12 ms·

The lingua franca of LaTeX

246 points by JohnHammersley 7y ago

JohnHammersley 7y ago
And whilst this is shameless self-promotion, if you want to try out LaTeX without installing it yourself, please check out https://www.overleaf.com https://www.overleaf.com (I'm one of the founders)
- jszymborski 7y ago
  I'll come in and say that Overleaf has been invaluable when you're working in teams and need real-time editing and/or your team members don't know how to/refuse to use Git (cough some academic settings cough)
  - blt 7y ago
    I prefer git for the bulk of the writing process because it lets you make well structured commits, use your favorite editor, and doesn't depend on having a strong internet connection. Even so, you can't beat overleaf for the final stages of paper submission when all the authors are making tiny typo fixes and style edits in all parts of the document concurrently.
- OrangeManBad 7y ago
  Please do more shameless promotion, latex is amazing and overleaf makes it very accessible.
  - smitty1e 7y ago
    For really mind-blowing possibilities, try org-mode[1] under emacs, along with org-babel[2] and LaTeX export. You can pretty much write and execute your technical paper and your source code simultaneously in arbitrary languages. I recommend the spacemacs[3] distribution, as the vi interface gets it right. [1] https://orgmode.org/manual/index.html#Top https://orgmode.org/manual/index.html#Top [2] https://orgmode.org/manual/Working-with-Source-Code.html#Working-with-Source-Code https://orgmode.org/manual/Working-with-Source-Code.html#Wor... [3] http://spacemacs.org/ http://spacemacs.org/
    - _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
      Equally, AUCTeX in Emacs for direct editing of LaTeX (best TeX editor there is). (For more complex documents, I've had better luck manipulating TeX directly rather than via another layer, e.g. Org mode, which is fantastic for other things.)
      - shstalwart 7y ago
        Agreed. Writing with AUCTex plus helm-bibtex is like a dream. I like org-mode but I find it a too limiting for actually writing papers in.
        kleiba 7y ago
        Would you mind elaborating what is so great about AUCTeX? What makes it the best LaTeX editor?
- inamberclad 7y ago
  Virtually everyone at school used Overleaf. Impressive bit of kit, particularly since the version 2 update. I was fond of how v1 kept everything in a git repo though.
  - stroebjo 7y ago
    I liked that about v1 as well, but it seems like they have brought it over to v2 [0]. Trying it on a v2 project it only seems to have one commit for everything up until the first clone? [0]: https://www.overleaf.com/blog/bringing-the-git-bridge-to-v2-its-here-in-beta https://www.overleaf.com/blog/bringing-the-git-bridge-to-v2-...
- glerk 7y ago
  Overleaf got me through every math/CS course in my undergrad. Thank you for your amazing work.
- buildbot 7y ago
  Thank you for an absolutely awesome piece of software, my senior capstone in undergrad would have been so much worse without overleaf.
- TelmoMenezes 7y ago
  Congrats on overleaf. Me and my colleagues use it everyday and we love it!
- boazbarak 7y ago
  Thank you so much for overleaf! It’s been such a great tool for multi-author papers but even for writing on your own it’s better than standalone latex. Unlike typical latex that would just refuse to compile if you forget to close a brace, overleaf/sharelatex will make a best effort and just mark the part of the source where you made a mistake
- JohnHammersley 7y ago
  Thanks for all the lovely comments about Overleaf! I'd somehow missed them, and reading them all together now is a very nice way to end the day! We're continuing to build on and improve the platform now that the ShareLaTeX integration is pretty much complete, so look out for more updates soon, and thanks again for all your support. PS: Please do continue to tell all your friends nice things about Overleaf :)
capnrefsmmat 7y ago
I'm a little sad that there still doesn't seem to be a "LaTeX for the Web", a document markup system with similar philosophy as LaTeX but for HTML output. LaTeX is basically only suited for static PDF output, which only survives because there don't seem to be tools that do an equally good job generating HTML documents. There are a lot of special-purpose markup languages, like Markdown and AsciiDoc. They involve toolchains written in other languages to convert them to HTML. If you want to add features, you have to hack the toolchain. For blog posts and simple websites, that's fine. But sometimes I want to build something nontrivial -- as an academic, the first thing that comes to mind is an academic paper, where I might want to have special markup for theorems, proofs, examples, figures, and tables, and have ways to automatically cross-reference them, generate tables of contents, embed automatically formatted bibliographies, and so on. Or generate figures from code (like TiKZ), or embed data analysis code right in the source and embed the results (via knitr or Sweave). With pandoc, bookdown, and knitr, you can get pretty close to this. But what made LaTeX so powerful is that it is programmable in LaTeX. It can be extended: you can define new types of environments (example problems! homework exercises! every example shows equivalent source code in three different languages! category diagrams generated automatically! musical notation is typeset!), you can make new commands to automate drudgery (typesetting chemical equations! building complicated equations!), and you can do it all with at least some basic separation between content and presentation style. Converting the larger LaTeX documents I've made to Markdown or Org would be basically impossible without writing a bunch of scripts to extend the Markdown renderer and hack everything together. There's no equivalent of just writing a LaTeX package. I'm not aware of another document preparation system that comes close to LaTeX. Org mode is probably the closest, since it has tools to embed code blocks in other languages and include their output, but after a week of fighting with conversions between markup languages I can really see the appeal of LaTeX's uniform syntax and built-in programmability. The other promising option seems to be Pollen[0], a Racket-based programmable system. But it seems more like TeX than LaTeX: it provides the very basic tools to build a programmable document system, but not the higher-level conveniences (like cross-referencing commands and standard sectioning and environment commands) you would need to build yourself. Maybe someday... [0] https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/ https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/
- smitty1e 7y ago
btrettel 7y ago
Random LaTeX question: Does anyone have any tips for writing LaTeX code to avoid typos or other mistakes? I.e., using the fact that LaTeX is a programming language and not just markup language to catch mistakes? I started adding what basically are assertions to my TeX files. These have caught a fair number of errors. I also periodically run "static analysis" scripts to catch writing and coding errors but these tends to have many false positives in my experience. E.g., chktex and these: http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voice-weasel-words-duplicates/ http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voi... But I'm thinking there may be good coding styles or habits that could prevent errors too. Any ideas?
- Shoop 7y ago
  Maybe you want to check out proselint? [0] [0] https://github.com/amperser/proselint https://github.com/amperser/proselint
- bakul 7y ago
  The old ispell used to be able to deal with TeX/LaTeX input. Though that is for the text, not {La,}TeX code. You can try using TeXworks. You can try typesetting when you want to test and see the output in a pdf preview window. tex.stackexchange.com is a good resource.
- glial 7y ago
  My life has gotten easier since I started using ShareLatex (now Overleaf). It's kind of like Google Docs for LaTeX, and it checks your code for errors as you type.
- todd8 7y ago
  My observation is that TeX/LaTeX are designed for use by humans but unlike other programming, the literal content of the document occupies more of the source being generated by the author than the elements used to control the layout (macros, elemental operators, etc.); consequently, errors like improper nesting of environments can produce puzzling error messages. An XML style markup language would produce easier to understand error messages, but I believe that TeX/LaTeX makes the proper trade off by reducing the authoring effort to create content at the expense of harder to debug documents when complex formatting is being done. Another important observation is the TeX itself is as free of errors as any piece of software you are ever likely to use. LaTeX and many packages can sometimes have quirks because of a bug, but the underlying engine works the way it is intended to work, always. So knowing this, my approach is to use a system that continuously shows the typeset output as I type, if I can. That way errors are usually obvious and easy to find. If that's not practical with your favorite editor, just manually run LaTex on your source frequently to see how your document is progressing. The times I've had to do serious puzzling over what was happening were almost always because I had pages of complex text entered before checking to see the output. TeX most of the time doesn't care about whitespace. It makes its own, excellent, decisions on where to to wrap lines according to font size and margins, etc. So this means that you can just start every sentence on a new line without worrying about the right margin; TeX doesn't care. This makes editing and proofing your documents much easier, especially if your editor just autowraps the contents of long sentences without inserting line breaks: then it's easy to cut and paste and rearrange entire sentences while writing. So a three sentence paragraph would look like this in the source: Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. [1] Rarely, whitespace can matter, for example when defining special environments and macros for typesetting mathematics or a programming sample. In this case you can make use of the % (percent character) which starts a comment that continues to the end of line to cut off trailing whitespace. I find this handy when defining my own commands to keep the LaTeX easy to read by breaking it up into lines without worrying about extra spaces being inserted. (Don't be scared by this next example; it's not something that ordinary users would create. The point is it is possible and can be found when needed on tex.stackexchange.com. It's very fancy wizard level typesetting. TeX/LaTeX allows crazy powerful manipulation of text. See [2] to see the results that this produces--really, take a look.) Note the use of %. \newcommand\overlineset[2]{% \stackengine{2pt}{$#1$}{\makebox[\widthof{$#1$}]{% $\scriptscriptstyle\hrulefill\,#2\,\hrulefill$}}% {O}{c}{F}{T}{S}% } Don't fuss with margins, heading font, caption location for figures, and so forth while creating your masterpiece. Get the content down while making sure that LaTeX is formatting it without error. Afterwards, since everything is parameterized, you can go back and modify the appearance and get it to look just right and it will be consistent across the entire document. I find this so very superior to the What-You-See-Is-All-You-Get style of document preparation in Word. Because TeX/LaTeX is a markup language, it's very easy to generate form letters, labels, etc. by writing a small python script. I've done this to generate spine labels for my books containing a 2-D barcode, Dewey Decimal call number, author, ISBN, and my name for my books. The python code looks up the dimensions of the book on the internet to control the best layout. The TeX/LaTeX part wasn't hard, and with TeX's Turing complete macro language I could have programmed almost all of this in pure TeX, but I found the combination of using python as a preprocessor for a TeX/LaTeX backend very powerful. Fancy graphics are a challenge in any document, but a fantastic package for graphics is available for LaTeX called TikZ. It is a macro package, written in modern TeX/LaTeX macros. It, like most LaTeX packages, has excellent documentation. See the TikZ package documentation at [3]. Photos and other graphics can be directly inserted into documents too, but TikZ is integrated with LaTeX so margins, reflowing text, captions, fonts come out perfectly. For academic and more serious writing learn BibTeX, a bibliography generator/database. BibTeX citation information is widely available for the papers I care about so I don't even have to enter the Author/Title/Publisher/etc. myself. I waste too much time thinking about Fonts because I like them. Once upon a time, when TeX was created, there were very few fonts available for digital use. Today, Font creation should probably be left to professionals and serious hobbyists so I don't use MetaFont anymore. It is a font creation system and has been a part of TeX from the very beginning and is still available to those that would like to design their own fonts. I used it to create my company's first Logo (I only needed 5 upper case letters). Today, there are so many great fonts available, and TeX/LaTeX can work with all modern fonts so making your own isn't a good use of your time. Make sure to consult up to date documentation on font handling because there has been a great deal of evolution in the use of fonts in TeX/LaTeX over the past few decades. TeX is now 40 years old and has had many extension and additions so it is no fun to build from scratch. Fortunately for the Mac there is the comprehensive MacTex distribution containing every standard/optional part that you should need if you are using MacOS; on Windows there is proTeXt, but I haven't used it. Both MacTeX and proTeXt are just system specific distributions of the TeXLive distribution available on Linux that is updated every year. Programmers are probably most productive in their favorite editors and these are likely to have a LaTeX mode. Emacs has a very capable mode, AUCTeX, for editing LaTeX documents. I even generate PDFs from my org-mode files by using org-mode support for LaTeX. However, I do this only for documents that are org-mode to begin with, not for ordinary documents. There are also some nice standalone programs for preparing LaTeX documents. I've used the program TeXShop that comes with the bundle of TeX related stuff that is installed when you install the MacTeX distribution. It probably runs on Windows and Linux as well. This is a good TeX editor, but programmers will likely miss the power and flexibility of using a programming editor (git integration, custom key-bindings, etc.) To try out LaTeX without needing to install any software there is the excellent web based LaTeX system call Overleaf [4]. It also supports collaborative editing. [1] attributed to Mark Twain [2] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/122117/overline-containing-text-or-other-symbols?rq=1 https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/122117/overline-cont... [3] https://www.bu.edu/math/files/2013/08/tikzpgfmanual.pdf https://www.bu.edu/math/files/2013/08/tikzpgfmanual.pdf [4] https://www.overleaf.com https://www.overleaf.com
Wistar 7y ago
Maybe I dreamed it but I could swear that I read that Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid was typeset by Hofstadter in TeX. That, by itself, although fairly amazing, wasn't the most noteworthy thing to me but that he had first read—uploaded to his brain—all the docs for TeX before he wrote a single word and let the experience of using it call forth from memory the relevant documentation.
- stan_rogers 7y ago
  While METAFONT, and to a lesser extent, TeX, were to become frequently featured characters in Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas days, GEB was pre-TeX. It was created using Pentti Kanerva's TV-Edit at Stanford (with the data on punched paper tape). The preface to the 20th anniversary edition of GEB tells the tale.
  - Wistar 7y ago
    Ah. Thank you. Well, I guess I did dream it.
- teddyh 7y ago
  What you might be (mis-)remembering is Eric S. Raymond’s description of the production of The New Hacker's Dictionary printed book: http://catb.org/jargon/html/personality.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/personality.html
  - Wistar 7y ago
    You are absolutely correct! That is precisely what I mis-remembe... er, mis-attributed.
zzo38computer 7y ago
I use Plain TeX with .dvi output. One advantage is that it can use the DVI format, which is in many ways much better than PDF for many things. (You can also convert DVI to PDF and to other formats; I wrote a program to convert DVI to PBM (without using PostScript), and use that to print out the documents (through foo2zjs, which converts the PBM into the format needed by the printer).)
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  > DVI format, which is in many ways much better than PDF for many things Would you mind listing a few? I ask because, if my memory serves correctly, the only thing DVI ever accomplished for me was to make me want to poke my eyes out.
  - zzo38computer 7y ago
    It is much simpler, and many kind of post-processing can be done on it better too, and also you can compile the fonts per printer (DVI doesn't actually care about the font glyphs at all, and does not require that it is even a font glyph as is normally considered) as needed. If you have a printer that implements it, you could even do such things as cutting holes in pages, printing raised or engraved text, invisible ink, etc, without causing problems with software that does not support these things.
    - jahewson 7y ago
      PDF too supports external font files, a multitude of font formats, and special ink layers (these are called “separations”). PDF also supports PostScript fonts, which are already compiled for your printer.
      - zzo38computer 7y ago
        I didn't know that, but OK, so it does (although PostScript fonts won't be so good if you want to use bitmap fonts and stuff like that instead (I use METAFONT to compile bitmap fonts for the printer, and than use my own software to rasterize the page, by copying the generated font glyphs into the positions specified by the DVI file)). Still, DVI is simpler for many uses. I think PDF is too complicated.
segfaultbuserr 7y ago
I know there's a smaller but vocal group in tech that openly attacks LaTeX, e.g. "LaTeX considered harmful". While I don't completely agree with them, but I think there are some legitimate and genuine criticisms here. Personally, I find LaTeX is great due to its native programmability - it facilitates a natural separation of content and presentation, combined with its markup language, can be very powerful. It also enables extensibility - community packages for almost every single type of content, e.g. organic chemistry, Feynman diagram, even music. A typical user only needs to \usepackage and stop worrying. It's CTAN ecosystem is just like a programming language like Perl, or recently, Node.js or Go, which is great. But I find all hell breaks loose when you want to get a slightly different formatting than what's offered. Then suddenly the entire system becomes something you need to fight against. Previously, you could be a happy \usepackage code monkey, but now you need to know the system inside-out and hack a path ahead. Just like what happens when you use a software library in a slightly different way than the author expected, then suddenly you find yourself in a battle with the entire library, unfortunately, the same thing occurs in typesetting... For example, with LaTeX you can add footnotes to essentially anywhere with guaranteed aesthetics. UNLESS you want to add a footnote for your title, then it turns out the existing infrastructure in the "article" template doesn't allow it at all, and you need to define and redefine and undefine some internal macros in your document to implement it, as I learned from https://tex.stackexchange.com/ https://tex.stackexchange.com/ And all the separation of content and presentation and its benefits ends at this point. It's no longer "what you think is what you get". The same issue also occurs when you are trying to make a Beamer slideshow, most "environments" in LaTeX are designed for papers, not a slide. For example, when I want to put some images to the slide, often not fits in a "regular" geometric position, I find I have to keep hacking the width and position of the images and keep compiling until the result is acceptable. I don't know if there are better packages for typesetting slideshow, recommendations are welcome. Another problem I've noticed is the phenomenon of confusing and outdated packages. Often there are more than one package for a specific task, some are old and limited but still used in many documents, others are new, the rest are competing implementations. Old ones are frequently mentioned in the old guides, it works for a while until you have a corner case, then it takes a few attempts before moving to the newer packages. Again, just like programming languages. A recent trend in programming is writing new, cleaner implementations for basic tasks, I don't know if the same thing is happening in the LaTeX community, if it is, I think it would be great. On the other hand, I've yet to see a word processor which allows users to extend it and automate formatting and typesetting without doing some ugly macros hacked together and written in VBScript. So I see LaTeX as a valuable tool and I'll keep using LaTeX in the foreseeable future. The final words, having https://tex.stackexchange.com/ https://tex.stackexchange.com/ is a great contribution to the LaTeX community, just like how https://stackoverflow.com/ https://stackoverflow.com/ helps for programming.
svat 7y ago
This is a good article! A couple of corrections to the early history in the introductory paragraphs: • It is indeed true that the first edition of Volumes 1–3 of The Art of Computer Programming and the second edition of Volume 1 (1968, 1969, 1973, 1973) had been done with hot-metal typesetting (pieces of lead, laid out to form the page) with a human doing the typesetting/compositing (with a Monotype machine). And that for the second edition of Volume 2 in 1977, the publisher Addison-Wesley was switching to a cheaper alternative. But the cheaper alternative was not electronic; it was phototypesetting (the letterforms made with light and lenses instead of metal). It was Knuth who noticed a book that had been electronically typeset (Patrick Winston's AI book), realized that electronic typesetting machines actually had enough resolution to print like “real books” (unlike typewriters or printers of the time), and decided to solve his problem for himself (as he felt that he could make shapes with 0s and 1s). • The summer of 1977, Knuth spent in China, thinking he'd specified his program in enough detail and his two students would be able to complete the program by the time he came back. He came back and saw they had only implemented a small subset, and decided to spend his sabbatical year writing the program himself. He mentions that as he started writing it he realized the students' proto-TeX was an impressive effort, because there was a lot missing from his specifications. Knuth's article The Errors of TeX (reprinted in his collection Literate Programming) goes into excellent detail on the development process. Also: a suggestion to try plain TeX (instead of LaTeX), if you haven't tried it. The book A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy is especially good. It might surprise you.
- kashyapc 7y ago
  Thank you for the background and recommendations. Just read the very interesting abstract[1] of the book by Seroul and Levy; queued. (Wish it were a tad less pricey than €64). [1] https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9780387975627 https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9780387975627
  - cpach 7y ago
    If you buy a used copy it will probably be much cheaper. See e.g. https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?bi=0&bx=off&cm_sp=SearchF-_-Advtab1-_-Results&ds=30&recentlyadded=all&sortby=17&sts=t&tn=A%20Beginner%92s%20Book%20of%20TEX https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?bi=0&bx=off&c...
ai_ia 7y ago
Just a curious question. I love LaTeX. Can we build a programming language for the web which just focusses on the writing and takes care of the styling for Web, Mobile etc. I mean Markdown is already there doing somewhat similar but it still needs to set up properly and styled to use it correctly. Can LaTeX type tool be developed for web where the user writes what he wants to write and generates a static web book or blog post or article confirming to the same style? Apologies if this is stupid question.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  There's thousands of tools like this, called "static site generators". Most include a barebones default theme like you describe. There's so many because a few years ago they were a big hype and everybody and their cat built one.
- Asooka 7y ago
  These days you can just publish a PDF and every browser will display it properly.
- jonsonnotjonson 7y ago
  Like https://www.nongnu.org/texi2html/ https://www.nongnu.org/texi2html/ ?
ggm 7y ago
As a t/roff and eqn and tbl user I never found the story compelling. The uplift cost to latex in 1982 was north of my painpoint and in 1990 I managed to do things in tbl and eqn I never imagined possible. Tex font fascism was also a bummer. A phototypesetting expert I knew preferred the actual type to digital type, the microfilm typeset stuff was amazing (I saw galley proofs in bromide and they were crisp and clean) I think I "get" it better now. It's just at that time there was another school of more pragmatic engineering aligned thought in Unix using Dec10 RUNOFF derived concepts which morphd into t/roff and stuck there. Maybe it's like Emacs and vi? Dec 10 SOS editor was like ed which led to ex and vi. If you walked into the TECO door you went lisp and Emacs. To launch into Tex and latex you needed a professor leading you there rather than an engineer doing nroff and t/roff
- sampo 7y ago
  Systems engineers (for example the K&R "C Programming Language" book) didn't need elaborate math notation, like Knuth needed.
  - ggm 7y ago
    Eqn was invented precisely to do elaborate math notation. Integrals, sweeping braces, majuscule and minescule letters, suffixes, Greek..
- pjc50 7y ago
  Interesting to hear from the pre-Tex world. I'd like to see some examples of expert use of tbl and eqn; outside of manpages the roff ecosystem seems to have vanished.
  - cpach 7y ago
    roff is probably very uncommon in these days. But not unheard of. A recent example is Donovan and Kernighan’s book The Go Programming Language which was typeset using an XML and groff toolchain. It was featured on HN a few years ago, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11470905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11470905
j-pb 7y ago
If we want to get remotely intelligent machines, LaTeX needs to die. It's a visual description based on a turing complete language, 95% of semantic meaning is lost once it's poured into a TeX document, end the last 5% are gone once it's compiled into a mess of pdf text boxes that ignore text flow and just look correct. Literally any other document description language would be a better lingua franca than LaTeX, because a language should be used to communicate, and TeX is meant to print curves.
- ezequiel-garzon 7y ago
  The use of LaTeX should not and does not prevent the advancement of machine intelligence, just as the stubborn use of blackboards and chalk by mathematicians as prime communication devices. Now, when machines get intelligent enough they’ll figure out LaTeX and more. Keep in mind that one goal of TeX was to make it fairly easy for a human to write it down. Another goal is for another human to be able to understand that source quite well. Now picture both tasks with semantics-rich MathML.
pjmlp 7y ago
While I was big into LaTeX during the university, even wrote my thesis with it, using the MikTeX distribution, nowadays I rather use the likes of Word, FrameMaker, DocBook or DITA based tooling.
- cpach 7y ago
  It was quite long ago a saw a new project that opted to utilise DocBook. Is it still popular?
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    I used it on a project three years ago. All the help system was based on it, generating Word, PDF and HTML based deliveries. It is relatively popular at the enterprise level, where the licensing costs for such tools are peanuts vs the overall project costs.
    - cpach 7y ago
      Neat! Would you minding listing some of those toolchain vendors? I think about pros and cons of various publishing systems from time to time and would love some new input.
      - pjmlp 7y ago
        FrameMaker, OxygenXML, RoboHelp, XMetaL, XMLmind, Arbortext.
        cpach 7y ago
        Oh, lots of stuff to look up. Thank you!
jermaink 7y ago
Just curious with regard to presentations: Does any known tech corp use beamer for presentations?
- gh02t 7y ago
  I've seen people from IBM giving talks using Beamer.
jermaink 7y ago
Just curious with regard to presentations: Does any known tech corp use beamer?
lyxfan 7y ago
Let's not forget to show some love for the tool that makes LaTeX usable by mere mortals: https://www.lyx.org/ https://www.lyx.org/ Lyx is so useful that I am sometimes amazed it is not more popular. All the power of LaTeX with the ease of use of MS Word. And free and opensource. What's not to love?
- enriquto 7y ago
  > the ease of use of MS Word. I honestly find MS Word extremely difficult to use. Like, I'm always fighting against the incorrect assumptions it's doing on my text, and against an unknown amount of invisible state that changes my formatting as I type.
- FabHK 7y ago
  Yeah, Word-style "WYSIWYG" versus LaTeX-style source-code + compiling is really a pretty big philosophical difference. Some people much prefer the latter, and will avoid WYSIWYG LaTeX tools. The marked up source code gives you much better control, and you can use semantic macros that for example allow you to change how you format vectors or chapter titles etc. across the whole document easily. See a marginally relevant xkcd here: https://xkcd.com/2109/ https://xkcd.com/2109/
  - improbable22 7y ago
    Maybe you know this, but LyX is somewhere in the middle. You can see roughly what you are doing while writing, which makes some things much easier. Especially typing in large formulae (and double-checking that you didn't make a mistake). Although the way you enter them is more typing than point-and-clicking. For something like changing how the chapter titles look, you are pretty much back in the world of Latex, trying out some macro to change all of them.
- akvadrako 7y ago
  If you care about precise formatting, it's much easier to use than word. LyX encourages you to use defined styles and avoid formatting quirks, compared with Word where you need to be very careful not to insert little inconsistencies.
chess93 7y ago
Note for any college students (especially undergrad): Do your STEM presentations in Beamer to get extra brownie points.
mymythisisthis 7y ago
Good tutorial for Latex?
- wglb 7y ago
  There are tons of resources at https://www.tug.org/texlive/ https://www.tug.org/texlive/. If you download it there are many included.
  - wglb 7y ago
    Also the article itself has some pointers.
jedberg 7y ago
I used LaTex in college, to typeset all my essays. I also used it in my creative writing class, and people were amazed that I was able to add line numbers to my work so we could easily discuss it by referring to line numbers! I'm pretty sure I got better grades in all my writing based classes based solely on the fact that I used LaTex to typeset my work. The last time I wrote a resume[0] I used LaTex to do it too, and I provide the LaTex source[1] on my website. I've seen bits of it show up in other people's resumes, which is exactly what I want to happen! But what was funny was how often people would say "boy this looks so clean and professional!". Pretty sure I got some interviews just because of how "pretty" my resume was. [0] https://www.jedberg.net/Jeremy_Edberg_Resume.pdf https://www.jedberg.net/Jeremy_Edberg_Resume.pdf [1] https://www.jedberg.net/Jeremy_Edberg_Resume.tex https://www.jedberg.net/Jeremy_Edberg_Resume.tex
- EliRivers 7y ago
  Pretty sure I got some interviews just because of how "pretty" my resume was. Definitely. I've had interviewers start by thanking me for my CV being well-formatted and also short. Ha. I've just noticed that as I type this, I have literally in front of me on my desk Eijkhout's "Tex by Topic", Lamport's latex book and "The Latex Companion" by Goosens et al. This must be where I do most of my pretty document making.
xorand 7y ago
This quote is amusing: "there’s even an open archive maintained by Cornell University where authors of papers in physics, chemistry, and other disciplines can directly submit their LaTeX manuscripts for open viewing." for two reasons: 1) sounds like 'there's even a church at Vatican' seen that arXiv.org is the biggest ever collection of scientific articles submitted by their authors 2) and there's no chemistry section in arXiv.org, but a half is mathematics and some computer science

And whilst this is shameless self-promotion, if you want to try out LaTeX without installing it yourself, please check out https://www.overleaf.com https://www.overleaf.com (I'm one of the founders)

jszymborski 7y ago
I'll come in and say that Overleaf has been invaluable when you're working in teams and need real-time editing and/or your team members don't know how to/refuse to use Git (cough some academic settings cough)
- blt 7y ago
  I prefer git for the bulk of the writing process because it lets you make well structured commits, use your favorite editor, and doesn't depend on having a strong internet connection. Even so, you can't beat overleaf for the final stages of paper submission when all the authors are making tiny typo fixes and style edits in all parts of the document concurrently.
OrangeManBad 7y ago
Please do more shameless promotion, latex is amazing and overleaf makes it very accessible.
- smitty1e 7y ago
  For really mind-blowing possibilities, try org-mode[1] under emacs, along with org-babel[2] and LaTeX export. You can pretty much write and execute your technical paper and your source code simultaneously in arbitrary languages. I recommend the spacemacs[3] distribution, as the vi interface gets it right. [1] https://orgmode.org/manual/index.html#Top https://orgmode.org/manual/index.html#Top [2] https://orgmode.org/manual/Working-with-Source-Code.html#Working-with-Source-Code https://orgmode.org/manual/Working-with-Source-Code.html#Wor... [3] http://spacemacs.org/ http://spacemacs.org/
  - _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
    Equally, AUCTeX in Emacs for direct editing of LaTeX (best TeX editor there is). (For more complex documents, I've had better luck manipulating TeX directly rather than via another layer, e.g. Org mode, which is fantastic for other things.)
    - shstalwart 7y ago
      Agreed. Writing with AUCTex plus helm-bibtex is like a dream. I like org-mode but I find it a too limiting for actually writing papers in.
      - kleiba 7y ago
        Would you mind elaborating what is so great about AUCTeX? What makes it the best LaTeX editor?
inamberclad 7y ago
Virtually everyone at school used Overleaf. Impressive bit of kit, particularly since the version 2 update. I was fond of how v1 kept everything in a git repo though.
- stroebjo 7y ago
  I liked that about v1 as well, but it seems like they have brought it over to v2 [0]. Trying it on a v2 project it only seems to have one commit for everything up until the first clone? [0]: https://www.overleaf.com/blog/bringing-the-git-bridge-to-v2-its-here-in-beta https://www.overleaf.com/blog/bringing-the-git-bridge-to-v2-...
glerk 7y ago
Overleaf got me through every math/CS course in my undergrad. Thank you for your amazing work.
buildbot 7y ago
Thank you for an absolutely awesome piece of software, my senior capstone in undergrad would have been so much worse without overleaf.
TelmoMenezes 7y ago
Congrats on overleaf. Me and my colleagues use it everyday and we love it!
boazbarak 7y ago
Thank you so much for overleaf! It’s been such a great tool for multi-author papers but even for writing on your own it’s better than standalone latex. Unlike typical latex that would just refuse to compile if you forget to close a brace, overleaf/sharelatex will make a best effort and just mark the part of the source where you made a mistake
JohnHammersley 7y ago
Thanks for all the lovely comments about Overleaf! I'd somehow missed them, and reading them all together now is a very nice way to end the day! We're continuing to build on and improve the platform now that the ShareLaTeX integration is pretty much complete, so look out for more updates soon, and thanks again for all your support. PS: Please do continue to tell all your friends nice things about Overleaf :)

capnrefsmmat 7y ago

I'm a little sad that there still doesn't seem to be a "LaTeX for the Web", a document markup system with similar philosophy as LaTeX but for HTML output. LaTeX is basically only suited for static PDF output, which only survives because there don't seem to be tools that do an equally good job generating HTML documents. There are a lot of special-purpose markup languages, like Markdown and AsciiDoc. They involve toolchains written in other languages to convert them to HTML. If you want to add features, you have to hack the toolchain. For blog posts and simple websites, that's fine. But sometimes I want to build something nontrivial -- as an academic, the first thing that comes to mind is an academic paper, where I might want to have special markup for theorems, proofs, examples, figures, and tables, and have ways to automatically cross-reference them, generate tables of contents, embed automatically formatted bibliographies, and so on. Or generate figures from code (like TiKZ), or embed data analysis code right in the source and embed the results (via knitr or Sweave). With pandoc, bookdown, and knitr, you can get pretty close to this. But what made LaTeX so powerful is that it is programmable in LaTeX. It can be extended: you can define new types of environments (example problems! homework exercises! every example shows equivalent source code in three different languages! category diagrams generated automatically! musical notation is typeset!), you can make new commands to automate drudgery (typesetting chemical equations! building complicated equations!), and you can do it all with at least some basic separation between content and presentation style. Converting the larger LaTeX documents I've made to Markdown or Org would be basically impossible without writing a bunch of scripts to extend the Markdown renderer and hack everything together. There's no equivalent of just writing a LaTeX package. I'm not aware of another document preparation system that comes close to LaTeX. Org mode is probably the closest, since it has tools to embed code blocks in other languages and include their output, but after a week of fighting with conversions between markup languages I can really see the appeal of LaTeX's uniform syntax and built-in programmability. The other promising option seems to be Pollen[0], a Racket-based programmable system. But it seems more like TeX than LaTeX: it provides the very basic tools to build a programmable document system, but not the higher-level conveniences (like cross-referencing commands and standard sectioning and environment commands) you would need to build yourself. Maybe someday... [0] https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/ https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/

smitty1e 7y ago

btrettel 7y ago

Random LaTeX question: Does anyone have any tips for writing LaTeX code to avoid typos or other mistakes? I.e., using the fact that LaTeX is a programming language and not just markup language to catch mistakes? I started adding what basically are assertions to my TeX files. These have caught a fair number of errors. I also periodically run "static analysis" scripts to catch writing and coding errors but these tends to have many false positives in my experience. E.g., chktex and these: http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voice-weasel-words-duplicates/ http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voi... But I'm thinking there may be good coding styles or habits that could prevent errors too. Any ideas?

Shoop 7y ago
Maybe you want to check out proselint? [0] [0] https://github.com/amperser/proselint https://github.com/amperser/proselint
bakul 7y ago
The old ispell used to be able to deal with TeX/LaTeX input. Though that is for the text, not {La,}TeX code. You can try using TeXworks. You can try typesetting when you want to test and see the output in a pdf preview window. tex.stackexchange.com is a good resource.
glial 7y ago
My life has gotten easier since I started using ShareLatex (now Overleaf). It's kind of like Google Docs for LaTeX, and it checks your code for errors as you type.
todd8 7y ago
My observation is that TeX/LaTeX are designed for use by humans but unlike other programming, the literal content of the document occupies more of the source being generated by the author than the elements used to control the layout (macros, elemental operators, etc.); consequently, errors like improper nesting of environments can produce puzzling error messages. An XML style markup language would produce easier to understand error messages, but I believe that TeX/LaTeX makes the proper trade off by reducing the authoring effort to create content at the expense of harder to debug documents when complex formatting is being done. Another important observation is the TeX itself is as free of errors as any piece of software you are ever likely to use. LaTeX and many packages can sometimes have quirks because of a bug, but the underlying engine works the way it is intended to work, always. So knowing this, my approach is to use a system that continuously shows the typeset output as I type, if I can. That way errors are usually obvious and easy to find. If that's not practical with your favorite editor, just manually run LaTex on your source frequently to see how your document is progressing. The times I've had to do serious puzzling over what was happening were almost always because I had pages of complex text entered before checking to see the output. TeX most of the time doesn't care about whitespace. It makes its own, excellent, decisions on where to to wrap lines according to font size and margins, etc. So this means that you can just start every sentence on a new line without worrying about the right margin; TeX doesn't care. This makes editing and proofing your documents much easier, especially if your editor just autowraps the contents of long sentences without inserting line breaks: then it's easy to cut and paste and rearrange entire sentences while writing. So a three sentence paragraph would look like this in the source: Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. [1] Rarely, whitespace can matter, for example when defining special environments and macros for typesetting mathematics or a programming sample. In this case you can make use of the % (percent character) which starts a comment that continues to the end of line to cut off trailing whitespace. I find this handy when defining my own commands to keep the LaTeX easy to read by breaking it up into lines without worrying about extra spaces being inserted. (Don't be scared by this next example; it's not something that ordinary users would create. The point is it is possible and can be found when needed on tex.stackexchange.com. It's very fancy wizard level typesetting. TeX/LaTeX allows crazy powerful manipulation of text. See [2] to see the results that this produces--really, take a look.) Note the use of %. \newcommand\overlineset[2]{% \stackengine{2pt}{$#1$}{\makebox[\widthof{$#1$}]{% $\scriptscriptstyle\hrulefill\,#2\,\hrulefill$}}% {O}{c}{F}{T}{S}% } Don't fuss with margins, heading font, caption location for figures, and so forth while creating your masterpiece. Get the content down while making sure that LaTeX is formatting it without error. Afterwards, since everything is parameterized, you can go back and modify the appearance and get it to look just right and it will be consistent across the entire document. I find this so very superior to the What-You-See-Is-All-You-Get style of document preparation in Word. Because TeX/LaTeX is a markup language, it's very easy to generate form letters, labels, etc. by writing a small python script. I've done this to generate spine labels for my books containing a 2-D barcode, Dewey Decimal call number, author, ISBN, and my name for my books. The python code looks up the dimensions of the book on the internet to control the best layout. The TeX/LaTeX part wasn't hard, and with TeX's Turing complete macro language I could have programmed almost all of this in pure TeX, but I found the combination of using python as a preprocessor for a TeX/LaTeX backend very powerful. Fancy graphics are a challenge in any document, but a fantastic package for graphics is available for LaTeX called TikZ. It is a macro package, written in modern TeX/LaTeX macros. It, like most LaTeX packages, has excellent documentation. See the TikZ package documentation at [3]. Photos and other graphics can be directly inserted into documents too, but TikZ is integrated with LaTeX so margins, reflowing text, captions, fonts come out perfectly. For academic and more serious writing learn BibTeX, a bibliography generator/database. BibTeX citation information is widely available for the papers I care about so I don't even have to enter the Author/Title/Publisher/etc. myself. I waste too much time thinking about Fonts because I like them. Once upon a time, when TeX was created, there were very few fonts available for digital use. Today, Font creation should probably be left to professionals and serious hobbyists so I don't use MetaFont anymore. It is a font creation system and has been a part of TeX from the very beginning and is still available to those that would like to design their own fonts. I used it to create my company's first Logo (I only needed 5 upper case letters). Today, there are so many great fonts available, and TeX/LaTeX can work with all modern fonts so making your own isn't a good use of your time. Make sure to consult up to date documentation on font handling because there has been a great deal of evolution in the use of fonts in TeX/LaTeX over the past few decades. TeX is now 40 years old and has had many extension and additions so it is no fun to build from scratch. Fortunately for the Mac there is the comprehensive MacTex distribution containing every standard/optional part that you should need if you are using MacOS; on Windows there is proTeXt, but I haven't used it. Both MacTeX and proTeXt are just system specific distributions of the TeXLive distribution available on Linux that is updated every year. Programmers are probably most productive in their favorite editors and these are likely to have a LaTeX mode. Emacs has a very capable mode, AUCTeX, for editing LaTeX documents. I even generate PDFs from my org-mode files by using org-mode support for LaTeX. However, I do this only for documents that are org-mode to begin with, not for ordinary documents. There are also some nice standalone programs for preparing LaTeX documents. I've used the program TeXShop that comes with the bundle of TeX related stuff that is installed when you install the MacTeX distribution. It probably runs on Windows and Linux as well. This is a good TeX editor, but programmers will likely miss the power and flexibility of using a programming editor (git integration, custom key-bindings, etc.) To try out LaTeX without needing to install any software there is the excellent web based LaTeX system call Overleaf [4]. It also supports collaborative editing. [1] attributed to Mark Twain [2] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/122117/overline-containing-text-or-other-symbols?rq=1 https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/122117/overline-cont... [3] https://www.bu.edu/math/files/2013/08/tikzpgfmanual.pdf https://www.bu.edu/math/files/2013/08/tikzpgfmanual.pdf [4] https://www.overleaf.com https://www.overleaf.com

Wistar 7y ago

Maybe I dreamed it but I could swear that I read that Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid was typeset by Hofstadter in TeX. That, by itself, although fairly amazing, wasn't the most noteworthy thing to me but that he had first read—uploaded to his brain—all the docs for TeX before he wrote a single word and let the experience of using it call forth from memory the relevant documentation.

stan_rogers 7y ago
While METAFONT, and to a lesser extent, TeX, were to become frequently featured characters in Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas days, GEB was pre-TeX. It was created using Pentti Kanerva's TV-Edit at Stanford (with the data on punched paper tape). The preface to the 20th anniversary edition of GEB tells the tale.
- Wistar 7y ago
  Ah. Thank you. Well, I guess I did dream it.
teddyh 7y ago
What you might be (mis-)remembering is Eric S. Raymond’s description of the production of The New Hacker's Dictionary printed book: http://catb.org/jargon/html/personality.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/personality.html
- Wistar 7y ago
  You are absolutely correct! That is precisely what I mis-remembe... er, mis-attributed.

zzo38computer 7y ago

I use Plain TeX with .dvi output. One advantage is that it can use the DVI format, which is in many ways much better than PDF for many things. (You can also convert DVI to PDF and to other formats; I wrote a program to convert DVI to PBM (without using PostScript), and use that to print out the documents (through foo2zjs, which converts the PBM into the format needed by the printer).)

mehrdadn 7y ago
> DVI format, which is in many ways much better than PDF for many things Would you mind listing a few? I ask because, if my memory serves correctly, the only thing DVI ever accomplished for me was to make me want to poke my eyes out.
- zzo38computer 7y ago
  It is much simpler, and many kind of post-processing can be done on it better too, and also you can compile the fonts per printer (DVI doesn't actually care about the font glyphs at all, and does not require that it is even a font glyph as is normally considered) as needed. If you have a printer that implements it, you could even do such things as cutting holes in pages, printing raised or engraved text, invisible ink, etc, without causing problems with software that does not support these things.
  - jahewson 7y ago
    PDF too supports external font files, a multitude of font formats, and special ink layers (these are called “separations”). PDF also supports PostScript fonts, which are already compiled for your printer.
    - zzo38computer 7y ago
      I didn't know that, but OK, so it does (although PostScript fonts won't be so good if you want to use bitmap fonts and stuff like that instead (I use METAFONT to compile bitmap fonts for the printer, and than use my own software to rasterize the page, by copying the generated font glyphs into the positions specified by the DVI file)). Still, DVI is simpler for many uses. I think PDF is too complicated.

segfaultbuserr 7y ago

I know there's a smaller but vocal group in tech that openly attacks LaTeX, e.g. "LaTeX considered harmful". While I don't completely agree with them, but I think there are some legitimate and genuine criticisms here. Personally, I find LaTeX is great due to its native programmability - it facilitates a natural separation of content and presentation, combined with its markup language, can be very powerful. It also enables extensibility - community packages for almost every single type of content, e.g. organic chemistry, Feynman diagram, even music. A typical user only needs to \usepackage and stop worrying. It's CTAN ecosystem is just like a programming language like Perl, or recently, Node.js or Go, which is great. But I find all hell breaks loose when you want to get a slightly different formatting than what's offered. Then suddenly the entire system becomes something you need to fight against. Previously, you could be a happy \usepackage code monkey, but now you need to know the system inside-out and hack a path ahead. Just like what happens when you use a software library in a slightly different way than the author expected, then suddenly you find yourself in a battle with the entire library, unfortunately, the same thing occurs in typesetting... For example, with LaTeX you can add footnotes to essentially anywhere with guaranteed aesthetics. UNLESS you want to add a footnote for your title, then it turns out the existing infrastructure in the "article" template doesn't allow it at all, and you need to define and redefine and undefine some internal macros in your document to implement it, as I learned from https://tex.stackexchange.com/ https://tex.stackexchange.com/ And all the separation of content and presentation and its benefits ends at this point. It's no longer "what you think is what you get". The same issue also occurs when you are trying to make a Beamer slideshow, most "environments" in LaTeX are designed for papers, not a slide. For example, when I want to put some images to the slide, often not fits in a "regular" geometric position, I find I have to keep hacking the width and position of the images and keep compiling until the result is acceptable. I don't know if there are better packages for typesetting slideshow, recommendations are welcome. Another problem I've noticed is the phenomenon of confusing and outdated packages. Often there are more than one package for a specific task, some are old and limited but still used in many documents, others are new, the rest are competing implementations. Old ones are frequently mentioned in the old guides, it works for a while until you have a corner case, then it takes a few attempts before moving to the newer packages. Again, just like programming languages. A recent trend in programming is writing new, cleaner implementations for basic tasks, I don't know if the same thing is happening in the LaTeX community, if it is, I think it would be great. On the other hand, I've yet to see a word processor which allows users to extend it and automate formatting and typesetting without doing some ugly macros hacked together and written in VBScript. So I see LaTeX as a valuable tool and I'll keep using LaTeX in the foreseeable future. The final words, having https://tex.stackexchange.com/ https://tex.stackexchange.com/ is a great contribution to the LaTeX community, just like how https://stackoverflow.com/ https://stackoverflow.com/ helps for programming.

svat 7y ago

This is a good article! A couple of corrections to the early history in the introductory paragraphs: • It is indeed true that the first edition of Volumes 1–3 of The Art of Computer Programming and the second edition of Volume 1 (1968, 1969, 1973, 1973) had been done with hot-metal typesetting (pieces of lead, laid out to form the page) with a human doing the typesetting/compositing (with a Monotype machine). And that for the second edition of Volume 2 in 1977, the publisher Addison-Wesley was switching to a cheaper alternative. But the cheaper alternative was not electronic; it was phototypesetting (the letterforms made with light and lenses instead of metal). It was Knuth who noticed a book that had been electronically typeset (Patrick Winston's AI book), realized that electronic typesetting machines actually had enough resolution to print like “real books” (unlike typewriters or printers of the time), and decided to solve his problem for himself (as he felt that he could make shapes with 0s and 1s). • The summer of 1977, Knuth spent in China, thinking he'd specified his program in enough detail and his two students would be able to complete the program by the time he came back. He came back and saw they had only implemented a small subset, and decided to spend his sabbatical year writing the program himself. He mentions that as he started writing it he realized the students' proto-TeX was an impressive effort, because there was a lot missing from his specifications. Knuth's article The Errors of TeX (reprinted in his collection Literate Programming) goes into excellent detail on the development process. Also: a suggestion to try plain TeX (instead of LaTeX), if you haven't tried it. The book A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy is especially good. It might surprise you.

kashyapc 7y ago
Thank you for the background and recommendations. Just read the very interesting abstract[1] of the book by Seroul and Levy; queued. (Wish it were a tad less pricey than €64). [1] https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9780387975627 https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9780387975627
- cpach 7y ago
  If you buy a used copy it will probably be much cheaper. See e.g. https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?bi=0&bx=off&cm_sp=SearchF-_-Advtab1-_-Results&ds=30&recentlyadded=all&sortby=17&sts=t&tn=A%20Beginner%92s%20Book%20of%20TEX https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?bi=0&bx=off&c...

ai_ia 7y ago

Just a curious question. I love LaTeX. Can we build a programming language for the web which just focusses on the writing and takes care of the styling for Web, Mobile etc. I mean Markdown is already there doing somewhat similar but it still needs to set up properly and styled to use it correctly. Can LaTeX type tool be developed for web where the user writes what he wants to write and generates a static web book or blog post or article confirming to the same style? Apologies if this is stupid question.

skrebbel 7y ago
There's thousands of tools like this, called "static site generators". Most include a barebones default theme like you describe. There's so many because a few years ago they were a big hype and everybody and their cat built one.
Asooka 7y ago
These days you can just publish a PDF and every browser will display it properly.
jonsonnotjonson 7y ago
Like https://www.nongnu.org/texi2html/ https://www.nongnu.org/texi2html/ ?

ggm 7y ago

As a t/roff and eqn and tbl user I never found the story compelling. The uplift cost to latex in 1982 was north of my painpoint and in 1990 I managed to do things in tbl and eqn I never imagined possible. Tex font fascism was also a bummer. A phototypesetting expert I knew preferred the actual type to digital type, the microfilm typeset stuff was amazing (I saw galley proofs in bromide and they were crisp and clean) I think I "get" it better now. It's just at that time there was another school of more pragmatic engineering aligned thought in Unix using Dec10 RUNOFF derived concepts which morphd into t/roff and stuck there. Maybe it's like Emacs and vi? Dec 10 SOS editor was like ed which led to ex and vi. If you walked into the TECO door you went lisp and Emacs. To launch into Tex and latex you needed a professor leading you there rather than an engineer doing nroff and t/roff

sampo 7y ago
Systems engineers (for example the K&R "C Programming Language" book) didn't need elaborate math notation, like Knuth needed.
- ggm 7y ago
  Eqn was invented precisely to do elaborate math notation. Integrals, sweeping braces, majuscule and minescule letters, suffixes, Greek..
pjc50 7y ago
Interesting to hear from the pre-Tex world. I'd like to see some examples of expert use of tbl and eqn; outside of manpages the roff ecosystem seems to have vanished.
- cpach 7y ago
  roff is probably very uncommon in these days. But not unheard of. A recent example is Donovan and Kernighan’s book The Go Programming Language which was typeset using an XML and groff toolchain. It was featured on HN a few years ago, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11470905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11470905

j-pb 7y ago

If we want to get remotely intelligent machines, LaTeX needs to die. It's a visual description based on a turing complete language, 95% of semantic meaning is lost once it's poured into a TeX document, end the last 5% are gone once it's compiled into a mess of pdf text boxes that ignore text flow and just look correct. Literally any other document description language would be a better lingua franca than LaTeX, because a language should be used to communicate, and TeX is meant to print curves.

ezequiel-garzon 7y ago
The use of LaTeX should not and does not prevent the advancement of machine intelligence, just as the stubborn use of blackboards and chalk by mathematicians as prime communication devices. Now, when machines get intelligent enough they’ll figure out LaTeX and more. Keep in mind that one goal of TeX was to make it fairly easy for a human to write it down. Another goal is for another human to be able to understand that source quite well. Now picture both tasks with semantics-rich MathML.

pjmlp 7y ago

While I was big into LaTeX during the university, even wrote my thesis with it, using the MikTeX distribution, nowadays I rather use the likes of Word, FrameMaker, DocBook or DITA based tooling.

cpach 7y ago
It was quite long ago a saw a new project that opted to utilise DocBook. Is it still popular?
- pjmlp 7y ago
  I used it on a project three years ago. All the help system was based on it, generating Word, PDF and HTML based deliveries. It is relatively popular at the enterprise level, where the licensing costs for such tools are peanuts vs the overall project costs.
  - cpach 7y ago
    Neat! Would you minding listing some of those toolchain vendors? I think about pros and cons of various publishing systems from time to time and would love some new input.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      FrameMaker, OxygenXML, RoboHelp, XMetaL, XMLmind, Arbortext.
      - cpach 7y ago
        Oh, lots of stuff to look up. Thank you!

jermaink 7y ago

Just curious with regard to presentations: Does any known tech corp use beamer for presentations?

gh02t 7y ago
I've seen people from IBM giving talks using Beamer.

jermaink 7y ago

Just curious with regard to presentations: Does any known tech corp use beamer?

lyxfan 7y ago

Let's not forget to show some love for the tool that makes LaTeX usable by mere mortals: https://www.lyx.org/ https://www.lyx.org/ Lyx is so useful that I am sometimes amazed it is not more popular. All the power of LaTeX with the ease of use of MS Word. And free and opensource. What's not to love?

enriquto 7y ago
> the ease of use of MS Word. I honestly find MS Word extremely difficult to use. Like, I'm always fighting against the incorrect assumptions it's doing on my text, and against an unknown amount of invisible state that changes my formatting as I type.
FabHK 7y ago
Yeah, Word-style "WYSIWYG" versus LaTeX-style source-code + compiling is really a pretty big philosophical difference. Some people much prefer the latter, and will avoid WYSIWYG LaTeX tools. The marked up source code gives you much better control, and you can use semantic macros that for example allow you to change how you format vectors or chapter titles etc. across the whole document easily. See a marginally relevant xkcd here: https://xkcd.com/2109/ https://xkcd.com/2109/
- improbable22 7y ago
  Maybe you know this, but LyX is somewhere in the middle. You can see roughly what you are doing while writing, which makes some things much easier. Especially typing in large formulae (and double-checking that you didn't make a mistake). Although the way you enter them is more typing than point-and-clicking. For something like changing how the chapter titles look, you are pretty much back in the world of Latex, trying out some macro to change all of them.
akvadrako 7y ago
If you care about precise formatting, it's much easier to use than word. LyX encourages you to use defined styles and avoid formatting quirks, compared with Word where you need to be very careful not to insert little inconsistencies.

chess93 7y ago

Note for any college students (especially undergrad): Do your STEM presentations in Beamer to get extra brownie points.

mymythisisthis 7y ago

Good tutorial for Latex?

wglb 7y ago
There are tons of resources at https://www.tug.org/texlive/ https://www.tug.org/texlive/. If you download it there are many included.
- wglb 7y ago
  Also the article itself has some pointers.

jedberg 7y ago

I used LaTex in college, to typeset all my essays. I also used it in my creative writing class, and people were amazed that I was able to add line numbers to my work so we could easily discuss it by referring to line numbers! I'm pretty sure I got better grades in all my writing based classes based solely on the fact that I used LaTex to typeset my work. The last time I wrote a resume[0] I used LaTex to do it too, and I provide the LaTex source[1] on my website. I've seen bits of it show up in other people's resumes, which is exactly what I want to happen! But what was funny was how often people would say "boy this looks so clean and professional!". Pretty sure I got some interviews just because of how "pretty" my resume was. [0] https://www.jedberg.net/Jeremy_Edberg_Resume.pdf https://www.jedberg.net/Jeremy_Edberg_Resume.pdf [1] https://www.jedberg.net/Jeremy_Edberg_Resume.tex https://www.jedberg.net/Jeremy_Edberg_Resume.tex

EliRivers 7y ago
Pretty sure I got some interviews just because of how "pretty" my resume was. Definitely. I've had interviewers start by thanking me for my CV being well-formatted and also short. Ha. I've just noticed that as I type this, I have literally in front of me on my desk Eijkhout's "Tex by Topic", Lamport's latex book and "The Latex Companion" by Goosens et al. This must be where I do most of my pretty document making.

xorand 7y ago

This quote is amusing: "there’s even an open archive maintained by Cornell University where authors of papers in physics, chemistry, and other disciplines can directly submit their LaTeX manuscripts for open viewing." for two reasons: 1) sounds like 'there's even a church at Vatican' seen that arXiv.org is the biggest ever collection of scientific articles submitted by their authors 2) and there's no chemistry section in arXiv.org, but a half is mathematics and some computer science