10 ms·

I don't get it. Say I already know that I'll need some formulae in my document. Then the use case here seems to be, essentially, that I can write # Section

• daurnimator 9y ago
  But arch has pandoc in pacman. All you have to do is `pacman -S pandoc`
  • mbid 9y ago
    Right, but look at its dependencies. Arch links haskell packages dynamically, so you easily end up in DLL hell.
    • daurnimator 9y ago
      Yes it links them dynamically. Why is that a problem? How would that end in DLL Hell? (which is multiple versions of dlls around and different pieces of application using different versions at same time in same process and never being sure what is using what)
• Tarean 9y ago
  Pandoc is awesome for things like tables or code blocks. Here is a table in pandoc markdown: | Header 1 | header 2 | |-|-| | Column 1 | Column 2 | Which is easy to write via emacs mode/vim plugin. Similar for code blocks. Plus this is extendable, I frequently use an extension that transforms DOT syntax into embedded graphs.
  • tincholio 9y ago
    Thing is, if you're already looking to use e.g., Emacs, you'll be better off using org-mode instead of markdown. Same lightness of syntax, tens of times the functionality (including much better tables, which you can use directly from a TeX document, as well, via radio tables). Editing ascii tables with no editor support is painful. There's also some org functionality in vim plugins, though I've never used them, so I don't know how much they cover.
    • ikurei 9y ago
      > if you're already looking to use e.g., Emacs, you'll be better off using org-mode I find that you should use org only if you use Emacs. Vim plugins for Org are very limited, and this is even more true for other editors. Judging a technology only for its technical merits is unproductive. Markdown has "won", it's everywhere and everyone can learn to use it. Those are damn powerful advantages. Using Markdown, I gain the ability to read and write on a smartphone or tablet in my phone or tablet, which for some notes is extremely convenient. Many times being able to access my notes on philosophy from my phone during a bus commute allowed me to develop and write down a thought, which would have been a pain to do with other technologies. Of course I could have done the same with other options, but this ubiquitous convenience and effortlessness is great. What I'd love to see is a way to transition easy-to-write-everywhere to more powerful type-setting easily when needed. May be combining Markdown and Latex? Or converting Markdown to Latex before publishing? I'm sure this exists already; I just haven't needed it enough yet :)
      • tincholio 9y ago
        I don't doubt that using org outside Emacs may be problematic to some degree (in terms of expected functionalities, anyway), but I use Emacs for everything, so it's not really an issue. If popularity alone were sufficient for technological choices, we wouldn't even be having this discussion (and we'd all be using Windows). I try to choose my tools according to how well they work for me. Markdown, in my opinion, is a poor choice compared to org, but I can use it to collaborate with others, no problem. As for the transition from light markup to TeX, that's pretty much the point of the OP, isn't it? Maybe the break point is different for everybody. For me, LaTeX imposes no extra cognitive load, but then again, I've been using it extensively for many years. If I'm need for something lighter, it'll be org (but really, org usually wins for me because of how well it does all the other stuff, not just the markup part).
• skrebbel 9y ago
  > Latex is a beast, but there are no serious alternatives to typeset formulae. People keep repeating this like it's true, but MS Word has had an excellent formula editor for a decade now (the one they shipped before Word 2007 was terribly shitty though). It's wysiwyg (which is fantastic if you're editing a big formula), it supports all math notation I've ever needed, and it has surprisingly decent UX. It even supports LaTeX-like input, eg if you type e^2 it gets autocorrected to e². This makes entering formulas as fast, if not faster, than LaTeX and editing formulas an order of magnitude easier because you don't need to re-parse that backslash-curly-mess that you entered a week ago. Just point and click and edit.
  • lyk 9y ago
    It's nowhere near as nice in my, and lots of other people's, opinion. Just because people don't like it doesn't mean they haven't used it. Also, word's actual typesetting can't touch latex. I wouldn't want to use word for anything, let alone something that requires a large equation.
  • wfo 9y ago
    Agreed, there's a great formula editor which is very nice if you want to create math presentations in powerpoint instead of in beamer (and I wouldn't blame you, especially if you're in a hurry). But could you really imagine writing a serious mathematical document (paper, book, thesis) in Word? No Git, no vim/emacs, no plain text? Abandoning the digital lingua franca of mathematical communication? Abandoning the packages written by the sum total of anyone who has worked on anything close to mathematics in recent years? For what?
    • skrebbel 9y ago
      > But could you really imagine writing a serious mathematical document (paper, book, thesis) in Word? Yes I could, and I did. My Master's thesis is written in Word and it was pretty heavy on the theory and the formulas. If you're interested it's online on http://e.teeselink.nl/thesis_et.pdf http://e.teeselink.nl/thesis_et.pdf. It's not a particularly stunning thesis in terms of content, but in my humble opinion it's a pretty document, definitely no worse than the average LaTeX-produced thesis. See eg page 58 (the 70th page of the PDF) for some large formulas. It's not arithmetic but Structured Operational Semantics, but I doubt that matters for this argument. (in hindsight I hate that page and the ones like it - the sheer overload of single-character variables makes it totally impossible to understand) By the way you said "no git" but Word files can be version controlled just fine - particularly when you're working solo which I was. I used Subversion (hey, 2007) but ok. I used Word because I noticed in earlier years that LaTeX made my mind drop down into "programmer mode" every time I wanted to accomplish something that was non-trivial. This nerd sniped me and it distracted me from writing the actual content. I ended up with super nice LaTeX themes and definitions and homecooked macros (excuse me for having forgotten the real names these things have in LaTeX, I last used it over 10 years ago), my content sources were super clean, but I spent at least as much time on setting up LaTeX as actually writing. Plus, I found editing large formulas frustrating because I had to find the right place in a fullscreen wall of backslashes and curlies. Word forced me to focus on the content because everything layout-wise I wanted to accomplish was boring and, mostly, easy. The only thing that was cumbersome was getting IEEE-style references (i.e. the ones that Bibtex generates by default) to work. It worked out in the end but wasn't as easy as it should be (I noticed that they fixed that since). Also I had zero problems with that thing where Word just doesn't want to do what you tell it to (indents jump, list items suddenly disappear etc, you know the drill) because I only used Word Styles (a bit like CSS classes) and never custom formatting. As long as you stick to that, Word sucks less.
• __bjoernd 9y ago
  It might surprise you, but lots of documents and side sets are written without any formula at all.
• GhostVII 9y ago
  I think it is worth the extra complexity to avoid having to write \section and \emph all the time, and to make your notes more readable as a .TXT files. Also I find it easier to just set up a basic document, for markdown you can just open a new text file and start writing, for Latex you have to do a lot of setup at the start of the document to define your margins and import packages. Its not going to work well if you want a perfectly formatted document, but if you want to write simple notes styled with CSS it is much nicer to work with.
• sevensor 9y ago
  I wrote my dissertation and several papers for publication using mardown + pandoc + latex. On Arch. I have to say, you're far overstating the difficulty of this arrangement, and understating the benefits. As long as you're willing to accept the haskell package madness, which pacman takes care of for you, everything else works in a very straightforward manner. The trick is, you don't have pandoc generate straight through to PDF. You treat pandoc as a preprocessor, have it generate tex. Then your main LaTeX source file boils down to a bunch of \usepackages and \includes. I pulled it all together with a very simple makefile. The markdown source is a great deal more readable -- all of those little substitutions that seem inconsequential individually add up to a lot less noise in your document source. Equations just pass through to LaTeX, so you write them the same. All of my floats started out using markdown syntax, which is really beneficial when drafting, since much harder to mess up a single line when cutting and pasting it around. In the end, I wanted finer control over how they looked, so I pasted the generated tex into my sources and worked from there. My one caveat is, you absolutely must understand LaTeX first, or you will be in for a bad time. Pandoc + markdown + LaTeX is no substitute for understanding LaTeX, but it's a huge win if you're already familiar with LaTeX and you're tired of typing backslashes. Finally, the recommendation to use article is unfortunate. Memoir will save you a lot of headaches.
  • chmln 9y ago
    > as long as you're willing to accept the haskell package madness https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pandoc-bin/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pandoc-bin/