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LaTeX Makes Me Angry
- gerikson 4y agoThis is less a complaint about LaTeX and more a complaint about tooling.
- thomastjeffery 4y agoI think that LaTeX is an excellent example of messy tooling that adds a too much overhead to the user experience.
- jmtd 4y agoLatex is a tool.
- colesantiago 4y agothen find other or better tools than LaTeX to use?
- civilized 4y agoOn more than one occasion I have started writing a paper draft in Sublime + Markdown because the scaffolding of LaTeX felt too distracting. Eventually you need to actually build the real document though.
- Bootvis 4y agoExport from Emacs org mode to LaTeX. org mode offers plenty of flexibility to tweak the final output and lets you focus on writing. Edit: and creating tables in org mode is _so_ much better than in plain LaTeX. If you find yourself manually working on tables, the Emacs + org mode combo is worth investing time in.
- macintux 4y agoDiscovering the table support in org-mode was huge for me, wish I’d known about it decades ago.
- anthk 4y agoYou may like Texmacs.
- juujian 4y agoWhat's the missing feature that has your going back to latex? I switched to markdown and sublime a while ago. No more sideways tables, true. But even for that there is a workaround. And much less distraction in return.
- civilized 4y agoI've just worked with LaTeX for a long time and know all the tricks to make it do exactly what I want. Equations, figures, tables, cross-references... I can get it all to work on the page. And some of my collaborators still print things out, so using the tricks to get a good-looking PDF is still worth the trouble to me. When I want to get my rough, fluid thoughts onto a page, it's going to be easiest in Markdown + Sublime. But once the story and structure is basically there, the final product is easiest to achieve in LaTeX.
- WolfOliver 4y agoI've build MonsterWriter [1] to fight the LaTeX struggles. In Word, you are stuck in a write format, write format cycle. In LaTeX, you are stuck in a write google, write google cycle. We deserve to have a write, write, write, write cycle! [1] https://www.monsterwriter.app/ https://www.monsterwriter.app/
- WolfOliver 4y agoFor the sake of completeness. You can also setup a pandoc [1] + markdown editor toolkit ... but then you are back at yak shaving. [1] https://pandoc.org/ https://pandoc.org/
- emmelaich 4y agoTried Lout? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_(software)
- peteradio 4y agoTitle doesn't match, it's ripped from the first paragraph which really doesn't encompass the theme of the article. The article is more tips for writing manuscripts in tex without getting sucked down rabbit holes Recently had to track down and update my resume. When I finally found it I was able to quickly add last few years of updates on the commandline and run xelatex and done. It took much longer to track down the files than to update and ship it off, that is why I like latex. Building latex docs from scratch is incredibly daunting, fortunately there are many templates and often they are mandated for use.
- pch00 4y agoTitle doesn't match, it's ripped from the first paragraph which really doesn't encompass the theme of the article. Yes, in hindsight it came off more clickbaity than intended. The article did raise a theme of frustration I share though: sometimes you just want the framework/tooling to get out of the way and let you write, something that regularly comes up when I'm working through technical documentation.
- bradrn 4y agoIn fact, it appears the article has a different title: ‘Focus writing with (despite) LaTeX’, which I think summarises it much better. (Perhaps the author changed the title in the past few minutes?)
- jmtd 4y agoNo, I didn’t change the title. Blame the submitter :)
- peteradio 4y agoIt's not that big of a deal. I don't think anyone likes LaTeX so its a good way to get the gang together, clickbait or not.
- opless 4y ago
- chicob 4y agoLyX?
- bovermyer 4y agoI write LaTeX documents in VSCode because there's a syntax highlight plugin there for it. If I could, I would write in Sublime Text, because it's faster. However, no Sublime Text plugin for LaTeX exists. Unfortunately, the thing I would like most is a complete replacement for LaTeX that offers these features: * Text-based - no binary file formats * A unique DSL for all features * Complete control over layout and formatting * Complete control over typography (alignment, leading, kerning, spacing, document grid alignment, etc.) * Support for tables, including captions, headers, styling, and the ability to span multiple pages * Support for images and image formatting (resizing, borders, alignment, margins, etc.) * Reusable libraries/packages * A package management system (de-emphasis on this one because good package management systems are... difficult to make)
- lixtra 4y agoAnd how would it be different from (La)TeX?
- xavxav 4y ago> If I could, I would write in Sublime Text, because it's faster. However, no Sublime Text plugin for LaTeX exists. I'm using the Latex and LatexTools packagest, so I don't follow your point. It's pretty good and can also be set up to properly autocomplete `\cite` and `\ref` in multi-file projects quite easily.
- hprotagonist 4y ago> However, no Sublime Text plugin for LaTeX exists. ... anymore. https://github.com/LaTeXing https://github.com/LaTeXing used to exist, but has been dead for about 5 years.
- js8 4y agoWhat would be the advantage of the replacement compared to TeX/LaTeX? All the things you listed are already there. I think if you want an easier DSL (which might be fair), you will have to give up some requirement, such as "complete control over typography and formatting". P.S. I can also recommend Latex and Friends from Marc van Dongen. It is a really friendly cookbook that shows what modern LaTeX can do.
- ouid 4y agoI know that at least overleaf will give you a table of contents that you can use for navigation in more or less real time.
- hprotagonist 4y agoFor short stuff, i've started using org-mode as "markdown for latex" (whereas markdown is markdown for html). Takes a lot of the visual clutter out, dumps to PDF smoothly, and you can tweak the tex if you like in between.
- wallmountedtv 4y agoI personally often go to pandoc markdown. Quick translations to latex. Has first class support for latex packages (just include them in your pandoc's header). TeX like syntax for math with `$\delta$` for inline and `$$x=2$$` for newlines. Subscript/Superscript is `CO~2~` and `e=mc^2^`. A very comfy way to work once you get used to it.
- ogogmad 4y agoThis doesn't support citations or macros. [edit] Maybe I'm referring to the VScode Markdown plugin. Are there editors for the above workflow?
- reagle 4y agopandoc has great citation support, not sure what you mean by macros.
- ogogmad 4y ago> pandoc has great citation support Sure, on paper. Every time I use Pandoc, I have to look up how it works again, and I find it hard to get it working. I think it's hard to make it integrate with Bibtex/Natbib. > not sure what you mean by macros. It gives you a way of defining \RR so you don't have to write \mathbb{R} over and over again. Also, what about editor support? There are editor plugins for Latex and for Markdown, but I've never seen one for the hybrid you're suggesting. How do I get a preview of the document I'm working on while I'm writing it? I'd like to hit Ctrl+S and immediately see the changes.
- omnster 4y agoDefine your \newcommands in commands.tex and tell pandoc to add it to the header: `pandoc -H commands.tex ...` There can be multiple header files like this.
- omnster 4y agoPandoc is a standalone application that converts between a huge variety of formats, including markdown to pdf, which means that you can write your plain text markdown in the editor of choice and then convert it to pdf using pandoc. To use citations, the standard way is to use the `pandoc-citeproc` filter.
- rrwo 4y ago> format the document source for legible reading. Yes, it's the input to the typesetter, and yes, the output of the typesetter needs to be legible. But it's worth making the input easy to read, too. How is that difficult? Most text editors support word wrapping and syntax highlighting. > avoid rebuilding your rendered document too often. It's slow, it takes you out of the activity of writing, and it throws up lots of opportunities to get distracted by some rendering nit that you didn't realise would happen. I wrote a 300+ page PhD thesis with a lot of mathematical proofs, 12+ years ago on a computer that was a few years old. It wasn't that slow. But then again, the whole point of using something like LaTeX is that you can focus on the text and not how it looks when writing it. > If you use syntax highlighting in your editor, take a long, hard look at what it's drawing attention to. It's not your text, that's for sure. Is it worth having it on? Consider turning it off. Or (yak shaving beware!) tweak it to de-emphasise things, instead of emphasising them. Again, I never found this to be a problem, even with documents that were full of mathematical expressions.
- gautamdivgi 4y agoI didn’t find it an issue either. However, I’m suspecting the author may be using it as a “document first” tool as opposed to a typesetting one. As an example, I had a rough draft of my thesis on paper along with the formulae that I wanted. I iterated over the LaTeX doc after that. It wasn’t slow and the good thing is I had different files for different chapters. I used Texmaker - open source, free and worked on Linux.
- PaulHoule 4y agoIt’s funny, my hobby now is printing ‘three sided cards’ that have a photo or art reproduction on one side, a back with a QR code and some discussion of the subject, and an associated web page. I write the back sizes in YAML and it takes just a second or so to make a PNG of the back side which gets printed. So far I have manually triggered the PNG build but I am doing more work that involves positioning things in the back and I’m considering both making the process more interactive (less work to trigger build and tools to move objects around with the mouse) and have less need to be interactive (specify that object A is stuck on the left side of object B and centered vertically relative to B.) I’ve also had the pet peeve that conventional approaches to formatting text tend to make things of secondary importance such as annotations more prominent than the main text. I’ve sometimes experimented with making those things less prominent, instead of using bold I would make the annotations a bit lighter than the main text. Although it reverse the usual conventions the few trials I’ve done seem to indicate that people handle this just fine.
- throwaway384769 4y ago
- abudabi123 4y agoSimplify down to plain tex or eplain tex, use a Makefile in Emacs and pdftex.
- smitty1e 4y ago> avoid rebuilding Why not make a CI/CD pipeline and have the document rebuilt with each git commit?
- mnd999 4y agoThat sounds like a troll, and if it is, it’s a good one because it made me laugh.
- chrismorgan 4y ago> the styling used for comments (which is normally de-emphasised) And that’s wrong. Syntax highlighting should be emphasising comments, not making them almost invisible. But some colour schemes do get it foolishly wrong, and the only reason I can think this might happen is because their authors write the wrong sorts of comments, comments that largely shouldn’t be written. But proper comments are at least as important as the code. As for “normally”, that doesn’t match my observations. I’d say the significant majority are just different without obviously increasing or decreasing notice—though this is often inherently mild emphasis. Very few clearly increase it, and they’re mostly more conservative schemes that are less frivolous about changing colours.
- SebastianKra 4y agoComments are secondary to code. Not that they're less important, but they're usually read when the code isn't obvious. I read in the following order: 1. Top-level comments or README.md to get an overview. I don't care about the color. 2. The structure of the code - either looking for specific names, through source-code navigation, access of a specific variable, .... Here, non-greyed comments make scanning the file more difficult. 3. Comments that describe what can't be inferred from the code. Symbol names can be seen as headlines for comments - again, secondary to the headline.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago> avoid rebuilding your rendered document too often. It's slow How slow can it be today? I did typeset one book using LaTeX and the tricky part was that it had to look like a series of books typeset with QuarkXPress, so it took me lots of time to modify/adapt LaTeX so that the output would match what the editor wanted. Later on I simply used QuarkXPress: not that I didn't like LaTeX but... I got a Mac with QuarkXPress. But that was in the late nineties. Back when compiling, say, Emacs, took 45 minutes (which now takes 2 minutes or less depending on your system). Certainly LaTeX did benefit greatly too from advances in computing power during a quarter of a century? How can rendering a LaTeX document be still slow today?
- bee_rider 4y agoUsually? It is not so bad as long as you don't accidentally add a bunch of compiler passes. In general? LaTeX is a turing complete language so I guess you could write an infinite loop. https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/30674/document-requiring-infinitely-many-compiler-passes https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/30674/document-requi...
- cge 4y agoFor an extreme case, I have a large supplementary information document for a paper, of around 175 pages, that takes, if I recall correctly, around 10 minutes to compile on a modern machine. Working on it was frustrating enough that we had methods for compiling small portions we were working on at a given moment, and often used draft mode for the full document. However, this was for a document that, before post-processing, results in a 375 MB PDF, with thousands of included images and PDFs. It has never been that annoying for any normal document I've worked on. The major source of frustration was that there is no partial rebuilding of the document in LaTeX: fixing one word on one page, even if it did not result in any change on the other pages, would require multiple (because of references) compilations of the entire, enormous document, even just to get some sense of what the resulting document would look like. This is a problem that is somewhat unique to LaTeX, I think.
- jimhefferon 4y agoI agree that on modern hardware recompiling is pretty fast. I have a 445 page book (https://gitlab.com/jim.hefferon/toc https://gitlab.com/jim.hefferon/toc) with more than a graphic per page and lots of code inclusion, cross references, etc. The command "time pdflatex book" gives this on my 2016 laptop under Ubuntu. real 0m18.159s, user 0m17.747s, sys 0m0.296s Not instantaneous but considering the job, pretty good. I no longer bother with \includeonly.
- qwerty456127 4y ago> LaTeX — the age-old typesetting system — makes me angry. Not because it's bad. To clarify, not because there's something better. But because there should be. Yeah, exactly this. It's crazy there still is no better typesetting language. TeX/LaTeX is the most extraterrestrial language I ever seen. Take any language people consider weird and it shines as handy and intuitive instantly as you compare it to this. I don't mean the math formula part. I mean learning the actual language to be able to expressing the design you want in it feels impossible.
- newpcnotmyfault 4y ago>Unless you are very good at manoeuvring around long documents, liberally split them up. I think it's fine to have sections in their own source files. That's cool. I'm a lawyer. Often those section becomes snippets-like text I can re-using in other documents. Also, making those _snippets_ help me to think more clearly. LaTeX wants me to think as crisp he is.
- ogogmad 4y agoMy issue with many Latex replacements is that doing citations is painful: Standard Markdown can't do them. Pandoc makes them really hard and confusing for some reason. VScode's Markdown dialect doesn't support them. Texmacs makes you refresh your document over and over before you see them. With other replacements, I've encountered other problems: VScode's Asciidoc plugin didn't support inline formulas last time I checked. Org-mode had a steep learning curve last time I tried. How's Lyx for people?
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoRestructured text cures all ills.
- theow7384iri 4y agoThere is nothing better? Maybe it is just a bias, since you know all the quirks. 20 years ago I did my thesis in Word 2000 with some plugin for equations. It was far better than latex. I had to insert some hard page breaks, instead of learning completely new language!
- ogogmad 4y agoFor superficial reasons, you're not allowed to make it look like you use Word.
- gus_massa 4y agoIn which area? It depends a lot on the equation to figure ratio. If you have many equations, LaTeX is better. If you have many graphics, Word is better. I still use PowerPoint for slides for Math talks. Adding equations is painful, so you are encouraged to add as few as possible. In LaTeX adding graphics in the right position, with the right side, ... is painful, so people prefer to cover the slide with equations. Also, in PowerPoint is easier to add a color arrows here and there, so you can connect a random equation with a random part of the graphic. I used tikz and xypic and other packages in LaTeX but I never was able to get enough fine control of random arrows.
- svat 4y agoFor programmers today, an option to consider is to use plain TeX directly, by writing in Markdown or whatever, and generating the `.tex` file via a preprocessor program. After all, the facilities that LaTeX was written to provide (automatic section numbering, references, etc) can just as well (or even, more sanely) be done outside the TeX engine. There is a catch or two: • Writing the preprocessor will still be a bit of work — I think a promising approach is to use Pandoc, but no one has yet merged a plain TeX writer into the Pandoc repo (https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/4341 https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/4341 — I was briefly interested a couple of years ago, and may look into it again: it doesn't seem like a lot of work honestly). • The main reason people use LaTeX is because of all the packages in its ecosystem that do various tweaks to the typesetting. (This is also the main problem with LaTeX: TeX itself is good; LaTeX itself is mostly fine; it's the menagerie of packages of varying quality and conflicting effects that cause all the problems that LaTeX users usually complain about.) And in the LaTeX ecosystem, there does not exist a culture of teaching how to do things without the package (just as "You might not need jQuery" is not written by the jQuery authors), so if some LaTeX package looks attractive to you, you're back to LaTeX package hell. I have some ideas here of making it easier to "steal" from a LaTeX package by showing the equivalent "generated" TeX, but they require a bit of work hacking on the TeX engine, and have never got around to it. Anyway, in the meantime, writing in Markdown and using Pandoc to generate a LaTeX file remains a good approach IMO.
- kkfx 4y agoI'm not nor a TeXnicians nor a TeXpert but I use LaTeX for pretty any formal pdf document I produce, having used it for thesis, reports, letters, business cards, countless of times. I found hard to read VERY complex graphic code, like PGF/TikZ especially if badly formatted, some complex custom class/packages for specific stuff etc, but not much hard most of the time and most of the time I just write plain LaTeX in a simple style: - first I write my document in pure formatted text, with LaTeX just for something can't be easily written in text like math or so common typographic elements like an itemize/enumerate, a yasnippet away; - then I add the rest of the template and check the visual/typesetting aspects while I'm re-read my doc looking for typos, phrases to be better reformulated etc No need to rebuild so many times and no issue in build time, on a reasonably modern machine is quick enough for essentially all common docs, it might be a very little bit slow not enough to annoy on VERY big special docs who need various works aside anyway not for LaTeX but for mere proofreading and typographic checks. IMVHO I think that some like the authors came from the uncivilized modern world where well typeset docs are unknown and where people just know WebUIs to click around and quickly produce something prepackaged even if suboptimal and generally bad in quality terms. I see such behaviors many time where even skilled people do not understand that their docs are graphic heavy crap just because they do not know typography nor typographic conventions of their own country/institution. That's not an issue no LaTeX or other layer (like ConTeXt) can solve, it's a social issue, not a technical one. People should for instance learn why tables should not be like those crappy tables spitted for some spreadsheet tools on a pdf or pages drawn with such crappy margins their favorite "Office Automation" crapplication produce. In general IMVHO people in the famous "missed CS concepts" courses like the MIT one, typography should be a topic because right now too many do not know how to write on pen and paper BUT also do not know how to write on a desktop, to a level just above the minimum literacy demanded by our society. Not joking nor insulting, that's what I see EVEN from professional publishers.
- _aleph2c_ 4y ago\LaTeX is a tax on the smart. Once you have been hazed by it, you will start to defend it: LaTeX drives cognitive dissonance in its users. Nobody will build the next thing, because LaTeX is free and there are millions of plugins and lots and lots of people with Stockholm syndrome ready to defend it. I have built documentation systems for clients with LaTeX, but regular developers won't touch it, they know better, so the docs go stale. It's better to use restructured text/html/css, since it has a lot more features than markdown, yet it's simple enough that people who haven't been LaTeX-hazed will use it too.
- BeFlatXIII 4y agoNo discussion of ConTeXt?
- smegsicle 4y agoi've heard only good things, but congrats to that team for making something even harder to google than 'latex'
- BeFlatXIII 4y agoI believe LMTX and ConTeXt MkIV are the terms to use for Google
- Kitsune100 4y agohttps://youtu.be/oKlkOVn0IZw https://youtu.be/oKlkOVn0IZw Found OP
- amai 4y agoHave a look at https://quarto.org/ https://quarto.org/ if LaTeX makes you angry.
- FloatArtifact 4y agoCan anyone recommend a WYSIWYG LaTeX editor?
- lnwlebjel 4y agoSee overleaf.com which approximates this feature.