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Here's how a real man cooks with TeX. * Carefully sets out header with a tasteful collection of packages. * Sets all tables thoughtfully using \booktabs, neve
by dash2 5y ago
Here'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...
- splittingTimes 5y agoHave you tried to write any non trivial document with MS Word? It is infuriating. Even the simplest tasks don't work reliably, like placing a picture with a caption. And oh my god if you try to Google for your problem you end up on outdated MS doc pages or what the pages describe only works in the desktop app and not the online version.
- azangru 5y ago> Have you tried to write any non trivial document with MS Word? The last bullet point in dash2's comment specifically says "markdown". Why would you bring up MS Word?
- gcr 5y agoThere aren't many academic articles written in markdown. Most major conferences only accept word or PDF files, so it's a reasonable assumption to make.
- mcswell 5y agoAnd since you brought up Word, I'll add that it has never in 30 years done numbering right, whether sections (like legal numbering: 1, 1.1, 1.1.1 etc.) or lists. In fact I think it's worse than it used to be; I was tearing my hair out recently trying to get it to number lists, which is such a simple thing.
- ska 5y agoIt's used by millions of academics because it is literally the best option, warts and all. Markdown is vastly under-powered for a lot of things people need to do. Word is a hot mess for the same. Etc. etc.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoReST has TeX level of power and it's internal data structure maps mostly 1:1 onto DocBook if the native output capabilities of docutils aren't good enough. It's a shame Markdown took over the mindshare for ASCII markup.
- zokier 5y agoLaTeX is not made by Knuth, it's from Lamport.
- coliveira 5y agoLaTeX is just a set of packages that run on Knuth's creation.