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Begin LaTeX in minutes

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Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#71

Post by JadeNB »

pwdisswordfish wrote: post #25

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…

Since this thread has turned into a discussion of nice documentation, I've always thought that beamer (http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/beamer/doc/beam...) 's is quite nice. I also second the recommendation for TeX by Topic, which is lovely. Grätzer's Math into LaTeX (https://archive.org/details/George_Gratzer__Math_Into_LaTeX) is nice but outdated, and Knuth's TeXbook (freely available, but only as source, at http://ctan.org/pkg/texbook) is, of course, the original definitive resource.

(Links to the other currently mentioned documentation: http://mirrors.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf (of which TikZ is a sub-/co-package) and http://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/memoir/memman.p... ; and 2ion already linked to the KOMAScript documentation (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12830476).)

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#72

Post by sotojuan »

ArmandGrillet wrote: post #40

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…

Even years after Norvig's essay people still attempt to master skills in days or less!

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#73

Post by stochastician »

s_kilk wrote: post #53
Tehnix wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't realize this, and it's absolutely incredible. You guys are great!

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#75

Post by Rick_Sullivan »

mynewtb wrote: post #68
Tehnix wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've used Overleaf (formerly WriteLaTeX) with git before. It's especially nice that people comfortable with git can edit locally, while still having the option of editing directly in the browser.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#76

Post by CalChris »

yk wrote: post #21

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 aut…

For at least 5 of that last 10% I'd recommend \usepackage{microtype}

But yeah, fighting LaTeX is a pain. I thought I'd just install a font (hack). A month later I decided well maybe just using another font (inconsolata) is good enough.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#77

Post by s_kilk »

daemonk wrote: post #50
PleaseHelpMe wrote: post #32

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.

> But what people in my field want are tracked changes features that you see in MS word.

We're working on it ;)

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#78

Post by perlgeek »

yk wrote: post #21

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 aut…

> It lacks the most important LaTeX tip, don't fight the machine.

Fully agreed.

> The last 10 percent, fixing margin width

If you're talking about page margins, the `geometry` package makes that easy.

Luckily, sometimes you get into scenarios where somebody has done the hard part for you. For example when writing journal articles, some journals have document classes published that you just have to use, and not do anything special in the body.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#79

Post by laxatives »

pfooti wrote: post #22

The 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…

I think one of the best features of sharelatex is that you skip the insanely bloated installation/package maintenance process. Some of those packages use GB of fonts and I remember having a complete installation with over 30GB of fonts. Not really an issue anymore, but 5-10 years ago, that was pretty excessive.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#80

Post by ezequiel-garzon »

amelius wrote: 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…

I've always wondered the opposite: why don't major browsers implement (La)TeX formulas, given they are a de facto standard? I mean something like MathJax, but available with JavaScript disabled. Don't trigger it with $, but maybe with something more odd, like $@ ... @$, or similar.
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