5 ms·

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

by 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.
      - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
        Before I went the LaTeX route, I tried just doing it in HTML/CSS and although I'm well versed in both, it never really looked right. Using the "print" @media type and converting from px to inches only gets you so far. For something that I expect to be printed at some point, TeX is a much better place to start.
        taeric 8y ago
        Oddly, if you are willing to take complete control over the layout and not rely on any default flow of HTML, I suspect it would be easy enough. That said, the stability of the flow of TeX and friends lets me not worry about anything having changed on me in the past few months/years. I think this has gotten better in the HTML world, but it is still a much shakier foundation.
- mark-r 8y ago
  I didn't take the criticism of editing LaTex as anything to do with color schemes, but rather that you had to mentally skip over all the formatting text. For some that will be easier than others, but it's silly to ignore that there are alternatives that don't require that skill.
- nikdaheratik 8y ago
  It's not a very weak argument to say that learning LaTeX just so you can write your paper is a waste of time. The caveat is that, for some kinds of papers, it is less of a timewaster than other kinds. Especially if they have alot of math, or some wonky tables. I think the blog post was okay, but could have used some editing as I ended up skimming some of the points he was trying to make but that's kind of what blogs are about.
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.

by exergy 8y ago

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.
    - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
      Before I went the LaTeX route, I tried just doing it in HTML/CSS and although I'm well versed in both, it never really looked right. Using the "print" @media type and converting from px to inches only gets you so far. For something that I expect to be printed at some point, TeX is a much better place to start.
      - taeric 8y ago
        Oddly, if you are willing to take complete control over the layout and not rely on any default flow of HTML, I suspect it would be easy enough. That said, the stability of the flow of TeX and friends lets me not worry about anything having changed on me in the past few months/years. I think this has gotten better in the HTML world, but it is still a much shakier foundation.
mark-r 8y ago
I didn't take the criticism of editing LaTex as anything to do with color schemes, but rather that you had to mentally skip over all the formatting text. For some that will be easier than others, but it's silly to ignore that there are alternatives that don't require that skill.
nikdaheratik 8y ago
It's not a very weak argument to say that learning LaTeX just so you can write your paper is a waste of time. The caveat is that, for some kinds of papers, it is less of a timewaster than other kinds. Especially if they have alot of math, or some wonky tables. I think the blog post was okay, but could have used some editing as I ended up skimming some of the points he was trying to make but that's kind of what blogs are about.

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.