4 ms·

Your comment is interesting to me. I've read about TeX and LaTeX from time to time and it was my impression that everyone used LaTeX because TeX itself was diff

Your comment is interesting to me. I've read about TeX and LaTeX from time to time and it was my impression that everyone used LaTeX because TeX itself was difficult to use. And I never questioned this because almost every article I could find only spoke about LaTeX. Your comment is making me reevaluate what I thought I understood.

svat 9y ago
Yes, an overwhelming majority use LaTeX rather than TeX directly. (Well, among the tiny number of people who use TeX/LaTeX at all.) The reason, though, is not that TeX is difficult to use: it's that TeX is a system for typesetting, and most people don't need typesetting. If you're writing a paper for publication in a journal, they probably have their own typesetting style. With LaTeX you can just specify your paper as a sequence of paragraphs, "sections", a title, an author, and so on, and, by including the journal's style file (assuming it's good), your paper will come out typeset in that journal's style. This philosophy is explained at https://www.latex-project.org/about/ https://www.latex-project.org/about/ This is great for certain (many) kinds of documents. The problem with this, though, is that the moment you want to change the appearance and get into typesetting yourself, you're fighting a system that was actively designed to prevent you from doing this. An analogy may be a system like, say, WordPress: if what you have is a blog, then it would work for you, and you even get to choose one of several “themes” that others have written, and so on. The set of available plugins and customizations can even be impressively versatile (for example, I noticed that time.com runs on WordPress, and apparently so do a number of other non-blog sites: https://vip.wordpress.com/clients/ https://vip.wordpress.com/clients/). But ultimately, if you're trying to figure it out by yourself and have your own ideas about what your website should look like, a system like this will always be more frustrating than the alternative (of having full control). TeX is not difficult to use, though in the beginning you'd have to specify manually things like the typesetting of the document title (put it in a bold font at 16pt, centered on a line...). LaTeX has features to automate many such common typesettings tasks, but it has its own flaws (some stemming from the fact that it's implemented using TeX macros, which weren't designed for such heavy “programming”).
- xoroshiro 9y ago
  I've never needed to use it much, but when I do, it's mostly copy paste, crappy hacks, or video 'tutorials' of LaTeX. Now I'm genuinely curious what vanilla TeX looks like. Any good learning resources?
  - svat 9y ago
    Sure: The book I mentioned earlier (A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy) is my favourite learning resource. You may able to find it in a library, or wherever you look for books. (There are other books available for free online, such as A Gentle Introduction to TeX (http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/plain/gentle/gentle.pdf http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/plain/gentle/gentle.pdf) and TeX for the Impatient (http://mirrors.ctan.org/info/impatient/book.pdf http://mirrors.ctan.org/info/impatient/book.pdf).) If all you have is a passing curiosity though, you may just want to look at some examples: Knuth has .tex sources of some of his papers on his website (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/preprints.html); https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/preprints.html); you can look at them and compare with the resulting PDF files (which you can generate with `pdftex`). For an already typeset example, look at JRM2680.tex (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/JRM2680.tex https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/JRM2680.tex) and JRM2680.pdf (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/JRM2680.pdf https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/JRM2680.pdf).
taeric 9y ago
People use LaTeX because it already does a lot of what people want to do. More, it was also one of the first standard ways of packaging extensions for TeX. (I may be wrong on that point...) Folks are also highly scared off of TeX due to some of its aesthetic nature. Specifically, it looks rather different than most modern languages. That said, I think most of that fear is unfounded and I regret that I let it keep me from learning this while in college.
TylerE 9y ago
TeX is basically a much lower level formatting system. You don't say "make a heading", you say "make this text in 14pt font, bold, with this much extra vertical space.
- posterboy 9y ago
  No, if you did that instead of defining a macro, it would be your own fault.

svat 9y ago

Yes, an overwhelming majority use LaTeX rather than TeX directly. (Well, among the tiny number of people who use TeX/LaTeX at all.) The reason, though, is not that TeX is difficult to use: it's that TeX is a system for typesetting, and most people don't need typesetting. If you're writing a paper for publication in a journal, they probably have their own typesetting style. With LaTeX you can just specify your paper as a sequence of paragraphs, "sections", a title, an author, and so on, and, by including the journal's style file (assuming it's good), your paper will come out typeset in that journal's style. This philosophy is explained at https://www.latex-project.org/about/ https://www.latex-project.org/about/ This is great for certain (many) kinds of documents. The problem with this, though, is that the moment you want to change the appearance and get into typesetting yourself, you're fighting a system that was actively designed to prevent you from doing this. An analogy may be a system like, say, WordPress: if what you have is a blog, then it would work for you, and you even get to choose one of several “themes” that others have written, and so on. The set of available plugins and customizations can even be impressively versatile (for example, I noticed that time.com runs on WordPress, and apparently so do a number of other non-blog sites: https://vip.wordpress.com/clients/ https://vip.wordpress.com/clients/). But ultimately, if you're trying to figure it out by yourself and have your own ideas about what your website should look like, a system like this will always be more frustrating than the alternative (of having full control). TeX is not difficult to use, though in the beginning you'd have to specify manually things like the typesetting of the document title (put it in a bold font at 16pt, centered on a line...). LaTeX has features to automate many such common typesettings tasks, but it has its own flaws (some stemming from the fact that it's implemented using TeX macros, which weren't designed for such heavy “programming”).

xoroshiro 9y ago
I've never needed to use it much, but when I do, it's mostly copy paste, crappy hacks, or video 'tutorials' of LaTeX. Now I'm genuinely curious what vanilla TeX looks like. Any good learning resources?
- svat 9y ago
  Sure: The book I mentioned earlier (A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy) is my favourite learning resource. You may able to find it in a library, or wherever you look for books. (There are other books available for free online, such as A Gentle Introduction to TeX (http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/plain/gentle/gentle.pdf http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/plain/gentle/gentle.pdf) and TeX for the Impatient (http://mirrors.ctan.org/info/impatient/book.pdf http://mirrors.ctan.org/info/impatient/book.pdf).) If all you have is a passing curiosity though, you may just want to look at some examples: Knuth has .tex sources of some of his papers on his website (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/preprints.html); https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/preprints.html); you can look at them and compare with the resulting PDF files (which you can generate with `pdftex`). For an already typeset example, look at JRM2680.tex (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/JRM2680.tex https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/JRM2680.tex) and JRM2680.pdf (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/JRM2680.pdf https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/JRM2680.pdf).

taeric 9y ago

People use LaTeX because it already does a lot of what people want to do. More, it was also one of the first standard ways of packaging extensions for TeX. (I may be wrong on that point...) Folks are also highly scared off of TeX due to some of its aesthetic nature. Specifically, it looks rather different than most modern languages. That said, I think most of that fear is unfounded and I regret that I let it keep me from learning this while in college.

TylerE 9y ago

TeX is basically a much lower level formatting system. You don't say "make a heading", you say "make this text in 14pt font, bold, with this much extra vertical space.

posterboy 9y ago
No, if you did that instead of defining a macro, it would be your own fault.