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What should be step 1: it's 2017, you want XeLaTeX or LuaTeX, both capable of native unicode handling, using fonts by name, etc. Traditional LaTeX (and I use "t
by TheRealPomax 10y ago
What should be step 1: it's 2017, you want XeLaTeX or LuaTeX, both capable of native unicode handling, using fonts by name, etc. Traditional LaTeX (and I use "traditional" with scorn as we've had XeLaTeX for almost 15 years now), relying on the ancient pdftex engine, might be "easier to google" (let alone remember), but is also not an acceptable thing to recommend to people if all they want to do is control their typesetting.
It's like talking about how hard it is to work with browsers and then telling people the best way to set up IE8, instead of using a modern browser.
Of course it's still you in the typesetting driving seat, it's never going to be as easy as Word, but I'm writing a novella in XeLaTeX right now, not even maths papers, and it's almost child's play to make it do what I want with minimal effort. My entire "complicated setup" is five lines plus one line that's me being completely unreasonable, with XeTeX going "sure, be that way":
\documentclass[11pt, oneside]{book}
\usepackage{tocloft}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\pagestyle{plain}
\usepackage[b5paper, bindingoffset=0mm, inner=23mm, outer=23mm, top=21mm, bottom=24mm]{geometry}
\input{quotation-rules.tex}
And that's it, the rest of the document is basically just a giant text file of paragraph after paragraph of normal text, using normal as-per-unicode accented letters saved in UTF8. The doc's certainly interspersed with \part{} and \chapter{} markers because that's how a story works, but there is nothing I couldn't explain to my mom in there: I'm writing a "book" with a table of content, a reasonable looking page header but otherwise plain styling, with some explicit page dimensions (which is no different from using Word for a specific page size).
(the only unreasonable demand being that "\input" line, which imports a set of rules for using "Palatino Linotype" as main font, but then pulling the punctuation glyphs from "Sylfaen". So stuff like full stops, apostrophes, commas, double quotes, etc. And even for something seemingly as complex as that, is just a few more lines using modern XeLaTeX)
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y agoI've spent time on LuaTeX, and I'd really like to understand changing the font. For example I can list them with: mtxrun --script font --list --all But when I try to use "gonormal" ( \definefontfamily [myfam] [tf] [gornormal] ) I get: "The requested font 'gonormal' has no files for the 'tf' alternative, Latin Modern is used instead."
- TheRealPomax 10y ago\usepackage{fontspec} and you're done. \setmainfont{Palatino Linotype} to just use that, \newfontfamily\secondary{Times New Roman} now you can just stick in {\fontspec{\secondary} blah blah blah} for bits you need styled in a different font for a few words/sentences/paragraphs/however much you need. And if you need the automatic TeX style replacements (like turning `` into opening quotes - personally, I hate that, I'm writing text, not programming - then you can pass in TeX mapping instructions in [...] blocks, covered by the fontspec manual: \setmainfont[Ligatures=TeX]{Font By Name} and \newfontfamily\whateveryoucallit{Font by Name}[Ligatures=TeX])
- maksimum 10y agoBesides native UTF support and fonts what advantages do the XeLaTeX and LuaTeX ecosystems offer over LaTeX? You mention writing a novella as your use case, but I don't think that's a particularly difficult task for a typesetting engine. If you found typesetting a textbook with "rich" margins, annotations, and figures significantnly easier I would be more inclined to learn about alternatives. With LaTeX I can transform my research papers to comply with a publisher's template in a few lines of code. Sure there are some annoyances such as compile compile bibtex compile, but the ecosystem is mature enough that most of these are well handled.
- jhanschoo 10y agoFor the use case where your journal/publisher has a desired LaTeX template, it's probably more pain than it's worth. For works that have to handle multiple scripts, and for works wherein you are in control of your own typography, it's more logical and practical to work with XeLaTeX/LuaLaTeX. If you wish to use OpenType or TrueType fonts there's little debate. If you want to go the whole nine yards regarding Unicode, there's recently been some development regarding Unicode math, with the first impetus being Microsoft and its Cambria Math to support mathematical typesetting in Word. Unicode math refers to fonts implementing mathematical symbols as Unicode glyphs, as well as some font-side logic regarding how the font renders math, afaik.
- TheRealPomax 10y agoNot really? XeLaTeX is "the LaTeX API (because it's an API built to be run by a TeX engine. LaTeX is built on TeX the same way jQuery is built on JavaScript) run using XeTeX" (the natively-unicode-aware TeX engine). So if your publisher has a LaTeX template, that's pretty much guaranteed to work just fine when you \usepackage it in XeLaTeX context. Needless to say, except it really does need to be said, that also means full Unicode Maths support (through \setmathfont{A normal font name} without needing TeX metrics nonsense because it's 2017) for any OpenType font with maths support (Cambria Math, XITS Math, etc. etc.)
- jhanschoo 10y ago
- KKKKkkkk1 10y agoWriting prose is easy no matter what tool you're using. Now try to typeset a matrix that has annotations for its rows and columns. Say something like m n [ A B ] m X = [ C D ] n [ E F ] n Achieving this in LaTeX deserves a dissertation in and of itself.
- brians 10y ago\documentclass{article} \usepackage{blkarray} \usepackage{amsmath} \begin{document} \[ X = \begin{blockarray}{rrr} m & n \\ \begin{block}{[rr]r} A & B & m \\ C & D & n \\ E & F & n \\ \end{block} \end{blockarray} \] \end{document}
- KKKKkkkk1 10y agoSweet! For some reason I remember having bad interactions between blkarray and other packages, but I can't reproduce anymore...
- progman 10y agoOr you can use TeXmacs [1], enter such arrays in WYSIWYG and export to LaTeX. [1] http://texmacs.org/tmweb/home/screenshots.en.html http://texmacs.org/tmweb/home/screenshots.en.html
- throwupperb247 10y agoThe result doesn't prove how arduous the process to find that out can be. Latex stackexchange is a rich recourse though, and your help is certainly welcome. I'd still call it LaTe-X :P