An important correction: don't use TexMaker, it's no longer actively developed. Use TexStudio (http://www.texstudio.org/), the fork/continuation of that project. Much more polished, performant, and many more convenient features.
Begin LaTeX in minutes
61–70 of 175 posts
Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes
#62Most 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.
Another well documented set of general-purpose classes are the KOMAscript document classes, catering mostly to European document conventions [1].
Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes
#63Just don't try anything that isn't in your typical math paper. There are thousands of LaTeX packages, because they are all broken if you use them in a slightly unexpected way, so (reminiscent of JavaScript) a new package is created to "fix" it. Tables? Here you go. Oh, you wanted nested tables? For that you need to switch to an entirely different package. Oh, and that one doesn't support splitting up tables over mult…
Not just you. Tables are a huge mess, and for every package I add to my .tex file to fix a problem, two new problems pop up.. (oh you added package a at the end? It will fail, because package b loaded package C which defined the same macro names, and of course every macro is global...
Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes
#64Just don't try anything that isn't in your typical math paper. There are thousands of LaTeX packages, because they are all broken if you use them in a slightly unexpected way, so (reminiscent of JavaScript) a new package is created to "fix" it. Tables? Here you go. Oh, you wanted nested tables? For that you need to switch to an entirely different package. Oh, and that one doesn't support splitting up tables over mult…
Yep. It's exactly like that for me.
And the packages interact with each other in surprising and unexpected ways, and you will almost always end up researching some strange 80s-era TeX commands that are still in there.
And nothing is well documented and you will spend way more time on it than you should.
But it's still better than writing it in *Office, I guess.
Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes
#65I 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.
Well, the fact that it is a plaintext-based format makes it work extremely well with git. So for collaboration you can have a repo (even hosted in github) and your co-authors can propose merges, etc. It is extremely nice to be able to see the log of commits and who changed exactly what at any point in time, something I think it's difficult in complex formats like Word. Or you can use sharelatex.com as others have com…
This all sounds great. I'll definitely look into it for myself. However, coming from academic biology (I am a bioinformatician) where most of my collaborators won't even know what git is, this is just not a realistic solution. If Sharelatex (I actually wrote my phd thesis on sharelatex) or Overleaf (I used for my last publication) have a nice built-in GUI that does all of this auto-magically, I think a lot of people from the biological fields will probably start using it.
Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes
#66From 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've started working through the TeX Book for educational purposes about a year ago. It obviously lays the foundation for a deep understanding of TeX/LaTeX. If you're still getting surprised by syntax or the macro system in general, you can skip the chapters which go into minute detail and still take a lot of interesting things away: layouting commands, page structure, units, registers, understanding memory limits and allocation, etc.
That being said, LaTeX has its own kernel, on top of which comes a document class, on top which comes any number of packages. Each layer can alter or mask the lower layer, so understanding LaTeX on all its levels is a difficult task. Then, there are different implementations which add fundamental aspects to the Knuth reference TeX, like pdftex, luatex, xetex, and that does not even include platex, uplatex and other special things.
The little things I know I learned by finding a package/class/command that does what I need, and then study how it does it. E.g. hyperref is a very interesting starting place (relates closely to how documents (DVI, PDF,...) are output), as is memoir or my favourite, microtype.
Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes
#67Just don't try anything that isn't in your typical math paper. There are thousands of LaTeX packages, because they are all broken if you use them in a slightly unexpected way, so (reminiscent of JavaScript) a new package is created to "fix" it. Tables? Here you go. Oh, you wanted nested tables? For that you need to switch to an entirely different package. Oh, and that one doesn't support splitting up tables over mult…
Most people don't want to learn about the LaTeX (resp. TeX) internals or typesetting in general, they just want to produce documents. Including a package and using its functionality is the easiest way to get started, but sooner or later you'll hit a wall.
Writing LaTeX documents becomes easier once you understand the basics: plain boxes, positioning, macros, lengths, counters. Granted, you need to have a fair share of Donald Knuth's enthusiasm for typesetting, but it will be worth it.
Tables will always be a mess, though.
Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes
#68Earlier 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.
Thanks, not bad! I wish there was syncing without adding another cloud company to the mix though. Eg git or rsync.
Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes
#69Has anyone tried the Lout typesetting program? I worked with it several years ago and was very impressed. Mark Summerfield uses it for his programming books:
Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes
#70Just don't try anything that isn't in your typical math paper. There are thousands of LaTeX packages, because they are all broken if you use them in a slightly unexpected way, so (reminiscent of JavaScript) a new package is created to "fix" it. Tables? Here you go. Oh, you wanted nested tables? For that you need to switch to an entirely different package. Oh, and that one doesn't support splitting up tables over mult…
This is also very true in my experience, and seems to be in large part caused by the absence of proper namespacing, scoping, and general rules about how packages should be implemented to minimize bad interactions.
I feel like this is a significant shortcoming of Latex, and it really is a mystery to me why no one has seriously tried to write an alternative typesetting system. I know Latex is good enough for lots of applications, and would require a lot of work to rewrite, but I can think of freely available projects with less glaring shortcomings for which people have started successful competitors (Firefox -> Chrome, KDE and GNOME, gcc -> llvm, etc.).