Given how easy the markdown specs are, it is unbelievable how different the text is rendered using different engines.
The text is rendered with CSS, so you should be able to specify whatever rendering style you want using something like Pandoc.
Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
61–70 of 184 posts
Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
#62Author 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…
When you say "rendered to a screen", do you really mean "placed on a webpage"? PDFs generated by LaTeX are rendered to screen all the time.
edit: Actually, I find that I completely agree with your point if "printed" is replaced by "shared in pdf format" and "rendered to screen" is replaced by "shared in plain text or HTML format".
Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
#63I found Markdown quite lacking for things like documentation. Restructured Text with Sphinx was similar to Markdown in usage but significantly more flexible (especially references other parts of the documentation).
Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
#64Earlier 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…
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 a…
I thought Latex was superior to Word in every way than I had a colleague that knew Word. Word if you learn it is just fine generating a ToC or autonumbering sections, figures, and tables.
In practice, Markdown is better than either for documentation that isn't printed. It's easier to edit, can be viewed with a plain text editor, and has a minimal learning curve.
Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
#65RestructuredText has generally worked nicer for me that Markdown. Especially when combined with Sphinx you can easily embed LaTeX math structures as well. Having that said, depending on the scale of the paper I usually tend to go back and forth between RestructuredText and LaTeX. When it's large and might need some fine tuning it's better to use LaTeX, when you simply need to jot something down... no need for the com…
> RestructuredText has generally worked nicer for me that Markdown
Agree. As soon as you want to start having references to other parts of your document(s) RestructuredText wins out over Markdown.
Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
#66Earlier 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.
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 yo…
I’m not recommending anyone use InDesign or similar tools for everything.
It’s a typesetting tool designed for producing paper documents. You should use it for your company’s magazine, menu, posters, and published books, not for your auto-generated technical documentation, your blog posts, or your internal emails.
The previous commenter wrote about what to do if you “don't want to spend a few $10k on professional typesetting software.” That’s much steeper than most people will spend on professional typesetting software.
Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
In my field there are always templates. LaTeX, or I guess TeX, works well until it doesn’t, and then fails in ugly ways (quite the opposite of Word, which will work all the time not very well). So overflow and underflow paragraphs are possible, so are orphans, though it tries to avoid them if the output is decent. This is nice because I can fix all my problems usually by refining my content (changing words, orders, etc...), I don’t actually have to dig deep into TeX to otherwise modify the format! This is quite usable in general, though there are huge debates on whether it is appropriate.
From what I can tell, Adobe follows the more technical approach, though I’ve only looked over my wife’s shoulder. The fact that I’m just producing PDFs with LaTeX is also different. If I’m writing a web essay, I don’t mind using straight HTML/CSS, even markdown doesn’t really convey many benefits for me.
Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
#68Earlier 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…
Do you think legal writing falls into this category?
I have a dream where someone writes a processor that will allow the writer to bang out some Markdown-ish plaintext and turn it into a p&a with automatically generated Table of Contents, Table of Authorities, caption, and pleading paper.
Call it LexDown or something even less mellifluous and free millions from the tyranny of Word style sheets forever.
Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
In my field there are always templates. LaTeX, or I guess TeX, works well until it doesn’t, and then fails in ugly ways (quite the opposite of Word, which will work all the time not very well). So overflow and underflow paragraphs are possible, so are orphans, though it tries to avoid them if the output is decent. This is nice because I can fix all my problems usually by refining my content (changing words, orders, e…
Web essays is definitely not the place to use professional typesetting tools. Browsers are simply incapable of doing professional quality typesetting of the type books have had since the 15th century because the output environment is too heterogeneous, unless you abandon html and render documents as SVG or PDF or something (I would not recommend doing that). Authoring tools won’t help you. On the web the best you can do is make (or purchase/find) a decent CSS template and hope it’s readable enough for most viewers on most devices.
Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX
#70I find many of these points unconvincing. All of the pros listed at the beginning also apply to TeX, some arguably better than to Markdown. As far as I can tell, Markdown has several advantages over LaTeX, but these aren't highlighted in the article:
* Markdown is easier to learn (at least the basics)
* Markdown is more readable when in plain text format
* Markdown doesn't require boilerplate/metacode such as package imports
* Markdown more easily and naturally renders to HTML (biggest one in my opinion)
(I don't particularly find any of these that convincing for my uses except maybe the last one.)