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Modern LaTeX
- neuroelectron 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cadamsdotcom 1y agoTrivia: the correct capitalization is LaTeX and it's pronounced "lay-tek". Knuth & friends were on a roll naming things - the 80s must've been quite a time. As always wiki knows all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX
- seanhunter 1y agoAnother fun trivia: The "La" in latex is Leslie Lamport. https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/ https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/
- TheAceOfHearts 1y agoThe special naming convention is mostly used as a form of elitist gatekeeping; it's a tribal shibboleth. You should be able to figure out whether someone is talking about latex (polymer) or latex (markup) from context, so having a special naming convention is rather pretentious and superfluous. If calling it lay-tek was important, they should've called it laytek. Historically, as I understand it, distinctions between the written and spoken forms of words were used as a form of gatekeeping between elites and commoners. Same goes for arXiv. The great thing about language is that you can just change things if enough people play along. Call it gif or jif, arxiv or archive, latex or laytek.
- josephg 1y agoEh - the name is a bit of fun. Its fun to form communities with in-jokes and tribal knowledge and silly names. It doesn't hurt anyone. Lets not sacrifice everything joyous at the altar of being friendly to noobs.
- mariusor 1y agoThey did call it Latek, the X in the name is the Greek letter χ (Chi) and in my opinion, it's not an elitist shibboleth but a way to showcase the advantages of their typesetting system over existing, at the time, methods that didn't invest a lot in rendering non ASCII character sets.
- xboxnolifes 1y agoSo it's not actually LaTaX, it's LaTeχ. Make sure you type it properly i guess.
- IshKebab 1y agoIs arXiv not pronounced the same as "archive"? I agree with you about LaTeX but arXiv seems like an obvious allusion to "archive"?
- DemocracyFTW2 1y agoWell it does lack that final -e of archive, and—fun fact!—like LaTeX which I know as ['la:teç], arXiv could plausibly be pronounced [ar'çi:f] in German although I've never heard anyone pronounce that name. So why is it arXiv not at least arXive with an -e?
- IshKebab 1y agoBecause they're trying to be quirky I guess, but it is still unmistakably a weird spelling of "archive" (especially given the context).
- n2h4 1y agoin both arXiv and LaTeX, X is greek(chi).
- kashunstva 1y ago> it's pronounced "lay-tek" Or “lah-tek”, the Wikipedia article doesn’t seem to address which, if either is preferred. And I think Leslie Lamport said that he didn’t want to impose any particular pronunciation.
- mturmon 1y agoThis is incorrect. In his book on LaTeX, Leslie Lamport specifically says that he does not care how you pronounce it. (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX#Pronouncing_and_writing_%22LaTeX%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX#Pronouncing_and_writing_...) Knuth, on the other hand, has a whole rationale on why it’s pronounced “tech”. (“Your keyboard should become slightly moist”, iirc).
- kaoD 1y agoVoiceless velar fricative X or you're doing it wrong.
- foldr 1y agoFrom a linguist's point of view this is a perfect example of the chaos that ensues when people try to say how things are pronounced without describing the speech sounds using standard vocabulary. Here are the inept pronunciation instructions on the LaTeX project website: > «Lah-tech» or «Lay-tech» (to rhyme with «blech» or «Bertolt Brecht») The pronunciation of the 'ch' in 'blech' isn't really standardized, so that's not much help. If we go by the German pronunciation of Brecht then the sound should be [ç], i.e. a voiceless palatal fricative. But this seems to be a mistake, as Knuth intended the X in TeX to be [x], i.e. a voiceless velar fricative. In German, [ç] is an allophone of /x/ (conditioned by the preceding vowel), but they are distinct sounds, and Knuth's directions for the pronunciation of TeX unambiguously specify [x]. It seems unlikely that this difference between the X in LaTeX and the X in TeX is intentional, so maybe this was a confused attempt to identify the [x] sound. Really then, it's anyone's guess how LaTeX is supposed to be pronounced, since no-one with authority to specify has bothered to look up the IPA symbols for the relevant speech sounds. But IMO while [leɪtɛk] is a perfectly common and acceptable pronunciation, it can only really be understood as an anglicization of [leɪtɛx] rather than the canonical pronunciation.
- dochtman 1y agoTypst is the modern LaTeX. https://typst.app/ https://typst.app/
- fsiefken 1y agoTypst is more minimal and faster in compiling documents, I prefer using it. But it's not in all cases a LaTex replacement. The ecosystem is also larger. I have LaTex documents I struggle to convert.
- koakuma-chan 1y ago[flagged]
- fsiefken 1y agoI know, i love pedal to the metal - small is beautiful, it's lean and mean, but it's not a replacement in some cases. As an alternative, tectonic is a bit faster then the standard LaTex distributions: https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/discussions/1153 https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic/discussions... https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/ https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/
- JohnKemeny 1y agoTypst sure has a lot of good marketeers. LaTeX never needed that.
- mr_mitm 1y agoI remember tons of latex zealots 20 years ago. The internet must be full of latex vs word flamewars. Also, typst is just really good.
- Gualdrapo 1y agoI do remember that too. In fact it was one of my physics teacher who got me into LaTeX - he used to complain about Word while praising LaTeX and its WYSIWYM. Though I ended being a graphic designer so LaTeX felt rather limiting very quickly, but fortunately found ConTeXt. Hoped Typst was going to be great for my use case but alas it's got the same "problem" as LaTeX - modularity. Still it seems to be a great alternative for people doing standard documents.
- iNic 1y agoI recommend people check out typst: https://typst.app/ https://typst.app/
- qiu3344 1y agoLaTeX is quite underrated these days. Even though alternatives like Typst are popping up, LaTeX is also pretty convenient and powerful if you get past the crude syntax and obscure compilation errors. I sill remember my disbelieve when I found out that I can change my article into a presentation just by changing the document class to "beamer". These days I usually default to pandoc's markdown, mostly because the raw text is very readable.
- JohnKemeny 1y agoI wouldn't say underrated. Literally every single research article in maths and cs, every PhD dissertation and master thesis in these fields too, are written in LaTeX. Most students, and many researchers use Overleaf nowadays, though.
- Gualdrapo 1y ago> I wouldn't say underrated. Literally every single research article in maths and cs, every PhD dissertation and master thesis in these fields too, are written in LaTeX. Usage level is not correlated to "rate". Sometimes people use stuff because they have to, not only because they like it. See the Microsoft Word case. I'd agree that LaTeX has fell a bit in popularity this days against Typst - but not much in its usage. It is still the de facto standard of scientific and technical document typesetting.
- JohnKemeny 1y agoI've never met anyone who's used Typst, I've only ever heard it on HN. And I meet a lot of researchers, teachers, and students. Perhaps it's a programmer thing.
- goku12 1y agoOne reason is that many journals supply LaTeX templates. And I find them easier to apply compared to their Word templates. I wonder how much support Typst has from these publishers, considering its relatively young age.
- aquafox 1y agoDon't get me wrong, I love LaTeX, having written my PhD thesis in it. But with the current tools, I would use Quarto instead. It's much easier, you can still "inject" LaTeX and it's quicker for less technical collaborators to adapt.
- enriquto 1y ago$ sudo apt install quarto E: Unable to locate package quarto yeah, hard pass
- goku12 1y agoI don't know anything about quarto, but you're missing a lot of useful software if you're limiting yourself to the distro repo - especially Debian stable.
- enriquto 1y agoAs a matter of principle, i prefer to use really stable software that does not change wantonly, and whose authors took the care to put it into debian. My 20 year-old .tex documents still compile today. Will the same happen with quarto? (or typst, for that matter?) The fact that they offer no packages in the debian standard distribution signals they have likely succumbed to the awful trend of version churning, where you need to use the last version of the software or else. Thus, probably, in 20 years my documents will be un-compilable. For legacy things like typeset documents, it's reasonable to prefer legacy solutions like latex. Once quarto and typst have stabilized enough to appear in debian stable, I'll consider them as viable alternatives.
- immibis 1y agoFWIW software gets in Debian because of Debian, not because of the authors of the software.
- tecleandor 1y agoThey have a deb package (if you really wanted to install it) https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/releases/tag/v1.8.1 https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/releases/tag/v1.8.1
- BlackFly 1y agoI always wonder why people compare Latex with word and not with the single most popular document markup (especially here): HTML + css + javascript. The problems are quite similar, "How do I center a div?" vs "How do I keep this float on this page?" Has latex really modernized? I don't hear a lot about new layouts or style mechanisms. Most people are probably reading articles online these days, although there is a lot to be said about printing an article to read. It seems to me that adding responsiveness to journal articles instead of using a fixed paper layout regardless of media might be a good improvement for many readers in many situations.
- JackeJR 1y agoThere are many reasons this comparison is not made. I will just touch on one. The target medium is different. For html, you have monitors of different sizes as well as windows that can be resized. For latex, you choose your target at the start: A4 paper? Screen presentation? A0 poster? With a fixed medium in mind, you can be extremely particular on where on this canvas you want a piece of text/graphic or whatever. Without a fixed medium, you have to have logic to address the different mediums and compromises have to be made.
- karencarits 1y ago> For latex, you choose your target at the start Yes, sometimes, but I would say that one of the benefits of latex is how easy you can switch to another layout. But I guess the point is that you typically render to a set of outputs with fixed dimensions (pdf)
- chabska 1y agoHTML+CSS has facilities to target a page format (CSS @page rule, cm and in dimension units). Not to say that it's on the same level as LaTeX, but it's pretty impressive by its own right.
- maegul 1y agoAre there good deep dives on how far you can practically this? Especially in combination with headless browser pdf generation? Last time I looked into it, a while ago, my impression was that it would get rickety too soon. It’d be a good place to be, I think, if web and “document” tech stacks could have nice and practical convergence.
- anta40 1y agoI used LaTeX for writing my undergraduate thesis (> 1 decade ago). Nowadays, unless I write anything involving complicated math expressions or something fancy like Karnaugh map, chessboard diagram etc etc, most likely LaTeX is overkill. Markdown is more than enough.
- iveqy 1y agoI'm looking for something that you can embedd in your own application. LaTeX would be great but it's not really nice to have WEB code in your C application. It's also has a bit troublesome license.
- so-rose 1y ago`typst` might meet your needs. No, really. It embeds almost anywhere, including via client-side WASM, and someone even made a nice TypeScript lib [0]. If you dislike `typst`, it even has a package that transpiles LaTeX strings into native typst, which somehow doesn't seem to make `typst` any less fast [1]. WASM plugin magic will do that! The curious consequence is that the fastest and most portable way to render lightwight LaTeX code might actually be... To transpile LaTeX to embedded `typst`? Sure, sure, not all of LaTeX will map. But from an 80/20 mindset it might just be enough. - [0] https://github.com/Myriad-Dreamin/typst.ts https://github.com/Myriad-Dreamin/typst.ts - [1] https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex/ https://typst.app/universe/package/mitex/
- WolfOliver 1y agoI would love to read some feedback on MonsterWriter. It is my side-project made to make LaTeX accessible for everybody.
- herewulf 1y agoI'm finally updating my CV after years of neglect. I'm keen on switching to the route of Org mode -> LaTeX -> PDF. It's partly because I love the simplicity/power of Org and I do all my writing in it nowadays, the other part is to separate the content from the presentation so I can have the content in two different languages but still end up with the same formatted document for both. Anyone have experience with this or have favorite LaTeX templates for CVs? I'm currently experimenting with this: https://titan-c.gitlab.io/org-cv/ https://titan-c.gitlab.io/org-cv/
- boerseth 1y agoMy own experiment involved writing my CV in YAML, and using a Pandoc template to generate .tex and .pdf. I think I may have overcooked the thing a little, but it was good fun. I never got into emacs. Is Org worth it? https://github.com/boerseth/cv https://github.com/boerseth/cv
- signa11 1y agoit’s not too shabby.
- goku12 1y agoOrg mode is the swiss army knife of content markup languages. It does a lot more than just content markup. But keep in mind that org-mode, markdown, asciidoc, etc don't afford much control on final layout. They're like plain HTML in function. LaTeX and Typst include more layout control - sort of like HTML with a little bit of CSS. This may not matter if you're preparing something like an article or document. But you may want more layout control for something like a CV.
- ykonstant 1y agoMy go-to template collection is from Overleaf: https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/cv https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/cv My cv is an adaptation of one of the templates there: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1woxVNcJ4AmT7dD2WEnYr9BHEEY7Li39p/view?usp=share_link https://drive.google.com/file/d/1woxVNcJ4AmT7dD2WEnYr9BHEEY7... EDIT: ahahahahaha I just came across this cv: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/resume-slash-cv-template/ppghxxmdpmfv https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/resume-slash-cv-tem...
- watusername 1y agoCheck out Tectonic which is an all-in-one LaTeX toolchain (single executable w/ engine + build system) that lazily downloads TeX Live (no upfront multi-gig downloads). It's a breath of fresh air in the chaotic LaTeX landscape. Bit of a shame that they opted for XeTeX rather than LuaTeX though. [0]: https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic
- fryktelig 1y agoHonest question: why do you prefer lualatex to xetex?
- nanna 1y agoYou mean XeTeX for LuaLaTeX, I think.
- watusername 1y agoLuaTeX is the de facto successor of pdfTeX and is basically a more maintained pdfTeX with Unicode support and Lua scripting, whereas XeTeX has its own engine. In practice, it means that LuaTeX "just works" with most documents while with XeTeX you run into all sorts of weird incompatibilities. Fancy packages that make use of Lua scripting (e.g., graphdrawing) will only work with LuaTeX. Edit: Looks like it's not de facto anymore, and LuaTeX is now recommended for all documents and XeTeX is being recommended _against_ (https://www.texdev.net/2024/11/05/engine-news-from-the-latex-project https://www.texdev.net/2024/11/05/engine-news-from-the-latex...)
- agubelu 1y agoLaTeX is great. It also sucks. I'm happy to have learned it and I'm happy to never have to use it again.
- goku12 1y agoWhat's your alternative?
- agubelu 1y agoFor personal use, maybe Markdown + pandoc, or Typst for more complex stuff. For academical use I don't think there are any, because everything still revolves around LaTeX. But the lack of alternatives doesn't mean LaTeX is pleasant to use.
- goku12 1y agoI don't find LaTeX too pleasant either. But what is preventing Typst from replacing LaTeX in academia?
- cess11 1y agoIt's easier and good enough to just use LyX, a graphical document editor with a bunch of backends and templates, and if you really need to do something special you can still drop down to LaTeX and do your own templating. https://www.lyx.org/ https://www.lyx.org/ It's published under GPL so relatively protected from corporate nuisances. Takes five minutes to teach someone how to mark headlines, add content listing and change document type, then a little more to teach how to add tables and images.
- wiz21c 1y agoand maths shortcuts are really easy
- agoose77 1y agoA shameless plug for the MyST Engine https://mystmd.org/ https://mystmd.org/ It's a document engine that ingests Markdown (particularly the MyST superset) and builds upon "structured data" for sharing. E.g. SciPy's proceedings: https://proceedings.scipy.org/articles/XHDR4700 https://proceedings.scipy.org/articles/XHDR4700
- pbowyer 1y agoJust a note on MyST's citations feature as I was researching it this morning: until this ticket [1] is worked on there's one bibliography style and that's it. 1. https://github.com/jupyter-book/mystmd/issues/1462 https://github.com/jupyter-book/mystmd/issues/1462
- rochak 1y agoI remember having to learn LaTeX to write my research papers. Probably the worst time I’ve had learning something. As someone who has OCD for making everything consistent, trying to achieve the same in LaTeX made me wanna give up research itself. In fact, now that I think about it, I did give up research due to it.
- goku12 1y agoWow! Consistency is the reason I took up LaTeX, after suffering a disaster with Word. LaTeX feels dated and isn't flawless, but inconsistency is one complaint that I've never heard about it before.
- rochak 1y agoI'd say it is more about how esoteric LaTeX extensions/plugins felt like when I picked it up (I was just getting into the field back then). I am sure that now, after years of experience, I would be more open to give it a shot again. Unfortunately, I am no longer into research anymore. I did have fun converting my LaTeX resume to Typst though.
- goku12 1y agoUsing extensions these days is more like searching a software registry (CTAN in this case) for packages and looking up its API documentation. But your last sentence says a lot. The reason why Typst feels so much more ergonomic is that it resembles modern programming and markup languages. They have the advantage of hindsight. LaTeX markup does indeed feel esoteric, no matter how many times you use it. Perhaps it made more sense in its days.
- mgaunard 1y agoWhy LuaLaTex and not XeLaTex?
- red_trumpet 1y agoLatest stable release of xetex was in 2020[1], whereas luatex is actively developed[2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XeTeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XeTeX [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuaTeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuaTeX
- kzrdude 1y agoThe first document compile example in the posted link (the PDF, the actual document) uses `xelatex`, so why the question? > Feel free to try lualatex instead—there are a few differences between the two that we will discuss later, but either is fine for now
- WillAdams 1y agoOne notable reason to prefer lualatex is mplib which allow inclusion of METAPOST graphics directly which is _very_ convenient if one uses that tool.
- nbil 1y ago[dead]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- __mharrison__ 1y agoUse typst. I've migrated all of my latex (book layout and invoicing) usage to typst and couldn't be happier.
- dev_l1x_be 1y agoFor me Typst replaced Latex years ago. pros: - one small compiler that can output: pdf, png, svg, html - compilation is fast (see below) - syntax is much cleaner than Latex - few ways of to a thing - already has all the templates most people need - tooling is good enough with VS Code - supports SVG images cons: - less users? time typst compile cv.typ ________________________________________________________ Executed in 126.21 millis fish external usr time 93.66 millis 0.07 millis 93.58 millis sys time 37.97 millis 1.51 millis 36.46 millis
- Al-Khwarizmi 1y agoA big con is that there are no typst templates for journals and conferences that academics submit papers to. For me, this is a show-stopper. I would love to be able to ditch latex because honestly it's old and it shows a lot, in spite of apologists saying that it's perfect. But 90+% of my usage starts from a conference or journal template, so at the moment it's not gonna happen.
- tcfhgj 1y agoI don't feel like the template itself is the issue. In typst it's quite easy to recreate the templates without being years into typst (according to my experience). The real problem is acceptance of non-word/latex papers
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y agoThe problem is the user-base and acceptance of latex vs Typst. I use latex and as aware as I am about its deficiencies, I can create a doc faster in it than any other tool that I have not ever used before. I also have a bunch of utilities I created for my specific use-cases automating data into tables, figures, etc, ready for latex import. So its a mass and momentum problem. Typst not only has to be better/easier/faster than latex, but to a degree that it justifies all of the labor and time to learn it and change all that existing template and utility infrastructure built up over decades. A high bar. If Typst (or some other new contender) could also read and compile latex code and packages alongside its own syntax then that would be a game-changer. Then I can use all my old stuff and gradually change things over to typst (or whatever).
- arthur-st 1y agoHaving experience with digitizing a university textbook in physics by hand, this is a very nice LaTeX guide for everyone interested. One thing worth noting from 2025 perspective that the "default" local setup is most likely going to be VSCode with LaTeX Workshop[1] and LTeX+[2] extensions, and that you should use TeX Live on every platform supported by it (since MiKTeX and friends can lag). Also, use LuaTeX, as it's the officially recommended[3] engine since November 2024. [1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=James-Yu.latex-workshop https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=James-Yu... [2] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ltex-plus.vscode-ltex-plus https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ltex-plu... [3] https://www.texdev.net/2024/11/05/engine-news-from-the-latex-project https://www.texdev.net/2024/11/05/engine-news-from-the-latex...
- menturi 1y agoI glanced at the document and feel as though the author is not being very convincing on the advantages of LaTeX over WYSIWYG editors like Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer. > This might seem strange if you haven’t worked with markup before, but it comes with a few advantages: > 1. You can handle your writing’s content and its presentation separately. At the start of each document, you describe the design you want. LATEX takes it from there, consistently formatting your whole text just the way you asked. Compare this to a wysiwyg system, where you constantly deal with appearances as you write. If you changed the look of a caption, were you sure to find all the other captions and do the same? If the program arranges something in a way you don’t like, is it hard to fix? > 2. You can define your own commands, then tweak them to instantly adjust every place they’re used. For example, the \introduce and \acronym commands in the example above are my own creations. One italicizes text, and the other sets words in small caps with a bit of extra l e t t e r s p a c i n g so the characters don’t look too crowded. If I decide that I’d prefer new terms to have this look, or that acronyms should be formatted LIKE THIS, I just change the two lines that define those commands, and every instance in this book immediately takes on the new look. > 3. Being able to save the document as plain text has its own benefits: > • You can edit it with any basic text editor. > • Structure is immediately visible and simple to replicate. > • You can automate content creation using scripts and programs. > • You can track your changes with version control software, like Git or Mercurial. I find the author's criticisms not convincing, particularly points 1 and 2 but some aspects of point 3 as well. "If you changed the look of a caption, were you sure to find all the other captions and do the same?" That applies equally to LaTeX as it does to Word or Writer. In Word/Writer, you can use manual bold formatting and italics formatting for emphasis in two or so places. You can also find yourself in this situation using LaTeX by using \textbf or \textit for emphasis in different places. You can avoid this by following a convention like by defining and using something like \emphasis in LaTeX and using a character style in Word. "If the program arranges something in a way you don’t like, is it hard to fix?" From my experience, text wrap style in Word or anchors in Writer behave roughly similar to float specifiers in LaTeX (unsure if that is the correct term). "You can define your own commands, then tweak them to instantly adjust very place they’re used." This is the essence of using styles in Word or Writer. "You can edit it with any basic text editor." Word can be opened/extracted like a zip, and you can access the XML if you really want to mess with the markup language under the hood, though I've never seen anybody actually do this. "You can automate content creation using scripts and programs." If you feel so motivated, I don't see how this cannot apply to Word or Writer documents alike. "You can track your changes with version control software, like Git or Mercurial." I consider how Git or Mercurial can't handle container formats as a limitation of those software more so than a limitation of the document itself.