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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
by 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 agoYou'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 agoThe 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.
- rhn_mk1 5y ago> "LaTeX gets the content and fits to the constraints at hand" I'll believe this when scientific papers start appearing in the form of reflowable HTML.
- bayindirh 5y agoI don't think that'll happen anytime soon, because scientific papers are one of the rare species of publications, which are primarily made to be printed, read and mangled with pens. Even the templates from the publishers came with paper sizes and other crop marks coded inside them. When publications start accepting reflow able formats and provide relevant templates, producing them is easy with LaTeX.
- bluenose69 5y agoMost journals I read offer both reflowable HTML and PDF. I don't know anybody who prefers the former. A PDF (and the paper copy it generates) is more convenient for markup, and for memory. I can look at papers I read decades ago, and know where to go to find things, because of what I might call positional memory. Somehow, my brain has information such as "The key Figure is at top of third page" or "that equation I think is wrong is at the bottom of the second-last page". I'm not alone in this. I suppose it's just how brains work (e.g. people who do memory tricks "store" the information in an imagined space). When I look at reflowed text, I just get lost. I can't make notes that "stick" with the text if I enlarge the font. And memories don't form in the same way as for PDF/paper. I suppose this might be field-dependent. I think in some fields the key point of a paper is a single sentence, which could be identified easily in reflowing text and then copied into a separate file. I don't read papers like that, though. That's why, in my line of work, PDF/paper is superior to reflowable text.
- rhn_mk1 5y agoFlowed text doesn't mean that it won't be printed. It means that it could be printed the way you want it, not the way the author wanted. This comes in handy when the author decided that 50% of the surface of paper should remain blank, or using a tiny font. They may find it helpful, others not. Same goes for the decision to have pages at all. The only aspect where I see in which someone else making an unappealable decision for you is superior, is convenience. Conditional on that other person being an expert in the field [of printing].
- forrestthewoods 5y agoI genuinely can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic.
- periheli0n 5y ago> On publishers, I wrote a book for Springer-Nature, and they wanted LaTeX. I wouldn't have published with them, if not. Do you know if they used LaTeX for the layout internally, or if they used some proprietary system that was fed the LaTeX source?
- bluenose69 5y agoI think they used LaTeX internally, but I've no way to be sure. They provide latex style sheets and sample files, and so those were my starting point. Of course, they are a big organization, and latex is a simple system, so they might have a program that translates it to something else, e.g. using latex to create PDFs and something else for other formats. But at least at the galley-approval stage, it was still LaTeX.
- dash2 5y ago> LaTeX is very readable. I've never understood the complaints about the system. Here’s how you put an image on TeX: \begin{figure} \caption{A picture of a tucan.} \begin{center} \includegraphics{tucan.eps} \end{center} \end{figure}
- goldsteinq 5y agoThe hard part isn’t \section{Introduction}, but horrible hacks like \makeatletter you need to do something non-trivial.