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Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

blog.jez.io

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Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#41

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

da_chicken wrote: post #20
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #7

Markdown 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…

Both your issues are solved by LyX. It removes most of the pain, and what remains tends to be with adding obscure document classes anyway, which you don't need for documentation.

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#43

Post by seanmcdirmid »

jacobolus wrote: post #27
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #23

Earlier 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.

Fair enough. My wife uses Adobe tools for typesetting, she is a professional (she pays $100/month for her CS subscription, however). I'm not a professional, I've looked at the amount of effort needed to refine output in these tools and they make LaTeX look usable...

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#44

Post by geofft »

jacobolus wrote: post #27
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #23

Earlier 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.

One practical advantage of using free tools is that everyone in your company can use it, you can write automation that uses it, etc. I'm not going to defend LaTeX in particular, but there's a lot of value into using something (like Markdown or reStructuredText or whatever) that anyone in your company can propose edits to, where you can automatically publish nicely-formatted (e.g. HTML) documentation when anyone in your company makes a change, and so forth.

Another way of gaining this advantage is to use something you're already paying for like an internal wiki.

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#45

Post by geofft »

da_chicken wrote: post #20
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #7

Markdown 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…

Since this is a forum that values reasoned debate, it would help if you actually argued against "They get to use the same plain text editor they're familiar with. They get to use the same version control that they use with their code." instead of just dismissing them out of hand. Those seem like important things!

Also, what's wrong with

    apt-get install texlive-latex-recommended
(or better yet having your IT department / your provisioning system for new developer machines / whatever do that for you)? If your position was "Documentation edited by lots of people should not require weird CTAN modules," that I would agree with. You can write perfectly good documents of all kinds with just what's in texlive-latex-recommended.

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#46

Post by MajorSauce »

eevilspock wrote: post #11
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #7

Markdown 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.

Many flavors of Markdown support math extensions. Many do so in a way that degrades gracefully when the extended Markdown is opened in a standard Markdown tool. Typora is a great WYSIWYG Markdown editor that uses MathJax to render LaTeX mathematical expressions.

I just wanted to thank you for this discovery.

I am in the middle of writing a document and gave Typora a try, seems to fit the middle ground between "basic" formatting and Latex.

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#47

Post by vfulco »

Really appreciate this piece. I have been doing more rmarkdown into pdf through pandoc/latex/etc. (yea its complicated but made much easy by the R community) for my English resume editing business. Still wading into Latex to customize docs feels like hieroglyphics. Seems made for grad students with too much time on their hands. The learning curve is steeper than I want or need to to be as an intermediate tool.

Addendum: I would really recommend crowd here look at rmarkdown flavored work. There are now a ton of community offerings for resumes/CV/theses even academic journal article templates. Most can be found on github.com and CRAN (the central repository for non-base packages).

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#48

Post by anta40 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #23
da_chicken wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?…

Back to my CS undergrad days, I wrote my assignments in LaTeX. It can handle practically every CS nerds: Complicated math expression? Check. Displaying beautiful pseudocode? Check. Binary tree? Check. Karnaugh map? Check. Etc etc.

Probably you've heard that only real men write LaTeX using plain text editors. I'm not a real man enough, so IDE like TeXnicCenter or Texmaker is needed :p

These days, personally I use Pandoc or Halibut (https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/halibut) for anything not complicated. Or if working on team, then 'unfortunately' MS Word. Well, not every of us are nerds :)

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#49

Post by kerkeslager »

jez wrote: post #26

Author 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'd also add that while Markdown and LaTeX can do some of the same things, they're designed toward very different tasks. I've used both numerous times in my career, and I can't remember a case where it's been ambiguous which tool was more appropriate for the task.

If it's going to be printed, you probably want LaTeX. If it's going to be rendered to a screen, you probably want Markdown. If it's going to be rendered to a screen and have math in it, you probably want Markdown with some LaTeX for the math. If it's going to be rendered to a screen and printed, better start looking for a job, because that project is going down in flames.

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#50

Post by megaman22 »

behindmyscreen wrote: post #15

I used LaTeX all the time at university. It made citation/bib easy, it made writing reports for mathematics way more efficient, and the presentation of the documents were beautiful. I had a prof rave about how nice the my paper looked once when I turned it in. I wish I had stuck with it afterward. I write enough that it would make my work less painful, but I let the skill laps. This article is making me think I shoul…

I really wish I had bitten the bullet and learned LaTeX in college. At the time, trying to actually write a research paper start-to-finish in Word was too painful, too prone to crash and lose data, and badly incompatible with using version control (CVS and SVN, at the time), and so I settled on a process where I'd write the whole thing in plain-text, and insert my citations in inline parentheses, then when I was all done, have to go back and try to format the thing in Word with proper footnotes and formatting. More than a few times, it took nearly as long to get that post-processing right for printing than it did to actually write the paper.
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