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So convinced was I that this was why scientists wrote in LaTeX that I even had a go at writing a LaTeX paper of my own (it never got finished; there was

So convinced was I that this was why scientists wrote in LaTeX that I even had a go at writing a LaTeX paper of my own (it never got finished; there was a lesson there). So after successfully completing the task ZERO times, the author still felt fully qualified to dismiss the entire approach and whinge about the tooling. /facepalm

jjoonathan 8y ago
The only problem: he's right.
- exergy 8y ago
  Indeed. I felt he presented a very limited argument, without much of an overreach. He doesn't say "Never use Latex!". His opinion is that those who are picking it up under the false illusion that latex gets out of there way better than MS Word are doing themselves a disservice. Seems to me to be a fairly uncontroversial opinion. The latex document, especially one that's big, is not trivial to parse and edit. Making sure the 'flow' of the text is right is infinitely easier with WYSIWYG. He absolutely seems to be OK with people who use latex because they care deeply about the beauty of the resulting document, and himself advocates for a post-writing conversion to latex. Markdown>Pandoc>Latex even. I feel many here are not reading the article in context. I have an aside of my own to add to the "latex gets document design out of your way" crowd. I can bet any money that the types of people who will fiddle a lot with the typeface settings on MS Word will fiddle with themes/linespacing/monospaced font-du-jour on their text editor too. It has less to do with the writing environment and more to do with personality. I would know since I'm one of those people.
  - wirrbel 8y ago
    He slams Latex usage as a fetish. Then he actually has a hard time putting forth arguments against latex, ends up with very weak ones, for example he compares MacOS vanilla Emacs installation with a weird green-on-black colorscheme with MS Word as if it was the only editor you could use for Latex. In the end I feel I wasted my time reading his blog pot, because he just does not provide any substantial information. I don't even have the impression that his proposed alternatives (conversion changes from other formats to latex) are really used by him. Ah, I like writing documents in Docbook, so I am not even that kind of a latex enthusiast. But his criticism is kind of really off.
    - jcranmer 8y ago
      > Then he actually has a hard time putting forth arguments against latex One of the main things he does point out is that the justification often used to promote LaTeX is complete bullshit. "You should use LaTeX because you spend too much time trying to worry about what size your title should be in Word." No, I don't. He also points out that, even if you prefer writing markup yourself to WYSIWYG, LaTeX isn't exactly the simplest markup. Stuff like restructured text or markdown (hell, even HTML in many cases!) has much less intrusive formatting information than LaTeX does. LaTeX is designed for final typesetting, and it has too much overhead for the majority of writing cases where you don't care about final typesetting at all.
      - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
        > He also points out that, even if you prefer writing markup yourself to WYSIWYG, LaTeX isn't exactly the simplest markup. Stuff like restructured text or markdown (hell, even HTML in many cases!) has much less intrusive formatting information than LaTeX does. LaTeX is designed for final typesetting, and it has too much overhead for the majority of writing cases where you don't care about final typesetting at all. The larger hurdle (IMO), is that TeX can be extremely finicky even compared to HTML. To get a document that looks mostly the same as the one you got out of Word takes time and a fair bit of setup. I went through this same process with my CV after I finished my MA. Once it's done however, updates are quick and require almost no effort.
        taeric 8y ago
        That last point is the killer feature to me. I haven't updated my resume in years, but when I do, it is quick and I'm not worried about bitrot. The document I'm working on in wiki from last week? Odds are it is already broken. The document in Word that I shared with a friend? Almost certainly not going to be a trivial update. This isn't to say that there are not benefits to word/wiki, mind. Just, "where everyone else is" is not the most satisfying of reasons.
        8y ago
  - nickysielicki 8y ago
    > I feel many here are not reading the article in context. Agreed, people are having a strong reaction to a criticism of LaTeX that the author isn't actually making. > I can bet any money that the types of people who will fiddle a lot with the typeface settings on MS Word will fiddle with themes/linespacing/monospaced font-du-jour on their text editor too. It pains me to agree with you, but I'll agree that at the end of the day, being concerned about typesetting is probably a bit superfluous. I think you're missing the point though. There's a strong value to standardization in formatting when it comes to typesetting, can you imagine how annoying/distracting it would be if serious journals had minor differences in formatting? I'm not being sarcastic here, it's a necessity when it comes to any kind of repeated publication. LaTeX solves this problem better than anything else in existence, way better than the limited themes and styles available in WYSIWYG text processors. I made a nice fancy template with tcolorbox for q/a homework problemsets and now that's a solved problem for me. It looks better than anything you could possibly make in Docs or Word, it looks exactly the same every time. It's also scriptable. For example, I was working on an amateur radio and I needed to save off the calibration settings before I worked on it. I took a video of myself scrolling through the settings, watched it once with mpv repeatedly hitting 's' to take screenshots, and then was able to interpolate the screenshots with the actual content of the Yaesu manual, producing a beautiful manual that described the setting in question, as well as showing what it was set to before I started working. It took me like 15 minutes, and I'm glad that I did it because it saved me a lot of time later on. Try doing that in Word, Libreoffice, or Docs!
    - exergy 8y ago
      Not to bellitle your achievements (honestly!), but I do not think your last paragraph can be a commonly encountered scenario. Either way, I'll back out a bit and ask a more elementary question. Is a workflow possible wherein one writes in anything-but-latex (Word/Markdown etc) and then uses latex to typeset? Because I (and the author) agree with you that a) standardisation is a good thing and b) latex is excellent at typesetting. What latex is weak at is me writing my paper in it, and then trying to read back whether what I wrote flows well.
      - 8y ago
  - SiempreViernes 8y ago
    There is an unstated premise here that is very important: you care, or don't, about the final appearance of the document. When people argue that latex gets out of the way, the road being spoken of is the one leading to a beautiful document, so the author is expected to care about the final appearance. LaTeX and Word both come with learning costs, the initial effort in to just bang out some words is clearly higher in LaTeX, but they will look good from the start. Yes, if you don't much care about the looks of the end result, Word is more expedient, but then so is notepad.
    - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
      Of course, his comparison shots w/ LaTeX and LibreOffice are misleading. While it's understandable to show what CM and the global style template look like, I don't think I've seen anyone - save for people writing package documentation - deliver using that formatting. Tl;dr, That is ugly.
      - SiempreViernes 8y ago
        What sort of documents do you look at? Lots of actual reports are in the "basically default" template; I googled for "us annual car deaths", and followed the first "institutional" result found, clicking around to find an actual, recent*, report. The first I found was in "basically default" style: https://www.iihs.org/frontend/iihs/documents/masterfiledocs.ashx?id=2166 https://www.iihs.org/frontend/iihs/documents/masterfiledocs.... Next, I googled "russian pension reform pdf", and in the top three hits there were two reports with various levels of depressing Word defaults, and one that I'll give be benefit of the doubt and say was actually a conversion from a web page. I'd say this is a fairly typical look for any report that isn't super official or actually a magazine trying to sell something.
        chrisfinazzo 8y ago
        Most of the time, it's CV's, Thesis papers, dissertations, that sort of thing. Really just looking for interesting ideas and packages I might want to "borrow" :). My current CV (and one other supporting document) started out as creatures of Word, so trying to keep to the format was a primary goal. The IIHS report honestly isn't bad looking. To my eyes, it could be done in TeX or Word depending on how complicated the styles actually are.
  - zaphar 8y ago
    I use LaTeX for my resume primarily and to be fair I edit the content as plain vanilla text first and only "typeset" it after that. I view the two tasks as very different. One of the reasons I dislike Word and other Word Processors is that they crowd my writing views with formatting tools and suggestions. A plain text editor is far more comfortable for me when I'm writing and Latex allows me to tackle the layout and typesetting work as a separate step.
    - da_chicken 8y ago
      I guess I don't see why that's a complaint about Word at all. When I'm writing doc, I fire up Word, set the view to Draft, set the Zoom to whatever is comfortable, and use the built-in styles for Normal, Headings, and Titles to structure my document. I have just as much screen real estate dedicated to Word as I would to VS Code. That automatically builds the navigation pane in recent editions, and since I'm creating a living document roughly 95% of the time, that's perfect. I literally care nothing at all about the exact formatting; just the document structure, content, and spelling. I'm doing about as much formatting as I would with a markdown document. If Word auto-formats something and you really don't want it to, you hit Ctrl-Z to revert it. If it keeps bothering you, you turn that auto feature off. I get the argument that people -- that is to say, programmers -- like to write in their text editor of choice, too. However, I think that's what it is: preference for the familiar. Writing LaTeX feels like you're programming and lets you use tools you're familiar with, so it appeals to people who like to write programs. That doesn't mean the extra effort is really paying off. I think arguments that the results from Word aren't good enough or professional enough don't really hold water, either. Take a look at any of the opinions from the Supreme Court of the United States [0]. Download any of those opinions and look at the metadata. Some of them are scanned documents, but many of them say: "Application: Acrobat PDFMaker N for Word". You'll find the same thing if you look at petitions that have been filed, and they get quite complicated [1]. [0]: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/18 https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/18 [1]: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/18/18-306/63707/20180914111804389_Larrabee%20Petition%20--%20Final.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/18/18-306/63707/20180...
      - 8y ago
  - taeric 8y ago
    The difference with Word versus LaTeX fiddling is that I can see the markup and know exactly what I'm doing with LaTeX. Oddly, WordPerfect, back in the day, had a view that would show you the markup. It was actually quite nice. I could try to view things in a WYSIWYG view, but I could also drop into the markup, since that is ultimately capable of expressing where things are happening. Contrast this with the current Word system. I have had a non-trivial number of times where it will start doing things and I have no idea why. Probably logical, but I can't see the inputs to the logic. Only the output, with some idea that I should be able to drag things. Doesn't always work, and sometimes "undoing" the drag of an items is a non-trivial task.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  I don't think he did a good enough job justifying just how annoying LaTeX actually can be. To write a conference paper for submission, the steps to start it out are generally: a) Copy the journal's LaTeX shell file. b) Copy some other Makefile to actually convert TeX files into PDFs. (Because it turns out that this is simply too complicated to actually make a single command, especially when you have a bibliography and several images to import). c) Okay, now we can go through the process of actually setting up the master TeX file, separate TeX files for each chapter and start typing text. d) Include an image. Weep at how annoying this is, and how inconsistent documentation is. e) Time to tweak the article to get it to fit the page count. Don't you love all of those little cycles where you have to wait for a half-dozen commands to run to figure out if you've shortened a single paragraph enough to pull the section header up to the previous page? And this is assuming you have a PDF viewer that will automatically refresh the display for you if it detects the PDF file changed. In my opinion, the two great things about LaTeX are its syntax for math and BibTeX. But I wouldn't contend that these are unimprovable (particularly BibTeX). But it spends too much time making you concerned with publishing concerns that trying to just jot down notes or other early document planning is surprisingly difficult.
  - tnecniv 8y ago
    If you use a LaTeX editor, it automates a lot of those steps.
- gumby 8y ago
  Is he? For me, markup of plain text is easier because it fits with the other tools I use. Thus I get all the revision control, more powerful diffing capabilities, proper macrology (templates and styles). Whereas I (not claiming a universal) can only use Word for small documents; when they get big, with revision tracking, chapters, etc etc I've found it becomes fragile. We had a 1600 page FDA submission garble itself shortly before we had to submit and had to go find older versions from backup tapes (!), re type stuff from old printed out copies, and check every number in every inline data submission which caused major panic and stress. Everybody we asked for help said, "don't use word for a large document" Maybe some people are able to do it.
pvaldes 8y ago
Try to do a thesis in LaTeX + Sweave then, as I did. Reading books, browsing internet and building the thing from zero like a ram, just because I can (lol). In Emacs, of course (Learning to swim directly in the white waters, why not?) Fun times. It was worth it all the trouble? oh yes! :-)
- gumby 8y ago
  > In Emacs, of course (Learning to swim directly in the white waters, why not?) Does Emacs have a reputation of being difficult to use? I remember that in the late 70s and early 80s MIT's CS and AI labs were proud that the (not specifically trained) secretaries used Emacs and wrote macros for it. It's been decades since I was a novice user so I don't remember the experience, but was the first editor I'd ever used, and, years later, the first editor my (arts major) wife ever used, and I don't remember any particular anxieties or consternation from either of us.
  - marcosdumay 8y ago
    > Does Emacs have a reputation of being difficult to use? Yes. And as it usually goes, it's an undeserved reputation caused by it being different from what most people are used to.
    - pvaldes 8y ago
      Agree. The different mode of working is the more difficult barrier to overcome.
  - pvaldes 8y ago
    Newer generation. Everybody used word. Couldn't be more disconnected from MIT. No unix gurus teaching fancy jedi tricks at sight. I was the anomaly sprouting in the middle of nowhere for no reason and doing all the walk backwards like a flapping salmon Emacs was just more dificult than the other programs that I tried, and I tried a lot: word, antiword, abiword, starwriter, openoffice, ed, joe, elvis, nano, vim, xemacs... okay I will bang my fingers and head against emacs and see what happens I realized later that I was doing it all wrong when I started to slowly unfurl the capabilities of the program. Couldn't be great if...? and, suddenly a wild major-mode appears. Not more viruses hiding around, not more big files that decide to crash or lose their format five hours before a presentation. Not more I updated the program and now I can't open my old files anymore. Very well time spent in retrospective. I use it every day. Same for LaTeX that was much more dificult to grasp but even more rewarding in a lot of unexpected ways.
nailer 8y ago
> after successfully completing the task ZERO times There's a Knuth quote about how the aim of TeX was to allow anyone to create properly typeset documents. I can't find the exact source, but https://www.tug.org/whatis.html https://www.tug.org/whatis.html should give you some idea. This individual wasn't able to. Last time I looked at TeX it (or metafont specifically) often seemed to default to bitmap fonts. That's a poor default - a bug by today's standards - but Knuth has a different definition of 'bug' than you and I do. Maybe you should spend less time judging users and more time working on improving the software you're advocating for?
- zaarn 8y ago
  Metafont does produce bitmap fonts yes. However, it's quite good at generating these for arbitrary resolutions, so I don't think this is actually a problem. Though actually using a non-bitmap solution might work better nowadays since the computing power is available now, it's probably good enough as it is.
  - wbl 8y ago
    And OT1 works for a long time together with pdflatex. What is it about TeX that makes people think they can ignore the past 20 years of development.
- singhrac 8y ago
  I think you should spend more time updating your knowledge of TeX :) All jabs aside metafont is separate from TeX in most regards, other than that Computer Modern was made using metafont (but is now widely distributed in a vector format).
  - nailer 8y ago
    You're missing the point. That metafont is seperate from TeX is irrelevant: the only time someone has to use metafont is with TeX, so metafont is considered part of Tex. PostScript is its own can of worms. People who need typeset documents shouldn't have to concern themselves with it. It's not 1994 anymore, alt.sysadmin.recovery is dead, nobody knows what a 'cluestick' is or what code ID-10-T is, and people generally have stopped blaming users for poor software - which TeX, by Knuth's own standards is.
wirrbel 8y ago
I did read that piece from start to end and I always thought "the arguments against Latex must come soon", all that I read where kind of repetitions of their title and glorifications of MS Word et. al.
SiempreViernes 8y ago
Also, they make extensive arguments against LaTeX based on the fact that they think that text in their preferred text editor is hard to read.
tajd 8y ago
This comment gets it.
na85 8y ago
Btw here's what it looks like when you use your method of quoting text to mobile user. https://pasteboard.co/HVEPxvy.jpg https://pasteboard.co/HVEPxvy.jpg Please consider using a simple ">" instead :)
- yesenadam 8y ago
  OMG I've read people on here saying that 1000 times. I don't care. Could you write to HN instead asking them to change it? Thanks.
  - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    Sadly, communicating effectively is the speaker's responsibility, no one else's. (Which isn't to say that HN doesn't need to fix that shit. But it's still your fault if you don't account for it.)
scottlocklin 8y ago
Linkbait trolling tier for sure. Slams LaTeX for being a markup language, then suggests we use org mode instead (org mode being a markup language which only produces interesting LaTeX output when you embed LaTeX in it). FWIIW I do use org mode as a sort of higher level LaTeX for note taking, mostly because the latex bits get compiled as I type, but when it comes time to turn my thoughts into something more organized, it gets turned into pure LaTeX. There are a real reasons academics and quasi-academics (aka me) use LaTeX instead of something like libreoffice. Equations are basically impossible without it. I can't write down a complicated relation in LaTeX as fast as I can think of it, but it's a lot closer to that speed than laboriously constructing a relation in the equation editor of any word processor. If you do something like physics, machine learning or topology, trying to write a paper in libreoffice or whatever they call Word now is sort of like trying to write a novel on an iphone. The author never mentions equations. Yeah, it's more difficult for a n00b to construct, say, a letter to the editor in LaTeX than it is in Libreoffice -that's not what it's for! Though of course once you have paid the toll of learning the thing, it's pretty quick and in fact lives up to its promise of not getting in the way of writing the content. Beyond that, my equations will be accessible for decades and will be completely platform independent. If you have an academic career, this is probably reasonably important. There's other reasons besides "equations" and "long term stability" (BibTex is probably top third reason) -but those are the big ones. Edit add: beamer mode is also a good reason to use it once you know it. Take your paper; turn it into a presentation -never leave the same application.
- gota 8y ago
  Microsoft Word's equation editor has improved a lot over the last years. I'm not saying it meets LaTeX at its strenghts but it is very unfair to call it "hell". Also, I haven't used it but newer versions recognize handwritten equations and formulae and automatically transcribe them to the equation format.
  - kevindong 8y ago
    My experience with the Word equation editor is that it causes the entire program to stutter, hang, and lag horribly if you have non-trivial equations. No idea why. On the flip side, LaTeX definitely takes longer to write, but it's less frustrating than having to deal with Word's (well intentioned) autoformatting.

jjoonathan 8y ago

The only problem: he's right.

exergy 8y ago
Indeed. I felt he presented a very limited argument, without much of an overreach. He doesn't say "Never use Latex!". His opinion is that those who are picking it up under the false illusion that latex gets out of there way better than MS Word are doing themselves a disservice. Seems to me to be a fairly uncontroversial opinion. The latex document, especially one that's big, is not trivial to parse and edit. Making sure the 'flow' of the text is right is infinitely easier with WYSIWYG. He absolutely seems to be OK with people who use latex because they care deeply about the beauty of the resulting document, and himself advocates for a post-writing conversion to latex. Markdown>Pandoc>Latex even. I feel many here are not reading the article in context. I have an aside of my own to add to the "latex gets document design out of your way" crowd. I can bet any money that the types of people who will fiddle a lot with the typeface settings on MS Word will fiddle with themes/linespacing/monospaced font-du-jour on their text editor too. It has less to do with the writing environment and more to do with personality. I would know since I'm one of those people.
- wirrbel 8y ago
  He slams Latex usage as a fetish. Then he actually has a hard time putting forth arguments against latex, ends up with very weak ones, for example he compares MacOS vanilla Emacs installation with a weird green-on-black colorscheme with MS Word as if it was the only editor you could use for Latex. In the end I feel I wasted my time reading his blog pot, because he just does not provide any substantial information. I don't even have the impression that his proposed alternatives (conversion changes from other formats to latex) are really used by him. Ah, I like writing documents in Docbook, so I am not even that kind of a latex enthusiast. But his criticism is kind of really off.
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    > Then he actually has a hard time putting forth arguments against latex One of the main things he does point out is that the justification often used to promote LaTeX is complete bullshit. "You should use LaTeX because you spend too much time trying to worry about what size your title should be in Word." No, I don't. He also points out that, even if you prefer writing markup yourself to WYSIWYG, LaTeX isn't exactly the simplest markup. Stuff like restructured text or markdown (hell, even HTML in many cases!) has much less intrusive formatting information than LaTeX does. LaTeX is designed for final typesetting, and it has too much overhead for the majority of writing cases where you don't care about final typesetting at all.
    - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
      > He also points out that, even if you prefer writing markup yourself to WYSIWYG, LaTeX isn't exactly the simplest markup. Stuff like restructured text or markdown (hell, even HTML in many cases!) has much less intrusive formatting information than LaTeX does. LaTeX is designed for final typesetting, and it has too much overhead for the majority of writing cases where you don't care about final typesetting at all. The larger hurdle (IMO), is that TeX can be extremely finicky even compared to HTML. To get a document that looks mostly the same as the one you got out of Word takes time and a fair bit of setup. I went through this same process with my CV after I finished my MA. Once it's done however, updates are quick and require almost no effort.
      - taeric 8y ago
        That last point is the killer feature to me. I haven't updated my resume in years, but when I do, it is quick and I'm not worried about bitrot. The document I'm working on in wiki from last week? Odds are it is already broken. The document in Word that I shared with a friend? Almost certainly not going to be a trivial update. This isn't to say that there are not benefits to word/wiki, mind. Just, "where everyone else is" is not the most satisfying of reasons.
        8y ago
- nickysielicki 8y ago
  > I feel many here are not reading the article in context. Agreed, people are having a strong reaction to a criticism of LaTeX that the author isn't actually making. > I can bet any money that the types of people who will fiddle a lot with the typeface settings on MS Word will fiddle with themes/linespacing/monospaced font-du-jour on their text editor too. It pains me to agree with you, but I'll agree that at the end of the day, being concerned about typesetting is probably a bit superfluous. I think you're missing the point though. There's a strong value to standardization in formatting when it comes to typesetting, can you imagine how annoying/distracting it would be if serious journals had minor differences in formatting? I'm not being sarcastic here, it's a necessity when it comes to any kind of repeated publication. LaTeX solves this problem better than anything else in existence, way better than the limited themes and styles available in WYSIWYG text processors. I made a nice fancy template with tcolorbox for q/a homework problemsets and now that's a solved problem for me. It looks better than anything you could possibly make in Docs or Word, it looks exactly the same every time. It's also scriptable. For example, I was working on an amateur radio and I needed to save off the calibration settings before I worked on it. I took a video of myself scrolling through the settings, watched it once with mpv repeatedly hitting 's' to take screenshots, and then was able to interpolate the screenshots with the actual content of the Yaesu manual, producing a beautiful manual that described the setting in question, as well as showing what it was set to before I started working. It took me like 15 minutes, and I'm glad that I did it because it saved me a lot of time later on. Try doing that in Word, Libreoffice, or Docs!
  - exergy 8y ago
    Not to bellitle your achievements (honestly!), but I do not think your last paragraph can be a commonly encountered scenario. Either way, I'll back out a bit and ask a more elementary question. Is a workflow possible wherein one writes in anything-but-latex (Word/Markdown etc) and then uses latex to typeset? Because I (and the author) agree with you that a) standardisation is a good thing and b) latex is excellent at typesetting. What latex is weak at is me writing my paper in it, and then trying to read back whether what I wrote flows well.
    - 8y ago
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  There is an unstated premise here that is very important: you care, or don't, about the final appearance of the document. When people argue that latex gets out of the way, the road being spoken of is the one leading to a beautiful document, so the author is expected to care about the final appearance. LaTeX and Word both come with learning costs, the initial effort in to just bang out some words is clearly higher in LaTeX, but they will look good from the start. Yes, if you don't much care about the looks of the end result, Word is more expedient, but then so is notepad.
  - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
    Of course, his comparison shots w/ LaTeX and LibreOffice are misleading. While it's understandable to show what CM and the global style template look like, I don't think I've seen anyone - save for people writing package documentation - deliver using that formatting. Tl;dr, That is ugly.
    - SiempreViernes 8y ago
      What sort of documents do you look at? Lots of actual reports are in the "basically default" template; I googled for "us annual car deaths", and followed the first "institutional" result found, clicking around to find an actual, recent*, report. The first I found was in "basically default" style: https://www.iihs.org/frontend/iihs/documents/masterfiledocs.ashx?id=2166 https://www.iihs.org/frontend/iihs/documents/masterfiledocs.... Next, I googled "russian pension reform pdf", and in the top three hits there were two reports with various levels of depressing Word defaults, and one that I'll give be benefit of the doubt and say was actually a conversion from a web page. I'd say this is a fairly typical look for any report that isn't super official or actually a magazine trying to sell something.
      - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
        Most of the time, it's CV's, Thesis papers, dissertations, that sort of thing. Really just looking for interesting ideas and packages I might want to "borrow" :). My current CV (and one other supporting document) started out as creatures of Word, so trying to keep to the format was a primary goal. The IIHS report honestly isn't bad looking. To my eyes, it could be done in TeX or Word depending on how complicated the styles actually are.
- zaphar 8y ago
  I use LaTeX for my resume primarily and to be fair I edit the content as plain vanilla text first and only "typeset" it after that. I view the two tasks as very different. One of the reasons I dislike Word and other Word Processors is that they crowd my writing views with formatting tools and suggestions. A plain text editor is far more comfortable for me when I'm writing and Latex allows me to tackle the layout and typesetting work as a separate step.
  - da_chicken 8y ago
    I guess I don't see why that's a complaint about Word at all. When I'm writing doc, I fire up Word, set the view to Draft, set the Zoom to whatever is comfortable, and use the built-in styles for Normal, Headings, and Titles to structure my document. I have just as much screen real estate dedicated to Word as I would to VS Code. That automatically builds the navigation pane in recent editions, and since I'm creating a living document roughly 95% of the time, that's perfect. I literally care nothing at all about the exact formatting; just the document structure, content, and spelling. I'm doing about as much formatting as I would with a markdown document. If Word auto-formats something and you really don't want it to, you hit Ctrl-Z to revert it. If it keeps bothering you, you turn that auto feature off. I get the argument that people -- that is to say, programmers -- like to write in their text editor of choice, too. However, I think that's what it is: preference for the familiar. Writing LaTeX feels like you're programming and lets you use tools you're familiar with, so it appeals to people who like to write programs. That doesn't mean the extra effort is really paying off. I think arguments that the results from Word aren't good enough or professional enough don't really hold water, either. Take a look at any of the opinions from the Supreme Court of the United States [0]. Download any of those opinions and look at the metadata. Some of them are scanned documents, but many of them say: "Application: Acrobat PDFMaker N for Word". You'll find the same thing if you look at petitions that have been filed, and they get quite complicated [1]. [0]: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/18 https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/18 [1]: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/18/18-306/63707/20180914111804389_Larrabee%20Petition%20--%20Final.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/18/18-306/63707/20180...
    - 8y ago
- taeric 8y ago
  The difference with Word versus LaTeX fiddling is that I can see the markup and know exactly what I'm doing with LaTeX. Oddly, WordPerfect, back in the day, had a view that would show you the markup. It was actually quite nice. I could try to view things in a WYSIWYG view, but I could also drop into the markup, since that is ultimately capable of expressing where things are happening. Contrast this with the current Word system. I have had a non-trivial number of times where it will start doing things and I have no idea why. Probably logical, but I can't see the inputs to the logic. Only the output, with some idea that I should be able to drag things. Doesn't always work, and sometimes "undoing" the drag of an items is a non-trivial task.
jcranmer 8y ago
I don't think he did a good enough job justifying just how annoying LaTeX actually can be. To write a conference paper for submission, the steps to start it out are generally: a) Copy the journal's LaTeX shell file. b) Copy some other Makefile to actually convert TeX files into PDFs. (Because it turns out that this is simply too complicated to actually make a single command, especially when you have a bibliography and several images to import). c) Okay, now we can go through the process of actually setting up the master TeX file, separate TeX files for each chapter and start typing text. d) Include an image. Weep at how annoying this is, and how inconsistent documentation is. e) Time to tweak the article to get it to fit the page count. Don't you love all of those little cycles where you have to wait for a half-dozen commands to run to figure out if you've shortened a single paragraph enough to pull the section header up to the previous page? And this is assuming you have a PDF viewer that will automatically refresh the display for you if it detects the PDF file changed. In my opinion, the two great things about LaTeX are its syntax for math and BibTeX. But I wouldn't contend that these are unimprovable (particularly BibTeX). But it spends too much time making you concerned with publishing concerns that trying to just jot down notes or other early document planning is surprisingly difficult.
- tnecniv 8y ago
  If you use a LaTeX editor, it automates a lot of those steps.
gumby 8y ago
Is he? For me, markup of plain text is easier because it fits with the other tools I use. Thus I get all the revision control, more powerful diffing capabilities, proper macrology (templates and styles). Whereas I (not claiming a universal) can only use Word for small documents; when they get big, with revision tracking, chapters, etc etc I've found it becomes fragile. We had a 1600 page FDA submission garble itself shortly before we had to submit and had to go find older versions from backup tapes (!), re type stuff from old printed out copies, and check every number in every inline data submission which caused major panic and stress. Everybody we asked for help said, "don't use word for a large document" Maybe some people are able to do it.

pvaldes 8y ago

Try to do a thesis in LaTeX + Sweave then, as I did. Reading books, browsing internet and building the thing from zero like a ram, just because I can (lol). In Emacs, of course (Learning to swim directly in the white waters, why not?) Fun times. It was worth it all the trouble? oh yes! :-)

gumby 8y ago
> In Emacs, of course (Learning to swim directly in the white waters, why not?) Does Emacs have a reputation of being difficult to use? I remember that in the late 70s and early 80s MIT's CS and AI labs were proud that the (not specifically trained) secretaries used Emacs and wrote macros for it. It's been decades since I was a novice user so I don't remember the experience, but was the first editor I'd ever used, and, years later, the first editor my (arts major) wife ever used, and I don't remember any particular anxieties or consternation from either of us.
- marcosdumay 8y ago
  > Does Emacs have a reputation of being difficult to use? Yes. And as it usually goes, it's an undeserved reputation caused by it being different from what most people are used to.
  - pvaldes 8y ago
    Agree. The different mode of working is the more difficult barrier to overcome.
- pvaldes 8y ago
  Newer generation. Everybody used word. Couldn't be more disconnected from MIT. No unix gurus teaching fancy jedi tricks at sight. I was the anomaly sprouting in the middle of nowhere for no reason and doing all the walk backwards like a flapping salmon Emacs was just more dificult than the other programs that I tried, and I tried a lot: word, antiword, abiword, starwriter, openoffice, ed, joe, elvis, nano, vim, xemacs... okay I will bang my fingers and head against emacs and see what happens I realized later that I was doing it all wrong when I started to slowly unfurl the capabilities of the program. Couldn't be great if...? and, suddenly a wild major-mode appears. Not more viruses hiding around, not more big files that decide to crash or lose their format five hours before a presentation. Not more I updated the program and now I can't open my old files anymore. Very well time spent in retrospective. I use it every day. Same for LaTeX that was much more dificult to grasp but even more rewarding in a lot of unexpected ways.

nailer 8y ago

> after successfully completing the task ZERO times There's a Knuth quote about how the aim of TeX was to allow anyone to create properly typeset documents. I can't find the exact source, but https://www.tug.org/whatis.html https://www.tug.org/whatis.html should give you some idea. This individual wasn't able to. Last time I looked at TeX it (or metafont specifically) often seemed to default to bitmap fonts. That's a poor default - a bug by today's standards - but Knuth has a different definition of 'bug' than you and I do. Maybe you should spend less time judging users and more time working on improving the software you're advocating for?

zaarn 8y ago
Metafont does produce bitmap fonts yes. However, it's quite good at generating these for arbitrary resolutions, so I don't think this is actually a problem. Though actually using a non-bitmap solution might work better nowadays since the computing power is available now, it's probably good enough as it is.
- wbl 8y ago
  And OT1 works for a long time together with pdflatex. What is it about TeX that makes people think they can ignore the past 20 years of development.
singhrac 8y ago
I think you should spend more time updating your knowledge of TeX :) All jabs aside metafont is separate from TeX in most regards, other than that Computer Modern was made using metafont (but is now widely distributed in a vector format).
- nailer 8y ago
  You're missing the point. That metafont is seperate from TeX is irrelevant: the only time someone has to use metafont is with TeX, so metafont is considered part of Tex. PostScript is its own can of worms. People who need typeset documents shouldn't have to concern themselves with it. It's not 1994 anymore, alt.sysadmin.recovery is dead, nobody knows what a 'cluestick' is or what code ID-10-T is, and people generally have stopped blaming users for poor software - which TeX, by Knuth's own standards is.

wirrbel 8y ago

I did read that piece from start to end and I always thought "the arguments against Latex must come soon", all that I read where kind of repetitions of their title and glorifications of MS Word et. al.

SiempreViernes 8y ago

Also, they make extensive arguments against LaTeX based on the fact that they think that text in their preferred text editor is hard to read.

tajd 8y ago

This comment gets it.

na85 8y ago

Btw here's what it looks like when you use your method of quoting text to mobile user. https://pasteboard.co/HVEPxvy.jpg https://pasteboard.co/HVEPxvy.jpg Please consider using a simple ">" instead :)

yesenadam 8y ago
OMG I've read people on here saying that 1000 times. I don't care. Could you write to HN instead asking them to change it? Thanks.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  Sadly, communicating effectively is the speaker's responsibility, no one else's. (Which isn't to say that HN doesn't need to fix that shit. But it's still your fault if you don't account for it.)

scottlocklin 8y ago

Linkbait trolling tier for sure. Slams LaTeX for being a markup language, then suggests we use org mode instead (org mode being a markup language which only produces interesting LaTeX output when you embed LaTeX in it). FWIIW I do use org mode as a sort of higher level LaTeX for note taking, mostly because the latex bits get compiled as I type, but when it comes time to turn my thoughts into something more organized, it gets turned into pure LaTeX. There are a real reasons academics and quasi-academics (aka me) use LaTeX instead of something like libreoffice. Equations are basically impossible without it. I can't write down a complicated relation in LaTeX as fast as I can think of it, but it's a lot closer to that speed than laboriously constructing a relation in the equation editor of any word processor. If you do something like physics, machine learning or topology, trying to write a paper in libreoffice or whatever they call Word now is sort of like trying to write a novel on an iphone. The author never mentions equations. Yeah, it's more difficult for a n00b to construct, say, a letter to the editor in LaTeX than it is in Libreoffice -that's not what it's for! Though of course once you have paid the toll of learning the thing, it's pretty quick and in fact lives up to its promise of not getting in the way of writing the content. Beyond that, my equations will be accessible for decades and will be completely platform independent. If you have an academic career, this is probably reasonably important. There's other reasons besides "equations" and "long term stability" (BibTex is probably top third reason) -but those are the big ones. Edit add: beamer mode is also a good reason to use it once you know it. Take your paper; turn it into a presentation -never leave the same application.

gota 8y ago
Microsoft Word's equation editor has improved a lot over the last years. I'm not saying it meets LaTeX at its strenghts but it is very unfair to call it "hell". Also, I haven't used it but newer versions recognize handwritten equations and formulae and automatically transcribe them to the equation format.
- kevindong 8y ago
  My experience with the Word equation editor is that it causes the entire program to stutter, hang, and lag horribly if you have non-trivial equations. No idea why. On the flip side, LaTeX definitely takes longer to write, but it's less frustrating than having to deal with Word's (well intentioned) autoformatting.