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TeX Live 2017 released

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Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#11

Post by lindbergh »

LaTeX is still one of my favourite piece of technology of all time. It is at time so alien, yet beautiful.

I now get closer to 10+ years of programming experience, yet nothing comes close to debugging a faulty LaTeX custom command... it can quickly turn to an unreadable mess, but you have to admit that once everything is swept under a preamble.tex file, the rest of the code is very clean. Especially with auctex in emacs which displays most math symbols as their true unicode counterpart.

Funny story: one of my first gig was working in a music instruments shop where I was basically the IT guy, from sysadmin to web dev. At some point the software that created the barcode labels stopped working. Now I had to find an automatic way to make those labels, so of course I turned to LaTeX. All I needed to do was to write a batch file calling `pdflatex` with a template tex file and a pdf file for the label was promptly sent to the printer! There is probably some python package for doing the same thing, but I was so proud of seeing Computer Modern font tagged to every instruments in the shop!

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#12

Post by whyenot »

kstenerud wrote: post #2

I've given up on tex. I'm typesetting a book right now, and getting the epub going was a piece of cake. Then I tried using LibreOffice for the print version and it was a nightmare to control via the API and buggy as hell. So I decided now would be a good time to try tex. After 2 solid days of yak shaving, I threw in the towel. It's too fragmented, the documentation is terrible (complete - all 600 pages worth, but ter…

I found the memoir class frustrating to use when I was writing a technical manuscript (a botanical flora). It's great if you are willing to accept the defaults, but if you want to change things, the documentation is actually pretty spare. You can waste hours or even days tweaking and rebuilding your document to have it formatted the way you would like -- tasks that could be done in a lot less time in graphical page layout software like InDesign. I ended up composing my work in Word and then importing it into InDesign. That was a lot more satisfying than using latex for me, for writing that is not math heavy.

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#13

Post by stephen_g »

kstenerud wrote: post #10
radarsat1 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ask this as a totally naive person regarding novels and publishing, but who is fairly happy with writing papers in Latex: what is difficult about typesetting a novel? I ask because I would think that novels would be on the easier end of typesetting situations, but clearly your experience is different.. I just can't imagine what you are struggling with. I've "typeset" many novels by converting them from text formats…

Getting otf fonts working, getting images working and properly positioned, getting alternating left-right headers to behave themselves, especially at a chapter start. Every new thing involved going back to ctan (I had high hopes for memoir) or searching online in the hopes that someone took the time to write down how they did it. Most of the time you'd just find "how to make your math formulas look pretty" or "how to…

OTF is dead easy if you use XeTeX (specifically the xelatex command). The fancyhdr should give enough control over headers. Yeah, floating images can be annoying.

I use it mainly for technical documentation (product manuals, etc.), so I've never tried the memoir class. But what I find myself doing mostly these days is makinng my own classes, usually based on article because it seems to me to have the most 'neutral' defaults.

It's a very steep learning curve, but I've found it an extremely valuable technology to be able to use.

Asking questions on the TeX stack overflow is a pretty good way to get help also.

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#14

Post by Tharre »

lindbergh wrote: post #11

LaTeX is still one of my favourite piece of technology of all time. It is at time so alien, yet beautiful. I now get closer to 10+ years of programming experience, yet nothing comes close to debugging a faulty LaTeX custom command... it can quickly turn to an unreadable mess, but you have to admit that once everything is swept under a preamble.tex file, the rest of the code is very clean. Especially with auctex in em…

Does anyone know a similar plugin for vim?

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#15

Post by radarsat1 »

kstenerud wrote: post #10
radarsat1 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ask this as a totally naive person regarding novels and publishing, but who is fairly happy with writing papers in Latex: what is difficult about typesetting a novel? I ask because I would think that novels would be on the easier end of typesetting situations, but clearly your experience is different.. I just can't imagine what you are struggling with. I've "typeset" many novels by converting them from text formats…

Getting otf fonts working, getting images working and properly positioned, getting alternating left-right headers to behave themselves, especially at a chapter start. Every new thing involved going back to ctan (I had high hopes for memoir) or searching online in the hopes that someone took the time to write down how they did it. Most of the time you'd just find "how to make your math formulas look pretty" or "how to…

Hm. Font stuff I'm not surprised, fonts can be tricky especially in Latex, you're definitely right. Bit surprised images were difficult. I guess I haven't had to deal much with margin and header issues. fancyhdr can certainly be confusing. Did you try "lyx"? I guess for what it does help with, it might not actually make any of these particular issues easier..

Of course, it's all about using a good template. Usually I find there are tons of resources out there, but it does often involve finding someone with the same problem and asking the right question.

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#16

Post by jon_richards »

lindbergh wrote: post #11

LaTeX is still one of my favourite piece of technology of all time. It is at time so alien, yet beautiful. I now get closer to 10+ years of programming experience, yet nothing comes close to debugging a faulty LaTeX custom command... it can quickly turn to an unreadable mess, but you have to admit that once everything is swept under a preamble.tex file, the rest of the code is very clean. Especially with auctex in em…

I once heard a professor talk about writing a book 30 or so years ago. He looked at all the available options and decided latex wasn't perfect, but was the best available. 20 years later he decided to look at everything again and was appalled that latex was still the best option he had.

Have you ever tried to color a latex table? If you color a cell, most readers will cover ~1 pixel of the upper and left table borders with the cell color, regardless of the zoom level. This is especially a problem on zoom levels where the border is only 1 or 2 pixels, but makes you feel insane when you zoom in so it's 10 or more. You know what the most common advice for fixing this is? "Get rid of your table borders. It will make your table look better."

Latex is full of little problems like this, but it's still the best.

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#17

Post by mscholz »

Tharre wrote: post #14
lindbergh wrote: post #11

LaTeX is still one of my favourite piece of technology of all time. It is at time so alien, yet beautiful. I now get closer to 10+ years of programming experience, yet nothing comes close to debugging a faulty LaTeX custom command... it can quickly turn to an unreadable mess, but you have to admit that once everything is swept under a preamble.tex file, the rest of the code is very clean. Especially with auctex in em…

Does anyone know a similar plugin for vim?

If you set `conceallevel' to 2 and use syntax highlighting, you should get it in vim without any plugins needed (although I have only neovim installed).

For example, \AA -> Å, $\pm$ -> ±, and {\'e} -> é.

http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/syntax.html#tex-concea...

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#18

Post by pmoriarty »

radarsat1 wrote: post #3
kstenerud wrote: post #2

I've given up on tex. I'm typesetting a book right now, and getting the epub going was a piece of cake. Then I tried using LibreOffice for the print version and it was a nightmare to control via the API and buggy as hell. So I decided now would be a good time to try tex. After 2 solid days of yak shaving, I threw in the towel. It's too fragmented, the documentation is terrible (complete - all 600 pages worth, but ter…

I ask this as a totally naive person regarding novels and publishing, but who is fairly happy with writing papers in Latex: what is difficult about typesetting a novel? I ask because I would think that novels would be on the easier end of typesetting situations, but clearly your experience is different.. I just can't imagine what you are struggling with. I've "typeset" many novels by converting them from text formats…

I've typeset novels, technical manuals, math, poetry, articles, chess diagrams, posters, presentations, my resume, and probably a bunch of other things in LaTeX. It wasn't a big deal, though it's definitely a rabbit hole in terms of the amount of tweaking that's required if you want everything just right, if you're doing something fancy, and if what you're doing doesn't quite fit any of the many pre-written templates. The great thing, though, is that once you've tweaked one document the way you like it, now you've got a template to use for documents of the same type, which should only require minor tweaking in the future.

There's definitely a learning curve to LaTeX, but not a huge one, as it's mostly just a markup language. If you want to get in to the programming side of it, or if you want to learn one of the larger LaTeX packages really well, that would take you more time, but not even then it shouldn't scare anyone, particularly if you've learned other high level programming languages before. Diving in to TeX itself could be a different story, but I can't comment since I've never bothered to learn it myself, and haven't had to for anything that I've done with LaTeX.

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#19

Post by svat »

kstenerud wrote: post #2

I've given up on tex. I'm typesetting a book right now, and getting the epub going was a piece of cake. Then I tried using LibreOffice for the print version and it was a nightmare to control via the API and buggy as hell. So I decided now would be a good time to try tex. After 2 solid days of yak shaving, I threw in the towel. It's too fragmented, the documentation is terrible (complete - all 600 pages worth, but ter…

What 600-page documentation are you referring to? The TeXbook by Knuth goes only up to page 483 (with the appendixes starting on page 304).

By the way, a really excellent book for (plain) TeX is A Beginner's Book of TeX by Seroul and Levy: it's truly for the beginner, yet at the end you'll be practically an expert, or at least know how to become one.

I've seen people get frustrated with LaTeX (not TeX), but that's because it was designed to make it difficult to do typesetting: instead the LaTeX philosophy is to specify only the document structure, and leave all the typesetting to a package that you hope someone has written.

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#20

Post by SwellJoe »

I wrote my first (well, only) book in SGML Docbook, which I processed through a LaTeX toolchain. Sebastian Rahtz answered so many of my questions back then (~15 years ago), despite them often being stupid questions (because I was entirely new to TeX/LaTeX). I just read that he passed away last year. TeX Live was originally his project, among many other document-related projects. I'm happy to see it continues without him.
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