6 ms·

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

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.
- Agathos 12y ago
  My school publishes a LaTeX template for theses. After I downloaded that, I spent very little time thinking about formatting. Unfortunately my advisor doesn't do LaTeX so it kind of sucked for collaboration.
  - jahewson 12y ago
    My schools's thesis template was incompatible with the packages which I had to use for a specific notation. I spent the rest of the year constantly wrestling it. The OP makes a good point, LaTeX ultimately does not separate content and presentation, nor is it declarative.
  - neltnerb 12y ago
    The latter point is the reason I stopped using LaTeX even though I was proficient enough years past to type up lecture notes in realtime during class with little thought (lots of math). Collaboration with it requires everyone involved to know it. With my adviser and collaborators, I ended up compiling PDFs, printing them, and then they would mark them up by hand because that was fastest. It was not ideal by any stretch. Word has it's faults (cough figure placement and cross-references), but track changes and adding comments to the manuscript is just spot on and easy. Getting comments and revisions done in Word is just an order of magnitude easier, and just leaves me at the end to make sure all the figures are positioned properly with captions. And now that Word finally seems to have gotten Styles and sections working properly (so many horrible disasters with this in previous iterations) it's pretty workable for technical documents. Even the equation editor now very nearly straight up accepts latex markup for the math to the point where it's good enough for all but heavy theory papers. But with LaTeX, asking your busy adviser to look at the compiled output, and then mark up a separate file they have to parse in their head to comment on is just too much effort.
lmm 12y ago
I always see this claim that latex separates content from presentation, but I don't see how it's true. As the article says, \emph{hello} is implemented in terms of font commands; it entangles the semantics (emphasis) and the presentation (italicisation), and there is no way to extract the semantics of a latex document and render it in a different format the way you can with e.g. Markdown.
- tincholio 12y ago
  \emph does not always render as italics, it actually depends on the document class you're using, and you're free to redefine it as you see fit. It just indicates that the argument should be emphasized, not how.
- lottin 12y ago
  Bad example, because \emph means emphasis, not italics, and you can represent the emphasis in any way you want — the italics is just the default. So there is separation of format and content. Though it's true that it's not enforced.
dzsekijo 12y ago
There is a big difference between the web (HTML + CSS) and LaTeX (LaTex + styles) worlds in terms of culture, and that defeats the idea of "separating content from presentation". On the web, that content and presentation are separate, that's a technically a possibility, and culturally an actuality. That is, while you have the technical tools to apply such a separation, the toolkit does not force it on you; you can choose to write html with in-place defined colors and font sizes and other style elements. That the standards are higher than that and one is expected to write clean structural HTML and specify style separately with CSS is just a cultural phenomenon. In the LaTeX world (scientific community), separation of content and presentation is also technically feasible, but the culture that maintains it as standard is missing. Most LaTeX documents are written by scientists who just want the damn thing look as they prefer, and apply all nasty tricks that the system can offer to get at there. The more computer savvy ones engage macro writing to save them a few keystrokes, but that's far from a way of document authoring that keeps content and presentation separate.
- mhandley 12y ago
  Over the years I've written nearly 200 papers with about 70 co-authors, probably 75% of them done in latex (most of the rest in some nroff/troff variant). The process of latex authoring usually involves iteration, with different authors contributing different sections, then a certain amount of rewriting of each other's content. Papers typically have a page limit - often 12 pages. But you ignore all that while coming up with the first few drafts. A couple of days out from the submission deadline, someone (often me) starts to panic that the paper is 16 pages and needs to be 12. That's when you start going through and copy-editing, trimming non-essential content and rephrasing for conciseness. Only during the last 48 hours do you start to worry about tuning the layout, because you know from experience that it will likely all change in the last day. In the last day you're doing fine tuning, panicking that the paper is still 13 paqes and needs to be 12. Now you do a layout tuning pass, and it's now that authors tend to get into all the nasty tricks like negative vspace, tuning caption distances, and so forth. Even then, your co-authors are probably still modifying content without paying too much about the effects on layout. Finally, two hours before the deadline, you've got it down to 12 pages. Now you have to stop changing text without regards to layout. Anyway, my point is that in the weeks/months of writing a paper, the messy mixup of content and presentation really only becomes relevant in the last two hours before the submission deadline. Up until that point, everyone is mostly using the same subset of latex, not worrying too much about the presentation part, because the coarse-grain paper layout is usually handled by the style sheet you get from the conference.
JulianMorrison 12y ago
You want to separate content from presentation? Use pandoc flavored Markdown. LaTeX is a render target. So, for that matter, is Word.

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.

Agathos 12y ago
My school publishes a LaTeX template for theses. After I downloaded that, I spent very little time thinking about formatting. Unfortunately my advisor doesn't do LaTeX so it kind of sucked for collaboration.
- jahewson 12y ago
  My schools's thesis template was incompatible with the packages which I had to use for a specific notation. I spent the rest of the year constantly wrestling it. The OP makes a good point, LaTeX ultimately does not separate content and presentation, nor is it declarative.
- neltnerb 12y ago
  The latter point is the reason I stopped using LaTeX even though I was proficient enough years past to type up lecture notes in realtime during class with little thought (lots of math). Collaboration with it requires everyone involved to know it. With my adviser and collaborators, I ended up compiling PDFs, printing them, and then they would mark them up by hand because that was fastest. It was not ideal by any stretch. Word has it's faults (cough figure placement and cross-references), but track changes and adding comments to the manuscript is just spot on and easy. Getting comments and revisions done in Word is just an order of magnitude easier, and just leaves me at the end to make sure all the figures are positioned properly with captions. And now that Word finally seems to have gotten Styles and sections working properly (so many horrible disasters with this in previous iterations) it's pretty workable for technical documents. Even the equation editor now very nearly straight up accepts latex markup for the math to the point where it's good enough for all but heavy theory papers. But with LaTeX, asking your busy adviser to look at the compiled output, and then mark up a separate file they have to parse in their head to comment on is just too much effort.

lmm 12y ago

I always see this claim that latex separates content from presentation, but I don't see how it's true. As the article says, \emph{hello} is implemented in terms of font commands; it entangles the semantics (emphasis) and the presentation (italicisation), and there is no way to extract the semantics of a latex document and render it in a different format the way you can with e.g. Markdown.

tincholio 12y ago
\emph does not always render as italics, it actually depends on the document class you're using, and you're free to redefine it as you see fit. It just indicates that the argument should be emphasized, not how.
lottin 12y ago
Bad example, because \emph means emphasis, not italics, and you can represent the emphasis in any way you want — the italics is just the default. So there is separation of format and content. Though it's true that it's not enforced.

dzsekijo 12y ago

There is a big difference between the web (HTML + CSS) and LaTeX (LaTex + styles) worlds in terms of culture, and that defeats the idea of "separating content from presentation". On the web, that content and presentation are separate, that's a technically a possibility, and culturally an actuality. That is, while you have the technical tools to apply such a separation, the toolkit does not force it on you; you can choose to write html with in-place defined colors and font sizes and other style elements. That the standards are higher than that and one is expected to write clean structural HTML and specify style separately with CSS is just a cultural phenomenon. In the LaTeX world (scientific community), separation of content and presentation is also technically feasible, but the culture that maintains it as standard is missing. Most LaTeX documents are written by scientists who just want the damn thing look as they prefer, and apply all nasty tricks that the system can offer to get at there. The more computer savvy ones engage macro writing to save them a few keystrokes, but that's far from a way of document authoring that keeps content and presentation separate.

mhandley 12y ago
Over the years I've written nearly 200 papers with about 70 co-authors, probably 75% of them done in latex (most of the rest in some nroff/troff variant). The process of latex authoring usually involves iteration, with different authors contributing different sections, then a certain amount of rewriting of each other's content. Papers typically have a page limit - often 12 pages. But you ignore all that while coming up with the first few drafts. A couple of days out from the submission deadline, someone (often me) starts to panic that the paper is 16 pages and needs to be 12. That's when you start going through and copy-editing, trimming non-essential content and rephrasing for conciseness. Only during the last 48 hours do you start to worry about tuning the layout, because you know from experience that it will likely all change in the last day. In the last day you're doing fine tuning, panicking that the paper is still 13 paqes and needs to be 12. Now you do a layout tuning pass, and it's now that authors tend to get into all the nasty tricks like negative vspace, tuning caption distances, and so forth. Even then, your co-authors are probably still modifying content without paying too much about the effects on layout. Finally, two hours before the deadline, you've got it down to 12 pages. Now you have to stop changing text without regards to layout. Anyway, my point is that in the weeks/months of writing a paper, the messy mixup of content and presentation really only becomes relevant in the last two hours before the submission deadline. Up until that point, everyone is mostly using the same subset of latex, not worrying too much about the presentation part, because the coarse-grain paper layout is usually handled by the style sheet you get from the conference.

JulianMorrison 12y ago

You want to separate content from presentation? Use pandoc flavored Markdown. LaTeX is a render target. So, for that matter, is Word.