61–70 of 104 posts
I respect Latex users, but I believe it should die. However I see no actual replacement now or in near future :/ I wish one of the big guys eliminate it once and for all. But there is little value in developing a replacement for academic paper publishing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thats what I thought too. However, there's a plethora of tools that can generate (and parse!) XML for you, e.g. HAML or Markdown. I write all my TeX docs in Markdown and then convert it to TeX, but stuff like figure placement has to be done in weird comments containing TeX, which'd be easier with RhinoType. HAML for content: http://chriseppstein.github.io/blog/2010/02/08/haml-sucks-fo... (its not so bad :P)
> I write all my TeX docs in Markdown and then convert it to TeX Is there some program that converts Markdown into TeX? Or are you saying that you do this manually?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thats what I thought too. However, there's a plethora of tools that can generate (and parse!) XML for you, e.g. HAML or Markdown. I write all my TeX docs in Markdown and then convert it to TeX, but stuff like figure placement has to be done in weird comments containing TeX, which'd be easier with RhinoType. HAML for content: http://chriseppstein.github.io/blog/2010/02/08/haml-sucks-fo... (its not so bad :P)
> I write all my TeX docs in Markdown and then convert it to TeX Is there some program that converts Markdown into TeX? Or are you saying that you do this manually?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thats what I thought too. However, there's a plethora of tools that can generate (and parse!) XML for you, e.g. HAML or Markdown. I write all my TeX docs in Markdown and then convert it to TeX, but stuff like figure placement has to be done in weird comments containing TeX, which'd be easier with RhinoType. HAML for content: http://chriseppstein.github.io/blog/2010/02/08/haml-sucks-fo... (its not so bad :P)
> I write all my TeX docs in Markdown and then convert it to TeX Is there some program that converts Markdown into TeX? Or are you saying that you do this manually?
LaTeX does a lot of stuff - it'd take a long time to replicate all that functionality. However, on my todo list is to write some sort of "TeX-down" wrapper for LaTeX - I want to write my dissertation in a modified form of Markdown, with inline LaTeX equations and sectioning of "theorem" and "proof"-type environments, and then run a make to generate the TeX and PDF based off of a type of TeX template. I'm familiar wit…
You might like Pandoc[1]. 1: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
:-) But thanks!
"There is no strict separation of content and style. This is mostly an issue for publishers that want to ensure a consistent style across articles in a journal. With LaTeX, academic authors can always reduce the margins or change the interline spacing to be able to squeeze in more half-truths." Does this ever happen?
When my papers get too long, I take it as an opportunity to obsess over superfluous words and sentences.
So, the situations in which I would use LaTeX rather than something cruder but friendlier are these: (1) I am typesetting something with nontrivial mathematical formulae in it. (2) I want the excellent typographical quality that comes from, e.g., the very nice Knuth-Plass dynamic-programming algorithm for line breaks. (3) I want to use some clever thing someone has implemented in LaTeX (say, to add Feynman diagrams t…
You want a drop-in LaTeX replacement. Use LuaTeX.
I therefore take it that no-one who actually writes ever uses it.
This looks great - hopefully wouldn't be too hard to implement Markdown as well. I really want to be writing my academic papers in Markdown or some other simple markup (my papers usually have a surprisingly simple structure), and still have them look nice. Making it _much_ easier to create nice-looking templates would be great (maybe even a GUI editor for templates). However, I would also love to see more movement to…
I looked at the sample output ( http://www.mos6581.org/files/intro_template.pdf ) and is it just me or does the vertical spacing seem off? (for example, look at the tables and how the text goes right up to kiss the horizontal bars).
Wow, that really is hideous, e.g. the table at the beginning of section III. I wish this guy the best, but TeX was written by a very smart and utterly obsessive man, and typography is an ancient and complex field. I doubt this will work out.