4 ms·
I wish I could upvote this a thousand times and then some. Already in the 80's Jeff Bezos refused to use latex due to its absurd difficulty to use. I can't bel
by MperorM 6y ago
I wish I could upvote this a thousand times and then some.
Already in the 80's Jeff Bezos refused to use latex due to its absurd difficulty to use. I can't believe it's been 40 years and there still isn't a better tool to write papers with.
It took me less than an hour to create a Google Docs template that looks roughly as good as a standard Latex document. The reason Latex looks beautiful is due to a set of wisely chosen defaults, nothing more.
Yet the focus of Google Docs clearly isn't scientific papers. I don't imagine it would take more than a few passionate employees at Google to expand Docs to a powerhouse of scientific writing.
Pictures of my template can be found below:
https://imgur.com/a/cC0e0gG https://imgur.com/a/cC0e0gG
(and a blogpost about my Latex induced misery)
http://mathiasbonde.com/?p=72 http://mathiasbonde.com/?p=72
- milquetoastaf 6y agoThat's a great template - mind sharing?
- mNovak 6y agoI agree beautiful defaults help LaTeX, all the more so because I always use someone else's well defined template. But, my main issues with Docs/Word is not just "look", rather: - smart figure/caption/table handling (no orphaned captions, no figures hanging out in the middle of the page) - easy, label-based cross referencing (not selecting each from a popup interface) - text-based equation input All that being said, I still have an elaborate Word template I use for proposal writing. Because often I have to pass it off to others (who may not know TeX) to contribute, and sometimes I need to quickly bastardize my nice formatting to squeeze into hard page limits. ShareLatex / Overleaf is very good, but I'd love to see slightly more ease of use as OP suggests. I'd like to see a switchable WYSIWYG / code editor, so laypeople can make simple formatting changes visually without needing to know the right commands, and it propagates correctly into the underlying LaTeX.
- MperorM 6y agoTotally agree with your points. Latex remains the best tool for many tasks. But none of the things you described, I think latex does particularly well either. Better than Google docs and the likes, sure, but I think it's possible to do better. I truly think Google Docs could be so much more than it currently is. They for example built a brilliant speech-to-text feature that is only available on desktop. Mobile is the one place I could imagine using such a feature. Imagine writing your documents with speech while hiking deep in the woods. Feeling the fresh air with a view of a beautiful brook as Google transcribes your thoughts. That's how I want to write! Why on earth put so much effort into such a brilliant feature, and then have it only be available to users already sitting in front of a keyboard!? Apologies for the tangent, it was where my mind wanted me to go!
- marvy 6y agoJust read your rant/blogpost. You didn't give too many examples of what's wrong with LaTeX, but you did mention putting two images next to each other. Isn't this just: \includegraphics{img1} \includegraphics{img2} Or is that not what you meant?
- abdullahkhalids 6y agoSubcaption package https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Floats,_Figures_and_Captions https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Floats,_Figures_and_Capt...
- marvy 6y agoOkay, nice, but maybe overkill, unless you want to refer to them separately within the main text?
- abdullahkhalids 6y agoIf the images are not related to each other, but you want to place them on top of the page together for stylistic reasons, you probably want a simple minipage environment with two figure environments inside.
- marvy 6y agoI meant they might be so closely related that you want them share the same caption and figure number and everything.
- abdullahkhalids 6y agoSubcaption works perfectly for that. You can skip the subfigure caption - "The gull" etc in this picture https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Latex_example_subfig.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Latex_example_subfig... You can reference either the whole figure by using the label inside the figure environment, or you can reference the subfigures using labels inside the subfigure environments.
- drwu 6y agoThe automatic microtype is the killer feature for my own `unprofessional' publishing without Adobe suite. Besides, the macro language of TeX is not the best programming language IMHO, but it just works, especially for the flexible control of long document.