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Hahahahaha I might be going to downvote hell for this, but as a computer scientist writing papers for a living, every hour spent writing latex belies your comm
by norswap 9y ago
Hahahahaha
I might be going to downvote hell for this, but as a computer scientist writing papers for a living, every hour spent writing latex belies your comment.
By the way, Context is a much saner alternative, although it still shares many of Latex' core flaws.
Unfortunately, that doesn't matter because most conference mandate use of their Latex or (ugly) Word template, and using Word is cause for ostracization.
You are also correct to say that version control is a big advantage of Latex. I wonder why Microsoft hasn't come up with a better competing solution.
- ska 9y agoWriting papers is always real work, but I’ve never wasted more time than when collaborating with a word processing document...
- cup-of-tea 9y agoHow many papers have you written? Have you written a master's or PhD thesis? How exactly are you spending your hours writing LaTeX? It sounds like you are doing it wrong.
- norswap 9y agoYou're two links away from the answer, person that obviously wants to have a good faith conversation.
- cup-of-tea 9y agoIt took me a while to figure out what you meant. I've never looked at people's profiles on here before. I couldn't imagine writing my thesis in anything but LaTeX. Or rather, anything that didn't support both high-quality typesetting and programming. I had little programs written in my .tex files which would generate some of the tables and figures. TikZ is wonderful. I aimed for nothing less than TAoCP level of quality.
- norswap 9y agoThe output of Tex is superior to anything else. I doesn't change the fact that the user experience is awful. But if you want Tex quality with less head-bashing, Context is much better than Latex. It's what I use for my thesis, but not for my papers -- templates are all Latex, and I didn't know about it at the time. Also I disagree with your basic point: hours of my time are worth much more than some fancy ligatures and fluff that makes the text look very marginally better.