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No, it doesn't work fine. LateX is slow, inconsistent and needs to be ran multiple times to give a correct result, it has no API, is not extendable in a sane wa
by tinco 13y ago
No, it doesn't work fine. LateX is slow, inconsistent and needs to be ran multiple times to give a correct result, it has no API, is not extendable in a sane way, it's source code is so arcane there's books written about it, and if you've read the books the only thing you've learned is that trying to reimplement LateX is a fool's errand. And it's syntax is ugly.
Markdown is better. Microsoft Word is better. They just both lack certain things we need, and LaTeX has those things.
Could you not envision things could be better?
A LaTeX that parses to an in-memory tree so it could be transformed before compilation?
A shell that instead of working on character streams worked on structured and annotated data streams, so it could intelligently interpret what is going on?
An editor that does have at its core an expectation that its output is ASCII character commands controlling a 1970s terminal interface?
Of course you'll stick to using Vim to write LaTeX in a Bash shell, I do too. Doesn't mean I'm not mad about it..
- robinhoodexe 13y ago"Markdown is better. Microsoft Word is better." Stop comparing oranges to apples. And there's really no "objectively better", it's two different tools with two different uses. Sure, LaTeX could be better, but it's been working on.
- tinco 13y agoI do what I want. Also, LaTeX is a system for creating documents, and Word is a system for creating documents. There's only four important differences: Word has a more modern architecture, Words compiler is integrated into its GUI, Word is closed source, Words source format is not human readable. Apples to Oranges? I can compare these Braeburns to those Fujis just fine thank you.
- Crito 13y agoIf that is all you need and expect from a replacement for LaTeX, why aren't you just using LibreOffice?
- tinco 13y agoIt's not, I need the human readable source part, so I can track my work and cooperate in git :) I use LibreOffice for some stuff though.
- Crito 13y agoAren't modern word processor formats just zipped-up XML files? I suspect it should be a straight-forward matter to get at least LibreOffice and version control cooperating.
- TylerE 13y agoYou are technically correct, but not usefully so. The XML is pretty hairy. A VCS that handles XML semantically (e.g. tag-pair oriented, rather than line-oriented) might have some shot....but, basically, merges are more or less not going to work so it's not really version control, just backups.
- davidgerard 13y agoVersioning of OpenOffice/LibreOffice documents using git: http://blog.riemann.cc/2013/04/23/versioning-of-openoffice-libreoffice-documents-using-git/ http://blog.riemann.cc/2013/04/23/versioning-of-openoffice-l...
- blueblob 13y agoThat is really cool, thanks for that.
- PeterisP 13y agoIf we're talking about LaTeX, Word, Markdown and LibreOffice - well, then LibreOffice is a contender for the worst usability, it's superficially similar to a mature product but it's a case of "the remaining 10% of goodness will take more work than the first 90%".
- 13y ago
- stusmall 13y agoI don't mean to be a jerk, but how much do you actually use/have used LaTex? They aren't even similar. They have very few similar use cases. One is a typesetting system the other is a word processor. Sure, documents come out the other end with both but the process and targets are very different. One allows you to quickly and easily make a quality document. One allows you to make the document to look exactly how you want. Java and C are both programming languages but it is still apples and oranges to compare them.
- tinco 13y agoI'm by no means a LaTex expert. I've written a few papers and a bunch of reports, nothing published, just undergraduate stuff. I dropped out halfway through my graduate degree, so I'm not what you'd call an academic. But I've seen and read enough to know that you can do impressive things with LaTex. I have another question though, how much have you used Word? I have used it only a couple of times since highschool, but it's gotten pretty impressive. I bet that if you really dive into it you could get very close to the power of latex. At least, with regards to the typesetting. The drawing images/formulas/schemas thing is a whole different ballgame I'd agree. Anyway, my point was not that Microsoft Word in any way is a good replacement for LaTex, I'm just saying that if LaTex could be as well written as Word is, it could have these fancy GUI and fast rendering features too. There's people out there that think that the power in typesetting that LaTex has is mutual exclusive with the speed and usability that Word has. That just isn't so. The only reason LaTex isn't fast and more easily extensible is that it was written for the machines of 40 years ago, that didn't have enough RAM to hold the parsed tree of a document. LaTex could be ten times as fast, were it written in Ruby, the slowest language out there. Just because a modern programmer would make use of the modern hardware and modern design concepts, and just make it responsive. A GUI could be as simple external process that accessed a message passing API, rendering it to HTML and run it through Webkitview. Overhead everywhere, still ten times faster than LaTex... (edit: definitely worth a downvote, this comment :P)
- x0x0 13y agoto summarize: you've written a handful of latex documents, so you're now an expert on what latex is used for and what people want out of it. would it help to point out that given latex is more difficult to use than word, I'd bet most latex users have tried and discarded word in favor of latex? Would that affect your judgements about the relative use cases? There's people out there that think that the power in typesetting that LaTex has is mutual exclusive with the speed and usability that Word has. That just isn't so. Since, well, nothing else offers similar typesetting plus mathematical notation / flexibility, your proof is... what exactly? If you built a better system, you'd find customers for it.
- terminus 13y agoThose are just the surface differences. The modes in which you use all of these are very different. Word: explicit WYSIWYG control over typesetting. LaTeX: semantic level control over typesetting. Additionally provides explicit low level typesetting commands. Markdown: given how basic (trivial even) Markdown is (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax) I'm not sure why it's even in this list.
- tinco 13y agoIt's in the list because it's what I would use for my thesis, if I'd do one now :) It's basic, but it has the semantics for most stuff, and can easily be extended for more. I'd do all formula's/drawings in external tools. Word nowadays has semantic typesetting controls too, I think since they started that ribbon thing that it has become useable. If you stick to using their semantic things I think you can do a pretty good job of properly typesetting in Word.
- jbranchaud 13y agoWriting a thesis using only markdown sounds extremely painful. Are you going to create all your figures elsewhere and then include them as images? How are you going to create your list of figures? And your table of contents? How are you going to create, maintain, and organize your list of references? I could go on.
- ngoldbaum 13y ago> Are you going to create all your figures elsewhere and then include them as images? This is what most people do in physics and astronomy. You make the plot in some kind of plotting package and export it to a vector format. In astronomy, the journals only recently started accepting PDF figures in addition to EPS. In my experience doing all of my figures in LaTeX is significantly more painful than using a real plotting package like matplotlib.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
- kcbanner 13y agoIf you are comparing Word and Markdown to LaTeX I think it's clear you haven't really used LaTeX.
- Perseids 13y agoCan one not value the simplicity of an apple, the juiciness of an orange and compare it to a Pomelo, wishing the latter had both? I would say LaTeΧ can be perfectly well seen as a combination of many aspects of Word and Markdown in the sense that it offers the feature set and backwards compatibility that Words offers, while culminating a legacy, complexity and perceived indeterminism that also plagues Word (though in a different way); and on the other side being a plain text format that can be version controlled and taken apart and shared as snippets.
- unfamiliar 13y agoOh get over yourself. Every one of the criticisms he levelled against latex is spot on, and you pick up on the fact that he mentions Word is easier to use (which, by a long, long way, it it).
- banachtarski 13y agoIt's an apples to oranges comparison. I want to draw a conformal mapping diagram in word and also write a 3-vector of the navier-stokes equations. Also, I want to do a lot of tensor arithmetic with tons of superscripts and subscripts and arrows. Tell me how any of this is accomplished in Word please. Saying Word is easier to us is like saying BASIC is easier than C++.
- mbreese 13y agoYou know what most people would do? Use a dedicated program to create the plots and equations, export it as a PDF, and embed that in Word. Instead of LaTeX being the de facto standard for all publishing, it is relegated to very specialized uses in mathematics and some engineering. If you try to use LaTeX with a biomedical researcher, they will look at you very funny. Hell, I just had a postdoc send me figures as part of a manuscript draft where she was using Powerpoint to make the figures instead of something more appropriate like Illustrator. Most people who publish don't care about how their documents are created, they just want them to work and get published. Word does a pretty good job for this. Use the best tools for the job. Most people would tell you that BASIC is easier to use than C++, if you can write your program in BASIC. And if you don't want to deal with learning curve of C++ and you get get by with BASIC, then what's wrong with using a tool that works?
- dllthomas 13y ago"A shell that instead of working on character streams worked on structured and annotated data streams, so it could intelligently interpret what is going on?" I'm not convinced that's worse, but I'm not convinced it's better for the task of being a shell. It's totally, unequivocally, way the hell better when you're trying to build anything large out of it, but taking everything back to byte streams at the interfaces means a huge ability to easily reformulate things to fit them together.
- im3w1l 13y agoThe by far easiest way to write formulae I've come across is pen and paper. I could imagine a drawing tablet interface with good computer vision algorithms could be nice.
- jodrellblank 13y agoSurface Pro has a digitizer and pen, Windows has math-writing recognition from pen input: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-ph/windows7/use-math-input-panel-to-write-and-correct-math-equations http://windows.microsoft.com/en-ph/windows7/use-math-input-p... OneNote has "insert Ink Equation" (I don't know if it uses the same engine, or has its own).
- markdennehy 13y ago1) You run latex twice only on really large and complex documents like books, and if you're writing books (not editing, see antipope.org for details) in Word, then you need professional help. 2) Markdown and LaTeX are designed for different tasks. Next you'll be telling me that if you have a leafblower, you have no need for a chainsaw. 3) Find me the structured and annotated data streams first - and show me that the structure and annotations are correct - then lament the lack of a shell that can route them to the programs that don't interpret stdin and stdout and stderr that way anyway. 4) I use vim to write latex when I write latex, but "in a bash shell" doesn't make any sense. You fire up vim from bash, yes, but unless you're trying to do an ex-style editing session, you're not editing in the shell any more than you're editing in the kernel or the tty driver...
- callesgg 13y agoOne could easily remove then fan on the leefblower engine and add a saw blade.
- flying-sheep 13y agomarkdown is perfect for forum comments, but idiotic to extend too far. if you’re a programmer wanting to write a book in markdown, you’ll find yourself thinking of markdown syntax extensions more than thinking about the book. if you want extensibility and still a rather lightweight syntax, try restructuredtext. it has exactly one flaw compared to markdown, which is the hideous inline link syntax (which practically forces you to use named links). that makes it less suited for forum comments (where you might want to quickly inline 1-2 links), but perfect for books (where you can neatly specify your link targets below the current section)
- markdennehy 13y agoOr you could just use LaTeX, which has been used for writing books for decades (the word you're looking for is "debugged" and the phrase is either "well understood" or "well documented"). And yes, there are efforts underway to improve it (LaTeX3) but 2e works so well, there's not been much drive there. And if you find LaTeX is so hard, there's always LyX...
- flying-sheep 13y agoLuaTeX is exactly what you’re talking about. LuaLaTeX is a reimplementation of PDFLaTeX on that base. ConTeXt is a new syntax/concept based on LuaLaTeX (that doesn’t want to be compatible with LaTeX and its errors) --- That shell is unfortunately MS PowerShell. There are several approaches to do it in a way more familiar and compatible with unix shells. (some of which have been started recently, such as Final Term, and some are vaporware, such as TermKit) And most editors are like that, some of which even have an optional vim mode for fans of that control scheme (my favourite is Kate)
- AliceWonder32 13y agoLaTeX is not slow or inconsistent. You only need to run it multiple times if you use features that require it, and that is because one pass generates code to be read in a second pass. The syntax is not ugly. It's a macro programming language. If you don't like use vim (or emaca with AucTeX) to write it, look at LaTeXila - it's pretty good. If on Windows, notepad++ is also free and has excellent support for LaTeX.
- tincholio 13y ago> Markdown is better. Microsoft Word is better. They just both lack certain things we need, and LaTeX has those things. That comparison right there, between systems in entirely different categories, tells me you have no idea about what you're saying.