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I love LaTex. Writing without thinking about formatting and get marvelous looking documents is kind of magic. You use any excuse just to put some math in your d

by neves 9y ago

I love LaTex. Writing without thinking about formatting and get marvelous looking documents is kind of magic. You use any excuse just to put some math in your documents. I've stopped using it due to 2 reasons: 1) Tables are hard. There must be a more visual way do layout a table. 2) All your documents look like a scientific paper. It doesn't have beautiful styles which you can include and have a completely different layout. Like you can do with Word templates. Does LaTex improved in the last ten years? Or we all must be content with markdown?

gervase 9y ago
For point 1, I always use this. [0] For point 2, this is still the case. [0]: http://www.tablesgenerator.com/ http://www.tablesgenerator.com/
pmoriarty 9y ago
I've typeset books, articles, reports, fliers, resumes, chess diagrams, recipes, presentations, and probably a bunch of other stuff in LaTeX over the years... and, no, they don't all look like scientific papers. LaTeX is really what you make of it. It can look like anything you want. It's just a matter of which styles/packages you use, which options you select, how much tweaking you do, and how much knowledge/help you have when trying to make it look the way you want it to.
tincholio 9y ago
For 1), if you're an Emacs user, you can use org-mode tables, and convert them into LaTeX. You can even do that from the same LaTeX document using "radio tables" (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/org/Radio-tables.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/org/Radi...), which you can edit with all the facilities of org-mode, and then simply convert to LaTeX at the appropriate place. Regarding 2), you can nowadays find a wealth of document styles to use, if you don't want your writing to look like a CS paper... While creating proper document classes is a non-trivial amount of work (and so it is in MS Word and other WYSIWYG tools), it can then greatly simplify the task of creating the documents themselves. For example, I have recently done a CV class ( https://github.com/mvarela/orbit-cv https://github.com/mvarela/orbit-cv ), which provides a bunch of macros to automate the creation of your CV/résumé, and looks nothing like a scientific paper...
maemre 9y ago
Regarding 1), I use org-mode with inline LaTeX to write first couple of drafts, which has a nice visual table layout. It also has a Markdown-like syntax for markup. I export to LaTeX after I'm fairly satisfied with the result. For math-heavy documents, I start from LaTeX. In my opinion, that's where it really shines. Regarding 2), there are many document classes that don't look like scientific papers although LaTeX ships a limited number of document classes (book, article, report, and letter). Here are two third-party classes that come to my mind: - https://ctan.org/pkg/hitec https://ctan.org/pkg/hitec is a nice class that is - https://www.ctan.org/pkg/tufte-latex https://www.ctan.org/pkg/tufte-latex is inspired by Edward Tufte's books and provides a similar-looking handout/book style. And here is a list of some other classes: http://texcatalogue.ctan.org/bytopic.html#classes http://texcatalogue.ctan.org/bytopic.html#classes

by neves 9y ago

gervase 9y ago

For point 1, I always use this. [0] For point 2, this is still the case. [0]: http://www.tablesgenerator.com/ http://www.tablesgenerator.com/

pmoriarty 9y ago

I've typeset books, articles, reports, fliers, resumes, chess diagrams, recipes, presentations, and probably a bunch of other stuff in LaTeX over the years... and, no, they don't all look like scientific papers. LaTeX is really what you make of it. It can look like anything you want. It's just a matter of which styles/packages you use, which options you select, how much tweaking you do, and how much knowledge/help you have when trying to make it look the way you want it to.

tincholio 9y ago

For 1), if you're an Emacs user, you can use org-mode tables, and convert them into LaTeX. You can even do that from the same LaTeX document using "radio tables" (https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/org/Radio-tables.html https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/org/Radi...), which you can edit with all the facilities of org-mode, and then simply convert to LaTeX at the appropriate place. Regarding 2), you can nowadays find a wealth of document styles to use, if you don't want your writing to look like a CS paper... While creating proper document classes is a non-trivial amount of work (and so it is in MS Word and other WYSIWYG tools), it can then greatly simplify the task of creating the documents themselves. For example, I have recently done a CV class ( https://github.com/mvarela/orbit-cv https://github.com/mvarela/orbit-cv ), which provides a bunch of macros to automate the creation of your CV/résumé, and looks nothing like a scientific paper...

maemre 9y ago

Regarding 1), I use org-mode with inline LaTeX to write first couple of drafts, which has a nice visual table layout. It also has a Markdown-like syntax for markup. I export to LaTeX after I'm fairly satisfied with the result. For math-heavy documents, I start from LaTeX. In my opinion, that's where it really shines. Regarding 2), there are many document classes that don't look like scientific papers although LaTeX ships a limited number of document classes (book, article, report, and letter). Here are two third-party classes that come to my mind: - https://ctan.org/pkg/hitec https://ctan.org/pkg/hitec is a nice class that is - https://www.ctan.org/pkg/tufte-latex https://www.ctan.org/pkg/tufte-latex is inspired by Edward Tufte's books and provides a similar-looking handout/book style. And here is a list of some other classes: http://texcatalogue.ctan.org/bytopic.html#classes http://texcatalogue.ctan.org/bytopic.html#classes