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Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

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Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#5
I have such a love-hate relationship with Latex. I use it almost every day. I love how easy it is to write beautiful math, and how easy it is to organize well large documents. It's fast (in general). And, thank god, there are lots of information online.

But boy do I hate the whole semi-broken macro-based system. The package management feels so outdated. Errors are hard to decipher. Package documentation is there but takes days and days if you actually want to read it.

And then you use Tikz. Same result. Beautiful neat graphs. Horrible obscure macro based system with impossible-to-understand error messages.

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#6

I have such a love-hate relationship with Latex. I use it almost every day. I love how easy it is to write beautiful math, and how easy it is to organize well large documents. It's fast (in general). And, thank god, there are lots of information online. But boy do I hate the whole semi-broken macro-based system. The package management feels so outdated. Errors are hard to decipher. Package documentation is there but…

LaTeX is a bit like democracy. It is horrible, but all the alternatives I have tried a worse.

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#7

I have such a love-hate relationship with Latex. I use it almost every day. I love how easy it is to write beautiful math, and how easy it is to organize well large documents. It's fast (in general). And, thank god, there are lots of information online. But boy do I hate the whole semi-broken macro-based system. The package management feels so outdated. Errors are hard to decipher. Package documentation is there but…

With https://www.lyx.org/ you only need to write LaTeX when you want to.

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#9

I have such a love-hate relationship with Latex. I use it almost every day. I love how easy it is to write beautiful math, and how easy it is to organize well large documents. It's fast (in general). And, thank god, there are lots of information online. But boy do I hate the whole semi-broken macro-based system. The package management feels so outdated. Errors are hard to decipher. Package documentation is there but…

I feel similar about latex. I love how easily I can write math in it, how neat the result looks and how I can structure larger documents easily.

But I hate the syntax, that seemingly simple tasks have arcane syntax or are hard to acomplish and mostly, that it's damn slow to compile. I was really surprised that you consider it fast, it's really interesting to me!

Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

#10
post #6

I have such a love-hate relationship with Latex. I use it almost every day. I love how easy it is to write beautiful math, and how easy it is to organize well large documents. It's fast (in general). And, thank god, there are lots of information online. But boy do I hate the whole semi-broken macro-based system. The package management feels so outdated. Errors are hard to decipher. Package documentation is there but…

LaTeX is a bit like democracy. It is horrible, but all the alternatives I have tried a worse.

Gosh yeah. Imagine writing a 150+ pages thesis in Word. Would give me nightmares.

EDIT: To complement: I think it's obviously possible, lots of people do it. But I feel I would spend a lot of time on "keeping the structure right" as I edit it. Feels more straightforward with Latex. And then Math is kind of hard to write efficiently, but that's field specific.

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