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Maybe it's you? I don't really have any of those problems. LaTeX works great for me (I use TexShop on a pretty old mac mini) You seem to be using it in the term

Maybe it's you? I don't really have any of those problems. LaTeX works great for me (I use TexShop on a pretty old mac mini) You seem to be using it in the terminal. Why?! TexShop (I hear there are a few other, equally good GUIs) has been nothing like a "can of worms", but a delight to use - I can't think of any problems I've had with it, in 5+ years. Not having Command-Click to be able to instantly shift between somewhere in the LaTeX file and the corresponding place in the PDF and back would be a pain, I imagine. Or not being able to program your own macros. It's slow? Compared to what? It typesets 100 pages what seems like pretty fast to me. You know you can pre-compile all sections of a long text except the one you're working on, right? Why expect every one of the million features users might want be "natively supported"?! What you describe as "a complex hack of internals" is usually in practice a 30 second visit to Stack Exchange and a cut and paste. Although I haven't needed to do that in a long time. I was amazed when I started (it did take about 3 months of intense learning in the beginning) that every package I needed or wanted was already on my computer, and usually the author was on TeX stack exchange answering questions!

aborsy 5y ago
I don’t want to learn one specialized IDE for every application. I use Vim and Emacs for coding in general. There are of course plugins, but they didn’t notably change the experience for me. The speed problem is mentioned in the Beamer’s paragraph. It’s true to some extent for latex too, but becomes problematic with beamer (lots of figures with Tikz and pgfplots etc). And I have to use beamer, because the source documents are in latex. When you consider collaborative writing, Overleaf is slow even with base latex. If you use it heavily, you will see its issues. Part of the problem is that it’s not consistent. In Python, when I type print(“LaTeX”) the answer is always the same. In latex if I type, \hspace*{5mm} it depends on many things. This becomes specially problematic when the effect you are trying to produce is not covered by a common template; the language is not fully rule-based either so that you systematically produce it yourself. You have to try various things.
CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
>You seem to be using it in the terminal. Why?! Not OP, but having similar problems as OP. One of the reasons I use(d) it in the terminal is because I use make which also generates figures for me. I also don't like having to learn X different GUIs for Y different programming languages and prefer using vim and make if possible.
- yesenadam 5y ago
  This is my reply also to aborsy: I also don't use a different IDE for every programming language, just VSC or Sublime Text for them all. I guess I think of (La)TeX as a tool for writing books/papers, not just another programming language. TexShop (and I guess the other GUIs) is not like vim or emacs, with a million key commands to learn. Most of the non-standard key commands I use are ones I defined myself, like e.g. Command-I to make selected word/s italic. Anyway, refusing to use (La)TeX the easy way, then complaining about how hard it is to use, seems hardly (La)TeX's fault. We have this incredible publishing technology..and you refuse to use it?! CorrectHorseBat: "I use make which also generates figures for me" - I'm curious how that works! Sounds very interesting.
  - CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
    >Anyway, refusing to use (La)TeX the easy way, then complaining about how hard it is to use, seems hardly (La)TeX's fault. Not generating clear error messages, or apparently requiring a gui as the easy way is definitely Latex's (and the tooling around it) fault in my eyes. Latex files are text, just give me a decent compiler and let me use my own editor. If that is too hard there's something wrong. Also to me all the syntax is unnecessary cryptic, working with "variables" is a pain, nice modulatisarion is non-existent and probably a few more things I forgot. >I'm curious how that works! Sounds very interesting. Nothing really fancy. I have python scripts that generates figures which are included in my pdf. I use make to stitch everything together.
Enginerrrd 5y ago
LaTeX has a number of issues: - Compilation feels almost non-deterministic at times. You should not have to recompile your document 2 or 3 times to get the final behavior, yet that's pretty standard practice. References / bibliographies don't work the first time through, and often you compile the bibliography separately, which is just crazy to me. - Compilation errors are really non-helpful. In programming, if I omit one side of a bracket or parentheses somewhere, I'll almost certainly get an error with a reference to the line number right at or below the issue. GOOD LUCK finding a missing bracket in a LaTeX document based on the error messages when compilation fails. - Lots of pretty simple behavior that really should be standardized and built in requires additional packages. The real problem comes when combining multiple packages... It's like how medications interact. It's almost hopelessly intractable to try and predict how multiple packages will interact with each other, so the way you do a simple thing in one document may change in another document depending on the combination of packages. - >What you describe as "a complex hack of internals" is usually in practice a 30 second visit to Stack Exchange and a cut and paste. I'm with the person you were replying to on this. There's a lot of really hacky stuff to get a result that really should have been built in. Like, a built in quote or excerpt for example, should just be a standard style like: /begin{quote} Quote \end{quote}. But instead you have to do it as a \parbox[center]{hope-you-guessed-a-good-width-mm}{Quote}. - It's a small thing, but the way you do quotes is pretty silly. Not a fan of `` '' instead of "". If that's really how I have to do it without including additioanl packages, why not at least have a built-in like: \lquote and \rquote ? I am normally a person that is deeply opposed to language updates, unnecessary feature updates, new frameworks, etc. But in the case of LaTeX, it's one of the most obvious examples I can think of where it's desperately needed.
- mcswell 5y ago
  "You should not have to recompile your document 2 or 3 times... References / bibliographies don't work the first time through..." If you think about it, you'll probably see why. Cross-references can't be set until you know what they refer to, which may be later on in the doc ("see section 8 below"), and setting such references (or citations) can change the page numbering. If the multiple passes (which are analogous to the multiple passes a compiler makes) bother you, then use a tool that hides them from your eyes, like arara. That's probably what Word does under the hood.

aborsy 5y ago

I don’t want to learn one specialized IDE for every application. I use Vim and Emacs for coding in general. There are of course plugins, but they didn’t notably change the experience for me. The speed problem is mentioned in the Beamer’s paragraph. It’s true to some extent for latex too, but becomes problematic with beamer (lots of figures with Tikz and pgfplots etc). And I have to use beamer, because the source documents are in latex. When you consider collaborative writing, Overleaf is slow even with base latex. If you use it heavily, you will see its issues. Part of the problem is that it’s not consistent. In Python, when I type print(“LaTeX”) the answer is always the same. In latex if I type, \hspace*{5mm} it depends on many things. This becomes specially problematic when the effect you are trying to produce is not covered by a common template; the language is not fully rule-based either so that you systematically produce it yourself. You have to try various things.

CorrectHorseBat 5y ago

>You seem to be using it in the terminal. Why?! Not OP, but having similar problems as OP. One of the reasons I use(d) it in the terminal is because I use make which also generates figures for me. I also don't like having to learn X different GUIs for Y different programming languages and prefer using vim and make if possible.

yesenadam 5y ago
This is my reply also to aborsy: I also don't use a different IDE for every programming language, just VSC or Sublime Text for them all. I guess I think of (La)TeX as a tool for writing books/papers, not just another programming language. TexShop (and I guess the other GUIs) is not like vim or emacs, with a million key commands to learn. Most of the non-standard key commands I use are ones I defined myself, like e.g. Command-I to make selected word/s italic. Anyway, refusing to use (La)TeX the easy way, then complaining about how hard it is to use, seems hardly (La)TeX's fault. We have this incredible publishing technology..and you refuse to use it?! CorrectHorseBat: "I use make which also generates figures for me" - I'm curious how that works! Sounds very interesting.
- CorrectHorseBat 5y ago
  >Anyway, refusing to use (La)TeX the easy way, then complaining about how hard it is to use, seems hardly (La)TeX's fault. Not generating clear error messages, or apparently requiring a gui as the easy way is definitely Latex's (and the tooling around it) fault in my eyes. Latex files are text, just give me a decent compiler and let me use my own editor. If that is too hard there's something wrong. Also to me all the syntax is unnecessary cryptic, working with "variables" is a pain, nice modulatisarion is non-existent and probably a few more things I forgot. >I'm curious how that works! Sounds very interesting. Nothing really fancy. I have python scripts that generates figures which are included in my pdf. I use make to stitch everything together.

Enginerrrd 5y ago

LaTeX has a number of issues: - Compilation feels almost non-deterministic at times. You should not have to recompile your document 2 or 3 times to get the final behavior, yet that's pretty standard practice. References / bibliographies don't work the first time through, and often you compile the bibliography separately, which is just crazy to me. - Compilation errors are really non-helpful. In programming, if I omit one side of a bracket or parentheses somewhere, I'll almost certainly get an error with a reference to the line number right at or below the issue. GOOD LUCK finding a missing bracket in a LaTeX document based on the error messages when compilation fails. - Lots of pretty simple behavior that really should be standardized and built in requires additional packages. The real problem comes when combining multiple packages... It's like how medications interact. It's almost hopelessly intractable to try and predict how multiple packages will interact with each other, so the way you do a simple thing in one document may change in another document depending on the combination of packages. - >What you describe as "a complex hack of internals" is usually in practice a 30 second visit to Stack Exchange and a cut and paste. I'm with the person you were replying to on this. There's a lot of really hacky stuff to get a result that really should have been built in. Like, a built in quote or excerpt for example, should just be a standard style like: /begin{quote} Quote \end{quote}. But instead you have to do it as a \parbox[center]{hope-you-guessed-a-good-width-mm}{Quote}. - It's a small thing, but the way you do quotes is pretty silly. Not a fan of `` '' instead of "". If that's really how I have to do it without including additioanl packages, why not at least have a built-in like: \lquote and \rquote ? I am normally a person that is deeply opposed to language updates, unnecessary feature updates, new frameworks, etc. But in the case of LaTeX, it's one of the most obvious examples I can think of where it's desperately needed.

mcswell 5y ago
"You should not have to recompile your document 2 or 3 times... References / bibliographies don't work the first time through..." If you think about it, you'll probably see why. Cross-references can't be set until you know what they refer to, which may be later on in the doc ("see section 8 below"), and setting such references (or citations) can change the page numbering. If the multiple passes (which are analogous to the multiple passes a compiler makes) bother you, then use a tool that hides them from your eyes, like arara. That's probably what Word does under the hood.