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Begin LaTeX in minutes

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51–60 of 175 posts

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#51
post #35

From 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…

> I just recently realized that {} are not needed for singletons Trick question: What will you get by TeX-ing this document? $\acute a\acute{a}\acute{{a}}$\'a\'{a}\'{{a}}\end

Frustrated.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#52

Spoiler alert: you will not master LaTeX (nor anything) in minutes. I have written my master thesis on sharelatex.com, the first months have been painful but at the end I had a great feeling of having achieved something. I still not consider that I master LaTeX but at least I can now use it for any standard documents and draw graphs and math formulas with ease. I really suggest developers to use LaTeX to create their…

The author has updated the Title of the repo. It's now begin not master anymore lol

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#53
post #46
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you deal with 'the cloud' not being under your control? Can you sync the documents from sharelatex to your local file system automatically?

They support syncing to and from Dropbox directly https://www.sharelatex.com/dropbox . So you can work offline, use your own editor etc.

[I work for ShareLaTeX]

You can also download your entire project as a zip archive, so you're not locked in to our platform in any way.

EDIT: also, ShareLatex is open source and fully self-hostable.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#55

Most 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…

I agree with the documentation issue. In addition to TikZ, the Memoir package manual is a pleasant surprise. It's really thorough, and I definitely recommend reading it if you are writing up your thesis in LaTeX.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#56
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

checkout sharelatex.com

I've used sharelatex and overleaf. I find them great. But what people in my field want are tracked changes features that you see in MS word. So deleted/added text highlighted by who changed it, comment boxes, etc.

Use latex with git, say on github. You get all those features and more, just with a UI that separates them from the document.

I've collaborated on notes using latex before on github and PR discussions, inline comments, and git collaboration features like branching, descriptive commit messages and diffs, etc. are awesome for productivity.

That said, everyone will need to know how to use latex, git, and GitHub, so gdocs certainly has a simpler workflow.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#57
post #48

Sometimes I wonder: why can't LaTeX be just as simple as HTML, or perhaps even simpler? Except perhaps for pagination and available default fonts, HTML practically fulfills all my formatting needs. (Note: HTML includes MathML, a mathematical formula markup language). And for automatically numbering tables and figures, one can easily write a script that is completely independent from the underlying formatting language…

It is called DITA and Docbook, but they are designed to be toolable.

Writting them manually is not a good idea, at all.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#58
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

checkout sharelatex.com

I've used sharelatex and overleaf. I find them great. But what people in my field want are tracked changes features that you see in MS word. So deleted/added text highlighted by who changed it, comment boxes, etc.

With latexdiff (included with your LaTeX distribution) it's really easy to produce "track changes" PDFs. (That's the entire purpose of this tool.) With git it's very easy to checkout the .tex file from an arbitrary commit.

There are even wrappers that integrate this with git, so just "git latexdiff HEAD~5 HEAD" will give you a "track changes" PDF between the current version and the one from five commits ago.

I've used this on complex papers where editors have requested it, and it works fine. Once I had to manually tweak the .tex file produced by latexdiff, but it was a very complex use case (packages added and removed between versions) and pretty easy to fix.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#59
This is a good beginner doc.

I'd never used LaTeX until about a year ago when I needed it to write a paper. The first thing I wondered was how to install it. Surely in 2015 installation would be a snap. It'd be in the App Store. Or Homebrew.

Do not install LaTeX. Use it in the cloud. I use www.overleaf.com which is awesome. Similarly, I use www.draw.io to create PDFs for my drawings.

  \usepackage{microtype}
  \usepackage[hang,font=bf]{caption}
  \usepackage{natbib}
  \usepackage[unicode=true]{hyperref}
  \usepackage[noabbrev,capitalise,nameinlink]{cleveref}
  \usepackage{amsmath}
  \usepackage{csquotes}
  \usepackage{minted}
  \usepackage{inconsolata}
  \usemintedstyle{bw}
  \usepackage{float}
  \usepackage{siunitx}
  \usepackage{booktabs}
  \usepackage{url}
  \usepackage{graphicx}
  \usepackage{textcomp}
  \usepackage{fixltx2e}
The one thing I'd add to this tutorial is citations and bibliographies.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#60
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…

I used it for the language manual used on our compiler design lectures, thesis monthly reports and final thesis.

Nowadays I just use Markdown, Word or Libre Office.

In some projects at work we used Docbook and DITA, coupled with text processor like applications.

Where Latex really shines is writing papers full of mathematical or scientifical notation, with a huge references section at end.

I don't see a place for it on the office workflows.

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