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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
by 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 agoThis 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 agoI 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 agoHow did you do emojis in pandoc? I’ve had a hard time writing them in md files and converting them to pdf using pandoc
- leephillips 4y agoPandoc uses LaTeX to make the PDF, so you have to set up LaTeX somehow to be able to handle the emoji. I use “normal” Unicode in md source all the time, but not emoji, so, sorry, I don’t know what to do.
- Schiphol 4y agoI am in academia and I do all of my writing in pandoc. I simply submit the .tex file that pandoc outputs if and when the manuscript is accepted. (I liked and learned a lot from your post, just wanted to prevent a possible misunderstanding about the usefulness of pandoc for academic writing).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]