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Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

blog.jez.io

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Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#51

Post by mixmastamyk »

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…

Was with you until your recommendation for Word for documentation. Something like a wiki or Sphinx would be much more appropriate than a flawed and proprietary one.

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#52

Post by greenleafjacob »

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…

Do you think legal writing falls into this category?

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#53

Post by xigency »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #51
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…

Was with you until your recommendation for Word for documentation. Something like a wiki or Sphinx would be much more appropriate than a flawed and proprietary one.

The proper tool is whatever the IT department has installed on everyone's computer by default, and failing that, something simple and easily edited (like raw text or markdown).

I think the proper analogy is like editing documentation in PDF. Software that can edit PDFs is expensive and difficult to use, like LaTeX can be (difficult, not expensive, just in terms of time).

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#54

Post by URSpider94 »

kerkeslager wrote: post #49
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…

If you haven’t tried it yet, I encourage you to give Markdown + Pandoc a try for printed docs. Pandoc can take a LaTeX template and flow Markdown into it. I find Markdown formatting simpler to remember and execute than LaTeX, and there are a huge number of editors and live-preview apps that will let you validate your Markdown as you write. A few keystrokes, and you get a beautiful PDF document, flawlessly typeset in Computer Modern - and with a few more keystrokes, you can have an HTML page with exactly the same content.

There is even a company, LeanPub, that is based on generating paper and e-books direct from Markdown.

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#55

Post by rz2k »

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.

I use RStudio with `knitr` when it is the wrong tool, because it is just too easy to make something that is easy to read and people think I put a lot of effort into formatting. I do have a few templates that I use so that the text isn't always Computer Modern, but it is mostly a mix of Markdown, Latex math, and features from R like `kable` for making tables. I even tend to plot graphics into the text using R, rather than looking up how to place them using markdown.

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#56

Post by hyperbovine »

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…

Wow, this is just so far off the mark I don't even know where to begin. LaTeX excels in three areas that are crucial for writing complex documents -- cross references, citations, and indexing. You clearly have not had to endure the house of horrors that is the MS Word ToC, or trying to get autonumbering working as you wish for sections, figures, and tables, or managing a large (100s of pages) multipart document, or any one of a bazillion other little asspains that crop up when forced to use Word for a nontrivial task like maintaining documentation for a large complex project. And point #1 is a complete straw man, setting up a TeX env takes 20 minutes and the basic doc format has not changed since the 1990s at least.

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#57

Post by jacobolus »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #43
jacobolus wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I find that in most cases InDesign takes an order of magnitude less time/effort and dramatically less frustration to get a particular careful output than MS Word, LaTeX, or other commonly available tools. Your wife probably has difficult requirements and exacting quality standards, and could likely get output with quality equivalent to common documents prepared using amateur/automatic tools in a much shorter time, if she wanted to.

It’s almost impossible to do professional quality typesetting in MS Word. Last time I really tried was about 10 years ago. I spent like 4 hours trying and failing to fix basic typographic mistakes in another person’s 20-page document, and then gave up and did the whole thing over in InDesign in 20 minutes, with great results.

In LaTeX, you can theoretically do anything you want but unless there’s already a template for it (or you have numerous or long documents targeting the same output style, for which you want to make a template and then mostly rely on automatic layout), it’s going to take a huge amount of time. It’s a good tool if you want output that is “good enough” for many practical purposes without direct human input, but it is especially difficult to do anything special-cased for a particular spread (moving images, text boxes, diagrams, ... exactly where you want them).

LaTeX is great for things like auto-generated documentation, long structured outlines, legal documents, or math papers full of complicated formulas. LaTeX is abysmally ineffective for posters, magazines, or the like. I find that for the vast majority of content in between those extremes (e.g. college humanities homework, non-technical journals, resumés, menus, coffee-table books, novels, poetry, personal letters, ...), InDesign ends up giving nicer output with less headaches.

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#58

Post by Mindless2112 »

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 was also required to typeset homework for some classes in college, but I used LyX [1] instead and never really learned how to typeset a whole document. I picked up the equation syntax though.

[1] http://www.lyx.org/

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#59

Post by no_wizard »

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…

Or markdown or restructured text or ascii doc.

I mean it’s not like it must be either LaTex or a word processor. Markdown is sufficiently easy to turn into text nowadays there’s really no reason not to first instance.

And that’s assuming someone agrees with the general premise of this argument which I don’t think I do

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#60

Post by dunham »

mbostock wrote: post #39
dunham wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I just saw that pop up on the front page of observablehq. That resolves another pain point for me. (My first experiment with the platform happened to have a lot of math exposition in it.)
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