I've migrated all of my latex (book layout and invoicing) usage
| to typst and couldn't be happier.
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| For me Typst replaced Latex years ago.
|
| pros:
|
| - one small compiler that can output: pdf, png, svg, html
|
| - compilation is fast (see below)
|
| - syntax is much cleaner than Latex
|
| - few ways of to a thing
|
| - already has all the templates most people need
|
| - tooling is good enough with VS Code
|
| - supports SVG images
|
| cons:
|
| - less users? time typst compile cv.typ
| ________________________________________________________
| Executed in 126.21 millis fish external
| usr time 93.66 millis 0.07 millis 93.58 millis
| sys time 37.97 millis 1.51 millis 36.46 millis
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| A big con is that there are no typst templates for journals and
| conferences that academics submit papers to. For me, this is a
| show-stopper. I would love to be able to ditch latex because
| honestly it's old and it shows _a lot_ , in spite of apologists
| saying that it's perfect. But 90+% of my usage starts from a
| conference or journal template, so at the moment it's not gonna
| happen.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| I don't feel like the template itself is the issue. In typst
| it's quite easy to recreate the templates without being years
| into typst (according to my experience).
|
| The real problem is acceptance of non-word/latex papers
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| The problem is the user-base and acceptance of latex vs
| Typst. I use latex and as aware as I am about its
| deficiencies, I can create a doc faster in it than any
| other tool that I have not ever used before. I also have a
| bunch of utilities I created for my specific use-cases
| automating data into tables, figures, etc, ready for latex
| import.
|
| So its a mass and momentum problem. Typst not only has to
| be better/easier/faster than latex, but to a degree that it
| justifies all of the labor and time to learn it and change
| all that existing template and utility infrastructure built
| up over decades. A high bar.
|
| If Typst (or some other new contender) could also read and
| compile latex code and packages alongside its own syntax
| then that would be a game-changer. Then I can use all my
| old stuff and gradually change things over to typst (or
| whatever).
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| I used latex for over 20 years.
|
| Typst is a breath of fresh air. Interacting with modern
| tooling (GitHub, discord). Responsive developers. Easy to
| read code. Easy to do things on your own.
|
| Admittedly, my use case is mainly writing books, I've
| never published an academic paper.
| MortyWaves wrote:
| But I thought one of the points of latex was to emit pdf
| files? Are you saying these places are so backwards they
| only accept latex and word files? What stops them being
| edited by someone?
| rlkf wrote:
| > The real problem is acceptance of non-word/latex papers
|
| Some scientific journals, which only provides a Word
| template, require you to print to PDF to submit, then ships
| this PDF to India, where a team recreates the look of the
| submission in LaTeX, which is then used to compose the
| actual journal. I wish this was hyperbole. For these
| journals, you can safely create a LaTeX-template looking
| _almost_ the same, and get away with it.
| fastasucan wrote:
| Have you checked out Quarto? There are a lot of templates
| supported already, and possible to create out of latex if not
| (or just generate latex from Quarto).
| stared wrote:
| Is there any side-by-side comparison of a page created by LaTeX
| by Typst?
|
| My main selling points is that with LaTeX, it is easy to create
| typography shines beauty for a distance. (Often way better that
| most of books you find in stores.) With other typesetting
| systems, usually it is not the case. Yet, I am waiting for new
| things that offer simplicity, yet have same (or better!)
| visuals that LaTeX.
| creata wrote:
| As far as I know, the main differences (in the body text)
| between LaTeX and, say, Word, are the linebreaking algorithm
| (Knuth-Plass, which is used for both ragged-right and
| justified text) and the microtypography package. Is there
| anything else that contributes to the quality of LaTeX's
| output for ordinary English text?
|
| Typst apparently uses Knuth-Plass, but I don't see any
| information about microtypography.
| stared wrote:
| From what I see, it is also section breaking, fonts, and
| general typesetting defaults, such as margins, section, etc
| (sure, they vary from package to package, and some are
| ugly, but the default are aesthetically pleasing).
| creata wrote:
| Oh true, section breaking is also important. And figure
| placement.
|
| Things like default margins, in my opinion, are a lot
| easier to fix than these other issues.
| arthur-st wrote:
| Having experience with digitizing a university textbook in
| physics by hand, this is a very nice LaTeX guide for everyone
| interested. One thing worth noting from 2025 perspective that the
| "default" local setup is most likely going to be VSCode with
| LaTeX Workshop[1] and LTeX+[2] extensions, and that you should
| use TeX Live on every platform supported by it (since MiKTeX and
| friends can lag). Also, use LuaTeX, as it's the officially
| recommended[3] engine since November 2024.
|
| [1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=James-
| Yu...
|
| [2] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ltex-
| plu...
|
| [3] https://www.texdev.net/2024/11/05/engine-news-from-the-
| latex...
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