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My biggest issue with (la)tex is how hard it is to find up to date best practices. There are fifty ways to accomplish your desired outcome but it seems like ev
by na85 7y ago
My biggest issue with (la)tex is how hard it is to find up to date best practices. There are fifty ways to accomplish your desired outcome but it seems like every blog post or stack exchange answer conflicts with everything else and it turns out half of what you're doing is deprecated.
I'd pay good money for a "modern idiomatic latex"-type of tutorial.
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoJust get Lyx. It's a graphical front end for LaTeX, so you never actually write LaTeX. You don't have to worry about what's idiomatic at all, because you aren't writing it. You're just writing a document.
- sackintor 7y agoThe best bit about LyX is using it to format LaTeX tables nicely. When writing my thesis I used LyX but found myself creating more and more ERT (what LyX calls raw LaTeX code). I eventually just started using a text editor. However, I still do tables in LyX and copy them over -- such a pain to insert a column otherwise...
- na85 7y agoThat's kind of an indictment of latex in and of itself; the best way to use latex is to not use it? At that point why not just use .docx?
- souterrain 7y agoRepeatability. Complex formatting, such as figure captions and figure placement, in Word documents suddenly break for no apparent reason. Troubleshooting a “broken” Word doc is akin to fixing a typewriter while one is blindfolded.
- sjy 7y agoWouldn't it be nice if Word actually provided some kind of UI for working with the underlying XML, like the old WordPerfect 'show codes' feature?
- chongli 7y agoHear, hear! I have been slowly evolving the way I structure my LaTeX documents and I still feel like it leaves much to be desired. It has often been repeated that we should all aim toward separation of content and presentation and LaTeX has been highly touted in this area, yet I find it very difficult to achieve in practice. Far too often, I find some package-provided environment lacking and I need to manually add some extra space or what have you. Now my document has become tainted due to the introduction of explicit styling in the content file. It's now baked in at that location and is very difficult to update later. How do I avoid doing this? It's not enough to say "go back and redefine that command/environment to make it work the way you want." LaTeX is a leaky abstraction.
- rightbyte 7y agoDeprecated? Like, has Latex been updated since the www became a thing? The last standard was set 1994.
- sampo 7y ago> Deprecated? Yes. In 1994, you would `latex document` and then `dvips document` to get your document.ps. Then in the 00s almost everyone would use `pdflatex document`. And these days, pdflatex is going out of fashion, but I am unsure what the current to go tool is.
- radarsat1 7y agoI recommend `latexmk -pdf <mainfile.tex>` (This just runs latex and bibtex in the right order and the right number of times..)
- cperciva 7y agothe right number of times Unless the authors managed to solve the halting problem, I guarantee that latexmk doesn't always run them the right number of times. ;-)
- rocqua 7y agoIt runs until you produce the same output twice in a row, or you exceed a maximum number of runs. This defaults to 5, but is user select able. You can disable the maximum number of runs, in which case it really does run the right number of times.
- garmaine 7y agoThe snark was that you can create an infinite chain of varying output.
- red_trumpet 7y agoUsed in that way, it still uses pdflatex, which sucks if you have Unicode symbols (even Umlauts äöü are complicated...). Though latexmk can easily be configured to use xelatex with the -xelatex flag.
- impendia 7y agoAs a frequent LaTeX editor (professional mathematician) -- what are you attempting to accomplish? And what do you mean by a "best practice"? My usual operandi is: poke around or Google for a solution, until I figure out one of the fifty ways that achieves my desired outcome. I then declare my problem solved. If my solution is deprecated (by whom?), then whoever deprecated it may tsk-tsk to their heart's content. Most mathematicians I know are not all that fussy with how they write their LaTeX documents, the same way programmers can be extremely fussy with their code. If there are "best practices" out there, then they aren't widely known or followed. That said, here's something that may interest you. On the arXiv (arxiv.org), at least in math and probably in other disciplines as well, the LaTeX code is available for nearly any paper you want. Pick your favorite paper, and then click "Download other formats" on the right. If nothing else, you can see what professional researchers are using in practice.
- sampo 7y agoFor example, there are two "dialects" for writing equations: vanilla LaTeX, and the amsmath package. Also, graphicx is not the only package for including images in to a document (I just forgot what the other options are).
- cozzyd 7y agoYes, which is why my arxiv target in my Makefiles strips comments in addition to putting all files in the same dir etc.
- impendia 7y agoIndeed, reading through the comments can be quite entertaining at times. I think that many authors don't realize they can be read....
- na85 7y ago>As a frequent LaTeX editor (professional mathematician) -- what are you attempting to accomplish? And what do you mean by a "best practice"? Well in the simplest case how about something like \bf versus \bfseries versus \textbf? Google that and you'll find thousands of blog posts, each telling you which is the One True Way™ but not expanding on the why. Finding actual answers is really hard for latex.
- pletnes 7y agoIn my experience, journals sometimes use old versions of packages, so you often don’t want to use the «modern way». Examples: lualatex is often not available, biblatex is not supported, etc
- dual_basis 7y agoOverleaf's documentation is quite good.