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Overleaf is an example of academics' Stockholm syndrome with respect to LaTeX. It's a not very good web-based text editor with none of the basic features you'd
by dash2 2y ago
Overleaf is an example of academics' Stockholm syndrome with respect to LaTeX. It's a not very good web-based text editor with none of the basic features you'd expect from your text editor. Think Notepad, but online. But these guys use LaTeX... they're not discriminating consumers. So then you get locked into it by your colleagues who have never used a decent text editor or IDE, and never thought "hmm, I wonder if it should take less than half an hour of fiddling with parameters to build a decent-looking table".
- jdiez17 2y agoCan you recommend another document authoring system that produces decent-looking results? (including tables, math typesetting, bibliography, etc.) > with none of the basic features you'd expect from your text editor it has a vim mode, so I'm happy.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y agoWhat do you propose as an alternative to LaTeX? Word? I wouldn't recommend LaTeX to a casual user writing the occasional letter or memo, but if you're writing an academic paper with equations, figures, references, etc., then Word is a massive pain. Markup languages like LaTeX take some initial investment to learn, but at a certain level of complexity, they become less of a pain than a WYSIWYG editor like Word. As for your comparison to Notepad, I wasn't aware that Notepad allowed simultaneous, collaborative editing by multiple online users, revision tracking, continuous compilation of markup to PDF, and jumping between the same location in the markup and compiled PDF. Notepad must have come a long way since the last time I used it.
- dash2 2y agoMarkdown. There is some exaggeration in my "Notepad", but the fact is, Overleaf lacks many features of a decent modern text editor, starting with a decent menu bar, all wrapped in the awkwardness of using a web browser as the main window, plus having to upload all files to a shared web space where your tools aren't available. (Forget dynamic documents which mix code and text.)
- DiogenesKynikos 2y agoMarkdown is insufficient for academic writing. It has a tiny fraction of the flexibility of LaTeX. Markdown is great for writing casual blog entries, but if you're trying to typeset a book or a journal article, it's insufficient.
- dash2 2y agoI'm an academic, and I use markdown, because I don't want to do my own typesetting. I want to write a paper. When I open my document I want to see: title: Title of article author: Author Name not 300 lines of backslashes. When there's an image in the text, I want to see ``, not some huge paragraph starting with `\float`.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y agoSo you expect (and trust) the journal to do all the typesetting for you? At some point, someone has to convert your Markdown to LaTeX and properly typeset it. Beyond that, how do you handle equations? I assume you embed LaTeX in your Markdown for that. How do you handle references? Do you use a BibTeX extension for Markdown? In the end, I doubt that your setup is much simpler than just loading the LaTeX template for whatever journal you're submitting to, and adding your content.