3 ms·
> What is remarkable here is that a lot of people are using TeX who do not care about meticulous typesetting of "beautiful books" at all, and will blithely igno
by spekcular 6y ago
> What is remarkable here is that a lot of people are using TeX who do not care about meticulous typesetting of "beautiful books" at all, and will blithely ignore warnings related to such matters.
Is this really remarkable? It's the standard tool for writing papers in physics. Get result, put into LaTeX, put on arxiv, repeat. The fact that these people have to constantly Google for obscure LaTeX incantations (faster than TeXbook) is not ideal for them. Indeed, it would be better if it were easier to use without reading a 500 page book.
Anyway, thanks for tip. When I googled for this I found only \sloppy, which did not produce reasonable results.
- svat 6y agoI should have been clear: I don't think people's behaviour is remarkable here (I've done the same, with LaTeX years ago, and with many other tools); what I found remarkable is the history / state of affairs, where a finicky tool primarily concerned with the finer points of typesetting (TeX) became the standard tool for dashing off papers (thanks to Lamport and LaTeX I guess) even for people not concerned so much with typesetting. It's as if, say, a samurai sword had become the standard tool for chopping vegetables in the kitchen, and everyone was complaining about the awkward shape, the unnecessary sheath, etc. It's neither the tool's fault nor the users', but… something has gone wrong somewhere.