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LaTeX Cookbook – Collection of LaTeX Recipes
- amichail 5y agoRelated: https://penrose.ink/siggraph20.html https://penrose.ink/siggraph20.html
- gjvc 5y agotenuously...
- actually_a_dog 5y agoWell, fuck. Where was this when I was in grad school?
- anyfactor 5y agoCrisp. That is the word that pops in my head whenever I see something that is generated by LaTeX. I am not sure why or how to define it.
- gjvc 5y agoIn the 90s, I used to imagine the future to be one where "browsers" would be much less than combined JavaScript execution / DOM+CSS layout engines and hence able to do much more by downloading (signed) decoders/renderers on-demand for different content types, of which DVI would be just one of many. There are still huge conceptual leaps to be made in the notion of a computer as a document creator and content rendering, and Smalltalk provides some clues in that direction, though I doubt we'll see it in my lifetime, considering the weight of the last twenty-five years will make it difficult to change course. The relevance of the above flight of fantasy to your point is that LaTeX, for all its awkwardness, is absolutely a local maxima in document creation, and I love seeing its results appear from the markup, knowing that it's following the numbers precisely, as if by magic, and print them out and marvel at the quality of the fonts close-up, and we need more such systems with which to create and render content, before denting the DOM+CSS hegemony in the manner I described above.
- BlueTemplar 5y agoThe whole issue with LaTeX ia that it renders to PDFs, which aren't appropriate these days any more for most electronic documents because you want reflowable content rather than fixed layout. And (m)HTML is great for that and can include other content types : https://eater.net/quaternions https://eater.net/quaternions
- GiovanniP 5y agoAs far as I know the main issue there is that LaTeX is a Turing-complete language and no reliable complete export filter can exist, so in particular one cannot export reliably all of LaTeX to HTML
- NotOscarWilde 5y agoI don't think Turing-completeness implies any issues when converting programs between equally powerful automata. In fact, a lot of results in the theory of automata / early computational complexity take a form of converting all programs of machine A -- in fact the machine itself -- in order to run it on machine B.
- DemocracyFTW 5y agoIn theory there should be no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there often is. TeX's syntax itself being Turing-complete means you can barely start to do static analysis on the code before hitting a wall you can only get over by installing a huge fraction of the ~1GB download that is TeXLive. "Being theoretically possible" is in no way orthogonal to "impractical in many or most circumstances".
- GiovanniP 5y agoPlease take a look at the following comments thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27820466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27820466, in particular at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27822662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27822662 where Massimiliano Gubinelli (one of the main TeXmacs developers) explains the issue.
- canjobear 5y agoIt's true. There's an accumulation of small details involving spacing that LaTeX gets right but something like Word gets wrong, each of them individually almost imperceptible, but adding up to an effect where the LaTeX document looks somehow clean and correct, and the Word document looks like a big mess. I can detect a Word document almost immediately on sight but it takes me a while to follow up and find the concrete evidence of Wordness.
- GiovanniP 5y ago> Crisp. Please open any of the publications in https://www.texmacs.org/joris/main/publs.html https://www.texmacs.org/joris/main/publs.html (pdf versions) and then get your own opinion on whether anything else is crisp ;-)
- anyfactor 5y ago> https://www.texmacs.org/joris/surhypexp/surhypexp.pdf https://www.texmacs.org/joris/surhypexp/surhypexp.pdf I saw "France" at the top of the document and I quickly scrolled the document thinking, "Looks crisp French to me." Then it dawned on me.....
- ansgri 5y agoSomehow it’s “characteristically ugly” for me, looking at these examples specifically. You can get good-looking documents in LaTeX if you customize formatting just a little bit, but the default colors, shapes and even fonts are just off. Especially Beamer. It’s really like a style of clothing: a sort of old man’s suit that looks normal in academic institutions but in most other settings you do look like you’ve just come from that institution. The typesetting is much better than anything in common (non-design-professional) use though.
- gjvc 5y ago100% agree. Some people have a fetish for wide aspect ratio fonts, such as some of the Computer Modern family. Must have been the fashion at some point.
- anyfactor 5y agoI agree with you what you said. On the flip side of the coin, I would say don't attempt to customize it. LaTeX out of the box is essentially what you need for an easy to read document. There is no LaTeX graphic designer out there. I would agree to a little defeat and say the poster example on that website looked bad. If customizability is something people are looking for LaTeX is not the ideal choice because the learning curve for advance use can be incredibly steep, you may not have a good eye for good graphics if you are using LaTex in the first place and you might compromise early and say good enough.
- dash2 5y agoyou sure it’s crisp? Not another word starting with cr and ending with p? Seriously, TeX is a bad maths language [http://xahlee.info/cmaci/notation/TeX_pestilence.html http://xahlee.info/cmaci/notation/TeX_pestilence.html], surrounded by a terrible document markup language, wrapped in tooling straight from the 1980s, plus a community only too willing to tell you how your question is wrong.
- anyfactor 5y agohaha, I don't have much experience with mathematical equation writing in LaTeX, I just like how the words and document look. So I can't say much about this. Have you looked into Groff >> https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/527864/latex-vs-groff-for-mathematics-formatting https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/527864/latex-vs-grof... I have heard atleast one people say that, the math syntax is much more elegant in groff as opposed to LaTex.
- DemocracyFTW 5y ago> a community only too willing to tell you how your question is wrong Been there, experienced that. Like this one poor guy who dared to ask at the TeX.StackOverflow help desk—"what can I do to get this and that vertical line in my table", only to get lectured by one acolyte, "Oh noes, don't, vertical lines bad, only horizontal lines in tables, proven to be the only way to go". Which totally throws centuries of finely typeset mathematical, astronomical and nautical tables out of the window while not answering the question. To be fair, there are quite a few people on the TeXSO that go to incredible lengths to give extensive answers—expositions really—to hairy questions ('hairy' being a technical term here which translates to 'daily' in the context of TeX).
- aborsy 5y agoLaTeX needs to be updated. It’s slow, errors need to be better handled, packages need to be improved, language should be more expressive, etc. There is beamer for presentation that is a pain to work with. Sometimes the most that I can understand from an error message is the slide in which the error has occurred. Sometimes I even have to incrementally delete the text and compile the remaining text to identify the slide location. Sometimes I can’t even abort the program with Carl+C or D or X after the error has occurred, and I have to close the terminal (maybe IDEs are better, but that’s another can of worms). It’s also super slow. I am really in pain working with it quite often. A lot of times, producing the intended behavior in latex requires complex hack of internals (see Stack Exchange answers) because the feature is not natively supported. It seems software engineers don’t care about LaTeX (and don’t use it to know about its problems). Academics are also not expert in software to fix it. The pace of development thus has been slow.
- ratorx 5y agoI can recommend Tectonic (https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/) as an alternative to directly invoking the LaTeX (or in this case XeTeX) compiler. The build experience is magnitudes better than LaTeX or latexmk.
- knolan 5y agoIt’s mostly because LaTeX is deemed mature for its audience and features like these, while flashy, are not going to see much use day to day. Most academics want to take plots they make in Matlab or whatever and put them into the template supplied by a journal and get an elegant looking document with well typeset equations and a bibTeX bibliography.
- andi999 5y agoTex support by conference and journals is declining though (engineering).
- CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
- ToddWBurgess 5y agoI have a lot of fond memories of working with LaTeX in the 90s in my undergrad. These days I wouldn't use LaTeX because I want something quick and dirty.I am not investing a lot of time in writing documents that people are not going to spend a lot of time reading. That said, The Lamport book I used heavily in my undergrad still has a place on my bookshelf.
- azalemeth 5y agoArguably if you spend a lot of time writing a document it becomes more likely that others are going to read it. I am a peer-reviewer and an editor on a few academic journals. In my field, a mix of authors use [Xe](La)TeX and Word. There's a definite quality bias towards the TeX articles -- not because of the typesetting per se but rather because it's indicative of a lot of time spent carefully preparing a document to a standard. I'm sure others in similar fields have similar experiences.
- OneOneOneOne 5y agoI love my 86 Lamport. The cartoons add such a nice touch.
- DemocracyFTW 5y agoSee, that might be cultural background or whatnot, I don't know, but some people find those cartoons to be a nice touch, and they admire the clarity of exposition of The TeXbook. I'm the proud owner of the entire 6 vol Computers and Typesetting series (of which the former title is vol A), and have worked through sizable portions of those. I also read mot of the 680 pages of Knuth's Digital Typography monograph. I also owned one LaTeX book at some point. I admire the depth of Knuth's knowledge (typographic and otherwise), the sheer diligence, his quest for quality, all of that. Those lion doodles though, the author's urge to land another witty remark, come up with another finely crafted reference, and how he's prone to hint at stuff instead of writing a proper documentation are not aspects of his work that I enjoy.
- WolfOliver 5y agoI wonder what you thing about https://www.monsterwriter.app/ https://www.monsterwriter.app/ ... I'm exchanging a free licence for valuable feedback :)
- enriquto 5y agoIt's not clear from the website what this is. Does it convert text files to pdf? Please show the source text file on the landing page. Can you describe the figures easily inside the text file? It's so light on details that I don't even know if I'm interested or not. LaTeX, for simple articles and light math, is trivial to use and problem-free. The complexities arise when you try to do fancier stuff. How much fancy stuff do you allow in monsterwriter? Does it support multiple language conventions on the same article? Can I generate monsterwriter articles programatically in an easy way? Can I prepare a pdf presentation with animations like in beamer? A poster in arbitrarily large paper size?
- pseingatl 5y agoBlogging publication to Ghost: should include other platforms. Ghost is expensive. Is there really tables support? Ulysses is a markdown-based editor which doesn't support tables. This would be an improvement over that program. Pdf export? A4, letter, A5, or? PDF is size agnostic. I haven't tried LaTeX export. It would be interesting to write once and have both html and LaTeX export. No CSS? This might be helpful. Just my thoughts.
- alphachloride 5y agoThis is why I use Microsoft PowerPoint for my schematics.
- dash2 5y agoHere's how a real man cooks with TeX. * Carefully sets out header with a tasteful collection of packages. * Sets all tables thoughtfully using \booktabs, never dreaming of using vertical borders. * Uses wysiwym everywhere, \emph for emphasis not \it etc. * Gets an incomprehensible error because he copied a single Unicode character. * Throws TeX document out of the window, opens text editor, types out markdown.
- GiovanniP 5y agoOr uses TeXmacs
- coliveira 5y agoMillions of people, including me, disagree. LaTeX has allowed me to write articles, books, and other documents for decades, and I have not to worry if it will be there in 10 years or more. It is the work of genius (Knuth), and continues to be widely used.
- dash2 5y agoIt’s used by millions of academics with Stockholm Syndrome.
- GiovanniP 5y agoOne needs a different perspective. It is used by millions of academics who did not yet try TeXmacs.
- leephillips 5y agoI use LaTeX. I tried TeXmacs out of curiosity. It’s not good enough, by far.
- GiovanniP 5y agoJust out of curiosity, how much time ago did you try it? On the one hand the latest version, 2.1.1, runs very smoothly and has a complete set of features (the extensibility of course allows to augment them, just like in TeX); on the other hand TeXmacs has very different principles than any other document preparation system and need just a bit of time (far less then LaTeX) to get used to. This blog post by Massimiliano Gubinelli may be a good introduction: https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/art-of-math-writing.html https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/art-of-math-writing.htm...
- spekcular 5y agoAnyone who doesn't have a long list of problems with LaTeX doesn't use it enough, or doesn't go beyond the built-in templates. Unfortunately, those templates are designed for print and not screen viewing ... so you really have to edit them. I'd be happy to argue this in detail, but I see that others have already hit many of the big points. (Some more: The typesetting is suboptimal, even if you improve it with the microtype package; the default symbols for real and imaginary part (\Re and \Im) are horrible; the cleverref package should be built in; the geometry package should be built in; the artificial distinction between equation and align environments is because the engine can't space properly around aligns, so this should be fixed and they should be a single command; \left and \right for delimiters often make really bad choices; the default font is the only good option if you need matching mathematical characters, and it grates on you after years of use; I could go on for hours...) The more interesting question to me is: What should be done about this? LaTeX seems too embedded in the scientific community for there to be a clean break to a new technology (see, e.g. arxiv.org). Also, I'm not sure an entirely new markup language would be desirable, since the core LaTeX language is actually not so bad – it's the transformation of the markup to the final document where the problems occur. What we need is a new backend or shim layer that keeps the basic language but allows for more aesthetically pleasing rendering and better control of the layout.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoI don't really see the point of using LaTeX for on-screen viewing, well, not unless you want to impose some amount of focus on the reader (which printed forms usually do). HTML or markdown for on-screen content usually works better. The main asset of Lamport's LaTeX is its high quality formatting for printed artifacts. Most of that in turn comes from Knuth's TeX, which is a much lower level language. One can do (and many definitely have done) markup to TeX languages, but they never expose as much control as LaTeX does, so aren't very popular. Madoko (https://www.madoko.net/ https://www.madoko.net/) does pretty good, however, so maybe try that? Otherwise, there are plenty of commercial and expensive typesetting systems out there, but besides the cost, I don't think they are even as user friendly or flexible as LaTeX.
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- worik 5y agoIs this book available in a dead tree version?
- stk21 5y agoYes, it's available on Amazon, Book Depository etc.
- charlieyu1 5y agoThe problem that I’ve with latex is that it predates most of the modern software development. Everything is in a giant namespace. Package management is a mess and packages often conflict. No numeric characters in method names. If you want to use numbers, you can only hack it using names like \WidthXV. No functions in the modern sense. Everything is just macro expansion. Turing complete but hard to write any useful code. I have seen more code written in Brainfuck than LaTeX.
- DemocracyFTW 5y agoEvery. Damn. Single. Thing. You. Said.
- subset 5y agoI would love to see a combination of Markdown + Pandoc used to generate LaTeX whilst keeping the writing process content-centric. I find the mathematical typesetting functionality of LaTeX to be incredible, but anything else (tables, columns, etc.) to be an absolute nightmare. Pandoc allows for Lua filter to pre-process an AST generated from raw Markdown, and can then convert to 'traditional' LaTeX - why can't we utilise the best of both worlds? For example, I used Pandoc to create Beamer slides in Markdown, with nice `div` syntax and maths typesetting - the advantage was I could focus on the semantics (and have a directly readable document) without any LaTeX fluff that was purely aesthetic.