8 ms·

The LaTeX cargo cult

111 points by reledi 12y ago

andridk 12y ago
I don't disagree with his arguments. But, it's still the best typesetting tool that I know of.
- ObviousScience 12y ago
  I too agree with all of his points... but what's a realistic alternative stack that satisfies those points without drastically cutting down on the available rendering tools and packages for specialized tasks?
  - brodney 12y ago
    If .rtf/.doc is in such high demand, can't we output to those formats using LaTeX? I think of it as just another output alongside dvi/pdf/etc, but I know very little of the internals that would generate those additional formats.
    - ObviousScience 12y ago
      I mean, I view .DOC was worse than Latex in terms of ability to correctly render it in the future, ability to generate complex documents correctly from originals, ability to programmatically interact with it, and generally anything to do with the future. I'm tempted to go down some XML path, because that separates concerns between the semantic structuring of the document/corpus and the rendering of it, but is that really better than just using a declarative subset of LaTeX and worrying about correctly implementing the styling scripts to render them as desired? I have my doubts it would really be an improvement. For context, I have a project at work coming up for which I have a bit of time to establish a toolchain and our format for things like documentation, specifications, etc. I'm open to the suggestion I should spend some of that time working on a system to make sure we don't hit a rendering issue on a technical manual in a few years when technologies change. (I'd also like to look in to literate programming tools, so semantic demarcation for automatic selection of certain kinds of elements in the document is high on my list of things to look in to, as well as relationships between and metadata in those blocks.) I'm just not convinced that trying to replace Latex with XML or anything of that nature is actually going to make my life better in those regards, rather than being a waste of time. (If you haven't noticed, XML is sort of the main alternative to Latex in my mind for the things I'm trying to do; perhaps there are better options.)
    - UnoriginalGuy 12y ago
      It would be more rational to output to HTML5, since there are insane amounts of HTML to X converters around (APIs and tools alike). PDF or Doc from HTML is utterly trivial at this stage.
      - krakensden 12y ago
        Math conversions tend to be lossy or involve rasterization (that inevitably ages poorly).
      - Derbasti 12y ago
        I am very tempted to try to write my next publication in HTML. However, I seriously worry about things like footnotes, code examples, floating figures and references. CSS3 seems to have support for many of these, but I wonder how well the convert-to-PDF pipeline really works, and how flexible it really is. It's bad enough if I have to convert my original source to some other format years down the line, but it is absolutely critical that I can at least create the initial PDF correctly.
    - jarvist 12y ago
      Yes, it's what I do when I submit to a journal that accepts submissions as RTF/DOC. It even has acceptable recoding for the maths. http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/ http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/
tonfa 12y ago
Though he points out this mostly applies to philosophy papers. Many of the points do not really apply in some other scientific fields (I usually had no trouble submit LaTeX papers for CS journals/conferences).
- TTPrograms 12y ago
  The primary strength of using LaTeX is math typesetting. If you're not writing equations the argument gets to be very subjective. If you are writing equations there's nearly no alternative (at least one nearly as well proven).
robinhoodexe 12y ago
While (La)Tex could be better/faster/easier to use, it's still the best typesetting system there is.
jmount 12y ago
I like Latex (Math/CS background), but I would definitely like to try some alternatives (like Asciidoc discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8509062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8509062 ). The problem is I never can tell which Markdown/Docbook inspired systems actually have working implementations and which ones are hot air. I don't want to end up with a big SGML mess that I can't do anything with or have to edit CSS just to render a book in a standard format. Any recommendations/tutorials? My ideal system would allow something like literate-programming/sweave/knitr. The notation could be any of markdownish/xml/ascii. I would have to be able to do call-outs/annotations on listings with tags (not insane/fragile region specifications). I need figures and charts. And I would have to be able to produce at least HTML5, PDF, epub, mobi. And I need support for footnotes, endnotes, tables of contents, indexes, and bibliographies. Flexibility in back-ends (like being able to render to Latex) would also be good. Edit: the sweave/knitr thing I can live without (could probably arranged a pre-process to do this).
- masklinn 12y ago
  Sphinx has most of these, though not all (it doesn't have the literate programming part, it could probably be done though; and the standard builders are html4). And I'll acknowledge that ReST is hard to love.
- amouat 12y ago
  asciidoc is quite nice. It can output DocBook which I think is pretty well supported. I'm currently writing a book in asciidoc which produces output in all your mentioned formats and includes footnotes, endnotes, call-outs, code listings, index etc. However, whilst I write almost exclusively in asciidoc, a lot of the styling etc is done by the publisher's docbook workflow.
- ultimape 12y ago
  I've had good luck using tools like Pandoc as part of a workflow to translate between various messes.
siscia 12y ago
> LaTeX input files are proprietary to LaTeX, just as .doc is Word. The only definition of LaTeX as a language is “whatever LaTeX does”. I am sorry but I don't see this point... Everybody is free to write a parser for .tex files and use it for whatever reason they want... You are not free to do so with .doc or other proprietary format...
- lamby 12y ago
  > You are not free to do so with .doc or other proprietary format... Eh?
  - namtrac 12y ago
    doc format is not documented, obviously.
    - brandonbloom 12y ago
      The doc (and docx) formats are actually very well documented, thanks to pressure from the EU: [MS-DOC]: Word (.doc) Binary File Format http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/cc313153(v=office.12).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/cc313153(v=of... [MS-DOCX]: Word Extensions to the Office Open XML (.docx) File Format http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd773189(v=office.12).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd773189(v=office.12...
      - cldellow 12y ago
        "Very well" is a euphemism here, I assume? I worked in Windows Server when Microsoft was under the US DOJ consent decree and had to document every thing that looked at all like an API--even internal things that were just APIfied for design reasons / ease of testability / to make servicing simpler. I can say with some confidence that no one gave a shit about producing good quality docs. Without exception, people viewed the government requirement as onerous and excessive and we produced docs that were perhaps technically correct, but did not provide insight into why things were the way they were. No effort at ease of readability was made, either.
praseodym 12y ago
Personally, I could just as well use Word for most of my work, but I like not having to use shortcuts or plough through menus to format my text. Markdown is a nice alternative, but doesn't support referencing figures and tables nor does it support citations.
chimeracoder 12y ago
> LaTeX input files are a proprietary format. This is a really misleading statement, especially since it comes after him stating that "LaTeX is free in both senses". LaTeX input files apparently lack a standard specification, which is admittedly bad, but then again, so do the input files of many programming languages that some people on HN are writing on a daily basis[0]. This is not the same thing as them being proprietary; anyone can write a new LaTeX parser and there is nothing stopping them legally or technically from doing so. [0] I may be wrong, but I believe PHP and Ruby both fall under this category. Markdown is another example (everyone parses it in a slightly different way, and while it's generally consistent, there are definitely warts around the edge cases where it's clear that Markdown would benefit from having a standard).
- revelation 12y ago
  By his definition, every document ever written in any DSL is in a propietary format. Personally, I'm perfectly happy if I can open a document in a text editor and get the content that way. That obviously works perfectly fine with LaTeX, it doesn't work at all with doc.
  - lmm 12y ago
    > By his definition, every document ever written in any DSL is in a propietary format. I think that's basically true. The good formats are formats that have a) a standard but more importantly b) multiple independent implementations. > Personally, I'm perfectly happy if I can open a document in a text editor and get the content that way. That obviously works perfectly fine with LaTeX, it doesn't work at all with doc. You can get the content, but not the formatting, which was presumably important if you were using latex. It's pretty trivial to extract the plain text from a word doc too.
htns 12y ago
>LaTeX will never be able to effectively render a LaTeX document to a web browser’s finite view of an infinitely tall document or read it aloud, because its output primitives are oriented around print media, and its apparently declarative constructs are defined in terms of them. That is somewhat untrue. You can lay out content in a box of fixed width, and then set the page size to that plus margins. Now perhaps the performance isn't good enough for real time rendering, but setting up custom schemes is very possible and not as difficult as people might fear. And LaTeX already supports PDF search, so I don't see why it could not support accessibility features like speaking the text.
Rhapso 12y ago
I use latex daily and tolerate it. If you can offer me a tool that does a similar job (conforms to ieee journal style specifications and deals with citations well) then I would love to hear about it. The biggest reason I do like latex, is that it allows me to put 1 sentence per line and has a text based format that git handles well. This makes collaborative editing and writing much more manageable.
graycat 12y ago
Good news for the OP: The OP seems to want more output options than just paper or PDF. It appears that the OP also wants HTML output. Okay. TeX and LaTeX say next to nothing about the final physical form of the document and, instead, leave all that to an appropriate device driver. Or, TeX (and likely LaTeX) puts out a file called device independent with three letter file name extension DVI. Basically a DVI file says, put this character here on the page, then put the next character there on the page, etc. Then move to a new page. Well, then, it would appear that there could be a device driver that would convert a DVI file to HTML. And there should be a way to have the HTML file make use of suitable fonts and the special math symbols. Besides, now Unicode has a lot of characters and symbols. It appears that the OP feels that typing a paper into TeX or LaTeX somehow locks him into TeX in a bad way. But, TeX is fully open source with some of the best and most beautiful software documentation ever written.
- andreasvc 12y ago
  There are latex to HTML converters and they only work for a subset of latex functionality. It is not as simple as defining a driver that outputs HTML. Latex and HTML work in fundamentally different ways: latex typesets for a fixed paper size, and specifies its coordinates in physical dimensions. HTML is free flowing; if the user resizes the window the layout should adapt, they layout has to work on mobile devices, etc. The HTML way asks for a completely different way of designing layout, and Latex is simply not the right tool for that job. Incidentally I believe that the Latex way of typesetting for a specific paper size is superior, because it allows the typesetter to manually arrange everything until it looks just right, whereas with HTML there are x number of browsers, with y number of screen sizes, and you have much less control over the final look.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    >HTML is free flowing; if the user resizes the window the layout should adapt, they layout has to work on mobile devices, etc. The HTML way asks for a completely different way of designing layout, and Latex is simply not the right tool for that job. I agree that HTML should re-flow. Let's try with the OP article. <http://imgur.com/LWrS6pn> http://imgur.com/LWrS6pn>
brians 12y ago
It's funny to hear this compared to Markdown. The reference implementation of Markdown uses regexes applied in order---an operationally defined language. Only niche implementations like the beautiful Pandoc---also by a philosopher---use a real parser to provide a less leaky declarative semantics.
mhandley 12y ago
The biggest advantage of latex is that by (mostly) separating content from presentation, you can use revision control systems like git or svn to collaborate on papers. You can be in that final hour before the paper submission deadline, on a skype call with four authors scattered around the world, all simultaneously editing the paper (each using whatever tools they prefer), and be reasonably confident it won't all end in tears. That's when you really understand the advantage of this latex-style markup. Don't get me wrong - there are lots of things I hate about latex, but I'll almost certainly keep using it because of the workflow it enables.
- pinko 12y ago
  Isn't this also a feature of ASCII-based markup languages, which the author suggests as the right alternative to LaTeX?
  - mhandley 12y ago
    I'm old enough to have collaborated on papers using troff (strictly speaking psroff) and sccs as a revision control system, long before latex became popular and PDF didn't yet exist. So, yes, the primary requirement is, as you say, for an ASCII-based markup system to enable this workflow. However, latex is extremely good at flowing text while applying good style guidelines. Most of the time you know that extending a paragraph by a line won't make anything bad happen - no titles left at the bottom of a page, acceptable stretch of line spacing, and things like that. Of course you can only push this so far before you have to fiddle about moving figures to the right page, etc. This is probably unavoidable, although it would be better to have a bit more direct control over where floats end up. The key thing is that latex does mostly get the small stuff right, so you're not constantly yelling at your collaborators for breaking anything.
- pavanred 12y ago
  I agree with this, my thesis committee wanted my thesis as a research paper (irrespective of whether my work was going to be published or not) but in the final stages the graduate college declined to approve it in spite of my committee's approval because they require a predefined format of the thesis. The change of format took me a few minutes, thanks to latex. I can't begin to imagine how much work and anxiety it would have taken to change the entire format at the last minute otherwise.
mangecoeur 12y ago
LaTeX is a good idea with a terrible implementation. The popularity of markdown (+variants) is a testament to the usefulness of plain text writing. However, LaTeX syntax is a clunky and the ecosystem is a scrapheap-challenge amalgamation of packages with assorted cross-incompatibilities. Latex to PDF converters are also shockingly slow for this day and age, a simple document can take several seconds to compile compared to browsers which can re-flow complex HTML documents in milliseconds. IMHO this is because of the ad-hoc nature of people using Latex, its been cobbled together by researchers based on their needs at the time while HTML+browsers have been carefully designed and optimized by people who know the intricacies of document rendering. Researchers just aren't very good software engineers as a rule so perhaps its not surprising that they produce something that more or less works but is not very well designed
- joemi 12y ago
  To be fair, LaTeX has a more complicated method of processing text since it considers a lot of typographic issues that browsers do not, so it has to be slower than a browser when rendering text. That said, I don't know enough to say whether the amount it's slower is proportional or not.
- deong 12y ago
  There are a couple of issues here. First, Markdown and HTML simply punt on the vast majority of the issues that TeX solves. Just as the author rightly comments that TeX is not geared toward online publication, HTML is geared toward only that model. If you want to paginate HTML or Markdown, you do it yourself. Widows and orphans are (obviously) your problem to deal with. Compared to the work that TeX is doing, Markdown is, to a first order approximation, just catting the file. HTML can reflow a document in real-time because it's doing a really poor job of reflowing the document. Even when they work, they're just putting line breaks in whenever the width would otherwise be too wide. TeX is running a dynamic programming algorithm to minimize the "badness" of the line breaks across multiple lines and even paragraphs. And quite a lot of the time, the browser just throws its hands up and says, "fuck it, you can just scroll horizontally to read the rest of this line". You can't do that on paper. So of course it's faster. You might as well be complaining that Preview is faster than Photoshop. HTML and Markdown don't do automatic hyphenation (across multiple languages). They don't do ligatures. They don't do proper text justification (neither does Microsoft Word or Libre Office for that matter). They don't do cross reference tracking (i.e., having automatically numbered sections, tables, figures, etc. with automatically updated references). They have no logic at all for automated float placement. Font handling is specified by a human instead of relying on algorithmic font selection and substitution when necessary. I could go on for pages of this. I think the idea that web browser vendors are better at this sort of thing than TeX and LaTeX is so wrong I don't know where to start. The author complains that some of his 20 year old LaTeX articles rely on outdated files to render properly. While this is true, and very occasionally a problem, it's only very recently that you had even the vaguest hope that your HTML document would render the same way on two different computers owned by the same person today! Arguably, the biggest slice of the software industry is now devoted to making things render on browsers. And for Markdown, we quite recently saw that even the simplest text rendered in no fewer than 17 different ways depending on which software (and version) you processed it with. If my goal is to be able to reproduce the output of today 15 or 20 years from now, HTML would be the absolute worst choice I could think of, unless again, you stick with <b> tags and the like, and the subset of LaTeX you can reliably assume will always work gives you much broader coverage of the space of typesetting issues than the subset of HTML that doesn't change monthly does. Not to mention, I can still more easily go get an old LaTeX implementation to rebuild a document that doesn't compile anymore (but in 15 years, I've never had to). It's quite a lot harder to get Netscape Navigator 3 up and running to attempt to faithfully render a document I wrote in 1997. Also, web browsers have historically been just about the buggiest, most insecure, and transient pieces of software we've ever written as a field, and TeX is famously maybe the highest quality piece of software ever written. It's more or less fine that the web changes every 18 months. It's a problem for archivists, but the web isn't really intended for that. Academic publications are though, and the impedance mismatch is, in my opinion, brutal. The interface (by which I mean the programming language) of TeX and LaTeX is indeed pretty dreadful, but this is a really minor issue compared to the rest of it. There are a lot of things I dislike about LaTeX, but I don't see how HTML or Markdown is an improvement. You'd need a completely new thing that supported everything that LaTeX supports, and while you could certainly do so with a nicer language, you couldn't do it with something as clean and simple as Markdown -- there are just too many things you need to be able to tell it you want it to do.
siscia 12y ago
> a. It’s an operational rather than a declarative language. If TeX was declarative you should wait for somebody to implement in the engine any features...
moomin 12y ago
latex2e is 20 years old. I appreciate that's not the same as permanence, but in terms of stability in computer science, it's far from shoddy.
gcv 12y ago
I wish the meme about the supposed superiority of "declarative" languages would go away. They have tradeoffs, like everything else. "Make" is also declarative — and horrific. TeX has plenty of warts by modern standards (and the LaTeX macro package even more so), but the suggestion that HTML+CSS work better for general layout use is ridiculous (the standards committee only heard that multi-column layouts are impossible without major hackery what, last year?). I tried docbook for a document a while ago, and it was horrible. SGML might be acceptable for machine generation, but not for human writing. The toolchain is even worse than TeX's, hard as that may be to believe. A replacement for TeX would be fantastic, but its absence over the last 30 years suggests that it's difficult to get right and achieve critical mass.
new299 12y ago
There are a few nice things about Latex for scientific publications: 1. It's style driven. I'm not sure how well you can do this is Word now. But in Latex it's pretty easy to reformat your document to match a journal or thesis style. 2. It's scriptable. I don't mean that it's Turing complete. But you can drive it with a Makefile. This is great for scientific publications I've found. You can script it such that Make will re-build you tools, re-run analysis, generate new figures, and then regenerate the article. This save a lot of time when you're iterating over a publication. 3. Well integrated reference management. Bibtex itself is a mess, but if you don't need to alter the reference format, it works well. 4. Equations! I think it's probably overkill for what he's doing. Sounds like Markdown + a reference manager would be fine for him. But for a lot of scientific publications it has handy features. I too would like to find something else, but I've not seen anything. I guess you could write everything in HTML! But it's obviously not well suited to this application.
- auntienomen 12y ago
  A footnote to your 2nd point: LaTeX actually is Turing complete. (You can find a Turing machine implemented in LaTeX at http://en.literateprograms.org/Turing_machine_simulator_%28LaTeX%29 http://en.literateprograms.org/Turing_machine_simulator_%28L... .) As far as I know, this feature is more amusing than useful.
  - new299 12y ago
    Oh sure. It's programmability gets used quite a lot I think e.g.: http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/tag/fractals/ http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/tag/fractals/ There are also some really nice graph drawing libraries etc. which I would guess rely on this.
- ygra 12y ago
  1. has been possible in Word for ages (according to an article recently on the front page, it's been the main difference between Word and WordPerfect), and it's pretty much how you write documents of any size without going insane. I'm actually astonished how many people think that using Word means using direct formatting and eschewing styles.
joosters 12y ago
LaTeX: great for those compsci students who don't want to stop programming, even when they come to write up their projects :)
monochr 12y ago
I don't think I've ever seen a physics paper not typeset in Latex.
CrLf 12y ago
As much as I like LaTeX, I think it has outlived its usefulness. Let me elaborate a bit... LaTeX is pretty good for typesetting lots of text, like novels, if you want to output something that looks professional without much effort. It's also good for typesetting lots of mathematical formulas, as the GUI alternatives are pretty tedious to use and the result doesn't look as good. It's also interesting as a template language, to produce documents from applications, but here's where it starts to become obsolete: there are a lot of alternatives to do this that don't force the person creating the templates to be technically-inclined and having to learn LaTeX. Also, LaTeX becomes downright irritating when trying to make complex documents. The rules say you let LaTeX choose the looks of your document, while you focus on content, but it's impossible not to spend hours fighting it because it's not breaking pages or placing figures where we want it to (and iterating over this endlessly as the document is modified). You just cannot force yourself to let LaTeX do everything by itself. So, it's useful for novels (which might as well be written in plain text and let the publisher do the typesetting) or documents with a lot of maths (which are nowadays most likely also complex documents that cannot go without human intervention to look good.) I like LaTeX for the technical aspect of it, but in the end it's just a tool do accomplish some goal and, sorry, but Word doesn't consume that much resources anymore on a modern machine...
- avian 12y ago
  > LaTeX becomes downright irritating when trying to make complex documents. Sorry, but this is simply not true. Maybe I could agree with a general "it is irritating to make complex documents", though. After many bitter fights with WYSIWYG software and 300+ page technical documents, I firmly believe that LaTeX is by far the least irritating way of making them.
  - deleted 12y ago
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tehabe 12y ago
I think LaTeX has one disadvantage and it is not mentioned in the linked article. It has nothing to do with this "Cargo cult" thing, which I'm not sure it used correctly in this text but nevermind that. The disadvantage is, that while LaTeX has an excellent support for PDF or PS its support for e.g. EPUB is awful. Otherwise there is nothing better to write longer text than LaTeX.
- roel_v 12y ago
  The whole article is exactly about that point. Epub is just a packaged set of html pages, for which tex is horrible, because it's page-centric.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > The disadvantage is, that while LaTeX has an excellent support for PDF or PS its support for e.g. EPUB is awful. Well, yeah, but ePub is just a packaging format for HTML as input to a system that does its own layout and pagination, LaTeX is a layout/pagination system. Using it to generate ePub makes about as much sense as using ePub reading system to generate LaTeX. It'd be better to just have end-user device-side apps that compiled LaTeX to PS/PDF/etc. after plugging in a device-appropriate page size, using LaTex as the distribution format and the rendered format as the viewing format than to use LaTeX to generate ePub
  - tehabe 12y ago
    LaTeX is but the code of a LaTeX isn't. You should be able to create whatever you want out of it. The commands in the file (just) have to be interpret differently and yes, this "just" thing is the big point, because it is not easy, especially for a language which is as old as LaTeX. For me it is odd, I currently rely on LaTeX for my workflow. Creating documents which includes other PDF files and a certain pre defined layout is (for me) very easy to do in LaTeX. Especially if the ground work (layout) is done.
indubitably 12y ago
We should be writing papers in HTML.
lelf 12y ago
I don't know why many people, including the author skips (or don't even see?) the important point: we are not just miles and miles far away, we are in the entirely different reality from where automatic typography is any good. So the more it's “declarative” (whatever this means) the worse it will look. This is out ugly reality. And the document in LaTeX made by someone without a clue (≈ how we want it, simple and declarative) is f*cking MSWord-level ugly.
przemoc 12y ago
All hard (but honest) LaTeX fans may enjoy reading my old post about LaTeX, which is somehow loosely related (I hope I'm not overstretching it :>). Getting things done in LaTeX (or not) http://abyss.przemoc.net/post/28208254393/getting-things-done-in-latex-or-not http://abyss.przemoc.net/post/28208254393/getting-things-don... Surely any modern complete (La)TeX replacement would be a good thing to have, but I haven't found out any yet, so LaTeX IMHO still remains one of the best choices when it comes to writing/publishing stuff. I think that reStructuredText could be a nice foundation for some more generic writing/publishing solution, where TeX notation could be still uded for math environments (as I don't know any better one for that). Markdown is too vague, imprecise and inflexible, and CommonMark - a strongly specified, highly compatible implementation of Markdown - is not much better, mostly due to Markdown compatibility. EDIT: AsciiDoc could be also used instead of reST.
cvsintellect 12y ago
May be specialized applications giving a WYSIWYG editor while using LaTeX in the background be useful? Like the one we have built: www.cvsintellect.com. Its a CV / Résumé builder built on LaTeX but the user does not need to know LaTeX.
deleted 12y ago
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impendia 12y ago
Philosophy journals won't accept manuscripts typeset in LaTeX?! Journal publishers charge thousands of dollars for subscriptions to individual journals. It seems reasonable to occasionally expect publishers to, you know, do the work for which they are being paid. (And to do it competently.)
- Sharlin 12y ago
  As the author mentions, it's a seller's market: the publishers are in a position of both charging thousands of dollars for subscriptions and making their life as convenient as possible at the expense of others'. Anyway, surely it's no wonder many philosophy journals don't accept LaTeX documents? As far as I know, LaTeX isn't really a thing outside hard sciences.
zwiteof 12y ago
So LaTeX sucks, but there's not a good alternative? I'm in the midst of creating a document from scratch with LaTeX for the first time (as opposed to using a template provided to me) and while some things have been annoying, it's mostly been the learning curve of figuring how to do what I wanted. Tables are a mess though. It seems like I need to stitch 3 different packages together to do what I want with my tables.
Yetanfou 12y ago
LaTeX has one large advantage over lesser text processors which this article does not touch upon: Quidquid LaTeX dictum sit, altum videtur Put two documents in front of someone used to quickly scanning scientific articles. One of them is formatted using LaTeX, the other using whatever document template Word happened to be launched with. In my experience the LaTeX-formatted article will be seen as a more reliable source than the Word-formatted one, even if the contents are similar.
- sjtrny 12y ago
  In my experience this is something that I do subconsciously but it's often justified. People who write in word do so because they are unaware of LaTeX or because they don't know how. The first means they are usually not familiar enough with the field to understand that LaTeX is the default. This lack of understanding is then also present in the content. The second reason is usually indicitive of someone who is lazy or is writing junk. If they can't write LaTeX then it is unlikely that they can write other code.
  - Sharlin 12y ago
    This, of course, only applies in the fields where LaTeX is in fact a de facto standard.
Xcelerate 12y ago
When I started grad school, I initially used LaTeX to prepare my articles. But then my advisor tried to open one of my documents on his machine (Windows, I'm using a Mac) and some kind of weird error came up. So we spent one whole advising session with him searching for MiKTeX and installing it, whereupon my document still wouldn't load for whatever reason. Then once BibTeX got in the mix, it became even messier. Well, I finally finished the article and submitted it to a journal, but they had so many requirements for LaTeX submissions that it took a while to change everything for it. Once I finally submitted it -- surprise! -- their online LaTeX compiler came back with another weird error. It took me about 8 more submission attempts to isolate the "bug" (which was some kind of issue due to differences in versions and default packages installed on their machine vs mine), and I finally got a PDF generated. Except it still didn't look the same as mine for whatever reason. Well, the article got rejected from that journal, and so as I'm applying for another journal, I read "Word documents only". So I gave up on LaTeX. Too much of a hassle for me. Maybe it's a smooth process for everyone else, but I don't have any problems just typing a Word document and sending it off. (Although I do miss LaTeX's equation typesetting system.)
- qznc 12y ago
  TeX sources are only for co-authors. Everybody else gets the generated pdf. Advisors et al can annotate the pdf or print-and-scribble. All my publishing venues only gave templates and required a pdf.
  - evanb 12y ago
    The preferred format for arXiv submissions is source. http://arxiv.org/help/submit#text http://arxiv.org/help/submit#text
cheez 12y ago
So the alternative is to use Word? That's messed up.
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  It's argumentation from "my journal requires Word". Somebody should add that to the Wikipedia list.
  - cheez 12y ago
    I can see requiring org mode files, but not word.
tincholio 12y ago
For someone who works in philosophy, his argumentation is extremely weak...
sktrdie 12y ago
I understand some of the negative things about LaTeX but it generates outstanding documents that no other processing system can match so far. Specifically the typography: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beautiful-typography-done-in-tex-friends http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beau... http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/85904/showcase-of-beautiful-title-page-done-in-tex http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/85904/showcase-of-bea... Also the graphs are outstanding: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/158668/nice-scientific-pictures-show-off http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/158668/nice-scientifi...
- deleted 12y ago
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- hdevalence 12y ago
  I don't see anything on that page that couldn't be done with, say, InDesign.
  - sktrdie 12y ago
    Probably but I don't think most people can afford InDesign.
deleted 12y ago
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dendory 12y ago
I use LaTeX for anything complex or long form, and Markdown for anything else. I have yet to find something that can beat it.
qznc 12y ago
What is the alternative? The author does not propose any. Office documents do not play well with version control systems. HTML for printing is quite poor and buggy on features (e.g. column layout, page-relative positioning).
- titanomachy 12y ago
  The article mentions markdown, HTML. I think markdown is more practical for actually writing in, and combined with pandoc it can be very powerful. Both of these formats should work well with version control. Personally, I find that markdown's minimalism goes very nicely with git. As long as you use suitable line wrapping it generates very concise and helpful diffs. Bonus: if you're using pandoc you get native use of LaTeX's math mode.
  - xorcist 12y ago
    Even if you're using pandoc + markdown you're still dependent on LaTeX, so the question to ask is really why not write in LaTeX directly to begin with? If you already know it, and you do if you are in certain parts of academia, it's probably the easiest route. Or put differently: nobody has even gotten rejected for typing in LaTeX, if you pardon the expression.
- sampo 12y ago
  > What is the alternative? The author does not propose any. The author is an academic. He is concerned about writing papers. His solution is to write papers in Word, submit to journals, and let the publisher worry about the final layout.
- mxfh 12y ago
  Wrote my thesis in IDML, worked surprisingly well, yet Adobe InDesign is a beast of its own. And once you run into more problems you're pretty much on your own.
muyuu 12y ago
I had no idea that LaTeX was popular among philosophers.
etrautmann 12y ago
Markdown is a great idea, but are there markdown based solutions for 1) figure numbering and caption handling, 2) references, 3) automatically updating an index? Anyone in academia needs to worry about all of these, and solutions in Word are sufficiently worse than LaTeX, which automatically updates all references, heading numbers, regenerates figures that have changed, and tracks your index for longer documents like theses.
Animats 12y ago
LaTeX, and TeX, are the last gasp of a long line of development. That line starts with MIT's RUNOFF, which begat roff, nroff ("New ROFF"), troff, ditroff, psroff, and finally TeX. It's the last of the programming-language like word processing systems. TeX assumes your final output is paper. That's an obsolete assumption. The math features are concerned with presentation. You can't cut a formula from TeX and paste it into Mathematica or MathCAD and have it understood. TeX doesn't understand mathematical notation; it just format it for printing. We need to get past that.
- sjtrny 12y ago
  I think wolfram alpha has some support for tex notation.
Cheatboy2 12y ago
I don't get the point about declarative vs operational paradigms. LaTeX does a great job separating the data and the processes (it is declarative in this sense), although it allows to mess with both inside the document for flexibility. I can't see the fundamental difference with HTML: it indeed lacks "operational" commands, but is massively used with javascript that implements the dirty stuff.

111 points by reledi 12y ago

andridk 12y ago

I don't disagree with his arguments. But, it's still the best typesetting tool that I know of.

ObviousScience 12y ago
I too agree with all of his points... but what's a realistic alternative stack that satisfies those points without drastically cutting down on the available rendering tools and packages for specialized tasks?
- brodney 12y ago
  If .rtf/.doc is in such high demand, can't we output to those formats using LaTeX? I think of it as just another output alongside dvi/pdf/etc, but I know very little of the internals that would generate those additional formats.
  - ObviousScience 12y ago
    I mean, I view .DOC was worse than Latex in terms of ability to correctly render it in the future, ability to generate complex documents correctly from originals, ability to programmatically interact with it, and generally anything to do with the future. I'm tempted to go down some XML path, because that separates concerns between the semantic structuring of the document/corpus and the rendering of it, but is that really better than just using a declarative subset of LaTeX and worrying about correctly implementing the styling scripts to render them as desired? I have my doubts it would really be an improvement. For context, I have a project at work coming up for which I have a bit of time to establish a toolchain and our format for things like documentation, specifications, etc. I'm open to the suggestion I should spend some of that time working on a system to make sure we don't hit a rendering issue on a technical manual in a few years when technologies change. (I'd also like to look in to literate programming tools, so semantic demarcation for automatic selection of certain kinds of elements in the document is high on my list of things to look in to, as well as relationships between and metadata in those blocks.) I'm just not convinced that trying to replace Latex with XML or anything of that nature is actually going to make my life better in those regards, rather than being a waste of time. (If you haven't noticed, XML is sort of the main alternative to Latex in my mind for the things I'm trying to do; perhaps there are better options.)
  - UnoriginalGuy 12y ago
    It would be more rational to output to HTML5, since there are insane amounts of HTML to X converters around (APIs and tools alike). PDF or Doc from HTML is utterly trivial at this stage.
    - krakensden 12y ago
      Math conversions tend to be lossy or involve rasterization (that inevitably ages poorly).
    - Derbasti 12y ago
      I am very tempted to try to write my next publication in HTML. However, I seriously worry about things like footnotes, code examples, floating figures and references. CSS3 seems to have support for many of these, but I wonder how well the convert-to-PDF pipeline really works, and how flexible it really is. It's bad enough if I have to convert my original source to some other format years down the line, but it is absolutely critical that I can at least create the initial PDF correctly.
  - jarvist 12y ago
    Yes, it's what I do when I submit to a journal that accepts submissions as RTF/DOC. It even has acceptable recoding for the maths. http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/ http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/

tonfa 12y ago

Though he points out this mostly applies to philosophy papers. Many of the points do not really apply in some other scientific fields (I usually had no trouble submit LaTeX papers for CS journals/conferences).

TTPrograms 12y ago
The primary strength of using LaTeX is math typesetting. If you're not writing equations the argument gets to be very subjective. If you are writing equations there's nearly no alternative (at least one nearly as well proven).

robinhoodexe 12y ago

While (La)Tex could be better/faster/easier to use, it's still the best typesetting system there is.

jmount 12y ago

I like Latex (Math/CS background), but I would definitely like to try some alternatives (like Asciidoc discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8509062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8509062 ). The problem is I never can tell which Markdown/Docbook inspired systems actually have working implementations and which ones are hot air. I don't want to end up with a big SGML mess that I can't do anything with or have to edit CSS just to render a book in a standard format. Any recommendations/tutorials? My ideal system would allow something like literate-programming/sweave/knitr. The notation could be any of markdownish/xml/ascii. I would have to be able to do call-outs/annotations on listings with tags (not insane/fragile region specifications). I need figures and charts. And I would have to be able to produce at least HTML5, PDF, epub, mobi. And I need support for footnotes, endnotes, tables of contents, indexes, and bibliographies. Flexibility in back-ends (like being able to render to Latex) would also be good. Edit: the sweave/knitr thing I can live without (could probably arranged a pre-process to do this).

masklinn 12y ago
Sphinx has most of these, though not all (it doesn't have the literate programming part, it could probably be done though; and the standard builders are html4). And I'll acknowledge that ReST is hard to love.
amouat 12y ago
asciidoc is quite nice. It can output DocBook which I think is pretty well supported. I'm currently writing a book in asciidoc which produces output in all your mentioned formats and includes footnotes, endnotes, call-outs, code listings, index etc. However, whilst I write almost exclusively in asciidoc, a lot of the styling etc is done by the publisher's docbook workflow.
ultimape 12y ago
I've had good luck using tools like Pandoc as part of a workflow to translate between various messes.

siscia 12y ago

> LaTeX input files are proprietary to LaTeX, just as .doc is Word. The only definition of LaTeX as a language is “whatever LaTeX does”. I am sorry but I don't see this point... Everybody is free to write a parser for .tex files and use it for whatever reason they want... You are not free to do so with .doc or other proprietary format...

lamby 12y ago
> You are not free to do so with .doc or other proprietary format... Eh?
- namtrac 12y ago
  doc format is not documented, obviously.
  - brandonbloom 12y ago
    The doc (and docx) formats are actually very well documented, thanks to pressure from the EU: [MS-DOC]: Word (.doc) Binary File Format http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/cc313153(v=office.12).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/cc313153(v=of... [MS-DOCX]: Word Extensions to the Office Open XML (.docx) File Format http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd773189(v=office.12).aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd773189(v=office.12...
    - cldellow 12y ago
      "Very well" is a euphemism here, I assume? I worked in Windows Server when Microsoft was under the US DOJ consent decree and had to document every thing that looked at all like an API--even internal things that were just APIfied for design reasons / ease of testability / to make servicing simpler. I can say with some confidence that no one gave a shit about producing good quality docs. Without exception, people viewed the government requirement as onerous and excessive and we produced docs that were perhaps technically correct, but did not provide insight into why things were the way they were. No effort at ease of readability was made, either.

praseodym 12y ago

Personally, I could just as well use Word for most of my work, but I like not having to use shortcuts or plough through menus to format my text. Markdown is a nice alternative, but doesn't support referencing figures and tables nor does it support citations.

chimeracoder 12y ago

> LaTeX input files are a proprietary format. This is a really misleading statement, especially since it comes after him stating that "LaTeX is free in both senses". LaTeX input files apparently lack a standard specification, which is admittedly bad, but then again, so do the input files of many programming languages that some people on HN are writing on a daily basis[0]. This is not the same thing as them being proprietary; anyone can write a new LaTeX parser and there is nothing stopping them legally or technically from doing so. [0] I may be wrong, but I believe PHP and Ruby both fall under this category. Markdown is another example (everyone parses it in a slightly different way, and while it's generally consistent, there are definitely warts around the edge cases where it's clear that Markdown would benefit from having a standard).

revelation 12y ago
By his definition, every document ever written in any DSL is in a propietary format. Personally, I'm perfectly happy if I can open a document in a text editor and get the content that way. That obviously works perfectly fine with LaTeX, it doesn't work at all with doc.
- lmm 12y ago
  > By his definition, every document ever written in any DSL is in a propietary format. I think that's basically true. The good formats are formats that have a) a standard but more importantly b) multiple independent implementations. > Personally, I'm perfectly happy if I can open a document in a text editor and get the content that way. That obviously works perfectly fine with LaTeX, it doesn't work at all with doc. You can get the content, but not the formatting, which was presumably important if you were using latex. It's pretty trivial to extract the plain text from a word doc too.

htns 12y ago

>LaTeX will never be able to effectively render a LaTeX document to a web browser’s finite view of an infinitely tall document or read it aloud, because its output primitives are oriented around print media, and its apparently declarative constructs are defined in terms of them. That is somewhat untrue. You can lay out content in a box of fixed width, and then set the page size to that plus margins. Now perhaps the performance isn't good enough for real time rendering, but setting up custom schemes is very possible and not as difficult as people might fear. And LaTeX already supports PDF search, so I don't see why it could not support accessibility features like speaking the text.

Rhapso 12y ago

I use latex daily and tolerate it. If you can offer me a tool that does a similar job (conforms to ieee journal style specifications and deals with citations well) then I would love to hear about it. The biggest reason I do like latex, is that it allows me to put 1 sentence per line and has a text based format that git handles well. This makes collaborative editing and writing much more manageable.

graycat 12y ago

Good news for the OP: The OP seems to want more output options than just paper or PDF. It appears that the OP also wants HTML output. Okay. TeX and LaTeX say next to nothing about the final physical form of the document and, instead, leave all that to an appropriate device driver. Or, TeX (and likely LaTeX) puts out a file called device independent with three letter file name extension DVI. Basically a DVI file says, put this character here on the page, then put the next character there on the page, etc. Then move to a new page. Well, then, it would appear that there could be a device driver that would convert a DVI file to HTML. And there should be a way to have the HTML file make use of suitable fonts and the special math symbols. Besides, now Unicode has a lot of characters and symbols. It appears that the OP feels that typing a paper into TeX or LaTeX somehow locks him into TeX in a bad way. But, TeX is fully open source with some of the best and most beautiful software documentation ever written.

andreasvc 12y ago
There are latex to HTML converters and they only work for a subset of latex functionality. It is not as simple as defining a driver that outputs HTML. Latex and HTML work in fundamentally different ways: latex typesets for a fixed paper size, and specifies its coordinates in physical dimensions. HTML is free flowing; if the user resizes the window the layout should adapt, they layout has to work on mobile devices, etc. The HTML way asks for a completely different way of designing layout, and Latex is simply not the right tool for that job. Incidentally I believe that the Latex way of typesetting for a specific paper size is superior, because it allows the typesetter to manually arrange everything until it looks just right, whereas with HTML there are x number of browsers, with y number of screen sizes, and you have much less control over the final look.
- DanBC 12y ago
  >HTML is free flowing; if the user resizes the window the layout should adapt, they layout has to work on mobile devices, etc. The HTML way asks for a completely different way of designing layout, and Latex is simply not the right tool for that job. I agree that HTML should re-flow. Let's try with the OP article. <http://imgur.com/LWrS6pn> http://imgur.com/LWrS6pn>

brians 12y ago

It's funny to hear this compared to Markdown. The reference implementation of Markdown uses regexes applied in order---an operationally defined language. Only niche implementations like the beautiful Pandoc---also by a philosopher---use a real parser to provide a less leaky declarative semantics.

mhandley 12y ago

The biggest advantage of latex is that by (mostly) separating content from presentation, you can use revision control systems like git or svn to collaborate on papers. You can be in that final hour before the paper submission deadline, on a skype call with four authors scattered around the world, all simultaneously editing the paper (each using whatever tools they prefer), and be reasonably confident it won't all end in tears. That's when you really understand the advantage of this latex-style markup. Don't get me wrong - there are lots of things I hate about latex, but I'll almost certainly keep using it because of the workflow it enables.

pinko 12y ago
Isn't this also a feature of ASCII-based markup languages, which the author suggests as the right alternative to LaTeX?
- mhandley 12y ago
  I'm old enough to have collaborated on papers using troff (strictly speaking psroff) and sccs as a revision control system, long before latex became popular and PDF didn't yet exist. So, yes, the primary requirement is, as you say, for an ASCII-based markup system to enable this workflow. However, latex is extremely good at flowing text while applying good style guidelines. Most of the time you know that extending a paragraph by a line won't make anything bad happen - no titles left at the bottom of a page, acceptable stretch of line spacing, and things like that. Of course you can only push this so far before you have to fiddle about moving figures to the right page, etc. This is probably unavoidable, although it would be better to have a bit more direct control over where floats end up. The key thing is that latex does mostly get the small stuff right, so you're not constantly yelling at your collaborators for breaking anything.
pavanred 12y ago
I agree with this, my thesis committee wanted my thesis as a research paper (irrespective of whether my work was going to be published or not) but in the final stages the graduate college declined to approve it in spite of my committee's approval because they require a predefined format of the thesis. The change of format took me a few minutes, thanks to latex. I can't begin to imagine how much work and anxiety it would have taken to change the entire format at the last minute otherwise.

mangecoeur 12y ago

LaTeX is a good idea with a terrible implementation. The popularity of markdown (+variants) is a testament to the usefulness of plain text writing. However, LaTeX syntax is a clunky and the ecosystem is a scrapheap-challenge amalgamation of packages with assorted cross-incompatibilities. Latex to PDF converters are also shockingly slow for this day and age, a simple document can take several seconds to compile compared to browsers which can re-flow complex HTML documents in milliseconds. IMHO this is because of the ad-hoc nature of people using Latex, its been cobbled together by researchers based on their needs at the time while HTML+browsers have been carefully designed and optimized by people who know the intricacies of document rendering. Researchers just aren't very good software engineers as a rule so perhaps its not surprising that they produce something that more or less works but is not very well designed

joemi 12y ago
To be fair, LaTeX has a more complicated method of processing text since it considers a lot of typographic issues that browsers do not, so it has to be slower than a browser when rendering text. That said, I don't know enough to say whether the amount it's slower is proportional or not.
deong 12y ago
There are a couple of issues here. First, Markdown and HTML simply punt on the vast majority of the issues that TeX solves. Just as the author rightly comments that TeX is not geared toward online publication, HTML is geared toward only that model. If you want to paginate HTML or Markdown, you do it yourself. Widows and orphans are (obviously) your problem to deal with. Compared to the work that TeX is doing, Markdown is, to a first order approximation, just catting the file. HTML can reflow a document in real-time because it's doing a really poor job of reflowing the document. Even when they work, they're just putting line breaks in whenever the width would otherwise be too wide. TeX is running a dynamic programming algorithm to minimize the "badness" of the line breaks across multiple lines and even paragraphs. And quite a lot of the time, the browser just throws its hands up and says, "fuck it, you can just scroll horizontally to read the rest of this line". You can't do that on paper. So of course it's faster. You might as well be complaining that Preview is faster than Photoshop. HTML and Markdown don't do automatic hyphenation (across multiple languages). They don't do ligatures. They don't do proper text justification (neither does Microsoft Word or Libre Office for that matter). They don't do cross reference tracking (i.e., having automatically numbered sections, tables, figures, etc. with automatically updated references). They have no logic at all for automated float placement. Font handling is specified by a human instead of relying on algorithmic font selection and substitution when necessary. I could go on for pages of this. I think the idea that web browser vendors are better at this sort of thing than TeX and LaTeX is so wrong I don't know where to start. The author complains that some of his 20 year old LaTeX articles rely on outdated files to render properly. While this is true, and very occasionally a problem, it's only very recently that you had even the vaguest hope that your HTML document would render the same way on two different computers owned by the same person today! Arguably, the biggest slice of the software industry is now devoted to making things render on browsers. And for Markdown, we quite recently saw that even the simplest text rendered in no fewer than 17 different ways depending on which software (and version) you processed it with. If my goal is to be able to reproduce the output of today 15 or 20 years from now, HTML would be the absolute worst choice I could think of, unless again, you stick with <b> tags and the like, and the subset of LaTeX you can reliably assume will always work gives you much broader coverage of the space of typesetting issues than the subset of HTML that doesn't change monthly does. Not to mention, I can still more easily go get an old LaTeX implementation to rebuild a document that doesn't compile anymore (but in 15 years, I've never had to). It's quite a lot harder to get Netscape Navigator 3 up and running to attempt to faithfully render a document I wrote in 1997. Also, web browsers have historically been just about the buggiest, most insecure, and transient pieces of software we've ever written as a field, and TeX is famously maybe the highest quality piece of software ever written. It's more or less fine that the web changes every 18 months. It's a problem for archivists, but the web isn't really intended for that. Academic publications are though, and the impedance mismatch is, in my opinion, brutal. The interface (by which I mean the programming language) of TeX and LaTeX is indeed pretty dreadful, but this is a really minor issue compared to the rest of it. There are a lot of things I dislike about LaTeX, but I don't see how HTML or Markdown is an improvement. You'd need a completely new thing that supported everything that LaTeX supports, and while you could certainly do so with a nicer language, you couldn't do it with something as clean and simple as Markdown -- there are just too many things you need to be able to tell it you want it to do.

siscia 12y ago

> a. It’s an operational rather than a declarative language. If TeX was declarative you should wait for somebody to implement in the engine any features...

moomin 12y ago

latex2e is 20 years old. I appreciate that's not the same as permanence, but in terms of stability in computer science, it's far from shoddy.

gcv 12y ago

I wish the meme about the supposed superiority of "declarative" languages would go away. They have tradeoffs, like everything else. "Make" is also declarative — and horrific. TeX has plenty of warts by modern standards (and the LaTeX macro package even more so), but the suggestion that HTML+CSS work better for general layout use is ridiculous (the standards committee only heard that multi-column layouts are impossible without major hackery what, last year?). I tried docbook for a document a while ago, and it was horrible. SGML might be acceptable for machine generation, but not for human writing. The toolchain is even worse than TeX's, hard as that may be to believe. A replacement for TeX would be fantastic, but its absence over the last 30 years suggests that it's difficult to get right and achieve critical mass.

new299 12y ago

There are a few nice things about Latex for scientific publications: 1. It's style driven. I'm not sure how well you can do this is Word now. But in Latex it's pretty easy to reformat your document to match a journal or thesis style. 2. It's scriptable. I don't mean that it's Turing complete. But you can drive it with a Makefile. This is great for scientific publications I've found. You can script it such that Make will re-build you tools, re-run analysis, generate new figures, and then regenerate the article. This save a lot of time when you're iterating over a publication. 3. Well integrated reference management. Bibtex itself is a mess, but if you don't need to alter the reference format, it works well. 4. Equations! I think it's probably overkill for what he's doing. Sounds like Markdown + a reference manager would be fine for him. But for a lot of scientific publications it has handy features. I too would like to find something else, but I've not seen anything. I guess you could write everything in HTML! But it's obviously not well suited to this application.

auntienomen 12y ago
A footnote to your 2nd point: LaTeX actually is Turing complete. (You can find a Turing machine implemented in LaTeX at http://en.literateprograms.org/Turing_machine_simulator_%28LaTeX%29 http://en.literateprograms.org/Turing_machine_simulator_%28L... .) As far as I know, this feature is more amusing than useful.
- new299 12y ago
  Oh sure. It's programmability gets used quite a lot I think e.g.: http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/tag/fractals/ http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/tag/fractals/ There are also some really nice graph drawing libraries etc. which I would guess rely on this.
ygra 12y ago
1. has been possible in Word for ages (according to an article recently on the front page, it's been the main difference between Word and WordPerfect), and it's pretty much how you write documents of any size without going insane. I'm actually astonished how many people think that using Word means using direct formatting and eschewing styles.

joosters 12y ago

LaTeX: great for those compsci students who don't want to stop programming, even when they come to write up their projects :)

monochr 12y ago

I don't think I've ever seen a physics paper not typeset in Latex.

CrLf 12y ago

As much as I like LaTeX, I think it has outlived its usefulness. Let me elaborate a bit... LaTeX is pretty good for typesetting lots of text, like novels, if you want to output something that looks professional without much effort. It's also good for typesetting lots of mathematical formulas, as the GUI alternatives are pretty tedious to use and the result doesn't look as good. It's also interesting as a template language, to produce documents from applications, but here's where it starts to become obsolete: there are a lot of alternatives to do this that don't force the person creating the templates to be technically-inclined and having to learn LaTeX. Also, LaTeX becomes downright irritating when trying to make complex documents. The rules say you let LaTeX choose the looks of your document, while you focus on content, but it's impossible not to spend hours fighting it because it's not breaking pages or placing figures where we want it to (and iterating over this endlessly as the document is modified). You just cannot force yourself to let LaTeX do everything by itself. So, it's useful for novels (which might as well be written in plain text and let the publisher do the typesetting) or documents with a lot of maths (which are nowadays most likely also complex documents that cannot go without human intervention to look good.) I like LaTeX for the technical aspect of it, but in the end it's just a tool do accomplish some goal and, sorry, but Word doesn't consume that much resources anymore on a modern machine...

avian 12y ago
> LaTeX becomes downright irritating when trying to make complex documents. Sorry, but this is simply not true. Maybe I could agree with a general "it is irritating to make complex documents", though. After many bitter fights with WYSIWYG software and 300+ page technical documents, I firmly believe that LaTeX is by far the least irritating way of making them.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

tehabe 12y ago

I think LaTeX has one disadvantage and it is not mentioned in the linked article. It has nothing to do with this "Cargo cult" thing, which I'm not sure it used correctly in this text but nevermind that. The disadvantage is, that while LaTeX has an excellent support for PDF or PS its support for e.g. EPUB is awful. Otherwise there is nothing better to write longer text than LaTeX.

roel_v 12y ago
The whole article is exactly about that point. Epub is just a packaged set of html pages, for which tex is horrible, because it's page-centric.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> The disadvantage is, that while LaTeX has an excellent support for PDF or PS its support for e.g. EPUB is awful. Well, yeah, but ePub is just a packaging format for HTML as input to a system that does its own layout and pagination, LaTeX is a layout/pagination system. Using it to generate ePub makes about as much sense as using ePub reading system to generate LaTeX. It'd be better to just have end-user device-side apps that compiled LaTeX to PS/PDF/etc. after plugging in a device-appropriate page size, using LaTex as the distribution format and the rendered format as the viewing format than to use LaTeX to generate ePub
- tehabe 12y ago
  LaTeX is but the code of a LaTeX isn't. You should be able to create whatever you want out of it. The commands in the file (just) have to be interpret differently and yes, this "just" thing is the big point, because it is not easy, especially for a language which is as old as LaTeX. For me it is odd, I currently rely on LaTeX for my workflow. Creating documents which includes other PDF files and a certain pre defined layout is (for me) very easy to do in LaTeX. Especially if the ground work (layout) is done.

indubitably 12y ago

We should be writing papers in HTML.

lelf 12y ago

I don't know why many people, including the author skips (or don't even see?) the important point: we are not just miles and miles far away, we are in the entirely different reality from where automatic typography is any good. So the more it's “declarative” (whatever this means) the worse it will look. This is out ugly reality. And the document in LaTeX made by someone without a clue (≈ how we want it, simple and declarative) is f*cking MSWord-level ugly.

przemoc 12y ago

All hard (but honest) LaTeX fans may enjoy reading my old post about LaTeX, which is somehow loosely related (I hope I'm not overstretching it :>). Getting things done in LaTeX (or not) http://abyss.przemoc.net/post/28208254393/getting-things-done-in-latex-or-not http://abyss.przemoc.net/post/28208254393/getting-things-don... Surely any modern complete (La)TeX replacement would be a good thing to have, but I haven't found out any yet, so LaTeX IMHO still remains one of the best choices when it comes to writing/publishing stuff. I think that reStructuredText could be a nice foundation for some more generic writing/publishing solution, where TeX notation could be still uded for math environments (as I don't know any better one for that). Markdown is too vague, imprecise and inflexible, and CommonMark - a strongly specified, highly compatible implementation of Markdown - is not much better, mostly due to Markdown compatibility. EDIT: AsciiDoc could be also used instead of reST.

cvsintellect 12y ago

May be specialized applications giving a WYSIWYG editor while using LaTeX in the background be useful? Like the one we have built: www.cvsintellect.com. Its a CV / Résumé builder built on LaTeX but the user does not need to know LaTeX.

deleted 12y ago

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impendia 12y ago

Philosophy journals won't accept manuscripts typeset in LaTeX?! Journal publishers charge thousands of dollars for subscriptions to individual journals. It seems reasonable to occasionally expect publishers to, you know, do the work for which they are being paid. (And to do it competently.)

Sharlin 12y ago
As the author mentions, it's a seller's market: the publishers are in a position of both charging thousands of dollars for subscriptions and making their life as convenient as possible at the expense of others'. Anyway, surely it's no wonder many philosophy journals don't accept LaTeX documents? As far as I know, LaTeX isn't really a thing outside hard sciences.

zwiteof 12y ago

So LaTeX sucks, but there's not a good alternative? I'm in the midst of creating a document from scratch with LaTeX for the first time (as opposed to using a template provided to me) and while some things have been annoying, it's mostly been the learning curve of figuring how to do what I wanted. Tables are a mess though. It seems like I need to stitch 3 different packages together to do what I want with my tables.

Yetanfou 12y ago

LaTeX has one large advantage over lesser text processors which this article does not touch upon: Quidquid LaTeX dictum sit, altum videtur Put two documents in front of someone used to quickly scanning scientific articles. One of them is formatted using LaTeX, the other using whatever document template Word happened to be launched with. In my experience the LaTeX-formatted article will be seen as a more reliable source than the Word-formatted one, even if the contents are similar.

sjtrny 12y ago
In my experience this is something that I do subconsciously but it's often justified. People who write in word do so because they are unaware of LaTeX or because they don't know how. The first means they are usually not familiar enough with the field to understand that LaTeX is the default. This lack of understanding is then also present in the content. The second reason is usually indicitive of someone who is lazy or is writing junk. If they can't write LaTeX then it is unlikely that they can write other code.
- Sharlin 12y ago
  This, of course, only applies in the fields where LaTeX is in fact a de facto standard.

Xcelerate 12y ago

When I started grad school, I initially used LaTeX to prepare my articles. But then my advisor tried to open one of my documents on his machine (Windows, I'm using a Mac) and some kind of weird error came up. So we spent one whole advising session with him searching for MiKTeX and installing it, whereupon my document still wouldn't load for whatever reason. Then once BibTeX got in the mix, it became even messier. Well, I finally finished the article and submitted it to a journal, but they had so many requirements for LaTeX submissions that it took a while to change everything for it. Once I finally submitted it -- surprise! -- their online LaTeX compiler came back with another weird error. It took me about 8 more submission attempts to isolate the "bug" (which was some kind of issue due to differences in versions and default packages installed on their machine vs mine), and I finally got a PDF generated. Except it still didn't look the same as mine for whatever reason. Well, the article got rejected from that journal, and so as I'm applying for another journal, I read "Word documents only". So I gave up on LaTeX. Too much of a hassle for me. Maybe it's a smooth process for everyone else, but I don't have any problems just typing a Word document and sending it off. (Although I do miss LaTeX's equation typesetting system.)

qznc 12y ago
TeX sources are only for co-authors. Everybody else gets the generated pdf. Advisors et al can annotate the pdf or print-and-scribble. All my publishing venues only gave templates and required a pdf.
- evanb 12y ago
  The preferred format for arXiv submissions is source. http://arxiv.org/help/submit#text http://arxiv.org/help/submit#text

cheez 12y ago

So the alternative is to use Word? That's messed up.

marcosdumay 12y ago
It's argumentation from "my journal requires Word". Somebody should add that to the Wikipedia list.
- cheez 12y ago
  I can see requiring org mode files, but not word.

tincholio 12y ago

For someone who works in philosophy, his argumentation is extremely weak...

sktrdie 12y ago

I understand some of the negative things about LaTeX but it generates outstanding documents that no other processing system can match so far. Specifically the typography: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beautiful-typography-done-in-tex-friends http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beau... http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/85904/showcase-of-beautiful-title-page-done-in-tex http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/85904/showcase-of-bea... Also the graphs are outstanding: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/158668/nice-scientific-pictures-show-off http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/158668/nice-scientifi...

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hdevalence 12y ago
I don't see anything on that page that couldn't be done with, say, InDesign.
- sktrdie 12y ago
  Probably but I don't think most people can afford InDesign.

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dendory 12y ago

I use LaTeX for anything complex or long form, and Markdown for anything else. I have yet to find something that can beat it.

qznc 12y ago

What is the alternative? The author does not propose any. Office documents do not play well with version control systems. HTML for printing is quite poor and buggy on features (e.g. column layout, page-relative positioning).

titanomachy 12y ago
The article mentions markdown, HTML. I think markdown is more practical for actually writing in, and combined with pandoc it can be very powerful. Both of these formats should work well with version control. Personally, I find that markdown's minimalism goes very nicely with git. As long as you use suitable line wrapping it generates very concise and helpful diffs. Bonus: if you're using pandoc you get native use of LaTeX's math mode.
- xorcist 12y ago
  Even if you're using pandoc + markdown you're still dependent on LaTeX, so the question to ask is really why not write in LaTeX directly to begin with? If you already know it, and you do if you are in certain parts of academia, it's probably the easiest route. Or put differently: nobody has even gotten rejected for typing in LaTeX, if you pardon the expression.
sampo 12y ago
> What is the alternative? The author does not propose any. The author is an academic. He is concerned about writing papers. His solution is to write papers in Word, submit to journals, and let the publisher worry about the final layout.
mxfh 12y ago
Wrote my thesis in IDML, worked surprisingly well, yet Adobe InDesign is a beast of its own. And once you run into more problems you're pretty much on your own.

muyuu 12y ago

I had no idea that LaTeX was popular among philosophers.

etrautmann 12y ago

Markdown is a great idea, but are there markdown based solutions for 1) figure numbering and caption handling, 2) references, 3) automatically updating an index? Anyone in academia needs to worry about all of these, and solutions in Word are sufficiently worse than LaTeX, which automatically updates all references, heading numbers, regenerates figures that have changed, and tracks your index for longer documents like theses.

Animats 12y ago

LaTeX, and TeX, are the last gasp of a long line of development. That line starts with MIT's RUNOFF, which begat roff, nroff ("New ROFF"), troff, ditroff, psroff, and finally TeX. It's the last of the programming-language like word processing systems. TeX assumes your final output is paper. That's an obsolete assumption. The math features are concerned with presentation. You can't cut a formula from TeX and paste it into Mathematica or MathCAD and have it understood. TeX doesn't understand mathematical notation; it just format it for printing. We need to get past that.

sjtrny 12y ago
I think wolfram alpha has some support for tex notation.

Cheatboy2 12y ago

I don't get the point about declarative vs operational paradigms. LaTeX does a great job separating the data and the processes (it is declarative in this sense), although it allows to mess with both inside the document for flexibility. I can't see the fundamental difference with HTML: it indeed lacks "operational" commands, but is massively used with javascript that implements the dirty stuff.