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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 proc
by 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 agoAcademia. 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 agoThat’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 agoFor 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 agoOk that makes a bit more sense, thanks for taking the time to educate me :)
- red_trumpet 4y agoHow do you typeset your research then?
- vjerancrnjak 4y agoYou 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.
- diffeomorphism 4y agoBy just using the existing "code"/markup. Similarly, I would not count writing markdown as programming. Now if you need some new stuff, e.g. complicated tree diagrams, it starts to turn into programming.
- aulin 4y agoThere really isn't much code to write for a typical scientific document, just sectioning and math. You usually include the same preamble in your own documents and a preamble from the editor if you're targeting a scientific journal, but most of the time you focus on the content.
- RugnirViking 4y agoexpanding on what others mentioned, usually each university has latex templates for their papers and reports which handle most of the complicated parts, the only real latex ive worked on for reports is for eqations and tables, and many people just use gui tools that generate the code for them. New students do occasionally complain about images/figures not being where they are relative to the text in the code, thats a solvable problem in latex by embedding it in a minipage but honestly people complain about images having a mind of their own in word too ;)
- vjerancrnjak 4y agoI thought Sharelatex was bought by Overleaf years ago? It is still alive I see.
- RugnirViking 4y agoafaik yes it was, perhaps its a force of habit for me as sharelatex redirects to overleaf I just always click through to it.
- tel 4y agoGold standard equation editing.
- xattt 4y agoMy use case was for getting easy marks for proper APA formatting, which Zotero/EndNote and Mendeley don’t quite cover in one pass.
- leephillips 4y agoAnything where decent typography is desired. Also, of course, mathematics. Mathjax is very good, but we sometimes want a canonical version of a document that looks the same for every reader, and doesn’t depend of the vagaries of constantly evolving browser engines. This means PDF.
- SebastianKra 4y agoPDF is unfortunately still the preferred format for sharing research papers. And you're right, single file HTML with embedded images would be a much better format, but I assume publishers are preventing this.
- aulin 4y agohave you ever printed a webpage?
- WolfOliver 4y agoFor how long do we still need to print a paper?
- petschge 4y agoFor as long as I use time sitting on public transport and airplanes to review them. Nothing beats the ergonomics of a printout, a red pen and no internet.
- ProfXponent 4y agoOr a decent paperback novel. Reading long form content on a screen gives me awful eyestrain. Plus I love the smell of a good book.
- WolfOliver 4y agoI think the same way but I'm also pretty sure that the generation to come does not appreciate it anymore. I hope that e-inc displays will mature. Paired with the UX of a modern I Pad this will replace printed stuff.
- ProfXponent 4y agoPaper is the best form of long term storage of data we have besides stone tablets.
- SebastianKra 4y ago
- gus_massa 4y agoWe use a lot of LaTeX to make the midterms and final exams in the math department of my university. Everyone knows how to write in LaTeX, so if I make a internal helper package or a bunch of macros, then everyone can use it with minimal training. The problem with wysiwyg word processors is that people get creative and it's very difficult to enforce the same style for all the material.
- ProfXponent 4y agoOk, that makes perfect sense.
- kzrdude 4y agoWord processor does not work with git and group collaboration and versioning properly. HTML is not an authoring tool. Maybe pandoc or sphinx or other system would compete.
- benoliver999 4y agoI use it for stuff more than a couple of pages long, because: - I can use my text editor of choice - I don't have to worry about messing with the formatting by accident - It goes through git easily Anything shorter and I just use a word processor, it's not worth the time messing with the boilerplate. I do use it for writing letters - I have a template I just fill out and it spits out a nicely formatted letter with an envelope. It's also handy for when I need documents in multiple languages - you can make one change to the formatting and it changes them all.
- billfruit 4y agoWon't asciidoc together with tools like pandoc serve the same usecase.
- FabHK 4y agoMaster/PhD theses and papers in the sciences, particularly if formulas are involved.
- flenserboy 4y agoLaying out books. The fact that all of this can be done in a text file, without hidden codes and being tied to this file format or another, is extraordinary. Images are easily handled, fonts simply work (XeTeX & friends work well for me), and — with sufficient warnings — these files can be handed over to an author and edited without messing much, if anything, up. The PDFs generated work well with all the PDF tools I've attempted to use on them, and there's none of the weirdness that too-often shows up in Word or other WPs. If all you want is good-looking text, generated from truly basic documents, it will give it to you without effort.
- galangalalgol 4y agoAnother poster just finished saying images and tables are hard. Why the disconnect do you think?
- krinchan 4y agoVery late but just in case: If you're referring to my post, it was the particular layout I was trying to achieve. The board wanted me to imitate the existing minutes title page layout from their Word "template." The image was inside a table cell, the table had a lot of column/row spans, and things got messy really fast. As with HTML, using tables for layout is just a bad idea all around. Also, as pointed out deeper in other responses, the basic tabular environment is not terrific when you're not just presenting standard table data. Breaking apart the image and table and letting LaTeX handle the layout Just Worked (TM) and looked better in my opinion. That said, LaTeX images and tables are pretty easy and look great by default when you're not doing something weird with them. Edit: A better way to phrase this might actually be that a major principle for LaTeX is that I should be able to just drop in a new chapter in the middle of a large document and LaTeX will automatically reflow and typeset the entire document without any of the very specific fiddling necessary in WYSIWYG word processors. A major example is for instance, figures/images/tables will move to new pages but will remain correctly placed between paragraph X and Y. Because I've marked it up as such, if paragraph Y is on the page following paragraph X, it will bring the figure along with it to the new page. In WYSIWYG word processors, that figure would likely just sit at the end of the page until I manually moved it myself. When you try to micromanage the layout of a very specific page, even if it's just the title page, you're going to have a pretty bad time unless you've written your own \documentclass. :-)
- ska 4y ago> What is the intended use for LaTex these days? Writing anything with complicated mathematical typesetting, for one; their have been improvements in word processors and thinks like MathML/MathJax, but they are still behind. Works pretty well for autogenerated docs with more going on than is easy in Markdown, also - but that's often a bit of a wash.
- krinchan 4y agoLaTeX is particularly suited to print (and by extension PDF). When you get into writing your own custom LaTeX macros/commands, yes it's difficult. However, the vast majority of users are simply consuming these sorts of custom commands in the article, not producing them. This leads into environments where people writing papers or articles just use what's handed to them. LaTeX works out amazingly for two very specific use cases: 1) Large, collaborative documents and 2) producing the exact same, highly structured print document over and over. I have pretty extensive experience with the second use case. When I was Secretary for a non-profit organization, I had an entire little personal library of macros that sat on top of the minutes[1] package. I could open an empty text file, type in \attendee{Name} as people arrived. Type in \maketitle and do a quick preview and the document would instantly build out a front page that included if we had quorum or not, etc. I typed the document exactly as the meeting happened while marking up things like tasks (and who they're assigned to), decisions made (with voting tallies and who motioned what), and so on. All that data would get duplicated to the end of the document in nice lists for quick reference. It had consistent formatting. The build system (a make file and latexmk iirc) would wrap my new file in the basic boilerplate and spit out the PDF for me to email. I consistently had the meeting minutes published an hour after every meeting whereas my predecessors often took 24 hours or more to publish meeting minutes due to Word being Word. Those documents also lacked a table of contents or the various appendices with summary data. That said, there were things that I tended to avoid doing, like complex tables or something. There's something to be said for staying inside the box of what comes built into LaTeX. I recall giving up with floating an image to the left of a table on our title page and just plopping the image inline in a horizontally centered paragraph and then putting the rest of the title content beneath it. Also, many documentation frameworks (sphinx comes to mind) use LaTeX under the covers to produce their PDF output. So you might think you're just using markdown or RST, but somewhere someone is converting that to LaTex or TeX in order to leverage a very good typesetting engine. [1]: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/minutes https://www.ctan.org/pkg/minutes
- impendia 4y agoI'm a professor and research mathematician, and I use LaTeX for nearly everything I write. In addition to what others wrote -- - The way I conceptualize it, LaTeX is a word processor. So, for example, if I'm writing a rec letter and I choose LaTeX over Word, I'm thinking "I like this word processor better than that one." - LaTeX/PDF is often criticized for being static, but in my experience, this is a good thing in most cases. If I am discussing the contents of a file with someone else, it is useful if we are both looking at exactly the same thing. - I don't try to do any significant programming, or extensive customization of how my documents look. I agree that trying to do so would be annoying, but this is not part of my use case. If you look at a random selection of math papers, say here https://arxiv.org/list/math/new https://arxiv.org/list/math/new you'll notice that all of them look more or less identical.
- lurquer 4y agoI use it for puzzle books. Things like suduko, cryptograms, criss-cross, etc. I have various custom C++ programs to generate the puzzles. But, getting the results to a formatted PDF was nearly impossible. I use LaTeX as I can have my C++ program output a text file which, when compiled with LaTeX, creates the pretty puzzle books. Essentially, I can press a button and “poof” I have a print-ready puzzle book ready to go up on Amazon.