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TeX Live 2017 released

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Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#21

Post by Crontab »

svat wrote: post #19
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 be…

Your comment is interesting to me. I've read about TeX and LaTeX from time to time and it was my impression that everyone used LaTeX because TeX itself was difficult to use. And I never questioned this because almost every article I could find only spoke about LaTeX.

Your comment is making me reevaluate what I thought I understood.

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#22

Post by shawnee_ »

Looks like it has added many of the enhancements from recent updates to luatex. LuaLaTeX has saved my hide more times than I care to mention... Because for reasons I do not understand, there are still some people from the dark ages who insist on shipping PDFs with documentation that does not belong in a PDF.

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#23

Post by mkl »

jon_richards wrote: post #16
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 border…

You have much more control if you make your table in TikZ using a matrix of nodes. If you want borders, the key thing is setting "row sep=-\pgflinewidth, column sep=-\pgflinewidth" so the border doesn't get doubled up (see e.g. [1]).

Latex is far from ideal, but it's still the best because it hasn't stood still - many people are constantly contributing improvements and new packages, and it's very hard for a new replacement system to compete with that.

[1] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/18521/tikz-matrix-as...

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#24

Post by taeric »

Crontab wrote: post #21
svat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

Your comment is interesting to me. I've read about TeX and LaTeX from time to time and it was my impression that everyone used LaTeX because TeX itself was difficult to use. And I never questioned this because almost every article I could find only spoke about LaTeX. Your comment is making me reevaluate what I thought I understood.

People use LaTeX because it already does a lot of what people want to do. More, it was also one of the first standard ways of packaging extensions for TeX. (I may be wrong on that point...)

Folks are also highly scared off of TeX due to some of its aesthetic nature. Specifically, it looks rather different than most modern languages.

That said, I think most of that fear is unfounded and I regret that I let it keep me from learning this while in college.

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#25

Post by homarp »

chrisanthropic wrote: post #6
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 wrote a free tool a bit ago that wraps Pandoc/LaTeX/Jekyll and takes Markdown inputs and exports epub, mobi, and print-ready PDFs (5x8 & 6x9 Pdfx-1a compliant), specifically for fiction. You can check out the LaTeX template in the repo. http://chrisanthropic.github.io/Open-Publisher-Documentation...

you should add a LICENSE or LICENSE.txt file

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#26

Post by TylerE »

jon_richards wrote: post #16
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 border…

As soon as your start talking about that sort of thing you probably want to look at ConTeXT.

LaTeX::Word as Context::PageMaker.

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#27

Post by TylerE »

Crontab wrote: post #21
svat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

Your comment is interesting to me. I've read about TeX and LaTeX from time to time and it was my impression that everyone used LaTeX because TeX itself was difficult to use. And I never questioned this because almost every article I could find only spoke about LaTeX. Your comment is making me reevaluate what I thought I understood.

TeX is basically a much lower level formatting system.

You don't say "make a heading", you say "make this text in 14pt font, bold, with this much extra vertical space.

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#28

Post by Lxr »

mscholz wrote: post #17
Tharre wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Does anyone else find this "feature" really annoying? I always set conceallevel to 0 but vim seems to constantly find a way to replace my code with unicode.

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#29

Post by gkoller »

jon_richards wrote: post #16
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 border…

> 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.

Many many years ago I evaluated the available options as well to write internal documentation for the company I worked for. Looked at groff with the mom macro package. But eventually settled on Lout.

Lout worked very pleasantly (it has a nice markup language) but the output didn't look as beautiful as Latex. Unfortunately it doesn't seemed to be developed anymore.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_%28software%29

Re: TeX Live 2017 released

#30

Post by petters »

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…

Two days? I wrote my thesis in Tex and i probably spent two weeks! But the end result was typographically great! When you're in academia, you can afford to spend that time. These days, it's all Google Docs for me.

I've had complete strangers email me with Tex questions just from encountering my thesis.

The community on Stack Exchange was very helpful for me.

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