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That's also been my own personal experience, and I have a CS background and have written several papers and a PhD thesis in LaTeX. I have done many detailed fig
by ulrikrasmussen 1y ago
That's also been my own personal experience, and I have a CS background and have written several papers and a PhD thesis in LaTeX. I have done many detailed figures in TikZ and done countless presentations using Beamer.
I have no idea how to implement anything in TeX on my own besides rudimentary macros. I did once try to implement a simple typesetting package for typesetting some particularly gnarly natural deduction trees, and I thought it worked fine for a few examples, but then it broke down in ways that was completely non-obvious to me.
The computational model of TeX is really, really opaque to me.
- coliveira 1y agoIf you had opened and read the TeX book, you'd understand it.
- volemo 1y agoOh, you mean those 500 pages of dense Knuth writing?
- stevesimmons 1y agoDense? The TeX book is a total delight to read.
- DemocracyFTW2 1y agoNot for people who are fun at parties
- whatever1 1y agoOh definitely, let’s do a PhD in Latex and its worthless toolchain before start writing the actual thesis. Software should be invisible and not a hindrance to our ability to express ourselves.
- coliveira 1y agoReading a single book is not equivalent to a PhD in LaTeX.
- whatever1 1y agoA single book on latex only covers you until the introduction of your thesis. Then you will need to add a table. That’s a different book. Then you will need to align your equations. That is another book. Then you will need a graph. This is a freaking library of books. I mourn for the time I wasted on Latex. For nothing.
- coliveira 1y agoThat's not even close to be true.
- DemocracyFTW2 1y agoI am the proud owner of all 5 five volumes and Digital Typography. I have been in front of a computer for almost every single day for around 45 years. I speak and write several languages, including Chinese and Japanese. I am regularly coding in several programming languages and consider myself fairly fluent in things like HTML and CSS. I have worked as a typesetter and assistant editor of two medical periodicals. I could go on but what else in the world do I have to add to that so I can say "as for me, I opened the TeX book, read it, and understood it" or "I know how to use LaTeX, confidently"? I don't know the answer to that question, but I do know the answer to the question "is TeX / LaTeX a well-designed, user-friendly, sane software?". The answer is no, no, and no.
- coliveira 1y agoMillions of people love to use LaTeX and use it daily. Your experience is just a personal opinion.
- tcfhgj 1y agoYour claim is just a claim.
- DemocracyFTW2 1y agoMillions of people love traffic jams which is why they're happy they can have them twice a day.