TeX Live 2017 released
51–60 of 67 posts
Re: TeX Live 2017 released
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 repla…
I think it's also the degree of flexibility. Typesetting is itself a creative process as much as a technical one. When I do technical writing with LaTeX (and I do a lot) I'm usually ok with about 99% of what it outputs, but then I have the ability to fiddle around and make that one table have the borders exactly how I like them and that picture caption to be spaced just a little differently etc; I want to indulge my sense of aesthetics just a bit.
It's the combination of (mostly works by default) and (I can make it look just right) that is appealing. It gives me just enough stuff to play with to be satisfying and even a bit fun, without having to tweak so many things that it gets frustrating.
Re: TeX Live 2017 released
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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' d…
I agree with the last point: asking questions on tex.stackexchange is a GREAT way to get help. Sometimes you run into an "impossible" problem and some wizard will show up and fix it in minutes.
Re: TeX Live 2017 released
#54Earlier 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…
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…
That doesn't answer the question. To me as a common reader, the typesetting of a novel requires in no particular order
- nice block text adjustment, line-breaks and hyphenation, line/paragraph,chapter spacing
- margins and padding, page numbers, and chapter headings
- font selection, supporting ligatures and kerning if you are fancy
I'm sure the devil is in the details, but how much detail can there be in basic running text? I'm fine reading novels rendered by basic html engines without css, even in monospaced font. The most important consideration for a text layout engine seems to be the font data format and corresponding font engine, which I don't know much about, because I don't really care.
Re: TeX Live 2017 released
#55Earlier 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…
I have round about never seen images in a novel, but every other novel mentioned on HN seems to have images.
Re: TeX Live 2017 released
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No, if you did that instead of defining a macro, it would be your own fault.
Re: TeX Live 2017 released
#57LaTeX 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…
Yes .tex programming is probably the least intuitive kind of language I've ever seen. Here is a FizzBuzz in vanilla .tex for anyone who curious to see what that's like: % fizzbuzz.tex -- Compile with pdftex, not pdflatex \def\modulo#1#2{(#1-(#1/#2)*#2)} % a mod n = a-(a/n)*n where / is integer division \newcount\X \X=1 \loop \ifnum \numexpr\modulo{\X}{15} = 0 FizzBuzz \else \ifnum \numexpr\modulo{\X}{3} = 0 Fizz \els…
That's pdfTeX, not vanilla TeX.
$ tex
This is TeX, Version 3.14159265 (TeX Live 2016/Debian) (preloaded format=tex)
**\show\numexpr
> \numexpr=undefined.Re: TeX Live 2017 released
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'm typesetting a series of novels with LaTeX and memoir and I share your pain. I didn't have much trouble with fonts (fontspec is pretty awesome compared to the old TeX way), but things like typesetting on a grid, that was difficult. I'm now reading on ConTeXt and it seems to be a much more adequate TeX format. For one thing, it supports grid typesetting! LaTeX's philosophy is to separate style and content, leaving…
> typesetting on a grid
what does this mean? I haven't seen that term before. I assume it's nothing to do with tables..
Re: TeX Live 2017 released
#59It's amazing how many different and dissimilar components go into a TeX distribution like TeX Live: - At the base, there is Donald Knuth's program `tex`, itself written in a strange language (WEB) that is essentially an ad-hoc macro-expansion system (not used by many others, and not even by Knuth today, who prefers CWEB), and compiles (via `tangle`) to a dialect/version of Pascal (“Pascal-H”) for which a compiler has…
This reminds me of Markdown before the CommonMark standard was created. Actually...even with the standard, there are so many derivatives.
Re: TeX Live 2017 released
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm typesetting a series of novels with LaTeX and memoir and I share your pain. I didn't have much trouble with fonts (fontspec is pretty awesome compared to the old TeX way), but things like typesetting on a grid, that was difficult. I'm now reading on ConTeXt and it seems to be a much more adequate TeX format. For one thing, it supports grid typesetting! LaTeX's philosophy is to separate style and content, leaving…
> typesetting on a grid what does this mean? I haven't seen that term before. I assume it's nothing to do with tables..
The main idea is to have every line of text fall on an evenly spaced grid. Here's an example where the middle paragraph is not grid aligned: https://i.stack.imgur.com/XskJu.png
Generally you also want the baseline of titles to fall on the grid. Possibly also the formulas, figures etc.
LaTeX is pretty bad at this: by default it inserts stretchable vertical space between paragraphs, and around things like bullet lists, centered text and formulas.
Stretchable space is a good thing when you have a lot of elements beside simple paragraphs: it gives TeX flexibility to produce a nice page layout. For example the optimal spacing around equations might not be a multiple of the inter-line space. And you might still want to have the last line land precisely at the bottom of the page, so there must be a stretchable space somewhere. This flexibility also helps avoiding widows and orphans[1].
On the other hand I think non-grid-aligned text looks terrible for novels, especially when the page is thin and you can see through the paper the text on the other side (it's much less noticeable if the lines on both sides are perfectly aligned). Grid typesetting is also nice when you have multiple columns of text on the same page: it looks odd if the lines of one column are not aligned with those in the next column.