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> 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 m

> 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.
- fusiongyro 8y ago
  There is not, to my knowledge, a really commonly-used workflow that starts at Word and ends at typesetting. This is something Pandoc purports to do, but I would expect to lose most of your manual formatting tweaks from Word in the process. Pandoc is a good tool for automating workflows that start with some other format and end with LaTeX. Another good option if you like Emacs is org-mode, which has a LaTeX export, among other things.
- Nullabillity 8y ago
  Org-mode has a similar feel to Markdown, exports to LaTeX, and allows you to embed LaTeX snippets so that you can keep using the Org file as your source of truth, rather than eventually having to do a full switch and edit the LaTeX document full-time. Another very neat feature is Org-Babel, which allows you to write code in (almost) any language that is then replaced with its output, which is great for example code. It can even pipe stuff through PlantUML, allowing you to embed your diagrams into the source code rather than having to manage them separately. As an example of what it looks like at scale(-ish), I used this to write my thesis paper[1], and all the other related documentation[2]. [1]: https://gitlab.com/PicoNodes/PicoNodes/blob/master/docs/Report.org https://gitlab.com/PicoNodes/PicoNodes/blob/master/docs/Repo... [2]: https://gitlab.com/PicoNodes/PicoNodes/blob/master/docs/PicoTalk.org https://gitlab.com/PicoNodes/PicoNodes/blob/master/docs/Pico...
- taeric 8y ago
  I'm curious why latex is weak at that? Considering most authors probably just use a notepad equivalent, the idea is if you are finding yourself having to put a ton of markup into the document, you are probably relying too much on items other than the prose to make your points. That is to say, yes, there is a workflow. It is basically to build the prose out separately from the layout. Latex is used to typeset the document you want to do. Not to author it. By the time you get to it, you probably should be at the point where the markup is what you care about. That make sense? Yes, there will be times where you care about how the document looks. That is likely an iterative process and many of us find value in separating the quibbles over the look from the authoring of the content. Both are valuable. Doing them both at the same time is ridiculously hard.
- 8y ago

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.

fusiongyro 8y ago
There is not, to my knowledge, a really commonly-used workflow that starts at Word and ends at typesetting. This is something Pandoc purports to do, but I would expect to lose most of your manual formatting tweaks from Word in the process. Pandoc is a good tool for automating workflows that start with some other format and end with LaTeX. Another good option if you like Emacs is org-mode, which has a LaTeX export, among other things.
Nullabillity 8y ago
Org-mode has a similar feel to Markdown, exports to LaTeX, and allows you to embed LaTeX snippets so that you can keep using the Org file as your source of truth, rather than eventually having to do a full switch and edit the LaTeX document full-time. Another very neat feature is Org-Babel, which allows you to write code in (almost) any language that is then replaced with its output, which is great for example code. It can even pipe stuff through PlantUML, allowing you to embed your diagrams into the source code rather than having to manage them separately. As an example of what it looks like at scale(-ish), I used this to write my thesis paper[1], and all the other related documentation[2]. [1]: https://gitlab.com/PicoNodes/PicoNodes/blob/master/docs/Report.org https://gitlab.com/PicoNodes/PicoNodes/blob/master/docs/Repo... [2]: https://gitlab.com/PicoNodes/PicoNodes/blob/master/docs/PicoTalk.org https://gitlab.com/PicoNodes/PicoNodes/blob/master/docs/Pico...
taeric 8y ago
I'm curious why latex is weak at that? Considering most authors probably just use a notepad equivalent, the idea is if you are finding yourself having to put a ton of markup into the document, you are probably relying too much on items other than the prose to make your points. That is to say, yes, there is a workflow. It is basically to build the prose out separately from the layout. Latex is used to typeset the document you want to do. Not to author it. By the time you get to it, you probably should be at the point where the markup is what you care about. That make sense? Yes, there will be times where you care about how the document looks. That is likely an iterative process and many of us find value in separating the quibbles over the look from the authoring of the content. Both are valuable. Doing them both at the same time is ridiculously hard.
8y ago