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The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

danielallington.net

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Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#41

Post by obastani »

taeric wrote: post #12

I had a few things about TeX versus LaTeX. I think the reality is nobody really tries writing TeX. But, ultimately my beef is the straw man that markup is bad because it is harder to read. That a graphical editor is superior because it is more readable. Instead, the advantage is that in the one you are only writing text and you are indicating special instructions to the computer. In the other, you only see what the c…

On the flip side, sometimes simple formatting in Latex can be a nightmare, for example, getting your table columns spaced correctly.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#42

Post by greggyb »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #38

I just switch my consulting company to have all our documents (Statement of Work, proposals, NDA, MSA, etc) in LaTeX. It has worked amazing well. For a few reasons: 1. We easily can typeset all our documents the same and if we do something like change the letterhead we can easily update them all. 2. Auto-generating documents (forms letters) is a snap. 3. Everything is source controlled. 3a. If a client needs customiz…

Curious about clients that ask you to execute these items in their own templates? We run into this fairly often.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#43

Post by krupan »

I have spent countless hours fiddling with both LaTeX and Word trying to get them to do what I want. The difference between the two is, once I had figured out how to make LaTeX do what I want, the steps were all documented and reproducible. With Word I had no such record of all the menu items, settings, and button clicks that had given me what I wanted.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#44

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

grecy wrote: post #24

I am currently writing my first print book, and honestly feel that LaTeX is the best solution. I want precise control over a 250+ page book. I have never seen a WYSIWYG editor that doesn't make that a royal PITA. Different gutters on left and right pages, chapters always starting on a right hand page, consistent and great justification, fine control over how chapter headings appear (and quick to update) etc. etc. On…

XSL-FO provides a similar level of format control without the headaches of a hard to debug language and fossilized macros. You can use Docbook as the launching point for the final translation to XSL-FO and use any number of human friendly markup languages (ReST, Markdown, etc.) that can be converted to Docbook. Other output formats like ePub also become easy to generate with a Docbook intermediate.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#45

Post by grecy »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #37
grecy wrote: post #24

I am currently writing my first print book, and honestly feel that LaTeX is the best solution. I want precise control over a 250+ page book. I have never seen a WYSIWYG editor that doesn't make that a royal PITA. Different gutters on left and right pages, chapters always starting on a right hand page, consistent and great justification, fine control over how chapter headings appear (and quick to update) etc. etc. On…

I've worked with O'Reilly and Wrox and both have you do one document per chapter. Anything over 30 pages and MS Word starts to choke, especially with a lot of diagrams. Neither gave me the choice to use LaTeX although I'm sure they might have been open to it had I asked.

> I've worked with O'Reilly and Wrox and both have you do one document per chapter

Ouch. The number of times I have changed stuff like gutters, margins, chapter headings, caption fonts and layouts would make that an absolute nightmare.

I am really happy how easy all that stuff is in LaTeX. (Of course, other things are a nightmare.)

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#46

Post by theden »

I'm one of those guys. I used to write my university philosophy papers in LaTeX (which I learned from physics+maths classes), and dealing with citations was definitely a lot easier. A more understated advantage of using markup was that I was trivially able to nondestructively comment out sections or leave comments on important points or paragraphs in a paper, not unlike what one would do in code. Once I got used to that I couldn't go back to WYSIWYG. Now, if I don't have time to deal with LaTeX, I'll just use Markdown or whatever format that isn't proprietary.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#47

Post by coliveira »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #37
grecy wrote: post #24

I am currently writing my first print book, and honestly feel that LaTeX is the best solution. I want precise control over a 250+ page book. I have never seen a WYSIWYG editor that doesn't make that a royal PITA. Different gutters on left and right pages, chapters always starting on a right hand page, consistent and great justification, fine control over how chapter headings appear (and quick to update) etc. etc. On…

I've worked with O'Reilly and Wrox and both have you do one document per chapter. Anything over 30 pages and MS Word starts to choke, especially with a lot of diagrams. Neither gave me the choice to use LaTeX although I'm sure they might have been open to it had I asked.

You touched on the weak spot of MS Word. It works great for small documents, but anything longer and it takes forever and crashes a lot. In other words, MS doesn't scale, and I wouldn't do anything other than writing pure text in MS Word.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#48

Post by throwaway2016a »

grecy wrote: post #45
throwaway2016a wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked with O'Reilly and Wrox and both have you do one document per chapter. Anything over 30 pages and MS Word starts to choke, especially with a lot of diagrams. Neither gave me the choice to use LaTeX although I'm sure they might have been open to it had I asked.

> I've worked with O'Reilly and Wrox and both have you do one document per chapter Ouch. The number of times I have changed stuff like gutters, margins, chapter headings, caption fonts and layouts would make that an absolute nightmare. I am really happy how easy all that stuff is in LaTeX. (Of course, other things are a nightmare.)

> The number of times I have changed stuff like gutters, margins, chapter headings, caption fonts and layouts would make that an absolute nightmare.

The big publishers don't give you control over that. They give you a template and you have to stick to it. As an author your first and only job is to provide the content (typically).

Not everyone knows this but MS Word lets you create formatting blocks that essential behave like CSS classes. Most people have used MS Word Heading, Sub Heading, etc not realizing that as long as you never touch the font formatting options the classes can be changed globally just by applying a different template.

The final typesetting of the document is completely up to the publisher. I always assume they simply have a script that pulls out the raw text with formatting indicators and compiles it all together.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#49

Post by throwaway2016a »

greggyb wrote: post #42
throwaway2016a wrote: post #38

I just switch my consulting company to have all our documents (Statement of Work, proposals, NDA, MSA, etc) in LaTeX. It has worked amazing well. For a few reasons: 1. We easily can typeset all our documents the same and if we do something like change the letterhead we can easily update them all. 2. Auto-generating documents (forms letters) is a snap. 3. Everything is source controlled. 3a. If a client needs customiz…

Curious about clients that ask you to execute these items in their own templates? We run into this fairly often.

Unfortunately we're stuck with whatever format they use in that case. Haven't found a good way around it yet. Fortunately for our documentation system, Git does allow binary files.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#50

Post by taeric »

obastani wrote: post #41
taeric wrote: post #12

I had a few things about TeX versus LaTeX. I think the reality is nobody really tries writing TeX. But, ultimately my beef is the straw man that markup is bad because it is harder to read. That a graphical editor is superior because it is more readable. Instead, the advantage is that in the one you are only writing text and you are indicating special instructions to the computer. In the other, you only see what the c…

On the flip side, sometimes simple formatting in Latex can be a nightmare, for example, getting your table columns spaced correctly.

Tables amuse me. I honestly think they are easier in raw TeX. Though, they are a pain in all languages, sometimes. Word, TeX, HTML, I don't think anyone has ever succeeded at the perfect table.
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