I would like to see somebody write their PhD thesis in markdown.
I wrote my MSc dissertation in Markdown
Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
31–40 of 184 posts
Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not many go into LaTeX "loving it". Many of us try Word first, and are just unhappy with its output. If you need something that is well typeset and don't want to spend a few $10k on professional typesetting software, LaTeX fits the bill well. Everything else about LaTeX is a pain, not a joy. Is a lot of documentation written in LaTeX? I would never use it for that. Paper that is going to be submitted to a conference?…
The current version of Adobe InDesign costs $20/month on subscription. Used copies of older versions can be found for relatively cheap. I would advise anyone who values their time against using LaTeX for any document that doesn’t primarily consist of mathematical formulas.
I used to do all my docs in Adobe Framemaker. The output was amazing. The software itself felt a little obtuse, but seeing the printed pages was great.
Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
#33For an intermediate choice, I would recommend AsciiDoc [http://asciidoc.org/]. I currently use it for some of the more complicated pages on my company's GitHub wiki, and am very satisfied with it.
For an example of its usage and look, here [http://asciidoc.org/INSTALL.txt] is the source from which this [http://asciidoc.org/INSTALL.html] page was rendered.
Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
#34Author here! I'd like to take a second to point out that the audience I had in mind when writing this article was mostly my fellow classmates in college. In school we were hastily introduced to LaTeX freshman year and were required to typeset our homeworks before submission. The point of the article isn't "you should never use LaTeX" but rather "hey, there's this other, simpler tool that you might like better!" plus…
Interesting, and a bit surprising. Back in the Triassic Age, I picked up LaTeX from an undergrad roommate because it was easier than writing up homework by hand, and because you can turn a basic ".txt" file into a ".tex" file with very few changes.
I agree that Markdown and friends have their place, but they quickly reach their limits. You write that "Pandoc can take care of the presentation for us," but in my experience, Markdown and such will only get you as far as "good enough." If you want to typeset complicated equations, or print something more complicated than a novel, you need more powerful tools.
Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
#35Markdown can do quite a lot, but it doesn't have any way to write mathematical formulae. Since that's 90% of why I use LaTeX in most cases it seems silly to recommend Markdown. LaTeX has a superset of features, and is well suited to what it does properly (typesetting). Markdown is quick and easy to use, so it's good for blog posts.
My problem with LaTeX is that a ton of programmers think it's a good idea to use LaTeX instead of, say, Word or Writer or plain text wrapped at 80 characters or a Wiki for things like process or project documentation. Programmers love to use LaTeX, because they get to feel like they're doing something exciting like writing a computer program when what they're actually doing something incredibly boring like writing do…
I was with you until the last paragraph. Microsoft Word? Really? I can still read plain text documents written in the late 70s. Can't quite say the same for VIP-Writer. Or even Word Perfect.
Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
#36Author here! I'd like to take a second to point out that the audience I had in mind when writing this article was mostly my fellow classmates in college. In school we were hastily introduced to LaTeX freshman year and were required to typeset our homeworks before submission. The point of the article isn't "you should never use LaTeX" but rather "hey, there's this other, simpler tool that you might like better!" plus…
Interesting, and a bit surprising. Back in the Triassic Age, I picked up LaTeX from an undergrad roommate because it was easier than writing up homework by hand, and because you can turn a basic ".txt" file into a ".tex" file with very few changes. I agree that Markdown and friends have their place, but they quickly reach their limits. You write that "Pandoc can take care of the presentation for us," but in my experi…
[deleted]
Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
#37Author here! I'd like to take a second to point out that the audience I had in mind when writing this article was mostly my fellow classmates in college. In school we were hastily introduced to LaTeX freshman year and were required to typeset our homeworks before submission. The point of the article isn't "you should never use LaTeX" but rather "hey, there's this other, simpler tool that you might like better!" plus…
I can second this. Markdown and Pandoc work quite well together. I write documents professionally using this setup.
I do fall back to LaTeX for certain formatting, but it's actually quite easy to build pass-through filters so that raw LaTeX can be inserted when specialized formatting that can't be easily simulated in Markdown is required.
Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
#38Author here! I'd like to take a second to point out that the audience I had in mind when writing this article was mostly my fellow classmates in college. In school we were hastily introduced to LaTeX freshman year and were required to typeset our homeworks before submission. The point of the article isn't "you should never use LaTeX" but rather "hey, there's this other, simpler tool that you might like better!" plus…
I have used latex to typeset most of my work at uni. but recently I began using org-mode, With a bit of knowlegde it is so much easier to structure my notes. And then it can export to a lot of differnt formats like latex.
Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
#39We recently added support for embedding LaTeX expressions (and really, any dynamically-generated DOM) within Markdown template literals to Observable notebooks. So you can say md`I like ${tex`\\KaTeX`}`, and KaTeX renders its logo, which is then embedded within the generated Markdown. I’m admittedly biased, but I love the ease of writing Markdown combined with being able to inline arbitrary DOM for math, sparklines e…
I worked around the inline math issue by doing: md2 = x => md([x[0].replace(/\$(.*?)\$/g, m => tex([m.slice(1,-1)]).outerHTML)]) I do appreciate you adding support for ${tex`...`}, but it's still a bit more verbose than I'd like to type.
Well, it’s nice that you can always define your own tagged template literal. ;) The double backslashes certainly are annoying. We may be able to eliminate them by using String.raw. https://github.com/observablehq/notebook-stdlib/issues/10
Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
#40Author here! I'd like to take a second to point out that the audience I had in mind when writing this article was mostly my fellow classmates in college. In school we were hastily introduced to LaTeX freshman year and were required to typeset our homeworks before submission. The point of the article isn't "you should never use LaTeX" but rather "hey, there's this other, simpler tool that you might like better!" plus…
I have used latex to typeset most of my work at uni. but recently I began using org-mode, With a bit of knowlegde it is so much easier to structure my notes. And then it can export to a lot of differnt formats like latex.
Yep, org-mode is really cool too!