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Every time I look at markdown flavors I come up with this question: Why not latex? Granted, I rarely need markdown or latex so this might be just my ignorance.

Every time I look at markdown flavors I come up with this question: Why not latex? Granted, I rarely need markdown or latex so this might be just my ignorance. I've tried doing my CV and some presentations in markdown cause I just didn't want to put the time to learn latex. I went markdown -> html -> pdf. I just couldn't get something satisfactory. The pains: pagination, centering, columns, image positioning, colors. And then I took a day to learn enough latex - https://latex-beamer.com/quick-start/ https://latex-beamer.com/quick-start/ - to create a presentation for work. It was a lot easier than I thought and it came out looking great. Here is the skeleton of it so you can judge how complex it is: \documentclass{beamer} \usepackage{hyperref} \usetheme {teheme-name} \title{My Title} \subtitle{My subtitle} \author{me@example.com} \date{\today} \setlength{\parindent}{4ex} \setlength{\parskip}{1ex} \begin{document} \begin{section}{Title} \begin{frame} \titlepage \end{frame} \begin{frame}{Contents} \tableofcontents \end{frame} \end{section} \begin{section}{Some section} \begin{frame}{Page title} My text here \begin{itemize} \item one item \item another item \end{itemize} \end{frame} \end{section} \end{document}

eggy 5y ago
I had a textdrive account and used textile for my sites back in 2002 or 2003. I don't think markdown was around then. Textile was easy to work with at the time. I took the trouble to learn LaTeX in 2008 or 2009. I like it a lot, and I switched my resume/CV over to it. It's work, but you can get such nice results.
pwdisswordfish9 5y ago
I also like having a Turing-complete macro system in a text formatting language that can only support a fixed-in-advance page layout.
wizhi 5y ago
Markdown simply isn't meant for that kind of content. The idea of markdown, is that you end up with a text that is readable by itself, and renderable in more simple graphical environments. No one should ever ask themselves "how do I do image positioning" or "how do I add pagination" when dealing with markdown. That's just not what it's good for. Imagine having to write comments on HN using LaTeX.
- masklinn 5y ago
  > Markdown simply isn't meant for that kind of content. The idea of markdown, is that you end up with a text that is readable by itself, and renderable in more simple graphical environments. Also renderable safely and in bounded time (TeX is turing complete). > No one should ever ask themselves "how do I do image positioning" or "how do I add pagination" when dealing with markdown. That's just not what it's good for. Meh. This is a common question for table extensions, and the full-blown image commonmark spec is a bit of a mess. > Imagine having to write comments on HN using LaTeX. That would be an improvement over the current state of affairs at least, though probably a tad overdone on the other side of proper complexity.
- enriquto 5y ago
  > Imagine having to write comments on HN using LaTeX. Plain text paragraphs separated by blank lines is already a subset of LaTeX, so we are already doing that!
  - detaro 5y ago
    HN has a tiny bit more formatting than that.
geraldbauer 5y ago
Why not latex? Why not the best of both worlds? Anyways, see latext and markdown compared - https://github.com/mundimark/markdown-vs-latex https://github.com/mundimark/markdown-vs-latex In evolution simpler wins. The beauty of the paragraph syntax is an empty line, for example! And yeah for sure - the image syntax in markdown is a big FAIL and there are easier alternatives upcoming (out there waiting for the big time) - see https://texti.github.io https://texti.github.io - and image and figure "macros" - that is - built-in templates, for example.
TudorAndrei 5y ago
Why not Rmarkdown [0], in which you can also write LaTeX code, and if you want presentation with beamer, you just have to change a single line, so you could generate beamer presentation, html, pdf and doc from the same file. I don't even use RStudio, I just have a keybind in vim [1]. [0] https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/ https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/ [1] https://github.com/TudorAndrei/dotfiles/blob/1b118830315cdcc2c0740caef306cf382da6534a/nvim/plugin/md.vim#L4 https://github.com/TudorAndrei/dotfiles/blob/1b118830315cdcc...
progre 5y ago
Next time I have to update my CV, I'm gonna use Inkscape. I'm done with trying to trick various markup languages into placing text where I want it on the page.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  I'd make a simple word doc to PDF version as a backup. A lot of application portals parse out the text from a word doc or PDF and look for explicit keywords, employers, etc. for a first round of automatic filtering (before it even gets to recruiter inboxes). It would not be good if your beautifully readable and typeset SVG just looks blank to the machines.
  - progre 5y ago
    Why would it look blank? You don't have to rasterize text when rendering pdf from svg.
    - qbasic_forever 5y ago
      You're counting on inkscape and some unknowable backend pdf/doc processing backend to all do the right thing and preserve semantic text. There are so many places it could break and fall back to rasterizing or simple vector paths, and you'd have no way to know other than never getting an email back. Save everyone in your hiring loop the pain and make a resume with bone stock formatting, text sizes, etc. Any extra work they have to do to interpret your experience and skills is just working against you--these folks see hundreds of resumes a day and if one makes them have to stop and spend time to figure it out, it's faster to bin it.
- rosetremiere 5y ago
  Or scribus?
cryptos 5y ago
Latex is way harder to master than markdown. While it offers also way more features, it mixes (to a certain degree) semantic information with styling information. And at least to me Latex code looks just ugly. And have you ever tried to write complex tables with Latex? A nightmare! The best approach to write structured documents in a non-WYSIWYG way is AsciiDoc. You get a clean separation between content with its semantics and styling and you have a all the features you need for the biggest technical or scientific books.

eggy 5y ago

I had a textdrive account and used textile for my sites back in 2002 or 2003. I don't think markdown was around then. Textile was easy to work with at the time. I took the trouble to learn LaTeX in 2008 or 2009. I like it a lot, and I switched my resume/CV over to it. It's work, but you can get such nice results.

pwdisswordfish9 5y ago

I also like having a Turing-complete macro system in a text formatting language that can only support a fixed-in-advance page layout.

wizhi 5y ago

Markdown simply isn't meant for that kind of content. The idea of markdown, is that you end up with a text that is readable by itself, and renderable in more simple graphical environments. No one should ever ask themselves "how do I do image positioning" or "how do I add pagination" when dealing with markdown. That's just not what it's good for. Imagine having to write comments on HN using LaTeX.

masklinn 5y ago
> Markdown simply isn't meant for that kind of content. The idea of markdown, is that you end up with a text that is readable by itself, and renderable in more simple graphical environments. Also renderable safely and in bounded time (TeX is turing complete). > No one should ever ask themselves "how do I do image positioning" or "how do I add pagination" when dealing with markdown. That's just not what it's good for. Meh. This is a common question for table extensions, and the full-blown image commonmark spec is a bit of a mess. > Imagine having to write comments on HN using LaTeX. That would be an improvement over the current state of affairs at least, though probably a tad overdone on the other side of proper complexity.
enriquto 5y ago
> Imagine having to write comments on HN using LaTeX. Plain text paragraphs separated by blank lines is already a subset of LaTeX, so we are already doing that!
- detaro 5y ago
  HN has a tiny bit more formatting than that.

geraldbauer 5y ago

Why not latex? Why not the best of both worlds? Anyways, see latext and markdown compared - https://github.com/mundimark/markdown-vs-latex https://github.com/mundimark/markdown-vs-latex In evolution simpler wins. The beauty of the paragraph syntax is an empty line, for example! And yeah for sure - the image syntax in markdown is a big FAIL and there are easier alternatives upcoming (out there waiting for the big time) - see https://texti.github.io https://texti.github.io - and image and figure "macros" - that is - built-in templates, for example.

TudorAndrei 5y ago

Why not Rmarkdown [0], in which you can also write LaTeX code, and if you want presentation with beamer, you just have to change a single line, so you could generate beamer presentation, html, pdf and doc from the same file. I don't even use RStudio, I just have a keybind in vim [1]. [0] https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/ https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/ [1] https://github.com/TudorAndrei/dotfiles/blob/1b118830315cdcc2c0740caef306cf382da6534a/nvim/plugin/md.vim#L4 https://github.com/TudorAndrei/dotfiles/blob/1b118830315cdcc...

progre 5y ago

Next time I have to update my CV, I'm gonna use Inkscape. I'm done with trying to trick various markup languages into placing text where I want it on the page.

qbasic_forever 5y ago
I'd make a simple word doc to PDF version as a backup. A lot of application portals parse out the text from a word doc or PDF and look for explicit keywords, employers, etc. for a first round of automatic filtering (before it even gets to recruiter inboxes). It would not be good if your beautifully readable and typeset SVG just looks blank to the machines.
- progre 5y ago
  Why would it look blank? You don't have to rasterize text when rendering pdf from svg.
  - qbasic_forever 5y ago
    You're counting on inkscape and some unknowable backend pdf/doc processing backend to all do the right thing and preserve semantic text. There are so many places it could break and fall back to rasterizing or simple vector paths, and you'd have no way to know other than never getting an email back. Save everyone in your hiring loop the pain and make a resume with bone stock formatting, text sizes, etc. Any extra work they have to do to interpret your experience and skills is just working against you--these folks see hundreds of resumes a day and if one makes them have to stop and spend time to figure it out, it's faster to bin it.
rosetremiere 5y ago
Or scribus?

cryptos 5y ago

Latex is way harder to master than markdown. While it offers also way more features, it mixes (to a certain degree) semantic information with styling information. And at least to me Latex code looks just ugly. And have you ever tried to write complex tables with Latex? A nightmare! The best approach to write structured documents in a non-WYSIWYG way is AsciiDoc. You get a clean separation between content with its semantics and styling and you have a all the features you need for the biggest technical or scientific books.