5 ms·

> 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 wor

by 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 ago
I 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 ago
It’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.
bradrn 4y ago
> How is that difficult? Most text editors support word wrapping and syntax highlighting. To add to this, I personally prefer using semantic linefeeds — adding a newline after each sentence or clause (as in e.g. [0] [1]). I find this works exceptionally well with LaTeX, since I get the benefit of the newlines as I write and edit, while the typeset version is formatted nicely into paragraphs for me. (Not that this is unique to LaTeX, of course; Markdown would be no different. The technique works well with all such tools.) [0] https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/ventilated-prose/ https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/ventilated-prose/ [1] https://sembr.org/ https://sembr.org/
- CrazyStat 4y ago
  An additional benefit of this style is that it plays very nicely with version control--diffs are much cleaner than if you have one paragraph per line.
  - Certhas 4y ago
    Version control configured for text should not split the text at newlines. It should split at full stops, commas, etc... Ideally it also should understand the hierarchy implied. The fact that we are using a tool chain built for kernel hacking to version control Text documents is a further problem. The workflow and presentation of Word or Google Docs in track changes mode is the gold standard here and is what people that edit text for a living actually use. (As much as I hate that fact when I am forced to move my latex documents into their workflows).
bee_rider 4y ago
I think compile times for LaTeX are an over-stated issues (I mean if nothing else it is really easy to get the document to compile in the background). But we should note that it isn't just a matter of length, there are various packages that require an additional pass over the document. I went looking for a list of which packages increase pass counts and found https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/30674/document-requiring-infinitely-many-compiler-passes https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/30674/document-requi... the first infinite loop doesn't even really look to use anything exotic at all.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  I remember that my undergrad thesis took ~8 compile passes to link up all the references correctly, and this was so common that the latex IDE I used had that as one of the possible "build" presets.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Yeah I've had some slides with a similar story, Tikz I think is one of the main villains there (memory is a bit hazy though, I've been avoiding that library).
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      I think the combination of Tikz and Bibtex is all you need to get to 8 compile passes.
BrandoElFollito 4y ago
I chose LaTeX for my PhD (~25 years ago in physics, I was working in IT at the same time) for that exact reason: that I could write and not wory about how this will end up. I was happy with the extreme complexity to change things (for me at least) because it means I will not spend time to modify the defaults which are correct typographically speaking. I only compiled the text when I wanted to pat myself on the shoulder about how great job I was doing. This is why LaTeX is well suited for something longer (memoir, thesis, book, larger documentation that will end up printed or in a file) and not that mush for one pages (a CV in LaTeX looks dull and you need to have at least something that will make it stand out). An exception would be exercises in math or similar, where the power of equations is primordial.
whatever1 4y ago
Give me your thesis source code, I will just remove one bracket from your complex equations Let’s see how many hours you will spend to fix it. The compiler will just tell you “out of memory error” with no line number. Good luck finding it. Latex and its tooling ecosystem are atrocious for productivity. For a type system that promises “just write, forget about formatting” the effort it requires to get document formatting right is insane.
- rekado 4y ago
  Can confirm. The error messages bear little resemblance to the actual problem. Just yesterday I tried to apply Texinfo patches to support generating Chinese PDFs via XeTeX. The first error I got was an out-of-memory error, which was solved only by adding a missing font file. The next error I got is "Undefined control sequence." and there's nothing wrong with the sources. I'm maintaining a modular installation of TeX Live for GNU Guix for years now, and understanding the errors doesn't ever seem to get easier. My experience with lout (another typesetting system) has been a lot smoother, even though by default it does not support Unicode. (It's possible with some configuration.)
- pvaldes 4y ago
  > I will just remove one bracket from your complex equations Let’s see how many hours you will spend to fix it. I would measure the fix time in minutes, even seconds, but not in hours. Emacs would help with that. Moving your \end{document} backwards would find the problem also.
  - treis 4y ago
    Challenge issued and accepted. Now all that remains is choosing the time and manner of battle.
    - pvaldes 4y ago
      Challenges are for low-rank influencers and people willing to prove to strangers how freaking smart or popular they are, or how fast they can rap. To be honest, I couldn't care less about that. Knowing that it can be done and how to do it is more than enough for me. Nothing to learn or gain jumping in that vanity wrestling ring.
sideshowb 4y ago
> 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. Having used LaTeX for a few things. including a PhD thesis, I can say with confidence that this approach just doesn't work for me. I view "how something looks" as being an integral part of what it communicates. The text itself is only part of the package, so not being able to see how the finished product looks as I write is frankly a hassle. (It's also a hassle when I want to collaborate with people who don't know LaTeX, but that's another story). I wish Word didn't slow to a crawl when I had ~30 equations in a document, but I still prefer it to LaTeX.
- maegul 4y ago
  The existence of side-by-side GUI representations of LaTeX (eg overleaf) demonstrates your point well IMO. It seems to be a common pattern for many to render their pdf every paragraph or so, check, then tweak as desired. It may be a bad habit to be broken but it’s driven by a real need to make sure the final product is good. However good LaTeX or ones ability with it is, software should have tests … right … surely the visual checks a an essential necessity at some point?
- kkfx 4y ago
  IMVHO beside plots/formulae/tables etc who are hard to read if just a bit more than deadly simple cases in code, well written pure text AND an outliner (like org-mode or the old CanonCAT etc, now forgotten tools from a more civilized and dead age) are the best way to focus on what you write instead of it's visual aspects. Visual is part of the package for advertisement, not for scientific/important stuff production. The best example: those who crappy formatting HTML emails not much to embed an image but to really send "rendered text" thinking that's nice and useful instead of visual useless crap...
  - sideshowb 4y ago
    > Visual is part of the package for advertisement, not for scientific/important stuff production That's where my experience differs. Knowledge is fractal in nature; I can add more details to a paper ad infinitum. Seeing how big the rendered paragraph or section will be is, to me, a crucial hint that it might be time to stop. Seeing how far away two mutually dependent concepts appear in the finished product (when you a know a reader will likely have to jump back and forth between them) may also influence my writing. If they're getting too far apart I might have to introduce A, then B, then more details on each, to keep the introductions close together. Deciding whether certain details are better communicated in the figure, the figure caption, or the main text also depends on the layout. Knowing how large the section/subsections headings are may influence my choice to use less of them, and group some items into the same section, because I find excessive division into subsections makes things harder to read. And I'll admit this is weird, but somehow this all applies even though I know a journal is going to reformat and re-typeset my work anyway. I fear that, even though I write technical (and not advertising) material, you'd probably not want to receive an email from me, lest I use bold font at some point to highlight a key point or something ;-)

by rrwo 4y ago

gautamdivgi 4y ago

I 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 ago

It’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.

bradrn 4y ago

> How is that difficult? Most text editors support word wrapping and syntax highlighting. To add to this, I personally prefer using semantic linefeeds — adding a newline after each sentence or clause (as in e.g. [0] [1]). I find this works exceptionally well with LaTeX, since I get the benefit of the newlines as I write and edit, while the typeset version is formatted nicely into paragraphs for me. (Not that this is unique to LaTeX, of course; Markdown would be no different. The technique works well with all such tools.) [0] https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/ventilated-prose/ https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/ventilated-prose/ [1] https://sembr.org/ https://sembr.org/

CrazyStat 4y ago
An additional benefit of this style is that it plays very nicely with version control--diffs are much cleaner than if you have one paragraph per line.
- Certhas 4y ago
  Version control configured for text should not split the text at newlines. It should split at full stops, commas, etc... Ideally it also should understand the hierarchy implied. The fact that we are using a tool chain built for kernel hacking to version control Text documents is a further problem. The workflow and presentation of Word or Google Docs in track changes mode is the gold standard here and is what people that edit text for a living actually use. (As much as I hate that fact when I am forced to move my latex documents into their workflows).

bee_rider 4y ago

I think compile times for LaTeX are an over-stated issues (I mean if nothing else it is really easy to get the document to compile in the background). But we should note that it isn't just a matter of length, there are various packages that require an additional pass over the document. I went looking for a list of which packages increase pass counts and found https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/30674/document-requiring-infinitely-many-compiler-passes https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/30674/document-requi... the first infinite loop doesn't even really look to use anything exotic at all.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
I remember that my undergrad thesis took ~8 compile passes to link up all the references correctly, and this was so common that the latex IDE I used had that as one of the possible "build" presets.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Yeah I've had some slides with a similar story, Tikz I think is one of the main villains there (memory is a bit hazy though, I've been avoiding that library).
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    I think the combination of Tikz and Bibtex is all you need to get to 8 compile passes.

BrandoElFollito 4y ago

I chose LaTeX for my PhD (~25 years ago in physics, I was working in IT at the same time) for that exact reason: that I could write and not wory about how this will end up. I was happy with the extreme complexity to change things (for me at least) because it means I will not spend time to modify the defaults which are correct typographically speaking. I only compiled the text when I wanted to pat myself on the shoulder about how great job I was doing. This is why LaTeX is well suited for something longer (memoir, thesis, book, larger documentation that will end up printed or in a file) and not that mush for one pages (a CV in LaTeX looks dull and you need to have at least something that will make it stand out). An exception would be exercises in math or similar, where the power of equations is primordial.

whatever1 4y ago

Give me your thesis source code, I will just remove one bracket from your complex equations Let’s see how many hours you will spend to fix it. The compiler will just tell you “out of memory error” with no line number. Good luck finding it. Latex and its tooling ecosystem are atrocious for productivity. For a type system that promises “just write, forget about formatting” the effort it requires to get document formatting right is insane.

rekado 4y ago
Can confirm. The error messages bear little resemblance to the actual problem. Just yesterday I tried to apply Texinfo patches to support generating Chinese PDFs via XeTeX. The first error I got was an out-of-memory error, which was solved only by adding a missing font file. The next error I got is "Undefined control sequence." and there's nothing wrong with the sources. I'm maintaining a modular installation of TeX Live for GNU Guix for years now, and understanding the errors doesn't ever seem to get easier. My experience with lout (another typesetting system) has been a lot smoother, even though by default it does not support Unicode. (It's possible with some configuration.)
pvaldes 4y ago
> I will just remove one bracket from your complex equations Let’s see how many hours you will spend to fix it. I would measure the fix time in minutes, even seconds, but not in hours. Emacs would help with that. Moving your \end{document} backwards would find the problem also.
- treis 4y ago
  Challenge issued and accepted. Now all that remains is choosing the time and manner of battle.
  - pvaldes 4y ago
    Challenges are for low-rank influencers and people willing to prove to strangers how freaking smart or popular they are, or how fast they can rap. To be honest, I couldn't care less about that. Knowing that it can be done and how to do it is more than enough for me. Nothing to learn or gain jumping in that vanity wrestling ring.

sideshowb 4y ago

> 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. Having used LaTeX for a few things. including a PhD thesis, I can say with confidence that this approach just doesn't work for me. I view "how something looks" as being an integral part of what it communicates. The text itself is only part of the package, so not being able to see how the finished product looks as I write is frankly a hassle. (It's also a hassle when I want to collaborate with people who don't know LaTeX, but that's another story). I wish Word didn't slow to a crawl when I had ~30 equations in a document, but I still prefer it to LaTeX.

maegul 4y ago
The existence of side-by-side GUI representations of LaTeX (eg overleaf) demonstrates your point well IMO. It seems to be a common pattern for many to render their pdf every paragraph or so, check, then tweak as desired. It may be a bad habit to be broken but it’s driven by a real need to make sure the final product is good. However good LaTeX or ones ability with it is, software should have tests … right … surely the visual checks a an essential necessity at some point?
kkfx 4y ago
IMVHO beside plots/formulae/tables etc who are hard to read if just a bit more than deadly simple cases in code, well written pure text AND an outliner (like org-mode or the old CanonCAT etc, now forgotten tools from a more civilized and dead age) are the best way to focus on what you write instead of it's visual aspects. Visual is part of the package for advertisement, not for scientific/important stuff production. The best example: those who crappy formatting HTML emails not much to embed an image but to really send "rendered text" thinking that's nice and useful instead of visual useless crap...
- sideshowb 4y ago
  > Visual is part of the package for advertisement, not for scientific/important stuff production That's where my experience differs. Knowledge is fractal in nature; I can add more details to a paper ad infinitum. Seeing how big the rendered paragraph or section will be is, to me, a crucial hint that it might be time to stop. Seeing how far away two mutually dependent concepts appear in the finished product (when you a know a reader will likely have to jump back and forth between them) may also influence my writing. If they're getting too far apart I might have to introduce A, then B, then more details on each, to keep the introductions close together. Deciding whether certain details are better communicated in the figure, the figure caption, or the main text also depends on the layout. Knowing how large the section/subsections headings are may influence my choice to use less of them, and group some items into the same section, because I find excessive division into subsections makes things harder to read. And I'll admit this is weird, but somehow this all applies even though I know a journal is going to reformat and re-typeset my work anyway. I fear that, even though I write technical (and not advertising) material, you'd probably not want to receive an email from me, lest I use bold font at some point to highlight a key point or something ;-)