Begin LaTeX in minutes

#1

Post by PleaseHelpMe » Sun, Oct 30, 2016, 1:56 PM UTC

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#2

Post by andrew3726 » Sun, Oct 30, 2016, 2:16 PM UTC

"Brief Intro to Latex for programmers/developers" vs "Master LATEX in minutes", quite a difference! But looks nevertheless like a good introduction to LaTeX. Just why the all the emoji...

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#3

Post by mtrn » Sun, Oct 30, 2016, 2:18 PM UTC

I've written my first LaTeX documents with LyX [1], a wonderful application, if you're just getting started.

[1] https://www.lyx.org/

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#4

Post by FunctionalGuy » Sun, Oct 30, 2016, 2:18 PM UTC

LaTeX. Can someone fix the title?

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#5

Post by renke1 » Sun, Oct 30, 2016, 2:22 PM UTC

I used LaTeX a lot in university, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Even a minimal (and good looking) document requires a lot of (La)TeX knowledge.

You can of course use one of many existing templates, but you will quickly feel lost when you have to customize things.

These days, just go with Markdown (or the like) and just include assets (say graphs) as SVG and be done with it.

For scientific papers (especially with two columns layout) you probably have to go with LaTeX though.

Edit: By the way, my take at minimal LaTeX templates: https://github.com/renke/latex-templates

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#6

Post by mydpy » Sun, Oct 30, 2016, 2:25 PM UTC

LaTeX is much deeper than this "mastery" document conveys. Although, LaTeX is significantly easier to pick up if you learn to program first. I appreciate the author sharing this here though :)

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#7

Post by ben_straub » Sun, Oct 30, 2016, 2:27 PM UTC

renke1 wrote: post #5

I used LaTeX a lot in university, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Even a minimal (and good looking) document requires a lot of (La)TeX knowledge. You can of course use one of many existing templates, but you will quickly feel lost when you have to customize things. These days, just go with Markdown (or the like) and just include assets (say graphs) as SVG and be done with it. For scientific papers (especially…

Yeah, LaTeX is great, but mostly you won't need the superpowers that a document-programming language gives you. When Markdown doesn't quite do what I need, Asciidoc usually does (Pro Git 2 was written in Asciidoc).

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#8

Post by JeremyS » Sun, Oct 30, 2016, 2:27 PM UTC

Filename for screenshots should be changed ;)

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#9

Post by aduitsis » Sun, Oct 30, 2016, 2:28 PM UTC

For any poor soul that has to write LaTeX for whatever reason but doesn't want to bother installing anything, I cannot recommend https://www.sharelatex.com/ enough.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#10

Post by rschuetzler » Sun, Oct 30, 2016, 2:31 PM UTC

ben_straub wrote: post #7

renke1 wrote: post #5

I used LaTeX a lot in university, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Even a minimal (and good looking) document requires a lot of (La)TeX knowledge. You can of course use one of many existing templates, but you will quickly feel lost when you have to customize things. These days, just go with Markdown (or the like) and just include assets (say graphs) as SVG and be done with it. For scientific papers (especially…

Yeah, LaTeX is great, but mostly you won't need the superpowers that a document-programming language gives you. When Markdown doesn't quite do what I need, Asciidoc usually does (Pro Git 2 was written in Asciidoc).

I'm a big fan of Asciidoc. It's nice to have the option of advanced features, while still dealing in text.