19 ms·

I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

210 points by miguelmurca 4y ago

WolfOliver 4y ago
Check out https://www.monsterwriter.app/ https://www.monsterwriter.app/, It is something like LyX but even easier to use.
- porker 4y ago
  Interesting, I hadn't seen this before. How does it differ from LyX? Is a Windows build planned?
  - WolfOliver 4y ago
    There is a Windows build available already. LyX is a LaTeX frontend, you still need to understand some notions of LaTeX. MonsterWriter is a WYSIWYM Word Processor, LaTeX is just used as internal tool to create PDF files. There are other exports available (e.g. HTML, Markdown, you also can publish to Ghost directly)
mhh__ 4y ago
LaTeX needs replacing with something faster and more program-y, and that isn't just a python script. LateX's successor should be opinionated, safe, easy to build in parallel, and also good at integrating with other tooling: Let a CAS generate the next equation for you, for example. Make sure that figure is never out of date (e.g. a build system rather than relying on a web of files and button clicks) Etc. This will likely never happen because latex is still very good at what people want it to do push comes to shove, but we could have a much better document format and publishing system around it.
- clircle 4y ago
  What is LuaLaTeX?
  - mhh__ 4y ago
    Good idea. Doesn't go far enough / is only an incremental improvement. I've never truly immersed myself in it so maybe it's more powerfully elegant than I remember.
  - dhosek 4y ago
    LuaLaTeX is a lot slower than pdfLaTeX or XeLaTeX and default settings give different output than the other two, e.g., around line breaks at – or —. I only recommend it if you need it. Most people don't.
- einpoklum 4y ago
  > something faster I don't know that this is the major pain point. The thing is, writing complex-structure/programmed documents is not something which needs immediate re-rendering with every character - just like you don't recompile your program with every character you change. This would, however, be very useful for syntax and compiler-detectable error. You would have an effectively-immediate indication of warnings and errors per line in your document, like an IDE. So it would be Java-like compilation speed rather than C++-like compilation speed... > safe LaTeX programming is basically sandboxed, or at least you have to work _very_ hard to do dangerous things. > latex is still very good at what people want it to do That's not it. It is actually usually pretty bad in doing what we want it to do (e.g. tables. Oh, the pain!) ... but what it has going for it is that you can do almost anything you want?: It will take effort and the "source code" will be ugly, but it'll work.
- Smithalicious 4y ago
  Please no. Stop replacing useful tools with "opinionated" ones. Nothing makes me nope out of using a tool faster than hearing it described as "opinionated".
- ska 4y ago
  > Make sure that figure is never out of date For anyone with a software background, this is pretty straightforward - once you start thinking of the latex file(s) as source code rather than the document, it's a short jump to setting up a build environment...
- jasomill 4y ago
  You can embed CAS-generated equations and computations in LaTeX[1]. This came in handy for undergraduate linear algebra homework that combined proofs (where I could use my existing LaTeX macros) and computations (where we were expected to use a CAS). Mathematica or Jupyter notebooks would also work, but I prefer Emacs over the notebook UI (and Jupyter didn't actually exist at the time). [1] See, e.g., https://github.com/tmolteno/SympyTeX/ https://github.com/tmolteno/SympyTeX/
- GiovanniP 4y ago
  > we could have a much better document format and publishing system around it. TeXmacs (http://www.texmacs.org/ http://www.texmacs.org/ and http://forum.texmacs.cn/ http://forum.texmacs.cn/), and it happens right now!
gus_massa 4y ago
I'm not sure if it's necessary to use auxiliary files. I made something implementing fake vectors using \csname . I think that a similar approach can be used for this problem, but I prefer to never see my old code again. IWIMM \newcommand{\defwithindex}[3]{% \expandafter\def\csname #1@#2\endcsname{#3}% } \newcommand{\getwithindex}[2]{% \csname #1@#2\endcsname% } (You probably need the two dimensional version.)
- miguelmurca 4y ago
  Hi! Author here. This is a cool idea for a vector implementation, but you still need to work around the fact that the command definition can come after the \get
  - gus_massa 4y ago
    Perhaps you can use the main aux file, as other packages do. I think I never did that, so I'm not sure about how difficult it is. Or perhaps I used the aux file and I forgot about that. [ I should write an article titled "I hate LaTeX. I hate MSWord." :) . ]
  - zauguin 4y ago
    Since your code doesn't write the authors to the file it already requires that the authors are given before `\maketitle`, so then it's also reasonable to require affiliations there. Then you get something like https://gist.github.com/zauguin/19bf1bc9128a8abaedfe3081717ba5f6 https://gist.github.com/zauguin/19bf1bc9128a8abaedfe3081717b... which doesn't need a file.
    - miguelmurca 4y ago
      Hello, I thought about it a little and indeed you are both right! For the sake of completeness I've updated beamleeto to use this mechanism instead :) thank you for your help!
patrickg 4y ago
I have a related feeling about TeX. It has superb output quality but the programming is awful. When LuaTeX finally arrived a few years ago, it was possible to do almost everything you have done before in the TeX language (starting with \backslashes) in Lua. See http://wiki.luatex.org/index.php/TeX_without_TeX http://wiki.luatex.org/index.php/TeX_without_TeX for an introduction. I have (shameless plug) created a database publishing software using this technique (https://github.com/speedata/publisher/ https://github.com/speedata/publisher/). Once in a while I have to use LaTeX and it feels a bit old school to do the macro programming. My next project is to rewrite the TeX algorithms in Go - see https://github.com/speedata/boxesandglue https://github.com/speedata/boxesandglue. Already usable but not TeX like in any way (this is just a library, not a frontend software like TeX)
- guidoism 4y ago
  I feel the same way! I also feel like the LaTeX crap on top of Plain TeX is crap and it fills me with rage when I try to find info about TeX and always get back something assuming LaTeX. Your stuff looks cool, I will take a look!
- GiovanniP 4y ago
  > It has superb output quality but the programming is awful TeXmacs (http://www.texmacs.org/ http://www.texmacs.org/) has better output quality and nicer programming (it is Scheme :-) ) and it is easier to use.
  - patrickg 4y ago
    In which sense “better output quality”?
    - GiovanniP 4y ago
      Various senses that concur. It has, in addition to the line-breaking algorithm, a global page-breaking algorithm ... and for the rest may I suggest reading (it's brief) section 4.2 of GNU TeXmacs, A free, structured, wysiwyg and technical text editor, J. Van der Hoeven, Cahiers GUTenberg, no. 39-40 (2001), pp. 39-50, that you can find at the official website of the journal at http://www.numdam.org/article/CG_2001___39-40_39_0.pdf http://www.numdam.org/article/CG_2001___39-40_39_0.pdf And also looking at https://www.jonmsterling.com/papers/sterling:2022:wg6.pdf https://www.jonmsterling.com/papers/sterling:2022:wg6.pdf, I find it beautiful ... but perhaps there are better judges.
Pinus 4y ago
You sometimes see people ask fairly simple Python questions on Stack Overflow, that could be solved by five lines of plain Python, and be answered with some Pandas magic incantation that happens to do what they want with one call. I always find this a bit sad, because it seems to take away the idea that programming is about assembling composable parts, replacing it by a search for the right magic thing from a box of ready-made magic things. (Plain)TeX always seems the opposite of this. There is never a keyword that does what you want, but you can always do it by using five different mechanisms in concert. You always feel like you are trying to trick the system into doing something it was not designed for.
- galoisgirl 4y ago
  > There is never a keyword that does what you want Clearly you haven't seen https://github.com/mscroggs/realhats https://github.com/mscroggs/realhats
- enriquto 4y ago
  > You always feel like you are trying to trick the system into doing something it was not designed for. This is one of the hallmarks of human civilization. Your hands were designed for throwing a stone at the eye of a mammoth. But you can play the violin with them! Yes; it is totally awkward and anti-natural for your hands, obviously not their intended purpose... but so beautiful!
  - rland 4y ago
    I see what you're saying, but the violin was designed for human hands.
  - netizen-936824 4y ago
    Nothing in nature was necessarily "designed"
    - cosmojg 4y ago
      Sculpted like a riverbed.
jonpalmisc 4y ago
I also have a love & hate relationship with LaTeX. I think it really boils down to the following: LaTeX will work excellently for you, so long as your use case was envisioned by the original authors. I can't say that the original authors of LaTeX didn't envision using it for creating slideshows/presentations, but I can say that making a beamer theme is uniquely complicated. I wish that LaTeX had something as flexible as CSS for styling documents rather than the awkward commands, etc. used now—so much so that I attempted to replace LaTeX with a HTML & CSS -> PDF workflow in the past [0]. It is still an idea I want to revisit someday when I have more time. [0] https://github.com/jonpalmisc/pmt https://github.com/jonpalmisc/pmt (no longer actively maintained)
- wollsmoth 4y ago
  If you have a lot of time on your hands, nothing makes your math/cs hw look quite as slick. Was fun to play around with in undergrad for sure. I've forgotten all my LaTeX skills since though.
  - jonpalmisc 4y ago
    I used it avidly for years. It’s still fun to see pretty LaTeX documents, but my patience for working with it—despite being rather fluent with it—has grown too slim.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  I don't mind Beamer, there's some boilerplate but it is like a once-per-institution setup so it doesn't seem like too big of a pain. It was hopefully done by someone else, and if not, I only have to do it once for myself -- and then I can share it. However, drawing figures in TikZ seems to be the main way of getting figures into a beamer presentation. This is a total nightmare and not really worth the effort, IMO.
dontbenebby 4y ago
LaTeX is mostly good for academics who need to manage citations, if you just want a clean, readable CV there's lots of WYSIWYG options. I actually used to use TexMaxer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texmaker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texmaker It's on my list of things I want to deploy a fuzzer on when I get around to learning that -- I've been focused more on data visualization lately.
ProfXponent 4y ago
What is the intended use for LaTex these days? I’m not trying to flame, I just have no idea why anyone would choose to use it over html/css or just a word processor.
- RugnirViking 4y ago
  Academia. At least, its widespread (almost universal) where I am studying. Mainly to manage citations, figures, and tables of contents automatically. Tools like Sharelatex are used for collaboration on papers.
  - ProfXponent 4y ago
    That’s interesting. Is it really a problem that requires manually writing the code? Seems like there should be more elegant solutions by this point.
    - kalenx 4y ago
      For most usages, you don't need to write the code. Sometimes buff out rough edges for your specific application, but in my 12 years in academia, I think I've only really _written_ Latex twice.
      - ProfXponent 4y ago
        Ok that makes a bit more sense, thanks for taking the time to educate me :)
      - red_trumpet 4y ago
        How do you typeset your research then?
        vjerancrnjak 4y ago
        You could do it through Pandoc. Pandoc can process multiple data sources (citations, chapters, yamls etc.) and output a pdf. You can turn on citation linking (in the text), you can apply a custom latex template. Once it is all setup, you just write text in Pandoc Markdown.
akavel 4y ago
Take a look at https://sile-typesetter.org/ https://sile-typesetter.org/. IIRC it literally reuses some core C libraries from TeX/LaTeX, and glues them together in a different way using Lua, keeping Lua as the only language available. Notably, SILE recently achieved the long overdue milestone of math/equations support (https://sile-typesetter.org/2021/09/sile-0-12-0-is-released https://sile-typesetter.org/2021/09/sile-0-12-0-is-released). Obviously, open-source. edit: for some attempt at an explicit discussion of pros & cons & history vs. TeX, see: https://sile-typesetter.org/what-is/#sile-versus-tex https://sile-typesetter.org/what-is/#sile-versus-tex
funnym0nk3y 4y ago
In my opinion LaTeX fails to deliver when doing anything other than text based work. Tables, images, etc are always a hassle. It gets even worse when changing one page to landscape mode. Debugging is a pain and there aren't any tools to help with that.
leephillips 4y ago
The solution presented in this anonymous, undated article is relevant if you’re constrained to only using LaTeX. But you’re not, and there are certainly easier ways to go about such things. We have Python and other higher level languages that we can use to pre-process source and extract metadata. This type of problem is made much easier if you write in Markdown, putting authors, affiliations, and other metadata in (say) YAML blocks, and use Pandoc to convert to LaTeX (or anything else). You can write a filter in Python, Lua, or Haskell to rearrange the metadata the way the author wants. This would be a far more pleasant experience, and easier to extend and generalize.
- miguelmurca 4y ago
  This anonymous, undated article was written by me, yesterday. The strong backwards compatibility of LaTeX(2e) [0] make it so that the date is not especially relevant (since I'm using primitives); in any case my point was pedagogical, in the sense of diving into the operational mechanisms of (La)TeX to develop a better mental model of what's going on. And while Pandoc is very nice, if you're in academia none of your alternatives are viable, since LaTeX is a de facto standard for most journals. Fun fact: the article was written in Markdown, with some front matter for metadata! [0] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/247524/do-i-risk-breaking-documents-by-updating-my-tex-distribution https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/247524/do-i-risk-bre...
  - leephillips 4y ago
    I certainly appreciate the pedagogical purpose; what you did there goes beyond any pure TeX programming I’ve ever tried to do. My suggestion was to use Pandoc to create a LaTeX document. You can easily tell it to use RevTeX or any style required by a journal. The only friction with my approach is when you need to work with coauthors or editors on revisions. EDIT: I think I caused some confusion due to my sloppiness. I should have written “constrained to only writing in LaTeX”.
  - behnamoh 4y ago
    How did you do emojis in pandoc? I’ve had a hard time writing them in md files and converting them to pdf using pandoc
giraffe_lady 4y ago
I only interact with tex and latex through pollen these days. https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/ https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/ It doesn't shield you from much of the pain, initially at least. But you can separate it from the document and treat it as markup, and reuse bits more easily. Of course pollen itself is a thing to learn. But if you work with text a lot and like lisp it might be worth it. It's been good to me.
- sph 4y ago
  I gave a cursory look at it and it's really too niche, complicated for its own good IMO. Your comment made me want a modern TeX, written in Racket/Lisp. #lang latex (documentclass "article") (document (section "Chapter 1") Welcome to (LaTeX). Here is some (textbf "bold") text.) How does this not exist yet??
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    Yeah it is kind of surprising. Scribble supports latex output but I don't know the details and it's probably similar to pollen, since pollen is built on it. It doesn't seem that hard (famous last words tho) especially since turning arbitrary DSLs into xexprs is one of the things racket truly excels at.
    - techdragon 4y ago
      Just having proper semantic closing syntax would be a huge improvement for any member of the TeX family. It drives me nuts wrestling with shit falling into or out of some macro expanded function based on argument parsing logic. If it had defined closing syntax the damn tools would just tell me there was a mistake or get it correct not mysteriously screw up my document because I added or removed one row from my document. Or my favourite because I added a second table and that macro could only handle one table of that kind per document because it was designed for a table based bibliography that would only exist once at the end of a document… I put TeX and Perl in my “decent tool with extremely shitty syntax” mental categorisation of languages. I basically never look at anything TeX related directly anymore unless I have to. It’s either the input material I converted to something better like plain text or vector graphics (fuck Tkiz based graphics are so miserable to use) or it’s the output from putting something more sensible into pandoc.
teleforce 4y ago
Try TeXmacs, it's neither TeX nor it's Emacs clone. TeXmacs is WYSIWYG scientific editing platform. Documents created can be saved in TeXmacs, Xml, Scheme, PDF or Postscript. Converters exist for TeX/LaTeX and HTML/MathML. It can also be used as a graphical front-end for other computer algebra, numerical analysis, statistics software[1]. [1]https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html
- kzrdude 4y ago
  Any published papers that use this?
  - GiovanniP 4y ago
    You can check all of the papers of Joris van der Hoeven (https://www.texmacs.org/joris/main/publs.html https://www.texmacs.org/joris/main/publs.html) and of Massimiliano Gubinelli (https://www.hcm.uni-bonn.de/people/faculty/publications/?tx_sevenpack_pi1%5Bauthor%5D=1144&tx_sevenpack_pi1%5BbackPageId%5D=239 https://www.hcm.uni-bonn.de/people/faculty/publications/?tx_...), and as well these lecture notes the link to which was recently posted on the TeXmacs forums https://www.jonmsterling.com/papers/sterling:2022:wg6.pdf https://www.jonmsterling.com/papers/sterling:2022:wg6.pdf (link to the forum post http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/sharing-some-lecture-notes-created-using-texmacs/945 http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/sharing-some-lecture-notes-created...). The papers of vdH you find in his website are converted from the TeXmacs format into pdf (one can find the TeXmacs sources too by each paper) and the papers of Gubinelli as far as I know are written using TeXmacs but since he puts the links to the journals there you get a version converted from the TeXmacs format into LaTeX.
  - mgubi 4y ago
    I write all my papers with it since few years, and my lecture notes, and my talks. The papers are converted to LaTeX when sending to the publisher. Several of my PhD students used it to write their thesis. Also some Master students. Some pointers here: Papers: - https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.09637 https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.09637 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.05562 https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.05562 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.12115 https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.12115 Lecture notes: - https://www.iam.uni-bonn.de/abteilung-gubinelli/teaching/stochastic-analysis-ss22 https://www.iam.uni-bonn.de/abteilung-gubinelli/teaching/sto... Online lectures with TeXmacs: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL50D2PpswE&t=4990s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL50D2PpswE&t=4990s
camel-cdr 4y ago
I'm always amazed how people could bootstrap something as feature rich and versatile as LaTeX from plain TeX. I'd really like to get to know plain TeX a bit better, but I've got no idea where to start.
- miguelmurca 4y ago
  I can only hope to curse you with a TeX nerd-snipe :) I can recommend reading the first few chapters of The TeX Book (it's a genuinely fun read) followed by the links in the article's footnotes for more operational information.
- cruegge 4y ago
  If found “TeX by Topic” a great introduction, it's less overwhelming than the TeX book. Also really helpful in wrapping your head around macro expansion is the `texdef` cli tool, which allows you to quickly evaluate a line of macro code. Finally, https://www.tug.org/utilities/plain/cseq.html https://www.tug.org/utilities/plain/cseq.html is nice for reference.
  - dhosek 4y ago
    There are three books that are worth looking at to get plain TeX. I’d start with Viktor Eijkhout’s TeX by Topic (which I think is free in PDF on CTAN). Then the TeXbook to really get everything (the PDFs that float around the net are illegal. Please buy your copy. DEK donated his royalties to TUG so your purchase will help support the continuation of things like CTAN and the LaTeX project). And finally, if you really want to dig deep, Stephan v. Bechtolsheim’s four-volume magnum opus, TeX in Practice will tell you more than you ever wanted to know.
- jhallenworld 4y ago
  I found The Advanced TeXbook by David Salomon to be helpful. It shows how to make your own format on top of plain TeX, including table of contents, page numbering, cross-references and insertions. I also found A Beginner's Book of TeX by Raymond Seroul and Silvio Levy helpful as a quick reference. Also I have an anti-recommendation for Knuth's TeXBook. I did not find this book helpful at all- too much information buried in exercises (which I don't think is appropriate for a reference), and not enough directly said on how to do useful things. Figure out how to make a table of contents using only the TeXBook..
dash2 4y ago
Jesus H Carnegie. I JUST WANT TO WRITE AN ACADEMIC ARTICLE. I mean, look at this abhorrence. And look at what you open up in a TeX file, which again is meant to represent English prose. % Options for packages loaded elsewhere \PassOptionsToPackage{unicode}{hyperref} \PassOptionsToPackage{hyphens}{url} % \documentclass[ ]{article} \usepackage{amsmath,amssymb} \usepackage{lmodern} \usepackage{iftex} \ifPDFTeX ... and more and more of this dross ... I want to get stuck into the article. At least show me my abstract. But no. It's just more and more backslashes. It's just vile. And the people who use it have Stockholm syndrome, and they pass it on to their PhD students who spend nights before their presentation at 2am, trying to align a table and crying. Then they have Stockholm syndrome too, and they tell you "it's pronounced LARTECH" and give themselves a little pat on the back. And here's an equation: \sigma _{I}^{2}=a^{2}s^{2}+\left( 1-a\right)^{2}S^{2}+2a\left( 1-a\right)\sigma. How are you supposed to manipulate that? I can open up a WYSIWYG editor and literally do maths by just copy-pasting parts from one side to another. But this, I can't even read, let alone intuit. TeX. It's the worst.
- foobarian 4y ago
  I am with you for all* of it. The Stockholm syndrome bit is oh so true. But I take exception with the math, Latex math is its only redeeming quality (with Adobe FrameMaker coming in a distant second).
- bowsamic 4y ago
  As a physics postdoc I have to say that is quite a simple equation
  - dash2 4y ago
    That's my point! The equation is simple. The markup makes it complicated. Now imagine a complex equation.
- iflp 4y ago
  The equation example is artificial. In practice there will be no curly brackets around these single-token sub/superscripts, nor should the \left / \right present in this example. With properly added whitespaces this equation becomes quite legible. For more complex equations people use line breaks and indentations, and/or macros.
kkfx 4y ago
Not a TeXnicians nor a TeXpert but I've learnt it at a certain point in high school after a professor suggestion, than much used at the uni and now just used casually for letters, reports etc I do love the quality, that's is. As far as I do not find something with equivalent or better typesetting quality I'm stick with LaTeX :-) To those who hate it: try to learn some tangible "alternatives" like *roff or TeXinfo and than you'll see LaTeX syntax is not that horrid or difficult, then try to learn some modern typesetting tools like those from Adobe. LaTeX win easily, that's is. Said that IF someone can offer something equivalent with a far simpler/nicer markup as I said before my love is just to the quality of the output!
rq1 4y ago
There must be a solution similar to this: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/TeX-my-math https://hackage.haskell.org/package/TeX-my-math I don't understand why they encode these expressions f^{(2)}(x) like so. They should be written like a regular function: f 2 x. Then you apply your styling depending on eg. the domain definitions. Eg. for f : N x R -> R, then the first argument is sub/super-scripted... etc. Another eg. In python, we would render this expression: sum([i*2 for i in range(0, n)]) with sigma expression... etc.
ahmadmijot 4y ago
I don't use LateX explicitly (my colleagues and supervisors didn't know LaTeX and exclusively use MS Word) but I like how I can write equation in MS Word using LateX notations.
- officehero 4y ago
  Same. I'm a PhD student in CS and manage just fine with embedded latex in word documents and a reference plugin (I use zotero). There's definitely pros/cons. Imo biggest con is the absence of something like overleaf and biggest pro is ease of use.
yingbo 4y ago
I hate clickbait. I click clickbait
wesleywt 4y ago
Having written my thesis in LaTex, I can say it is wonderful and a wonderful waste of time.
- sph 4y ago
  Same, I just did my resume in LaTeX, it's such an obtuse and painful tool, yet nothing even comes close to the control it gives you. Hey btw, I'm looking for contract work! https://github.com/1player/resume/blob/master/resume.pdf https://github.com/1player/resume/blob/master/resume.pdf
  - bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
    Surely plain old html does?
    - jdbernard 4y ago
      For several years (a decade maybe?) I authored my resume in LaTeX. Then a few years ago I wanted to restructure it radically, and make an interactive version that showed off some simple subset of my full-stack skillset (from design to implementation). This goal led me to authoring it in HTML with CSS. I never actually got around to implementing my full vision because I had an unexpected opportunity land in my lap before I'd officially started looking. I had the design and static mockup completed, so I just exported that to PDF and used it. In hindsight, I spent a lot less time getting the look I wanted in HTML than I did in LaTeX. I still tend to use LaTeX for some long-form documentation, but I'll probably stick to HTML for my resume and I'm finding myself using HTML + Markdown a lot more for other authoring tasks too.
    - sph 4y ago
      It's not the right tool for the job, in this case perfectly laying out text on a A4 sheet of paper. HTML is made for variable-sized screens, and can be repurposed to be printed, but it's still trying to screw a nail in when all you need is a hammer.
  - jtbayly 4y ago
graycat 4y ago
LaTeX? I just use TeX. The documentation for TeX is clear, very precise, and much shorter. LaTeX is just TeX but with a lot of new macros. The intent is different: With TeX, you just say in detail what steps you want the software to do. With LaTeX you say what you want in general terms and f'get about the details.
- miguelmurca 4y ago
  Yes :) https://github.com/mikeevmm/nobeamer https://github.com/mikeevmm/nobeamer
  - graycat 4y ago
    Yup, for "doing slides", I wrote some TeX macros. It sets the sizes of the page and the fonts, draws a box around the content, etc.
Tepix 4y ago
In the last three decades of having the opportunity to learn and use TeX, i have managed to avoid it. In the same time i've helped a friend with word processing for her dissertation. I'm still not sure how we managed to get it to work with all the horror stories about data loss and Microsoft Word at the time. But it did its job and I'm still in the WYSIWYG camp. Maybe in another life...
- tomtomistaken 4y ago
  I have the exact opposite story to tell. A friend of mine asked me to convert a 300 pages Word document to LaTeX, because Word couldn’t handle it. It was text, mostly, so it worked out quite well.
- dev_tty01 4y ago
  I find Word is only tolerable when used like Latex. I.e., extensive use of Styles. Define a Style for every object type in your doc. Also, carefully choose the Next Style option. Define Sections if columns or pagination vary across the document. With that in hand, it is now just a matter of plugging in text and images. If something isn't working quite right, edit the Style instead of macdinking the text on the screen. You are still left with formatting equations, but Word lets us use Latex-ish syntax for that now, so you can keep the fine control of Latex within the GUI context. Don't get me wrong, I hate Word, but it is required in many environments. Adopting a rational use strategy helps a bit. https://www.wordsense.eu/macdink/#English https://www.wordsense.eu/macdink/#English
  - Tepix 4y ago
    Indeed, using styles is the (only) way to manage any significant document in Word.
- ska 4y ago
  People write dissertations in Word all the time. How painful it is depends a bit on how complicated the dissertation is as a document. This is of course only an anecdote, but I know many people who started in word, gave up on it and moved to Tex/Latex, but nobody who went the other way (that is to say, I know people who tried to give up on Tex, but eventually went back - not anyone who actually published with it). This might have quite a bit to do with subject matter - Word has always been an awkward fit for mathematics.
ttul 4y ago
In 1999, I was editing a telecom industry standard as an intern and, of course, decided to use LaTeX instead of Word. The seasoned industry veterans on the technical committee were super impressed with my “Word” abilities and wondered if I could share my much-improved template with them. It suffices to say that I hastily hired a friend in school to work over the weekend converting the beautiful LaTeX into Word.
zuzun 4y ago
My rule of thumb is that once I start writing imperative LaTeX with loops and stuff, I'm almost always on the wrong path. Now, I might be missing some important corner cases, but by skimming through the blog post, I feel like the author's solution is too complicated. For example, I don't get why this requires auxiliary files. I would create a counter for the affiliations, let the \affiliation command define macros that contain the name of the affiliation and the value of the counter and then append the output to two different helper macros, one for authors and one for affiliations, whose contents I dump in \maketitle.
cuteboy19 4y ago
Like bash, LaTeX is one of those languages where you immediately forget it after you're done with your current task.
TheDesolate0 4y ago
jum1p 4y ago
I \usepackage{loveandhate} LaTeX
shp0ngle 4y ago
Oh I remember my CS years, when all the professors were raving to me about LaTeX, and I never understood why. Sure, it might be marginally better than just using Word, although - not that much; and it’s horrible to debug, it’s horrible to actually automate, it’s horrible to actually “separate content from style”… I thought that maybe something is wrong with me and over time it will “click”… it never did. But, this article made it click. (but that’s after I already got my degree…) http://www.danielallington.net/2016/09/the-latex-fetish/ http://www.danielallington.net/2016/09/the-latex-fetish/ LaTeX is not actually good for writing papers. It’s good for typesetting. And that’s it. It’s good as a type-setting program, that’s what it is meant to be. It’s definitely not good for separating content from style, or some kind of meta-automation or macros.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  Why is it not good at separating content from style?
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  It's great for writing papers. I can crack open vim rattle off an essay throw in some \par s and some \cite{sho0ngle} s, and then let all the typesetting, citation management, and whatnot get handled by the compiler. For STEM classes, the LaTeX defaults are perfect, and I can insert tables and images and such that can be in flux over the course of writing the report, importing then from external scripts that part of my data analysis. LaTeX only gets hairy when you start trying to fight it. If you want some that looks exactly as you imagine it, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle trying to specify exactly what you want, and constantly re-compiling. If instead, you just care about a clean, consistent, and presentable end product, then LaTeX gets you there with minimal fuss.
  - daptaq 4y ago
    Why do you use \par?
  - greazy 4y ago
    > LaTeX only gets hairy when you start trying to fight it. If you want some that looks exactly as you imagine it, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle trying to specify exactly what you want, and constantly re-compiling. 'fighting' as you describe it is the reason why people use latex. They want more fine grained control over the doc. I work in STEM, every publisher has their own formatting style. My pubs would get rejected if I submitted a default style. What you're describing is, in essence, using MS Word with defaults. Might as well use Word.
tunesmith 4y ago
I love LaTeX whole-heartedly. I never learned Word in college and wrote all my papers in LaTeX as an undergrad, just using its default styles. I write mathematical papers to myself, despite not being a mathematician. I found a LaTeX package that lays things out in the same style as old TSR D&D modules and I use that to write new dungeons. I wrote a book in markdown and used pandoc to output LaTeX and publish it through Amazon. I write silly scripts for my friends to do table reads from, using a LaTeX package. I write music scores of my composition in lilypond and one of my next projects is to combine it with LaTeX to print out books I can have on my piano. Ultimately, I think wrestling with LaTeX is kind of like wrestling with programming. Over time, you just have to develop that sense of radar that tells you when you are over-implementing. In programming, it's the choice of whether to write custom or hunt for a library, or at a higher level, the build-vs-buy question. For LaTeX, it's whether to wrestle with custom commands or just search its stack exchange or hunt for a package. It's still easy to go down the wrong rabbit hole - last time it happened to me it was because I got obsessed with wondering if I could create nomographs in LaTeX, but luckily I discovered pynomo instead.
- gibletsingravy 4y ago
  Which LaTeX package are you using for old school D&D?
  - tunesmith 4y ago
    https://github.com/slithy/rpg_module https://github.com/slithy/rpg_module - I'm not sure if it's published in CTAN but I've been active in its GitHub issues.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  I have never met someone who use Latex who wasn't a mathematician, CS, or older (elderly?) engineer
singhrac 4y ago
I too love LaTeX but it's important to remember that the writing experience might be nice and elegant in LaTeX with the right stys and ShareLatex and whatnot, but the editing experience is decidedly not. Everyone who has used it in any serious form with page limits knows the stress of slowly varying their figure sizes and hoping it will squish into the limits. Very honestly, part of the reason I don't bother with any new "LaTeX reimagined" projects is because either (a) they are written by LaTeX nonbelievers who don't understand the complexity of beautiful typesetting, or (b) I don't want to learn another markup+ language or mental model. The latter is increasingly annoying to me. Out of curiosity, is LaTeX compilation benchmarked on the M1 processors? Is it better? Has anyone experimented with magic Raph Levien-style SIMD magic (a la stack monoid) compilation for LaTeX? I just want LaTeX but really really fast.
- GiovanniP 4y ago
  > Very honestly, part of the reason I don't bother with any new "LaTeX reimagined" projects is because either (a) they are written by LaTeX nonbelievers who don't understand the complexity of beautiful typesetting, or (b) I don't want to learn another markup+ language or mental model. The latter is increasingly annoying to me. Then you have to try TeXmacs http://www.texmacs.org/ http://www.texmacs.org/. It is completely independent from LaTeX and TeX and has - beautiful typesetting (better than LaTeX) - it is fully WYSYWYG, so you don't have to learn a new markup language - yet it affords better document control than LaTeX
dreamcompiler 4y ago
I despise LaTeX for two reasons: It's offensively inelegant, and there's no such thing as "LaTeX". The offensively inelegant point is purely a matter of taste so I won't belabor it. The second point means that every author writes their document with their own particular suite of LaTeX add-ons, and if you don't have all of them you have no hope of compiling the document. There's Joe's LaTeX and Sally's LaTeX and Jennifer's LaTeX but nobody uses "vanilla LaTeX." So even after I download "LaTeX" (which is itself multiple gigabytes in size), I still have very little hope of compiling documentation that comes in LaTeX form. I hate LaTeX with the heat of a thousand suns and I'm embarrassed for my profession when I find it still in use. The one thing LaTeX does well is math; if I had to write math papers I'd probably force myself to learn it, but fortunately I don't. I tend to use org-mode for everything now. I don't use markdown because it has the same problem as LaTeX: There's really no such thing as "markdown" and the vanilla Daring Fireball version isn't facile enough for real work.
- computerfriend 4y ago
  There's no such thing as Python because other people write code that imports dependencies.
  - krapht 4y ago
    The pain of deploying Python applications is a leading complaint about the language, so maybe you could pick a better example :).
mgubi 4y ago
I collected here: https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/art-of-math-writing.html https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/art-of-math-writing.htm... some of my reflections about mathematical writing and in particular about the reasons I choose TeXmacs as my tool of choice. It might be also relevant to you.
wmwmwm 4y ago
Although I haven't used LaTeX in decades to write anything substantial like a paper or dissertation, I recently had cause to use it to write up some homework for an online course I'm doing - mainly (pretty simple) maths proofs. After 20 years of not doing maths, my ability to faithfully rearrange handwritten equations from one line to another was even more rubbish that it was in my 20s! All sorts of dropped or flipped signs, terms and stray brackets would trip me up. Although initially sceptical, I found that doing this in LaTeX (with the ability to cut/paste to a new line and then manually 'refactor') was way more reliable. I think it tapped into my ability to do this semi-unconsciously when coding! (And with no dreaded page turns...) However, it's still an effort to squint at all of LaTeX's curly brackets and long form symbol names, and LaTeX doesn't grok the equation of course. Has anyone come across any tools out there that offer a similar experience for manually rearranging equations and somehow 'linting' as you go along? i.e. something that knows a bit more about precedence/structure etc? Even a intellij ctrl-W style shortcut (highlights chunks with increasing scope) would make it easier/quicker to do what I'm talking about.
ivansavz 4y ago
Hey all, the giant code block in the article is quite intimidating to read, so I figured I'd post another example here for something developers might be more familiar. See below for FizzBuzz in plain TeX: % Save to fizzbuzz.tex and compile with pdftex, not pdflatex \def\modulo#1#2{(#1-(#1/#2)*#2)} % a mod n = a-(a/n)*n where / is integer division \newcount\X \X=1 \loop \ifnum \numexpr\modulo{\X}{15} = 0 FizzBuzz \else \ifnum \numexpr\modulo{\X}{3} = 0 Fizz \else \ifnum \numexpr\modulo{\X}{5} = 0 Buzz \else \the\X \fi \fi \fi \endgraf \advance \X by 1 \unless \ifnum \X>100 \repeat \bye
JaneYe 4y ago
I love LaTex. It helped me complete my two papers without having to learn various Word typesetting techniques.

210 points by miguelmurca 4y ago

Check out https://www.monsterwriter.app/ https://www.monsterwriter.app/, It is something like LyX but even easier to use.

porker 4y ago
Interesting, I hadn't seen this before. How does it differ from LyX? Is a Windows build planned?
- WolfOliver 4y ago
  There is a Windows build available already. LyX is a LaTeX frontend, you still need to understand some notions of LaTeX. MonsterWriter is a WYSIWYM Word Processor, LaTeX is just used as internal tool to create PDF files. There are other exports available (e.g. HTML, Markdown, you also can publish to Ghost directly)

mhh__ 4y ago

LaTeX needs replacing with something faster and more program-y, and that isn't just a python script. LateX's successor should be opinionated, safe, easy to build in parallel, and also good at integrating with other tooling: Let a CAS generate the next equation for you, for example. Make sure that figure is never out of date (e.g. a build system rather than relying on a web of files and button clicks) Etc. This will likely never happen because latex is still very good at what people want it to do push comes to shove, but we could have a much better document format and publishing system around it.

clircle 4y ago
What is LuaLaTeX?
- mhh__ 4y ago
  Good idea. Doesn't go far enough / is only an incremental improvement. I've never truly immersed myself in it so maybe it's more powerfully elegant than I remember.
- dhosek 4y ago
  LuaLaTeX is a lot slower than pdfLaTeX or XeLaTeX and default settings give different output than the other two, e.g., around line breaks at – or —. I only recommend it if you need it. Most people don't.
einpoklum 4y ago
> something faster I don't know that this is the major pain point. The thing is, writing complex-structure/programmed documents is not something which needs immediate re-rendering with every character - just like you don't recompile your program with every character you change. This would, however, be very useful for syntax and compiler-detectable error. You would have an effectively-immediate indication of warnings and errors per line in your document, like an IDE. So it would be Java-like compilation speed rather than C++-like compilation speed... > safe LaTeX programming is basically sandboxed, or at least you have to work _very_ hard to do dangerous things. > latex is still very good at what people want it to do That's not it. It is actually usually pretty bad in doing what we want it to do (e.g. tables. Oh, the pain!) ... but what it has going for it is that you can do almost anything you want?: It will take effort and the "source code" will be ugly, but it'll work.
Smithalicious 4y ago
Please no. Stop replacing useful tools with "opinionated" ones. Nothing makes me nope out of using a tool faster than hearing it described as "opinionated".
ska 4y ago
> Make sure that figure is never out of date For anyone with a software background, this is pretty straightforward - once you start thinking of the latex file(s) as source code rather than the document, it's a short jump to setting up a build environment...
jasomill 4y ago
You can embed CAS-generated equations and computations in LaTeX[1]. This came in handy for undergraduate linear algebra homework that combined proofs (where I could use my existing LaTeX macros) and computations (where we were expected to use a CAS). Mathematica or Jupyter notebooks would also work, but I prefer Emacs over the notebook UI (and Jupyter didn't actually exist at the time). [1] See, e.g., https://github.com/tmolteno/SympyTeX/ https://github.com/tmolteno/SympyTeX/
GiovanniP 4y ago
> we could have a much better document format and publishing system around it. TeXmacs (http://www.texmacs.org/ http://www.texmacs.org/ and http://forum.texmacs.cn/ http://forum.texmacs.cn/), and it happens right now!

gus_massa 4y ago

I'm not sure if it's necessary to use auxiliary files. I made something implementing fake vectors using \csname . I think that a similar approach can be used for this problem, but I prefer to never see my old code again. IWIMM \newcommand{\defwithindex}[3]{% \expandafter\def\csname #1@#2\endcsname{#3}% } \newcommand{\getwithindex}[2]{% \csname #1@#2\endcsname% } (You probably need the two dimensional version.)

miguelmurca 4y ago
Hi! Author here. This is a cool idea for a vector implementation, but you still need to work around the fact that the command definition can come after the \get
- gus_massa 4y ago
  Perhaps you can use the main aux file, as other packages do. I think I never did that, so I'm not sure about how difficult it is. Or perhaps I used the aux file and I forgot about that. [ I should write an article titled "I hate LaTeX. I hate MSWord." :) . ]
- zauguin 4y ago
  Since your code doesn't write the authors to the file it already requires that the authors are given before `\maketitle`, so then it's also reasonable to require affiliations there. Then you get something like https://gist.github.com/zauguin/19bf1bc9128a8abaedfe3081717ba5f6 https://gist.github.com/zauguin/19bf1bc9128a8abaedfe3081717b... which doesn't need a file.
  - miguelmurca 4y ago
    Hello, I thought about it a little and indeed you are both right! For the sake of completeness I've updated beamleeto to use this mechanism instead :) thank you for your help!

patrickg 4y ago

I have a related feeling about TeX. It has superb output quality but the programming is awful. When LuaTeX finally arrived a few years ago, it was possible to do almost everything you have done before in the TeX language (starting with \backslashes) in Lua. See http://wiki.luatex.org/index.php/TeX_without_TeX http://wiki.luatex.org/index.php/TeX_without_TeX for an introduction. I have (shameless plug) created a database publishing software using this technique (https://github.com/speedata/publisher/ https://github.com/speedata/publisher/). Once in a while I have to use LaTeX and it feels a bit old school to do the macro programming. My next project is to rewrite the TeX algorithms in Go - see https://github.com/speedata/boxesandglue https://github.com/speedata/boxesandglue. Already usable but not TeX like in any way (this is just a library, not a frontend software like TeX)

guidoism 4y ago
I feel the same way! I also feel like the LaTeX crap on top of Plain TeX is crap and it fills me with rage when I try to find info about TeX and always get back something assuming LaTeX. Your stuff looks cool, I will take a look!
GiovanniP 4y ago
> It has superb output quality but the programming is awful TeXmacs (http://www.texmacs.org/ http://www.texmacs.org/) has better output quality and nicer programming (it is Scheme :-) ) and it is easier to use.
- patrickg 4y ago
  In which sense “better output quality”?
  - GiovanniP 4y ago
    Various senses that concur. It has, in addition to the line-breaking algorithm, a global page-breaking algorithm ... and for the rest may I suggest reading (it's brief) section 4.2 of GNU TeXmacs, A free, structured, wysiwyg and technical text editor, J. Van der Hoeven, Cahiers GUTenberg, no. 39-40 (2001), pp. 39-50, that you can find at the official website of the journal at http://www.numdam.org/article/CG_2001___39-40_39_0.pdf http://www.numdam.org/article/CG_2001___39-40_39_0.pdf And also looking at https://www.jonmsterling.com/papers/sterling:2022:wg6.pdf https://www.jonmsterling.com/papers/sterling:2022:wg6.pdf, I find it beautiful ... but perhaps there are better judges.

Pinus 4y ago

You sometimes see people ask fairly simple Python questions on Stack Overflow, that could be solved by five lines of plain Python, and be answered with some Pandas magic incantation that happens to do what they want with one call. I always find this a bit sad, because it seems to take away the idea that programming is about assembling composable parts, replacing it by a search for the right magic thing from a box of ready-made magic things. (Plain)TeX always seems the opposite of this. There is never a keyword that does what you want, but you can always do it by using five different mechanisms in concert. You always feel like you are trying to trick the system into doing something it was not designed for.

galoisgirl 4y ago
> There is never a keyword that does what you want Clearly you haven't seen https://github.com/mscroggs/realhats https://github.com/mscroggs/realhats
enriquto 4y ago
> You always feel like you are trying to trick the system into doing something it was not designed for. This is one of the hallmarks of human civilization. Your hands were designed for throwing a stone at the eye of a mammoth. But you can play the violin with them! Yes; it is totally awkward and anti-natural for your hands, obviously not their intended purpose... but so beautiful!
- rland 4y ago
  I see what you're saying, but the violin was designed for human hands.
- netizen-936824 4y ago
  Nothing in nature was necessarily "designed"
  - cosmojg 4y ago
    Sculpted like a riverbed.

jonpalmisc 4y ago

I also have a love & hate relationship with LaTeX. I think it really boils down to the following: LaTeX will work excellently for you, so long as your use case was envisioned by the original authors. I can't say that the original authors of LaTeX didn't envision using it for creating slideshows/presentations, but I can say that making a beamer theme is uniquely complicated. I wish that LaTeX had something as flexible as CSS for styling documents rather than the awkward commands, etc. used now—so much so that I attempted to replace LaTeX with a HTML & CSS -> PDF workflow in the past [0]. It is still an idea I want to revisit someday when I have more time. [0] https://github.com/jonpalmisc/pmt https://github.com/jonpalmisc/pmt (no longer actively maintained)

wollsmoth 4y ago
If you have a lot of time on your hands, nothing makes your math/cs hw look quite as slick. Was fun to play around with in undergrad for sure. I've forgotten all my LaTeX skills since though.
- jonpalmisc 4y ago
  I used it avidly for years. It’s still fun to see pretty LaTeX documents, but my patience for working with it—despite being rather fluent with it—has grown too slim.
bee_rider 4y ago
I don't mind Beamer, there's some boilerplate but it is like a once-per-institution setup so it doesn't seem like too big of a pain. It was hopefully done by someone else, and if not, I only have to do it once for myself -- and then I can share it. However, drawing figures in TikZ seems to be the main way of getting figures into a beamer presentation. This is a total nightmare and not really worth the effort, IMO.

dontbenebby 4y ago

LaTeX is mostly good for academics who need to manage citations, if you just want a clean, readable CV there's lots of WYSIWYG options. I actually used to use TexMaxer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texmaker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texmaker It's on my list of things I want to deploy a fuzzer on when I get around to learning that -- I've been focused more on data visualization lately.

ProfXponent 4y ago

What is the intended use for LaTex these days? I’m not trying to flame, I just have no idea why anyone would choose to use it over html/css or just a word processor.

RugnirViking 4y ago
Academia. At least, its widespread (almost universal) where I am studying. Mainly to manage citations, figures, and tables of contents automatically. Tools like Sharelatex are used for collaboration on papers.
- ProfXponent 4y ago
  That’s interesting. Is it really a problem that requires manually writing the code? Seems like there should be more elegant solutions by this point.
  - kalenx 4y ago
    For most usages, you don't need to write the code. Sometimes buff out rough edges for your specific application, but in my 12 years in academia, I think I've only really _written_ Latex twice.
    - ProfXponent 4y ago
      Ok that makes a bit more sense, thanks for taking the time to educate me :)
    - red_trumpet 4y ago
      How do you typeset your research then?
      - vjerancrnjak 4y ago
        You could do it through Pandoc. Pandoc can process multiple data sources (citations, chapters, yamls etc.) and output a pdf. You can turn on citation linking (in the text), you can apply a custom latex template. Once it is all setup, you just write text in Pandoc Markdown.

akavel 4y ago

Take a look at https://sile-typesetter.org/ https://sile-typesetter.org/. IIRC it literally reuses some core C libraries from TeX/LaTeX, and glues them together in a different way using Lua, keeping Lua as the only language available. Notably, SILE recently achieved the long overdue milestone of math/equations support (https://sile-typesetter.org/2021/09/sile-0-12-0-is-released https://sile-typesetter.org/2021/09/sile-0-12-0-is-released). Obviously, open-source. edit: for some attempt at an explicit discussion of pros & cons & history vs. TeX, see: https://sile-typesetter.org/what-is/#sile-versus-tex https://sile-typesetter.org/what-is/#sile-versus-tex

funnym0nk3y 4y ago

In my opinion LaTeX fails to deliver when doing anything other than text based work. Tables, images, etc are always a hassle. It gets even worse when changing one page to landscape mode. Debugging is a pain and there aren't any tools to help with that.

leephillips 4y ago

The solution presented in this anonymous, undated article is relevant if you’re constrained to only using LaTeX. But you’re not, and there are certainly easier ways to go about such things. We have Python and other higher level languages that we can use to pre-process source and extract metadata. This type of problem is made much easier if you write in Markdown, putting authors, affiliations, and other metadata in (say) YAML blocks, and use Pandoc to convert to LaTeX (or anything else). You can write a filter in Python, Lua, or Haskell to rearrange the metadata the way the author wants. This would be a far more pleasant experience, and easier to extend and generalize.

miguelmurca 4y ago
This anonymous, undated article was written by me, yesterday. The strong backwards compatibility of LaTeX(2e) [0] make it so that the date is not especially relevant (since I'm using primitives); in any case my point was pedagogical, in the sense of diving into the operational mechanisms of (La)TeX to develop a better mental model of what's going on. And while Pandoc is very nice, if you're in academia none of your alternatives are viable, since LaTeX is a de facto standard for most journals. Fun fact: the article was written in Markdown, with some front matter for metadata! [0] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/247524/do-i-risk-breaking-documents-by-updating-my-tex-distribution https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/247524/do-i-risk-bre...
- leephillips 4y ago
  I certainly appreciate the pedagogical purpose; what you did there goes beyond any pure TeX programming I’ve ever tried to do. My suggestion was to use Pandoc to create a LaTeX document. You can easily tell it to use RevTeX or any style required by a journal. The only friction with my approach is when you need to work with coauthors or editors on revisions. EDIT: I think I caused some confusion due to my sloppiness. I should have written “constrained to only writing in LaTeX”.
- behnamoh 4y ago
  How did you do emojis in pandoc? I’ve had a hard time writing them in md files and converting them to pdf using pandoc

giraffe_lady 4y ago

I only interact with tex and latex through pollen these days. https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/ https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/ It doesn't shield you from much of the pain, initially at least. But you can separate it from the document and treat it as markup, and reuse bits more easily. Of course pollen itself is a thing to learn. But if you work with text a lot and like lisp it might be worth it. It's been good to me.

sph 4y ago
I gave a cursory look at it and it's really too niche, complicated for its own good IMO. Your comment made me want a modern TeX, written in Racket/Lisp. #lang latex (documentclass "article") (document (section "Chapter 1") Welcome to (LaTeX). Here is some (textbf "bold") text.) How does this not exist yet??
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Yeah it is kind of surprising. Scribble supports latex output but I don't know the details and it's probably similar to pollen, since pollen is built on it. It doesn't seem that hard (famous last words tho) especially since turning arbitrary DSLs into xexprs is one of the things racket truly excels at.
  - techdragon 4y ago
    Just having proper semantic closing syntax would be a huge improvement for any member of the TeX family. It drives me nuts wrestling with shit falling into or out of some macro expanded function based on argument parsing logic. If it had defined closing syntax the damn tools would just tell me there was a mistake or get it correct not mysteriously screw up my document because I added or removed one row from my document. Or my favourite because I added a second table and that macro could only handle one table of that kind per document because it was designed for a table based bibliography that would only exist once at the end of a document… I put TeX and Perl in my “decent tool with extremely shitty syntax” mental categorisation of languages. I basically never look at anything TeX related directly anymore unless I have to. It’s either the input material I converted to something better like plain text or vector graphics (fuck Tkiz based graphics are so miserable to use) or it’s the output from putting something more sensible into pandoc.

teleforce 4y ago

Try TeXmacs, it's neither TeX nor it's Emacs clone. TeXmacs is WYSIWYG scientific editing platform. Documents created can be saved in TeXmacs, Xml, Scheme, PDF or Postscript. Converters exist for TeX/LaTeX and HTML/MathML. It can also be used as a graphical front-end for other computer algebra, numerical analysis, statistics software[1]. [1]https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html

kzrdude 4y ago
Any published papers that use this?
- GiovanniP 4y ago
  You can check all of the papers of Joris van der Hoeven (https://www.texmacs.org/joris/main/publs.html https://www.texmacs.org/joris/main/publs.html) and of Massimiliano Gubinelli (https://www.hcm.uni-bonn.de/people/faculty/publications/?tx_sevenpack_pi1%5Bauthor%5D=1144&tx_sevenpack_pi1%5BbackPageId%5D=239 https://www.hcm.uni-bonn.de/people/faculty/publications/?tx_...), and as well these lecture notes the link to which was recently posted on the TeXmacs forums https://www.jonmsterling.com/papers/sterling:2022:wg6.pdf https://www.jonmsterling.com/papers/sterling:2022:wg6.pdf (link to the forum post http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/sharing-some-lecture-notes-created-using-texmacs/945 http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/sharing-some-lecture-notes-created...). The papers of vdH you find in his website are converted from the TeXmacs format into pdf (one can find the TeXmacs sources too by each paper) and the papers of Gubinelli as far as I know are written using TeXmacs but since he puts the links to the journals there you get a version converted from the TeXmacs format into LaTeX.
- mgubi 4y ago
  I write all my papers with it since few years, and my lecture notes, and my talks. The papers are converted to LaTeX when sending to the publisher. Several of my PhD students used it to write their thesis. Also some Master students. Some pointers here: Papers: - https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.09637 https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.09637 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.05562 https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.05562 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.12115 https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.12115 Lecture notes: - https://www.iam.uni-bonn.de/abteilung-gubinelli/teaching/stochastic-analysis-ss22 https://www.iam.uni-bonn.de/abteilung-gubinelli/teaching/sto... Online lectures with TeXmacs: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL50D2PpswE&t=4990s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL50D2PpswE&t=4990s

camel-cdr 4y ago

I'm always amazed how people could bootstrap something as feature rich and versatile as LaTeX from plain TeX. I'd really like to get to know plain TeX a bit better, but I've got no idea where to start.

miguelmurca 4y ago
I can only hope to curse you with a TeX nerd-snipe :) I can recommend reading the first few chapters of The TeX Book (it's a genuinely fun read) followed by the links in the article's footnotes for more operational information.
cruegge 4y ago
If found “TeX by Topic” a great introduction, it's less overwhelming than the TeX book. Also really helpful in wrapping your head around macro expansion is the `texdef` cli tool, which allows you to quickly evaluate a line of macro code. Finally, https://www.tug.org/utilities/plain/cseq.html https://www.tug.org/utilities/plain/cseq.html is nice for reference.
- dhosek 4y ago
  There are three books that are worth looking at to get plain TeX. I’d start with Viktor Eijkhout’s TeX by Topic (which I think is free in PDF on CTAN). Then the TeXbook to really get everything (the PDFs that float around the net are illegal. Please buy your copy. DEK donated his royalties to TUG so your purchase will help support the continuation of things like CTAN and the LaTeX project). And finally, if you really want to dig deep, Stephan v. Bechtolsheim’s four-volume magnum opus, TeX in Practice will tell you more than you ever wanted to know.
jhallenworld 4y ago
I found The Advanced TeXbook by David Salomon to be helpful. It shows how to make your own format on top of plain TeX, including table of contents, page numbering, cross-references and insertions. I also found A Beginner's Book of TeX by Raymond Seroul and Silvio Levy helpful as a quick reference. Also I have an anti-recommendation for Knuth's TeXBook. I did not find this book helpful at all- too much information buried in exercises (which I don't think is appropriate for a reference), and not enough directly said on how to do useful things. Figure out how to make a table of contents using only the TeXBook..

dash2 4y ago

Jesus H Carnegie. I JUST WANT TO WRITE AN ACADEMIC ARTICLE. I mean, look at this abhorrence. And look at what you open up in a TeX file, which again is meant to represent English prose. % Options for packages loaded elsewhere \PassOptionsToPackage{unicode}{hyperref} \PassOptionsToPackage{hyphens}{url} % \documentclass[ ]{article} \usepackage{amsmath,amssymb} \usepackage{lmodern} \usepackage{iftex} \ifPDFTeX ... and more and more of this dross ... I want to get stuck into the article. At least show me my abstract. But no. It's just more and more backslashes. It's just vile. And the people who use it have Stockholm syndrome, and they pass it on to their PhD students who spend nights before their presentation at 2am, trying to align a table and crying. Then they have Stockholm syndrome too, and they tell you "it's pronounced LARTECH" and give themselves a little pat on the back. And here's an equation: \sigma _{I}^{2}=a^{2}s^{2}+\left( 1-a\right)^{2}S^{2}+2a\left( 1-a\right)\sigma. How are you supposed to manipulate that? I can open up a WYSIWYG editor and literally do maths by just copy-pasting parts from one side to another. But this, I can't even read, let alone intuit. TeX. It's the worst.

foobarian 4y ago
I am with you for all* of it. The Stockholm syndrome bit is oh so true. But I take exception with the math, Latex math is its only redeeming quality (with Adobe FrameMaker coming in a distant second).
bowsamic 4y ago
As a physics postdoc I have to say that is quite a simple equation
- dash2 4y ago
  That's my point! The equation is simple. The markup makes it complicated. Now imagine a complex equation.
iflp 4y ago
The equation example is artificial. In practice there will be no curly brackets around these single-token sub/superscripts, nor should the \left / \right present in this example. With properly added whitespaces this equation becomes quite legible. For more complex equations people use line breaks and indentations, and/or macros.

kkfx 4y ago

Not a TeXnicians nor a TeXpert but I've learnt it at a certain point in high school after a professor suggestion, than much used at the uni and now just used casually for letters, reports etc I do love the quality, that's is. As far as I do not find something with equivalent or better typesetting quality I'm stick with LaTeX :-) To those who hate it: try to learn some tangible "alternatives" like *roff or TeXinfo and than you'll see LaTeX syntax is not that horrid or difficult, then try to learn some modern typesetting tools like those from Adobe. LaTeX win easily, that's is. Said that IF someone can offer something equivalent with a far simpler/nicer markup as I said before my love is just to the quality of the output!

rq1 4y ago

There must be a solution similar to this: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/TeX-my-math https://hackage.haskell.org/package/TeX-my-math I don't understand why they encode these expressions f^{(2)}(x) like so. They should be written like a regular function: f 2 x. Then you apply your styling depending on eg. the domain definitions. Eg. for f : N x R -> R, then the first argument is sub/super-scripted... etc. Another eg. In python, we would render this expression: sum([i*2 for i in range(0, n)]) with sigma expression... etc.

ahmadmijot 4y ago

I don't use LateX explicitly (my colleagues and supervisors didn't know LaTeX and exclusively use MS Word) but I like how I can write equation in MS Word using LateX notations.

officehero 4y ago
Same. I'm a PhD student in CS and manage just fine with embedded latex in word documents and a reference plugin (I use zotero). There's definitely pros/cons. Imo biggest con is the absence of something like overleaf and biggest pro is ease of use.

yingbo 4y ago

I hate clickbait. I click clickbait

wesleywt 4y ago

Having written my thesis in LaTex, I can say it is wonderful and a wonderful waste of time.

sph 4y ago
Same, I just did my resume in LaTeX, it's such an obtuse and painful tool, yet nothing even comes close to the control it gives you. Hey btw, I'm looking for contract work! https://github.com/1player/resume/blob/master/resume.pdf https://github.com/1player/resume/blob/master/resume.pdf
- bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
  Surely plain old html does?
  - jdbernard 4y ago
    For several years (a decade maybe?) I authored my resume in LaTeX. Then a few years ago I wanted to restructure it radically, and make an interactive version that showed off some simple subset of my full-stack skillset (from design to implementation). This goal led me to authoring it in HTML with CSS. I never actually got around to implementing my full vision because I had an unexpected opportunity land in my lap before I'd officially started looking. I had the design and static mockup completed, so I just exported that to PDF and used it. In hindsight, I spent a lot less time getting the look I wanted in HTML than I did in LaTeX. I still tend to use LaTeX for some long-form documentation, but I'll probably stick to HTML for my resume and I'm finding myself using HTML + Markdown a lot more for other authoring tasks too.
  - sph 4y ago
    It's not the right tool for the job, in this case perfectly laying out text on a A4 sheet of paper. HTML is made for variable-sized screens, and can be repurposed to be printed, but it's still trying to screw a nail in when all you need is a hammer.
- jtbayly 4y ago

graycat 4y ago

LaTeX? I just use TeX. The documentation for TeX is clear, very precise, and much shorter. LaTeX is just TeX but with a lot of new macros. The intent is different: With TeX, you just say in detail what steps you want the software to do. With LaTeX you say what you want in general terms and f'get about the details.

miguelmurca 4y ago
Yes :) https://github.com/mikeevmm/nobeamer https://github.com/mikeevmm/nobeamer
- graycat 4y ago
  Yup, for "doing slides", I wrote some TeX macros. It sets the sizes of the page and the fonts, draws a box around the content, etc.

Tepix 4y ago

In the last three decades of having the opportunity to learn and use TeX, i have managed to avoid it. In the same time i've helped a friend with word processing for her dissertation. I'm still not sure how we managed to get it to work with all the horror stories about data loss and Microsoft Word at the time. But it did its job and I'm still in the WYSIWYG camp. Maybe in another life...

tomtomistaken 4y ago
I have the exact opposite story to tell. A friend of mine asked me to convert a 300 pages Word document to LaTeX, because Word couldn’t handle it. It was text, mostly, so it worked out quite well.
dev_tty01 4y ago
I find Word is only tolerable when used like Latex. I.e., extensive use of Styles. Define a Style for every object type in your doc. Also, carefully choose the Next Style option. Define Sections if columns or pagination vary across the document. With that in hand, it is now just a matter of plugging in text and images. If something isn't working quite right, edit the Style instead of macdinking the text on the screen. You are still left with formatting equations, but Word lets us use Latex-ish syntax for that now, so you can keep the fine control of Latex within the GUI context. Don't get me wrong, I hate Word, but it is required in many environments. Adopting a rational use strategy helps a bit. https://www.wordsense.eu/macdink/#English https://www.wordsense.eu/macdink/#English
- Tepix 4y ago
  Indeed, using styles is the (only) way to manage any significant document in Word.
ska 4y ago
People write dissertations in Word all the time. How painful it is depends a bit on how complicated the dissertation is as a document. This is of course only an anecdote, but I know many people who started in word, gave up on it and moved to Tex/Latex, but nobody who went the other way (that is to say, I know people who tried to give up on Tex, but eventually went back - not anyone who actually published with it). This might have quite a bit to do with subject matter - Word has always been an awkward fit for mathematics.

ttul 4y ago

In 1999, I was editing a telecom industry standard as an intern and, of course, decided to use LaTeX instead of Word. The seasoned industry veterans on the technical committee were super impressed with my “Word” abilities and wondered if I could share my much-improved template with them. It suffices to say that I hastily hired a friend in school to work over the weekend converting the beautiful LaTeX into Word.

zuzun 4y ago

My rule of thumb is that once I start writing imperative LaTeX with loops and stuff, I'm almost always on the wrong path. Now, I might be missing some important corner cases, but by skimming through the blog post, I feel like the author's solution is too complicated. For example, I don't get why this requires auxiliary files. I would create a counter for the affiliations, let the \affiliation command define macros that contain the name of the affiliation and the value of the counter and then append the output to two different helper macros, one for authors and one for affiliations, whose contents I dump in \maketitle.

cuteboy19 4y ago

Like bash, LaTeX is one of those languages where you immediately forget it after you're done with your current task.

TheDesolate0 4y ago

jum1p 4y ago

I \usepackage{loveandhate} LaTeX

shp0ngle 4y ago

Oh I remember my CS years, when all the professors were raving to me about LaTeX, and I never understood why. Sure, it might be marginally better than just using Word, although - not that much; and it’s horrible to debug, it’s horrible to actually automate, it’s horrible to actually “separate content from style”… I thought that maybe something is wrong with me and over time it will “click”… it never did. But, this article made it click. (but that’s after I already got my degree…) http://www.danielallington.net/2016/09/the-latex-fetish/ http://www.danielallington.net/2016/09/the-latex-fetish/ LaTeX is not actually good for writing papers. It’s good for typesetting. And that’s it. It’s good as a type-setting program, that’s what it is meant to be. It’s definitely not good for separating content from style, or some kind of meta-automation or macros.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
Why is it not good at separating content from style?
OkayPhysicist 4y ago
It's great for writing papers. I can crack open vim rattle off an essay throw in some \par s and some \cite{sho0ngle} s, and then let all the typesetting, citation management, and whatnot get handled by the compiler. For STEM classes, the LaTeX defaults are perfect, and I can insert tables and images and such that can be in flux over the course of writing the report, importing then from external scripts that part of my data analysis. LaTeX only gets hairy when you start trying to fight it. If you want some that looks exactly as you imagine it, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle trying to specify exactly what you want, and constantly re-compiling. If instead, you just care about a clean, consistent, and presentable end product, then LaTeX gets you there with minimal fuss.
- daptaq 4y ago
  Why do you use \par?
- greazy 4y ago
  > LaTeX only gets hairy when you start trying to fight it. If you want some that looks exactly as you imagine it, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle trying to specify exactly what you want, and constantly re-compiling. 'fighting' as you describe it is the reason why people use latex. They want more fine grained control over the doc. I work in STEM, every publisher has their own formatting style. My pubs would get rejected if I submitted a default style. What you're describing is, in essence, using MS Word with defaults. Might as well use Word.

tunesmith 4y ago

I love LaTeX whole-heartedly. I never learned Word in college and wrote all my papers in LaTeX as an undergrad, just using its default styles. I write mathematical papers to myself, despite not being a mathematician. I found a LaTeX package that lays things out in the same style as old TSR D&D modules and I use that to write new dungeons. I wrote a book in markdown and used pandoc to output LaTeX and publish it through Amazon. I write silly scripts for my friends to do table reads from, using a LaTeX package. I write music scores of my composition in lilypond and one of my next projects is to combine it with LaTeX to print out books I can have on my piano. Ultimately, I think wrestling with LaTeX is kind of like wrestling with programming. Over time, you just have to develop that sense of radar that tells you when you are over-implementing. In programming, it's the choice of whether to write custom or hunt for a library, or at a higher level, the build-vs-buy question. For LaTeX, it's whether to wrestle with custom commands or just search its stack exchange or hunt for a package. It's still easy to go down the wrong rabbit hole - last time it happened to me it was because I got obsessed with wondering if I could create nomographs in LaTeX, but luckily I discovered pynomo instead.

gibletsingravy 4y ago
Which LaTeX package are you using for old school D&D?
- tunesmith 4y ago
  https://github.com/slithy/rpg_module https://github.com/slithy/rpg_module - I'm not sure if it's published in CTAN but I've been active in its GitHub issues.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
I have never met someone who use Latex who wasn't a mathematician, CS, or older (elderly?) engineer

singhrac 4y ago

I too love LaTeX but it's important to remember that the writing experience might be nice and elegant in LaTeX with the right stys and ShareLatex and whatnot, but the editing experience is decidedly not. Everyone who has used it in any serious form with page limits knows the stress of slowly varying their figure sizes and hoping it will squish into the limits. Very honestly, part of the reason I don't bother with any new "LaTeX reimagined" projects is because either (a) they are written by LaTeX nonbelievers who don't understand the complexity of beautiful typesetting, or (b) I don't want to learn another markup+ language or mental model. The latter is increasingly annoying to me. Out of curiosity, is LaTeX compilation benchmarked on the M1 processors? Is it better? Has anyone experimented with magic Raph Levien-style SIMD magic (a la stack monoid) compilation for LaTeX? I just want LaTeX but really really fast.

GiovanniP 4y ago
> Very honestly, part of the reason I don't bother with any new "LaTeX reimagined" projects is because either (a) they are written by LaTeX nonbelievers who don't understand the complexity of beautiful typesetting, or (b) I don't want to learn another markup+ language or mental model. The latter is increasingly annoying to me. Then you have to try TeXmacs http://www.texmacs.org/ http://www.texmacs.org/. It is completely independent from LaTeX and TeX and has - beautiful typesetting (better than LaTeX) - it is fully WYSYWYG, so you don't have to learn a new markup language - yet it affords better document control than LaTeX

dreamcompiler 4y ago

I despise LaTeX for two reasons: It's offensively inelegant, and there's no such thing as "LaTeX". The offensively inelegant point is purely a matter of taste so I won't belabor it. The second point means that every author writes their document with their own particular suite of LaTeX add-ons, and if you don't have all of them you have no hope of compiling the document. There's Joe's LaTeX and Sally's LaTeX and Jennifer's LaTeX but nobody uses "vanilla LaTeX." So even after I download "LaTeX" (which is itself multiple gigabytes in size), I still have very little hope of compiling documentation that comes in LaTeX form. I hate LaTeX with the heat of a thousand suns and I'm embarrassed for my profession when I find it still in use. The one thing LaTeX does well is math; if I had to write math papers I'd probably force myself to learn it, but fortunately I don't. I tend to use org-mode for everything now. I don't use markdown because it has the same problem as LaTeX: There's really no such thing as "markdown" and the vanilla Daring Fireball version isn't facile enough for real work.

computerfriend 4y ago
There's no such thing as Python because other people write code that imports dependencies.
- krapht 4y ago
  The pain of deploying Python applications is a leading complaint about the language, so maybe you could pick a better example :).

mgubi 4y ago

I collected here: https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/art-of-math-writing.html https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/art-of-math-writing.htm... some of my reflections about mathematical writing and in particular about the reasons I choose TeXmacs as my tool of choice. It might be also relevant to you.

wmwmwm 4y ago

Although I haven't used LaTeX in decades to write anything substantial like a paper or dissertation, I recently had cause to use it to write up some homework for an online course I'm doing - mainly (pretty simple) maths proofs. After 20 years of not doing maths, my ability to faithfully rearrange handwritten equations from one line to another was even more rubbish that it was in my 20s! All sorts of dropped or flipped signs, terms and stray brackets would trip me up. Although initially sceptical, I found that doing this in LaTeX (with the ability to cut/paste to a new line and then manually 'refactor') was way more reliable. I think it tapped into my ability to do this semi-unconsciously when coding! (And with no dreaded page turns...) However, it's still an effort to squint at all of LaTeX's curly brackets and long form symbol names, and LaTeX doesn't grok the equation of course. Has anyone come across any tools out there that offer a similar experience for manually rearranging equations and somehow 'linting' as you go along? i.e. something that knows a bit more about precedence/structure etc? Even a intellij ctrl-W style shortcut (highlights chunks with increasing scope) would make it easier/quicker to do what I'm talking about.

ivansavz 4y ago

Hey all, the giant code block in the article is quite intimidating to read, so I figured I'd post another example here for something developers might be more familiar. See below for FizzBuzz in plain TeX: % Save to fizzbuzz.tex and compile with pdftex, not pdflatex \def\modulo#1#2{(#1-(#1/#2)*#2)} % a mod n = a-(a/n)*n where / is integer division \newcount\X \X=1 \loop \ifnum \numexpr\modulo{\X}{15} = 0 FizzBuzz \else \ifnum \numexpr\modulo{\X}{3} = 0 Fizz \else \ifnum \numexpr\modulo{\X}{5} = 0 Buzz \else \the\X \fi \fi \fi \endgraf \advance \X by 1 \unless \ifnum \X>100 \repeat \bye

JaneYe 4y ago

I love LaTex. It helped me complete my two papers without having to learn various Word typesetting techniques.