Begin LaTeX in minutes • Hacker News Board

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#171

Post by godelski » Tue, Nov 01, 2016, 12:38 AM UTC

tnecniv wrote: post #144

godelski wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. Definitely not trivial to use, but generally I can get anything I want to get done with a quick google. I'm surprised at the hate on this website. I do a lot more googling for coding. I get if you're doing something exotic in LaTex, but for writing a paper, a presentation, or resume, it is fairly straightforward. The key to easily writing LaTex is making a few skeletons and then just reusing them.

The real problem with LaTeX is that it doesn't try to make itself friendly. It gives horrible errors that are big headaches for newcomers, and setting up your environment can be a pain. Early today, someone set me a document and I spent 15 minutes finding and updating the right packages until it built.

That is probably my biggest qualm with it, and really only problem I face. That there are a lot of libraries that do the same thing, but are incompatible. If there were standards it would solve a lot of problems.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#172

Post by ajarmst » Tue, Nov 01, 2016, 1:41 AM UTC

1wd wrote: post #42

Just 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…

In my experience there's two ways to do it: (1) use the house style (and standard auxiliary packages) of whatever publication you are writing for and/or (2) develop your own style files that use the subset of the 'thousands' of available packages that suit your needs and uses. I've got a small set of .sty files that I've been developing for decades to suit my own needs. When I needed a pseudocode notation for some papers on algorithms, I played with a half-dozen or so of the top contenders before settling on one, integrating it into my other macros, and writing a few of my own to make it easier to work with. No-one should learn LaTeX for a single paper, or only a few. That's like learning C for a single program:- sure, you can do it, but it seems a lot of work for small result. I treat LaTeX as the environment in which I develop my own ideosyncratic publishing style (that can now be shared with others), not as a giant garden that everyone is supposed to be simultaneously using all of.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#173

Post by ajarmst » Tue, Nov 01, 2016, 1:48 AM UTC

While I applaud the effort, this sort of thing suffers from the same problem any "quick introduction" to something rich and complex has: it's easy to see the complexity and discern the unfamiliarity, but requires effort to discern the value. No one has ever been convinced of the value of TeX/LaTeX, Vim, Emacs, Awk, Lex, Lisp, etc. by a fifteen minute intro. They're convinced by pushing themselves (or being forced) to use the tool for a substantial period of time (usually weeks) over several significant projects until they discovered the familiarity, power and utility that it affords people who are sufficiently familiar with the tool. In a machine shop, a lathe isn't an obvious choice for a project until you already know how to use a lathe.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#174

Post by asadjb » Tue, Nov 01, 2016, 5:25 AM UTC

supergarfield wrote: post #70

1wd wrote: post #42

Just 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 ap…

While I have never used LaTex before, the package situation that you talk about isn't anything new. It's just another twist on "Not Invented Here". Writing new code that does exactly what you want is usually easier than picking up something that works and modifying it to suit your needs, making sure it's backwards compatible.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#175

Post by totony » Thu, Nov 03, 2016, 12:55 PM UTC

nxc18 wrote: post #137

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I don't find Word or LibrePffice documents to be very visually appealing. Maybe I spend a lot of time reading nicely typeset documents, but MS Office just doesn't cut it any more. You can compile from markdown to LaTeX, getting nearly the best of both worlds.

In 5 minutes you can configure your word document to look just like something LaTeX would output. It is interesting that learning LaTeX is a completely reasonable thing to spend time on but learning the basics of styles (surprisingly similar to how styles work everywhere else) is thoroughly unacceptable.

Licenses of office are pretty expensive and the software is extremely bloated. It is also proprietary and not on linix

Latex has bloat problems too but there must be some lightweight distribution i just didnt find

Same for libre office, extremel bloated, but i still work sometimes with it. Latex has also better support in a lot of communities and a ton of packages.