It lacks the most important LaTeX tip, don't fight the machine. LaTeX is really good at getting documents that look 90% as good as an actual typesetter could make them look, if one can live with somewhat conservative looking documents. The last 10 percent, fixing margin width, changing paragraphs and so on, are incredibly hard with LaTeX. (Of course LaTeX defaults are a lot better than word, largely because LaTeX automatically uses consistent headers instead of sometime 15 pt and sometimes 16 pt underlined.)
Begin LaTeX in minutes
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Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes
#22The usual plug for sharelatex here. Check out sharelatex.com, it is amazing. Write LaTeX without having to install it, plus collaboration in the cloud. (I'm not affiliated, just a fan).
And in general, LaTeX is a super worthwhile language to learn. It may be a bit more complicated than markdown or its cousins, but it can do pretty much everything.
I've barely scratched the surface of what it can do, but since I live at the intersection of CS and Education research, it is great how BibTeX will swap between APA and ACM styles easily, or how I can use a macro to create likert scale questions, for example. It probably takes the right kind of mindset, but I really liked the fact that my dissertation had a makefile (and was in source control, way back in the CVS days).
Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes
#23[deleted]
Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes
#24Pro tip: you can't.
Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes
#25Most materials about LaTeX I tend to find on the web seem to be of the 'programming by StackOverflow' variety, i.e. 'copy this snippet of code, tweak it to your needs and compile'; they don't teach you about what the code actually does, how it interacts with everything else, and there is no syntax specification apart from series of digressions like 'oh, by the way, if you wish to achieve effect X, you can use option Y'. Unfortunately, even official documentation for LaTeX packages is often written that way (a major pleasant exception is the documentation for TikZ). In the short term, it may seem fine, but it inevitably comes back to bite the user later. The guide submitted here doesn't seem particularly different.
For those wishing to learn some 'theoretical' TeX, I can recommend TeX by Topic.[0] It mentions LaTeX macros only in passing, but even that amount was quite helpful to me.
Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes
#26I 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…
If you used Latex a lot, isn't it worth learning it well? It's like somebody using python a lot for science work, but just copying things around, because they don't bother to learn the language.
Don't get me wrong. Learning TeX is probably a worthwhile experience. I was actually trying to get a deeper understanding of TeX, but – to be honest – it's not that easy to get started and thus I gave up pretty quickly. Mostly because there is not that much you can do with TeX even if you mastered it. It's "only" a typesetting system and not really a general purpose programming language (although it is Turing-complete).
Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes
#27I am not really into LaTeX but i write all my letters with it and like doing so very much. I get nice looking clean documents that have a very professional appeal and are much more convenient to create than in any full fledged editor. I just use templates and fill in the blanks. I once showed my not so computer affine sister how to do it and she likes it too.
LyX is good for that.
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Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes
#28From various tutorials I feel my knowledge of latex is very top down, and not very deep. I just recently realized that {} are not needed for singletons, so I may for instance write \frac12 for 1/2. Can anybody recommend a more bottom up guide? Something more similar to learning a programming language, where you start with the basic syntax and build on features iteratively? Is Knuth's book the best way to go? Or is th…
Knuth's book (that is, the TeX Book) is worth looking at. You're right that it won't tell you everything you want to know about LaTeX, and in that sense is like learning C rather than C++. But (also like learning C before C++) it provides a lot of foundational knowledge that will be useful if go on to read a book specifically about LaTeX, and if you ever need to do something more complicated than LaTeX's defaults allow. For example, it explains how all layout is done with "boxes" and "glue", and the difference between horizontal and vertical mode.
Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes
#29The usual plug for sharelatex here. Check out sharelatex.com, it is amazing. Write LaTeX without having to install it, plus collaboration in the cloud. (I'm not affiliated, just a fan). And in general, LaTeX is a super worthwhile language to learn. It may be a bit more complicated than markdown or its cousins, but it can do pretty much everything. I've barely scratched the surface of what it can do, but since I live…
> Check out sharelatex.com, it is amazing.
Agreed. Someone posted about it recently on here, and I've been using it ever since then for my research papers. Great website. My only suggestion for it would be that I wish collaborators could work on a particular LaTeX document without having to register.
Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes
#30I personally really like using latex. But the main problem for me is that latex is not really designed for collaborative editing, especially with people who don't know latex. are there any track changes feature plugin/app that's available and relatively simple for people who mainly use MS word.