9 ms·

>No it's not. Yes, it is. That's like saying I prefer bash because it's the same on all platform as opposed to windows proprietary UI. Is latex powerful? Yes.

by philtar 10y ago

>No it's not. Yes, it is. That's like saying I prefer bash because it's the same on all platform as opposed to windows proprietary UI. Is latex powerful? Yes. Is it easy? Not for the average user.

itazula 10y ago
The "average" user isn't aware of the alternative that is LaTeX. Watching a few tutorials is an easy way to start. For example, see https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/latex-guides/beginners-tutorial.html https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/latex-guides/beginners-tutor... and go from there.
adimitrov 10y ago
> Is latex powerful? Yes. Is it easy? Not for the average user. Have you tried writing technical reports in Word? It's a nightmare. Word's numbering and reference functionality, not to mention its citation functions are way worse than what you can achieve with TeX. Cooperating on writing the same document with many people? Yeah, forget about it. One guy has Mac OS with one Word version and then you have three others with different combinations of Windows/Word, and the whole thing implodes in a cascade of formatting glitches. Also, I'd say that if you can't write your technical report in LaTeX because LaTeX is too hard, let's go shopping (in the Microsoft App Store), then maybe you shouldn't be writing a technical report. Not to mention that nobody has to write an ounce of LaTeX since the advent of pandoc.
- wallacoloo 10y ago
  Saying that the alternatives are hard does not do anything to prove that LaTeX is easy. When you make a syntax error (missing closing brace, forgot to escape that underscore, etc), what's the probability that the latex error message will be at all relevant to the source of the error? It's pretty damn low. In my experience, debugging LaTeX is anything but easy.
  - adimitrov 10y ago
    Yes, typesetting documents isn't easy, and it takes skill. Yes, LaTeX's error reporting is a bloody mess straight out of the 80s. Word may make it easier to half-ass something. But its error reporting is way worse than LaTeX's — it doesn't have any. If something's fucked up, it's fucked up, and good luck finding out what you did wrong. Writing a consistently styled, readable and good looking document in Word is anything but easy. So we're back to square one: typesetting a document is hard, and there is no software solution that makes it easy (for simple stuff, pandoc comes close.) You'll have to learn to do it.
- IshKebab 10y ago
  Have you tried writing technical reports in LyX? It's not a nightmare and you can see what it looks like.
- raesene6 10y ago
  To provide a counterpoint, I've been writing Technical reports in word for about 15 years, using it for about 20, works fine for most things I've seen. Like any complex program there are things to learn and quirks to get used to, but it can be a very powerful platform once you get past that.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
adrianN 10y ago
For an average document that doesn't do anything special, Latex is extremely simple. It only gets complicated if you want to deviate from the design that your document class uses by default. The average user of course doesn't even know what the difference between a text editor and MS Word is but I'd argue that it's not much harder to learn using something like LyX than learning Word. Word only wins because of peer pressure. Almost all offices use MS Office, so you're expected to use that, even for documents where simple Markdown would be completely sufficient.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > It only gets complicated if you want to deviate from the design that your document class uses by default. Which is always, because defaults are ugly as hell. Might work for math papers, but not much else. My only real issue with LaTeX though is its error reporting, which is less readable than C++ template metaprogramming fails, and the fact you have to compile the same file $magic times in a row to get a stable render.
  - railorsi 10y ago
    > Which is always, because defaults are ugly as hell. Might work for math papers, but not much else. There are shittons of templates.
  - scatty 10y ago
    > My only real issue with LaTeX though is its error reporting, which is less readable than C++ template metaprogramming fails Oh, that's so true. I've spend far to many hours trying to help debug LaTeX code from friends and coworkers. I'd give Office users that MS Office is easier to use if you want to write one page of plain text without anything else but above that Office is just a huge pain in the a... But the biggest problem I have with Office isn't whether it's hard to use or not but that the text it produces is simply ugly. Especially so if you have to work between different versions of MS Office and maybe even an OO user within the loop. (That would than probably be me...) The text layout MS Office produces is simply hideous.
  - adrianN 10y ago
iveqy 10y ago
I would say it's a huge difference between easy to use and easy to learn. LaTeX is easy to use, but not easy to learn.
pqs 10y ago
Maybe LaTeX is not easy, but writing a scientific PhD dissertation in LaTeX is easier than doing so in Word. I did it in LaTeX. I had no problems. My wife did it in Word, and we both spend hours trying to solve tons of stupid Word related problems. edits: typos.
- dagw 10y ago
  Writing a dissertation in word is fine. Preparing for a dissertation for print in word is a pain in the ass. The 'correct' way to do it is to write in Word, do citations in Endnote, and then lay the whole thing out in InDesign.
- CmdrSprinkles 10y ago
  And for actual publications and the like, latex is indeed awesome and there is a strong argument for superiority. But the ``problem'' is people who insist on using it for everything. Have a memo? Better set up a repo. Writing a report for a manger? Latex! With the simpler things where you won't be cross referencing constantly and any figures that you have you want absolute control over placement, Word is the way to go. And pretty much the moment you are done your dissertation, that is the majority of what you'll write. Even in academia you'll likely spend more time writing grants and memos than papers. And, with at least the former, what matters most is having the figure easily seen and fitting the format requirements (specifically page count). Use the best tool for any given job.
  - sidarape 10y ago
    I agree. The other day, I had to write a 1-page project proposal for a PhD scholarship and they were giving the font to use and its size, and the margins. I had almost no mathematical symbol to use. One of the professors said that it looks unprofessional to not use Latex. I mean, I could have use Latex and I would have looked like exactly the same given the requirements. I just did it in LibreOffice because that was really the simplest I could have done.
    - ssivark 10y ago
wietze 10y ago
Let me be the guy that brings this article in: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115069 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... "LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text, made more typesetting, grammatical, and formatting errors"
- MereInterest 10y ago
  Also, the usual rebuttal to that article. http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/219581 http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/219581. Anything that did not perfectly reproduce the typesetting of a reference document, they counted as a typesetting error. Any word placement at the end of one line as opposed to the start of the next, for example. The sort of thing that LaTeX handles automatically, and better than humans.
- nekopa 10y ago
  Murphy's law in action, there was a correction made to the paper you quote, so I clicked through to see what was corrected: Notice of Republication This article was republished on March 30, 2015, to correct the sizing and placement of the figures; none of the article content was changed. The publisher apologizes for the original layout errors. Please download this article again to view the corrected version. The originally published, uncorrected article and the republished, corrected article are provided here for reference.
- thanatropism 10y ago
  > made more typesetting Agh, I keep on making the mistake of doing homework directly to LaTeX. It seems that you're able to think directly from the page but it ultimately slows you down. I know way too much about mathematical typesetting as it is -- before I start making up rules about how Expectation should be \mathsf{E} and writing huge custom command files. This one exam I started doing all the exercises in the book into LaTeX. As an aspiring mathematician, I need to learn to better appreciate pencil and paper.
ryandrake 10y ago
I agree. I consider myself a fairly technical guy. Given the breathless praise for it anytime it's mentioned, I've tried to get into LaTeX off and on throughout the years, but it's just a massive learning cliff. I still haven't figured out how to change formatting or fonts, so every document I write in it has that standard "PhD dissertation" look. I can pick up a new programming language in a weekend, but I still don't "get" TeX.
- fdgdasfadsf 10y ago
  Search online for "xelatex". It's latex for the 21st century.
titanix2 10y ago
Maybe it's not when writing plain English, but as soon as you want to include tricky Unicode characters it's not anymore. I spend hours trying to fix bugs for my master dissertation and gave up with two unfixed problems: (1) missing line breaking in references containing accentuated characters and (2) including some non BMP code-point character. And some package can mess up with some other packages so coming with a solution can sometime break another thing.

by philtar 10y ago

>No it's not. Yes, it is. That's like saying I prefer bash because it's the same on all platform as opposed to windows proprietary UI. Is latex powerful? Yes. Is it easy? Not for the average user.

itazula 10y ago

The "average" user isn't aware of the alternative that is LaTeX. Watching a few tutorials is an easy way to start. For example, see https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/latex-guides/beginners-tutorial.html https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/latex-guides/beginners-tutor... and go from there.

adimitrov 10y ago

> Is latex powerful? Yes. Is it easy? Not for the average user. Have you tried writing technical reports in Word? It's a nightmare. Word's numbering and reference functionality, not to mention its citation functions are way worse than what you can achieve with TeX. Cooperating on writing the same document with many people? Yeah, forget about it. One guy has Mac OS with one Word version and then you have three others with different combinations of Windows/Word, and the whole thing implodes in a cascade of formatting glitches. Also, I'd say that if you can't write your technical report in LaTeX because LaTeX is too hard, let's go shopping (in the Microsoft App Store), then maybe you shouldn't be writing a technical report. Not to mention that nobody has to write an ounce of LaTeX since the advent of pandoc.

wallacoloo 10y ago
Saying that the alternatives are hard does not do anything to prove that LaTeX is easy. When you make a syntax error (missing closing brace, forgot to escape that underscore, etc), what's the probability that the latex error message will be at all relevant to the source of the error? It's pretty damn low. In my experience, debugging LaTeX is anything but easy.
- adimitrov 10y ago
  Yes, typesetting documents isn't easy, and it takes skill. Yes, LaTeX's error reporting is a bloody mess straight out of the 80s. Word may make it easier to half-ass something. But its error reporting is way worse than LaTeX's — it doesn't have any. If something's fucked up, it's fucked up, and good luck finding out what you did wrong. Writing a consistently styled, readable and good looking document in Word is anything but easy. So we're back to square one: typesetting a document is hard, and there is no software solution that makes it easy (for simple stuff, pandoc comes close.) You'll have to learn to do it.
IshKebab 10y ago
Have you tried writing technical reports in LyX? It's not a nightmare and you can see what it looks like.
raesene6 10y ago
To provide a counterpoint, I've been writing Technical reports in word for about 15 years, using it for about 20, works fine for most things I've seen. Like any complex program there are things to learn and quirks to get used to, but it can be a very powerful platform once you get past that.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

adrianN 10y ago

For an average document that doesn't do anything special, Latex is extremely simple. It only gets complicated if you want to deviate from the design that your document class uses by default. The average user of course doesn't even know what the difference between a text editor and MS Word is but I'd argue that it's not much harder to learn using something like LyX than learning Word. Word only wins because of peer pressure. Almost all offices use MS Office, so you're expected to use that, even for documents where simple Markdown would be completely sufficient.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> It only gets complicated if you want to deviate from the design that your document class uses by default. Which is always, because defaults are ugly as hell. Might work for math papers, but not much else. My only real issue with LaTeX though is its error reporting, which is less readable than C++ template metaprogramming fails, and the fact you have to compile the same file $magic times in a row to get a stable render.
- railorsi 10y ago
  > Which is always, because defaults are ugly as hell. Might work for math papers, but not much else. There are shittons of templates.
- scatty 10y ago
  > My only real issue with LaTeX though is its error reporting, which is less readable than C++ template metaprogramming fails Oh, that's so true. I've spend far to many hours trying to help debug LaTeX code from friends and coworkers. I'd give Office users that MS Office is easier to use if you want to write one page of plain text without anything else but above that Office is just a huge pain in the a... But the biggest problem I have with Office isn't whether it's hard to use or not but that the text it produces is simply ugly. Especially so if you have to work between different versions of MS Office and maybe even an OO user within the loop. (That would than probably be me...) The text layout MS Office produces is simply hideous.
- adrianN 10y ago

iveqy 10y ago

I would say it's a huge difference between easy to use and easy to learn. LaTeX is easy to use, but not easy to learn.

pqs 10y ago

Maybe LaTeX is not easy, but writing a scientific PhD dissertation in LaTeX is easier than doing so in Word. I did it in LaTeX. I had no problems. My wife did it in Word, and we both spend hours trying to solve tons of stupid Word related problems. edits: typos.

dagw 10y ago
Writing a dissertation in word is fine. Preparing for a dissertation for print in word is a pain in the ass. The 'correct' way to do it is to write in Word, do citations in Endnote, and then lay the whole thing out in InDesign.
CmdrSprinkles 10y ago
And for actual publications and the like, latex is indeed awesome and there is a strong argument for superiority. But the ``problem'' is people who insist on using it for everything. Have a memo? Better set up a repo. Writing a report for a manger? Latex! With the simpler things where you won't be cross referencing constantly and any figures that you have you want absolute control over placement, Word is the way to go. And pretty much the moment you are done your dissertation, that is the majority of what you'll write. Even in academia you'll likely spend more time writing grants and memos than papers. And, with at least the former, what matters most is having the figure easily seen and fitting the format requirements (specifically page count). Use the best tool for any given job.
- sidarape 10y ago
  I agree. The other day, I had to write a 1-page project proposal for a PhD scholarship and they were giving the font to use and its size, and the margins. I had almost no mathematical symbol to use. One of the professors said that it looks unprofessional to not use Latex. I mean, I could have use Latex and I would have looked like exactly the same given the requirements. I just did it in LibreOffice because that was really the simplest I could have done.
  - ssivark 10y ago

wietze 10y ago

Let me be the guy that brings this article in: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115069 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... "LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text, made more typesetting, grammatical, and formatting errors"

MereInterest 10y ago
Also, the usual rebuttal to that article. http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/219581 http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/219581. Anything that did not perfectly reproduce the typesetting of a reference document, they counted as a typesetting error. Any word placement at the end of one line as opposed to the start of the next, for example. The sort of thing that LaTeX handles automatically, and better than humans.
nekopa 10y ago
Murphy's law in action, there was a correction made to the paper you quote, so I clicked through to see what was corrected: Notice of Republication This article was republished on March 30, 2015, to correct the sizing and placement of the figures; none of the article content was changed. The publisher apologizes for the original layout errors. Please download this article again to view the corrected version. The originally published, uncorrected article and the republished, corrected article are provided here for reference.
thanatropism 10y ago
> made more typesetting Agh, I keep on making the mistake of doing homework directly to LaTeX. It seems that you're able to think directly from the page but it ultimately slows you down. I know way too much about mathematical typesetting as it is -- before I start making up rules about how Expectation should be \mathsf{E} and writing huge custom command files. This one exam I started doing all the exercises in the book into LaTeX. As an aspiring mathematician, I need to learn to better appreciate pencil and paper.

ryandrake 10y ago

I agree. I consider myself a fairly technical guy. Given the breathless praise for it anytime it's mentioned, I've tried to get into LaTeX off and on throughout the years, but it's just a massive learning cliff. I still haven't figured out how to change formatting or fonts, so every document I write in it has that standard "PhD dissertation" look. I can pick up a new programming language in a weekend, but I still don't "get" TeX.

fdgdasfadsf 10y ago
Search online for "xelatex". It's latex for the 21st century.

titanix2 10y ago

Maybe it's not when writing plain English, but as soon as you want to include tricky Unicode characters it's not anymore. I spend hours trying to fix bugs for my master dissertation and gave up with two unfixed problems: (1) missing line breaking in references containing accentuated characters and (2) including some non BMP code-point character. And some package can mess up with some other packages so coming with a solution can sometime break another thing.