12 ms·

First introduction to LaTeX

461 points by rawland 9y ago

aethos 9y ago
While this is a decent guide, I find that being skillful in latex comes from memorizing many highly specific commands. I spend most of my time googling for things such as "How to use (a), (b), (c) for enumerating lists".
- tomcam 9y ago
  ...but this article is giving me the context I need to understand the Google results
  - chairmanwow 9y ago
    True enough. But I agree with OP in that being "good" with LaTeX is essentially just memorizing lots of commands. I've never written a document without having to constantly search for specific commands.
  - chairmanwow 9y ago
    True enough. But I agree with OP in that being "good" with LaTeX is essentially just memorizing lots of commands. I've never written a document without having to constantly search for specific commands.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- clishem 9y ago
  To answer your example question: \usepackage[shortlabels]{enumitem} Then you can simply use: \begin{enumerate}[(a)] \item The first item \item The second item \item The third etc \end{enumerate} Other label types are very intuitive this way. I could have pulled this from an old document I made, no memorizing neccesary. It is also very easy to find using a search engine, as I did in this case: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/208696/using-enumerate https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/208696/using-enumera...
- Pitarou 9y ago
  Have you tried using LyX? Or does LyX not really support the kind of things you want to do?
walrus1066 9y ago
A nice intro project is writing your CV in latex, using packages like https://github.com/xdanaux/moderncv https://github.com/xdanaux/moderncv
- sevensor 9y ago
  I don't know about that. Formatting a CV is so fiddly and LaTeX is at its best when you can relax your grip and let it do its job. I'd recommend writing something really simple. Take ten minutes and write up the notes from your last meeting. They'll look amazing, and there's basically no formatting required beyond perhaps bulleted lists. It's hard enough just to get over the hump of having source code that's distinct from your finished document, without jumping straight in to the least rewarding part of LaTeX, which is trying to make things look just how you pictured them.
  - LVB 9y ago
    For my last job change I rewrote my then-outdated resume in Latex using a modified version of the popular resume style. The reason was that I found the usual suspects (Word, Docs) just as fiddly with what I was trying to format, but without the clean evolution that a .tex file in a git repo provided. Getting this just right did take time, but I did it iteratively and now have an excellent base that is exactly how I want it, and something that looks better than the word processor templates. Overall it was a worthwhile investment IMHO.
    - Myrmornis 9y ago
      Thing is, one of the aims of LaTeX is to separate content from formatting. I'm guessing in that in your resume.tex, the layout is fairly tightly bound up with the content, but it would be great to hear I'm wrong! Like, if you want it to have a different number of columns, or put the job title and years together outdented in the left margin or whatever, can you do that? Or are you kind of relying on a particular choice of style file?
      - LVB 9y ago
tomcam 9y ago
Just in time! I use pandoc to generate PDF files from markdown, but it's not a straightforward process in any case but creating documents that look like Donald Knuth dashed them off in 1978. Pandoc is super flexible but your output goes through LaTeX templates so customizing them felt out of reach given my limited time--until now.
- skierscott 9y ago
  I also use Pandoc to convert markdown to latex. Markdown expressed the content clearest. I've also started generated latex PDFs via the Jupiter notebook. They have a quick and easy preview, plus markdown + latex math + code integration that's easy.
- javitury 9y ago
  Here is another one that prefers markdown with pandoc. IMHO, it's much better to use markdown generally and insert latex only when it is completely necessary. A latex usage example is creating a tikz picture or for introducing \pagebreak or \framebreak in pdfs or beamer presentations. For the rest of the cases, markdown is much less verbose and can accomplish the same.
- aqsalose 9y ago
  I very much like the idea of markdown-pandoc-latex-pdf toolchain (I use markdown for all non-math stuff), but setting up a math LaTeX template that works for anything other than the most basic documents was a pain, so I gave up. Is there some good ready-made templates around one could try without too much hassle?
- fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
  I used pandoc to generate latex from markdown while studying philosophy in graduate school, I even came up with a little executable tarball that generated a directory structure in the the way I wanted, with a shell script to handle building everything properly. I find that this route is best for documents that you are writing: you can focus on the content and use a nice markdown editor like Ulysses without having to worry too much about formatting. On the other hand, when I'm trying to typeset a pre-existing text for reading/distribution, I find it a lot easier to copy and paste the text into a latex template and then tweak it incrementally until everything looks the way I want it to.
Xcelerate 9y ago
I absolutely love ShareLaTeX. It's one of the few products that is kind of niche but does one thing and does it really well. I definitely get $8 a month worth out of their service. Having used MacTeX and similar products, ShareLaTeX is just a much smoother user experience. Not to mention their documentation is great and really gets to the point of what you are often trying to do. I've used their service on the last three research papers I've written and have been sharing the platform with different professors I work with. (I sound like a shill, but check my comment history — I'm not affiliated with them. Just a happy customer.)
- beck5 9y ago
  Thanks, you would be surprised what a big difference it makes when we hear nice things about ShareLaTeX. (I am a ShareLaTeX person)
  - maxnoe 9y ago
    You are doing great work. But what I cannot understand is, how you still recommend stuff like $$ in a new beginners guide in 2017. I had several moments in this tutorial where I thought: Oh, god. This got deprecated 20 years ago.
    - yzmtf2008 9y ago
      Out of curiosity, what should I use instead? And what are some tutorials that promote more modern techniques?
      - ajholyoake 9y ago
        \begin{equation} ... \end{equation}. Finding modern resources to learn LaTeX (and indeed TeX for macros etc) has been a perennial difficulty for me!
        occamrazor 9y ago
        Or \[ ... \] for unnumbered equations.
aceperry 9y ago
I tried to learn LaTex a long time ago when I was just getting started with Linux, but gave up when I found that I could use MS Word and get what I needed, without the steep learning curve. I'm sure LaTex is much better than Word for some things, but I've never needed anything as specialized as LaTex. In fact, I don't use 99% of what Word is capable of and most of the time I'm using a simple text editor or vim or atom.
- zuron7 9y ago
  LaTeX was never meant to be used as a word processor. It's amazing for Math and other scientific writing, but apart from that, it's just much faster to open up your basic Word Processor and get on to playing the keys.
  - sotojuan 9y ago
    The problem is that a lot of LaTeX zealots and fanboys tell you to use it as soon as you mention Word/Pages/Google Docs/etc. This can confuse beginners and the public in general as to what LaTeX is for.
    - taeric 9y ago
      Meh. The public, in general, has a hard time with Word, too. Which isn't to say that word processors aren't nice. I actually held off on learning LaTeX years ago because I didn't see the point. The fact that I can still reliably open my documents is huge, though. And it only takes training to learn to use it. For transient things that just don't matter? Yeah, they work fine. What irks a lot of us is how we typically are given yet another document sharing method for documents that have to be kept in sync with source. Worse, a SharePoint or workdocs link that only works from one of my browsers correctly and has horrendous correspondence features. So bad that collaboration typically is, pick someone from the team and they will completely own this.
      - foldr 9y ago
        >The fact that I can still reliably open my documents is huge, though I've had multiple instances where a document that compiled with one LaTeX installation didn't compile with another. It was always possible to fix after a certain amount of head-scratching, but LaTeX is a twisted network of packages that interact with each other in unpredictable ways, and there's no real guarantee that your LaTeX will still compile in 10 years.
ptaipale 9y ago
I love LaTeX, but I disagree about that WYSIWYM. It's really WYGIWYAF. What You Get Is What You Asked For.
- mynewtb 9y ago
  WYGIWLTWBFY What You Get Is What LaTeX Thought Was Best For You. So, images spreading to the margins of the page, a block of whitespace on the next page, lots of weird characters instead of your local characters and lots of more obscure stuff.
  - lol768 9y ago
    > lots of weird characters instead of your local characters Is that really an issue with xetex, though?
platz 9y ago
For pdf deliverables regarding things like a resume, I am wondering if it is just better to create an html document using FE web dev skills, and render it to pdf (having done the latex resume thing recently). i.e. for PDF's (like a resume), What are the advantages of latex over html+css->pdf? (This is assuming I don't care about things like table-of-contents generation or precise chapter-aware commands)
- hashhar 9y ago
  If you are generating the HTML using data from a JSON schema (like JSON Resume) then HTML is a good enough way since the data is easy to handle. Raw HTML would be a very big pain once you want to generate tailored resumes based on some input criteria. LaTeX and JSON schema based resumes both offer modularization and help with generation of tailored resumes. I don't find any other advantages IMO.
  - platz 9y ago
    i am not interested in json or resumes so much . its more html vs latex
- mynewtb 9y ago
  Nothing I can think of except for some typographic sugar that almost no one (except for other latex users or typography people) would notice. It really is not worth the frustration today.
  - taeric 9y ago
    I take issue with calling it a frustration. Especially since trying to get good page layouts with html is frustrating to me. That said, if you need any document, be it a résumé or anything else, and you need it tomorrow, use the tools you know. And don't feel bad about not knowing other tools. Trying to get up to speed on anything that is worthwhile quickly on a new too will almost certainly be frustrating. Even word processors.
- seanwilson 9y ago
ppidugu 9y ago
I feel this post could be edited to as "Learn a pinch of Latex in 30 minutes"....for some people title could be ambiguous...frankly we can't learn anything in 30 minutes...we just get a feel of any skills or concept....the concept of really learning is when we could put something to practical...if we couldn't put anything to practical its not learning but just skimming through the concepts.
- tomcam 9y ago
  Just did the whole intro and them some. You're right--but it's accompanied by a whole lot of other lessons that all take the same clear, humane, approach. I'm willing to accept a little hype for such a comprehensive presentation overall.
greeneggs 9y ago
Besides Googling for tricks, another way of learning LaTeX is to download the source code for nice-looking papers that you find on the arXiv. For example, for "Learning to learn by gradient descent by gradient descent" arXiv:1606.04474 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04474 https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04474), if you click on Download->Other formats, you get the latex source code and in this case also the Omnigraffle files for the diagrams.
DoctorOW 9y ago
This didn't really answer "Why Learn Latex?". It mentioned some of the benefits of Latex as a format but what reason do I have for not using some sort of Latex generator?
mhh__ 9y ago
I found that, for someone with programming experience, the core LaTeX is quite easy to teach. I use it for all my school projects, and ShareLaTeX just works. I also managed to use it(Nothing Fancy) collaboratively with a friend of mine, with only ~5min introduction (Although I was sat next to him, so not quite the same as learning it alone).
EvgeniyZh 9y ago
I've learned LaTeX by taking all lecture notes in LaTeX and googling all the stuff (or just leaving comment to google it later). Math was especially hard, but after a semester and a half I'm almost not googling and writing relatively complicated LaTeX as fast as regular text.
mythrwy 9y ago
I'd like to know LaTeX. And of course played with it a few times. The issue is, I write something that requires a document editor like once month (if) and it's usually a minimal number of pages. I do it so infrequently it's always a huge pain even using Libre Office. And every time I think "it really ought to be possible to do this with Vim" (which I suppose LaTex would solve, and that's a big plus). It's just the learning curve/benefit ratio isn't there yet.
- ams6110 9y ago
  Something like Markdown, Restructured Text, etc. might be better. I'd suggest Emacs org-mode too but not sure if anything like that is available for Vim.
Koshkin 9y ago
I wonder if Donald Knuth uses LaTeX or some other TeX macro package (e.g. Plain TeX).
- TheRealPomax 9y ago
  > Andrew: What set of tools do you use today for writing TAOCP? Do you use TeX? LaTeX? CWEB? Word processor? And what do you use for the coding? > Donald: My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine, using the conventions of TeX. I use tex, dvips, and gv to see the results, which appear on my screen almost instantaneously these days. I check my math with Mathematica. http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856 http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856
  - Koshkin 9y ago
    So, one of the greatest minds of our time uses Plain TeX, it seems. Given that his texts look more complex than any other mathematical texts that I have seen, why would anyone prefer to use LaTeX instead?
    - Ar-Curunir 9y ago
      Because most people do not have his great mind :P
    - ams6110 9y ago
      Well, he took a detour in writing TAOCP to invent TeX, because he felt other typesetting solutions were inadequate. So not surprising he uses plain TeX still. Most people prefer LaTeX becase plain TeX is rather more primitive -- for the same reason most people would choose C or a higher level language over assembly language for programming.
      - marvy 9y ago
        > most people would choose C or a higher level language over assembly language for programming And the inventor of TeX is not most people, and decided to invent an assembly language for his book, rather than using a high level language.
TheApexTheater 9y ago
Honest question: I tried using LaTeX for a homework assignment. I had already done all the work on some loose paper, but it was all over the place and thought LaTeX-ing it would help readability. It took me about three hours and I wasn't even halfway done (there were four questions and I had barely done the second one)... Is taking this long normal for LaTeX? or is it something you get better at with practice?
- cben 9y ago
  I wonder: did you spend much of this time on math formulas, or on "regular" typography like lists & headings? TeX math notation is the pretty much only game in town, and worth learning, but there are many ways to skip/ease the rest, might help your learning curve: - WYSIWYG with TeX math: Dropbox paper lets you press $$, type formula, press Enter; and I shudder to suggest it but I hear modern Word more or lets you type TeX math [https://superuser.com/a/509805/33415 https://superuser.com/a/509805/33415]. - WYSIWYM: Lyx, https://www.fiduswriter.org/ https://www.fiduswriter.org/, http://www.texts.io/ http://www.texts.io/ - Markdown with TeX math: there is alas no single standard syntax but tons of tools do support it: https://github.com/cben/mathdown/wiki/math-in-markdown https://github.com/cben/mathdown/wiki/math-in-markdown For conversion Pandoc is king, infinitely flexible, and can render through LaTeX, HTML or many other ways. * Markdown is unbtrusive enough that styling it in-place gives you a form of WYSIWYG. Several editors doing this (plus rendering formulas in-place): StackEdit, Typora, https://www.gitbook.com/editor https://www.gitbook.com/editor, Atom with https://atom.io/packages/preview-inline https://atom.io/packages/preview-inline (see also https://discuss.atom.io/t/19222 https://discuss.atom.io/t/19222), http://markdownnotes.com/ http://markdownnotes.com/, and my own https://mathdown.net https://mathdown.net - https://overleaf.com https://overleaf.com similarly has "rich text mode" that styles LaTeX source and renders formulas in-place. [https://www.overleaf.com/blog/81 https://www.overleaf.com/blog/81] - Other lightweights markups: there are too many, notably reStructuredText, asciidoc are popular and powerful. But I'd start with Markdown. I'm genuinely interested to hear your experiences if you try any of these...
- mturmon 9y ago
  I'm doubtful that using Latex for ephemeral stuff like math-heavy homework is a good use case. It's excellent for documents like journal papers and tech reports that you will be revising and distributing, and perhaps coming back to months later. It's also great for collaboration. I could see it working for a lab report. With mathematical homework, aren't you spending significant time ensuring that what you typed into Latex rendered correctly? (I.e., the edit-compile-look loop?) I sometimes omit parentheses or put braces in the wrong place, which causes the display to be in error. Introducing another step in the process seems troublesome, and would take me out of the "zone" of problem-solving. (I.e., handwritten copy -> Latex -> rendering vs. just handwritten copy.) I switched from troff to Latex around 1991. The explanatory tables for the sprinkler system and the electrical panel for my house are in Latex. So, I'm a Latex-phile, just skeptical about this case.
arooaroo 9y ago
Always pleased to see more resources encouraging more LaTeX use. ShareLatex and Overleaf are doing a great job of promoting Latex. Fwiw my Getting to Grips with LaTeX[1] tutorial have been around for years and are well used. [1] http://www.andy-roberts.net/writing/latex http://www.andy-roberts.net/writing/latex
- blt 9y ago
  I used your tutorials to learn LaTeX around 2008-2009. Thanks!!
oldgun 9y ago
Always enjoyed services from sharelatex, they made a lot of stuff easier. A looks like a nice tutorial.
zackmorris 9y ago
Here is an editor from a couple of years ago that lets you check your LaTeX: http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9986430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9986430
amygdyl 9y ago
I figure the chance of downvotes is worth it for relating the most unexpected conversation I had socially I'm prompted by the commenter who above says they struggled and preferred Word. I use Word as a daily driver because of Excel embedding, and company policy, but this is about the value of pursuing LaTeX that may open not so unique possibilities: Posted because there are lots more places where I think being up to speed with TeX / LaTeX can get you hired by someone interesting / or in lucrative if dull job, not necessarily as a programmer: Through a friend, I met and chatted with, eventually for hours, the a gentleman whose last occupation turned out to be the publisher for authorized education books... In Iraq... Under Saddam.. Why we got so deep talking at my friend's dinner party? We were arguing the real time composability of TeX. I don't know the chances of such a conversation with any septuagenarian gentleman, to start with, but I hope my friend's promise to invite me next chance we can meet will arise. I encountered a delightful gentleman programmer by nature as opposed to training; his formal education was history and languages, self taught programmer, who also mentioned MCL. I last used LaTeX in earnest in the late 90s - his knowledge, I should have asked if he was actively using, seemed current... our mutual friend a publisher, this makes me think I ought inquire if a book is forthcoming. Regardless, I think it's fascinating just how entrenched TeX and LaTex are in the minds of users. And publishers I've met who use TeX are devotees. I've been told by a couple now, that they expect associates to pick it up on the job. So potentially this might be a angle for a programmer to side move into a different field. Associates hired or promoted to work with publishers are usually tasked with longer term research into subjects and trends, it looked to be rewarding work. And in politics, economics, tech obviously, a programmers skills might be enough for the transition, especially if the publisher felt lightweight on in house abilities. I used to encounter commercial applications wrapping TeX frequently, in the 90s. One, by a British software house since subsumed in the XML everything, enterprise data / private equity rollup fad, I forget the names it went through, was essentially selling TeX, plus advert placement layout engine, used by FAZ, Suddeutsche Zeitung, lots of Italian dailies, the EC, for a sweet 50,000 a seat. Mass market Print publishers need tools to manage costs that drill down to the weight of ink used on the paper. It's a reason the InDesign ecosystem is stable- third party integrations that are expensive to write for a select audience. But smaller houses have wider tolerances, may "leave that to the printer" (hope they can get good bids without the pre press estimate), so the variety of pre press tools widens to include just LaTex and a impostor for separations/plates. Knuth's Digital Typography, is a excellent read, and a chapter in that, showing by how much, and how easily, major press titles can be made more readable, save space, and more, became a brilliant sales tool for my consulting. If you know TeX / LaTex, and need a gig, Digital Typography, plus the addresses of nearby smaller publishers, might be a great way to catch good work. I found so, anyhow.
romeinaday 9y ago
I used to do page layout nearly 10 years ago for academic and medical books, using InDesign. And Quark before that (I'm that old). I always thought that the process could be automated. So many things needed manual fiddling. Kerning, placing pictures and illustrations next to their text references, splitting up chapters, indexing etc. How far along are we with automating book layout? Looking at the LaTeX article, it seems to be more for academic papers. And the vocabulary seems ugly for text formatting. Is there some system where I can give it a style and feed it a markdown text file (with markup for images) which will layout a whole PDF book?
rosstex 9y ago
>ctrl+f "lyx" > 0 results https://www.lyx.org/ https://www.lyx.org/ Gonna plug Lyx, the best tool for writing LaTeX without actually feeling like you're writing LaTeX.
- hota_mazi 9y ago
  Not responding, and http://isup.me http://isup.me confirms it's down.
  - rosstex 9y ago
    Oh no, how unfortunate!
  - rosstex 9y ago
    It's back. Go check it out!
xattt 9y ago
ShareLatex and TeX in general is awesome. I use it for the Biblatex and I have dabbled with Beamer. Two issues that I have run into are live word counts for assignments for profs who refuse to give page counts, and having to maintain multiple document versions manually (one in TeX, one in Word) because my field (Nursing) is full of non-tech savvy older profs who will look at you funny if you provide them with something outside their comfort zone.
konschubert 9y ago
I strongly dislike LaTeX mostly because of its terrible error messages, because of the mess of incompatible packages and because of its inflexibility in layout adjustments. I admit that I never sat down to understand the latex design principles and learn it the hard way. So maybe I'm just uninformed. But seriously, I just want to write some text with formulas. The error messages are so useless, usually I'm forced to trace a bug by commenting out sections of text. For even the most trivial features, packages have to be included. Finding the right set of compatible packages is a science on its own. Usually you start with somebody else's document header and try to tweak it to your needs. And good luck placing an image on the page where you want it. I assume that if you spend some time understanding the language, it becomes clearer and less of a mess. But I feel like there is room for a declarative text editor that's a little bit more intuitive.
- kevindong 9y ago
  To some extent, ShareLaTeX has actually been building a wrapper to help you decode obscure error messages [0]. In addition, their online editor provides some basic linting [1]. [0]: https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/2016/06/29/latex-log-hints.html https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/2016/06/29/latex-log-hints.h... [1]: https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/2016/11/01/introducting-latex-code-checker.html https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/2016/11/01/introducting-late...
  - konschubert 9y ago
    Yea, I'm now using sharelatex whenever I am teXing something. Its features ease the pain.
- mastax 9y ago
  SILE could be a new-and-improved LaTeX, someday. http://sile-typesetter.org/what-is/ http://sile-typesetter.org/what-is/
- madez 9y ago
  I agree. You mention two problems that I both agree with. First, LaTeX wants to be so much, that it can be difficult to get simple things done. Second, LaTeX's tooling is abhorrent. The quite useless error messages are just one example. Why, for the sake of whoever, would a user-facing tool require me to compile the source twice to get some references right? There is no valid excuse for that. The real problem here is that LaTeX is not what a document should be described in. LaTeX is a middleware that should be hidden from the user wherever possible.
soyiuz 9y ago
LaTeX I feel is going the way of HTML as a intermediate layer language that is not to be meant to be read/written by humans. Like others in this thread I much prefer writing in Markdown and then using something like Pandoc to convert to Latex.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
cygned 9y ago
We have built a reporting engine for PDFs on top of LaTeX; data is loaded using SQL, pre-processed with JavaScript if neccessary and then rendered using pdflatex. Works great and is fast, but I wouldn't do it again (thinking about using CSS3 + print properties for that).
- flukus 9y ago
  How would you say this went compared to off the shelf reporting engines? It seems like all reporting engines have major deficiencies and I've thought about trying something like this myself.
  - cygned 9y ago
    Frankly, we were not able to find something suitable. It needed to be fast (our largest report has like 2000 pages), needed to support advanced layouting (images outside of usual print margins, multi-pages tables with continued headers, ...) and we wanted to have some kind of templating language. Native node.js would have been nice, but not required. Maybe I was out of luck, butI couldn't find anything useful fulfilling these requirements - if you have suggestions, I'd be interested in seeing what's possible. How it went, though? Due to our use cases, this LaTeX service is a complexity beast. The templating isn't fun; LaTeX was not created to be templated itself. We have escaping in place, but from time to time user input breaks it. We have no way to let users create their own reports at this point. There are multiple reasons, but LaTeX being not that beginner-friendly is definitely one of them. But given the template is correct and the user input is sane, it's fast and simply works.
    - flukus 9y ago
      The "least worst" I've ever used to SSRS (Microsoft), not sure if the 2000 pages will cause an issue or if the images outside the borders are possible though. Apparently it supports other data sources but I'm not sure how well, I've got an upcoming task at work to investigate this. But 2000 pages? That's a data dump, not a report.
matteocantiello 9y ago
Here's why I don't think it's worth any longer spending time learning LaTeX: When Donald Knuth came up with TeX, he had in mind the printed page. LaTeX gave writers the opportunity to control the way their printed documents looked like. It made writers their own typographers. But the future of documents is content and collaboration, not typographic style. Printing will become irrelevant, and the documents of the future will have to be interactive, executable and device agnostic. As we move forward Authorea provides the best of both worlds (full disclosure, I'm one of the people behind the project). Authorea, which is a format agnostic collaborative platform, allows to write documents in richtext (word), markdown, LaTeX (or a combination of the three). It renders your docs to HTML, but you can export anytime to LaTeX (and PDF). Which means if you want, you can still convert your document to LaTeX without learning LaTeX syntax. It is version controlled (built on GIT) and allows to include data rich plots and Jupyter notebooks. We built it with the "paper of the future" in mind https://www.authorea.com https://www.authorea.com
- stonogo 9y ago
  I've been hearing this pitch since approximately the middle of the 1980's. Back then it was Harvard Graphics, Foxpro, and ... TeX. What makes your offer different?
  - dginev 9y ago
    I think the new value-add is based on a combination of: 1) the internet and 2) being further down Moore's Law The increase in both computational power and connectivity has had impact all over the place, but has also transformed science. Even the most analog disciplines now have computational modeling branches, are building datasets, and need best practices for presenting and publishing computational artifacts. From Digital Humanities, to Computational Biophysics. Printed pages struggle to convey the depth of these results, as do (originally) flat data formats like PDF, which are oriented towards pixels, rather than datatypes. But I have to disagree strongly about sniping LaTeX as (completely) outdated, because of the need to supplement the printed page with a "content browser". Yes, we most certainly need a computational toolkit for presenting scientific results and aiding peer-review. But no, typesetting is not going away. The human taste for aesthetically pleasing documents is here to stay, and beautifully laid out narratives are instrumental for getting your message across to your audience. Delighting the eye allows the reader to focus on content, rather than struggle with an ugly form. So my take on my work at Authorea (yep, beware inside bias!) is to transfer our typesetting best practices to the web as the baseline, but then focus and innovate on the "depth" of web-first science articles. To improve academic writing, we need to expose and interact with data, do the well-known social collaboration gig, and embed guarantees for transparency and reproducibility. Machine-assisted quality control and authoring are the two large impact sweet-spots to hit in the coming decade on this front. Time will show if we're in the know or not, but LaTeX is certainly a point of departure that has to be supported, and learning it is a healthy thing to do in 2017. We have a lot of important work ahead of us!
rawland 9y ago
To be honest, I shared the LaTeX documentation of ShareLaTeX with you because it is plain excellent. Right now, I'm finishing my doctoral thesis and compiling locally, because I'm without internet for long times due to travelling. Therefore, I scraped the docs to have a local copy. Am glad to see the praise for ShareLaTeX here, though. Especially due to their solutions with ridiculous error messages and their general approach. When I encounter a cryptic problem I switch from vim+vimtex to texstudio -- which usually helps a lot by providing an overview, syncing the logs to the occurrence, organizing them by severity and enhancing understanding by unfolding the log. The only difference between ShareLaTeX and overleaf I see, is SLs over-the-tops documentation. Kudos again and thanks. For general interest, my current LaTeX workflow is: * Write in vim + vimtex. * Switch on continuous compiling (that's like ShareLaTeX). * Using synctex to preview with zathura (lightweight pdf). + This is really nice, you can configure vimtex to it. + CTRL-Click into the (zathura) pdf focuses vim to the corresponding position + <leader>lv in vim jumps to the position in the pdf being open side-by-side in zathura. * In case of complex errors open texstudio * Save battery, use vimagic and be happy.
- cyphar 9y ago
  > The only difference between ShareLaTeX and overleaf I see, is SLs over-the-tops documentation. Kudos again and thanks. There is also the (awesome) fact that ShareLaTeX is free software (under the AGPL no less).[1] [1]: https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex
  - rawland 9y ago
    Didn't know this. Thanks.
- paradite 9y ago
  I liked and used sharelatex initially, but my thesis was eventually moved to overleaf because overleaf has support for git repo (inside the share button), which is easier to manage for the research group.
  - 9y ago
anton_tarasenko 9y ago
LyX[1] can be a better intro to LaTeX. It was posted on HN before. But really, it's the most powerful WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX, and it still provides access to the .tex source of the document. You can use the interface and learn the language at the same time. Besides, custom shortcuts make LyX much faster than writing TeX directly with autocomplete. [1] https://www.lyx.org/ https://www.lyx.org/
jimhefferon 9y ago
If you benefit from TeX, LaTeX, and friends, please consider supporting them with a membership in the TeX Users Group. For full information see http://tug.org/aims_ben.html http://tug.org/aims_ben.html but note that if you select to get the journal electronically then a one-year membership is $45. (If you are a student, recent student, senior citizen, or come from a country with a modest economy then the annual rate is $15.) It could not be more reasonable.

461 points by rawland 9y ago

While this is a decent guide, I find that being skillful in latex comes from memorizing many highly specific commands. I spend most of my time googling for things such as "How to use (a), (b), (c) for enumerating lists".

tomcam 9y ago
...but this article is giving me the context I need to understand the Google results
- chairmanwow 9y ago
  True enough. But I agree with OP in that being "good" with LaTeX is essentially just memorizing lots of commands. I've never written a document without having to constantly search for specific commands.
- chairmanwow 9y ago
  True enough. But I agree with OP in that being "good" with LaTeX is essentially just memorizing lots of commands. I've never written a document without having to constantly search for specific commands.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
clishem 9y ago
To answer your example question: \usepackage[shortlabels]{enumitem} Then you can simply use: \begin{enumerate}[(a)] \item The first item \item The second item \item The third etc \end{enumerate} Other label types are very intuitive this way. I could have pulled this from an old document I made, no memorizing neccesary. It is also very easy to find using a search engine, as I did in this case: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/208696/using-enumerate https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/208696/using-enumera...
Pitarou 9y ago
Have you tried using LyX? Or does LyX not really support the kind of things you want to do?

walrus1066 9y ago

A nice intro project is writing your CV in latex, using packages like https://github.com/xdanaux/moderncv https://github.com/xdanaux/moderncv

sevensor 9y ago
I don't know about that. Formatting a CV is so fiddly and LaTeX is at its best when you can relax your grip and let it do its job. I'd recommend writing something really simple. Take ten minutes and write up the notes from your last meeting. They'll look amazing, and there's basically no formatting required beyond perhaps bulleted lists. It's hard enough just to get over the hump of having source code that's distinct from your finished document, without jumping straight in to the least rewarding part of LaTeX, which is trying to make things look just how you pictured them.
- LVB 9y ago
  For my last job change I rewrote my then-outdated resume in Latex using a modified version of the popular resume style. The reason was that I found the usual suspects (Word, Docs) just as fiddly with what I was trying to format, but without the clean evolution that a .tex file in a git repo provided. Getting this just right did take time, but I did it iteratively and now have an excellent base that is exactly how I want it, and something that looks better than the word processor templates. Overall it was a worthwhile investment IMHO.
  - Myrmornis 9y ago
    Thing is, one of the aims of LaTeX is to separate content from formatting. I'm guessing in that in your resume.tex, the layout is fairly tightly bound up with the content, but it would be great to hear I'm wrong! Like, if you want it to have a different number of columns, or put the job title and years together outdented in the left margin or whatever, can you do that? Or are you kind of relying on a particular choice of style file?
    - LVB 9y ago

tomcam 9y ago

Just in time! I use pandoc to generate PDF files from markdown, but it's not a straightforward process in any case but creating documents that look like Donald Knuth dashed them off in 1978. Pandoc is super flexible but your output goes through LaTeX templates so customizing them felt out of reach given my limited time--until now.

skierscott 9y ago
I also use Pandoc to convert markdown to latex. Markdown expressed the content clearest. I've also started generated latex PDFs via the Jupiter notebook. They have a quick and easy preview, plus markdown + latex math + code integration that's easy.
javitury 9y ago
Here is another one that prefers markdown with pandoc. IMHO, it's much better to use markdown generally and insert latex only when it is completely necessary. A latex usage example is creating a tikz picture or for introducing \pagebreak or \framebreak in pdfs or beamer presentations. For the rest of the cases, markdown is much less verbose and can accomplish the same.
aqsalose 9y ago
I very much like the idea of markdown-pandoc-latex-pdf toolchain (I use markdown for all non-math stuff), but setting up a math LaTeX template that works for anything other than the most basic documents was a pain, so I gave up. Is there some good ready-made templates around one could try without too much hassle?
fiddlerwoaroof 9y ago
I used pandoc to generate latex from markdown while studying philosophy in graduate school, I even came up with a little executable tarball that generated a directory structure in the the way I wanted, with a shell script to handle building everything properly. I find that this route is best for documents that you are writing: you can focus on the content and use a nice markdown editor like Ulysses without having to worry too much about formatting. On the other hand, when I'm trying to typeset a pre-existing text for reading/distribution, I find it a lot easier to copy and paste the text into a latex template and then tweak it incrementally until everything looks the way I want it to.

Xcelerate 9y ago

I absolutely love ShareLaTeX. It's one of the few products that is kind of niche but does one thing and does it really well. I definitely get $8 a month worth out of their service. Having used MacTeX and similar products, ShareLaTeX is just a much smoother user experience. Not to mention their documentation is great and really gets to the point of what you are often trying to do. I've used their service on the last three research papers I've written and have been sharing the platform with different professors I work with. (I sound like a shill, but check my comment history — I'm not affiliated with them. Just a happy customer.)

beck5 9y ago
Thanks, you would be surprised what a big difference it makes when we hear nice things about ShareLaTeX. (I am a ShareLaTeX person)
- maxnoe 9y ago
  You are doing great work. But what I cannot understand is, how you still recommend stuff like $$ in a new beginners guide in 2017. I had several moments in this tutorial where I thought: Oh, god. This got deprecated 20 years ago.
  - yzmtf2008 9y ago
    Out of curiosity, what should I use instead? And what are some tutorials that promote more modern techniques?
    - ajholyoake 9y ago
      \begin{equation} ... \end{equation}. Finding modern resources to learn LaTeX (and indeed TeX for macros etc) has been a perennial difficulty for me!
      - occamrazor 9y ago
        Or \[ ... \] for unnumbered equations.

aceperry 9y ago

I tried to learn LaTex a long time ago when I was just getting started with Linux, but gave up when I found that I could use MS Word and get what I needed, without the steep learning curve. I'm sure LaTex is much better than Word for some things, but I've never needed anything as specialized as LaTex. In fact, I don't use 99% of what Word is capable of and most of the time I'm using a simple text editor or vim or atom.

zuron7 9y ago
LaTeX was never meant to be used as a word processor. It's amazing for Math and other scientific writing, but apart from that, it's just much faster to open up your basic Word Processor and get on to playing the keys.
- sotojuan 9y ago
  The problem is that a lot of LaTeX zealots and fanboys tell you to use it as soon as you mention Word/Pages/Google Docs/etc. This can confuse beginners and the public in general as to what LaTeX is for.
  - taeric 9y ago
    Meh. The public, in general, has a hard time with Word, too. Which isn't to say that word processors aren't nice. I actually held off on learning LaTeX years ago because I didn't see the point. The fact that I can still reliably open my documents is huge, though. And it only takes training to learn to use it. For transient things that just don't matter? Yeah, they work fine. What irks a lot of us is how we typically are given yet another document sharing method for documents that have to be kept in sync with source. Worse, a SharePoint or workdocs link that only works from one of my browsers correctly and has horrendous correspondence features. So bad that collaboration typically is, pick someone from the team and they will completely own this.
    - foldr 9y ago
      >The fact that I can still reliably open my documents is huge, though I've had multiple instances where a document that compiled with one LaTeX installation didn't compile with another. It was always possible to fix after a certain amount of head-scratching, but LaTeX is a twisted network of packages that interact with each other in unpredictable ways, and there's no real guarantee that your LaTeX will still compile in 10 years.

ptaipale 9y ago

I love LaTeX, but I disagree about that WYSIWYM. It's really WYGIWYAF. What You Get Is What You Asked For.

mynewtb 9y ago
WYGIWLTWBFY What You Get Is What LaTeX Thought Was Best For You. So, images spreading to the margins of the page, a block of whitespace on the next page, lots of weird characters instead of your local characters and lots of more obscure stuff.
- lol768 9y ago
  > lots of weird characters instead of your local characters Is that really an issue with xetex, though?

platz 9y ago

For pdf deliverables regarding things like a resume, I am wondering if it is just better to create an html document using FE web dev skills, and render it to pdf (having done the latex resume thing recently). i.e. for PDF's (like a resume), What are the advantages of latex over html+css->pdf? (This is assuming I don't care about things like table-of-contents generation or precise chapter-aware commands)

hashhar 9y ago
If you are generating the HTML using data from a JSON schema (like JSON Resume) then HTML is a good enough way since the data is easy to handle. Raw HTML would be a very big pain once you want to generate tailored resumes based on some input criteria. LaTeX and JSON schema based resumes both offer modularization and help with generation of tailored resumes. I don't find any other advantages IMO.
- platz 9y ago
  i am not interested in json or resumes so much . its more html vs latex
mynewtb 9y ago
Nothing I can think of except for some typographic sugar that almost no one (except for other latex users or typography people) would notice. It really is not worth the frustration today.
- taeric 9y ago
  I take issue with calling it a frustration. Especially since trying to get good page layouts with html is frustrating to me. That said, if you need any document, be it a résumé or anything else, and you need it tomorrow, use the tools you know. And don't feel bad about not knowing other tools. Trying to get up to speed on anything that is worthwhile quickly on a new too will almost certainly be frustrating. Even word processors.
seanwilson 9y ago

ppidugu 9y ago

I feel this post could be edited to as "Learn a pinch of Latex in 30 minutes"....for some people title could be ambiguous...frankly we can't learn anything in 30 minutes...we just get a feel of any skills or concept....the concept of really learning is when we could put something to practical...if we couldn't put anything to practical its not learning but just skimming through the concepts.

tomcam 9y ago
Just did the whole intro and them some. You're right--but it's accompanied by a whole lot of other lessons that all take the same clear, humane, approach. I'm willing to accept a little hype for such a comprehensive presentation overall.

greeneggs 9y ago

Besides Googling for tricks, another way of learning LaTeX is to download the source code for nice-looking papers that you find on the arXiv. For example, for "Learning to learn by gradient descent by gradient descent" arXiv:1606.04474 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04474 https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.04474), if you click on Download->Other formats, you get the latex source code and in this case also the Omnigraffle files for the diagrams.

DoctorOW 9y ago

This didn't really answer "Why Learn Latex?". It mentioned some of the benefits of Latex as a format but what reason do I have for not using some sort of Latex generator?

mhh__ 9y ago

I found that, for someone with programming experience, the core LaTeX is quite easy to teach. I use it for all my school projects, and ShareLaTeX just works. I also managed to use it(Nothing Fancy) collaboratively with a friend of mine, with only ~5min introduction (Although I was sat next to him, so not quite the same as learning it alone).

EvgeniyZh 9y ago

I've learned LaTeX by taking all lecture notes in LaTeX and googling all the stuff (or just leaving comment to google it later). Math was especially hard, but after a semester and a half I'm almost not googling and writing relatively complicated LaTeX as fast as regular text.

mythrwy 9y ago

I'd like to know LaTeX. And of course played with it a few times. The issue is, I write something that requires a document editor like once month (if) and it's usually a minimal number of pages. I do it so infrequently it's always a huge pain even using Libre Office. And every time I think "it really ought to be possible to do this with Vim" (which I suppose LaTex would solve, and that's a big plus). It's just the learning curve/benefit ratio isn't there yet.

ams6110 9y ago
Something like Markdown, Restructured Text, etc. might be better. I'd suggest Emacs org-mode too but not sure if anything like that is available for Vim.

Koshkin 9y ago

I wonder if Donald Knuth uses LaTeX or some other TeX macro package (e.g. Plain TeX).

TheRealPomax 9y ago
> Andrew: What set of tools do you use today for writing TAOCP? Do you use TeX? LaTeX? CWEB? Word processor? And what do you use for the coding? > Donald: My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine, using the conventions of TeX. I use tex, dvips, and gv to see the results, which appear on my screen almost instantaneously these days. I check my math with Mathematica. http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856 http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856
- Koshkin 9y ago
  So, one of the greatest minds of our time uses Plain TeX, it seems. Given that his texts look more complex than any other mathematical texts that I have seen, why would anyone prefer to use LaTeX instead?
  - Ar-Curunir 9y ago
    Because most people do not have his great mind :P
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Well, he took a detour in writing TAOCP to invent TeX, because he felt other typesetting solutions were inadequate. So not surprising he uses plain TeX still. Most people prefer LaTeX becase plain TeX is rather more primitive -- for the same reason most people would choose C or a higher level language over assembly language for programming.
    - marvy 9y ago
      > most people would choose C or a higher level language over assembly language for programming And the inventor of TeX is not most people, and decided to invent an assembly language for his book, rather than using a high level language.

TheApexTheater 9y ago

Honest question: I tried using LaTeX for a homework assignment. I had already done all the work on some loose paper, but it was all over the place and thought LaTeX-ing it would help readability. It took me about three hours and I wasn't even halfway done (there were four questions and I had barely done the second one)... Is taking this long normal for LaTeX? or is it something you get better at with practice?

cben 9y ago
I wonder: did you spend much of this time on math formulas, or on "regular" typography like lists & headings? TeX math notation is the pretty much only game in town, and worth learning, but there are many ways to skip/ease the rest, might help your learning curve: - WYSIWYG with TeX math: Dropbox paper lets you press $$, type formula, press Enter; and I shudder to suggest it but I hear modern Word more or lets you type TeX math [https://superuser.com/a/509805/33415 https://superuser.com/a/509805/33415]. - WYSIWYM: Lyx, https://www.fiduswriter.org/ https://www.fiduswriter.org/, http://www.texts.io/ http://www.texts.io/ - Markdown with TeX math: there is alas no single standard syntax but tons of tools do support it: https://github.com/cben/mathdown/wiki/math-in-markdown https://github.com/cben/mathdown/wiki/math-in-markdown For conversion Pandoc is king, infinitely flexible, and can render through LaTeX, HTML or many other ways. * Markdown is unbtrusive enough that styling it in-place gives you a form of WYSIWYG. Several editors doing this (plus rendering formulas in-place): StackEdit, Typora, https://www.gitbook.com/editor https://www.gitbook.com/editor, Atom with https://atom.io/packages/preview-inline https://atom.io/packages/preview-inline (see also https://discuss.atom.io/t/19222 https://discuss.atom.io/t/19222), http://markdownnotes.com/ http://markdownnotes.com/, and my own https://mathdown.net https://mathdown.net - https://overleaf.com https://overleaf.com similarly has "rich text mode" that styles LaTeX source and renders formulas in-place. [https://www.overleaf.com/blog/81 https://www.overleaf.com/blog/81] - Other lightweights markups: there are too many, notably reStructuredText, asciidoc are popular and powerful. But I'd start with Markdown. I'm genuinely interested to hear your experiences if you try any of these...
mturmon 9y ago
I'm doubtful that using Latex for ephemeral stuff like math-heavy homework is a good use case. It's excellent for documents like journal papers and tech reports that you will be revising and distributing, and perhaps coming back to months later. It's also great for collaboration. I could see it working for a lab report. With mathematical homework, aren't you spending significant time ensuring that what you typed into Latex rendered correctly? (I.e., the edit-compile-look loop?) I sometimes omit parentheses or put braces in the wrong place, which causes the display to be in error. Introducing another step in the process seems troublesome, and would take me out of the "zone" of problem-solving. (I.e., handwritten copy -> Latex -> rendering vs. just handwritten copy.) I switched from troff to Latex around 1991. The explanatory tables for the sprinkler system and the electrical panel for my house are in Latex. So, I'm a Latex-phile, just skeptical about this case.

arooaroo 9y ago

Always pleased to see more resources encouraging more LaTeX use. ShareLatex and Overleaf are doing a great job of promoting Latex. Fwiw my Getting to Grips with LaTeX[1] tutorial have been around for years and are well used. [1] http://www.andy-roberts.net/writing/latex http://www.andy-roberts.net/writing/latex

blt 9y ago
I used your tutorials to learn LaTeX around 2008-2009. Thanks!!

oldgun 9y ago

Always enjoyed services from sharelatex, they made a lot of stuff easier. A looks like a nice tutorial.

zackmorris 9y ago

Here is an editor from a couple of years ago that lets you check your LaTeX: http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php http://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9986430 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9986430

amygdyl 9y ago

I figure the chance of downvotes is worth it for relating the most unexpected conversation I had socially I'm prompted by the commenter who above says they struggled and preferred Word. I use Word as a daily driver because of Excel embedding, and company policy, but this is about the value of pursuing LaTeX that may open not so unique possibilities: Posted because there are lots more places where I think being up to speed with TeX / LaTeX can get you hired by someone interesting / or in lucrative if dull job, not necessarily as a programmer: Through a friend, I met and chatted with, eventually for hours, the a gentleman whose last occupation turned out to be the publisher for authorized education books... In Iraq... Under Saddam.. Why we got so deep talking at my friend's dinner party? We were arguing the real time composability of TeX. I don't know the chances of such a conversation with any septuagenarian gentleman, to start with, but I hope my friend's promise to invite me next chance we can meet will arise. I encountered a delightful gentleman programmer by nature as opposed to training; his formal education was history and languages, self taught programmer, who also mentioned MCL. I last used LaTeX in earnest in the late 90s - his knowledge, I should have asked if he was actively using, seemed current... our mutual friend a publisher, this makes me think I ought inquire if a book is forthcoming. Regardless, I think it's fascinating just how entrenched TeX and LaTex are in the minds of users. And publishers I've met who use TeX are devotees. I've been told by a couple now, that they expect associates to pick it up on the job. So potentially this might be a angle for a programmer to side move into a different field. Associates hired or promoted to work with publishers are usually tasked with longer term research into subjects and trends, it looked to be rewarding work. And in politics, economics, tech obviously, a programmers skills might be enough for the transition, especially if the publisher felt lightweight on in house abilities. I used to encounter commercial applications wrapping TeX frequently, in the 90s. One, by a British software house since subsumed in the XML everything, enterprise data / private equity rollup fad, I forget the names it went through, was essentially selling TeX, plus advert placement layout engine, used by FAZ, Suddeutsche Zeitung, lots of Italian dailies, the EC, for a sweet 50,000 a seat. Mass market Print publishers need tools to manage costs that drill down to the weight of ink used on the paper. It's a reason the InDesign ecosystem is stable- third party integrations that are expensive to write for a select audience. But smaller houses have wider tolerances, may "leave that to the printer" (hope they can get good bids without the pre press estimate), so the variety of pre press tools widens to include just LaTex and a impostor for separations/plates. Knuth's Digital Typography, is a excellent read, and a chapter in that, showing by how much, and how easily, major press titles can be made more readable, save space, and more, became a brilliant sales tool for my consulting. If you know TeX / LaTex, and need a gig, Digital Typography, plus the addresses of nearby smaller publishers, might be a great way to catch good work. I found so, anyhow.

romeinaday 9y ago

I used to do page layout nearly 10 years ago for academic and medical books, using InDesign. And Quark before that (I'm that old). I always thought that the process could be automated. So many things needed manual fiddling. Kerning, placing pictures and illustrations next to their text references, splitting up chapters, indexing etc. How far along are we with automating book layout? Looking at the LaTeX article, it seems to be more for academic papers. And the vocabulary seems ugly for text formatting. Is there some system where I can give it a style and feed it a markdown text file (with markup for images) which will layout a whole PDF book?

rosstex 9y ago

>ctrl+f "lyx" > 0 results https://www.lyx.org/ https://www.lyx.org/ Gonna plug Lyx, the best tool for writing LaTeX without actually feeling like you're writing LaTeX.

hota_mazi 9y ago
Not responding, and http://isup.me http://isup.me confirms it's down.
- rosstex 9y ago
  Oh no, how unfortunate!
- rosstex 9y ago
  It's back. Go check it out!

xattt 9y ago

ShareLatex and TeX in general is awesome. I use it for the Biblatex and I have dabbled with Beamer. Two issues that I have run into are live word counts for assignments for profs who refuse to give page counts, and having to maintain multiple document versions manually (one in TeX, one in Word) because my field (Nursing) is full of non-tech savvy older profs who will look at you funny if you provide them with something outside their comfort zone.

konschubert 9y ago

I strongly dislike LaTeX mostly because of its terrible error messages, because of the mess of incompatible packages and because of its inflexibility in layout adjustments. I admit that I never sat down to understand the latex design principles and learn it the hard way. So maybe I'm just uninformed. But seriously, I just want to write some text with formulas. The error messages are so useless, usually I'm forced to trace a bug by commenting out sections of text. For even the most trivial features, packages have to be included. Finding the right set of compatible packages is a science on its own. Usually you start with somebody else's document header and try to tweak it to your needs. And good luck placing an image on the page where you want it. I assume that if you spend some time understanding the language, it becomes clearer and less of a mess. But I feel like there is room for a declarative text editor that's a little bit more intuitive.

kevindong 9y ago
To some extent, ShareLaTeX has actually been building a wrapper to help you decode obscure error messages [0]. In addition, their online editor provides some basic linting [1]. [0]: https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/2016/06/29/latex-log-hints.html https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/2016/06/29/latex-log-hints.h... [1]: https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/2016/11/01/introducting-latex-code-checker.html https://www.sharelatex.com/blog/2016/11/01/introducting-late...
- konschubert 9y ago
  Yea, I'm now using sharelatex whenever I am teXing something. Its features ease the pain.
mastax 9y ago
SILE could be a new-and-improved LaTeX, someday. http://sile-typesetter.org/what-is/ http://sile-typesetter.org/what-is/
madez 9y ago
I agree. You mention two problems that I both agree with. First, LaTeX wants to be so much, that it can be difficult to get simple things done. Second, LaTeX's tooling is abhorrent. The quite useless error messages are just one example. Why, for the sake of whoever, would a user-facing tool require me to compile the source twice to get some references right? There is no valid excuse for that. The real problem here is that LaTeX is not what a document should be described in. LaTeX is a middleware that should be hidden from the user wherever possible.

soyiuz 9y ago

LaTeX I feel is going the way of HTML as a intermediate layer language that is not to be meant to be read/written by humans. Like others in this thread I much prefer writing in Markdown and then using something like Pandoc to convert to Latex.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

cygned 9y ago

We have built a reporting engine for PDFs on top of LaTeX; data is loaded using SQL, pre-processed with JavaScript if neccessary and then rendered using pdflatex. Works great and is fast, but I wouldn't do it again (thinking about using CSS3 + print properties for that).

flukus 9y ago
How would you say this went compared to off the shelf reporting engines? It seems like all reporting engines have major deficiencies and I've thought about trying something like this myself.
- cygned 9y ago
  Frankly, we were not able to find something suitable. It needed to be fast (our largest report has like 2000 pages), needed to support advanced layouting (images outside of usual print margins, multi-pages tables with continued headers, ...) and we wanted to have some kind of templating language. Native node.js would have been nice, but not required. Maybe I was out of luck, butI couldn't find anything useful fulfilling these requirements - if you have suggestions, I'd be interested in seeing what's possible. How it went, though? Due to our use cases, this LaTeX service is a complexity beast. The templating isn't fun; LaTeX was not created to be templated itself. We have escaping in place, but from time to time user input breaks it. We have no way to let users create their own reports at this point. There are multiple reasons, but LaTeX being not that beginner-friendly is definitely one of them. But given the template is correct and the user input is sane, it's fast and simply works.
  - flukus 9y ago
    The "least worst" I've ever used to SSRS (Microsoft), not sure if the 2000 pages will cause an issue or if the images outside the borders are possible though. Apparently it supports other data sources but I'm not sure how well, I've got an upcoming task at work to investigate this. But 2000 pages? That's a data dump, not a report.

matteocantiello 9y ago

Here's why I don't think it's worth any longer spending time learning LaTeX: When Donald Knuth came up with TeX, he had in mind the printed page. LaTeX gave writers the opportunity to control the way their printed documents looked like. It made writers their own typographers. But the future of documents is content and collaboration, not typographic style. Printing will become irrelevant, and the documents of the future will have to be interactive, executable and device agnostic. As we move forward Authorea provides the best of both worlds (full disclosure, I'm one of the people behind the project). Authorea, which is a format agnostic collaborative platform, allows to write documents in richtext (word), markdown, LaTeX (or a combination of the three). It renders your docs to HTML, but you can export anytime to LaTeX (and PDF). Which means if you want, you can still convert your document to LaTeX without learning LaTeX syntax. It is version controlled (built on GIT) and allows to include data rich plots and Jupyter notebooks. We built it with the "paper of the future" in mind https://www.authorea.com https://www.authorea.com

stonogo 9y ago
I've been hearing this pitch since approximately the middle of the 1980's. Back then it was Harvard Graphics, Foxpro, and ... TeX. What makes your offer different?
- dginev 9y ago
  I think the new value-add is based on a combination of: 1) the internet and 2) being further down Moore's Law The increase in both computational power and connectivity has had impact all over the place, but has also transformed science. Even the most analog disciplines now have computational modeling branches, are building datasets, and need best practices for presenting and publishing computational artifacts. From Digital Humanities, to Computational Biophysics. Printed pages struggle to convey the depth of these results, as do (originally) flat data formats like PDF, which are oriented towards pixels, rather than datatypes. But I have to disagree strongly about sniping LaTeX as (completely) outdated, because of the need to supplement the printed page with a "content browser". Yes, we most certainly need a computational toolkit for presenting scientific results and aiding peer-review. But no, typesetting is not going away. The human taste for aesthetically pleasing documents is here to stay, and beautifully laid out narratives are instrumental for getting your message across to your audience. Delighting the eye allows the reader to focus on content, rather than struggle with an ugly form. So my take on my work at Authorea (yep, beware inside bias!) is to transfer our typesetting best practices to the web as the baseline, but then focus and innovate on the "depth" of web-first science articles. To improve academic writing, we need to expose and interact with data, do the well-known social collaboration gig, and embed guarantees for transparency and reproducibility. Machine-assisted quality control and authoring are the two large impact sweet-spots to hit in the coming decade on this front. Time will show if we're in the know or not, but LaTeX is certainly a point of departure that has to be supported, and learning it is a healthy thing to do in 2017. We have a lot of important work ahead of us!

rawland 9y ago

To be honest, I shared the LaTeX documentation of ShareLaTeX with you because it is plain excellent. Right now, I'm finishing my doctoral thesis and compiling locally, because I'm without internet for long times due to travelling. Therefore, I scraped the docs to have a local copy. Am glad to see the praise for ShareLaTeX here, though. Especially due to their solutions with ridiculous error messages and their general approach. When I encounter a cryptic problem I switch from vim+vimtex to texstudio -- which usually helps a lot by providing an overview, syncing the logs to the occurrence, organizing them by severity and enhancing understanding by unfolding the log. The only difference between ShareLaTeX and overleaf I see, is SLs over-the-tops documentation. Kudos again and thanks. For general interest, my current LaTeX workflow is: * Write in vim + vimtex. * Switch on continuous compiling (that's like ShareLaTeX). * Using synctex to preview with zathura (lightweight pdf). + This is really nice, you can configure vimtex to it. + CTRL-Click into the (zathura) pdf focuses vim to the corresponding position + <leader>lv in vim jumps to the position in the pdf being open side-by-side in zathura. * In case of complex errors open texstudio * Save battery, use vimagic and be happy.

cyphar 9y ago
> The only difference between ShareLaTeX and overleaf I see, is SLs over-the-tops documentation. Kudos again and thanks. There is also the (awesome) fact that ShareLaTeX is free software (under the AGPL no less).[1] [1]: https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex https://github.com/sharelatex/sharelatex
- rawland 9y ago
  Didn't know this. Thanks.
paradite 9y ago
I liked and used sharelatex initially, but my thesis was eventually moved to overleaf because overleaf has support for git repo (inside the share button), which is easier to manage for the research group.
- 9y ago

anton_tarasenko 9y ago

LyX[1] can be a better intro to LaTeX. It was posted on HN before. But really, it's the most powerful WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX, and it still provides access to the .tex source of the document. You can use the interface and learn the language at the same time. Besides, custom shortcuts make LyX much faster than writing TeX directly with autocomplete. [1] https://www.lyx.org/ https://www.lyx.org/

jimhefferon 9y ago

If you benefit from TeX, LaTeX, and friends, please consider supporting them with a membership in the TeX Users Group. For full information see http://tug.org/aims_ben.html http://tug.org/aims_ben.html but note that if you select to get the journal electronically then a one-year membership is $45. (If you are a student, recent student, senior citizen, or come from a country with a modest economy then the annual rate is $15.) It could not be more reasonable.