6 ms·

The discussion reminds me a little of the one around LaTeX in the scientific community. Latex is extremely powerful but reading the raw source of a text is a pa

The discussion reminds me a little of the one around LaTeX in the scientific community. Latex is extremely powerful but reading the raw source of a text is a pain. WISYWIG is just so much more comfortable when writing, but MS Word sucks in its own specific and manifold ways (as does LibreOffice). HTML is still not nice to read, too much boilerplate tags required. Markdown source however is mostly well-readable in a plain-text editor, and offers the basic formatting that serves 95% of the needs. But the truth is: the ideal text layout platform for scientific writing does not exist. Markdown+HTML+CSS could be getting close, but it currently still lacks LaTeX's tooling for citations, support for pagination. MS Word's "track changes" is extremely useful when collaboratively editing (and no, Overleaf's version doesn't come close, unfortunately). But references and citations in Word still are no match for the flexibility of bibtex, even with Papers/Zotero/Mendeley. Figure placing can be a nightmare, although LaTeX is not infallible, either. And you need a Mac or Windows to use Word, and on a Mac it feels like it's running in an emulator. I have given up on the belief that one tool could solve all this. There are a few good attempts like overleaf and the less-known authorea (which I liked more), but these are cloud apps which complicates writing offline. The only solution is to choose whatever tool works for the specific use case, learn to live with its shortcomings, and never forget that in the end only the finished manuscript counts.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cprecioso 5y ago
Using Markdown with pandoc and pandoc-crossref is basically perfect as a substitute of LaTeX. It allows in-line and standalone LaTeX, and citations with crossref.
- jonathanstrange 5y ago
  In my experience this has zero advantage over LaTeX since converting your markdown to formats other than LaTeX will be just as hard as converting from a LaTeX source. It's even harder because you have to deal with an eclectic mix of LaTeX and markdown, and various errors and restrictions in pandoc.
  - fjorde 5y ago
    yes, these are all fraught. Any X-to-Y format exchange is a brew/apt miracle in my experience. It's not necessarily important for a LaTeX document to be render-able in all media, but the maths disciplines, for example, should be asking themselves how they want to be able to search for things including formula, algorithms etc, and finding ways to guarantee that a maxima of media support search/find/read operations on their articles. It's not just about how easy is it to input? but it's very similar to "how easy is it to get back out?" it has been a bit of a mismatch in maths re formulae expressions, and how those are represented visually vs. textually.
  - periheli0n 5y ago
    The problems in converting LaTeX usually come from third-party packages. When only a restricted set of packages is allowed then it is quite straightforward. This is the reason many publishers require latex, even if they don't use LaTeX internally (which is often the case). They convert LaTeX to the XML dialect that their in-house layout system understands.
  - leephillips 5y ago
    I use the system to write documents that I convert to PDF (through LaTeX), Word, plain text, and HTML, with equations, tables, and internal and external links preserved (citations in plain text turn into footnotes). It works brilliantly, and this would be impossible when starting with LaTeX source. You can embed the target formats directly into the markdown when needed, and have alternative versions for different targets. I do this for things like tables, where I want to directly format them for LaTeX and HTML, rather than rely on Pandoc’s automatic translation. You can write filters¹ that extend Pandoc/markdown to do any processing that you want, so you can create your own syntax with custom translations to any target format. [1] https://lee-phillips.org/panflute-gnuplot/ https://lee-phillips.org/panflute-gnuplot/ [This is sort of obsolete now, as you should probably write filters with Lua. But it’s still a good illustration of the possibilities.]
- lmc 5y ago
  Are there any tutorials you could recommend please?
  - leephillips 5y ago
    The official manual is pretty complete: https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html.
- 0thgen 5y ago
  Pandoc completely solves any of the issues mentioned about markdown for scientific writing. it works flawlessly, and it unarguably way cleaner than writing in plain latex How can anyone - tell me - that this - list Is harder to read: \begin{itemize} \item than this \item unintuitive \item mess \end{itemize}
  - gilcot 5y ago
    With the former, can you items of many paragraphs and other complex stuffs one sometimes need in a complex/advanced document? So you can understand why LaTeX had to go the less naive way MarkDown did.
    - cprecioso 5y ago
      Of course the LaTeX syntax is more capable, but for the simple and common case, it's extremely fussy. The simple case should be effortles. With markdown it is, and in Pandoc you can easily drop to more complicated syntax should you need any of its capabilities.
sundarurfriend 5y ago
> Latex is extremely powerful but reading the raw source of a text is a pain. WISYWIG is just so much more comfortable when writing, but MS Word sucks The Lyx editor solves both these problems for me. I'd probably be using LaTeX a lot less if I hadn't found Lyx (that quote about fingernail clippings in oatmeal doesn't apply to Lisp IMO, but certainly does to LaTeX).
- Semaphor 5y ago
  I used Lyx back in university to transcribe the math lectures. It was good enough that the professor later asked me if I can send him the PDFs and source files ;)
  - periheli0n 5y ago
    Lyx is great for that exact purpose! I used it too as an undergrad. But it doesn't offer the full flexibility and toolset available in LaTeX, which limits its use for more complex documents.
Semaphor 5y ago
> Markdown+HTML+CSS could be getting close, but it currently still lacks LaTeX's tooling for citations, support for pagination. I don’t think the citation tooling is great, but for pagination even free tools work well with CSS Paged Media [0] [1] [0]: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-page-3/ https://www.w3.org/TR/css-page-3/ [1]: https://www.print-css.rocks/ https://www.print-css.rocks/
jonathanstrange 5y ago
The problem is not writing or reading LaTeX, properly written LaTeX is very readable. It's easy to maintain and understand, and Bibtex for bibliographies works fine once you've gotten used to it. The problems start once you have to convert this to MS Word, which is essentially impossible with any advanced LaTeX document which will invariably contain complex formulas and also include hacks and adjustments in the preamble. I've done it several times and it basically requires a rewrite. All of the existing tools fail. In fact, in a book I've once edited and made camera-ready in LaTeX, the LaTeX contributions were harder to integrate into the book than the Word files! Recently I had to deliver a book I've written camera-ready, doing all the typesetting myself, because a large prestigious publisher I had a contract with turned out to be unable to deal with LaTeX. In a sense the problem really is MS Word, it's still the standard and I was astonished to learn about the publishing world in my postdoc time how surprisingly many publishers only deal with MS Word files and do not even use any special typesetting software - many use Word all the way down to creating the final PDF for printing! Looks horrible but I know of several major academic publishers who do it that way.
- bluenose69 5y ago
  You're right: LaTeX is very readable. I've never understood the complaints about the system. What's so hard about writing `\section{Introduction}` or `$R \int_0^1 f dx$`? After a bit of learning on your first document (perhaps requiring half the time of one of the first of dozens of edits you'll be making, if the document is important), what you get is (a) ease of transition between formats (article in journal becomes chapter in thesis in about 3 minutes work) and (b) beautiful output, not just in mathematics but in support for many language characters, hyphenation hints, etc. On publishers, I wrote a book for Springer-Nature, and they wanted LaTeX. I wouldn't have published with them, if not.
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    The biggest misunderstandings about LaTeX stems from comparing it with Microsoft Word or to any other word processor. LaTeX is a typesetter. You give the text, the template and the page size and it typesets it all. You nudge it with hints, and that's all. So, LaTeX is content first and layout second in a sense. On the other hand, word processors work at absolute terms, layout first. Looking to LaTeX from this perspective distorts the vision a lot, and people get confused. When one understands the idea of "LaTeX gets the content and fits to the constraints at hand", the rest is liberating.
sampo 5y ago
> Latex is extremely powerful but reading the raw source of a text is a pain. For the kind of text that you'd use Markdown for, i.e. text that is mostly just text and not math heavy, LaTeX should be almost as readable as Markdown. For example, \section{Introduction} is almost as readable as ## Introduction
- periheli0n 5y ago
  Yes, almost ;)
- Lio 5y ago
  Takes a bit more typing though unless you some macros dedicated to it. Not hard to do but Markdown is easy to write anywhere.
- gilcot 5y ago
  Plus, you can have nice stuffs like: \section[short title in toc]{very very long title at page} and stared version. Those two things, Markdown cannot do, show the power of that syntax ovec simple bangs starting the line.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

cprecioso 5y ago

Using Markdown with pandoc and pandoc-crossref is basically perfect as a substitute of LaTeX. It allows in-line and standalone LaTeX, and citations with crossref.

jonathanstrange 5y ago
In my experience this has zero advantage over LaTeX since converting your markdown to formats other than LaTeX will be just as hard as converting from a LaTeX source. It's even harder because you have to deal with an eclectic mix of LaTeX and markdown, and various errors and restrictions in pandoc.
- fjorde 5y ago
  yes, these are all fraught. Any X-to-Y format exchange is a brew/apt miracle in my experience. It's not necessarily important for a LaTeX document to be render-able in all media, but the maths disciplines, for example, should be asking themselves how they want to be able to search for things including formula, algorithms etc, and finding ways to guarantee that a maxima of media support search/find/read operations on their articles. It's not just about how easy is it to input? but it's very similar to "how easy is it to get back out?" it has been a bit of a mismatch in maths re formulae expressions, and how those are represented visually vs. textually.
- periheli0n 5y ago
  The problems in converting LaTeX usually come from third-party packages. When only a restricted set of packages is allowed then it is quite straightforward. This is the reason many publishers require latex, even if they don't use LaTeX internally (which is often the case). They convert LaTeX to the XML dialect that their in-house layout system understands.
- leephillips 5y ago
  I use the system to write documents that I convert to PDF (through LaTeX), Word, plain text, and HTML, with equations, tables, and internal and external links preserved (citations in plain text turn into footnotes). It works brilliantly, and this would be impossible when starting with LaTeX source. You can embed the target formats directly into the markdown when needed, and have alternative versions for different targets. I do this for things like tables, where I want to directly format them for LaTeX and HTML, rather than rely on Pandoc’s automatic translation. You can write filters¹ that extend Pandoc/markdown to do any processing that you want, so you can create your own syntax with custom translations to any target format. [1] https://lee-phillips.org/panflute-gnuplot/ https://lee-phillips.org/panflute-gnuplot/ [This is sort of obsolete now, as you should probably write filters with Lua. But it’s still a good illustration of the possibilities.]
lmc 5y ago
Are there any tutorials you could recommend please?
- leephillips 5y ago
  The official manual is pretty complete: https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html.
0thgen 5y ago
Pandoc completely solves any of the issues mentioned about markdown for scientific writing. it works flawlessly, and it unarguably way cleaner than writing in plain latex How can anyone - tell me - that this - list Is harder to read: \begin{itemize} \item than this \item unintuitive \item mess \end{itemize}
- gilcot 5y ago
  With the former, can you items of many paragraphs and other complex stuffs one sometimes need in a complex/advanced document? So you can understand why LaTeX had to go the less naive way MarkDown did.
  - cprecioso 5y ago
    Of course the LaTeX syntax is more capable, but for the simple and common case, it's extremely fussy. The simple case should be effortles. With markdown it is, and in Pandoc you can easily drop to more complicated syntax should you need any of its capabilities.

sundarurfriend 5y ago

> Latex is extremely powerful but reading the raw source of a text is a pain. WISYWIG is just so much more comfortable when writing, but MS Word sucks The Lyx editor solves both these problems for me. I'd probably be using LaTeX a lot less if I hadn't found Lyx (that quote about fingernail clippings in oatmeal doesn't apply to Lisp IMO, but certainly does to LaTeX).

Semaphor 5y ago
I used Lyx back in university to transcribe the math lectures. It was good enough that the professor later asked me if I can send him the PDFs and source files ;)
- periheli0n 5y ago
  Lyx is great for that exact purpose! I used it too as an undergrad. But it doesn't offer the full flexibility and toolset available in LaTeX, which limits its use for more complex documents.

Semaphor 5y ago

> Markdown+HTML+CSS could be getting close, but it currently still lacks LaTeX's tooling for citations, support for pagination. I don’t think the citation tooling is great, but for pagination even free tools work well with CSS Paged Media [0] [1] [0]: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-page-3/ https://www.w3.org/TR/css-page-3/ [1]: https://www.print-css.rocks/ https://www.print-css.rocks/

jonathanstrange 5y ago

The problem is not writing or reading LaTeX, properly written LaTeX is very readable. It's easy to maintain and understand, and Bibtex for bibliographies works fine once you've gotten used to it. The problems start once you have to convert this to MS Word, which is essentially impossible with any advanced LaTeX document which will invariably contain complex formulas and also include hacks and adjustments in the preamble. I've done it several times and it basically requires a rewrite. All of the existing tools fail. In fact, in a book I've once edited and made camera-ready in LaTeX, the LaTeX contributions were harder to integrate into the book than the Word files! Recently I had to deliver a book I've written camera-ready, doing all the typesetting myself, because a large prestigious publisher I had a contract with turned out to be unable to deal with LaTeX. In a sense the problem really is MS Word, it's still the standard and I was astonished to learn about the publishing world in my postdoc time how surprisingly many publishers only deal with MS Word files and do not even use any special typesetting software - many use Word all the way down to creating the final PDF for printing! Looks horrible but I know of several major academic publishers who do it that way.

bluenose69 5y ago
You're right: LaTeX is very readable. I've never understood the complaints about the system. What's so hard about writing `\section{Introduction}` or `$R \int_0^1 f dx$`? After a bit of learning on your first document (perhaps requiring half the time of one of the first of dozens of edits you'll be making, if the document is important), what you get is (a) ease of transition between formats (article in journal becomes chapter in thesis in about 3 minutes work) and (b) beautiful output, not just in mathematics but in support for many language characters, hyphenation hints, etc. On publishers, I wrote a book for Springer-Nature, and they wanted LaTeX. I wouldn't have published with them, if not.
- bayindirh 5y ago
  The biggest misunderstandings about LaTeX stems from comparing it with Microsoft Word or to any other word processor. LaTeX is a typesetter. You give the text, the template and the page size and it typesets it all. You nudge it with hints, and that's all. So, LaTeX is content first and layout second in a sense. On the other hand, word processors work at absolute terms, layout first. Looking to LaTeX from this perspective distorts the vision a lot, and people get confused. When one understands the idea of "LaTeX gets the content and fits to the constraints at hand", the rest is liberating.

sampo 5y ago

> Latex is extremely powerful but reading the raw source of a text is a pain. For the kind of text that you'd use Markdown for, i.e. text that is mostly just text and not math heavy, LaTeX should be almost as readable as Markdown. For example, \section{Introduction} is almost as readable as ## Introduction

periheli0n 5y ago
Yes, almost ;)
Lio 5y ago
Takes a bit more typing though unless you some macros dedicated to it. Not hard to do but Markdown is easy to write anywhere.
gilcot 5y ago
Plus, you can have nice stuffs like: \section[short title in toc]{very very long title at page} and stared version. Those two things, Markdown cannot do, show the power of that syntax ovec simple bangs starting the line.