13 ms·

Begin LaTeX in minutes

263 points by PleaseHelpMe 10y ago

pfooti 10y ago
The usual plug for sharelatex here. Check out sharelatex.com, it is amazing. Write LaTeX without having to install it, plus collaboration in the cloud. (I'm not affiliated, just a fan). And in general, LaTeX is a super worthwhile language to learn. It may be a bit more complicated than markdown or its cousins, but it can do pretty much everything. I've barely scratched the surface of what it can do, but since I live at the intersection of CS and Education research, it is great how BibTeX will swap between APA and ACM styles easily, or how I can use a macro to create likert scale questions, for example. It probably takes the right kind of mindset, but I really liked the fact that my dissertation had a makefile (and was in source control, way back in the CVS days).
- Xcelerate 10y ago
  > Check out sharelatex.com, it is amazing. Agreed. Someone posted about it recently on here, and I've been using it ever since then for my research papers. Great website. My only suggestion for it would be that I wish collaborators could work on a particular LaTeX document without having to register.
- nickysielicki 10y ago
  They're also open source! https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex
- mynewtb 10y ago
  How do you deal with 'the cloud' not being under your control? Can you sync the documents from sharelatex to your local file system automatically?
  - Tehnix 10y ago
    They support syncing to and from Dropbox directly https://www.sharelatex.com/dropbox https://www.sharelatex.com/dropbox. So you can work offline, use your own editor etc.
    - s_kilk 10y ago
      [I work for ShareLaTeX] You can also download your entire project as a zip archive, so you're not locked in to our platform in any way. EDIT: also, ShareLatex is open source and fully self-hostable.
      - stochastician 10y ago
        I didn't realize this, and it's absolutely incredible. You guys are great!
    - mynewtb 10y ago
      Thanks, not bad! I wish there was syncing without adding another cloud company to the mix though. Eg git or rsync.
      - Rick_Sullivan 10y ago
        I've used Overleaf (formerly WriteLaTeX) with git before. It's especially nice that people comfortable with git can edit locally, while still having the option of editing directly in the browser.
- deleted 10y ago
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- laxatives 10y ago
  I think one of the best features of sharelatex is that you skip the insanely bloated installation/package maintenance process. Some of those packages use GB of fonts and I remember having a complete installation with over 30GB of fonts. Not really an issue anymore, but 5-10 years ago, that was pretty excessive.
  - Turing_Machine 10y ago
    While I've never looked into the guts of LaTeX package management, I've often thought that it could really, really use a tool that looks for dependencies and installs them (and only them) in an automated way, like Bundler for Ruby, npm, and similar systems. Nope, tlmgr just isn't the same. :-)
  - pvaldes 10y ago
    > insanely bloated installation/package maintenance process (Lol) Just type "apt install texlive-full" in Debian and you are done.
- eatbitseveryday 10y ago
  I find working in split-screen using something like sharelatex.com makes it difficult to actually read your PDF as you edit it. I keep the PDF open in a separate window, and compile from the command line.
deleted 10y ago
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myf01d 10y ago
Pro tip: you can't.
andrew3726 10y ago
"Brief Intro to Latex for programmers/developers" vs "Master LATEX in minutes", quite a difference! But looks nevertheless like a good introduction to LaTeX. Just why the all the emoji...
- 50CNT 10y ago
  I've personally have had a lot of fun abusing emoji/dingbats in curses TUIs. VOL〈▰▰▰▰▰▰▱▱▱▱〉
mtrn 10y ago
I've written my first LaTeX documents with LyX [1], a wonderful application, if you're just getting started. [1] https://www.lyx.org/ https://www.lyx.org/
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  Yes, LyX is an excellent way to get a feel for LaTeX without having to learn the syntax.
- auxym 10y ago
  For me LyX hits a sweetspot: it does 95% of what I need to do in Latex without ever having to type a backslash (or having to lookup whatever amsmath command is used for setting a matrix). But when I do need to drop down to latex to do something unsupported, I don't need to fight lyx. I wrote my paper and master's thesis with a workflow involving LyX, LaTeX and python (scipy, numpy, mpl, doit for building the whole thing). The doit script ran the analysis pipeline, exported the figures, exported a .tex using the LyX CLI and ran all the latex/bibtex stuff to generate a PDF and and zip with all the necessary stuff for submission. My colleagues looked at me weirdly (mech. engineering department), but I think it was worth it. Probably not time efficient, but at least for the peace of mind.
FunctionalGuy 10y ago
LaTeX. Can someone fix the title?
renke1 10y ago
I used LaTeX a lot in university, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Even a minimal (and good looking) document requires a lot of (La)TeX knowledge. You can of course use one of many existing templates, but you will quickly feel lost when you have to customize things. These days, just go with Markdown (or the like) and just include assets (say graphs) as SVG and be done with it. For scientific papers (especially with two columns layout) you probably have to go with LaTeX though. Edit: By the way, my take at minimal LaTeX templates: https://github.com/renke/latex-templates https://github.com/renke/latex-templates
- ben_straub 10y ago
  Yeah, LaTeX is great, but mostly you won't need the superpowers that a document-programming language gives you. When Markdown doesn't quite do what I need, Asciidoc usually does (Pro Git 2 was written in Asciidoc).
  - rschuetzler 10y ago
    I'm a big fan of Asciidoc. It's nice to have the option of advanced features, while still dealing in text.
- thomasahle 10y ago
  If you used Latex a lot, isn't it worth learning it well? It's like somebody using python a lot for science work, but just copying things around, because they don't bother to learn the language.
  - renke1 10y ago
    Don't get me wrong. Learning TeX is probably a worthwhile experience. I was actually trying to get a deeper understanding of TeX, but – to be honest – it's not that easy to get started and thus I gave up pretty quickly. Mostly because there is not that much you can do with TeX even if you mastered it. It's "only" a typesetting system and not really a general purpose programming language (although it is Turing-complete).
- 10y ago
mydpy 10y ago
LaTeX is much deeper than this "mastery" document conveys. Although, LaTeX is significantly easier to pick up if you learn to program first. I appreciate the author sharing this here though :)
JeremyS 10y ago
Filename for screenshots should be changed ;)
aduitsis 10y ago
For any poor soul that has to write LaTeX for whatever reason but doesn't want to bother installing anything, I cannot recommend https://www.sharelatex.com/ https://www.sharelatex.com/ enough.
- globuous 10y ago
  Love it. You can also edit latex documents with collaborators in real time. This is the only reason I got to make my team mates use to Latex for lab reports instead of Word. Latex isn't hard, and the fact that I could help them in real time and that they could see my code in our report's context got them pretty good at latex within an hour of using it !
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  I'm currently using Overleaf[1]. It has collaboration (no live tracking) in the free tier, support for BibTeX with auto-import from Zotero, auto-complete and syntax highlighting, and works completely in the browser. [1]: https://www.overleaf.com https://www.overleaf.com
  - cyphar 10y ago
    Note that ShareLaTeX is entirely free software (under AGPL) and self-hostable. Overleaf is not.
    - chronic6l 10y ago
      Furthermore, Overleaf has a history of occasionally losing people's data. That's bad for college and university folks.
      - Cyph0n 10y ago
        Source please?
      - jdleesmiller 10y ago
        (Overleaf co-founder here.) As far as I know, we've never lost any user data. We take that very seriously. If you believe you have lost data on Overleaf, please contact our support team via www.overleaf.com/contact and we'll investigate.
mercora 10y ago
I am not really into LaTeX but i write all my letters with it and like doing so very much. I get nice looking clean documents that have a very professional appeal and are much more convenient to create than in any full fledged editor. I just use templates and fill in the blanks. I once showed my not so computer affine sister how to do it and she likes it too.
- contingencies 10y ago
  LyX is good for that.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
thomasahle 10y ago
From various tutorials I feel my knowledge of latex is very top down, and not very deep. I just recently realized that {} are not needed for singletons, so I may for instance write \frac12 for 1/2. Can anybody recommend a more bottom up guide? Something more similar to learning a programming language, where you start with the basic syntax and build on features iteratively? Is Knuth's book the best way to go? Or is that like learning C, when you wanted to learn C++?
- rwl 10y ago
  Knuth's book (that is, the TeX Book) is worth looking at. You're right that it won't tell you everything you want to know about LaTeX, and in that sense is like learning C rather than C++. But (also like learning C before C++) it provides a lot of foundational knowledge that will be useful if go on to read a book specifically about LaTeX, and if you ever need to do something more complicated than LaTeX's defaults allow. For example, it explains how all layout is done with "boxes" and "glue", and the difference between horizontal and vertical mode.
- mci 10y ago
  > I just recently realized that {} are not needed for singletons Trick question: What will you get by TeX-ing this document? $\acute a\acute{a}\acute{{a}}$\'a\'{a}\'{{a}}\end
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
    Frustrated.
  - thomasahle 10y ago
    Haha, great example on how my knowledge of the syntax is lacking. Does the first acute attach to the space rather than the a? Is the last one an error?
- 2ion 10y ago
  I've started working through the TeX Book for educational purposes about a year ago. It obviously lays the foundation for a deep understanding of TeX/LaTeX. If you're still getting surprised by syntax or the macro system in general, you can skip the chapters which go into minute detail and still take a lot of interesting things away: layouting commands, page structure, units, registers, understanding memory limits and allocation, etc. That being said, LaTeX has its own kernel, on top of which comes a document class, on top which comes any number of packages. Each layer can alter or mask the lower layer, so understanding LaTeX on all its levels is a difficult task. Then, there are different implementations which add fundamental aspects to the Knuth reference TeX, like pdftex, luatex, xetex, and that does not even include platex, uplatex and other special things. The little things I know I learned by finding a package/class/command that does what I need, and then study how it does it. E.g. hyperref is a very interesting starting place (relates closely to how documents (DVI, PDF,...) are output), as is memoir or my favourite, microtype.
umbs 10y ago
I used Latex extensively in Univ for thesis and publishing papers. Since then, I forgot that knowledge and am having hard time picking it up. However, I briefly used www.sharelatex.com, is a web GUI (or WYSIWYG) type approach to Latex. It's a good project and makes using Latex slightly easier, but user must still know various packages, how to layout images etc. Nonetheless, sharelatex is a good effort and hope it benefits others.
boramalper 10y ago
If you are looking for a more coherent and better source, Wikibooks has an amazing Latex guide: https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX
yk 10y ago
It lacks the most important LaTeX tip, don't fight the machine. LaTeX is really good at getting documents that look 90% as good as an actual typesetter could make them look, if one can live with somewhat conservative looking documents. The last 10 percent, fixing margin width, changing paragraphs and so on, are incredibly hard with LaTeX. (Of course LaTeX defaults are a lot better than word, largely because LaTeX automatically uses consistent headers instead of sometime 15 pt and sometimes 16 pt underlined.)
- pwdisswordfish 10y ago
  Consistent header styles are doable with MS Word too. It's just that few people seem to learn that feature.
  - yk 10y ago
    Yes, but there are 500 'features' in Word which are almost always really stupid ideas, an experienced graphics designer knows how to use them, 99% of Word users don't. In LaTeX you have to work to do something really stupid.
- leephillips 10y ago
  I get your point, but you're really exaggerating the difficulty of changing margins, paragraph spacing, and similar things. It's easy with straight LaTeX, and even easier with the "geometry" package.
  - yk 10y ago
    Yes, to address to criticisms of your comments and siblings, in my experience if you start changing fonts, then you need to change margins and paragraph spacing, and down the rabbit hole you go. The thing is, a small change is not very complicated, but the defaults are also really good. So if you just want to get below a certain page limit, then it is easy to change the margin. If you start to wanting to improve the overall look of the document, then it is usually a much better idea to play with different packages were someone else already did the hard work instead of trying to improve details by yourself.
pwdisswordfish 10y ago
Most materials about LaTeX I tend to find on the web seem to be of the 'programming by StackOverflow' variety, i.e. 'copy this snippet of code, tweak it to your needs and compile'; they don't teach you about what the code actually does, how it interacts with everything else, and there is no syntax specification apart from series of digressions like 'oh, by the way, if you wish to achieve effect X, you can use option Y'. Unfortunately, even official documentation for LaTeX packages is often written that way (a major pleasant exception is the documentation for TikZ). In the short term, it may seem fine, but it inevitably comes back to bite the user later. The guide submitted here doesn't seem particularly different. For those wishing to learn some 'theoretical' TeX, I can recommend TeX by Topic.[0] It mentions LaTeX macros only in passing, but even that amount was quite helpful to me. [0] https://bitbucket.org/VictorEijkhout/tex-by-topic https://bitbucket.org/VictorEijkhout/tex-by-topic
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  I agree with the documentation issue. In addition to TikZ, the Memoir package manual is a pleasant surprise. It's really thorough, and I definitely recommend reading it if you are writing up your thesis in LaTeX.
  - 2ion 10y ago
    Another well documented set of general-purpose classes are the KOMAscript document classes, catering mostly to European document conventions [1]. [1] https://www.ctan.org/pkg/koma-script https://www.ctan.org/pkg/koma-script
- JadeNB 10y ago
  Since this thread has turned into a discussion of nice documentation, I've always thought that beamer (http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/beamer/doc/beameruserguide.pdf http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/beamer/doc/beam...) 's is quite nice. I also second the recommendation for TeX by Topic, which is lovely. Grätzer's Math into LaTeX (https://archive.org/details/George_Gratzer__Math_Into_LaTeX https://archive.org/details/George_Gratzer__Math_Into_LaTeX) is nice but outdated, and Knuth's TeXbook (freely available, but only as source, at http://ctan.org/pkg/texbook http://ctan.org/pkg/texbook) is, of course, the original definitive resource. (Links to the other currently mentioned documentation: http://mirrors.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf http://mirrors.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf (of which TikZ is a sub-/co-package) and http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/memoir/memman.pdf http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/memoir/memman.p... ; and 2ion already linked to the KOMAScript documentation (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12830476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12830476).)
daemonk 10y ago
I personally really like using latex. But the main problem for me is that latex is not really designed for collaborative editing, especially with people who don't know latex. are there any track changes feature plugin/app that's available and relatively simple for people who mainly use MS word.
- PleaseHelpMe 10y ago
  checkout sharelatex.com
  - daemonk 10y ago
    I've used sharelatex and overleaf. I find them great. But what people in my field want are tracked changes features that you see in MS word. So deleted/added text highlighted by who changed it, comment boxes, etc.
    - ves 10y ago
      Use latex with git, say on github. You get all those features and more, just with a UI that separates them from the document. I've collaborated on notes using latex before on github and PR discussions, inline comments, and git collaboration features like branching, descriptive commit messages and diffs, etc. are awesome for productivity. That said, everyone will need to know how to use latex, git, and GitHub, so gdocs certainly has a simpler workflow.
    - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      With latexdiff (included with your LaTeX distribution) it's really easy to produce "track changes" PDFs. (That's the entire purpose of this tool.) With git it's very easy to checkout the .tex file from an arbitrary commit. There are even wrappers that integrate this with git, so just "git latexdiff HEAD~5 HEAD" will give you a "track changes" PDF between the current version and the one from five commits ago. I've used this on complex papers where editors have requested it, and it works fine. Once I had to manually tweak the .tex file produced by latexdiff, but it was a very complex use case (packages added and removed between versions) and pretty easy to fix.
deleted 10y ago
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ArmandGrillet 10y ago
Spoiler alert: you will not master LaTeX (nor anything) in minutes. I have written my master thesis on sharelatex.com, the first months have been painful but at the end I had a great feeling of having achieved something. I still not consider that I master LaTeX but at least I can now use it for any standard documents and draw graphs and math formulas with ease. I really suggest developers to use LaTeX to create their resume because it looks really professional and personal (if you do not just use a standard template). It takes some time but you will get exactly what you want and learn many things along the way.
- PleaseHelpMe 10y ago
  The author has updated the Title of the repo. It's now begin not master anymore lol
- sotojuan 10y ago
  Even years after Norvig's essay people still attempt to master skills in days or less!
  - yannis 10y ago
    Here is an alternative way to master LaTeX http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/5713/963 http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/5713/963.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
mixedmath 10y ago
A better title would be "How to produce a simple LaTeX document in minutes". Or perhaps even "Another brief LaTeX tutorial". When I first began to use LaTeX long ago, a friend of mine gave me a preamble and essentially told me to not touch it until I knew better. This was very helpful to me, and I immediately began to use LaTeX in a mindset that separated content from presentation. Later, I did know better, but I'd already gotten the gist of what's going on. Years later, when I introduce LaTeX to others (which I have frequently done), I follow the same starting path.
1wd 10y ago
Just don't try anything that isn't in your typical math paper. There are thousands of LaTeX packages, because they are all broken if you use them in a slightly unexpected way, so (reminiscent of JavaScript) a new package is created to "fix" it. Tables? Here you go. Oh, you wanted nested tables? For that you need to switch to an entirely different package. Oh, and that one doesn't support splitting up tables over multiple pages. Maybe this new one can do it. But it doesn't support that other package you use. Maybe try that one instead. Oh, in that one you can't have ... Or is that just me?
- zzleeper 10y ago
  Not just you. Tables are a huge mess, and for every package I add to my .tex file to fix a problem, two new problems pop up.. (oh you added package a at the end? It will fail, because package b loaded package C which defined the same macro names, and of course every macro is global...
  - pvaldes 10y ago
    In 15 years using latex I thing that I had problems with the order of packages in one or two cases (and they were documented, so it was my fault in fact). The situation that you claim is not common at all. All that you need basically for tables is booktabs and, in very specific cases, longtable.
    - zzleeper 10y ago
      Not really... \usepackage{tabulary} gives me the X column type \usepackage{multirow} does what the name says \usepackage{longtable} is the most useful one \usepackage{booktabs} adds -toprule-, -midrule-, -bottomrule- \usepackage{threeparttable} adds titles and notes to tables \usepackage{threeparttablex} extends -threeparttable- to work with -longtable \usepackage{siunitx} allows decimal alignment \usepackage{array} some table column types require arraybackslash \usepackage{varwidth} helps in setting a max column type \usepackage{ragged2e} because \raggedright used in table footnotes would otherwise break hyphenation \usepackage{afterpage} defers typesetting of the longtable environment to the top of the next page \usepackage{etoolbox} helps to write monospace numbers in tables And then I add all the newcommands, and end up with pretty tables but very fragile wrt changes in the latex environment
amelius 10y ago
Sometimes I wonder: why can't LaTeX be just as simple as HTML, or perhaps even simpler? Except perhaps for pagination and available default fonts, HTML practically fulfills all my formatting needs. (Note: HTML includes MathML, a mathematical formula markup language). And for automatically numbering tables and figures, one can easily write a script that is completely independent from the underlying formatting language.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  It is called DITA and Docbook, but they are designed to be toolable. Writting them manually is not a good idea, at all.
- ezequiel-garzon 10y ago
  I've always wondered the opposite: why don't major browsers implement (La)TeX formulas, given they are a de facto standard? I mean something like MathJax, but available with JavaScript disabled. Don't trigger it with $, but maybe with something more odd, like $@ ... @$, or similar.
- yannis 10y ago
  Try writing a 300 page book in HTML, create citations and bibliographies, table of contents etc. Then convert it to a pdf, say using Pandoc and then you will have a better understanding where TeX/LaTeX fits in. Write also some complicated formulae using MathML. Save the document and render it again in 30 years! TeX was designed to typeset a document always the same way on any machine that could run it. You can typeset any of Knuth's papers from the 80s and they can still compile today. Maths as Barbara is fond of saying has a long shelf life.
  - amelius 10y ago
    I'm not saying that HTML is totally suitable, but a slight modification of it could be, and it would be a lot simpler to use than TeX. And who says that it could not be rendered in the same way in 30 years? By the way, the one thing that disappoints me most about LaTeX is that you often cannot nest one environment in another without running into issues. In HTML the "composability" is much better.
0xmohit 10y ago
Just wondering if people here use ConTeXt [0] as well? I've personally found it somewhat easier to manage floats in ConTeXt as compared to TeX/PDFTex. [0] http://wiki.contextgarden.net/What_is_ConTeXt http://wiki.contextgarden.net/What_is_ConTeXt
CalChris 10y ago
This is a good beginner doc. I'd never used LaTeX until about a year ago when I needed it to write a paper. The first thing I wondered was how to install it. Surely in 2015 installation would be a snap. It'd be in the App Store. Or Homebrew. Do not install LaTeX. Use it in the cloud. I use www.overleaf.com which is awesome. Similarly, I use www.draw.io to create PDFs for my drawings. \usepackage{microtype} \usepackage[hang,font=bf]{caption} \usepackage{natbib} \usepackage[unicode=true]{hyperref} \usepackage[noabbrev,capitalise,nameinlink]{cleveref} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{csquotes} \usepackage{minted} \usepackage{inconsolata} \usemintedstyle{bw} \usepackage{float} \usepackage{siunitx} \usepackage{booktabs} \usepackage{url} \usepackage{graphicx} \usepackage{textcomp} \usepackage{fixltx2e} The one thing I'd add to this tutorial is citations and bibliographies.
- gaur 10y ago
  Biblatex is better than bibtex.
- tagrun 10y ago
  What? Do install LaTeX. I don't know (and frankly don't care) how hard it is under Windows, Mac or Android, but it has been readily available from the package managers with GNU/* and most BSDs for decades, easy to install and use. There are plenty of editors like gummi, kile, texmacs or lyx. Seriously. You're asking people to give up their freedoms for what? To avoid typing a single line "sudo apt-get install gummi texlive-latex-base"? I personally do stay away from "cloud"y things (or whatever buzzword you prefer for SaaSS in the stylish Apple-land), and recommend people that I care about around me to do so: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
  - detaro 10y ago
    Windows has easy-to-use distributions of LaTeX as well (e.g. MikTex).
  - kevindong 10y ago
    I personally use www.sharelatex.com (which is open sourced under the AGPL license). Downloading LaTeX locally on macOS (or rather, Mac OS X as it was called at the time) is not very difficult. As I recall, it's basically just: download this .pkg file, run it, and you're set. That being said, I did _not_ enjoy having LaTeX installed locally. It wasn't harmful, it just wasn't at all beneficial compared to using an online LaTeX service. The install size is easily tens of thousands of files (totalling a couple GBs), most of which are only a couple hundred KBs each. The vast majority of those files went unused. It clogged up my file system, gave me a marginal amount of benefits, and figuring out how to change the config files to do one _tiny_ thing was horrifically difficult. As a result, I migrated to using ShareLaTeX. It was just simpler than having to manage the install myself. The value proposition of a (hosted instance of) ShareLaTeX is that I can use LaTeX from any computer (connected to the Internet) to access any of my automatically synchronized files and have an automatically updated install of LaTeX. I personally found that value proposition worthwhile.
andrepd 10y ago
An important correction: don't use TexMaker, it's no longer actively developed. Use TexStudio (http://www.texstudio.org/ http://www.texstudio.org/), the fork/continuation of that project. Much more polished, performant, and many more convenient features.
nyankosensei 10y ago
Has anyone tried the Lout typesetting program? I worked with it several years ago and was very impressed. Mark Summerfield uses it for his programming books: https://www.qtrac.eu/lout.html https://www.qtrac.eu/lout.html
curiousgal 10y ago
Surprised no one mentioned TeXworks[0] as an alternative for easy installation. 0.https://www.tug.org/texworks/ https://www.tug.org/texworks/
apathy 10y ago
Overleaf.com is really nice too, if you work with others (e.g. on academic papers). The most painless papers I've ever written were with other competent people using LaTeX and overleaf. ShareLatex is good too, I'm not sure if you can autosubmit to journals and preprint servers with it though. That last feature is terrific for academics -- it's how publishing should work, but usually doesn't. I spent the same amount of time (72 hours) getting one hairy equation laid out in Word that I spent compiling my entire dissertation in LaTeX. Naturally the former was a request from my adviser, who did the latter back when she was a student. Dammit. If you have any serious math in your writing, nothing else comes close. (Protip: Mathematica, the only non-free software package that ever earned its keep for me, will directly export equation cells as LaTeX if you ask nicely. I can't stand doing tedious symbolic manipulation without it.)
- cyphar 10y ago
  Note that Overleaf.com is proprietary, while ShareLaTeX is completely free software under the AGPL (and self-hostable).
  - apathy 10y ago
    Absolutely true, and although I did pay for Overleaf at first, I stopped paying when I realized I didn't need the for-pay features anyhow. They made a conscious decision to focus on internal development and I'm OK with that -- Google isn't open-source either (certainly not all of it, and when I was there, very little of it), and I'm OK with that too. https://www.overleaf.com/help/17-is-overleaf-open-source#.WBZSuhIrKkA https://www.overleaf.com/help/17-is-overleaf-open-source#.WB... An open-source business that doesn't survive (cough ReplicaDB cough) isn't necessarily better than a closed-but-extensible one that does. LaTeX itself is, and anything you're working on within Overleaf can be exported as text at any time, so I don't worry so much about lock-in. The underlying toolchain (LaTeX and packages) is fully OSS, and isn't going anywhere; I have supported the LyX project in the past, and indeed that's how I laid out my dissertation, but in the end I find Overleaf more usable. I still wish they'd support Markdown, though. Sometimes I just want to run off a quick, properly typeset series of equations and lists/tables without all the boilerplate. I suppose you could make the argument "well, if it was OSS, you could just patch it yourself!", and you wouldn't be wrong. But we use the autosubmit feature a lot, so on balance I've decided I can live with this shortcoming.
santaclaus 10y ago
I still wake up from nightmares about pages upon pages of overfull hboxs...
good_gnu 10y ago
Tip for people who want to compile LaTeX from the command line: latexmk is basically a build tool for latex, which can also do things like incremental compilation and listen for changes. It's part of MacTex and can also be installed with the package manager of your choice if you use texlive. Another tip: If you usually write markdown, pandoc can turn Markdown interspersed with LaTeX code into pdfs.
thanatropism 10y ago
At my school overleaf.com is the standard. Some professors are git-savvy, but most use overleaf to keep tabs and comment on dissertations.
paradite 10y ago
The author mentioned ShareLaTeX but not the other popular cloud service overleaf. I actually would have done the same given my experience with both. Recently I tried out overleaf in order to allow others to collaborate on a paper. However, what was compiling perfectly fine on my local machine just refused to compile on overleaf, keep throwing me error related to $ symbol even though I did not use $ symbol at all (I used my own bst and cls). After googling for 30 minutes without finding a fix, I gave up and turned to the alternative, ShareLaTeX. It compiled perfectly with no errors on the first try.
- cyphar 10y ago
  Note that ShareLaTeX is entirely free software licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License[1]. Which makes it much better than most cloud services (you can self-host it if you want). In particular, it looks like overlaf is not free software which is pretty ridiculous given the competition[2]. [1]: https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex [2]: https://www.overleaf.com/help/17-is-overleaf-open-source https://www.overleaf.com/help/17-is-overleaf-open-source
- jdleesmiller 10y ago
  (Co-founder of Overleaf here.) Sorry to hear you had a bad experience --- we run a standard install of TeX Live, so that's surprising. If you try Overleaf again, feel free to send your project's link to our support team via www.overleaf.com/contact, and they can help you fix any issues.
  - paradite 10y ago
    Good to hear that. I've sent it via www.overleaf.com/contact and I hope this would help your team figure out why.
user5994461 10y ago
Stupid question: Outside of the maths heavy documents, could markdown or restructuredtext be a substitute to Latex nowadays? It is a lot easier to learn and use.
- xapata 10y ago
  LaTeX is more like XML or HTML than Markdown or rST. One could duplicate the functionality of LaTeX with a superset of rST or Markdown. Case in point: Sphinx. That's essentially writing your documents in a combination of rST and Python.
- seanlane 10y ago
  I use Pandoc [1] to write in Markdown and then have it converted into LaTeX. There's been some bumps, but it seems to let me have (most of) the best of both worlds. This post was the inspiration for using it: http://kesdev.com/you-got-latex-in-my-markdown/ http://kesdev.com/you-got-latex-in-my-markdown/ [1] http://pandoc.org/ http://pandoc.org/
- tomrod 10y ago
  I switched from beamer (LaTeX) to markdown + pandoc for that very reason. Beamer was just too command heavy to be useful for quick slides.
- mharrison 10y ago
  I have written all of my books (Treading on Python, Pandas, etc) in restructuredtext. I have tools that convert said markup to epub and LaTeX[0]. There is some learning curve, but you can get LaTeX out of rst from docutils, Sphinx, or my tools. 0 - https://github.com/mattharrison/rst2nitrile https://github.com/mattharrison/rst2nitrile
graycat 10y ago
I just use TeX, never LaTeX. With TeX, the documentation is shorter and, IMHO, better written. That is, get to concentrate on just Knuth's The TeXBook -- nicely done technical writing. With LaTeX, I suspect that really should also know the underlying TeX, but with some understanding of TeX can do just fine without LaTeX and all its extra considerations.
biswaroop 10y ago
A latex tip: hover over equations in Wikipedia to get the syntax.
ankitbko 10y ago
I love the licence he has included. Rarely see it used anywhere.
arca_vorago 10y ago
For those of you who like latex output but find learning it daunting, give emacs org mode a try, as it can export to latex easily, and you can always break into actual latex inside org if you are doing something more complicated.
ajarmst 10y ago
While I applaud the effort, this sort of thing suffers from the same problem any "quick introduction" to something rich and complex has: it's easy to see the complexity and discern the unfamiliarity, but requires effort to discern the value. No one has ever been convinced of the value of TeX/LaTeX, Vim, Emacs, Awk, Lex, Lisp, etc. by a fifteen minute intro. They're convinced by pushing themselves (or being forced) to use the tool for a substantial period of time (usually weeks) over several significant projects until they discovered the familiarity, power and utility that it affords people who are sufficiently familiar with the tool. In a machine shop, a lathe isn't an obvious choice for a project until you already know how to use a lathe.

263 points by PleaseHelpMe 10y ago

The usual plug for sharelatex here. Check out sharelatex.com, it is amazing. Write LaTeX without having to install it, plus collaboration in the cloud. (I'm not affiliated, just a fan). And in general, LaTeX is a super worthwhile language to learn. It may be a bit more complicated than markdown or its cousins, but it can do pretty much everything. I've barely scratched the surface of what it can do, but since I live at the intersection of CS and Education research, it is great how BibTeX will swap between APA and ACM styles easily, or how I can use a macro to create likert scale questions, for example. It probably takes the right kind of mindset, but I really liked the fact that my dissertation had a makefile (and was in source control, way back in the CVS days).

Xcelerate 10y ago
> Check out sharelatex.com, it is amazing. Agreed. Someone posted about it recently on here, and I've been using it ever since then for my research papers. Great website. My only suggestion for it would be that I wish collaborators could work on a particular LaTeX document without having to register.
nickysielicki 10y ago
They're also open source! https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex
mynewtb 10y ago
How do you deal with 'the cloud' not being under your control? Can you sync the documents from sharelatex to your local file system automatically?
- Tehnix 10y ago
  They support syncing to and from Dropbox directly https://www.sharelatex.com/dropbox https://www.sharelatex.com/dropbox. So you can work offline, use your own editor etc.
  - s_kilk 10y ago
    [I work for ShareLaTeX] You can also download your entire project as a zip archive, so you're not locked in to our platform in any way. EDIT: also, ShareLatex is open source and fully self-hostable.
    - stochastician 10y ago
      I didn't realize this, and it's absolutely incredible. You guys are great!
  - mynewtb 10y ago
    Thanks, not bad! I wish there was syncing without adding another cloud company to the mix though. Eg git or rsync.
    - Rick_Sullivan 10y ago
      I've used Overleaf (formerly WriteLaTeX) with git before. It's especially nice that people comfortable with git can edit locally, while still having the option of editing directly in the browser.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
laxatives 10y ago
I think one of the best features of sharelatex is that you skip the insanely bloated installation/package maintenance process. Some of those packages use GB of fonts and I remember having a complete installation with over 30GB of fonts. Not really an issue anymore, but 5-10 years ago, that was pretty excessive.
- Turing_Machine 10y ago
  While I've never looked into the guts of LaTeX package management, I've often thought that it could really, really use a tool that looks for dependencies and installs them (and only them) in an automated way, like Bundler for Ruby, npm, and similar systems. Nope, tlmgr just isn't the same. :-)
- pvaldes 10y ago
  > insanely bloated installation/package maintenance process (Lol) Just type "apt install texlive-full" in Debian and you are done.
eatbitseveryday 10y ago
I find working in split-screen using something like sharelatex.com makes it difficult to actually read your PDF as you edit it. I keep the PDF open in a separate window, and compile from the command line.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

myf01d 10y ago

Pro tip: you can't.

andrew3726 10y ago

"Brief Intro to Latex for programmers/developers" vs "Master LATEX in minutes", quite a difference! But looks nevertheless like a good introduction to LaTeX. Just why the all the emoji...

50CNT 10y ago
I've personally have had a lot of fun abusing emoji/dingbats in curses TUIs. VOL〈▰▰▰▰▰▰▱▱▱▱〉

mtrn 10y ago

I've written my first LaTeX documents with LyX [1], a wonderful application, if you're just getting started. [1] https://www.lyx.org/ https://www.lyx.org/

Cyph0n 10y ago
Yes, LyX is an excellent way to get a feel for LaTeX without having to learn the syntax.
auxym 10y ago
For me LyX hits a sweetspot: it does 95% of what I need to do in Latex without ever having to type a backslash (or having to lookup whatever amsmath command is used for setting a matrix). But when I do need to drop down to latex to do something unsupported, I don't need to fight lyx. I wrote my paper and master's thesis with a workflow involving LyX, LaTeX and python (scipy, numpy, mpl, doit for building the whole thing). The doit script ran the analysis pipeline, exported the figures, exported a .tex using the LyX CLI and ran all the latex/bibtex stuff to generate a PDF and and zip with all the necessary stuff for submission. My colleagues looked at me weirdly (mech. engineering department), but I think it was worth it. Probably not time efficient, but at least for the peace of mind.

FunctionalGuy 10y ago

LaTeX. Can someone fix the title?

renke1 10y ago

I used LaTeX a lot in university, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Even a minimal (and good looking) document requires a lot of (La)TeX knowledge. You can of course use one of many existing templates, but you will quickly feel lost when you have to customize things. These days, just go with Markdown (or the like) and just include assets (say graphs) as SVG and be done with it. For scientific papers (especially with two columns layout) you probably have to go with LaTeX though. Edit: By the way, my take at minimal LaTeX templates: https://github.com/renke/latex-templates https://github.com/renke/latex-templates

ben_straub 10y ago
Yeah, LaTeX is great, but mostly you won't need the superpowers that a document-programming language gives you. When Markdown doesn't quite do what I need, Asciidoc usually does (Pro Git 2 was written in Asciidoc).
- rschuetzler 10y ago
  I'm a big fan of Asciidoc. It's nice to have the option of advanced features, while still dealing in text.
thomasahle 10y ago
If you used Latex a lot, isn't it worth learning it well? It's like somebody using python a lot for science work, but just copying things around, because they don't bother to learn the language.
- renke1 10y ago
  Don't get me wrong. Learning TeX is probably a worthwhile experience. I was actually trying to get a deeper understanding of TeX, but – to be honest – it's not that easy to get started and thus I gave up pretty quickly. Mostly because there is not that much you can do with TeX even if you mastered it. It's "only" a typesetting system and not really a general purpose programming language (although it is Turing-complete).
10y ago

mydpy 10y ago

LaTeX is much deeper than this "mastery" document conveys. Although, LaTeX is significantly easier to pick up if you learn to program first. I appreciate the author sharing this here though :)

JeremyS 10y ago

Filename for screenshots should be changed ;)

aduitsis 10y ago

For any poor soul that has to write LaTeX for whatever reason but doesn't want to bother installing anything, I cannot recommend https://www.sharelatex.com/ https://www.sharelatex.com/ enough.

globuous 10y ago
Love it. You can also edit latex documents with collaborators in real time. This is the only reason I got to make my team mates use to Latex for lab reports instead of Word. Latex isn't hard, and the fact that I could help them in real time and that they could see my code in our report's context got them pretty good at latex within an hour of using it !
Cyph0n 10y ago
I'm currently using Overleaf[1]. It has collaboration (no live tracking) in the free tier, support for BibTeX with auto-import from Zotero, auto-complete and syntax highlighting, and works completely in the browser. [1]: https://www.overleaf.com https://www.overleaf.com
- cyphar 10y ago
  Note that ShareLaTeX is entirely free software (under AGPL) and self-hostable. Overleaf is not.
  - chronic6l 10y ago
    Furthermore, Overleaf has a history of occasionally losing people's data. That's bad for college and university folks.
    - Cyph0n 10y ago
      Source please?
    - jdleesmiller 10y ago
      (Overleaf co-founder here.) As far as I know, we've never lost any user data. We take that very seriously. If you believe you have lost data on Overleaf, please contact our support team via www.overleaf.com/contact and we'll investigate.

mercora 10y ago

I am not really into LaTeX but i write all my letters with it and like doing so very much. I get nice looking clean documents that have a very professional appeal and are much more convenient to create than in any full fledged editor. I just use templates and fill in the blanks. I once showed my not so computer affine sister how to do it and she likes it too.

contingencies 10y ago
LyX is good for that.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

thomasahle 10y ago

From various tutorials I feel my knowledge of latex is very top down, and not very deep. I just recently realized that {} are not needed for singletons, so I may for instance write \frac12 for 1/2. Can anybody recommend a more bottom up guide? Something more similar to learning a programming language, where you start with the basic syntax and build on features iteratively? Is Knuth's book the best way to go? Or is that like learning C, when you wanted to learn C++?

rwl 10y ago
Knuth's book (that is, the TeX Book) is worth looking at. You're right that it won't tell you everything you want to know about LaTeX, and in that sense is like learning C rather than C++. But (also like learning C before C++) it provides a lot of foundational knowledge that will be useful if go on to read a book specifically about LaTeX, and if you ever need to do something more complicated than LaTeX's defaults allow. For example, it explains how all layout is done with "boxes" and "glue", and the difference between horizontal and vertical mode.
mci 10y ago
> I just recently realized that {} are not needed for singletons Trick question: What will you get by TeX-ing this document? $\acute a\acute{a}\acute{{a}}$\'a\'{a}\'{{a}}\end
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
  Frustrated.
- thomasahle 10y ago
  Haha, great example on how my knowledge of the syntax is lacking. Does the first acute attach to the space rather than the a? Is the last one an error?
2ion 10y ago
I've started working through the TeX Book for educational purposes about a year ago. It obviously lays the foundation for a deep understanding of TeX/LaTeX. If you're still getting surprised by syntax or the macro system in general, you can skip the chapters which go into minute detail and still take a lot of interesting things away: layouting commands, page structure, units, registers, understanding memory limits and allocation, etc. That being said, LaTeX has its own kernel, on top of which comes a document class, on top which comes any number of packages. Each layer can alter or mask the lower layer, so understanding LaTeX on all its levels is a difficult task. Then, there are different implementations which add fundamental aspects to the Knuth reference TeX, like pdftex, luatex, xetex, and that does not even include platex, uplatex and other special things. The little things I know I learned by finding a package/class/command that does what I need, and then study how it does it. E.g. hyperref is a very interesting starting place (relates closely to how documents (DVI, PDF,...) are output), as is memoir or my favourite, microtype.

umbs 10y ago

I used Latex extensively in Univ for thesis and publishing papers. Since then, I forgot that knowledge and am having hard time picking it up. However, I briefly used www.sharelatex.com, is a web GUI (or WYSIWYG) type approach to Latex. It's a good project and makes using Latex slightly easier, but user must still know various packages, how to layout images etc. Nonetheless, sharelatex is a good effort and hope it benefits others.

boramalper 10y ago

If you are looking for a more coherent and better source, Wikibooks has an amazing Latex guide: https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX

yk 10y ago

It lacks the most important LaTeX tip, don't fight the machine. LaTeX is really good at getting documents that look 90% as good as an actual typesetter could make them look, if one can live with somewhat conservative looking documents. The last 10 percent, fixing margin width, changing paragraphs and so on, are incredibly hard with LaTeX. (Of course LaTeX defaults are a lot better than word, largely because LaTeX automatically uses consistent headers instead of sometime 15 pt and sometimes 16 pt underlined.)

pwdisswordfish 10y ago
Consistent header styles are doable with MS Word too. It's just that few people seem to learn that feature.
- yk 10y ago
  Yes, but there are 500 'features' in Word which are almost always really stupid ideas, an experienced graphics designer knows how to use them, 99% of Word users don't. In LaTeX you have to work to do something really stupid.
leephillips 10y ago
I get your point, but you're really exaggerating the difficulty of changing margins, paragraph spacing, and similar things. It's easy with straight LaTeX, and even easier with the "geometry" package.
- yk 10y ago
  Yes, to address to criticisms of your comments and siblings, in my experience if you start changing fonts, then you need to change margins and paragraph spacing, and down the rabbit hole you go. The thing is, a small change is not very complicated, but the defaults are also really good. So if you just want to get below a certain page limit, then it is easy to change the margin. If you start to wanting to improve the overall look of the document, then it is usually a much better idea to play with different packages were someone else already did the hard work instead of trying to improve details by yourself.

pwdisswordfish 10y ago

Most materials about LaTeX I tend to find on the web seem to be of the 'programming by StackOverflow' variety, i.e. 'copy this snippet of code, tweak it to your needs and compile'; they don't teach you about what the code actually does, how it interacts with everything else, and there is no syntax specification apart from series of digressions like 'oh, by the way, if you wish to achieve effect X, you can use option Y'. Unfortunately, even official documentation for LaTeX packages is often written that way (a major pleasant exception is the documentation for TikZ). In the short term, it may seem fine, but it inevitably comes back to bite the user later. The guide submitted here doesn't seem particularly different. For those wishing to learn some 'theoretical' TeX, I can recommend TeX by Topic.[0] It mentions LaTeX macros only in passing, but even that amount was quite helpful to me. [0] https://bitbucket.org/VictorEijkhout/tex-by-topic https://bitbucket.org/VictorEijkhout/tex-by-topic

semi-extrinsic 10y ago
I agree with the documentation issue. In addition to TikZ, the Memoir package manual is a pleasant surprise. It's really thorough, and I definitely recommend reading it if you are writing up your thesis in LaTeX.
- 2ion 10y ago
  Another well documented set of general-purpose classes are the KOMAscript document classes, catering mostly to European document conventions [1]. [1] https://www.ctan.org/pkg/koma-script https://www.ctan.org/pkg/koma-script
JadeNB 10y ago
Since this thread has turned into a discussion of nice documentation, I've always thought that beamer (http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/beamer/doc/beameruserguide.pdf http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/beamer/doc/beam...) 's is quite nice. I also second the recommendation for TeX by Topic, which is lovely. Grätzer's Math into LaTeX (https://archive.org/details/George_Gratzer__Math_Into_LaTeX https://archive.org/details/George_Gratzer__Math_Into_LaTeX) is nice but outdated, and Knuth's TeXbook (freely available, but only as source, at http://ctan.org/pkg/texbook http://ctan.org/pkg/texbook) is, of course, the original definitive resource. (Links to the other currently mentioned documentation: http://mirrors.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf http://mirrors.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf (of which TikZ is a sub-/co-package) and http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/memoir/memman.pdf http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/memoir/memman.p... ; and 2ion already linked to the KOMAScript documentation (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12830476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12830476).)

daemonk 10y ago

I personally really like using latex. But the main problem for me is that latex is not really designed for collaborative editing, especially with people who don't know latex. are there any track changes feature plugin/app that's available and relatively simple for people who mainly use MS word.

PleaseHelpMe 10y ago
checkout sharelatex.com
- daemonk 10y ago
  I've used sharelatex and overleaf. I find them great. But what people in my field want are tracked changes features that you see in MS word. So deleted/added text highlighted by who changed it, comment boxes, etc.
  - ves 10y ago
    Use latex with git, say on github. You get all those features and more, just with a UI that separates them from the document. I've collaborated on notes using latex before on github and PR discussions, inline comments, and git collaboration features like branching, descriptive commit messages and diffs, etc. are awesome for productivity. That said, everyone will need to know how to use latex, git, and GitHub, so gdocs certainly has a simpler workflow.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    With latexdiff (included with your LaTeX distribution) it's really easy to produce "track changes" PDFs. (That's the entire purpose of this tool.) With git it's very easy to checkout the .tex file from an arbitrary commit. There are even wrappers that integrate this with git, so just "git latexdiff HEAD~5 HEAD" will give you a "track changes" PDF between the current version and the one from five commits ago. I've used this on complex papers where editors have requested it, and it works fine. Once I had to manually tweak the .tex file produced by latexdiff, but it was a very complex use case (packages added and removed between versions) and pretty easy to fix.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ArmandGrillet 10y ago

Spoiler alert: you will not master LaTeX (nor anything) in minutes. I have written my master thesis on sharelatex.com, the first months have been painful but at the end I had a great feeling of having achieved something. I still not consider that I master LaTeX but at least I can now use it for any standard documents and draw graphs and math formulas with ease. I really suggest developers to use LaTeX to create their resume because it looks really professional and personal (if you do not just use a standard template). It takes some time but you will get exactly what you want and learn many things along the way.

PleaseHelpMe 10y ago
The author has updated the Title of the repo. It's now begin not master anymore lol
sotojuan 10y ago
Even years after Norvig's essay people still attempt to master skills in days or less!
- yannis 10y ago
  Here is an alternative way to master LaTeX http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/5713/963 http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/5713/963.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

mixedmath 10y ago

A better title would be "How to produce a simple LaTeX document in minutes". Or perhaps even "Another brief LaTeX tutorial". When I first began to use LaTeX long ago, a friend of mine gave me a preamble and essentially told me to not touch it until I knew better. This was very helpful to me, and I immediately began to use LaTeX in a mindset that separated content from presentation. Later, I did know better, but I'd already gotten the gist of what's going on. Years later, when I introduce LaTeX to others (which I have frequently done), I follow the same starting path.

1wd 10y ago

Just don't try anything that isn't in your typical math paper. There are thousands of LaTeX packages, because they are all broken if you use them in a slightly unexpected way, so (reminiscent of JavaScript) a new package is created to "fix" it. Tables? Here you go. Oh, you wanted nested tables? For that you need to switch to an entirely different package. Oh, and that one doesn't support splitting up tables over multiple pages. Maybe this new one can do it. But it doesn't support that other package you use. Maybe try that one instead. Oh, in that one you can't have ... Or is that just me?

zzleeper 10y ago
Not just you. Tables are a huge mess, and for every package I add to my .tex file to fix a problem, two new problems pop up.. (oh you added package a at the end? It will fail, because package b loaded package C which defined the same macro names, and of course every macro is global...
- pvaldes 10y ago
  In 15 years using latex I thing that I had problems with the order of packages in one or two cases (and they were documented, so it was my fault in fact). The situation that you claim is not common at all. All that you need basically for tables is booktabs and, in very specific cases, longtable.
  - zzleeper 10y ago
    Not really... \usepackage{tabulary} gives me the X column type \usepackage{multirow} does what the name says \usepackage{longtable} is the most useful one \usepackage{booktabs} adds -toprule-, -midrule-, -bottomrule- \usepackage{threeparttable} adds titles and notes to tables \usepackage{threeparttablex} extends -threeparttable- to work with -longtable \usepackage{siunitx} allows decimal alignment \usepackage{array} some table column types require arraybackslash \usepackage{varwidth} helps in setting a max column type \usepackage{ragged2e} because \raggedright used in table footnotes would otherwise break hyphenation \usepackage{afterpage} defers typesetting of the longtable environment to the top of the next page \usepackage{etoolbox} helps to write monospace numbers in tables And then I add all the newcommands, and end up with pretty tables but very fragile wrt changes in the latex environment

amelius 10y ago

Sometimes I wonder: why can't LaTeX be just as simple as HTML, or perhaps even simpler? Except perhaps for pagination and available default fonts, HTML practically fulfills all my formatting needs. (Note: HTML includes MathML, a mathematical formula markup language). And for automatically numbering tables and figures, one can easily write a script that is completely independent from the underlying formatting language.

pjmlp 10y ago
It is called DITA and Docbook, but they are designed to be toolable. Writting them manually is not a good idea, at all.
ezequiel-garzon 10y ago
I've always wondered the opposite: why don't major browsers implement (La)TeX formulas, given they are a de facto standard? I mean something like MathJax, but available with JavaScript disabled. Don't trigger it with $, but maybe with something more odd, like $@ ... @$, or similar.
yannis 10y ago
Try writing a 300 page book in HTML, create citations and bibliographies, table of contents etc. Then convert it to a pdf, say using Pandoc and then you will have a better understanding where TeX/LaTeX fits in. Write also some complicated formulae using MathML. Save the document and render it again in 30 years! TeX was designed to typeset a document always the same way on any machine that could run it. You can typeset any of Knuth's papers from the 80s and they can still compile today. Maths as Barbara is fond of saying has a long shelf life.
- amelius 10y ago
  I'm not saying that HTML is totally suitable, but a slight modification of it could be, and it would be a lot simpler to use than TeX. And who says that it could not be rendered in the same way in 30 years? By the way, the one thing that disappoints me most about LaTeX is that you often cannot nest one environment in another without running into issues. In HTML the "composability" is much better.

0xmohit 10y ago

Just wondering if people here use ConTeXt [0] as well? I've personally found it somewhat easier to manage floats in ConTeXt as compared to TeX/PDFTex. [0] http://wiki.contextgarden.net/What_is_ConTeXt http://wiki.contextgarden.net/What_is_ConTeXt

CalChris 10y ago

This is a good beginner doc. I'd never used LaTeX until about a year ago when I needed it to write a paper. The first thing I wondered was how to install it. Surely in 2015 installation would be a snap. It'd be in the App Store. Or Homebrew. Do not install LaTeX. Use it in the cloud. I use www.overleaf.com which is awesome. Similarly, I use www.draw.io to create PDFs for my drawings. \usepackage{microtype} \usepackage[hang,font=bf]{caption} \usepackage{natbib} \usepackage[unicode=true]{hyperref} \usepackage[noabbrev,capitalise,nameinlink]{cleveref} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{csquotes} \usepackage{minted} \usepackage{inconsolata} \usemintedstyle{bw} \usepackage{float} \usepackage{siunitx} \usepackage{booktabs} \usepackage{url} \usepackage{graphicx} \usepackage{textcomp} \usepackage{fixltx2e} The one thing I'd add to this tutorial is citations and bibliographies.

gaur 10y ago
Biblatex is better than bibtex.
tagrun 10y ago
What? Do install LaTeX. I don't know (and frankly don't care) how hard it is under Windows, Mac or Android, but it has been readily available from the package managers with GNU/* and most BSDs for decades, easy to install and use. There are plenty of editors like gummi, kile, texmacs or lyx. Seriously. You're asking people to give up their freedoms for what? To avoid typing a single line "sudo apt-get install gummi texlive-latex-base"? I personally do stay away from "cloud"y things (or whatever buzzword you prefer for SaaSS in the stylish Apple-land), and recommend people that I care about around me to do so: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
- detaro 10y ago
  Windows has easy-to-use distributions of LaTeX as well (e.g. MikTex).
- kevindong 10y ago
  I personally use www.sharelatex.com (which is open sourced under the AGPL license). Downloading LaTeX locally on macOS (or rather, Mac OS X as it was called at the time) is not very difficult. As I recall, it's basically just: download this .pkg file, run it, and you're set. That being said, I did _not_ enjoy having LaTeX installed locally. It wasn't harmful, it just wasn't at all beneficial compared to using an online LaTeX service. The install size is easily tens of thousands of files (totalling a couple GBs), most of which are only a couple hundred KBs each. The vast majority of those files went unused. It clogged up my file system, gave me a marginal amount of benefits, and figuring out how to change the config files to do one _tiny_ thing was horrifically difficult. As a result, I migrated to using ShareLaTeX. It was just simpler than having to manage the install myself. The value proposition of a (hosted instance of) ShareLaTeX is that I can use LaTeX from any computer (connected to the Internet) to access any of my automatically synchronized files and have an automatically updated install of LaTeX. I personally found that value proposition worthwhile.

andrepd 10y ago

An important correction: don't use TexMaker, it's no longer actively developed. Use TexStudio (http://www.texstudio.org/ http://www.texstudio.org/), the fork/continuation of that project. Much more polished, performant, and many more convenient features.

nyankosensei 10y ago

Has anyone tried the Lout typesetting program? I worked with it several years ago and was very impressed. Mark Summerfield uses it for his programming books: https://www.qtrac.eu/lout.html https://www.qtrac.eu/lout.html

curiousgal 10y ago

Surprised no one mentioned TeXworks[0] as an alternative for easy installation. 0.https://www.tug.org/texworks/ https://www.tug.org/texworks/

apathy 10y ago

Overleaf.com is really nice too, if you work with others (e.g. on academic papers). The most painless papers I've ever written were with other competent people using LaTeX and overleaf. ShareLatex is good too, I'm not sure if you can autosubmit to journals and preprint servers with it though. That last feature is terrific for academics -- it's how publishing should work, but usually doesn't. I spent the same amount of time (72 hours) getting one hairy equation laid out in Word that I spent compiling my entire dissertation in LaTeX. Naturally the former was a request from my adviser, who did the latter back when she was a student. Dammit. If you have any serious math in your writing, nothing else comes close. (Protip: Mathematica, the only non-free software package that ever earned its keep for me, will directly export equation cells as LaTeX if you ask nicely. I can't stand doing tedious symbolic manipulation without it.)

cyphar 10y ago
Note that Overleaf.com is proprietary, while ShareLaTeX is completely free software under the AGPL (and self-hostable).
- apathy 10y ago
  Absolutely true, and although I did pay for Overleaf at first, I stopped paying when I realized I didn't need the for-pay features anyhow. They made a conscious decision to focus on internal development and I'm OK with that -- Google isn't open-source either (certainly not all of it, and when I was there, very little of it), and I'm OK with that too. https://www.overleaf.com/help/17-is-overleaf-open-source#.WBZSuhIrKkA https://www.overleaf.com/help/17-is-overleaf-open-source#.WB... An open-source business that doesn't survive (cough ReplicaDB cough) isn't necessarily better than a closed-but-extensible one that does. LaTeX itself is, and anything you're working on within Overleaf can be exported as text at any time, so I don't worry so much about lock-in. The underlying toolchain (LaTeX and packages) is fully OSS, and isn't going anywhere; I have supported the LyX project in the past, and indeed that's how I laid out my dissertation, but in the end I find Overleaf more usable. I still wish they'd support Markdown, though. Sometimes I just want to run off a quick, properly typeset series of equations and lists/tables without all the boilerplate. I suppose you could make the argument "well, if it was OSS, you could just patch it yourself!", and you wouldn't be wrong. But we use the autosubmit feature a lot, so on balance I've decided I can live with this shortcoming.

santaclaus 10y ago

I still wake up from nightmares about pages upon pages of overfull hboxs...

good_gnu 10y ago

Tip for people who want to compile LaTeX from the command line: latexmk is basically a build tool for latex, which can also do things like incremental compilation and listen for changes. It's part of MacTex and can also be installed with the package manager of your choice if you use texlive. Another tip: If you usually write markdown, pandoc can turn Markdown interspersed with LaTeX code into pdfs.

thanatropism 10y ago

At my school overleaf.com is the standard. Some professors are git-savvy, but most use overleaf to keep tabs and comment on dissertations.

paradite 10y ago

The author mentioned ShareLaTeX but not the other popular cloud service overleaf. I actually would have done the same given my experience with both. Recently I tried out overleaf in order to allow others to collaborate on a paper. However, what was compiling perfectly fine on my local machine just refused to compile on overleaf, keep throwing me error related to $ symbol even though I did not use $ symbol at all (I used my own bst and cls). After googling for 30 minutes without finding a fix, I gave up and turned to the alternative, ShareLaTeX. It compiled perfectly with no errors on the first try.

cyphar 10y ago
Note that ShareLaTeX is entirely free software licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License[1]. Which makes it much better than most cloud services (you can self-host it if you want). In particular, it looks like overlaf is not free software which is pretty ridiculous given the competition[2]. [1]: https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex [2]: https://www.overleaf.com/help/17-is-overleaf-open-source https://www.overleaf.com/help/17-is-overleaf-open-source
jdleesmiller 10y ago
(Co-founder of Overleaf here.) Sorry to hear you had a bad experience --- we run a standard install of TeX Live, so that's surprising. If you try Overleaf again, feel free to send your project's link to our support team via www.overleaf.com/contact, and they can help you fix any issues.
- paradite 10y ago
  Good to hear that. I've sent it via www.overleaf.com/contact and I hope this would help your team figure out why.

user5994461 10y ago

Stupid question: Outside of the maths heavy documents, could markdown or restructuredtext be a substitute to Latex nowadays? It is a lot easier to learn and use.

xapata 10y ago
LaTeX is more like XML or HTML than Markdown or rST. One could duplicate the functionality of LaTeX with a superset of rST or Markdown. Case in point: Sphinx. That's essentially writing your documents in a combination of rST and Python.
seanlane 10y ago
I use Pandoc [1] to write in Markdown and then have it converted into LaTeX. There's been some bumps, but it seems to let me have (most of) the best of both worlds. This post was the inspiration for using it: http://kesdev.com/you-got-latex-in-my-markdown/ http://kesdev.com/you-got-latex-in-my-markdown/ [1] http://pandoc.org/ http://pandoc.org/
tomrod 10y ago
I switched from beamer (LaTeX) to markdown + pandoc for that very reason. Beamer was just too command heavy to be useful for quick slides.
mharrison 10y ago
I have written all of my books (Treading on Python, Pandas, etc) in restructuredtext. I have tools that convert said markup to epub and LaTeX[0]. There is some learning curve, but you can get LaTeX out of rst from docutils, Sphinx, or my tools. 0 - https://github.com/mattharrison/rst2nitrile https://github.com/mattharrison/rst2nitrile

graycat 10y ago

I just use TeX, never LaTeX. With TeX, the documentation is shorter and, IMHO, better written. That is, get to concentrate on just Knuth's The TeXBook -- nicely done technical writing. With LaTeX, I suspect that really should also know the underlying TeX, but with some understanding of TeX can do just fine without LaTeX and all its extra considerations.

biswaroop 10y ago

A latex tip: hover over equations in Wikipedia to get the syntax.

ankitbko 10y ago

I love the licence he has included. Rarely see it used anywhere.

arca_vorago 10y ago

For those of you who like latex output but find learning it daunting, give emacs org mode a try, as it can export to latex easily, and you can always break into actual latex inside org if you are doing something more complicated.

ajarmst 10y ago

While I applaud the effort, this sort of thing suffers from the same problem any "quick introduction" to something rich and complex has: it's easy to see the complexity and discern the unfamiliarity, but requires effort to discern the value. No one has ever been convinced of the value of TeX/LaTeX, Vim, Emacs, Awk, Lex, Lisp, etc. by a fifteen minute intro. They're convinced by pushing themselves (or being forced) to use the tool for a substantial period of time (usually weeks) over several significant projects until they discovered the familiarity, power and utility that it affords people who are sufficiently familiar with the tool. In a machine shop, a lathe isn't an obvious choice for a project until you already know how to use a lathe.