4 ms·
I don't understand why LaTeX is considered hard. I wish people would try TeX out first as well. You literally type stuff and a paragraph comes out. Enter a blan
by cup-of-tea 9y ago
I don't understand why LaTeX is considered hard. I wish people would try TeX out first as well. You literally type stuff and a paragraph comes out. Enter a blank line to separate paragraphs. It can't be much easier. LaTeX just adds some macros to make it easy to make a title and section headings etc. Once you become proficient at entering equations in TeX it's incredibly fast. And you won't even need to render them to read them after a while.
> One can achieve something like 95% of the visual appearance of native LaTeX documents with a one-time investment of an hour or less work
Yes, and one can use LaTeX and achieve 100% with a similar one-time investment. I really don't understand this. To produce the document presented here LaTeX has absolutely no extra overhead compared with any other tool.
I suspect the misconception comes from the complicated looking tools like TeXnicCenter etc. If people saw me writing LaTeX in emacs (with zero buttons or other complications) they wouldn't think it was complicated. It's just text.
Still, if people insist on using Word for whatever reason I'm glad if they make the documents look nice like this one, even if the page geometry is way off (use Komascript).
- sp332 9y agoThis is covered on page 4, which cites a study showing a loss of productivity on papers that don't have a lot of equations.
- cpach 9y ago”I wish people would try TeX out first as well.” Do you by any chance have any TeX tutorials to recommend?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cup-of-tea 9y agoThe TeXbook by Knuth. See if you can find it in a library.
- svat 9y agoMy favourite TeX tutorial, which will turn you from beginner to expert and make you fall in love with TeX (maybe), is the book A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy. It comes highly recommended by Hans Hagen in the ConTeXt manual. (It's not free—published by Springer—but you can find it in the usual places you find books: libraries, whatever.)
- beefhash 9y ago> I wish people would try TeX out first as well. You literally type stuff and a paragraph comes out. Enter a blank line to separate paragraphs. It can't be much easier. This may be because raw TeX is not very google-able, whereas large amounts of guides exist for LaTeX in particular. The best resource for it seems to be the TeXbook, which seems to still be in print and not freely available. Side note: This is one of the reasons why I'm personally somewhat partial to troff, be it heirloom-doctools or groff. Many great resources, introductionary or otherwise, are freely available on the Internet at no cost, such as UNIX Text Processing and the introductions to the ms macros, eqn and tbl in the UNIX V7 manual volume 2A.
- cup-of-tea 9y agotroff/groff seems attractive to me, but can it achieve the same level of quality is TeX? When it comes to typesetting I'm not prepared to sacrifice quality for convenience and TeX seems to offer a reasonable compromise here.
- beefhash 9y agoStraight up: No, it can't. It will blow MS Word and LibreOffice out of the water. It can get close to TeX, but very noticeably eqn(1) is inferior to math mode. Table of contents generation and putting it at the top of the document is still not happening.